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...sitting at my writing table in the dark and very late, I work on a text lit only by a cluster of small lanterns swinging to the vibration of my hand moving across the paper. This stillness in the night can be like the stillness of online. It is the charm of midnight, the intimacy of the unconscious, to sit here knowing how many sleeping things are close by yet hidden from my view and to be aware that such quiet does not signal solitude, as it might in the daytime, but means simply that this part of the world is in suspension.
The language we have given our computers mirrors the language of slumber – hibernate, sleep, suspend. I’m surprised we don’t have command called ‘dream’ – after all, there is an equivalent, which is when you run a programme in the background. That must be the nearest a computer comes to dreaming. Or perhaps it’s dreaming when it is running a task like the Seti search for extra-terrestrial life . Most people only make use of a tiny percentage of their computers’ capacity, so applications like seti@home live in the spaces. While you sleep at night, your computer reads signals from deep space and looks for alien life forms. That sounds pretty much like dreaming to me.
