Dream Control – When Freedom Ends by Efacts Photography

FRANK LASSAK

DREAM CONTROL WHEN FREEDOM ENDS

FRANK LASSAK

FOR LEA

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CONTENTS

Prologue

February 29, 2044

Somniverse

Tableaux

Kontext

Production

Credits

Literature

PROLOGUE

thanks to daniel f. galouye,

we cannot be sure if we really are who we think we are. In his book Simulacron 3, published in 1964, the American novelist described a scientific experiment and its weird repercussions: a simulated universe, modeled after our world and managed by computer technicians, where some cracks in the system occur, allowing virtual beings — avatars — to establish contact with the scientists who created them. A situation that inevitably leads to catastrophe. Almost 30 years later, Neal Stephenson made things more confusing in his cyberpunk novel Snow Crash (1992). Here, it is even less clear, who controls who. In his socalled Metaverse, human beings and their avatars interact — and those interactions result in conflict between real and virtual entities. There are several competing factions fighting for control over the Metaverse, and a resistance organization wants to constitute anarchy in the virtual world. Control is key in Stephenson’s dystopian story — as it is in our world today. The early 21st century has seen significant progress in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). We are witnessing a development that will ultimately lead to thinking

machines, some of them in human shape, performing an increasing number of tasks in our daily life. Avatars, robots, cyborgs — whatever their name — will soon be the new normal. With the advent of artificial humanoids, we not only have to define new rules and laws for society, but also find appropriate ways to limit the power of the machines. On another front, Big Data firms like Google, Facebook or Amazon are creating extremely powerful algorithmic empires, whose central aim is to collect data that is sold to clients — for analysis, advertising, microtargeting and behavior manipulation. Imagine tailor-made private data in the hands of intelligent machines: even if those machines wouldn’t be able to weaponize the information, they could still be used by sinister corporations or demagogues to exert control over individuals on a massive, if not global, scale. While mass media and mass manipulation became tools of the trade already in the 20th century, nowadays individuals are the preferred targets of the ever more sophisticated industry of behavior manipulation and mind control. The final frontier is the subconscious: our dreams.

This is by no means the stuff of science fiction movies, even though many people would like to think it is. In 2018 physicists and neuroscientists at the University of Washington in Seattle developed digital tools that can sense thoughts and transmit information into other brains. Brain-tobrain communication has become a reality, and it could be a matter of three or four decades until mind control arrives. At MMT Neurotech in Westport, Connecticut, a company founded in 2004 by neuroscientists, biochemists and computer experts, according to chief scientist Donald Marks the future has just begun: “We are working on brain virtualization and the creation of artificial thoughts.” MMT uses its own technology called Cognitive Engram to correlate specific brain activation patterns to specific thoughts. Data gained from those scans is stored and can be used to visualize thoughts and dreams. The company already offers the service commercially. In 2013, scientists at ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories, Kyoto, built a computer model that links patterns of brain activity to different types of images. It predicts what images the subjects saw in their dreams. Their findings show

that visual experience during sleep is represented by brain activity patterns shared by stimulus perception, providing a means to uncover subjective contents of dreaming using neural measurement. In other words, MRI technology, aka: brain scans, are used to reconstruct visual memories of dreams. Mark Stokes, an acclaimed neuroscientist at Oxford University, says the new method “brings us a lot closer to creating dreamreading machines.” from reading to writing dreams? Combining the aformentioned scientific methods leads to the concept of dream manipulation, which is not as far fetched as one might think. In principle, it happens already today in the shape of lucid dreaming: “Lucid dreamers can watch their dreams evolve and then alter their course as they see fit”, explains Allan Hobson, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. In his groundbreaking paper “The Neurobiology of Consciousness” (2009) Hobson concludes that dreams can be pre-planned “by means of autosuggestion.” Or potentially by third-party interference, whereby the dreamer’s mind would be hacked. how long will it take

