Imagicide: The Death of Dreaming and the Scarcity of Hope
“I believe that dreams — day dreams, you know, with your eyes wide open and your brain machinery whizzing — are likely to lead to the betterment of the world. The imaginative child will become the imaginative man or woman most apt to create, to invent, and therefore to foster civilization.”
L. Frank Baum, Introduction to The Lost Princess of Oz (1917)
I have always been a creature of creativity and imagination. My parents raised me in a world of books and games and movies filled with fascinating lands and weird characters and wild possibilities. They bought me art supplies and word processors and cameras and musical instruments. When we visited Disney’s Epcot Center — which I preferred over Disney World, for some reason — I never wanted to leave the “Journey Into Imagination” area.
At the time, it was just a matter of fun. I loved adventuring with Garion’s crew in Eddings’ novels; visiting outer space with Asimov’s robots; and wilding out with the Muppet Babies. I had no way of knowing that I was building a fortress of self-preservation that would protect me from the horrors of untenable realities.
In his 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus writes: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” He goes on to speculate about the meaning of life, about which I have written elsewhere. But in this space I want to interrogate another ingredient for confronting that one serious problem: The death of dreaming.
Not the death of dreams, or dreams about death. (A web search for “death of dreaming” returns only those topics.) I’m referring to those unfortunate souls who have stopped dreaming, stopped imagining different worlds. They exist everywhere, and like those who believe their lives can serve no purpose, they are at serious risk for self-harm. Worst of all, their condition of extinct imagination is needless. Fortunately, no imagination can ever be truly destroyed — it can always be resurrected.
Why Dreams Matter
Imagination keeps us going; it is necessary for survival. When we believe that our current reality is the inevitable stasis of eternity, and our current reality is terrible, there’s no reason to continue. This is why suicide was so common in the Treblinka death camp; it was the one way to exercise some control over the prisoners’ wretched conditions. Fortunately for history (and those of us willing to learn from it), some prisoners dreamed a different future, convinced their comrades to avoid suicide, and staged a successful liberatory rebellion.
Rebecca Solnit puts it this way, in her 2016 book Hope in the Dark: “Authentic hope requires clarity — seeing the troubles in this world — and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable.” The denizens of Plato’s cave are trapped not only by their chains, but also their inability to conceive of anything beyond the shadow-play.
In her 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry writes in Big Walter’s voice: “Seem like God didn’t see fit to give the black man nothing but dreams — but He did give us children to make them dreams seem worthwhile.” Young Walter struggles at times with a lack of dreams; he is tormented by a horrifying absence of hope: “Sometimes it’s like I can see the future stretched out in front of me — just plain as day. The future, Mama. Hanging over there at the edge of my days. Just waiting for me — a big, looming blank space — full of nothing.” This is what imagicide looks like.
When he does begin to dream, Young Walter is fixated on material things: liquor store profits, cool offices, and fancy cars. Yet this is the fuel for his life; it gives him hope and keeps him going. When he finally shifts his focus in the final scene, he sacrifices those superficial rewards for a new set of dreams about integrity, self-love, obligations to his ancestors, his sister’s ambitions, and his son’s future.
Hamlet, too, is driven by his dreams, but in a different way. He is shaken by “what dreams may come” after death, imagining a future even more terrible than his current wretched dilemma. Therefore he decides to stick it out and make the best of his situation, miserable though it is. In a negative inversion of Young Walter’s line from Raisin, Hamlet’s rumination on “to be or not to be” focuses on the inextricable link between imagination and perseverance.
This is What Imagicide Looks Like
In 20 years of teaching, I’ve worked with many students suffering from a death of dreaming. Sometimes it is a pedestrian generic malaise which clouds their thinking in minor ways, and vanishes with the spring. Other times it’s a deep, existential crisis which poses a real threat to their health and well-being.
One obvious symptom is a loss of self-worth. If dreams keep us going, then their absence makes giving up look like a good choice. This is something of a chicken-and-egg puzzle, since a feeling of worthlessness can easily lead someone to stop dreaming. But I’ve found that imagicide usually comes first; when someone feels wretched now, they might still believe that things can improve later. That requires imagination.
