The Oneirocritica is an ancient book on dream interpretation. Compiled in the first centuries CE, it includes a taxonomy of dream-types, a compendium of knowledge on the significance of dream symbols, and a practical manual for how to go about the business of oneiromancy. We think of it as a literary technology that seeks to use nightly visions to make sense of waking life.

Across the ages, the text has influenced Islamic scholars and medieval Byzantine Christians, as well as contemporary theorists like Foucault and Freud. Thinkers have returned to it time and time again, reviving and reworking it for the worlds in which they find themselves. It seems that as long as the waking world has defied our understanding, we have looked for answers at the borderlands of consciousness.

Today, we wake to a world populated by hallucinating machines, a nightmarish place shaped by oligarchs who do not dream of futures as much as they synthesize them through big-data divination. The “consensual hallucination” of cyberspace has fractured as the ghosts in the machine urge us toward consumption, complicity, a life spent sleepwalking. We struggle for the right language to describe all this. Meanwhile there’s little respite from it all, even in sleep. The forces of techno-capital have deemed this once-sacred domain the final frontier of extraction. Money pours into technologies that promise to help us sleep better, to make our dreams productive, or turn them into pure entertainment. And yet, we find glimmers of possibility in the space between waking and sleep, actual and virtual. We cannot help but dream, as we always have.

For our second issue, we’re taking inspiration from the Oneirocritica. Our subject is the dreams, visions, divinations, and hallucinations that haunt us in our own technologized moment. We ask: How are our dream lives changing as our cognition fragments across new networks and prostheses? What happens when desire is channeled into the algorithmic feeds, pornographic slop machines, and gambling platforms shaping the contemporary mediascape? What new nightmares haunt our autonomous killing machines? What words might describe this dreamspace after postmodern talk of hyperreals and simulacra become clichés? Can our dreams peer beyond the enshittified possibilities allotted to us by the capitalist class?

Knowing these questions may only be answerable through dream-logic, we welcome contributions across genres and forms: critical essays, speculative fiction, poetry, art, and everything in between. We’re looking for words and images that use dreams as a lens to understand the changing topography of consciousness and experience in the still-young millennium. Contributors will be paid a modest honorarium of $200 for their work, alongside our eternal gratitude. We’ll be accepting all forms of pitches, ideas, daydreams, and delusions until January 31st, 2026.

Pitch us at: editors@emptysetmag.com