I was tempted by an Apple, but went for a cheaper and more powerful machine. It has Windows, and something happened to my internal life as I settled to my new existence as mouse potato.

New forms of technology recreate subjectivity in different ways. One can easily imagine, for example, the impact of early industrial machines on the self-image of Europeans in the middle of the nineteenth century, and it is often said that Freudian psychoanalysis is rooted in that impact, and in hydraulic metaphors in which the libido seeks outlet, is repressed, and then erupts in displaced or sublimated ways. Once this image of the mental apparatus was given free reign in Western culture, other images and technologies had to contend with it as a relatively enduring template for the self that we absorb and fashion as our own.

What is Windows as a computer environment but an incarnation and mutation of the unconscious and object relations? I started dreaming vividly, or, at least, started remembering vivid dreams (and maybe that itself is the issue, the symptomatic issue) after being plunged into Windows in a new PC at home. I already had some experience of working with Windows at work, though this was quite desultory and only sufficient to make me familiar with the format; enough that I would not be completely lost, not enough that I should be comfortable in the terrain.