Thirst for Interpretation

That waters have been associated with the unconscious and the unconscious with dreams is not an accident. Three layers of symbolism are present here. Firstly, is the relating of sleep with drinking and of dreams with water, quenching a need in the same way that water quenches thirst. Unlike food, which is burned as fuel, water fills and vivifies the body, flowing through like blood as a foundational substance of vitality. Sleep works the same for the mind, as recent research has shown in multiple ways, popular science articles on the need for sleep repeatedly speaking of healing and repairing this or that function within the brain. Secondly, some conjecture on marine life and the origins of complexity posits that sleep is primordial, as basic brain stem functions remain active (including complex motion, as shown in sleep walkers), thus making sleep the primordial state of the mind upon which awakening was created as greater intelligence developed, and thus when sleep is entered, it is returned to in the same way that drinking or swimming returns to the waters as the substrate of life, anatomically and temporally. Thirdly, in sleep, vertical discourses (intelligences) are engaged with in horizontal fashion, free creative association cutting across rationality verticalities, like tunnels beneath skyscrapers.

Notwithstanding the powers of insomnia to bring unconscious thinking styles into waking life, the cult of sleeplessness is worshipped by the rationalists of STEM and capitalism as a sign of full integration into their religion. This not a cause of anything, but a consequence of the greater project of verticalism. The latest emanations of it are seen in those who see their verticality in STEM or in entrepreneurial capitalism, but this is a tendency which sees its earliest manifestation in the invention of precision clocks. Throwing aside the general and imprecise hours once observed in tune with the natural world, the verticalists devised a device with which they can affix the entirety of the day to. The twenty four hour day was born, a day which obeys not the rotation of any natural order or the intuitive readings of the sky, but the regular rotation of a mechanical device, around which work could be regulated. In doing this, day and night were deconstructed in practice and thus both were destroyed. The sun lost its brilliance as the night lost its darkness, both instead being degrees on the scientifically precise rotation of the objective device. For the verticalists, this proved instrumental in creating their industrial projects, as now humanity could be yoked to a schedule as regular and unchanging as the machines they were enslaved to run.

A parallel tendency on larger timescales is evident in the verticalists in their prejudice against astrology. Attempting to overcode astrology, the stars are instead read for their material details. In favor of the open shapes of the constellations, the stars are read as collections of objects, the materiality of which should be investigated and catalogued with scientific precision. An interesting trend emerges in comparing the narratology of the resulting texts. Astrological signs are open symbols, that is, texts which are sent out as single images to be mutated upon in interpretation and rewritten by each viewer. The astronomical text is a closed sequence of information, a bulleted list of facts, each one diminishes and closes off a potential line of interpretation.

Here, the war against sleep is shown to be a deeper conflict in all media, between open and closed media, a subterranean conflict in culture, made explicit today with the rise of science and corporation fiction. Open media, such as the tarot, zodiac, bible, or Touhou Project encourages sleeping. Its verticalities work in an open plurality, gateways to pass through and interpret, building upon in the voyage of a reader writing their own texts in their passage through the discourse of the work. These works function as a landscape, inviting and creating anew with each reader. Just as the verticalists fear and hate sleep, they fear and hate this media which has the same function as sleep, taking the mind through the same horizontal-creative motions as sleep. Major corporations have been at the vanguard of this war, taking it upon themselves to push onto the masses the once niche STEM fictions, spreading the autistic narratology of “wiki-fiction” in mass reproduction of comic books and science-fiction. In these, there can be no movement, only the recitation and memorization of concrete details, verbatim.