A Field Guide to the Oneirosphere
Most dream journals are just lists of text. They are useless for navigation. To become a hacker of your own dreams, you must stop writing stories and start drawing maps. Here is how to use ThirdGate to uncover your world.
A dream is a "location" first, and a "plot" second. When you wake up, ask yourself: Where was I?
Create a new Bubble. Assign it a specific archetype (e.g., "Home," "Zone of Transits," "Labyrinth," "City"). Give it a descriptive name.
Bubbles do not exist in a vacuum. They are connected by your movement between them. After you wake up, create a dream entry and place all the bubbles (locations) you visited during that dream.
When you log a dream, select the sequence of Bubbles you visited. The app automatically creates a Transit between them, linking them in your personal geography.
Initially, your map might look like a cloud of random points. This is where your intuition comes in. You are the cartographer of your own mind.
Go to the Dream Map. You can drag and place your Bubbles on the canvas. Play with their locations relative to each other until it "feels right." Trust your gut—your spatial memory often knows better than your logical mind.
The ground beneath your bubbles differs. Some places are Cities, others are Forests, Oceans, or Void. This "Surface" represents the core archetypes (Zones) of your map.
By default, ThirdGate provides a generic archetypal map created from the dreams of thousands of lucid dreamers. You can use this as a foundation to place your bubbles, or you can ignore it and start from scratch.
Edit the Map Surface to paint the Zones. Define where your City ends and your Forest begins.
As you map more dreams, your world grows. You will see how your "travel region" expands every night from the center, pushing back the fog of war.
Keep expanding until you reach a critical mass—a "memory explosion"—where the isolated islands of your dreams connect to form a single, cohesive world.
