Why am I the only one still talking about Somnum? While I was in the bathroom, did everyone just agree to stop caring? With all the impact the drug has had on popular culture and world events, why, the moment it’s discontinued, does it dissolve into the same haze of cultural amnesia as tired social media memes and celebrity gossip?
Is it the result of an ever-shortening news cycle? The fragmentation of the media landscape? Or something engineered? Why is the Wikipedia article on Somnum only three short sections? Why is it so hard to disambiguate facts from conspiracy theories? Are those in power eager for us to move on from the whole messy episode? Am I the only one bothered by this? Still talking about it? (Becoming increasingly unwelcome at social gatherings, and dropping two stars on dating apps.) But I can’t help it! It’s like we all walked up to the edge of understanding reality, consciousness, the meaning of it all… and now we’re back to arguing about politics, watching sports, shopping, and going to work.
People call me obsessed, but even I find it hard to remember the order of things. Maybe the global group hysteria (as some have called it) of the last year has finally worn off. So, for what it’s worth, this is my attempt to get the whole timeline in one place before it fades from our collective memory. Maybe someone will read this and put the pieces together. Make sense of this strange but important moment in our history.
It started when Somnum became commercially available last February as a prescription sleep aid, uniquely positioned in the market as the first sleep aid not classified as a sedative-hypnotic. (Sedative-hypnotics depress the central nervous system by binding to receptor sites and altering brain chemistry.) Somnum instead triggers sleep across a broader range of brain-wave patterns. Instead of only being able to sleep within the delta band (0.5–4 Hz), patients could experience sleep all the way through the theta band (4–8 Hz), allowing those who can’t relax down to the lower frequencies to sleep without chemical suppression. This eliminated the common side effects of conventional sleep aids: sluggishness, inhibited motor function, fatigue, tremors, seizures.
But Somnum wasn’t without side effects. One in particular emerged after its mass adoption that hadn’t come to light during clinical trials. Patients reported a much higher rate of lucid dreaming, the term for when a person is aware they are dreaming and able to consciously control the dream. An exceptionally rare occurrence among the general public, and even among trained meditation experts.
The drug was quickly rebranded behind this “side effect,” and within two months millions of Americans were directing their nightly dreams with all the enthusiasm of a child on Christmas morning playing a new video game. When no serious side effects emerged, the drug was bumped down from Schedule II to Schedule IV and became a worldwide bestseller. More than antidepressants, erectile dysfunction pills, or opioids, the drug penetrated popular culture, and it seemed like everywhere you turned, in person or online, people were sharing ideas and experiences for how best to control their dreams.
Initially many people directed their dreams toward wish fulfillment and the satisfaction of carnal desires, especially those too offensive for polite society. But even the most degenerate sensualist eventually bores of having every appetite satisfied. Turns out that when you can have anything you want, consuming and indulging yourself eventually leaves you unsatisfied. So people pivoted from indulgence to adventure: dramatic episodes of exploration, combat, perseverance, courage, and compassion that offered a sense of purpose and meaning. People workshopped ideas with others online, looking to increase the stakes, scale, and grandeur of these epic adventures. Dreams became the ultimate euphoric escape from the drab minutiae of everyday life. It was the drug to end all drugs. Why drink that extra beer to numb yourself against the drudgery of your life, when you could instead go to sleep and rule a medieval kingdom atop a giant dragon, riding into glorious battle against an army of mythic monsters, to unite the countryside and save a beautiful elven queen?
Everyone became an amateur fiction writer. Lawyers, mechanics, schoolteachers, politicians, all finding their literary voice, writing steamy romances and fantasy epics in their minds, in the privacy of their bedrooms, where consciousness could project itself into the limitless possibilities of dream space.
But it wasn’t quite limitless. A lucid dream can feel real, but when you’re perfectly alert to the fact that you’re dreaming, the illusion falls critically short of reality. Some things in dreams just don’t work the same. Electricity can be awkward; light switches don’t really work. Reading can be difficult, the text morphing and shifting under your steady gaze. Reflections and mirrors produce strange results. Smell and taste are dull and inconsistent. Time is elastic in ways that are hard to control. Not surprisingly, all these limitations and inconsistencies were catalogued and investigated with intense zeal by people online. A new kind of citizen science emerged and proliferated, eventually coalescing into a network of websites connecting those trying to probe the possibilities and extend the edge of dreams.
These sites shared techniques for gaining mastery over dreams, making them feel more plausibly real, and in some cases super real, as when they figured out how to manipulate the elasticity of time, packing a week of subjective time into a single night of dreaming. Other techniques focused on drawing out subconscious insights, useful to designers, researchers, and strategists working in various fields. Specific regimens were tested and recommended, from pre-bed rituals, diet, supplements, fasting, and meditation, to boost dream efficacy and gain advantages over the limiting factors of dream space. What effect did sitting in a sauna and then doing a cold plunge right before bed have on your dreams? What was the effect of fasting? What about falling asleep while hanging upside down? Individual results might vary, might be the product of subjective perception and reporting, but when hundreds or thousands of people report the same results, tracked and collated in a database, statistically significant correlations emerge. This was the heyday of dream hacking, deepening our understanding and pushing the limits of lucid dreaming for the benefit of all.
It was during this dream stress-testing that cases began to emerge of people falling out of their dreams, into an outer boundary layer that seemed to contain dream space. A space where the dreamer exerted no control. And most alarming of all, this liminal space appeared to be the same for anyone who fell into it. As the reports came in, from both dream hackers and the general public, it became clear that everyone who fell outside of dream space fell into the same canonical liminal space.
They all described the same thing: falling through some invisible hole in their dream, either through a wall or the floor. A sensation of tumbling in blackness before a sort of floating sensation took over. The dreamer would then be left suspended in murky darkness, naked and powerless to affect anything, their lucid dreaming powers rendered mute. They reported the distinct sensation of floating as if in water, and the strong instinct to hold their breath. They would float in the darkness in a kind of claustrophobic terror until their breath gave out, at which point they would wake up.