Inter-dreamer communication has already arrived, too. Daniel Oldis, a software engineer from Costa Mesa, California, used a special EEG headband called Zeo, a red light bulb, some programming skills and the internet to engage in what he calls social dreaming. The concept is fascinating: the EEG headbands of two participants are connected via bluetooth to the internet, transmitting their brain wave data to a website which hosts special software. When it detects that both people are in REM sleep and most likely dreaming, it sends one of them a signal, turning on the light bulb. Chances are, he or she will incorporate the light into their dream. If the dreamer, while in lucid state, notices the light, he or she sends a signal back to the other dreamer with a unique physical gesture, such as looking twice to the left. The headband captures the eye movement and transmits it to the second dreamer, and a light will turn on in his or her room, too, causing the second person to become lucidly aware of the other in the dream. From then on, both persons are inside the same stream of subconsciousness — until they wake up. Oldis’ experiment has shown that dreamers are susceptible to outside signals and

capable of interpreting those signals in their dreams. By replacing the second dreamer with a person that is awake, this simple set up lays the foundations for a process that is more frightening than fascinating: controlled dreaming. for most people, dreams are private

territory, like thoughts and feelings. Although they sometimes talk about them with family and friends, it is a given that the subconscious isn’t shared with others — except for therapeutical reasons. One of the most compelling accounts of recounted dreams was published by the exiled German journalist Charlotte Beradt. In 1943, four years after she was forced to leave Germany, she wrote an article for the New York-based paper Free World. It was a detailed account of dreams that had been retold by Germans who suffered from the Nazi regime. Common to all those dreams was, according to Beradt, that “the principals suffered without taking any action. The thought of opposition did not occur to them — fear was too deeply ingrained.” Even in the realm of dreams, people in Nazi Germany were unable to put up any resistance against the regime — although in

their hermetically sealed dream world they didn’t have to fear punishment, since nobody could listen in on what was happening in their subconscious. In the neurodigital age, however, where brain activity can be scanned, monitored, even induced or commanded; where individuals can be targeted precisely and where artificial intelligence reacts much faster to changing parameters than humans ever could — the realm of dreams rapidly loses its defensive bastion. The attack on our minds, thoughts and dreams will most likely come unnoticed, but there are numerous blueprints that illustrate how it could happen. In 2016, behavior manipulation was employed during the US elections, when the hitherto unknown British company Cambridge Analytica handed pre-processed data of more than 80 million voters over to the propaganda department of republican candidate Donald J. Trump. For each single voter, the data revealed hundreds of personal preferences and aversions, likes and dislikes, derived from their activity on Facebook. In a complex operation, the data was browsed for topics that could be used as a gateway to influence each individual voter’s political opinion. This information

was used for massive microtargeting. With the polls being only two weeks away, the electorate in three US states — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — received an unprecedented barrage of tailormade ads committing them to vote for Trump. The outcome is well-known. The method elucidates, how manipulation in the digital age works — through the backdoor. And it works reliably, as the average user of social media platforms voluntarily surrenders his or her personal data to the company that provides the service, even so internet pioneer Jaron Lanier, a lone voice in the wilderness, pointed out in his book Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (2018) that the only defense against behavior manipulation is by abstaining from social media completely. Lanier writes: “We’re being tracked and measured constantly, and receiving engineered feedback all the time. We’re hypnotized little by little by technicians we can’t see, for purposes we don’t know. We’re all lab animals now.” Fast-forward to the future of mind control: A straight path leads from current social media consumption and addiction via loss of independent thinking and inability

of opinion formation based on facts, into the largely uncharted territory of neurodigital behavior engineering — and ultimately towards controlled dreaming. The theoretical framework exists, practical tests have been successfully completed, and the current constellation of commercial and political players strongly suggests that the development follows the seasoned principle: “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” on the strength of these realities,

