Dreams of intrusion (Second Life)

Second Life.

I remember walking alone at night, in the Freundschaft Resorts.

Clean, green, safe streets that adjoined the Saarbrücken Zoo. Or at least its digital version.

I set the environment parameters to "Midnight" – bluish tones, cold, dim moonlight. Any other player present at the same time, next to me, would have been able to see the world in the low light of dusk, or in the full map of the afternoon; I needed the darkness, the secrecy and protection of darkness.

I entered houses.

It was rare for me to run into someone and get kicked out. Even rarer that a parcel would automatically eject me after a warning message and ten seconds to leave the premises (a small window opens at the bottom right of the screen, informing you that you have no access to these premises, and it's as if the whole universe suddenly revealed a forgotten paranoid nature).

I would fly over empty houses at night, as if in a dream. I'd take photos of bedrooms, living rooms, offices. The houses were all wood and glass, geometric, open – contemporary. Somewhere, real human beings owned these virtual houses, paying to live part of their lives in them; they decorated them and connected to them in their spare time, to experience things that escaped me. None of this was a game. Neither for them nor for me. Second Life allowed me to realize my lifelong fantasies of intrusion and voyeurism. I stood still for long periods in empty houses. I savored my transgression. A strange peace was rising.

My memories in Second Life – this one and others – are real memories. By this I mean that I often recall images, sensations and emotions perceived and felt entirely in Second Life. I'm probably not always aware of where they come from, just as some old dreams can be mistaken for real. These memories are real, and nostalgia is attached to them. They, too, are my story.

And the places I've seen come back to me in my dreams. They mix with other places, real or entirely fictitious, which together make up my inner space, the place where my imagination takes place – recomposed memories, reveries of other lives, fantasies of all kinds, stories to be written. These places existed within me before I discovered Second Life. They existed in the real world, for a start; and more or less consciously in my mind; independently, as distinct places and entities, or as mere potentialities. Second Life actualized these potentialities and gave them an autonomous existence of their own.

There's a dream I had one night – I'm in an open space, and my field of vision, panoramic. The setting is a country lane, fields, a pile of dead trees and branches. I'm with my girlfriend and we're walking. In the middle of nowhere, to our right, the abandoned, eerie red-brick house I sometimes entered as a teenager. In many other dreams, in a frightening number of other dreams, in fact, I'd enter it again, and the house, alive, conscious and ill-intentioned, would "digest" me within it, the space distorting and contracting, as if to, yes, digest me. In this dream, as in the others, I'm aware of the evil emanating from this house. It's never appeared to me in a dream in any other way. We branch off towards it, keeping a certain distance so as not to enter its zone of influence. Leaving the path, we end up climbing a steep slope, with green, mossy ground, to emerge into a landscape of glass and metal structures, similar to the Freundschaft Resorts. I say to myself, "so this is what it looks like in real life".

Empty houses, virtual, immaterial, where I live out my fantasies. A real house, which comes back to terrify me in my dreams. The two mix in new dreams. And they become the setting for the story I'm writing. And other stories that mature within me – memoirs, fictions, game scenarios, photo series to be realized.

There's a mystery to space – which we inhabit and which inhabits us. And a mystery of haunting; for who is haunted? The house, or the person the house haunts in return?

(originally published on Schizodoxe webzine)