You emerge into a nightmare, a world of hallucinating machines and oligarchs summoning desolation through big-data divination. During the Warring States period, Zhuangzi asked if he was a man who dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was a man; the more you come to, the more you’re sure it must be the latter. How else could you explain the unreality of a world set on gleefully accelerating towards oblivion, mad with the total faith that it can fly off the edge? You shut your eyes. You want the dream to end, but it refuses. Even in the distant tributaries of your mind where lucidity and hallucination flow into each other, you feel the presence of cold machinery—blinking systems designed to manage this last bit of interiority, speaking in voices you mistake as your own, leading you in labyrinthine loops to nowhere.

So you make a choice. You plunge into the dream’s uncertain depths. It’s a perilous descent. Dante needed Virgil for his visio in somniis—his dream vision, which William Blake brought to life so vividly through the imagery that graces these pages. Unfortunately, no heroic guide appears forthcoming; but we’re not the first to have to gather our own tools for this journey.

In the first centuries CE, Artemidorus Daldianus compiled the first Oneirocritica, an ancient book on dream interpretation replete with dream-types, a compendium of knowledge on the significance of dream symbols, and a practical manual for how to go about the business of oneiromancy. We think of it as a literary technology, a map of the nowhere borderlands of dream and waking life charted by myth, testimony, revelation, rumor, analysis, and hearsay. Since its invention, this technology has been reworked and reappropriated—by Islamic scholars and medieval Byzantine Christians, theorists like Foucault and Freud—as the shape of this territory has shifted.

For our second issue, we offer our own version of this device: an Oneirocritica for the hallucinations of our technologized present.