Why The War on Dreams Must Inspire Us to Build the Greatest Desire Machines the World Has Ever Seen

When I was about 18, I read Angela Carter’s extraordinary 1972 novel ‘The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman’, and in these dark days as my 57^th birthday approaches it comes back into my imagination often. It tells the story of the diabolical evil genius Doctor Hoffman who, at war with an unnamed South American city, has developed a weapon, a kind of ray gun which when fired at the city, unleashes mass hallucinations, causing the dreams and desires of the population take physical form and the whole city begins to turn mad, what Carter describes as “this phantasmagoric redefinition of a city”.

“Cloud palaces erected themselves then silently toppled to reveal for a moment the familiar warehouse beneath them until they were replaced by some fresh audacity”, she writes. “A group of chanting pillars exploded in the middle of a mantra and lo! they were once again street lamps until, with night, they changed to silent flowers. Giant heads in the helmets of conquistadors sailed up like sad, pained kites over the giggling chimney pots. Hardly anything remained the same for more than one second and the city was no longer the conscious production of humanity; it had become the arbitrary realm of dream”.

Doctor Hoffman also used his weapon to disrupt time. As Carter writes “tricks with watches and clocks were pet devices of his, for so he rubbed home to us how we no longer held a structure of time in common”. “We”, she added, “that is, those of us who retained some notion of what was real and what was not – felt the vertigo of those teetering on the edge of a magic precipice”.

When I first immersed myself in the world painted by Carter, a world in which nothing was as it seemed, in which monsters and ghosts appeared from nowhere and distinguishing between reality and nightmare was impossible, it was hard to square that with the real world around me. It felt like something that existed between the pages of the book and nowhere else. I no longer feel like that.

After just a few weeks of the Trump administration, the world feels very much to me as though Doctor Hoffman, like Trump, has returned from exile, and now we find ourselves in the sights of his new and improved Desire Machine. Nothing seems real anymore. The title of Carter’s book when first published in the US was ‘The War of Dreams’. Sound familiar?

Our enemies are now our friends. Our friends are our enemies. Scientists and government officials in the US can’t use the words ‘climate change’ and ‘social justice’ anymore, as if somehow the existential problems they are naming will magically disappear if we just stop talking about them. Trans and non-binary people are being forced out of public life.

After a summer of the worst forest fires in US history, the people who protect the nation from those fires are being laid off en masse, like the people who detect pandemics early, or the people who protect us from the predations of billionaires and large corporations. And that’s just this week!

It’s a 1+1=3 world, where Presidents turn into Emperors, where ‘alternative facts’ are prioritised over actual facts, where Nazi salutes pop up in the middle of talks as if it’s completely normal. It’s bewildering, and exhausting. It’s classic Doctor Hoffman, that “vertigo of those teetering on the edge of a magic precipice” Carter wrote of. David Graeber once said “this feeling of hopelessness that everyone has is a manufactured product, and that’s what Neo-Liberalism is really about … it’s a political program designed to produce hopelessness and kill any future alternatives”. What we’re experiencing is that on steroids. It’s a punch-drunk feeling of overwhelm, the result of what Steve Bannon once referred to as “flooding the zone with shit”, or what Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur, calls “psychological overwhelming”, a ‘shock and awe’ approach which leaves us all reeling.

We’re left clutching for the familiar, unable to cling to even the basic things we assumed we would always be able to take for granted as insane Executive Order after insane Executive Order fly past us. Putin is now the good guy, and which bathroom trans people get to use is of far greater importance than the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. Oh, and Ukraine started the war apparently. Is it us going mad, or the world around us? What can we cling onto as being real anymore?

Resistance to this is taking many forms. Challenging the Trump administration in the courts is going to be vital, as is organising by trades unions and many different parts of civil society. Boycotts of Elon Musk and Trump’s enterprises will hurt for sure (do support ‘Everyone Hates Elon’s crowdfunder to expand on their brilliant ‘0-1939 in 3 seconds’ posters across London recently). But I want to suggest something else that needs to sit alongside those things.

In Carter’s novel, the protagonist Desiderio is sent on a secret mission to find Doctor Hoffman and destroy his Desire Machines. I can’t helping wondering how the book might have played out if, instead, he had decided to stay put and pull together the city’s finest minds to build a Desire Machine of his own. We need to out-engineer Doctor Hoffman and find the new ways to work together to create the most powerful desire machines the world has yet seen. It’s true that we don’t have platforms like X and Facebook at our disposal, but that doesn’t mean we are powerless.