At first the community of dream hackers didn’t recognize this as a space at all, but as a subjective experience: a state of mind within dream space, a sort of de-synch between consciousness and the brain state responsible for dreaming. The consistency of the experience, regardless of the dreamer, was reminiscent of night terrors, the well-documented sleep disorder in which your mind wakes up before your body. When this happens, your body is still chemically paralyzed as it is during sleep, and your mind tries to make sense of this while coming out of the dream. It races for an explanation to justify the scary inability of your body to move, and throughout human history it has commonly conjured some kind of predatory animal or monster pressing down on you. The monster produced by your imagination is a product of cultural experience. Medieval Europeans experiencing night terrors commonly reported demons and gargoyles sitting on their chests. So when liminal space was discovered, dream hackers took it for a kind of inverted night terror: the brain waking up before the dreaming mind, briefly stranding that mind in a denatured, chemically unsupported dream state, interpreted by the mind’s eye as a featureless black void. In other words, liminal space didn’t prove the existence of a real metaphysical location any more than night terrors prove the existence of demons.
But as reports of people falling out of dream space became more common, it was clear something else was going on. Variations in experience and perceptual fidelity only served to strengthen and better detail the space as something existing outside of subjective experience. Strangely, as liminal space became better understood, it also became more confusing.
For example, it wasn’t accurate to say it was underwater. The dreamer did appear to be floating underwater, but also, somehow, as if floating in outer space. The space did appear black and featureless, but increasingly people reported a soft glow that seemed to emanate from their own forehead, as if they were wearing a headlamp. They could faintly see their hands in front of their face, and light sparking off thin flakes of floating detritus. Calcium deposits settling toward some unseen ocean floor? Bits of dust tumbling through a limitless vacuum? And the space did feel limitless, but in another sense it felt constrictive and claustrophobic. People increasingly reported seeing, or rather feeling, that they were surrounded, as if swimming through an underwater tunnel. When pressed, they would struggle to describe the tunnels as a mix of dark stone and gently breathing living tissue. Even without seeing the tunnel walls in the surrounding darkness, there was an intuition that they were there. Eventually people confirmed these intuitions, floating up to the walls and glimpsing them in the dim light of the headlamp, before contact with the walls ejected them from the space and they woke.
Another intuitive feeling suggested that progress through the tunnels was possible. This sense of progress guided the dreamers’ choices about which tunnels to float down as the passages branched into an elaborate web-like maze. If the dreamer floated down the “wrong” tunnel, they would reach a dead end of sorts and be ejected from the space. People waking in this way consistently reported a vague sense of disappointment in themselves, as if they should have listened more closely to their intuitive knowledge of the path, an eagerness to go back and take the branch they nearly chose but didn’t. This pathfinding intuition at first felt distinct and obvious, but the deeper a dreamer floated into liminal space, the more their headlamp dimmed, their float speed slackened, their intuition dulled, and their breath gave out. Unlike drowning in real life, running out of breath in this space was the result of an irresistible pull into a blissfully terrifying surrender. One of the first people to articulate the feeling described it on a dream-hacking forum:
…it reminded me of falling asleep while driving. You don’t want to do it. You know it’s irresponsible and extremely dangerous, and all you have to do is will yourself to sit up, open your eyes wide, maybe slap yourself a couple times, roll down the window to let in some cold air, and you’ll be fine. Instead you play games with yourself; you justify resting your eyes for just a second, then two or three. You let your head hang slack, until you eventually give in to sleep. A few seconds later your car drifts onto the loud rumble strips at the side of the road and you bolt awake in a panic. Scared, relieved, embarrassed, and disappointed in yourself.
In the same way, dreamers found themselves ejected from the dream, sitting up in bed in a cold sweat, heart racing, with the sense of having cheated death, and a nucleus of shame at having given in to the sweet, terrifying temptation to let go.
As reports of entering liminal space multiplied, and the details were found to be canonically consistent, a project began to map the topology of the space. The accumulating contributions eventually found a home at whitefountain.com, which became the central portal for the community’s investigations.
(A side note. In writing this piece I looked up the origin of the project’s name, which I’d never bothered to question at the time. It turns out to be a reference to the Nabokov novel Pale Fire. In it, one of the central characters has a near-death experience in which he sees a white fountain. Years later he reads an account of another person’s near-death experience that also describes a white fountain, convincing him that he visited an independently existing metaphysical location, a place traveled to during death, from which he and this other person both returned. He tracks the person down, only to discover the corroborating detail was a misprint. No such place likely exists.)
The website tried to examine every report from people who made it into liminal space, in an attempt to discern the rules that governed it. These were the consistent, perceptible features:
And the conditions that trigger ejection from the space, causing the dreamer to wake:
Once these parameters were understood, the dream hackers set about doing what they do best: stress-testing the edges of every variable, looking for optimizations and correlations, in an attempt to better explore the space.
The first step was figuring out how to enter consistently. Dreams substantially covered in water, particularly at night, proved the most likely to harbor whatever collision errors allowed dreamers to clip past the dream boundary into liminal space. A group of dream hackers used this observation to work out the first reliable methodology. These were the instructions published on White Fountain at the time:
Conjure a beach at night under a full moon.
Stand naked on the shore watching the waves ebb and flow.
Sprint into the water and swim past the shore break as fast as you can.
After clearing the waves, take a deep breath and dive down into the dark water.
It is important that the moonlight be bright enough to faintly illuminate the ocean floor.
Cover the ocean floor with circular openings just large enough to swim through. (The scatter of these openings should appear organic, as if a feature of some geologic process or naturally occurring reef. The numerous and varied holes of a sponge are a good example to emulate.)
