‘What does living beyond the corporatised state look like today?’ Artist as Family asked recently. ‘How do we continue to live outside the snares that corporatism has set for the world’s populations wherever we are?’ The question has grown more pressing since the draconian global response to Covid.

So I’m mulling it over while reading the third Hunger Games novel. I dislike the simplistic morality of young adult writing, but thirteen years after publication, the totalitarian trope hasn’t dated; the West resembles dystopian Panem even more since our ‘pandemic’. In a world run by narcissistic psychopaths, fiction about teens trained to kill their peers for mass entertainment seems more like research than escapism. Not that Suzanne Collins has answers. War just entrenches the nightmare. So our only defence against omnipresent corporate corruption is to see through the (dis)simulation. How to wake ourselves up?

A cigar is never just a cigar in Jungian dream interpretation. But nor is it the phallic object of clichéd Freudian logic. Like all else in a dream, a cigar stands for part of the self. And to extend the analysis to waking reality makes Russia and the Ukraine, Israel and Palestine, the yes and no Voice campaigns, parts of ourselves as well. Whether or not these conflicts affect us directly, we can’t take sides without rejecting part of our own unconscious; the corporate state isn’t just outside but inside all of us. We can resist, critique or even work to subvert it, but we can’t purge it from our psyches. Like climate change, it embodies the zeitgeist.

So it’s futile to fight. But lucid dreaming can free us from nightmares – if we train ourselves to become aware while asleep. And, as with dreams, waking reality isn’t as fixed as it seems. According to government fact sheets, hallucinogens like psilocybin cause imbibers to see, hear, smell, taste and touch ‘things that do not exist’. Yet anyone who’s ever taken a wild-picked magic mushroom trip knows their potential to open doors of perception onto other dimensions. Big Pharma knows it too, so authorised shrinks can now prescribe imported psilocybin for TRD (treatment-resistant depression), and, as this capitalist prison system continues to grind down its inmates, the nanny state (compliant whore of corporate employers) will dole out regulated access to windows. Meanwhile, science is crediting fungi – the whole kingdom, not just shrooms – with hitherto unguessed-at intelligence. It’s as if the development of AI has opened our tiny minds to the news that we’re not the smartest kids in the room. I mean, who’d have thought Elon Musk and zombie ants have lots in common?

A fungus invades the body of an unsuspecting ant, which proceeds with business as usual. But as the fungus feeds on it, the host adapts to its hijacker by leaving its nest for a higher possie – the better to disperse fungal spores postmortem. Like Big Tech taking over the minds of users and controlling their thoughts. Yet unlike Big Tech, fungi have evolved over many millennia to maintain a balanced ecology, so only a few ants per colony host the zombie-ant fungus at once. In contrast, Big Tech has grown so rapidly, it threatens to wipe us all off the map, for which we can thank pests like Elon Musk, who’s left the terrestrial nest and ascended – the better to facilitate parasitic spores (social media platform X, exploding EV batteries, satellites, interplanetary spacecraft) to spread, the difference being that fungal spores erupt from the zombie ant’s corpse. Musk, whatever the state of his soul, isn’t technically dead.

If anyone today is surviving and thriving wholly outside the snares corporatism has set, chances are it’s because they steer clear of the net; don’t want to be found, marketed to and monitored. Still, it’s not as if any of us lives either in or outside the system. With participation more or less guaranteed, it’s a question of degree. We cherish the ideal of freedom. But like democracy, it’s a myth or critically endangered; and, like love, it can’t live in captivity. Our collective Western fantasy of sovereignty remains a source of cognitive dissonance. Because what would freedom – in practical terms – mean? Independence from the system, insofar as it’s possible, comes at a cost: loss of addictive convenience. And who needs a gift economy when omniscient Amazon – reminding you of what you forgot you’d wanted to buy – is the gift that keeps on giving with the option of next-day delivery? Who wants to risk the intimacy of a close community when you can begin and end any connection via auto-completing text?

As far as status and values go, I’ve lived on the edge or outside of society for most of my adult life, yet I’m still deeply enmeshed in its food and energy supply systems – like many urban residents of small flats lacking land for fruit trees, a vegie patch or free-range chooks. And even if any of us had the means to live on a quarter acre, in some cases age or disablement hampers hard labour. But we can’t afford to escape noisy neighbours; meet few kindred spirits. I used to connect with a wide range of locals most days, but now folk tend to talk on phones as they walk, or jog past in herds, or hang with fellow dog-owners all over parks and paths and shores that once supported native birds. Folk I know by name and more now pass by without seeing me. Others view this coastal paradise only as a selfie backdrop. At dusk on the beachfront and nearby paths, big rats raid bins spilling takeaway food dumped by overstuffed consumers, and the few not too lost in their phones to notice yelp with disgust.

The corporatised state is just a symptom of the problem: us. The West has sold its soul for safety and comfort. What would it take to retrieve it? Countless online teachers (and kudos to a few) offer answers, for which they solicit charity and/or subscription fees from devotees. Nice work if you can get it. Just like in the mainstream world, cultivating connections helps. Another is to retreat from society with fellow dissenters to build alternative communities, ideally on land not prone to drought, floods or fires (and good luck as zones migrate).

Why can I see society collapsing while most folk around me act like it’s not happening? Maybe it helps that I grew up surveilled by a safety-obsessed mother whose faith in doctors endangered me, whose fear of strangers bred isolation; who dissed my perceptions so much that I distrusted them; scorned my values, violated my privacy and stifled my social life until I hated her guts. At seventeen I planned to leave but major surgery intervened, and how she gloated when I needed her help to get my pain-racked, plaster-trussed torso out of bed; how impressed she was with professionals who profit from our dependency, using their specialised skills to compound it: optometrists who warn against natural vision improvement; GPs who unthinkingly write prescriptions every fifteen minutes; public health officials who push vaccines that can worsen existing conditions and/or induce brand new ones.

And so here I am again in my mother’s world. Only this time I can’t move out. The vigilant eye, meddling intrusions and arbitrary rules of what Simon Sheridan calls ‘the Devouring Mother’ and CJ Hopkins calls ‘GloboCap’ and Paul Kingsnorth calls ‘the Machine’ reach every habitable place on Earth. And even allies who share my despair just shrug or say, ‘What can you do?’ Well, here’s a possibility. Not the only one, and it may not work for you. But since our species is, en masse, mindlessly losing touch with the physical, it can’t hurt to cultivate some subtle-body discipline. First, why not train yourself to remember your dreams? Easier than you might think, we all have them; it starts with intent. Then train yourself to dream lucidly instead of passively. Because once you can consciously navigate the fluid astral plane, you’re ready to reevaluate the density of waking ‘reality’. The devouring globo-capitalist machine wants to strip us of interiority. But we don’t have to play along.