I have always been a constant daydreamer. As a result of my undiagnosed ADHD, my teachers would lecture in English but their words would soon transform into a strange language that acted as hypnotic spells. The words they wrote on chalkboards were symbols, sigils, and runes that unlocked visions in my brain. The brown lights of the overhead projector blasted my sight, through the corneas like a lighthouse calling me to Neverland. It was all part of a technological, psychedelic trance that induced me into a state of astral projection.
I have visited so many worlds and I have lived more years in my mind than I could ever live on this physical meatspace. With so much surreal experience, I have tried my best to document them in the form of stories. Some of these are absolutely fantastic while others are recreations of my own life, filtered through my perception into a narrative epic.
Yet, as much as I try, it is impossible for me to write all of these stories. Some of these projects trouble me with my inability to justify their fantastical nature to those readers with an acute eye for glitches in the literary Matrix. Other times, the desire and compulsion simply leave me as soon as I sit down. Regardless, these lost stories are sprites that I have failed to capture, free to return to the realm of ideas and possibilities.
I hope that there is someone else out there that is able to catch all the things that I have missed in my net, willing to dissect the ideas and reconstruct them into writing. Words are a means to capture the visceral, intangible things that exist in the individual and collective imagination. Despite the lack of any true evidence of some sort of collective human spirit—either conscious, unconscious, or otherwise—the fact that phenomena like the Mandela effect exist even as fantastic coincidences mean that these ideas that we as humans consider *ours* are anything but.
Like the prevalence of similar cuisines from different parts of the world, or the overlaps in spiritual culture, and maybe even considering the growing evidence of genetic memory—leads me to consider that the most primordial ideas are an inheritance bestowed upon the entirety of the human race. Maybe, this inheritance is extended to all mortal beings that may or may not exist.
In an age of Intellectual Property, where everyone thinks that they are entitled to the ideas that conjure from their minds, this might seem like a ludicrous statement. Digital assets are becoming more and more tangible thanks to the prevalence of mass computing and the rise of extended-reality technology. NFT and blockchain technology are making these ideas increasingly bound to the human concept of *real*. Our dreams are becoming reality.
Yet, like nature, I don’t think dreams are always meant to be bound. Not completely. They are wild things, often confusing, frightening, and enigmatic. Even the most comprehensible and analyzed dreams retain a level of surreality that makes them, at least, in part, free from the human concept of ownership. I think that is a part of the appeal.
Like petty gods, we fight over these concepts and ideas(see dreams) with our patents and trademarks. They are domains that we protect like entire demi-planes that we may mine for influence and power. We contribute to these spaces, giving them our time and focus. They influence us and our actions. They are digital, divine domains created by us.
The irony is that we fight over these exclusive rights to these dreams despite that mere contact with them has the potential to change our perspectives entirely. These ideas—like the uncaring nature of the universe—do not discriminate among those it incepts. As we interact with others both in meat and digital spaces, these ideas spread like viruses.
However, I am not a god nor do I think I would like to be one. They say that the more powerful an individual feels, the less a human can feel empathy. They say that the part of their brains that should blaze with compassion in the face of another’s suffering becomes a small flicker to those drowned in a sea of control.
I have no desire to fight over these dreams. I want filmmakers and dancers to use the music they find and treasure without fear of lawsuits. I want video essayists to create videos without the fear of getting their videos taken down, losing what could be their next month’s rent. I don’t want the characters of our pop culture kept behind a vault, only to be used exclusively by media empires as if they are exclusive agents in a psychic war over humanity’s collective heart. I don’t want to potentially break meaningless laws when I sing “Happy Birthday.” I want to make cool shit and not have to apologize for it.
Much like the planet that we are constantly trying to terraform and bend to our will, our dreams seem to refuse our desire to be contained. Much like how our planet is fighting back with destructive weather patterns, our minds are fighting back our need to control with anxiety, depression, and fractured attention spans.
Every day, people are making art in the form of memes, mixtapes, collages, and videos. I doubt most of these are “legal”. In that way, humans are pirates by nature. Long after humans are gone, the universe will still be here and so will the dreams and ideas we thought were so unique to us. My question is if other mortal races out there also quarrel over petty ownership? Or have they moved beyond it or never comprehended such a thing as “owning” an idea? Are they more focused on having a damn good time?
Danger Wonka 