Swim into one of the openings at random. (The longer you can delay the choice of opening, not being sure yourself until the last possible second, the greater the efficacy of this approach.)
Swim down into the featureless darkness while continuing to hold your breath.
Following these steps resulted in about a two percent success rate, at the time, the most consistent way to deliberately enter liminal space. Later the method was significantly improved, in the following manner:
Conjure an outdoor location that is very bright. (A clear, hot desert landscape at high noon works well.)
Place a body of water, anywhere from a lake to a puddle, so long as it’s larger than your body.
Make sure it is still, with a mirror-like finish.
Line the backs of your heels up with the water.
Stand at full height with your back facing it.
Extend your arms out in a T-pose and gently tip backwards.
Take a deep breath and hold it.
Keep your legs and body rigid as you fall backwards, describing an arc, and splash into the water.
To the best of your ability, conjure a convincing continuation of this arcing motion; complete the 180° rotation until you are upside down, at your full height, under the water, the soles of your feet standing on the underside of the water’s surface.
Convince your dreaming self, in this moment, that the surface below your feet is not the bright sky beyond the water but a rigid ground plane.
Look up into the darkness of the water above your head.
Swim away from the surface, deeper into that darkness, as gently as possible, to convince your dreaming self that you are floating up into black air rather than diving down into water.
This method proved much more successful: five to ten percent. Afterwards, people learned they could improve their odds by repeatedly simulating aspects of this sequence in real life. One company went as far as manufacturing transparent, self-illuminated, tile-shaped water floaties that people would stand on in lakes and swimming pools, repeatedly falling backwards in the manner described and standing inverted beneath the surface. A person who drilled the sequence in real life for an hour a day could, after a month, expect to enter liminal space nearly half the time.
That’s when the community began making rapid progress. It was an exciting time. New information was coming in daily; people all over the world were making discoveries and sharing them with the project. Just as with lucid dreaming, talent factored strongly. Some people were better at consistently entering liminal space, others at exploring once there. Entry, it turned out, could only be improved by intrinsic talent and hours of backwards water-falling. But a dreamer’s ability to explore the tunnels was a more complicated affair, subject to many opportunities for optimization.
The following were found to increase a dreamer’s ability to explore liminal space:
(On that last one: it’s true that certain areas of the planet mapped to deeper tunnel exploration, and that these areas did seem to conform to some pattern. Whether that pattern was accurately represented by megalithic sites and ley lines was very much a subject of debate.)
These factors were known to boost a person’s performance, but results also depended on some combination of intrinsic talent, practicable technique, lifestyle, environmental conditions, temperament, and perhaps genetics. There were people who possessed a sort of generalized dream fitness, like fit and athletic people in real life. But also as in real life, there were specialists. Just as athletes train exclusively for power, speed, coordination, balance, or stamina, liminal athletics came down to four distinct aptitudes.
Once in the tunnels, perhaps the most important factor was how long you could hold your breath. It was established that lung capacity in liminal space had no correlation with a person’s ability to hold their breath in real life. Breath-holding in liminal space has to do with a person’s ability to resist that inviting feeling of temptation, the one that dissolves intention until, sooner or later, everyone submits. The description of falling asleep while driving remains the best characterization of the sensation. Outliers in liminal breath-holding tended to be experienced meditators, people trained in resisting torture, and people occupationally obliged to dissociate through frequent and lasting discomfort, long-haul truckers, ER doctors and nurses.
The second factor was the illumination put out by the dreamer’s headlamp. As the only light in liminal space, if it is too dim the dreamer can see only a few inches ahead, and tunnel exploration becomes a claustrophobic nightmare. A bright headlamp offers a comfortably lit space where divergent tunnels can be seen well in advance, greatly aiding navigation. Illumination proved strongest among users of DMT, epileptics, and people with less severe forms of schizophrenia. Dreamers with bright headlamps were the most valuable contributors to the open-source map, and could supplement their intuition by memorizing already-published sections. Since the real-life factors behind this aptitude left little room for practice, most people had to rely on the reports of a gifted few, and on their own intuition, to navigate the tunnels.
The third factor was pathfinding. Since the vast majority couldn’t rely on a bright headlamp, they navigated by intuition, a faint sense that nonetheless reliably steered people down tunnels that didn’t dead-end. Later, when the space began to be mapped and it was discovered that tunnels often merged in and out of one another, this intuition became essential to choosing the shortest paths and preserving breath. Outliers in intuitive pathfinding fell into the broader category of mystics, yogis, and the deeply spiritual, especially those driven by an all-inclusive, compassionate ethic.
The fourth factor was float speed. This one is simple: the faster the dreamer floats, the farther into the system they can penetrate on a single breath. Outliers in float speed were almost exclusively prepubescent girls.
As more people entered liminal space regularly, and the correlates of tunnel penetration became better understood, a new breed of dream hacker emerged: the dream athlete. These were the people who could dramatically outperform everyone else in breath-holding, illumination, pathfinding, or float speed. Most people, through intense lifestyle changes and various substances taken before bed, could at best double their performance across one or two of the four factors. Dream athletes performed at ten times the norm unaided, and with training and intervention, up to a hundred times. They were in a league of their own, and they became invaluable to the White Fountain project.
Before the athletes, people returned from liminal space with dark, vague guesses at one or two branches, collected in near-blindness while holding their breath for a few seconds. The athletes, once the community began coaching them, submitted reports of long, clearly lit passages explored over subjective hours: ten, twenty, in some cases hundreds of branching paths, accurately detailed. The athletes were also the first to report floating through sections of tunnel they had explored before. They couldn’t be sure, but intuitively they felt they were revisiting the same spaces from previous nights. They began keeping informal maps, drawn and added to upon waking, studied in real life to aid navigation. When they started uploading these crude maps to White Fountain, people noticed that some passages matched the maps of others.