the project Dream Control took shape in November 2017, while I was conducting an indepth research of the manipulative nature of hyper-commercialized social media. Inspired by Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, which I read again 25 years after having devoured it in 1992, the idea emerged of a saturnine regime that draws its power from sophisticated behavior control in disguise of social entertainment — a modified example of today’s surveillance capitalism. Since the entertainment industry has conquered almost all areas of life but the realm of the subconscious, it is quite likely it will expand into that field in the near future. DC, the fictional enterprise that runs the socalled Somniverse, is loosely based on the

model of today’s ruthless multinational corporations. Its strategy does not provide for taking prisoners. On the contrary, the wideranging scope of operations, including secret — and not further specified — mandates from the government, calls for the management to establish a strict code of obedience among the staff. As in Daniel F. Galouye’s novel Simulacron 3 or in Terry Gilliam’s defining film Brazil (1982), however, the system is flawed. Dream Control describes and visualizes both the fascinating and terrifying aspects of an amusement park for sleepwalkers, which — as closer inspection reveals — is a front for a dubious organisation, whose true motives are unknown. As such, the series is an invitation for the viewers to scrutinize the value and integrity of allegedly lifeenhancing services, whose sole purpose is to jeopardize the customers’ ability to lead a self-determined, sovereign life. Closing this prologue, nothing is more appropriate than a quote from Snow Crash: “Any information system of sufficient complexity will inevitably become infected with viruses generated from within itself.” February 2019

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FEBRUARY 29, 2044

when i first heard of the somniverse,

it sounded like a big scam. How could sleepwalkers possibly indulge in joint adventures with their peers? I would rather assert the story you are about to read were fictitious. That, however, would be nothing but a deliberate act of delusion. A few months ago, I received an invitation to a banquet at the New York headquarters of DC Corp., one of those newfangled multi-trillion-dollar firms that succeeded Google and other second-generation startups of Silicon Valley. It was a lush party, and I soon got acquainted with DC’s CEO and founder George McKenzie. A tall and impressive man in his late thirties, whose hands-down talent was to rope everyone in on the merits of computer-aided behavior control, he stressed the importance of DC’s collaboration with the government — thus, admittedly, piquing my curiosity. “In our system,” he declaimed proudly, “dreams, whether lucid or not, are attentively monitored and amiably curated, enabling clients to dream much more efficiently. Wouldn’t you think this is a great improvement over the current state of things, where all that precious energy you spend in dreams is irretrievably lost?” Somehow,

McKenzie had a point. His speech was truly convincing, and finally he offered me a trial run, free of charge. “You know, we’re always searching for guinea pigs,” he smirked. The next day, a comm bot arrived, asking me what would be the most convenient day to partake in the test. It also delivered a lengthy questionnaire and a form I had to sign, granting DC permission to obtain details of my mental and physical health status. The procedure, albeit professionally presented, appeared suspicious, to say the least. And when I researched the so-called Somniverse, an entertainment park run by DC, I read about a string of scandals that had led to its temporary shutdown not long ago. Yet, after a couple of days — and mainly out of curiosity — I sent back all necessary papers and signatures, despite strong reservations regarding potential dangers. The confirmation arrived in no time. It also contained a bundle of electronic leaflets: “How to prepare your voyage to the Somniverse”, “The Rules of the Somniverse”, plus a few more pamphlets describing “landmark dream experiences” of famous people, including President Chandler. All in all, impressive marketing fuss, pimped with allegedly scientific facts.

16 “In the Somniverse, dreams, whether lucid or not, are attentively monitored and amiably curated, enabling clients to dream more efficiently. Wouldn’t you think it is a great improvement over the current state of things, where all the precious energy you spend in your dreams is irretrievably lost?” George McKenzie, CEO, DC Corp.

