Dream Invasions
Everyone is open every night. No practice, no affliction, no bargain and no invitation — sleep does it, to everybody, without asking.
This is the most common form of contact in the world and almost none of it is remembered.
Dream invasion is entry into a person by way of sleep. It is done to us by the Others and it is done by seekers, using the same door, and the wiki holds that these are one practice with two sets of practitioners. contested
The universal aperture
Everything else on this wiki requires something of the person: an affliction that matches, a bargain, a door opened from the inside, or the years of preparation described under Harnessing. Dreaming requires nothing. It is the one state in which an ordinary, well, uninitiated person is open, and they enter it every night of their lives. unverified
Two consequences the wiki was slow to draw:
- It is how most contact happens. Not the encounters that get written down — those are the rare, waking, catastrophic ones. The ordinary case is nightly, universal, and almost entirely unremembered, which is also why the record is made of the exceptions. contested
- It requires no consent problem to be solved. The grievance holds that nothing can seize the material world and must be admitted. A sleeper admits without deciding, every night, and cannot withhold. ⚠ warning
The pineal mechanism
Two entries on this wiki have described the same thing from opposite ends for years and neither noticed the other. firsthand · Gershon
Pineal Gland records that calcification protects a person against incursion by the Others, and that it is accompanied with an unpleasant side effect of an inability to experience natural and healthy sleep. That has been read as a cost of the protection.
It is not a side effect. It is the protection. The gland governs sleep; sleep is the aperture; a person who cannot sleep naturally cannot dream, and a person who cannot dream is closed by the only route that was ever open to everybody. The Fabian Society programme described in that entry is, on this reading, an attack on dreaming carried out at population scale. contested
Which makes it the most efficient arm of Inoculation by a wide margin. Soma must be distributed and taken. The memetic arm described under Mind Rape must be delivered. This one closes the universal door and needs nothing from the subject but that they go on living in a world someone else has arranged. unverified
The intrusion practices
Three entries on this wiki describe entering another mind, and they are one family at increasing severity. Dream invasion is the first because it is the easiest and needs no art at all from the Others' side. contested
- Dream invasion
- Enter to influence. The subject is asleep, the material is delivered as their own, and by morning it is indistinguishable from something they thought.
- Mind Divers
- Enter to gather. The Shadow located and interrogated; nothing left behind, at least by intent.
- Mind Rape
- Enter to install. Permanent, structural, and described in that entry as making a part of a mind uninhabitable.
Seekers do the first offensively and it belongs to the sight cluster under Harnessing — the Third eye turned outward and used to reach rather than to look. It is the only offensive application of that cluster the wiki documents, and the existence of one implies others we have not found. unverified
Why it is hard to defend against
Because the material arrives as yours. ⚠ warning
A waking encounter is recognisable as an encounter; something happened, and a person can report it, doubt it, or be disbelieved about it. A dream is authored by the dreamer in every account anyone has of dreaming, so anything delivered through one is received as self-generated. There is no moment of arrival to notice and nothing to attribute to anyone.
This is the mechanism Fifth Generational Warfare describes at the scale of a population — the characteristic experience of a successful operation is not being persuaded but discovering that you have always thought this. Here it is the same effect, per person, nightly, and available to anything that can reach a sleeper. contested
The wiki has no defence to offer and will not invent one. What it records is that the recognised protection is the pineal one, that it works, and that it works by taking the dreaming away. ⚠ warning
Competing accounts