I’ve spent the past 2 years writing a book called ‘How to Fall in Love with the Future: a time traveller’s guide to changing the world’ (to be published in May 2025) which argues that one of the key shifts that those of us in the resistance need to make is to become far better at the cultivation of longing, or what Prentis Hemphill, in her book What It Takes to Heal, describes as ‘that vulnerable, stomach-dropping craving’. How can we, urgently and at scale, bring alive for people what a future rooted in care, compassion, equality, social justice and doing everything we can to rapidly reduce our carbon emissions would look like, smell like, taste like? And how can we tell stories of that future that help people create a new North Star in their lives?

I already see glimpses of what this could look like in the work of activist and artists like Black Quantum Futurism, Moral Imaginations’ ‘Imagination Activism’, in the work of artists like Camille Turner and Cauleen Smith, in movements like Afrofuturism, Muslim Futures and Black Utopias, in artists like Sun Ra who talked of being an angel from Saturn who travelled through space with “both unshakable certainty and deadpan humour”, Aisha Shillingford’s writing on the Black Imagination, in local authorities and schools building time machines, in activists crewing imaginary spacecraft, Thrutopian storytelling such as Manda Scott’s novel ‘Any Human Power’, in community organisations creating and holding powerful ‘What If’ spaces. A positive futurism movement is emerging, and at pace. I already get people sending me photos of time machines they’d building. Here’s one created by my friend Annaig in France.

My own contribution to the building of Desire Machines is working with ambient music artist Mr Kit and light projection wizard Tim Dollimore on a project called ‘Field Recordings from the Future’, where we are creating an immersive multimedia Time Portal which combines live music and real recordings we captured on recent time travels with video projections in order to create a tear in the fabric of time to allow people to step through into the future that turned out the best it possibly could. A world of car-free neighbourhoods, bicycle rush hours, landscapes rewilded by beavers, of the urgent installation of community renewables on every street, of regenerative farms, of underground mushroom farms that are transforming urban economies.

I feel like we are working to build an optimist-generating machine in a time desperate for optimists. We think of it as ‘a Cirque du Soleil for the Radical Imagination’. We want it to be staged everywhere, for time portals to be created everywhere, and fast.  We will very soon be launching a crowdfunding campaign to enable the unleashing of this powerful device … watch this space.

We believe that if humanity is to hospice modernity and race towards a future we’d be proud to leave to the generations yet unborn, a critical mass of us need to experience something so profound, so genuinely mind-blowing, so awesome and multi-sensory, that it rips apart the ‘yes, but…’ narratives that tell us there is no alternative to the current system—and sweeps open doorways to a new way of being. This is the level of ambition we’re working at.

The nurturing of longing is not necessarily an approach or a skillset that comes naturally to those of us in the resistance. Our work is usually rooted in the present (“What do we want? When do we want it? Now!”) rather than in the future or the past, or in moving at will between temporalities. The people in our culture who are great at nurturing imagination tend not to be activists, rather they are street artists, poets, designers, people who write TV series, people who work in advertising, people who design wildly imaginative festivals such as Boomtown. If we are to build Desire Machines more powerful than those that currently have us bewitched, bewildered and bedazzled, we need to encourage a communion of artists (in the widest sense of that word) and activists on a scale we’ve never seen before.

We might imagine actors in public spaces, acting out scenarios from the future that turned out OK, ‘pop up tomorrows’ that touch people emotionally, creating ‘utopian moments’ in which, as Ben Anderson puts it, the present “overflows with what is not-yet”, providing tastes, glimpses, infusions of utopias in the present, through music, art, activist events…all manner of creative expressions that show us how our future could be so much better than anything we’re living through now.

Street art can bring that future into the present. Street artists like Sophie Mess, ATM and Mona Caron, to name just three, use large, vibrant, beautiful murals to create images Doctor Hoffman would be proud of; images that give us a taste of a different future in the here and now. As the great jazz musician and space traveller Sun Ra put it, ‘The future is obvious, but the potential impossible is calling softly and knocking gently.’

We’re done with dystopias. We’re awash with them. They paralyse us: we’ve had enough. Cast them out of our cinemas and toss them from the bookshelves. Rather, let’s turn to political theorist Wendy Brown who says:

“Only a compelling vision of a less frightening and insecure future will recruit anyone to a progressive or revolutionary alternative future – or rouse apolitical citizens for the project of making that future. This vision must be seductive and exciting, and it must be embodied in seductive and exciting leadership and movements…”

Fascists like Musk and Trump hate creativity, imagination, daring, playfulness, people who speak of dreams and build pictures of a future predicated in decency, compassion, courage, connection. Our ability to organise and resist is vital, but I believe now more than ever that our true strength lies in our ability to cultivate longing, to build awesome Desire Machines. After all, as Don Delillo once wrote, “longing, on a large scale, is what makes history”. Don’t you ever forget that. I’m digging out my toolbox and heading to the garage to start building a Desire Machine. Who’s joining me?