Tag: dream

Submissions open: Digital Dreamland

So excited to co-edit this new series with Maisie Florence Post!

SPAM Plaza is reopening submissions for Digital Dreamland. 

Ever had déjà vu, not knowing if something happened IRL, online or in your dreams? As screentime and sleep time increasingly clock similar hours of the day, we’re turning our attention to the acute relationship between dreams and the internet. 

We invite critical work inspired by, but not limited to, any of the following topics: 

☁︎ sleep procrastination and social media

☁︎ cloud hoarding 

☁︎ the return of the (digital) repressed

☁︎ the memetic unconscious

☁︎ distraction as dream economy 

☁︎ ghosting (and the metaphysics of digital presence)  

☁︎ sleep texting 

☁︎ hyperreal environments & nonspaces as dreamscapes 

☁︎ online dream journaling communities 

☁︎ targeted ads as unconscious desires 

☁︎ chaos edits as dream realism

☁︎ artificial intelligence and dreaming

☁︎ interactive & lucid dreaming

☁︎ digitally-induced parasomnias 

☁︎ dream imaginaries and political im/possibility

☁︎ neural net neurosis

☁︎ image spam and cyber garbage as psychic discharge 

☁︎ oceanic feeling online 

☁︎ dreams in augmented and virtual realities

☁︎ video game realities and dream framing

☁︎ online shopping and astral projection

☁︎ cognitive timelapse and digital intimacies

☁︎ corecore and collaging the cultural unconscious

☁︎ dream scanning as the next cyber frontier

☁︎ avatars, dreams and shadow selves 

☁︎ (rip) twitter dream sharing

☁︎ movie and/or fictional representations of dreams and the internet 

☁︎ typographic parapraxis (poetics of the typo as freudian slip)

☁︎ affective ecologies of the comment section

☁︎ recalibrating platforms/digital detournement

☁︎ dead internet theory as dreamscape

☁︎ online dream interpretation communities 

☁︎ folk hauntology and web 1.0, 2.0 or 3.0 

☁︎ somnambulist clickholes 

☁︎ liminal spaces and spaciality of dreams

☁︎ surrealist aesthetics

☁︎ online collective memories 

☁︎ posting as automatic writing 

☁︎ psychosomatics of the meta-nightmare 

☁︎ dreaming in digital interfaces 

☁︎ dream prophecies and crypto 

☁︎ virality as bottleneck alter-consciousness

☁︎ glitch feminism

☁︎ screen-induced hallucinations (shared hallucinations)

☁︎ I lost a piece of my psyche in geocities

☁︎ hyperconnectivity and dream symbolism

☁︎ we are (always already) living in a simulation

☁︎ rest vs attention online

☁︎ internet temporalities/(a)synchronicities

☁︎ social dreams as cyber commoning 

For more inspiration, read the inaugural editorial for this series written by Maisie Florence Post. We always love to see work which engages these themes specifically in relation to poetry, but are open to work that touches on any aspect of texts, media and internet culture. 

Submission guidelines:

We will be open for submissions between 15th January and 12th March 2025. 

All submissions should be sent to spamzine.editors@gmail.com with subject line SUBMISSION: DIGITAL DREAMLAND.

Please add a brief note to your email explaining how your work fits into our theme.

We aim to respond to all submissions within four weeks and some people will hear back before the submission window closes as we will be publishing pieces on a rolling basis throughout 2025. 

This is an open call for critical work. While we appreciate the line between creative and critical can be fluid, we are looking for work that fits overall a more critical angle. 

Unfortunately neither the editors or contributors of this series will receive remuneration. Copyright remains with the author. 

We don’t have capacity to give feedback on unsuccessful submissions and the editors’ decision remains final. 

Please send submissions that are previously unpublished.

