Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

I've never read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the book from which the movie Blade Runner was taken, but I think it's one of the best titles I've ever seen. Once I heard it, I could never forget it because it automatically produces some kind of visual image in your head. Mine is a purple sheep with springs. I don't know why. Maybe because the title reminds me of the scene in Blade Runner where James Olmos bends a paperclip into a unicorn and leaves it on the desk as a message to  Deckard that he knows his dreams and memories because both were downloaded into Deckard's brains by his creators, a giant corporation.

Another reason I love the title is because it asks a great question: how much does our culture shape our dreams, how much does it expand or limit what we think we can do and what we want to do?

The word culture takes me into murky territory, I know. First, we have the American culture, the global culture, our regional culture, our church culture, our family culture--on and on, all of these pushing or pulling  us in certain directions, so many ingrained that we don't realize that most of our reflexive decisions are based on assumptions developed by surrounding cultures and our response to them.

Like Androids, we base our dreams on what we know, and most of what we know is the result of the cultural ocean we swim in.

What I've been thinking about lately and what I want to explore here is how the current American/global culture affects not just my dreams, aspirations, hopes, plans, but what they do to younger people--those coming up immersed in technology and Lady Gaga, the epitome of marketing. (Let me confess here that to me she is the underside of our culture: shallow and self-absorbed, a self-creation that hovers on the verge of self-destruction.) Though I won't write only about this topic, I do plan to explore it for a while because, as a writer, I am always interested in imagination, whether in the form of dreams and aspirations or creativity.