Abstract

Contemporary digital capitalism increasingly governs not merely behaviour, but affect, attention, and interior mental states. While surveillance capitalism has been extensively theorised in relation to waking life, the domain of sleep and dreaming remains comparatively unexamined. This paper introduces the concept of dream enclosure to describe the transformation of involuntary mental life into administrable, tiered, and subscription-gated cognitive territory. Under this regime, nightmares become billable conditions, calm becomes a premium feature, and interior peace becomes access-controlled rather than morally guaranteed. Because sleeping subjects are maximally vulnerable and unreachable, harms inflicted within dream space are both unappealable and administratively invisible. I argue that unconscious subjects cannot meaningfully consent to ongoing interior modification and that prior consent models fail to account for the moral status of offline selves, producing a novel class of moral injury. Dream enclosure thus marks the final phase in the governance of human experience, completing the transition from attention economies to consciousness economies. The paper concludes by proposing interiority firewalls — normative constraints that protect unconscious interior life as a non-commodifiable moral domain, and establish sleeping subjects as distinct moral patients whose vulnerability imposes categorical ethical limits on market and institutional intervention.