A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

potential story of how we have arrived at a social moment during which otherwise normal people
claim to have been abducted by creatures from outer space.
DREAM, MYTH, UTOPIA
The forms of social estrangement found herein, unlike other expressions of social
alienation across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, tend to not prescribe any concrete
revolutionary program or call on organized socio-political action as a motive force for social
change. Yet they are concerned with social change nonetheless, social change of the most
sweeping kind. They envision changes that involve massive restructurings of society, global
shifts in priorities, even actual geographical/geological changes. Each of the articulations
discussed, while archetypal, are also clear, if displaced, expressions of the socio-historical
moment of which they are part. So while each articulation shares commonalities, each also
utilizes symbols that serve to condense and displace the concerns of the historical moment to
which it is native. Following Freud’s writing on dream work in The Interpretation of Dreams, I
use the term “condensation” to describe the process through which latent or implied dream
content is compressed into manifest form—the process of metaphor. 18
The narrative of any
dream is extremely dense metaphorically. Condensation often generates hybrid forms in which
the attributes of a variety of figures are collapsed into one. Displacement is the process via which
latent dream content is consigned to the margins of the dream itself—the process of metonymy.
Thus the import of a dream is not generally found in its central narrative thrust but in its details.
I argue that the mechanisms of condensation and displacement operate not only at the level of the
individual psyche but at the level of discourse as well. At the level of discourse, the dream’s
analogue is myth.
18 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (New York: Oxford University, 1999).
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