Recently, a friend on Facebook posted,

A guy who has worked in progressive grassroots political organizing for many years is jolted awake in a cold sweat from a dream in which he looked into a mirror and saw Don Quixote staring out at him.

I found this interesting for a couple of reasons. One is thinking about Don Quixote. The first part of my reply was

My association to this … is the beginning of Don Quixote:

"You must know, then, that the above-named gentleman whenever he was at leisure (which was mostly all the year round) gave himself up to reading ..."

When I studied the text back in college we talked about the social context, how it was inspired response to the growth of novel reading brought about by the printing press.

How does this relate to today's Don Quixotes giving themselves up to reading social media brought about by the internet, and posting responses, thinking that this accounts to meaningful political activism?

The other part of my response referenced my long time interest in social dreaming. I participated in some online social dreaming matrixes years ago and remain interested in the subject.

A starting point for this is The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation, 1933-39 by Charlotte Beradt. What can our dreams tell us about what is going on, that we might not be able to see otherwise? As I think about it, I wonder, to what extent, we can apply ideas from social dreaming matrixes to social media.

There are fragments of two dreams from last night that have stayed with me today. In one, I was at a restaurant with a bunch of people I knew. I learned that one of them had died and two of them had disappeared, but I don’t remember much else about it.

In the second dream, I was traveling around, plugging in my electric car to recharge. There was some sort of time travel involved so I could see how the distribution of charging stations had changed over time, and could select whichever time period I wanted.

I don’t have much for associations with either of these dreams.x