By this point most dream hackers believed liminal space was independently and canonically real, in whatever metaphysical sense that word still carried, that dreamers were all traveling to a location that existed outside their subjective experience. But this intuition had never been proven. This was back when the mainstream media treated liminal space as magical thinking by overenthusiastic online nerds, no different from socially awkward kids who think they’re wizards, or superheroes from a favorite comic. Since the proliferation of lucid dreaming, cases of people willfully confusing their dream personas with their real identities had become common, and very much the subject of ridicule and meme culture. Believing that this weird, drab, punishingly un-fun genre fantasy called “liminal space” was somehow more authentic, more real, more scientific. The mainstream found that hilarious.
Once enough dream athletes were regularly uploading long, detailed tunnel maps, the community built a drag-and-drop maze-drawing app that ran in the browser. Users picked from a palette of branching node types found in the tunnels and arranged them into the sequence they had just explored. Now anyone could, upon waking, quickly encode the section they had floated through. Each submission entered a sort of open-source jigsaw puzzle, automatically compared against everything already in the database. If part of one person’s puzzle piece sufficiently overlapped an existing piece, it was overlaid, ideally with new territory extending past the known edge. Areas with heavy redundant overlap, uploaded by many users, were color-coded green; areas of low corroboration, red.
Over time the liminal map grew enormously in surface area and internal detail, shifting from a blotchy patchwork of red and orange to mostly green. The map appeared to originate around the perimeter of a circle free of any tunnels, a blank disc at the center, presumed to be regular dream space, with a dense array of tunnels branching outward from its edge. Some of the passages near the center had been explored and reported over a hundred thousand separate times, by people from all around the world. The outermost edges were usually uncorroborated solo journeys by the most gifted athletes.
The community began to expect meetings in liminal space. If the space is real, and people are moving through it, and most people habitually explore the same areas around the edge of dream space, then sooner or later two people would meet. Perhaps two people on opposite sides of the planet could exchange information and carry it back to waking life. It was going to be a monumental moment, perhaps the seed of a future humanity connected instantly across countries, planets, star systems. Maybe one day we would all plug into a kind of internet of the mind, unconstrained by physical space.
This was the period of greatest energy and optimism for the White Fountain project, and the high point for me personally. I remember waking each morning excited if I had made it into liminal space during the night, eager to upload my meager contribution. I never once uploaded a section that wasn’t already corroborated by thousands of others, but I still felt involved, part of something important and revolutionary. Sometimes I would spend hours just scrolling around the giant map, marveling at the detail of the passages, constantly branching and recombining, and reflect in awe at what we were doing. None of us knew the significance of our explorations, but we knew it mattered. We were writing the next chapter of human progress. Every day, the community held its breath for the first astral meeting.
That day never came. Sure, there were plenty of false reports, crackpots, and people desperate for celebrity, but the community had developed a sixth sense for sniffing them out. Everyone remained eager and hopeful. The meeting simply never happened. Eventually it could be proven, from uploaded reports, that users had explored the same sections of tunnel at the same time, with bright headlamps, and never seen each other. The hopeful made excuses, time zones, dream-time elasticity, factors misaligned, but eventually the community had to accept that while liminal space might be independently real, people’s presence in it wasn’t. At least not in the same way. Maybe people float through the tunnels in some manner that renders them invisible to one another. Maybe everyone has the same liminal space uploaded to their mind, like a level from an online game downloaded to a local machine. Maybe the space exists in some higher dimension, and each consciousness moves through it on a lower, individuated one.
The space was real; there was no arguing that anymore. What it was, and what relationship it had to the people exploring it, was still anybody’s guess. By this time, people with highly optimized talents were floating through the tunnels at ten or twenty times normal speed, holding their breath for hours or days of subjective time, lighting their way with headlamps strong enough to illuminate a mile of tunnel. The map was massive. Rendered at human scale, the known regions would roughly cover the landmass of the United States. And while there was a clear indication of where the space began, it was anyone’s guess how far it extended. Were we anywhere near the edge? Was there an edge?
When the map’s corroborated data was determined to be statistically convincing, academics, public intellectuals, and even the military started taking the White Fountain project seriously. This is also when the project took on a heavier tone. It’s hard to describe, but there was a tangible shift once the project entered mainstream culture.
I had joined the dream-hacking community a little before the discovery of liminal space. I remember those early days: the lively debate over whether the space was “real,” then the migration of the various message boards and databases to the White Fountain project. Back then, dream hacking had an informal, punk-rock, pirate-ship, fun-loving quality. Then people mastered entry, and most of the community shifted from sharing lucid-dream scenarios and pre-bed rituals to min-maxing their entry percentages and tunnel penetration, and lionizing liminal athletes. The community became more serious and mature, a necessary step for the project’s respectability.
But by the time the project went mainstream, gone were the playful memes, the dream-snapshot sketches, the dream LARPing events, the grassroots citizen-science chutzpah. Progress was now mostly carried out by liminal athletes, statisticians, and computer scientists. Regular enthusiasts like me began to feel vestigial. Some tried to compensate by theory-crafting about the space and its metaphysical meaning. Unfortunately, much of this analysis was pathologically motivated, eager to jump to conclusions, often misrepresenting the project’s discoveries to better spin out conspiracy theories.
This was also when many in the community began to suspect infiltration by intelligence agencies, and members accused one another of being embedded agents. People started calling the project an elaborate psy-op, and floated conflicting claims about its funding. Rumors traced the website’s servers to an underground facility in Beijing, the Kremlin, the Pentagon, North Korea. People said the project was a plot to embed a new mind-control protocol in people’s dreams, that everyone who participated was being turned into an unwitting sleeper cell for the new world order. It became harder to separate fact from fiction. The community lost its common voice, and all across the media landscape people carved out space for their own interpretive theories. The best of these conversations were deeply compelling; many were simply projections of mental illness. People who had nothing to do with the project showed up in mainstream media evangelizing one grift or another, overpriced supplements promising liminal powers “the government doesn’t want you to know about,” courses teaching you to float into “secret, off-limits” regions of the tunnels where you could speak with dead loved ones. Those people got the most airtime. But there were also serious, deeply intriguing conversations happening as we all tried to wrap our heads around what was happening. I’ve done my best below to record the theories I found most insightful and credible.
