README.FIRST#
This is a collection of texts from a primarily Russian-speaking lucid dreaming community that called thyself “dream hackers”. It originated around early 2000s and died off fully in the next 10-15 years, althou some scattered groups are still there.
The main reason I am doing this aggregation and translation is to present English-speaking communities with a pretty unique approach and technology proposed by the group - “dream mapping”. I am prioritizing publishing this subset of materials is favour of everything else there, but generally the realm of knowledge and technique is much broader.
Source materials#
The main archive in Russian is available at this website. This website is an archive by itself with a collection of articles, often chronologically and semantically messed-up. They were originally letters is yahoo mail groups and phpbb-style forums. Site has a survived a couple of deaths and reborns, including couple of ideological purges (see Cultural context later) and doesn’t have the materials from second- and third- waves of dream hackers. Hopefully one day I can restore and translate those as well, given enough public interest. For now - Web Archive is your friend.
Cultural context#
Dream Hackers movement was deeply integrated in the magical and occult communities of late 90s and early 00s in post-Soviet countries. This gives a certain strange and unusual “smell” and feelings to all of that. While Western lucid dreaming world was mostly in the orbit of Laberge and Monroe, Russian-speaking world was deeply in C. Castaneda and authors in the orbit of Castaneda as a main source of world views and terminology. Dream Hackers slang is also heavily biased by Castaneda’s view of reality.
Also, this wasn’t the “friendliest” of places. Group is famous of incredible amount of internal wars, power hoarding and espionage paranoia (think Stargate analogues), which eventually led to it’s clusterization into many smaller movements and effective demise.
About this website author#
I was actively participating in the second- and later waves (a.k.a spin-off groups). Most notably I want to mention titanic effort of HigherOne, who went into a big trip to physically meet all lucid dreamers around post-Soviet countries and gathered us all into Dream Mapping project. Incrediable amount of talented lucid dreamers gather there, practicing map exploration and shared dreaming. Perfectly in line with paranoia and expectations one bright day the DB powering the website crashed and all materials were lost including more then 100 archetypical map locations crowsources from the group.
How materials are structured#
Instead of translating the list of publications “as-is”, I am taking a liberty of fixing some of the chronological and semantic issues, aggregating FAQ articles into one single FAQ section and splitting the “how-to” materials and “random chatter”. I am also suggesting the “reading order” to help you process that. It is like with Starwars order and/or Castaneda books order, there are an “official” and “fan suggested” ways of reading. I am doing this to the best of my abilities. If you want the original - you got it: website
When psychologists describe today’s hacker subculture, they often call us “possessed programmers” — people who see the real world as some kind of “operating system for the universe’s supercomputer.” It’s a flattering take, but it needs a bit of a tweak. We actually believe the reverse: each program is its own “world,” alive and running by its own rules and logic. As hackers drift through these “worlds,” they get the knack for slipping into complex structures and even protected systems. They explore, admire the elegance, and sometimes use what they find for their own purposes.
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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…
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The Dream Journal: Stage 00.doc The first thing any dreamer needs at stage 00.doc is a dream journal.
Dreams come in four types: “looping nonsense,” 100% chatter, dreams with some action, and what we call “transparent dreams.” You can debate this classification, add or subtract entries if you want, but the bottom line is: four types, that’s it. Lucid dreams aren’t dreams in this sense. The first two types are quite useful… but only at stages 07-09.doc. For beginners, though, action-oriented dreams (type three) are the best.
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Mapping Dreams: Method, Not Goal Creating a map is, naturally, a method, not the end goal. By making a map, you familiarize yourself with your surroundings and orient yourself in space. Think of a computer game where the playable area is hidden under a “fog of war.” The comparison to the dream world is a bit of a stretch, but it’s close enough. Have any of you played a game where the entire mission is just to reveal the map? Probably not. But there are plenty of games where clearing the fog and revealing the map helps you complete quests. Hardcore gamers know that in complex games, a map is essential. Having spatial awareness saves you time and energy, while a lack of a map turns an interesting game into a tedious loop of wandering. Mapping the dream world is a method, not a goal. And a dream map isn’t the dream world, just like a globe isn’t the Earth. A dream map is an artificially created space that more or less reflects our understanding of a particular set of dreams. The map can’t describe all your dreams. It’s limited by fundamental choices of elements — one person may map the dream landscape, another may focus on sensations, and someone else might highlight different components of the dream. The Dream Hackers chose to map the landscape. Why? They decided it would be a way of “not-doing” the dream’s description. This choice helps the dreamer silence some of the internal chatter connected to dream “sprites.” By “sprites,” the hackers mean the characters that appear in our dreams. According to the Dream Hackers, a dream is a bubble of perception, containing a small space that can include sprites and environmental backgrounds. Some dreams have no sprites or background at all.
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/from narrator: this page is aggregate of scattered q&a from team member to Segrei Izrigi around the dream mapping topic./
Frequently Asked Questions Question 1: (question lost, presumably something generic about dream mapping) Here’s the idea: you keep a dream journal (incredibly useful at the start of your practice), but as you record your dreams, you focus on mapping the setting. For instance: “Met up with Cryonus on some strange street. We talked about Tibetan sharks. Meanwhile, four robbers were raiding a jewelry store, and there was a hellish shootout.” Then you sketch out the layout of the street, the buildings’ positions, and try to remember what lies beyond (i.e., outside the perception bubble). If you can’t recall, just leave it as is. Add the dream’s entry number to your journal. Mark this number on your dream map. I’ll go over map orientation later. After a while, these “bubbles” will start connecting. They’ll multiply and merge, gradually forming a dream map from hundreds of fragments — an island of the tonal. This map-making process organizes the tonal. Then one day, BAM! You start recalling dream locations from five or ten years ago. You might sketch a railroad and station you saw in a dream, and suddenly remember traveling that route to a place called N. You know it was a dream, and maybe this place doesn’t even exist. But it does in the dream world, and you’re drawing it.
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I have a friend we all call Doc. He’s a healer and a skilled dreamer. It wasn’t until I met him that I understood what true suggestion was. I visited him in St. Petersburg, and before I’d even dropped my bags, they brought in a young girl, about 13 or 14 years old. She’d been thrown from a moving train by a group of drunken guys. The doctors had done all they could, but the severe concussion was relentless. She’d go five or six days without sleep, then fall into a near-coma, wake up a day later, and start the same cycle all over again. She was terrifying to look at — like a living corpse, with eyes full of terror and pain.
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Question from team member My best dreams were the recent ones. I didn’t even need to write them down; they’re etched in my memory, and I kept replaying the details all day. The very first dream had a strong Toltec vibe. In it, someone was showing me a forest behind a power station with two tall towers that looked a bit like Orthodox church domes, and telling me that beyond the power station lay places untouched by human feet. It was somewhere in the north. There was a thin layer of snow, with patches of green grass peeking through. I remember marveling at the sight of such green grass under the snow. At first, the power station was hidden behind a hill, and this guide, who seemed like a forester, led me to the left, where I saw the power station and the forest beyond. It wasn’t a fully lucid dream, though.
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