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The professional conversation about hypertext seems to shift between thinking of it as a technology and thinking of it as a mode of reading/writing. This shift is often nearly effortless, since each concept of hypertext is both useful in certain contexts and true to our experience; although most of us would theorize hypertext as either apparatus or activity, noun or verb, we tend to practice hypertextuality as a liminal operation, a crossing and recrossing of the border between machine and intention. The ease of that crossing, however, can veil a number of important implications for both theory and pedagogy. I want to tease out some of those implications by considering them in a much older frame than that of hypertext, the frame of the mind-body problem. Fully unfurled, of course, that is an ancient story. Julian Jaynes, among others, follows it to at least the sixth century B.C.E. and the earliest moments of what we might call writing consciousness. (1) Our reach will be more modest, and more obvious: back to the seventeenth century cogitations of Descartes and the emergence of modern subjectivity. Somnio, ergo sum -- I dream, therefore I am -- is a webtext in three threads, broadly historical, pedagogical, and theoretical, respectively. The title plays on Descartes's infamous first principle in the 1637 Discourse on Method, Cogito, ergo sum. The play is not wholly fanciful, however. On several occasions, Descartes traced "the foundation of the wonderful science" (2) -- what we now identify, for better and for worse, as Western rationalism -- to a series of youthful dreams, those most irrational of private dramas. If, as Gregory L. Ulmer has argued, the "conductive logic" of dream-work is also the dominant rhetorical mode of hypertext itself, (3) we may find in Descartes's dreams and their documentation the faint tracings of our own hand.
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