The first theory to gain popularity was that liminal space was a bridge to the afterlife. Thinking about it now, I’m not even sure how that idea ascended so spontaneously, but it was the first to capture the imagination of the mainstream. It was also the theory most embraced by conservatives and the elderly, who expected any night now to make it through to the other side, where they would meet their loved ones, or find Saint Peter and the pearly gates. It didn’t help that so many evangelical preachers claimed the archangel Gabriel had visited them in dreams and given them a secret path through the tunnels.
More sober-minded critics thought the whole thing was simply an example of mass hysteria. History offers many examples of entire populations exhibiting consistent but deranged behaviors and beliefs, the “dancing manias” of the Middle Ages, Tanzania’s “laughter epidemic,” and other cases of populations experiencing identical, unusual symptoms with no observable cause. This was the establishment line in the early days, but it fell out of favor in light of the statistical corroboration of the open-source map. Those who held onto the theory maintained that White Fountain’s data-gathering methodologies were not rigorous and left too much room for interpretation.
A theory adjacent to mass hysteria held that liminal space was a shared pathology, the result of some environmental contaminant not yet understood. Modern historians attribute much of the irrational violence of the Salem witch trials to ergot poisoning from spoiled grain. The islanders of Bikini Atoll struggled to make sense of their radiation sickness, not understanding it came from exposure to neighboring American nuclear test sites. Early Americans migrating west from the coast didn’t understand their nutritional dependence on iodine, deficient in the soil across much of the American North and West, particularly around the Great Lakes. People who settled those lands developed giant goiters that deformed their bodies and forced their heads backwards, and their children suffered severe, permanent damage to their development. These and other horrifying symptoms were not understood until the mid-1800s, when the missing iodine in what had been dubbed the “goiter belt” was finally identified and industrially fortified into staple foods such as salt. In the twentieth century it was discovered that the use of lead in manufacturing had contaminated the entire planet and constituted a severe public health hazard.
Similarly, we know the human endocrine system is extremely sensitive to exogenous hormones, and that nearly all the world’s groundwater is heavily contaminated by pharmaceutical hormone runoff from livestock, agriculture, and human wastewater. Industrial waste and contamination from plastics, especially chlorinated hydrocarbons, have been linked to a wide array of negative health outcomes. DuPont knew its Teflon-related contaminant C-8 had polluted the groundwater, was causing birth defects, and posed a serious threat to public health; its response was to hide that information from the public for decades. So we shouldn’t be surprised if using microwaves, cell phones, drinking out of plastic bottles, and sitting in front of screens is damaging us in ways we don’t understand. Maybe liminal space represents this silent erosion of our mind and spirit, and perhaps this glitchy, broken space will spread through more and more of our consciousness, until some pharmaceutical company or telecommunications giant is exposed for slowly killing us.
A related theory suggests the contamination might not be accidental. US government officials and military personnel working in Cuba in 2016 reported ringing in the ears, severe pain, and cognitive dysfunction with no apparent cause. The mysterious illness was dubbed Havana syndrome, and it became a regular occurrence among US intelligence and military personnel and their families stationed all over the world. For years the reports continued, with investigators unable to find a cause. It was thought these officials might be the victims of some clandestine technology, inaudible sound weapons, microwaves, or something we aren’t allowed to know enough about to guess at.
It’s well documented that US and Russian intelligence agencies conducted forced experiments on the public: mind control, torture, secretly dosing people with psychoactive drugs like LSD and psilocybin. It’s also known that intelligence agencies have investigated mind-programming techniques, low-frequency cranial transmissions, and directed sound weapons, and that the deep state actively acquires exotic technology patents, shelving promising avenues of civilian research. The US military has spent enormous time and money pursuing anti-gravity propulsion and zero-point energy since at least the fifties. Are we to believe they never got anywhere, in all that time, with all those resources? Or has that technology matured behind the scenes? Is it responsible for the government’s recent admissions about UFOs? Are such admissions a distraction, to keep people from realizing the deep state has already colonized physical technology in ways we can barely imagine, and is now turning that same deep well of research and development toward colonizing our minds? Embedding programming into our subconscious with some imperceptible weapon? Turning us into sleeper cells awaiting directives? Is liminal space just a holographic projection of this programmed code, or its structure?
With the conspiracy theories out of the way, I should give some space to the theory that the whole liminal space phenomenon is just plain wrong. No mass hysteria, no contamination, people simply got carried away with all their fictitious lucid-dreaming authorship. The whole thing was a delusional, crowdsourced creative-writing project that blurred the line between reality and fantasy. Lucid dreaming meant people could generate any reality they wanted, and discovering that wasn’t enough, they felt compelled to invent an imaginary, desolate, austere world, one that funneled them back into a scarcity mindset built on suffering and deprivation: the only gear they know how to operate in. There is no physical evidence anything else is happening. The consensus map is meaningless. Dreams can present invented information as memory at the point of recall, people wake up believing they’re remembering a dream when they’re actually inventing the memory in the moment, something like déjà vu, perhaps subconsciously recalling sections they had already studied on the open-source map. Corroboration in the consensus map comes down to bad science and sloppy data gathering. Self-reported data is notoriously unreliable, and the White Fountain project is no exception.