Another symptom of imagicide is canceled passion. Resignation and disaffectation have long been hallmarks of jilted generations, but these problems have always been tempered by creative urges and passionate impulses — to throw up graf tags, to play noisy punk music, to make incomprehensible short films. When angry and confused young people believe there’s no point in channeling their anger into art, we all suffer.
In 2020, political imagicide is also a serious problem. Mental defeat can feel inevitable in the face of a seemingly intractable political status quo. When the systems of democracy break down as they have in recent years, a small-d democrat can be forgiven for abandoning hope. But a strong imagination will remind us how quickly things can change.
I could go on and on with these examples. I believe imagicide is at the heart of many social woes, from mediocre mass-produced stories to humdrum existences lived by folks with unsatisfying jobs and loveless marriages. Instead, however, let’s look at where this problem comes from.
Sources of Imagicide
Imagicide can happen anywhere, to anyone — I’ve encountered students from every walk of life suffering from it. When a rich kid is handed everything on a silver platter, what else is there to dream about? Taboo cruelties, perhaps, or meaningless contests of conspicuous consumption to prove a greater horde of gold than their peers.
Which is not to say that those with means cannot suffer more serious wounds of imagination. Divorce, abuse, emotional neglect, and mental stagnation are vivid realities for plenty of well-off young people, and the threat of self-harm is no less real just because you’ve got plenty to eat and a warm bed in which to sleep.
Those at the bottom of society, of course, are even more prone to imagicide. Walter suffers in Raisin mostly because the white supremacist capitalism of 20th century Chicago has no use for his dreams. His only utility to the social order is for him to shut up and drive the car for the rich white family. Ruth, meanwhile, can dream about doing white folks’ laundry, just as Mama can dream about her next opportunity to “carry they slop jars”. These characters never stop dreaming, though, despite the delays and festering and explosions. This may be the most beautiful thing about them, Hansberry’s most important point about the human spirit.
For a few lucky souls, capitalist enterprises can facilitate imagination. Those who dream up hot new apps, for example, can strike it big in Silicon Valley. But for most of us, capitalism is a relentless assault on imagination. Daydreaming is a danger to your productivity. Your boss doesn’t want you coming up with new ways to run the place; he wants you to shut up and meet your quota for the week. Corporations don’t want their workers to lose themselves in the clouds; they want more products sold, more units shipped.
More to the point, capitalism cannot abide creative thinking on a larger scale. If you dream of a world without profit motives leading to polluted rivers and sick uninsured people kicked out of hospitals, you are a threat to the system itself. Therefore imagicide serves a very real and sensible purpose for our most elemental structure of social organization.
Not that communist states love creativity and imagination. North Korea isn’t filled with free-wheeling young people dreaming big and wide. (Or maybe it is. How would I know?) On the other hand, when the Soviet software engineer Alexey Pajitnov created Tetris in 1984, he wasn’t driven by profits or fame. He wanted to make an excellent game, and he did.
The enemy, we can hopefully agree, is a social order focused on bottom lines and conformity, which exists under both economic systems. The regimented thinking so common to ideologies of dominance leave young minds in a state of shock, where creativity is useless at best and harmful at worst.
Technopoly and Imagination
And our postmodern 21st century technosphere is a mixed blessing (or a mixed curse) with regard to this dilemma. Like all technology, it provides unprecedented promise — and agonizing suffocation. Never before have humans had such easy, instant access to information, culture, history, opinion, perspective, and stories. But how is most of the bandwidth used? Let’s be honest: flame wars, cyber-bullying, virtual isolation, meaningless memery, celebrity worship, vapid selfies, and hobby fixation.
Online entertainments are not hazardous in and of themselves, of course, and none are new in kind. The problem, rather, lies in the overwhelming totality of their saturation. You will never finish watching all the YouTube videos about your favorite video game. You will never finish reading all the Twitter posts about what happened on the show you’re binging. You will never finish flipping through all the variations of the Ohio meme.
Neil Postman’s 1992 book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology was decades ahead of its time, making clear that computers and the internet are like all tools: neither pure good nor pure evil. So it is with their impact on our ability to dream.
When I was a child, the world was filled with hysterical parents and commentators, clutching their pearls and explaining how TV cartoons and video games were going to ruin the minds of the next generation. Speaking only for myself, they have clearly had the opposite effect. Muppet Babies celebrated imagination; MYST centered books as magical transport; and the throughline from my beloved fantasy novels to the RPGs I played could not have been clearer.
