Night-mares on screens

Abstract

Beginning from the idea that if you are well adjusted to media you are sound asleep, this research extends a series of metaphors employed by Marshall McLuhan dealing with sleep, dreaming, and somnambulism. I evaluate sleep paralysis (SP), or the night-mare, as an addition to this series, focusing on McLuhan's take on the 1789 oil painting, The Nightmare. I completed two projects into SP on screens. One produced a collection of catalogued experiences from a popular internet message board (684 experiences across 573 posts from 523 users). The other, a collection of scenes and images from film and TV (81 scenes from 54 titles). Selections from my results form the basis of five chapters (4-8) concerned with variations of the night-mare on screens. In the process I connect McLuhan to other media studies philosophies: Richard Grusin's nonhuman turn, Jean Baudrillard and Graham Harman's takes on McLuhan, Eugene Thacker's concept of "dark media," and two psychoanalytic perspectives (Freud and Lacan, linked to McLuhan through Alice Rae). During a night-mare encounter one is neither sound asleep nor wide awake but enmeshed in a confusing and painful overlap. Compared with sleep or dreaming, this liminality more accurately conceptualizes nonhuman interpretations of McLuhan which complicate, collapse, and as I suggest, superimpose both sides of the following divisions: medium/message, reality/hyperreality, subject/object, natural/supernatural, real/unreal, conscious/unconscious, and figure/ground. Night-mare mediation summarizes and advances these interpretations while hoping to complicate things as ordinary as thin air.