People extended this skepticism with the possibility that the shared consistency of liminal space is just an extension of dream symbology, a known vocabulary of archetypal psychological forces in the subconscious, forced through the prism of experience and culture. We all operate under cultural influences baked into our history, our language, and how we structure our societies. Evolutionary psychology, genetic memory, universal grammar, all feed the archetypal associations of darkness and light, water, serpents, mythological creatures. It’s Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, the hero’s journey; Jung’s collective unconscious. We’re all part of society, and some portion of who we are, what we think, and how we identify is built on our collective history. Why shouldn’t that be reflected in our dreams?
Proponents of this theory point to cases where intuitions of independently real metaphysics have fallen short of transcending subjective experience. They highlight the inconsistent transpositions of synesthetes. Synesthesia is a perceptual phenomenon in which one form of sensory experience is mapped onto another: seeing certain colors when hearing certain musical notes, perceiving numbers as shapes, memories becoming spatial associations, auditory tones becoming tactile sensations. Synesthetes can display almost supernatural abilities to remember number sequences or perceive music, because they are literally seeing the numbers as a colorful landscape they can recognize and describe with the full benefit of visual acuity. A synesthete who experiences the number five as an orange triangle may feel a deep intuitive conviction that five is authentically, inherently orange and triangular. So it can be quite disturbing for them to meet another synesthete who is equally convinced that five is a blue circle. It turns out the color and the shape have no intrinsic connection to the number; they’re accidents of crossed wires in the individual’s neural pathways. The number five has no inherent color or shape in some platonic realm the synesthete is perceiving. It’s just a number; everything else is a subjective, idiosyncratic accident of wiring.
In this sense, the skeptics say, the White Fountain project is true to its namesake: the overactive imaginations of its members creating a reality that exists only in their minds. They all suffer from the same crossed wires and superstitious groupthink, coordinated by the zeitgeist, having nothing to do with any independent reality.
A similar interpretation, but one that acknowledges the scientific merit of the collected data, is that liminal space is the first direct evidence of consciousness outside individual brains. Science already knows the brain extends far beyond its physical boundary. If you could visualize magnetic fields, you would see dramatic plumes of magnetic fluctuation emanating from every brain, influencing the physics of the surrounding environment, and of others, in ways neuroscience doesn’t fully account for. With each passing year, aspects of cognition and neural activity assumed to be localized in the brain proper are found to exist elsewhere, the spinal column, the heart, and especially the digestive tract. The idea that the human mind is in conversation with the environment and with other minds, in ways we don’t fully understand, has found support among scientists and researchers for well over a hundred years.
In the early twentieth century, Georg Groddeck theorized that there was a consciousness above the self, of which the mind and ego were but a subsidiary organ. His work was essential to the understanding of psychosomatic disease and the placebo effect, and went on to influence Freud and other psychologists. Later researchers found evidence that new behaviors and ideas can spread between members of a group faster than the apparent means of transmission should allow, an effect demonstrated in species as diverse as monkeys, sheep, birds, and humans. The researcher Rupert Sheldrake generalized this idea in his theory of morphic resonance, in which even the laws of nature may be more accurately described as self-reinforcing habits, inherited through time and repetition. The effect has been claimed to extend beyond animal behavior to the melting points of crystals, the heat tolerance of plants, perhaps even the speed of light. In other words, physics and natural law may be bound together more subtly and deeply than we understand. Human consciousness may exist beyond individual brains, in some kind of superstructure not captured by contemporary science. Every particle in the universe exerts a physical influence on every other particle, if only a weak gravitational one. Maybe liminal space is our brain’s way of tapping into this base layer of interconnectedness, on a more subtle plane of existence than we currently understand.
Once we allow that thinking can happen outside the brain, it’s not much farther to panpsychism: the position that the fundamental constituent of physical reality is mind. That everything is made of consciousness, from our brains to molecules, subatomic particles, space, and energy. That physical reality, linear time, and causality all exist on a grosser level of existence, downstream from mind in the abstract. Liminal space might be our brain’s connection to this subtler frequency of mind, in a way that lets the self-aware part of our consciousness participate. The topology of liminal space probably represents some translation layer between that subtler frequency and our physical reality, which is probably why the tunnels look like a map of the human brain. Something about the geometry or topology of a brain is able to gain access to this deeper reality. The way a rotating cube casts a changing shadow on a two-dimensional plane, maybe the architecture of our brain is catching some higher-dimensional shadow that we experience as liminal space. Maybe the tunnels offer a glimpse behind the biocentric veil of our perceptually predigested reality. Taking cues from Robert Lanza and Donald Hoffman, the tunnels may in fact be a more authentic depiction of reality before it is processed and translated by perception and cognition, reality in a less processed form, where quantum superpositions haven’t yet collapsed into our physical world. Maybe all brains share some quantum coherence with one another, at a higher dimension or deeper layer of reality.
Some have pointed out that if the tunnels and our brains are a bridge to a more mathematically pure and authentic version of reality, perhaps it’s fractal. Fractals are mathematical shapes of infinite complexity, where every detail can be magnified to express the structure of the entire shape. The limit of a fractal’s complexity, when expressed in physical reality, is set by the resolution of its substrate or some other computational constraint, potentially by the fabric of space itself, if physicality can’t be reduced below the Planck length. Fractals are found throughout nature: the branching of trees, the circulatory and respiratory systems of animals, the erosion of riverbanks, and, of course, the branching neural connections of the human brain. The algebra needed to generate an infinitely detailed fractal pattern is extremely simple, and may be responsible for the incredible complexity of the liminal tunnels. Believers in the Wolfram model of fundamental physics suggested the liminal tunnels might be a peek into the abstract, simple rule-set that emergently generates our physical universe.
