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From alamut:

Oneironautics

Should we not classify web browsing as form of dreaming? Especially disinterested web browsing, web browsing completely unmotivated by greed or desire, where one at best is driven only by a gentle curiosity (or extremely gentle escapism), where browsing means wandering freely down corridors of thought and each web page jogs the soul in a new direction?

Browsing is a form of dreaming, in that dreaming is simply the unfettered journey through links and connections, from one image to another, one impression leading to other impressions. At the end of it we are left with a muddied trace of the journey, having assembled bits and pieces into some deeper coherent picture of our travels and travails.

Dreaming is surfing, on the waves of sleep, on the sweet rhythms of circadian cycles, the eyes rapidly scan the pictures that our brains and souls throw up before us. We can dream in preparation for a hunt, traveling the territory in vision, seeking the game that will come to us and making a pact with it, an appointment, whereupon we will show ourselves to each other and complete the bargain. We can dream for a future, for one of the myriad of options that might be or could have been. We can dream loss, even of those things we never possessed. We can grieve at the traces of light we leave as we fly over the dreamscape. Dream for ourselves or for others. Dream in this world, or outside of it, or, perhaps most frightening, dream on the very edge, with one foot firmly planted in manifested reality and one dangling into the vapour of pure possibility.

Is all our Life, then but a dream
Seen faintly in the golden gleam
Athwart Time’s dark resistless stream?

Bowed to the earth with bitter woe
Or laughing at some raree-show
We flutter idly to and fro.

Man’s little Day in haste we spend,
And, from its merry noontide, send
No glance to meet the silent end.

— Lewis Carroll, from Sylvie and Bruno