The Necessity of Dreams
One of the most important new facts about dreams is that they are a biologic necessity. You see, they have made experiments of waking people up whenever they start to dream (they can tell by the rapid eye movements and also by the brainwaves) and if they keep interfering with the REM sleep, very soon the subject will show all the symptoms of sleeplessness. No matter how much a dreamless sleep they’re allowed, it will eventually will be fatal as within two weeks or so. So we know now that dreams are a biologic necessity, which means that they must serve a very important function.
The next step is to go into space, to leave the planet but we’re not there yet. Here we have an artifact weighing about 170 pounds that cannot exist outside of a very specialized environment (sort of a whole aqualung) and the official space programs, how do they propose to solve this? They are going to move this whole artifact, the human artifact, in its environment, from one place to another. It would not occur to them to start from the other end.
Now you have an object “X”, that is the human body, and you want to transport “X” say, from earth to space but “X” is heavy and can only live in a whole medium. So why not alter “X” to reduce its weight and its dependency on its medium? That would seem a logical approach to the problem and this would not occur to the official programs because they accept the human artifact with all its limitations.
In effect they accept the limitations imposed by Christianity by what Crowley calls the slave gods. Now the human body is much too dense for space conditions. We have a model that is less dense, in fact almost weightless; that would be the astral or dream body. I postulate that the function of dreams may be to prepare us for space and that is why they are a biologic necessity.
- Williams Burroughs
