Delegating dreams

I fell back into Second Life, without remorse or hesitation, nor any more existential questions about this game that should be taken for what it is, and for what it offers, and nothing more. In this case, the best way I've found to see the country, to wander through places of infinite variety, as a pure tourist, as a pure spirit. My hour-long explorations in Second Life, with little or no attempt to establish human contact with the few people I come across, are the closest I've ever come to daydreaming. Or dreaming at all, as I frequently dream of walking alone, in unfamiliar places, in cities, gardens and insane architectural structures. Since I no longer have time to sleep, I can delegate dreaming to a software program.

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Someone was lamenting on MSN recently the growing importance of Facebook, which is tending to become a standardized and exhaustive catalog of the human species – something perfectly inhuman and even satanic, from a certain point of view, entirely respectable and right; but also, I find, something fascinating, and not without beauty. A whole new form of beauty. Like that of this screensaver you can download, Surveillance Screensaver, which lets you watch, as a pure voyeur, public surveillance cameras all over the planet. Of course, there's a lot to be said for freedom being trampled underfoot, the end of privacy, and so on. But there's an undeniable beauty in it. That of a kind of consciousness, of omniscience, that emerges little by little, of which we can all have our small share. I almost think of it as a form of meditation – admittedly a humble, rather mechanical form that doesn't really offer enlightenment, let alone liberation, but come on, spending a sleepless night browsing through HUNDREDS of photos on Flickr or Deviant Art, seeing pictures of cities, streets, vacation snaps, self-portraits, snapshots, seeing the whole of reality as God sees it, all at the same time, or almost all at the same time, gives me a sensation I've often felt, of no longer really existing, of being no more than a gaze hovering above the world, detached from time and space. I also get this feeling, though much less intensely of course, simply by surfing the Net. No doubt that's the explanation for this form of addiction: surfing as a means of escaping reality, space, time and oneself.