Dreampunk Part 2: Liberatory Cybernetics and Mythic Remediation*

(First published on the Queer Nature blog and instagram, January 2020 as a sequel to the poem “Trans(Eco)Futurism and Dreampunk.”)

Dreampunks became necessary when the future became colonized.

When we started to sleep less...

When sleep became inimical to capitalist progress...

Our anachronistic ancestor is the cyberpunk—she saw the subversive power in a type of interconnection that was developed for control. 

Her domain was cyberspace, ours the dreamworld, which you could also call the underworld.

Because that realm of bit and baud that sprouted its wires around us while we dreamt in our cribs 

has fused all the more with our senses, our memories, our imagination, with the earth’s flesh—global capitalism makes Gaia into an unwitting cyborg.

Systems of empire have come to mimic dreams.(1) Screens, filters, and feeds create a hypnotic hypnagogia. But hypnosis is not enchantment. Hypnosis is sleep without dreams. Hypnosis is a controlled state where consent can not be withdrawn.

So we must then be the hackers of the mythic. (And hackers have always been dreampunks, too.) And we must be then bards of mythcore, singing outlawed songs through a cybernetic synthesis of the virtual and the chthonic.

Which is to say we want myth and magic to be available to all, we want freedom of revelation. We want to disrupt projects of dream warfare, and dream piracy. We want to restore information and currency to the ecosystems from which they have been extracted.

We became necessary when our society told us to reject myths but secretly kept one for them$elve$.

When we were told church and state were separate while politics became a priesthood, while consumerism became a covenant.

We become necessary when creativity becomes merely another metric for production.

When dominant culture is stuck in the reoccurring nightmare of their eventual loss of control.

We became necessary when you institutionalized us for creating and inhabiting other worlds before you could think to make them.

When your hate put us in your shadow. We’re going to turn that cover of darkness into fuel for our practices of divination, for our oneiromancy. We’re going to dream the most liberatory dreams in that shadow of yours.

We became necessary when you legislated against our Eros.

When you said we weren’t real. When you said we weren’t human. 

That’s when we became // Fucking Necessary //

A dreampunk is not just someone who sleeps or who can rest. Because who has the ability to rest “peacefully” is also a problem of power (& often a parody of peace).

Dreampunks are ones who know that sleep, rest, and dreams—whatever the quantity or mode—are mystical practices, practices to invite the earth to dream with us and through us. Sometimes we even forego sleep in order to take back time from empire, under a digital glow we write our dreams, like the scribes who wrote by green foxfire. We have no monastery. But we’re finding it, that dark tower crouching in the future, its bells tolling for us backwards through time. We can already see its shadow.

We long for the earth to enter us with her roots and hyphae—that other Holy Spirit, ((the Holy Soul)), the one who comes from below. We long For possession of another kind, an old kind, the kind that grasps you to free you. So it is also an erotic practice(2) (and a beyond human erotic, as mysticism has often been). We want to donate these delta waves to the divine like blood, to all the beings who can’t rest because they’re surviving ecocide. 

So I say to you, before you wake up.

Dream.

· Mythic remediation : a spin on the term bioremediation which I initially developed on my former blog Farmpunk/Green Hermeneutics back in ‘08/09 

1.     see the poem by @borealfaun “images used to be gods”

2.     The notion of the erotic as a force for remediating white supremacy and conjuring eco justice are teachings we are seeing in the work of fellow dreampunk brontë velez