‘I Dreamt of Something Lost’ is a short ‘fake desktop’ narrative that examines the affect of personal data. It was created using the Phantasos Template, a freely available code library designed to enable novice digital writers to explore data and the desktop interface through storytelling.

On a literal level, ‘I Dreamt of Something Lost’ is about sitting at your desktop computer and encountering somebody who is no longer in your life. On an emotional level, it is concerned with grief, loss, and memory – as mediated through the vast amounts of data that now permeate our lives. It is about how data can become a kind of haunting, how losing someone means you also lose a version of yourself, and how self-quantifying memory practices can irrevocably warp your relationship to your selfhood.