Take a trip with me from 1974 to 1997, a unique period in cultural history when the radical idea of reaching beyond ordinary conscious thought moved completely out of clinical therapy rooms, university research laboratories, isolated spiritual communities, and classified government programs—and directly into ordinary suburban living rooms.
Over the next several posts, I’ll be working my way through a fascinating archive of vintage books, cassette tapes, VHS courses, and step-by-step audio programs. These were mass-market materials that promised an everyday person immediate access to something sitting beneath, behind, or far beyond the waking, conscious mind.
Together, we will explore the landscape of the sleeping mind through dream incubation. We will deliberately enter altered mental states. We’ll listen closely for the body’s “felt sense” before language has even formed around it. We will interact with vivid images that seem to arise entirely on their own. Throughout this project, we are going to experiment firsthand with methods intended to quiet analytical thought, access the subconscious, and, in their most ambitious forms, tap into what their creators described as a larger field of information or even the collective unconscious.
The Border Between Science and the Strange
Some of these historical ideas have since found profound echoes in mainstream modern psychology. Concepts like nonconscious processing, implicit memory, interoception, creativity during incubation, and the established fact that the brain can arrive at complex conclusions before we become consciously aware of how it got there are now widely accepted.
Other claims from this era remain far more controversial.
Can dreams actively solve our waking problems? Can the physical body know something before the conscious mind can articulate it? Can an image that appears spontaneously tell us something we did not already know? Can human consciousness be deliberately altered in ways that reveal information otherwise inaccessible to us? And can a person actually perceive a distant, hidden place, object, or event without physically seeing it at all?
Science does not give all of those questions the same answer. Some have substantial evidence behind them. Some remain deeply uncertain. Others, including many paranormal claims attached to these consumer systems, have never been established to rigorous scientific standards.
But that is not quite the experiment I am interested in.
Inhabiting the Media Matrix
I want to know what happens when you actually sit down and do exactly what these materials tell you to do.
So, as much as possible, I am approaching each system through the precise physical media in which an ordinary person might originally have encountered it. A paperback beside the bed. A cassette tape whirring in the stereo. A VHS tape playing through a tube television. A notebook, a pen, a quiet room, and a set of instructions telling you not to think too hard about what comes next.
I want to temporarily inhabit the specific worldview each method offered its original audience:
- What would you believe if it were 1977, and a bestselling book told you that you could easily learn to enter a deep alpha state and unlock a massive, unused percentage of your mind?
- What would happen if, in the 1980s, you put on a pair of heavy headphones and followed an audio program engineered to move your brain waves through increasingly unusual states of consciousness?
- What would you make of Jungian active imagination if you were instructed strictly not to invent an image, but to sit in the dark and wait to see what entity appeared?
- And what if it were 1997, the CIA had recently acknowledged decades of government-funded remote-viewing research, Major Ed Dames was appearing repeatedly on late-night talk radio, and a box of five VHS tapes arrived in the mail promising to teach you that exact intelligence-gathering process?
That is where this series begins.
The Midpoint of Discovery
I am not approaching these experiments with the blanket assumption that they work. I am also not approaching them with the skeptical assumption that nothing interesting can happen.
Instead, I am intensely interested in that strange, fleeting moment when an image, a thought, a physical sensation, a dream, an answer, or a sudden association appears in your consciousness and you cannot quite account for where it came from.
Did you discover it? Did you create it? Did some hidden part of your mind assemble it before “you” were ever aware of doing so? And does that distinction even feel obvious while it is happening?
Over the course of this project, I’ll work through methods developed by Patricia Garfield, José Silva, Eugene Gendlin, Robert Monroe and the Monroe Institute, Carl Jung and later Jungian practitioners, and PSI TECH’s Technical Remote Viewing program, using original-period media wherever I can find it.
At the end of this journey, I may not have found any hidden universal truths. But I fully expect to learn quite a lot about the deeply human need to go looking for them.
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