Dream Hacking: How To Use Your Brain's Wildest And Weirdest State

Dream Hacking: How To Use Your Brain's Wildest And Weirdest State

Chris Taylor

The good news for those who do not like to sup bitter tea, however, is that there is a completely substance-free way to unlock the psychedelic potential of our sleeping brains. It’s a practice used by some of history’s greatest inventors and artists to unlock their creativity. The final speaker of the evening, Jennifer Dumpert, describes herself as a "dream hacker" and dubs the drug-free experience "liminal dreaming."

Liminal dreaming is different from lucid dreaming, which means becoming aware during sleep so you can direct your brain to perform its stories however you’d like. Lucid dreaming can take an age to master, even if you chug dream herb tea every night. But liminal dreaming is simply about the moments when you drift out of and back into consciousness; it's about trying to prolong that wild brain state as much as possible. And that is something you could try right now, just by taking a nap.

Dumpert is the founder of the Oneironauticum, a decade-old international dream research group. Oneironauticum members all take the same vivid dream-promoting substance on the same night and compare notes; tonight, it's calea. But Liminal Dreaming, the book Dumpert just published on the term she coined, is the culmination of her life's work. It captures a fundamentally mysterious state of mind that science has barely begun to explore. Fellow author Douglas Rushkoff enthuses that it is "more accessible, sustainable and transformational than any drug or virtual reality."