I know my story is not the most common, perhaps, but I also know that it serves as an example of what can be done when we avoid the extremes of one type of thinking or the other; the internet isn’t making us smarter or dumber all by itself. It’s a question of how we use it, and I’m sorry to say that many (most?) young people are using the internet as a means of escape from the world, rather than a way to engage with it.
And I don’t blame them. I blame previous generations (including my own) that created such horrors from which they flee. But I also blame the educators, parents, and elders who have tried to regiment their minds into productive machines fit for acquiescence into a soul-crushing social order. Why engage with the world? So you can grind out another 60-hour work week, produce nothing of personal value, and hope — as Kate Tempest puts it — “you’ll make it to manager / pray for a raise / cross the beige days off on your beach-babe calendar”?
It’s easy to see these problems as separate and unrelated, but they’re not. When children are taught, explicitly and indirectly, that their daydreams and creative urges are verboten, they stop having them. It’s no coincidence that so many books and films about capturing lost wonder use grey worlds to depict the mediocre normal. Take away the watercolors and kids will paint with their bored tears.
The beauty of our technopolistic milieu is the explosion of creative output we can find online. People, in general, refuse to stop being creative. Webcomics, music, animations, short films, flash fiction, culture-jamming remixes, and even exhausting thinkpieces on Medium — the global marketplace of creativity has never been more bountiful or more diverse. Of course plenty of the stuff people are making is crap, but that’s nothing new. The point is that we have more awesome stuff than ever before, and the dedication of the best creators is remarkable to behold. Game recognize game just as art recognizes art; we can be intimidated by those who make great things, but we can also be inspired by them. Hearing another’s voice, clean and proud, can help us find our own. (I know; I’ve heard many students tell me that my volume in the classroom has given them confidence to unearth their own voices.)
Create at the Center
It should surprise no one that my recommendation, therefore, is to get kids to make good art. Brené Brown points to an eternal struggle with our artistic impulses: “The only unique contribution that we will ever make in this world will be born of our own creativity.” As thrilling as a high score on a standardized test might be in the moment, does any student think of such a mark as a “unique contribution” to the world?
I’m fortunate to teach classes on creative writing, hip-hop composition, and graphic novels. But I teach these classes in part because I have insisted on — and proven — their importance, not as sideline concerns for unemployable poets, but for every young person in the building. Our panic for high academic standards and closing achievement gaps comes from a laudable desire to give kids the best. But what if it comes at the cost of imagicide?
This is not abstract puffery; many years ago I had a student who nearly fell victim to suicide because of the pressure he faced for good grades and high scores. How desperately he longed for a release valve like creative writing or goofy poems. Alas, after elementary school, such things are considered obstacles to the real business of school.
Besides, creative writing and academic writing are both forms of writing. I didn’t set out as a writer at the age of eight in order to compose thirteen Featured Articles on Wikipedia. I wanted to make up silly stories about talking eyeballs and robot wars. But the craft and the discipline bleeds through. When a human follows a passion, who knows where they’ll end up? With the right guidance, the escapist can turn profound.
And it’s not just young people, either. (I focus on them because of my job, and because we can most easily affect their lives through the schools.) Adults need to kindle their creativity, too. After insisting that every child daydream regularly, George Carlin quickly added: “You could use some of it yourself. Just sit at the window, stare at the clouds. It’s good for you.”
Re-igniting creativity is also necessary for destroying political imagicide. We cannot fall victim to apathy or lack of action, which often grows from a lack of imagination. Few people in August 1998 imagined that East Timor would be able to vote for their future. But one year later, that’s exactly what happened. Discouraged though we are, we owe it to ourselves, future generations, and our ancestors to dream up ways to escape our current horror show; unite as a species; and cancel the looming apocalypse(s).
Every young person deserves time and resources for daydreaming and imagination. Every young person deserves recognition of their wacky ideas, their far-off speculations, their oddball reveries.
Every young person is naturally creative and filled with dreams. It’s up to us adults to decide whether we will encourage that creativity, or stifle it. As Kevin Smith said: “It costs nothing to encourage an artist. And the potential benefits are staggering.”
When we tell young people to stop being artists, we get imagicide.
They deserve better.