When the public at large caught whiff of physicists drawing comparisons between the geometry of liminal space and the human brain, a number of less scientifically stringent theories emerged. One contingent held fast to the idea that the tunnels were a map of the human brain, through which the seat of consciousness was moving toward the pineal gland, long associated with the spiritual “third eye.” Or to put it more precisely, passage through the tunnels mapped neatly onto the circulation of cerebrospinal fluid. This “sacred fluid” is poorly understood, but it carries many responsibilities and is essential to brain and body health, especially altered or elevated states of consciousness. It delivers the vital energy spoken of since ancient times across many cultures and esoteric schools, many of which interpret religious texts as coded descriptions of this fluid and the journey it takes through the human body. The “living waters” spoken of in the Torah and by Jesus. In Hinduism the fluid is Kundalini, imagined as a coiled serpent residing in the sacrum, waiting to be awakened, to rise up the spine, gaining potency from the chakra centers, before reaching the crown of the head, where it can offer enlightenment. In recent decades science has revealed the primacy of this fluid in distributing melatonin and DMT, both synthesized by the pineal gland, both necessary for sleep and for vivid, holistic states of consciousness, and both long associated with the subtle body. The third ventricle, the midline space connecting the pineal, pituitary, and hypothalamus, where the fluid is most concentrated in the brain, was called the “Crystal Palace” by ancient Taoists and the “Cave of Brahman” by Hindus. The ancient Egyptians and Greeks believed it circulated the psychic pneuma, the substance in the body that sustains consciousness. In the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the emergence of a clear fluid from the top of the head is a sign of a successfully accomplished phowa, the transference of consciousness, at the moment of death, to enlightenment. Coded (and often explicit) references appear in nearly every ancient religion and esoteric school, from the Hermetics down to modern Catholics. Descartes, laying the groundwork for the rationality that would define the Enlightenment, described the structure as housing the seat of the soul. More recently, science has shown the pineal gland, cerebrospinal fluid, and third ventricle to be primary to self-awareness, sleep, dreams, and psychedelic experience; work by Dr. Mauro Zappaterra has further detailed the dynamics of this fluid and the myriad ways it affects consciousness, echoing ancient precepts of higher spiritual states. Advocates of this theory are quick to explain that this is why light is emitted from the forehead in liminal space, and why DMT users, epileptics, and schizophrenics, historically overrepresented among shamans, yogis, and mystics, have naturally brighter headlamps.
Or maybe all of that is just an elaborately clinical way of generating a physical, literal, mechanical explanation for what many Eastern religions considered obvious: that the tunnels were one of many symbolic representations of the mind’s ascent into nirvana, satori, enlightenment. The overwhelming desire to let go of your breath in the tunnels is just the ego refusing to give up its supremacy and dissolve into the oneness of Brahman. Since the ego is all Western society acknowledges as the self, the West is incapable of understanding spiritual progress beyond the wheel of desire, of samsara. Enlightenment can’t be “hacked”, so detailing the process with maps and references to glands, studies, and spinal fluid is all just a waste of time.
Most of these theories hummed in the background, confined to their contingents. But over time the buzzwords and sound bites bubbled up into public discourse, where the mainstream got to tie quantum mechanics, esoteric knowledge, and the brain into a trifecta of poorly understood magical realism they could combine any way they liked, to produce any theory they wanted. Personality cults rallied behind liminal space as the long-fabled philosopher’s stone. Others thought it was the secret to eternal youth, or a means of time travel, of speaking to the dead, of communing with God and elevating the efficacy of prayer. Eccentric tech billionaires set up X Prize–style purses of enormous sums for anyone who could prove the outlandish claims. Liminal athletes became the new celebrities, increasingly recruited away from the open-source White Fountain project to join proprietary map-building ventures funded by venture capital.
It was a dark time for the project, which stood at the verge of real insight into the nature of liminal space. It seemed like any day it would either make a major breakthrough or implode. It never got the chance. Tragedy struck first.
It had long been suspected that the White Fountain project was being monitored by intelligence agencies, that they were investigating liminal space and exploiting its potential as a strategic frontier, likely with the same enthusiasm with which Russian and American agencies explored paranormal phenomena during the Cold War, when millions went into studying remote viewing, clairvoyance, mind control, brainwashing, and psychic spies. It was assumed the agencies were exploring liminal space. We didn’t know to what extent until Noor.
Noor was a ten-year-old Palestinian girl admitted to a hospital in Beirut. Once her condition had stabilized and she was able to speak, her story attracted the Lebanese National News Agency, whose coverage allowed Noor to broadcast her story to the world.
Noor grew up in a small village north of the West Bank, along the Judaean Mountains. She was an ordinary child, except that from the time she could talk, she spoke of her dreams. The other children and the adults of her village didn’t know what to make of her strange stories. She would often wake confused, sure that she had been somewhere else, wandering alone for months; those around her insisted she hadn’t gone anywhere and had only been sleeping a few hours. Later, when the world became educated about liminal space and dream hacking, the people in her life finally understood what she had been talking about all those years. It wasn’t long after that her village was visited by Mossad agents, and she was quietly disappeared. Her family received no explanation and no recompense. And while incidents of the Israeli military killing or disappearing Palestinians weren’t rare or particularly noteworthy, to do it in such a remote village, to a young girl, was shocking. Her family had no recourse, and nothing came of it.
Meanwhile Noor was taken to a facility with other young girls, all subjects of liminal space experiments. During the day they were made to weight-train to muscle failure; they were tortured, starved, injected with stem cells and growth hormones, and made to watch prisoners mutilated and killed in front of them. In the evenings they were flown in suborbital jets, anesthetized, put on a mild drip of DMT, their vitals closely monitored. They were given directives for what to do in liminal space; upon waking they were thoroughly debriefed, and their discoveries added to a proprietary database.
