And what do you mean by that, asks Numeroso, the voice of everyone. Do you mean to say that economic realism ia a delusion, that the whole industrial world is not as we think?
Yes I do, says Utopia. Just look at the activities which take up our time. And then she recites a long list of which I hear only a part...well, she is saying, there's watching tv for a start. What could be more dreamlike? And there's doing repetitive work in a factory, there's sitting in a classroom, or commuting to work in train or in a traffic jam, and there's what we do in the office, which you can think of as writing the story of this enormous dream that we're living, making its laws and regulations, working out its costs, designing it, and persuading everyone to buy it...and on and on she went...
But then the scene changes to tomorrow and Numeroso is asking Utopia what she thinks can bring everyone back to 'real life'. Imagine, she says, not living any longer as a passive consumer, or as a specialist producer of just a part of the dream, but as a wide-awake and active person who is somehow enabled to share in the creative control of the whole pattern of life as it occupies and shapes us all. Numeroso smiles.
And now Utopia begins to act strangely. She speaks entrancingly of dismantling centralised controls to the point where every one of us becomes a priest, shaman, self-leader or genius, as only a few people did in the past, and no one does now except a few artists or dictators perhaps. And then she begins to type words of ancient wisdom over the internet, of all things, and everything begins to happen just as she forsees as industrial living comes alive indeed! The dream is over.
I came to this idea, or it came to me, when I noticed in my classification of our brainstorm on dreaming that some industrial activities, or even all of them, resemble dreaming: dreaming with our eyes open but with mind detached or uncoupled, because of economic imperatives like profit and specialisation, the conditions of what is called realism, or because of the subjection of ourselves to material things and money, more than spirit, more than love.
I presented this to an affirmative group as notes for a chapter in a book on the internet that I have already begun. Several of those in the group advised me to separate the notion of industrial living as dreaming from the book, which they thought should be limited to more factual things. But some of them encouraged me to persist in combinining the dream with reality and this I am attempting in the fragment of text above.
I was helped in this by a chance selection from The Bhagavad Gita, translated by Juan Mascara (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1962, page 84) which reminded me of ancient notions of goodness in human life, which perhaps are excluded from industrial dreamlife as we know it. The chance quotation provided a list of 16 qualities which I supposed Utopia to be typing in the awakeing from the dream:
Intelligence, spiritual vision, victory over delusion, patient forgiveness, truth, self-harmony, peacefulness, joys and sorrows, to be and not to be, fear and freedom from fear, harmelessness and non-violence, an ever-quietness, satisfaction, simple austerity, generosity, honour and dishonour: these are the conditions of mortals (says Krishna, the god of love).