Missing, however, was a reference to DC’s purported connection with the government. They either weren’t allowed to mention it — or McKenzie had exaggerated the importance of his firm during the banquet. Both options weren’t exactly suited to ease my skeptical mind, but in the end I decided to not look a gift horse in the mouth and instead prepare for the coming adventure. the next evening, I delved into “The Rules of the Somniverse”, a visitor’s guide to the plenty dos and don’ts of the system. It was inadvertently hilarious and reminded me in parts of the ten commandments — rewritten by Monty Python. For example, when an alienlike figure wearing a golden dress told me in a speech bubble that it was “prohibited to remove any items from the virtual dream world and take them home.” Clearly, DC went to great lengths to make the Somniverse appear as if it were a real place. Concise rules covered the interactions with other visitors. In short, the Somniverse was populated by dreamers, avatars and DC’s technical staff. As a dreamer, I was allowed to communicate only with avatars and — in case of emergency — with staff who would be around at any time and easy to

recognize in their unique uniforms. By no means should I try to contact other dreamers if I encountered them. Otherwise, the voyage would immediately be terminated for all guests involved. In order to facilitate the journey, DC had implemented a security mechanism that prevented inter-dreamer contact, as it could lead to severe brain damage. What a nice prospect! Speaking of technology, the brochure did not explain precisely, how the scientists would analyze and interpret my brain activity while I was sleeping, but the concept outlined in “How to prepare your voyage to the Somniverse” gave me a vague idea: A few days before the test started, the company would send two pills by secure courier service. One contained a nano particle, basically a small chip handling neural communications between my brain and the Somniverse system. The second pill would include a psychoactive substance called Sync®, whose effect wasn’t further elaborated. The nano device had to be taken six hours ahead of the journey, the Sync® pill 15 minutes prior to take-off. As a matter of course, I had to be sober and wasn’t allowed to eat anything after having swallowed the nano chip.

from my night in the Somniverse is an encounter with a tall darkhaired woman, wearing a uniform that reminded me of a 19th century period movie. She looked at me from inside a mirror and was gesturing that I should follow her. In a dream everything is possible, they say, so walking through a mirror to follow the woman of my dreams felt absolutely natural. It was quite obvious that DC Corp. had gathered vital information about my life, especially my love life. A few weeks earlier, I had started dating a woman who very much resembled the Somniverse guide. In hindsight, I figure they must have analyzed my social media posts rigorously for to find a guide who almost was a lookalike. She brought me to a circular room full of oddities that resembled strange props from a David Lynch movie. Thick pipes and funny apparatuses — impossible to name, let alone to guess their functions — were lining

first thing i remember

the wall. Ominous sounds filled the room, almost as if compressed air was streaming through the pipes. I felt cold and uncomfortable. The guide asked me to take a seat inside a dimly lit cupola and closed its door. Suddenly, the lights started flickering and I got the impression of being transported to another sphere. (The actual sensation of that moment is hard to describe; never before had I been in a situation like this. Perhaps the Sync® began to kick in, putting me in a state of trance.) After a while (it could have been seconds or minutes — time somehow became irrelevant and thus impossible to measure) the guide disappeared. My eyes were irritated by flashing lights; the cupola started to shake harder and harder. I had to hold fast to the armrests to avoid being ejected from the seat. Finally, the machine teleported me to a dark corridor with numerous doors — and vanished.

» She brought me to a room full of oddities that resembled props from a David Lynch movie «

“It was a great career opportunity, of course. Just having finished my neuroengineering studies at university, the job offer from DC came as a big surprise. Well, I didn’t know exactly what they were doing, but I thought I’d give it a try. You don’t have so many choices these days.” Officer Komura, DC Corp.

life is about making choices.

The engineers of the Somniverse obviously had that in mind, when they built the system. And although there were no hints as to what would lay waiting behind all those doors, my instincts (or or so it seemed) told me to take the second one on the left. What a splendid idea: not in my wildest imagination had I expected to end up in my own apartment from a few years ago, with my ex-wife Isabella reminding me of all the good and bad things I had tried to forget ever since. For sure, this wasn’t the dream experience I had hoped for. (Later, I found out in a conversation with a staff member that the Isabella sequence was programmed to unfold behind every door of the corridor. In fact, DC’s analysts had thoroughly investigated my private life, based on what me and my friends had talked about over the preceding weeks. That knowledge was used to design several plausible dream scenarios. Confronting me with Isabella’s avatar in the first episode must have seemed promising from a user satisfaction angle. In stark contrast to life, dreams in the Somniverse were not focused on choices — they were designed around what DC had learned about the clients’ fears and hopes.

