Once, a crazy hacker had the idea to “hack” the dream program. This guy was an eccentric mix — part Don Quixote, part Baron Munchausen, and part lucky adventurer who’d raked in nearly a million and a half dollars without breaking a sweat. His name was Semen Semenovich Gorbunkov. Or maybe Sergey Izrigi? Well, what’s it matter?
He set up six dream clubs — in Minsk, Riga, and four cities across Russia. The guy hired five marketing reps and sixteen psychoanalysts to lure people into the clubs and conduct interviews based on a specially designed method. Conversations about dreams were recorded on audio and video tapes, then sent to six analytical teams. A total of forty-one ex-military analysts pored over these recordings, cranked out bizarre classifications, distilled the common threads, and passed their conclusions back to our client. I remember those days. The rush of excitement from a massive project, followed by exhaustion, irritation, and anger. People streamed into the clubs non-stop. Imagine a bright hall, a buffet of drinks and pastries, an atmosphere of warmth and welcome. Casual conversations, people meeting each other, a little harmless flirting. Then the interviews would start, and people would talk and talk and talk…
The psychologist would nod, ask questions, the tapes would spin. Everyone loved feeling important. The participants felt like their experiences and insights actually mattered to someone. And they gave it all they had. You could hardly stop them! We heard tales of dead relatives on balconies, chases through ancient ruins, flights over cities, and on and on.
After two weeks, I started waiting for a sign, something to tell me when this cultural “event” would end. The sign came in the form of a huge guy with a square jaw and fists like anvils. I’d just flown into Riga to check in on one of the dream clubs and was wandering around the place when I ran into this guy in the hallway. He asked, “Dream club?” “Yeah,” I answered. And then he yelled, “So you’re the guy sleeping with my wife?!” His punch sent me flying under a table, and I’ve worn a gold tooth ever since. Pretty clear sign, wouldn’t you say?
We shut down the clubs and got to analyzing the results. The psychologists wrote us whole volumes, but in the end, it all boiled down to one idea: dreams are chatter, a little action, and a lot of cliches. The same thoughts, scenes, and motions. When you’re talking about a hundred cases, it seems like there’s not much similarity. But we were talking thousands of dreams.
What stood out was the huge number of synchronized dreams. For example, on February 3, 1994, lots of people dreamt about playing with children either in an unfinished building or some kind of ruins. What was that about? A dream film screening? Some file that slipped through the “drive” made of these people? Or was it a misinterpreted message sent to them? A warning? An order? There’s still no answer. This is untouched ground, ripe for your future research.
Synchronization hit close to home for me, too. Going through the analysts’ reports, I stumbled upon a dream description that matched one of my own perfectly. A woman had dreamt of breaking into a pyramid and, to her surprise, finding a little chicken coop inside. It’s funny — the Great Pyramid of Giza, ruthless guards, underground tunnels, and, finally, a chicken coop. For me, it was a pen for cattle. I think I had two cows in there. But anyway.
I met the woman in question. We became friends, and she joined the circle of enthusiasts gathering around me at the time. Her name was Alla — Scarlet Star of Zaslavl. Later, when she became a dream hacker, she broke into the core of the “defense system,” which tracks conscious entries into that bizarre world of forces and energies, our personal, group, and societal personifications.
Alla — tragic fate, rebellious spirit, breaking the chains of physical affliction. Here’s a real-life example of what a true hacker is: a warrior. I’ll tell her story in the second part of this material. For now, let’s get back to analyzing dreams.
Back in those days, scientists openly published articles about dream research. The military barely paid attention, but in 1995, things changed. Hundreds of works describing direct and indirect links between everyday reality and the dream world were removed from archives.
Examples of direct links:
How do the dreams of ordinary people differ from those of assault survivors? The dreams of those who survived concentration camps and mass shootings. The dreams of adolescents showing signs of hearing loss. How sadism and masochism affect dreams across age groups. The connection between vestibular activity and the frequency of “transparent” dreams. How hormonal shifts during the menstrual cycle influence dreams. Examples of indirect links:
The role of dreams in adapting to stress. The influence of dreams on creativity and metaphor-making. Incorporating dream-based decisions into daily life. How various types of dreams impact hormone production. But we were just in time. All of humanity’s accumulated knowledge about dreams, spanning 30 centuries, found a home in fifty fat folders labeled “Archive.” And there was a lot of fascinating stuff in there. Hundreds of hired specialists hadn’t climbed those shelves for nothing. I dove into a sea of theories. Glowing tributes to Calvin Hall and Bergson were followed by critiques of Freud. “No,” wrote prominent scientists, “The content of a dream is a function of memories, randomly selected by biological processes.” “Not at all!” others yelled, “You’re ignoring creative incubation and the function of REM sleep. The brain itself organizes neural signals, whose cognitive correlation creates gaps and mismatches in the course of dreams!” “All nonsense!” claimed a third group. “We need to view REM sleep, NREM sleep, and waking as expressions of a single undifferentiated state. EEGs confirm that during transitions between waking, NREM sleep, and REM dreams, we see spikes of similar frequency, between 7 and 9 Hz — that’s the same EEG spectrum we note during transcendental meditation.”
Yet any theory is just a likelihood, defined by the facts at hand. Meaning, the number of theories could be endless, each true in its own way. Meanwhile, Russia was dead silent. Science was stripped bare and locked in a dark closet after the professors privatized everything. Professors stole test tubes. Grad students drank ethanol and sold off the last secrets. Maybe that’s why my friend, a wealthy, slightly mad hacker, told us, “Enough! Someone’s buying up factories and mines! Others profit off the blood of young guys and the tears of orphaned mothers. I’m investing in the science of lucid, controlled dreaming so that anyone sick of the garbage fed to them by their rulers can journey to the land of dreams and knowledge — a beautiful, mythical Eldorado!”
No sooner said than done. In a month or so, we pulled off a series of events and gathered all the available information on dreams. Our conclusion was this: dreaming is like a read-only text file. And now, almost five years later, American scientists are coming to the same idea.
A dream is a description, an interpretation of certain influences that the brain transmits to consciousness. The dream world is an illusion, maya. In reality, each individual dream is a bubble of perception, containing a description of some place, a scene, characters in that scene, and your emotions at that particular moment. What we call the dream world is just a handful of “bubbles” — emptiness within emptiness, separated from the void by a shimmering film. Anyone familiar with computers knows a text file can’t influence the operating system. It can only become a key to the system core if it’s packed with macros. This hacker rule applies to breaking into any protected environment, including lucid entry into the dream world. That’s why don Juan forced Castaneda to look for his hands in his dreams — forced him to remember it, introduce awareness, and embed a “hands” macro into the context of the dream world, gradually creating a powerful “worm” (dream body) within his consciousness.
You might say this is the craziest idea you’ve heard in two days. But it came from a mad hacker, so nothing surprising there. What’s more interesting is that my friend was rich enough to insist on testing his hypothesis.
To avoid rehashing Castaneda’s method, our analyst proposed using the “machine” (CAR – Creation of Artificial Replacement). This artificial replacement method involves introducing an active element into a system that creates an artificial space within it — a launching pad for further action.
We decided to replace a handful of dream “bubbles of perception” with an artificial, controllable space or, more precisely, an exact copy of the consciousness matrix that defines our dream world. Each of us would create a dream map and place the “bubble-nodes” into one unified picture.
Oh, how ridiculous we were in our “pioneering” vanity. Years have passed, and now I see that we just recreated the Toltec technique of recapitulation — not of life, but of dreams. And you know what? Those Toltecs were true hackers!