Dream-selves can fall in love where waking selves do not

Evidence

Once inside the Wessex projection, the participants cannot remember their real world identities. This means that, although they are referred to by the same name, the dreamers in the simulation are different entities from their real world counterparts (just as any dreamer is a different being from their double in waking life). A classic case of the Real (of unconscious wishes) versus reality. When they exit the Wessex simulation, the dreamers are replaced in the consensual hallucination by placeholder doppelgangers, programmed selves that, possessing no inner life, only exist for the Others in the dreamspace. Some of the participants come to recognise the points at which other dreamers depart from the simulation and come back to it: something in the other, that which is in them more than themselves perhaps, disappears or (seemingly miraculously) returns. What the novel renders especially powerfully is the overwhelming, intoxicating intensity of erotic connections with a dream Other, the uncanny sense of recognition, the deja vu of dreamlove. In the case of A Dream Of Wessex, the sense of recognition between the lovers can be accounted for by the fact that the two, Julia and David, know each other in the novel’s real world; and yet Julia and David are not in love in the real world, nor is there any suggestion that they would necessarily fall in love. It is their dream-selves that fall for each other. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 258

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s recurring Lacanian categories (the Real, fantasy mediation, the Other). Also resonates with ch14’s Ripley dynamic of desire requiring distance.