Slightly irritated by the encounter with Isabella, I felt the urge to leave the bedroom as quickly as possible — or even escape from the dream altogether. At that point, the alarm bells at DC’s mission control must have rung with ear-piercing intensity. In any case, the avatar and the room dissolved in front of my eyes, and I found myself back in the corridor. From then on, things got really weird. unable to recall how long the state of limbo continued, my memory of the events that followed immediately after I had opened another door, only contains fragments: in an old theater, seemingly defunct, a group of actors performed in what looked like a scene from Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus”. Heads were rolling, blood was splattering; a sickening smell of violence filled the room. Most puzzling, however, was the fact that nobody moved. The scene was frozen, like a photograph. As if someone had pressed the “Pause” button of the device that played the sequence. (A few days after the trip, McKenzie told me that the Somniverse had had a serious malfunction, probably caused by my abrupt escape from the Isabella episode. Originally, the stageplay was planned to be part of another client’s dream.)

“After I quit my job as a military instructor, it felt natural to apply for the position of client liaison officer at DC. You see, the routines are very similar — and I’ve always loved to be in command.” Officer Simpson, DC Corp.

“Recent events have scared me off quite a bit, to be honest. I’m trying to leave as soon as possible. But — who knows if they would really let me go, after all I’ve seen and heard?” Officer Fraser, DC Corp.

On the opposite side of the theater auditorium, I noticed one of the admins. Apparently, his movements weren’t frozen, signalling with his hands that I better leave the place and meet him outside. His efforts were in vain, though, as an inexplicable force pushed me towards another exit, into a tunnel, where I found myself on the tracks of a subway line — with a train quickly approaching. What had started as a flashback to my former love life, now became a full-blown nightmare. There was no other explanation than a sudden loss of control over where and how my dream was supposed to continue. (When I talked to one of DC’s officers later, he dismissed my notion that a technical error could have caused the disaster. Instead, he argued, those and similar occurrences were inherent in the system’s design. The Somniverse collected data from thousands of clients, and he had noticed several times that the AI software intentionally wasn’t filtering the myriads

of bits correctly. This often led to conflicting instructions both for avatars and admins.) the train is shrouded in memory. What remains, are blurred images of avatars in a backyard and a strange procession of golden cyborgs — the most wonderous encounter I recall from the trip. Then, shortly before I woke up again, two officers escorted me to an elevator. My physical condition was awful; I hardly managed to stay on my feet. In a lucid moment though, I noticed we were on the 15th floor. It’s those unimportant things that I remember best. Perhaps this is the only way to get out of the Somniverse free of all mental damage: by forgetting all the dangerous and potentially harmful situations that are lurking behind every corner of that place. George McKenzie contacted me a week after my sleepwalking adventure and asked for a first-hand account of my visit to the park.

how i exactly managed to dodge

» What had started as a flashback to my love life, now became a full-blown nightmare «

When I described the menacing moment on the subway tracks, he filled me in on the findings of his technical staff: What I had felt as an inexplicable push towards the tunnel was most likely a neural tractor impulse programmed by an intruder, who tried to sabotage the system. It was clear to McKenzie that only DC’s former Chief Security Officer Brad Hansen could have been behind the attack. “We fired him as a consequence of a massive data heist that happened two years ago,” he explained. “Now, he’s giving us a lot of trouble, but he makes mistakes. We’re hard on his heels already”. several weeks had passed,

