Dreaming M.J.

I had a very vivid dream this week, the week of Michael Jackson's death. In my dream, humans had evolved into forms that were suspended in something of a sensory-emotive virtual mist. Nothing of form or visual cues indicated that we were still human, or especially related to humans. Only a certain sense of familiarity or practicedness helped me recognize my new self as non-alien.

The only language spoken was a series of passwords that functioned as a system of consent for marrying together our psyches within the ether-net. I watched as flexible fluid windows united and parted by folding in on each other and then peeling away, all within a web of space indistinguishable as either virtual or actual.

To say we were composed in parts both human and computer sounds too crude. Notions of part and whole were of little use for understanding these forms. Our existence and co-existence were virtual. Potential. Happening in the space of their own unfolding. Our password invitations were each unique and composed of a purely emotive language with a sort of rolling, lapping sound that landed pleasantly and pleadingly at the edge of consciousness. Mine was a sound I recognized as a sort of new name for my mother. It was the only word I could say.

This was not exactly utopia--this sort-of-bodied sentience suspended in gauzy spiderwebs of telo-internet melting into perfect crystalline consensual enagagement. I recognized from the human quality of the experience that we were not enlightened. We had just come up with new ways of doing the telling and the listening—of paying attention to each other.

The day after my dream, my movements through the world carried an investigative quality. What I was investigating, it felt, was the project of coexistence. I wanted to listen and I wanted to tell, and I only knew one way of asking how. kaythingsswoombordmoydoosbp. Requesting permission to connect.