Dreams and Ghosts with Dominic Pettman & Everyday Analysis

@ Join us for a conversation between two of the most exciting theorists of the digital realm, Dominic Pettman and Alfie Bown.

We are delighted to welcome our friends Everyday Analysis back to Housmans for what promises to be another stimulating reflection on the agonies and aporias of contemporary culture. This time we have Dominic Pettman joining us to talk about some of the recurrent ideas that animate his recent publications, The Forgetting of Dreams: Selected Oneiric Residues (published by Everyday Analysis) and Ghosting: On Disappearance (Polity, 2025). Dominic is emerging as one of our major theorists of the digital world. His work is especially accomplished at interrogating modes of disconnection, loneliness and alienation that could only really exist now, in an epoch almost entirely mediated through a digital reflection of itself.

Blurbs:

The Forgetting of Dreams: Selected Oneiric Residues

We process our lives through riddles, mysteries, ciphers, and enigmas – but we hesitate to share these with friends and family. In times gone by, as for Freud, dreams were considered a key to cosmic secrets. Today, in all sorts of ways – both subtle and not – we are discouraged from sharing the content of our dreams, unless we happen to be indulging in that most anachronistic ritual: lying prostrate on the psychoanalyst’s couch. Anywhere else, an anecdote that begins, “Last night I dreamed . . .” is usually met with a sigh and a defensive glazing of the eyes. In our over-burdened world, any sharing of dreams is always already perceived as over-sharing. Contrary to this, Pettman argues – the more we share tales of our isolated nocturnal journeys, the better chance we have to understand the topography of our collective conundrum.

Ghosting: On Disappearance

Abandonment is as old as time, but ghosting is a modern twist on this ancient experience. It translates this age-old phenomenon into our modern world of screens, delete buttons and blocking options. Ghosting is not only an unpleasant experience, or cowardly act, but a symptom of our increasingly spectral – that is, mediated and virtual – relationship to the world. The overabundance of new modes of communication has invited an almost infinite number of contacts and conversations. At the same time, it has also offered an unprecedented opportunity for ignoring messages from others. And just as we invented the car crash when we invented automobiles, we also encouraged ghosting when we created the internet. Ghosting creates an empty space in our minds: a space faithfully tracing the silhouette of the one who ghosted us. But unlike traditional ghosts, today’s ghosters simply disappear, leaving behind a form of haunting that is closer to mourning: mourning for someone who is not in fact dead. In putting a kind of preemptive mourning into our everyday affairs, ghosting tells us much about the current human relationship – or non-relationship – to a shared sense of mortality, purpose, and spirit.