LSD & Remixes

As the common example goes - if one were asked to name every book they’ve read, they would stumble and falter, unable to recall even ten. If one were presented with each and every book by the questioner however, they’ve able to easily tell if they’ve read it or not. Perhaps over generations of mechanistic and Platonic thought, the delusion of a computational mind has overtaken the popular understanding of the self. That the opposite is true, that the mind works on literary, not scientific laws, is scarcely understood today.

In the film Inland Empire, the utmost concern is the creation of a film which privileges becoming at all costs over being. Such can be seen around the one-third mark, where Laura Dern’s character makes the transition between herself as an actress, movie character, and finally retreating inwards, as the various beings she inhabits by her becoming strain and break, leaving her to break free and forward from them. An affair with her partner as the movie character leads to an affair as the actress. Both break as her identity as a married actress disallows her an affair, not as a code of morals, but as her husband explains it, a law of reality. She breaks from both, retreating to the identity she inhabited when becoming-desire, going into the limbo-house with the prostitutes where she spends much of the middle third of the film.

The function of the superego is in many ways to resist this movement. The superego fulfills the function of restoring Platonic order to the mind, keeping beings stable as becoming (the flow of thought) travels through them. Such is turned around in dreaming. Being, the static noun-thought stored in memory, is subordinated to the freely moving becomings of thought. As such, dreams often take forms unrecognizable upon waking, requiring interpretation to uncover the becoming which produced the manipulation of beings. Freud uncovered this in the split between latent and manifest content of dreams, with the former being the becoming of thought and the latter being the being of thought.

Like the memories which dreams distort to suit the latent content, the manifest content of LSD Dream Emulator is made up of a rather small handful of objects. Around fifteen maps, each of which occur in half a dozen or so variations by different texture sets. There’s a variety of objects, most of which appear in the same place. Triggers of new events are consistent, with the only randomization being the dynamic links, which carry the player to one of a half dozen or so more central hub-maps. What truly changes from dream to dream is the latent content, here shown through the waking graph. By grading on an X/Y scale and then transmuting that grading into a shape representing the self, the latent content is not only described, but shown in relation to the self, the player-character of LSD.

Before anything else, the concern of LSD is in emotions. The latent content of the dreams are described through the emotions experienced, as shown by the texture set, and the motions of the player, as described by their path taken through the links. Rather than treat thought as an unlimitedly sovereign entity however, LSD destabilizes thought from any question of free will. Emotions work on a four-period cycle, almost astrological in nature, with the normal, kanji, downer, and then sexual textures appearing in sequence. The player’s self is forced to confront not only their emotions, but their unwillingness to be determined by any specific action, with only the X axis being under any control at all.