Why Dreamland?

I’m naming my book Riding Through Dreamland. It’s an intriguing title, but you might be wondering why I refer to the United States as a “dreamland” -- admittedly a highly generalized term that lacks substantive nuance. This blog post (and the next) is my attempt to explain what I mean and why I chose this term for the book’s title.

In my very first blog post last June, I wrote the following:

My observations of the people I met and places I visited led me to conclude that we are a nation of somnambulants, lulled to sleep by the marketing onslaught of commercial interests, the myths of our national self-identity, and the instinctive self-interest required to live comfortably (or as comfortably as we can afford, which for a large chunk of Americans, doesn’t amount to much).

There’s a lot packed into that statement (written with such privileged certainty!). Before I start unpacking, it’s important to clarify that I am not denouncing the American people. Nor am I implying that we are lazy or guilty of willfully reneging on efforts necessary to avoid this condition, or that this is even a uniquely American malaise. A point I’ll expand on later is that, even with the best of intentions, we can’t help but participate in (and perpetuate) this dreamworld.

It All Started in Xenia

I reached Xenia, Ohio at the end of the 51st day of the trek. That morning, Joanie had driven Olympia — the Class-B motorhome that was our mobile base and my support vehicle for more than seven weeks — back home to begin her regular work schedule. When I dragged my weary derriere into Xenia in the sticky, grey, late afternoon, I had been slogging through the midwestern humidity for two weeks. I didn’t so much dismount from the bike as sloughed off, much like a sweaty bandage that has lost its adhesive and slowly falls from the skin.

Xenia looked like it had only partially recovered from the F5-rated tornado that hit in 1974. There’s no doubt that a tragedy of that magnitude destroys a lot more than physical structures. I booked a room at the Ramada Inn, located in a dispiriting-looking downtown designed for cars to get through instead of a place where people would want to hang out. The Ramada, like the city, had seen better days (mold on the bathroom ceiling and in the shower’s tub, broken ice machine down the hall… you get the picture).

I had planned on writing a blog post, but I was too tired. Instead, I turned on the television looking for entertainment that didn’t expect too much of me. I finally settled on an early Harry Potter film, the movie equivalent of returning to a familiar restaurant to savor a dish one has enjoyed many times before. However, my plans for relaxation were assaulted by a stream of commercials. The transition from riding on empty country roads and riparian trails at 12 mph to quick-tempo advertisements replete with tightly edited images replaced by another visually aggressive montage every two or three seconds distressed my analog senses. Worse was the stream of sales-babble encouraging viewers to buy more stuff! And when I realized that the ooze streaming from my screen was the very same noxious messaging seen across the country — at that very moment — by millions of viewers in their homes, bars, hotel lobbies, airport terminals, and even dentist offices, it dawned on me that our ability to think critically is continually overwhelmed by messages designed to play to our unconscious desires.

My view is that the marketing onslaught I experienced that night in Xenia seems designed intentionally to erode our ability to think clearly while, in a manner, intoxicating us just enough so that we ignore the machine behind the messaging and what it is doing to us. The “dream-industrial” complex never sleeps and we, against our better judgement, internalize its messages and either voluntarily or involuntarily reside in this fabricated world.

Hyperreality & the Myth of American Exceptionalism

It’s a most peculiar thing to conduct our lives in the physical world where we perform our non-illusory tasks straightforwardly while, simultaneously, our minds spend so much time identifying with material objects or the acquisition of wealth that we become separated from who we deeply and actually are. This is similar to Carl Jung’s “participation mystique” where the ego is not clearly differentiated from an object or a collective identity. French philosopher Jean Baudrillard explains this phenomenon similarly using the term “hyperreality,” a condition where the hard truths of reality seamlessly blend in experience with the fiction of media and culture so that there is no longer any clear distinction between the two. In this context, my use of “dreamland” refers to a post-modern dissociative experience where we cannot help but unconsciously accept the media’s mirage.

As I lay on my hotel bed that night, I reflected on all that I had seen on my ride across the country. As I got progressively deeper into the trek, the more I felt that I was riding through a dreamland, inhabited by sleepwalkers -- distracted and fixated on the allure of “stuff.” I think this malaise affects all of us, regardless of how much pride we take in being conscious of our desires and “woke” to the dark side of consumerism.

And it’s not just unfettered capitalism and sophisticated marketing that pulls the strings of our unconscious minds. A co-creating factor for our dream-like state is how so many people unconsciously accept the narrative of American exceptionalism, conveniently ignoring the dark, unhealed wounds of the not-too-recent past, such as the genocide of the Indigenous population and our deeply rooted racism that didn’t die with the abolition of slavery (to name just two). It takes a solid pair of blinders to maintain the illusion that we are the cowboys wearing white hats, spreading the gospel of freedom to the rest of the world.

Unrestful Thoughts in Reston

As I write in the book, in many ways, we are like the protagonists in Plato’s allegory of the cave. Plato has us imagine a scene where prisoners spend their entire lives chained in a cave, facing a blank wall. They watch shadows projected onto the wall by objects passing in front of a fire, located behind them, and believe these shadows are real. Similarly, as a nation, we are chained to our TVs, computers, mobile devices, and beliefs, convinced the high-definition shadows passing in front of us — consumer goods, political propaganda, and the stories we tell about ourselves — are “real” and what truly matter.

Even if you are like me and believe that your life doesn’t wholly conform to this allegory, these shadows create a pervasive social, political, and economic field through which we move in our day-to-day lives. It’s a daunting task not to be affected by them. As consumers in a capitalist system (in a country now led by a full-fledged fascist), aren’t we all wrestling with these strange, invisible, undercurrents?

I pondered all this for the nine riding days it took me to get from Xenia to my sister’s place in Reston, Virginia. When I shared my thoughts with her, she recommended I read Chris Hedges’ book, Empire of Illusion. Published at the beginning of Obama’s first term, the book explores what he calls cultural decay as a result of our consumer culture and corporate influence. She handed me a copy which I devoured on my rest day in Reston. The book reinforced my thinking that, on the whole, we Americans prefer to suspend our disbelief and accept the illusions marketed to us by largely unaccountable corporations.

These were not exactly the most cheerful thoughts to accompany the final two days of riding from Reston to the Atlantic Ocean. But once I picked up the nearby Washington and Old Dominion rail-trail and started pedaling my way to Annapolis for my last night on the road, the excitement of completing the trek was like clear spring water that washed away any thoughts of illusions and being chained to our screens.

Only after returning home and taking the time to process the buzzing in my soul and the remnants of the fully immersive whoosh-like experience I had just completed did I start examining why it is so hard to resist these illusions. My evolving conclusions, steeped in a metaphysical cocktail of Taoism, quantum physics, and Jungian theory (shaken and stirred), are best left for the next post.