Why I made a new blog

I've owned the top-level domain (TLD) fakedreams.com for a year or two now.

When I was living in Portland, OR about 10 years ago, I didn't have a regular job or know many people, and my singular raison dêtre was to somehow create as much or more as I consumed.

While I treaded softly and conserved my energy as much as possible, I knew I wasn't strong enough or efficient enough to succeed physically. But my life revolved around the digital and intellectual space of books, movies, and music. I spent hours in different cafés each day listening to binaural beats or white noise, writing long streams of blank verse in a moleskin notebook or using software that completely blackened my laptop screen so I could type blindly. In private, I recorded many hours of improvised music on used casette tapes or onto an external hard-drive.

There wasn't anything particular I was trying to write or create. I just wanted to tap into my unconscious and learn to unleash my flow state. I wanted to lose control of my insecurities and inhibitions, as naturally as falling asleep and dreaming. But I often found myself running out of gas, in what must be a purgatory of dream states, staring at that always-black screen without a cursor, becoming conscious again and thinking that I was void of images or that what I was doing was void of meaning.

But I had two mantras to start up again.

The first was here and now. I could focus on what was here and now, and start describing what I perceived around me.

The second was fake dreams, which meant something like closing or partially closing my eyes and piecing together a dream vision from nothing. It was kind of like daydreaming but more like going through the motions of dreaming to try to stimulate a random vivid scene in my imagination.

This second approach was very much in keeping with my overall ideology of trying to create more than I consumed. It was all about creating something from nothing.

Originally, I thought I would use fakedreams.com as an esoteric repository of actual fake dreams, of dreams that I invented without ever actually dreaming. I thought about doing it as a writing project. People are always sharing their weird dreams, but you have no way of knowing what they actually experienced; they could easily be exaggerating or lying. I don't know why you would lie about a dream, but it seemed like an interesting idea and challenge. What if you could make up something that sounded more like a dream recollection than any actual recollection of a dream?

I even thought about making it a community site that would accept submissions. But time dragged on, and it went nowhere. I don't have much time for writing anymore, and I rarely do the kind of free-writing I devoted so much time to in the past.

But I do tend to make a lot of digital content, whether it's technical or creative writing or musings, music, code, or mockups, posters, or icon designs. In a way, they're all fake dreams, maybe more in the daydreaming sense, in the same way as when I was young and playing basketball or baseball by myself on the farm where I grew up, imagining a stadium around me, and that if I just made the next 3-pointer or hit the ball really far, it would just be the first of many and my life would montage into the pros and stardom. Every time I start something I really enjoy doing, it feels like that – like the start of something great; which I guess is a good sign that it's a fake dream.

I haven't been sharing much in recent years, and one of the reasons is because all my online spaces feel like they exist to serve a specific purpose or a specific audience. And the things I write and make don't feel refined enough for that kind of specificity. I want to be free to meander like a maker of fake dreams, to not really know what I'm making when I set out to make it, and to not really know what to do with it or where to post it.

As much as I love designing and developing websites, I didn't want to make this another design project that I might put off for a long time, or for it to end up like my previous site for which I've put off redesigning for so long. I also don't want the site design to inhibit or hinder me in any way, or make me feel like I need to do work on it just to motivate myself to update the content and post new things.

I was thinking I would just go completely minimalist, with a white page and centered column of black text, maybe even in a monospaced font. I've been hearing about 11ty a lot recently, and I thought maybe I would try that out. It's a static site generator like Jekyll, what I used for the first iteration of my site about 6 or 7 years ago, but with Node. I also already knew I wanted a site that would be effortless to maintain and deploy (and therefore hosted on Github + Netlify), so when I tried out hylia, an 11ty theme with Netlify CMS pre-configured, it seemed just about perfect for my needs. I do want to spend a little time making it my own, but I don't feel any burden or obligation. Sometimes you have to make something from something before you can make something from nothing.