Dream Machine

Abstract

Dream Machine is a collection which constructs a body of contemporary mythology, grappling with themes of American paranoia, online identity formation, and bodily alienation. Stories such as "Offerings" and "Pareidolia" explore the digital commodification of the body, following characters who—through Instagram-sourced sugar daddies and nude art modeling, respectively—offer themselves up freely as subjects of voyeurism and surveillance. Other stories, such as "Network Support" and "Dream Machine" involve characters who abandon their physical forms to disappear into the internet, existing as free-floating data and radiant frequencies. "Downstream," "Grass So Green," and "Little White Crosses" engage with the stark landscape of a country starved of its spirituality, where conspiracies, hallucinations, and deathly apparitions seem to possess the same inherent logic as a blue sky.