One night Noor went to sleep and stayed asleep. No matter what anyone tried, they couldn’t wake her. They thought she might have fallen into a coma, but her vital signs indicated she was only sleeping. She remained that way for a month, fed intravenously and closely monitored, until one day her vitals flatlined and she was pronounced dead. She was taken to a local funeral home to await unmarked burial, where she shocked the workers by waking and calmly sitting up. She couldn’t speak and was very weak. She refused to eat and seemed only half conscious, staring blankly, moving as if sleepwalking. One of the workers took pity on her, knowing where she had come from, the funeral home had already buried a number of girls her age from the same project. He remarked to Lebanese media later that she reminded him of his own daughter, and he couldn’t bear the thought of returning her to project officials. So he helped get her across the border into Lebanon. By the time they reached Beirut her pulse was weak and her body mostly limp, but her eyes remained open, staring.
The hospital staff managed to stabilize her, and after a couple of days she was able to sit up and speak. She began to relate her story. It didn’t take long for state media, and then the world, to take notice. The Lebanese military was called in to guard the hospital while she spoke to state media about her experiences in liminal space.
The transcript is long, and available online. It is of course in Arabic, colored strongly by her regional dialect and limited education. She was drowsy and distracted as she spoke, her speech broken by long pauses in which she seemed to drift in and out of lucidity. But linguists and cultural anthropologists have worked closely to translate and annotate what she said. I’ll paraphrase their analysis.
She said that while she was asleep to the world, she had spent many years of dreamtime traveling through liminal space. Navigating the tunnels had become as natural as breathing. She was a bolt of electricity, bright and hot, zipping effortlessly through the passages like a powerful current. She had long ago surpassed the need to breathe, and had come to recognize the space as her true home. She described her movement through the tunnels as a rhythmic ebb and flow of breath, a flowing liquid dance. She had lost all sense that she existed independently of the space, and felt as if she had dissolved into a bright, blissful totality. Asked to clarify the feeling, she likened it to warm oil pouring down her body. She lost all sense of time and remained in this state anywhere from a moment to a lifetime. When she regained her sense of self, she became aware of being in the presence of entities.
Her story becomes hard to follow at this point, and jumps around. She spoke more of what she understood and felt than of events that could be described in any independent way. The short of it was that she came to understand that human beings, their consciousness, and life in our material universe function as a farm, or rather, a simulation designed to generate a farm. This farm produces something of value to a higher plane of existence, connected in some way to these entities. When we sleep, and especially when we dream, part of our consciousness is partitioned off and coordinated with the minds of others to advance this higher-dimensional project. Computer scientists reviewing her speech said she was describing distributed computing, computation shared across multiple machines, which is particularly useful for intensive processes requiring non-simplifiable brute-force calculation. Spreading such computations over many computers is often more practical than stressing the resources of a single machine; popular applications include mining cryptocurrency and simulating protein folding for therapeutic medicine. At times it sounded like she was describing human beings as a kind of slave species, or farm animals to be consumed for our nutritional value, or machines operating in the service of some program. Bred to be stupid and docile like lambs, or forced into a lower gear of existence to serve someone else’s purpose.
Asked to clarify what she meant by the higher dimension and the entities, her answers were hard to follow. She seemed to describe the beings as a more authentic version of ourselves. Or that we are self-aware cells in the larger body of a single self, that each brain is like a neuron in the higher-dimensional brain of God. Which, to the ears of Hindus, sounded like she was repeating one of their central precepts: that we are all God, dreaming the dream of separateness.
The news people eventually lost patience, and the rest of the interview took the form of call and response. Some excerpts:
“How do we know what choices to make? About what is right and wrong?”
“We are given possibilities so vast and mysterious,
it is better to explore them with no hope of ever understanding.”
“How do we live a good life? What should we work towards?”
“The only thing that matters in life is death.
Your only obligation until then is to exercise your intent.
That is the music you are dancing to.
You can dance to the music, or you can disappear into the silence.”
Many of the questions were about whether God was real, which religion was correct, how to get into heaven. She didn’t offer specific answers, and even seemed a little embarrassed for the reporters asking. Eventually one reporter, the most visibly frustrated, took over and kept trying to corner her into answering some variation of What is the meaning of life? When it became clear he wouldn’t leave her alone until she gave him a prescriptive answer, she looked at him gravely, and answered with a seriousness strange to see in such a young child.
“The purpose of life is to balance the terror of being with the wonder of being.”
And with that she smiled, closed her eyes, laid her head down, and quietly died.
After Noor’s death, people demanded answers. Elected officials pretended to be outraged on behalf of their constituents in impassioned speeches, and promised inquiries for exactly as long as it took to get through the news cycle. Then everyone lost interest, and life returned to normal.
Except people started to notice that entrance into liminal space was no longer possible. The collision errors of dream space had been patched. People could still lucid dream, but they could go no further. At the same time, the long-term cost of Somnum came due: waking hours of fuzzy lightheadedness, heavy users needing ten to fifteen hours a night just to feel rested. The user base shrank by half in a month, and a suspicion we’d had from the beginning was finally confirmed: the drug only worked as an emergent network effect. It depended on how many other people were taking it. With fewer people on it, the dreams got thinner. The drug was recalled. Some enthusiasts bought up the remaining supply, but there weren’t enough of us left for it to work.
People stopped talking about the tunnels. About the map. About any of it. The window for discovery had closed.
Was the whole thing mass hysteria? Panpsychism? An immaterial plane of existence, a physical expression of our collective consciousness, the metaphysics of spirituality? The upper boundary of a computer simulation? Are our sleeping brains used in a distributed computing project by higher-dimensional entities? A consciousness farm, our minds harvested every night as neurons in a meta-brain? Are we computer chips powering God’s laptop?
Do we walk right up to the boundary of true knowing every night when we sleep, but never quite leave our fenced-in enclosure?
Did we miss our one opportunity to really know?
“White Fountain” is one of eight stories in Dreams of Earth. Stories that make you question.
Is it worth knowing the truth?
Of who you really are?
If you would like to read the rest, please email me at ali@artofali.com.