Can dreams be hacked?

If we believe in telepathy, or at least in a kind of rudimentary transmission of thoughts; for example, when someone suddenly begins to hum a song that we are singing in our minds at that very moment; the possibility of hacking a dream does not seem too remote.

Telepathic dreams basically consist of the possibility of communicating telepathically with a sleeping person. Now, during sleep our consciousness moves and in its place the unconscious emerges, that is, a region of ourselves that has its own rules, deprivations and appetites, many of which contrast strongly against our ego ideal; so that dreams are ultimately a fact of the unconscious mind.

When dreaming, our unconscious materializes those desires and thoughts that, due to their harshness, are repressed by our conscious mind. These desires never disappear, but are filled in the unconscious and there they wait until the dream valve allows them to access the surface.

Our daytime mind, what we agree to call ”self”, operates as a kind of firewall or antivirus that contains all those desires that contravene our ideal of socio-cultural personality. But the unconscious, remember, which has its own regulations, is responsible for materializing these drives through dreams, a vital task to preserve balance and mental health.

Now, to do its work, the unconscious needs to momentarily control the “restricted accesses” of our pulsations. The rejection produced by our innermost desires is so intense that even during sleep we are not able to tolerate them. To keep the escape valve free from the interruptions of the firewall, the unconscious appeals to signs, symbols and representations that manifest in a veiled way what we do not dare to face about ourselves.

Both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung suspected that during sleep the firewall of our mind, that is, our conscious mind, is particularly vulnerable, or rather, attenuated to allow the unconscious to evacuate our inner demons. If we believe in the possibility of telepathy, then our dreams could be hacked by innate or experienced intruders.

Regarding this, Sigmund Freud wrote in 1922 an essay entitled: Dreams and telepathy (Traum und Telepathie), where he analyses the possibility of communicating telepathically during sleep. Both he and Carl Jung defended this hypothesis, which the latter called: dream transference; that is, the idea that dreams, despite being an emergency of the unconscious, could be controlled and directed by the dreamer.

It is quite common that we consider dreams as a more or less ordered succession of images, when in reality it is a global experience that dispenses with continuity. Additionally, telepathic transmission does not always take place in two directions, that is, between two dreamers exchanging impressions; rather, it can become a link between several people, and even forcibly, when a dreamer forcibly enters the dream of another.

These Hacked Dreams are known as invasive dreams, that is, facts of the unconscious mind that are not completely ours; but part of a structure that has been violated by an intruder, either voluntarily or involuntarily. When an invading element enters our dream, that is, when a dream has been hacked, both the structure and the primary function of the dream: to materialize our hidden desires; it becomes unusual, unpredictable, altered, even within the non-logic of the dream material itself.

Fortunately, dream hackers are almost always identified by the mind. Once the intruder has been identified, they are isolated within the dream to allow the dream functions to continue to operate relatively normally.

How does the Unconscious to recognize the presence of a dream intruder? Releasing the structure of that particular dream or nightmare.

When we are inside our dream, nothing seems really strange to us. However, when we wake up we will notice the absurdity of that event, and we will still wonder why within the dream it seemed a perfectly admissible and even logical event. Hacked dreams, on the other hand, leave us a reverse impression; something alerts us to the presence of the intruder. Within the hacked dreams, the Unconscious detects something strange, inexplicable, disturbing, whose presence it seeks to isolate even by altering the characteristic function of the dream. When isolation fails, there is a withdrawal of the unconscious mind, almost as if it were seeking to reboot the system. In these cases, the dream turns into one of those nightmares that make us wake up visibly distressed.

In other words, if emerging from the dream seems illogical and inconsistent even while asleep, it is an indicator of the presence of an invader.

Of course, not all dream hackers operate consciously. In fact, hardly any of them have the slightest idea of ​​their dream wanderings. Sometimes the Unconscious encounters ephemeral emergencies of altered states of consciousness during sleep, which H.P. Blavatski and Annie Besant called “larvae”; and even with incorporeal entities that roam the astral plane desperately seeking to adhere to whatever draws them into the sensory world.

Hacked dreams are not really a danger, except in cases where the firewall and the operating system of the mind are irretrievably altered by different causes. H.P. Lovecraft, for example, author of a formidable dream cycle, explored the idea of ​​hacked dreams in the stories: The Shadow Out Of Time and The Shadow Out Of Space, where the mind of a comatose scientist is hacked by unknown creatures from the past, who use their dreams and memories to gather information about the present.

For some researchers, recurring nightmares may have meanings other than the obvious ones. Many of these cases could have to do with obsessed intruders, or with a powerful management of mental projection, who manage to hack someone’s dreams and go unnoticed by defense systems. Interestingly, these reports exclude people not identified by the dreamer; that is, they affirm that all dream hackers are people close to the receiving subject.