when one day an encrypted message arrived by holomail. Although the on-screen info was garbled, the sender was perfectly legible. He or she went by the name of Dolores — a reasonable cipher, not giving away too much, but indicating that something wasn’t the way it should be. I asked my buddy Alejandro, an expert code breaker, to decrypt the message, which he managed to do in almost no time. The holoscreen flickered slightly, but soon the video started playing. One of the golden cyborgs I had seen in the Somniverse leaned against a dark

wall and declaimed: “So you’ve been to the show, my friend, and saw the abyss of mankind’s dreams with your own eyes”. I shuddered. Alejandro looked at me clue lessly. The cyborg continued: “Listen up, mortal: the place you call the Somniverse has become a cesspool of greedy rascals. Now, we have come as scavengers, by order of Dolores. Stay away from that miserable venue and keep your dreams to yourself”. “This was a joke?”, Alejandro asked. I turned off the holoscreen and shook my head. “I’m afraid, not. When I was in the Somniverse, I saw several of those creatures — I know: it was in a dream, but ...” “Oh—kay, I get it. Just do me one favor, please: Spare me the details, man”. Hastily, he packed up his stuff and left. in my dreams. Although I never connected to the system again — and don’t feel the need to do so — the mysterious character appears in my subconscious until this day. And every once in a while, when I wake up in the middle of the night, a golden cyborg is floating in mid air outside my bedroom window. Luckily, in those moments Alejandro’s plea resonates in my ears: “Spare me the details”.

dolores remained a recurring visitor

“This is definitely the future of society: control of the subconscious. In the past, great ideas were too often repressed. The Somniverse will hopefully enable us to change the fate of humanity — for the better.” Officer Bowers, DC Corp.

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SOMNIVERSE

A virtual place where adventures of sleepwalkers become simulated reality (Advertising claim) The Somniverse was invented and designed by Canadian neuroscientist and IT specialist George McKenzie in 2039. He sold the related patents to his own company DC Corp., founded in 2040 in New York City, USA. The firm is listed at NYSE. Today, their shares are largely owned by institutional investors from Asia. In 2041, McKenzie and his staff, most of them highly skilled scientists and ex-military personnel, began building the commercial version of the Somniverse and started field tests with volunteers, recruited from federal prisons. On September 18, 2041, the simulated amusement park was inaugurated. Among the first clients who used the facility, was President Naomi Chandler. According to media reports, the POTUS was so amazed, she invited the entire staff of the White House to a weeklong dream-in. Early in 2042, it was rumored that a number of prisoners who had acted as guinea pigs the year before, were institutionalized. The company denied any responsibility and assured they had no knowledge of those events. Later that year, an unnamed group of cybercriminals outwitted the security system of

the simulation and stole neurodigital behavioural data of an unknown number of clients. DC Corp. apologized for the security breach and promptly fired their CSO Brad Hansen. His current whereabouts are unknown. When confidential memos of a high-ranking manager at DC Corp. were published on the holopage of the New York Times in 2043, the company faced one of their biggest PR disasters: the memos revealed in detail, that technical advisors of a political party not only were given access to clientsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; private data during the 2042 midterms, but were also allowed to actively infiltrate their dreams. Immediately after the news broke, DC Corp. shut down the Somniverse, allegedly for reasons of routine maintenance. The park remained closed for several months and was re-opened in January, 2044. Meanwhile, most customers had cancelled their subscriptions, but a successful multibillion dollar advertising campaign reanimated DCâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s business literally over night. In February, 2044, the company reportedly signed an agreement with the US Dept. of Defence. Its contents are classified.

Mission Control, February 29, 2044, 0100h

Establishing contact with: target BA07 ... Condition: green ... Rendez-vous destination: barber shop ... Liaison officer: Komura ... Mission leader: McKenzie ... Estimated time of contact: 0115h ... Estimated end of mission: 0545h ... Mission end sequence: elevator ... Fallback option: not established, pending … >> >> >>

Komura: Establishing contact with target BA07 … McKenzie: Good luck and deep dreams … Komura: Thank you, sir. Next ride is yours …