“DREAM HACKERS”. THE RELIABILITY OF LUCID DREAMING

Abstract

It is difficult to assess recollection of dreams by reliability of what happened despite the fact that the opposition “reality – dream” is considered a cultural universal. Such a task grows even more complex as one turns to recollection of so called lucid dreams. The article covers different types of messages published on the Dream Hackers forum. That online community is the largest Russian-language platform for publishing such texts. The dream-hackers believe that it is possible to control the dreams, create maps of the dreamed places and objects common for different dreamers and jointly experience dream plots. Among the stories of the forum participants one may find the stories about the so-called “talismans”, or, the specific objects that can be transferred from the dream to the material world, as well as the mentions of the different marks left on the body of a dreamer after waking up, such as scratches, wounds etc. Such beliefs blur the line between the dreaming and the wakefulness and question the credibility of the reality itself. Furthermore, the article analyzes the basic functions of the mapping of “lucid dreams” mapping. The most important of the functions is to increase the “awareness”, in other words, to achieve the key state of consciousness for the dream hackers.