The Digital Dreamhacker: Crowdsourcing the Dream Imaginary

The digital Dreamhacker is an application that collects dream themes reported by individual dreamers and turns them into crowdsourced imagery. These dream visualisations are then uploaded onto the Social Web, allowing for further commentary and collective interpretation. We thereby focus on the social context of dreams, creating visualisations that are neither depictions of individual imaginings or a means of enhancing artistic skill, but involve the reframing of dreams within the technical and social imaginary, which forms our collective understandings and expectations of social life. We outline a research strategy in which social media, supported by methods that emanate from both critical design and network analysis, are innovative contexts in which to explore the connection between technology, culture and our individual ‘imaginings’, including our dreams.