Dream Machine
The Dream Machine is a phone-operated dream database and exchange. It will operate forever, archiving our dreams long after we have forgotten them.
How it works:
You call the dream machine and leave a voice recording of your dream. It calls you back in about 15 minutes and plays a random dream from its memory.
A few words on the Dream Machine:
We are surrounded by surrogate memories, and have become accustomed to them as supports for usual function in an information-laden world. We could critique this, worry at the risk of losing memories by shunting them off to storage without actually encoding them in our brains. Yet there is also a way to find memory through these cues and systems, to forget and rediscover, or to come across something left by another. With the greater ease to leave behind small pieces of our lives comes as well the ease of discovery.
Spending nearly a third of our lives in suspended states of consciousness, memory loss is nothing new to us. We have *always* lost our dreams, which materialize for such brief moments each morning and disappear across the horizon that divides conscious and automatic thought. While our waking lives may be so laden with information that we pass it off to electronic systems (sometimes to be forgotten), the same systems can just as well remind us of the shadows of the things we are used to forgetting.
The Dream Machine is a locus for this: a receptacle and a transmitter for the ephemeral and the ethereal, a hub for the symbolic, surreal, uninhibited activities of our automatic minds. Its goal is to catalyze of the ubiquity of the unconscious, an anonymous amplifier for that which is so often held, lost, or forgotten.
The Dream Machine serves to store the ephemeral. It is at the same time systematic and random, accessible yet immaterial. If dreams are a haphazard reorganization of the elements that our conscious minds constrain to thought, then the Dream Machine is a distillation: an automatic nexus for the unconscious.
--Huong Ngo and George Monteleone
Food-related dreams from Dream Machine v 1.0, mashed up by George Monteleone:
Dream Bombs:
We have a closeness with certain dreams from the archive--old ones that were captured when the machine was a clunky object that sat in my studio and played dreams over the air at 1:00, 2:00, 3:00 in the morning and mixed in with my own. We wanted to share those with anyone curious enough to push the button.
Dream Maps:
Interested to see if there are dream patterns for particular times of the year, phase of the moon, during national crises, etc, George and I constructed a dream map that was published in Shifter Magazine, Issue 12. You can download it or purchase it on their website.