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Working name: Dream Collective


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For most of human history, we have been at the mercy of the future, powerless to know or alter it.  DC seeks to change that.  Our goals are to test if humans are capable of precognitive dreaming.  We compile dreams, compare them for common details and symbols, and then wait for those dreams to match up with events in reality.  The logic is that, assuming humans have precognitive dreams, a major world event is going to attract the attention of many people, and so on the threshold of this event people’s dreams will begin to line up.  Beyond that, after precognitive dreaming has become an accepted phenomenon, we hope to use our database of dreams to predict and, for the first time in human history, anticipate the future.




General information on dreams:

We don’t know how this works, but we have some theories.  In the words of Freud, dreams are “the royal road to the unconscious”.  Dream research confirms this; repressed emotions, desires, and memories that reside in the unconscious appear in our dreams.  Even memories that we don’t consciously remember and emotions that we aren’t aware of are revealed in our dreams.

One can only conclude that there’s a lot going on deep in the unconscious that we aren’t aware of.  Precognition, many believe, works like this.  Most users of precognition describe it as originating in the unconscious.  This is why precogs cannot use their abilities on command; prophecies come to them at random during the day or in dreams.  This is why making a prophecy feels like retrieving a forgotten memory.  The unconscious, we believe, uses precognition passively.  If this is true, precog, like anything else in the unconscious, will appear in dreams.

Many people report having precognitive dreams.  If this were not true, we wouldn’t put so much time into this undertaking.  It’s difficult to know when a dream is precognitive.  Precognitive dreams can be long or short; they can be realistic or fantastical, straight-forward or symbolic.  It differs from person to person.  Sometimes, dreams are only partially precognitive, where only a few details pertain to the future and the rest are irrelevant, other times they will be entirely precognitive.  Dreamers sometimes remark that precognitive dreams feel important and profound; they know for certain that the dream is precognitive, but again, this is not always the case.




Dream interpretation:
Psychologists often focus on symbolism in dreams.  One common maxim that you will hear on this site is that incorporeal ideas take on physical form in dreams.  A dreamer’s fear of the ocean take on the physical form of a sea-monster in a dream.  That sea-monster is a symbol.

It’s the job of dream interpreters to find out what those symbols represent.  We search for common details in the dreams that people submit, consider whether those details are literal or symbolic, then consider if they might be precognitive.  The most important element in precognitive dreams are called warning-events.  Say a precog has a dream where a meteor strikes New York City shortly after a famous celebrity dies.  The death of that celebrity is a warning-event: an irrelevant, unimportant event that foretells a much more significant one, like a meteor hitting New York.  This gives us something to watch out for, and allows us to anticipate the prophecy.  If a lot of dreamers started having dreams about meteors striking New York, we would look for warning-events in some of those dreams.

Though DC employs interpreters, the most important interpreter is without a doubt the dreamers themselves.  In order to determine if an element of a dream is precognitive, one must first rule out that it’s not caused by something as simple as a repressed emotion or a memory.  Only the dreamer is able to do this, since only the dreamer has complete access to their memories and a knowledge of their emotional state.  That’s why it’s important to be emotionally balanced and open about your emotions; it allows you to be a better interpreter.  Always do a cursory interpretation before submitting your dream.  If you think your dream about a zombie dog was caused by your sadness of the loss of your beloved pet, tell us that in the submission, otherwise we might be led to believe that a zombie apocalypse is nigh.  Remember, though, even if you think a dream is unimportant and not precognitive, submit it anyways, since you can never be completely sure.




Techniques:

Lucid dreaming:
Lucid dreaming has obvious application for precognitive dreamers.  Being able to control one’s dreams would allow them to look for specific things about the future.  It adds an element of control to precog; where normally, it’s impossible to control what one sees during a vision, lucid dreaming allows you to do just that.  So let’s get started:

Becoming proficient at lucid dreaming takes a while.  It’s not something that can be practiced; rather it requires a complete change in mindset.  The most common method is to get in the habit of doing constant “reality checks”, where you consciously check if you are awake or dreaming.  You will have to learn to take nothing for granted; you will have to look closely and see if reality is working as it should.  If you do this for long enough it will become second nature, so much so that it happens in your dreams.  The more lucid dreams you have, the more conditioned you will become to lucid dreaming.  You can expect that most of your dreams will become at least semi-lucid.

So you wake up in the dream, or “go lucid” in a dream—now what?  It’s important not to interfere too much.  In fact, it’s best not to interfere at all.  Simply let the dream play out, but stay conscious of the fact that you are dreaming.  While you are doing this, remember your mission: to look for prophecies in the dream.  If you remember this, elements of the dream that are precognitive will naturally stand out as important.

Contrary to the last paragraph, it can be helpful to change the dream in order to optimize it for precognition.  A common method is to turn on the TV and watch the news in the dream to see what is happening.




“Dreamworking”:
Essentially more sophisticated lucid dreaming.  Dreamworking is based on the idea that incorporeal things like concepts become incarnated in a physical form in dreams.  Repressed emotion might take on the physical form of a monster that plegues the dreaming during nightmares.  Dreamworking uses this phenomenon to extract information from the unconscious.

