Database of Dreams

Identifying Humanity’s Deepest Wishes

When I began digging into the story behind Database of Dreams, I stumbled onto a forgotten project — an attempt to create a catalog of people’s deepest wishes. It was part scientific ambition, part futuristic dream, and part control experiment.

This book follows that strange quest, from Cold War field sites to the rise of modern data systems. Along the way, it reveals how efforts to record and categorize human lives and dreams changed not just science, but how we think about our privacy, dreams, memory, and even freedom.

When Data Becomes Destiny

We live in a world where our choices, movements, and even emotions are tracked and stored. But this didn’t start with smartphones. The dream — and danger — of reducing human life to data points has a much longer history.

My goal in this book is to show where that history began and why it matters now. Once we see how the drive to build a catalog of humanity’s innermost thoughts became a reality,  we can better understand the systems shaping our lives today — and begin to ask what kind of future we want.

Following the Quest to Build the Ultimate Catalog

In this book, I follow the Cold War dream of creating a “total archive” — a catalog meant to capture every aspect of human life, from dreams to stories to innermost thoughts. I’ve always been fascinated by how far people will go in the pursuit of knowledge, and how easily those pursuits can turn into darker projects.

Along the way, I explore themes like:

• Forgotten experiments to reduce human beings to data points.
• What it means to be human in an age of rapid technological change.
• The scientists and dreamers who believed the subjective could be identified and cataloged to unlock human potential.
• How utopian ideals collided with the realities of surveillance and secrecy.
• The echoes of these projects in the databases and algorithms that shape our digital lives today.

What interests me most is how these early visions still live with us. We’ve inherited their promise and their dangers every time our personal data is collected, stored, and used to define who we are.

So let me tell you who I had in mind as I wrote.

For Those Wondering How We Became Data

I wrote this book for readers who sense that records are never just neutral. They’re stories, choices, and even tools of power. Long before the digital age, people tried to capture humanity in catalogs and files. If you’ve ever wondered how we became data — or what’s being done with it — this book is for you.

It’s also meant for:

• Professionals — researchers, technologists, educators, and anyone working where data and ethics intersect.
• Curious readers — people who want to understand how Cold War experiments shaped the digital systems we live with today.
• Those concerned with privacy — readers who want perspective on how we got here, and tools to think critically about where we’re headed.

This book isn’t meant to glorify or dismiss these catalogs. It’s an invitation to look closely at the dream of recording humanity’s deepest wishes — and what that dream still means today.

Praise for Database of Dreams