Pop 89: You Are Innocent When You Dream

By Madonna Hamel

I took this title from a Tom Waits song because, in these strange times of random accusations, heinous behaviours, and uncensored insults propelled by nothing more than hunches and resentments, I seriously wonder if any of us have a shred of innocence left in our beings. But, if we are sincere about wanting "a better world", we might do well to look to those who have maintained their innocence - the very young, and those who still listen to their dreams.

Children don't intend to be innocent; they are born that way. Everything is new. Everything is grab-able. They have no reason to suspect the rest of the creatures around them would take advantage of their openness, wonderment, and innocence. But eventually, something or someone will cause them to shrink back, reconsider their actions, and find ways to get their way without too much damage.

In the same way that young children don't plan their day, adults can't plan their nights. They have no control over the dreams that overtake them in their sleep. We can't censor ourselves in our dreams, which is why Freud called them "the royal road to the unconscious" and why they are such valuable insights into ourselves.

My brother works with dreams. Even when at the bottom of his rope regarding the visual havoc caused by his stroke two years ago, he will perk up if I tell him about a dream I had last night. His eyes lighten, he puts on the coffee and beckons me to sit at the table and take a good long look, parsing the dream for clues to who I am or struggling to become.

I've had some big dreams in my life. There are three in particular that I have been working on for over thirty years. The images that came up in those dreams reoccur in the world around me periodically and in such a concrete way that I'm bound to stop short and recall the words of Shakespeare's Hamlet to his friend Horatio: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

I hesitate to share my dreams with others - especially the big dreams. Each image is a pearl holding wisdom and I'm not about to cast my pearls to just anybody. I realize this approach is the opposite of what social media junkies do, who, out of a false sense of importance or dissociative naiveté, presume a world of strangers will value everything they value.

I value my dreams and the gift of dreaming because it is one of the few places where computer technology cannot surveil my every word and move. There are no algorithms calculating my next dream. 

I recently watched a video of Bill Gates waxing poetic over the powers of AI, calling it "a new religion". (AI is not intelligence as I define it, but data-crunching, mixing and matching).

But AI has no say over what I dream. It is not consciousness. It cannot discern an act of consciousness which goes far deeper and is far subtler than calculating or making snap judgements. Consciousness takes in the slow-breaking news from the subtle world of soul, spirit, mystery and grace. We can't program it. There is more to heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your technologies, Mr. Gates.

I doubt Gates spends much time on that immense word: "religion." It is popular these days to dismiss it as superstition or an institutional method of cruel child-rearing and crowd-control invented by killjoys. And let's face it, we've all faced our share of misguided "religious" types, in the same way we've all faced our share of misguided school teachers and doctors. 

What every world religion asks of us is that we give up our drive to control the material world. Religion asks us to find strength through acknowledging our weaknesses and peace in the humility that acknowledgement brings. To embrace a religion is to turn one's efforts to serving others in need, not acquiring more power, money and control. Religion is not religion until it moves from theory to practice.

But, if you'll notice, people who get excited about AI tend to be theorists. And they can't help it because they are, for the most part, young lads fresh out of school, like the ones so meticulously observed by Anna Weiner in "Uncanny Valley." Weiner left her job at a computer start-up company run by a group of young men when she faced "certain unflattering truths" about herself. Society was changing, she observed. And, she admitted: "It was preferable to be on the side that did the watching than on the side being watched." Until it wasn't.

The lads of Weiner's memoir reminded me of some of the young eastern scientists who come to the prairie to tell the local farmers, who have lived on this land for generations, what kind of grasses "should" grow best here, even though they don't.

They also remind me of Elon Musk's new team of computer engineers chosen to control American government spending—all of them under 25. Such limited experience of the world of human relationships should ring alarm bells, but it won't if you value technology and knowledge over human relationships, wisdom, and conscious spiritual practice.

Making a religion out of technology means that rather than solving problems of poverty by sharing what we have, we, as Laureen Smiley wrote in her essay on neighbourhood surveillance in San Francisco, consider "shared cam footage of porch thieves as a bonding exercise between neighbours who've never met." 

I suggest that such a "bonding experience" is easy to rationalize when we no longer refer to each other as "souls," "citizens," or even "consumers," which may be why the collective noun for humanity in the 21st century is "user."

So tonight, I intend to return to the home of innocence and the voice of my soul: my dreams.