You can submit up to TWO pieces in any of the following categories:

  • Flash essays – 400-1000 words
  • Full essays – 1000-2500 words
  • Theory fictions – up to 2000 words
  • Verse essays – up to 100 lines (we have very limited formatting options however, so please get in touch if you’re not sure your work will be suitable)
  • Visual essays (photography, memes, illustrations etc – max limit of 15 images)
  • Audio or video essays (with text transcript provided – you must already have the link hosted elsewhere rather than send it as a file – we need to be able to embed it via a link)

ʚɞ

You can read the SPAM Plaza archive for free to get a feel for the stuff we like to publish.  

A briar morning

A briar morning of London, the original underground statuette or ahistorical blossom — what are you doing here? It is very gentle to slice the cake of your loved one’s birthday, rich dark insomnia cocoa; the sky is practicing abstinence I can’t see the stars. Consider the interface of energies required to make this: several employees gathered around with walkie-talkies, another first edition loneliness, a seat to yourself. I say to myself, “this is the morning the sky is a gradient like the standardised gradients offered by Microsoft Powerpoint in the mid-2000s” and it is not cheapening? The modern philosophy of doing your tax returns in a panic to want accountancy exhausted and proffering the invoice through which a house is saved, this is the house of the poem whose cost is enormous. What is the most expensive poem in the world and was it ever gifted for Christmas? The doorways of the poem are the blanks in the world blank dream I sing for thee, the long day doesn’t remember itself as software. A man on the train says he’s connected to mystics and he saw a person looking over me in the moment I wrote this. A man took his Tesla into the dunes to obliterate the everyday dumpling of automobile labour, that you had to repair this through various elaborate steps like I order new headphones with speakers embedded so as to walk around on the phone, like a nozzle it connects my breath to the stars. You are dropping off sleeping bags in the dream, a shelf for your glasses, a coda for napping off lavish anxieties that bloom in the elevenses of news is a fallacy. Avanti mystics. This is the worst day to pass exactitude as a micro trend or see like zoomers typing badly in the 1980s; the person is a railroad that goes on forever once they get started. Friday is a frantic alacrity I love you a briar morning, my shins torn apologies of the privileged for getting this blood so torn — a tree, a sparkle, a dove, a star. Everyone’s locked in their own toasters and burning crumbs, smoking dope commons of the momentary aerosol, first-person trauma of seeing yourself convivial in other amusements. You read? You blink game? You test positive! It is a message to educate the beautiful thumbprint of kittens who haven’t yet scratched reality out of their innocent systems. Christmas is a rate of speed. Stasis, languid and of ivy, tussling, intimacy of the leaf miner and the leaf. We need holly, poinsettia, grace. A week from today will be the new year. 

This Place is Rammed

It’s Aries season and here’s a poem for Colin Herd’s birthday last week.

🔥♈🔥♈🔥♈🔥♈🔥♈

This Place is Rammed

The canteen was a dream canteen. No, it wasn’t on Mars!
I sat beside Colin Herd in a supervision that seemed to exist
horizoned on the kind of table I want to call cherrywood
is the word for anything darker and 
sweeter than pine. He asks
if I’ve been writing lately. A poem, “The old 
acid pit of the heart.” I turn sideways 
to offer him a Ready Salted Walkers Crisp.
We talk publishing. I am courageous and yet 
worry about waiting for lunch.

“O happy birthday!” 
it occurs to me
that I am a day or so late. 
I know he’s an Aries because 
everywhere in the dream I see red. 
It’s so busy. We’re not even
just a vibe. The packet 
of crisps is obviously red. The flames
in new-lit candles. The irate cadmium
aura of waiters, who should get better pay. 
I’m wearing red corduroy flares 
like in the Bob Perelman poem 
we heard last spring on Zoom. I’m showing 
a loss. Is cherrywood red?
I’m stuck in my chair. The sound of the crunch of
the crisp is red. Colin’s drinking 
a bright red thing with Campari & grenadine
Denise would approve of. Everything
is totally youthful. Will Colin eat
the big slice of blood orange? 
Tell me a glorious story!