I woke up this morning from a dream in which I had gotten lost in a part of the house (where I live) that had gotten disconnected from the rest of the building. I was wandering somewhere in what seemed like a large hotel or apartment complex looking for the rest of my home. When I woke up, I was happy to have found my way back, here to the real world. But it made me wonder what would happen if I hadn’t – if I had gotten lost in a dream world.
Earlier I had dreamed of Sino-Russian cyber-virus agents taking over the internet and forcing the rest of us to live without it all again — a meme that CBS’s Katie Couric and other media outlets had placed in my head with coverage yesterday of the Conficker worm, which supposedly hijacks computers in an attempt to create a global botnet. Couric had talked about right-wing Russian youth behind it (or that’s what I remember); I probably added the Sino- part myself — a kind of unconscious remnant Orientalism, I guess.
Realizing it was April Fool’s Day today only made both of these weird dreams seem a bit more realistic and consensus reality seem more dreamlike. We live in/on April Fool’s Day. Earth Day, Earth Hour (the “first globalized ritual,” as Stephen Bede Scharper called it yesterday), April Fool’s Day, Earth Fools’ Hour — every hour, as the economy goes down and alternative dreams (the right-wing lunatic dreams of Glenn Beck et al, the utopian Communist dreams of Zizek, Badiou, Ranciere, et al, the green dreams of worldchangers, sustainability transitionists, and green Obamists) float up like balls on a stormy sea… After the storm we will sift through them, relish what we’ve collected, and be glad to have found our way back here, back to shore, after a long weird dream.