Romanyshyn begins his prologue by talking about the power of technology as being awe-ful, filling us with wonder and causing us to dream. It is the magic of the modern world. This is a first fantasy. A second fantasy concerns itself with silence on the dry African plain, disturbed momentarily by some animals, only to return to silence, making the author aware of his own presence in the silence. Romanyshyn sees humans as agents of the earth with technology as perhaps a part of earth’s history of coming to know itself. But when he examines such technological disasters as Chernobyl and the space shuttle disaster it seems that our service as agents of the earth has gone astray. Romanyshyn foresees a future time when no human eyes will look upon the earth, which will have lost its splendor, with death creeping over all it. Then the silence will be complete.

The preceding visions represent science and art, respectively, and there is an affinity between them, says Romanyshyn. For example, he states that, "The atom fragments at roughly the same time that non-representational painting fragments the form of things. " Picasso and Einstein see the same things simultaneously. The physicist and the painter have common visions of reality but see them in different ways and levels of complexity. Romanyshyn sees technology as facilitating this convergence. To a great degree technology has gone beyond the life of imagination rather than being the realization of imagination. Atoms were once regarded as tiny, hard, invisible units of being, images of reality, but now technology has transformed this invisible depth of the world. The destruction of the atom in bombs has exploded the depths of invisibility. The invisible has become visible.

In a painting by Alex Grey, entitled Kissing, two people who look like they are from a medical textbook illustration depicting the inner workings of our bodies, are shown kissing. The painting represents the process that takes place while they are kissing. The message is one that says materialism leaves no place for the human spirit. Technology poses a crisis to the imagination. This is not a view that Grey accepts. His painting points out the consequences of materialism. What is "within" is not the invisible made visible. The "within" is the human imagination. However, should we ever reach a point at which our vision of a kiss is just a neurochemical event as depicted in the picture, then the character of human life will have been destroyed just as much as human life itself will have been destroyed by the fire of an atom bomb. We must avoid the use of the power of technology to reduce all depths to visibility.

Technology is the working out of a shared cultural dream, the acting out of the human imagination in the world. It is powered by conscious intentions and unconscious motivations. Dreams are a part of this work, which draws upon both darkness and light. Romanyshyn points out how there was a different sense of spirituality represented by Gothic cathedrals and Baroque churches and how the philosophy of Descartes was representative of the Baroque spirituality, which had a reduced role for God. Romanyshyn also points out the work of Marshall McLuhan and Harold Innis, which pointed out the shift from oral to written means of communication and the social and psychological effects of this shift. This shift saw the development of the book foster such things as homogeneity, standardization, uniformity and repeatability, as well as privacy, interiority and individualism in the advent of the silent reader of the book. In our own age such diverse things as newspapers, films, automobiles, airplanes, computers, spacecraft, nuclear power plants and nuclear bombs shape our social and psychological character. Romanyshyn calls upon us to attend to our cultural dreams of technology, to their shadows and silences, as a cultural symptom, to remember what might be forgotten on the surfaces of things and events. This is a way not only of saying that something is wrong, but that it can be made right. If we don't remember these dreams then they can become a nightmare of destruction.

At the end, Romanyshyn reminds us that while books have linear logic, and cause and effect, dreams are not like that (Note Robert H. Brady's comments on linear thought.). They have webs of interconnection. Romanyshyn wants us to think of technology in the way that we dream, not in a linear logical way such as we find in books. Technology is rooted in a special kind of linear historical vision. We should not perform a logical, rational technical analysis of technology if we are to understand it. We should approach our understanding of technology in the same way that we dream.

I must say that throughout most of this reading I had no idea of where Romanyshyn was trying to take me. The whole piece seemed very much up in the clouds, lacking coherence and intelligibility. It was only in the closing paragraphs that I began to have some inkling of what he was trying to say. As a result, to really understand what he is saying I need to spend more time on meditating on his message. It is deep and jars the senses. It is profound, and I don't think I am fully capable of doing what he is asking, but Romanyshyn acknowledges that he himself is bound to some extent by the logical, linear thinking of our culture. It is a snare that we cannot easily escape, if at all. We are limited by our humanity in that sense. But the challenge that Romanyshyn presents us is a worthy one. In this fast-paced world of ours I suspect that few of us will be able to take the time to attempt an escape from the constraints of linear thought, not that I believe that we should abandon linear thought. In closing I would like to say that my brief sketch of Romanyshyn's thoughts do not do justice to them. The reader would be advised to spend some time pondering this profound work independently of my assessment of it. The difference is not unlike the comparison of a meal at McDonald's with one at a gourmet restaurant. My assessment is analogous with the former.