[ExI] Dreams...

[Anders Sandberg]

On 20/08/2012 12:27, John Grigg wrote:
> My question for the list is just how "transhumanist" are your dreams?

Mine tend towards the very surreal, abstract and transhumanist. Mostly 
because that is how the inside of my head is.

> Anyway, I just wondered if some of you had really amazing dreams about 
> the future, and how much stock if any, you put into them.

Well, here is a small excerpt from my "autobiography file", from the 
section "My megalomaniac youth":


I have another childhood memory that I am pretty confident is by now 
far, far away from whatever happened in my young brain.

This was a dream, where a model aeroplane appeared in my bedroom after 
having squeezed under the window. It invited me to jump up on it, and 
together we flew out under the window by briefly becoming 
two-dimensional. Outside was a long dark tunnel, with walls covered with 
world maps. The floor was earthen furrows like a ploughed field. Ahead a 
traffic sign showed up, rocking as if an unseen person was holding it up 
from underground. It stated: "I am an Englishman". Passing the sign we 
saw a tiny planet with a tree and a house. Leaving the plane behind I 
went in. The interior was a single room, perhaps reminiscent of a simple 
farmstead. At the stove stood a person I knew was the Moon. At the 
dinner table was a group of people that I knew were the other planets. 
The Moon brought me to the back of the room where there was a circular 
window. Outside in the darkness I could see another planet -- now a real 
astronomical sphere rather than a personification. The planet was dark, 
but across its surface was a web of light similar to a circuit diagram 
or a vast city. I knew that this was my planet -- either I would be 
going there, or I would /become/ it.

It makes a great piece of personal narrative, doesn't it? Mysterious, 
hinting at some grand destiny, even a hint of hermetic symbolism. In my 
personal narrative it is supposed to have happened in my preschool years.

Picking apart details is not hard. The maps were from the background of 
the television news programs in the 70s. The English sign might have 
been inspired by the knowledge that a family we knew were partially 
English. An interest in space and planets obviously played a part. The 
tiny planet seems borrowed straight from the illustrations of "The 
Little Prince". And the dark planet lights were very similar to the 
lights from the back of a television set in the animated intro to the 
foreign-language children's program I occasionally saw when the Swedish 
children's programs ended. Even the basic plot -- a child brought by a 
strange messenger away to a land of magic and revelation -- is 
ubiquitous in children's stories.

These details make me actually think that I did have that dream at a 
fairly early age: there are no details that I would have learned later. 
Yet the meaning of the dream is clearly up for grabs. What would be a 
fun adventure to a child can be seen as a promise of destiny to a 
teenager. My current take on the dream is that it works pretty well as a 
symbolic motivator: it would be pretty cool if I could somehow make it real.

And, besides, I /did /more or less become an Englishman many years later.


-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University

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