Electric Dreams closes its doors

Posted by Ryan Hurd on September 1, 2007

I”m sad to report that the oldest site for dream studies on the web has published its last issue. Electric Dreams has been providing cutting-edge dream theory and information for fourteen years. Yeah, that’s long before “google” became a verb. Indeed, the associated networking site Dream Gate paved the way for other on-line communities in the early days of the “inter-web.” Virtual space and dreaming go way back.

In an internet era dominated by child pornography and terrible poetry, Electric Dreams tackled the issue of free expression in digital space, refusing to be censored. Let’s face it: dreams have a nasty habit of showing us the ugly bits. The cyber-sharing of dreams snowballed into the larger cultural movement of the 1990s, moving the study of dreams beyond limited medical models and into the realm of culture, spirituality, and ecology.

Thankfully, Richard Wilkerson, the editor of Electric Dreams, is keeping the website up, so its impressive catalogue of dream resources is still available to the public. Articles are searchable, too. Richard is still maintaining his postmodern dream site, for those of you interested in how dream theory intersects with contemporary philosophy.

Thanks for those fourteen years. While ya’ll were transforming the culture of cyberspace, I was still seething with adolescence, picking at my scabs in the mirror. Anything I do today on the web is only possible due to those years of hard work. And the fact that my skin finally dried out.