This works best if you “create” a place for your mind to go to while dreamworking.  Every time you go lucid in a dream, go to this place.  The more details you have the better, since it will make for a more convincing experience.  After many sessions of lucid dreaming in which you go to this place, it will start to feel more real; it will start to become impressed on your unconscious.  This is sometimes called a “wonderland”.  Now, you’re ready to start dreamworking.

Most users choose to build a library in their wonderland.  Books hold information; your unconscious knows that, so if you make a place in your wonderland (which at this point is fundamentally connected with your unconscious) which is supposed to hold information, your unconscious will fill it with that information.  Essentially, the library acts as an interface between your conscious mind and your unconscious.  You are incarnating that information in the unconscious in a physical form that the conscious mind can easy read.  It’s basically a more efficient method than the one described in the fourth paragraph under “lucid dreaming”.

To give you some ideas: users commonly make a library where books in, say, the south end hold information about the past (i.e. you consciously fill them with memories), while books in the north end hold information about the future.  It’s important to communicate that intent; the books will not tell the future unless you want them to.  This intent has to be cemented into the unconscious, which will take many hours and dozens of sessions to accomplish.




Sleep Paralysis:
Sleep paralysis is a complex neurological phenomenon that can’t be described in a few paragraphs.  Google it if you don’t already know what it is.

It is possible to initiate sleep paralysis, and go directly from consciousness to sleep paralysis.  Simply lie down and be completely relaxed and still.  After a few minutes, you will begin to feel itching and irritation all over you body, and the urge to move will be unbearable; ignore this, and don’t let it cause you to move.  Eventually, these sensations will pass, and at this point you should feel incredibly relaxed.  You will be so relaxed that you will feel temped to quiet your mind and fall asleep, but resist this at all costs.  Instead, begin meditating.  I’ve found the best type of meditation for inducing sleep paralysis works like this: completely open you mind, and become aware of all thoughts and sensations that you are feeling.  That’s it—this sort of meditation does take a lot of practice, but its use is pretty strait forward.  After a while, you will be partially or totally paralyzed.  You may have the sensation of floating, and be unable to tell which way is up or down.  While you may physically still be able to hear, you might not notice those sounds.  You may feel as if you cannot breath (this is simply an illusion).  It’s at this stage that hallucination may happen.  It is very important not to panic or try to move, since that will bring you out of sleep paralysis.  I call this state stage 1.  It is somewhat unstable, since it’s very easy to fall into a dream from this state, and very easy to regain “normal” consciousness (usually, this should be avoided).  It’s important to stay in touch with reality, since this will both limit hallucination and prevent you from falling into a non-lucid dream.  It is also possible to go into a lucid dream with this state; simply allow you mind to fall into a dream, but always remember that what you are experiencing is not real.

If you resist falling into a dream for a while, you enter a state which I call stage 2.  Unlike stage 1, it is stable, meaning that you don’t have to work consciously to stay in this state.  You don’t have to meditate to stay in stage 2.  This is where things start to get interesting.  You will begin to feel like time is breaking down.  Not only will it be difficult to judge the passage of time, but also memories will feel both distant and near at the same time.

If you resist falling into a dream for a while, you enter a state which I call stage 2.  Unlike stage 1, it is stable, meaning that you don’t have to work consciously to stay in this state.  You don’t have to meditate to stay in stage 2.  This is where things start to get interesting.  You will begin to feel like time is breaking down.  Not only will it be difficult to judge the passage of time, but also memories will feel both distant and near at the same time.  It’s difficult to describe in words what this state of consciousness if like; it’s not like dreaming or sleeping, but it’s certainly not like being awake.  It’s in this state that I’m subject to visions of the future.  At the moment, I don’t have much control over these visions, so this stage two is actually no more useful than ordinary lucid dreaming when it comes to precog.  I usually stop at stage one by going into a lucid dream; I only ever enter stage two because of what happens after that.

Stage 3 is only theoretical, and to my knowledge has not yet been reached.  This stage marks the complete breakdown of one’s conception of time, meaning that the user regards the past, present, and future in the same way (assuming that is even possible).  The reason I believe this is possible is because spontaneous precognitive visions are very common in late stage 2.  Logically, going into a deeper meditative state from stage 2 will continue that trend.  Reaching stage 3 is where I’m focusing most of my attention, because this breakdown of time has obvious implications for precogs.

A word about time: I’m not sure what is actually happening at the end of stage 2, where time seems to break down.  My scientific side doubts that it is really happening; more likely, it’s an illusion.  I believe that the unconscious regards time differently than the conscious (which is why we have visions), and that it is constantly using precog and having visions, just that the conscious doesn’t become aware of the visions because it regards time as linear and having causation.  Going into a mindset where it feels as if time is absent might reduce this discrepancy, and allows you to have a vision of the future.

On the other hand, perhaps stage 2 is actually a higher state of being that physically transcends time.  Far fetched, but then again, the entire idea of precog is pretty far fetched.  To understand precog, we might have to throw away some assumptions about the physics and time.