ABSTRACT
This article is an exploration of the effects digital life is having on our capacity to dream. Against the back-drop of Winnicottian developmental theory, it compares non-digital dreaming—from our nightly dreams to the waking dreams of everyday life—with how we dream as creatures of a digital world. It explores the new forms of dreaming that are opened up today by the virtual world in terms of how they hearken back to our earliest experience of what we come to call primal dreaming. At the same time, it shows how our immersion in the digital is interfering with the dream’s primary function as a metabolizer of affect. Through an examination of the link between dreams and madness, it considers how the virtuality generated by our new technologies is no longer containable within a digital kosmos and is leaking out into the world. The regressive side of dreaming life, that is, the omnipotence and disavowal that is its negative potential, as well as our increasing inability to awaken from the digital dream, is viewed in terms of the collapse of dream space that is taking place today in our social and political lives.
