The Digital Daydream

What is the Digital Daydream?

The Digital Daydream is an idea I’ve been working on when thinking about New Media. Whilst its difficult to explain comprehensively, much of it is actually pretty intuitive. I think the best way to explain it is by looking at a ‘biological’ daydream and breaking it down into its component parts.

So what are the features of a daydream?

1. Fantasy- not just any fantasy, though. When you daydream you deliberately draw in elements of real life, building it around events in the news, in your life, from a book you’ve read or you include person you’ve encountered etc. What is important is that you collect information- sometimes from various parts of your life- and selectively insert it into your fantasy.
2. Sleeping Awake- following on from this, you obviously have to be awake- daydreaming is consciously driven. Although you may drop into a daydream, you are the architect. You consciously build the story, inventing some bits, supressing others and distorting certain things of your life. You also seek out the daydream- you choose to slide into it, to involve and immerse yourself within it.
3. Emotional- following on from the above, it makes sense that there is a reason you slide into it. If you’re bored you may dream of an exciting scenario, if you fell disempowered you might dream of taking back some power or escape into a world where everyone follows you. If you’re frustrated by injustice- personal, political or international- you might focus on that, or it could be totally banal: you might muse about cute cats or a television programme. Whatever floats your boat.
4. Personal: This is crucial, and the other points above rely heavily on this. You are the centre of your own narrative. This might sound a little obvious and silly to say, but in fact this is quite important. Very few people get to be at the centre of a narrative in real life. Very few people get to set the narrative of real life, yet we are constantly trying to do this, we repeatedly try to find ways in which we can put ourselves at the centre of a narrative which we have helped to shape- this is fundamentally why Twitter is so popular- updating everyone minute by minute about the goings on of your life. A daydream gives us the illusion (and the sense) of doing this for real.
5. Vividity  & Fluidity: The whole point of a fantasy is that it has the appearance of reality- that it feels like it is happening, but also it is that we can change and shape events within it.  We imagine scenarios with such clarity, but simultaneously we give these senses a fuzzy quality- we give ourselves the space in the story to adapt, interpret and reimagine elements of the dream so that the story can progress, take unexpected turns. The most fun part of the daydream is this uncontrolled part, which we can fill with our imagination. This works the same way that the nightmare is always scariest when the pursuer is unseen or unknown, and in the same way that violence always seems greater and generates more complaints in films which never actually show the act being committed. Our imagination thrives on this vividty/fluidity aspect.
6. Time & Space- here we start to get a bit theoretical, and it is actually quite useful to bring in Christopher Nolan’s film Inception (2010). If you haven’t seen it, there is brief synopsis here. Anyway, the basic point is that time and space operate differently in the dream, so that we have dreamspace and dreamtime. These are very different to separate out, which I’ll try and do in a later post but at the moment let’s stick the simplistics. As DiCaprio’s character in the video below says, in a dream you leap about from place to place without really remembering how you got there- whole narratives can unfold instantaneously and you can find yourself in the middle of events, desperately responding to things that suddenly have a sense of immediacy. You can slip out of this timespace by waking up, returning to reality which have a totally different sense of time. You can get on with your normal life without any significant impact on your time- what seemed immediate a few seconds ago now subsides into the background. The same can be said of space- your dreamspace is imagined space- not simply space that is imagined, but space which is literally the imagination. In this way, space is not merely perceived to be different, but is literally different. Distance does not simply seem less, but literally is less-to imagine Egypt in your dream is to be there, to imagine a riot is to be there in your imagined world, whatever angle you take on it. As described in the film, you build and experience the dreamworld concurrently and the dream takes on a life of its own.

So where does this all fit in with New Media you say? To put it simply, every single component part described above is a feature of the online interaction of a western liberal citizen with an external conflict- in the particular context of my dissertation, with the Egyptian Revolution. Not being in Cairo during the protests, the online engaged audience could only imagine, based on the interactive use of news, images, audio, video and text from sources which they had to source. The image they built of the revolution – the image they imagined-