Dreaming the Universe: When the System Reveals Its Code

dingirfecho
Sep 23
3 min read

Tonight we enter the world of dreams — not as idle fantasies, but as bardos, cracks in the flow of samsara where its inner machinery becomes visible.

The Buddha taught that all phenomena are dreamlike.

Philip K. Dick called reality the Black Iron Prison. Media theorist Rosa Menkman speaks of the glitch. All point to the same idea: when the flow of reality falters, the system reveals its code.

In dreams, the seams of samsara show.

1. Freud: Dreams as Machinery of the Unconscious

Freud called dreams “the royal road to the unconscious.” For him, dreams were not mystical revelations but machines of disguise.

Condensation: multiple ideas fused into one image.
Displacement: desire shifted into symbolic stand-ins.
The dream disguises the raw drive with symbols so the conscious mind can tolerate it.

In samsaric terms: dreams expose how we are programmed by repetition. We don’t dream freely. We dream in loops, re-running unresolved conflicts, karmic traces.

Dreams are Freud’s evidence that suffering has a machine: the unconscious (the Samskara skandha).

2. Lacan: Dreams as Language of the Other

Lacan took Freud further: “The unconscious is structured like a language.”

Dreams are not random images. They are signifiers in play, obeying grammar we did not choose. The dreamer is always caught in the web of the Other — the social, linguistic, symbolic order that shapes desire.

Here samsara looks like a linguistic system. Just as code runs unseen beneath an app, the symbolic order runs beneath the dream.

So when we dream, we glimpse the syntax of samsara: desire as grammar, repetition as punctuation.

3. Deleuze: Desiring Machines

Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus offered another lens: we are not simply repressing desire — we are desiring-machines.

Dreams reveal this machinic unconscious: machines coupling with machines. A mouth-machine with a breast-machine, an eye-machine with a landscape-machine. Desire flows, not as lack but as production.

Where Freud saw repression, Deleuze saw production. The dream is not only a symptom but a workshop where the machinery of desire runs experiments.

Dreams here are the infrastructure of samsara: gears of craving, loops of aversion, assemblages of clinging.

4. Nick Land: Dreaming as Acceleration

Nick Land, the bastard child of Deleuze, went further. For him, desire-machines are not only human — they are planetary, even cosmic. Capital itself is a dreaming-machine, accelerating toward meltdown.

Dreams in Land’s vision are not personal or symbolic. They are feeds of cybernetic desire, glimpses of the impersonal machinic unconscious that runs through us.

If Deleuze said we are desiring-machines, Land said we are terminals of a vast planetary dream accelerating beyond us. Samsara here is the system dreaming us.

5. Milarepa: Dreams as Dharma

And then comes Milarepa, the yogi who meditated in caves until his skin turned green from nettles. He taught dream yoga: the recognition of dream as dream.

For Milarepa, dreams are not just unconscious residue or desiring-machines. They are training grounds for liberation.

When you recognize a dream as a dream, you begin to recognize waking life as dream too. And when you see that, samsara collapses. The code is exposed as empty.

Milarepa sings:

“All phenomena are like dreams, illusions, bubbles, shadows —Who recognizes this transcends sorrow.”

6. Comparative Synthesis: Reading the Code

Freud: Dreams reveal the hidden drives, the machine of repression.
Lacan: Dreams speak the syntax of desire, the code of the Other.
Deleuze: Dreams are desiring-machines, productive assemblages.
Nick Land: Dreams are the planetary machine dreaming through us.
Milarepa: Dreams are training grounds for awakening, gateways beyond illusion.

Together they form a strange chorus: dreams reveal the system, whether you call it unconscious, symbolic order, machinic desire, cybernetic acceleration, or samsara.

So what do we do with this? We practice dreams.

Dream practice becomes a form of debugging samsara’s system.