Russia's Agents in the Dreamscape

Some years ago, I had a vivid two-punch dream, in which I felt I was being recruited into a Russian intelligence agency.

I was lucid—that is, aware I was in a dream—from the beginning. Standing in a hallway with a crowd of other people like me, waiting for whatever was supposed to come next, I was practicing my lucidity skills by trying to levitate, and being reasonably successful at it. People were chatting among themselves, but I was minding my own.

Then, a representative of the Russian state appeared: a man in his sixties, heavily built, with a face both rough and intelligent. He could have been a professor of economics who makes most of his income by working with big oil and gas, occasionally drinks with powers that be—gangsters in the 90s, chekists in the 00s—but continues to do real research and is known to be both respectful and demanding towards his students.

He opened the door to a conference room and saw it was occupied by a different group. He shooed them away, getting visibly angry. “I really do hate these Kadyrovites. They have no business even being in this wing of the building.” Then he invited us in.

It appeared that everybody but me have been to this room before. People brought homework. They were giving presentations—in my view, poorly prepared and ultimately unimpressive—on reality’s fluid nature and ways to effectively navigate it. I sat next to the man from the state—I now knew he was Colonel, not Professor—and listened somewhat distractedly, less interested in what these guys had to say and more in what my experience of dreaming them up said on the same topic.

I tried to memorize what was going on. I even found a pen and some paper to write something down, not realizing or not knowing what to do about the obvious fact that I wouldn’t be able to bring this note through the dream-waking barrier.

There was a bowl filled with gold coins next to the door. Every speaker grabbed one on their way out. Some were obviously aware their talk was not a success, and there was an irritated “whatever” in their body language. “The coin’s mine anyway.”

I tapped Colonel on the shoulder.

— Yes?

— I have a question about what all of this means, but I’m not sure how to formulate it. These coins… Are they real?

— Sure.

He smiled. Of course they are. They’re an experience, and what’s more real than an experience? I searched for words.

— As in, if I take one, I’ll have it on my bed stand when I wake up?

He smiled again:

— Why not?

I looked at the coins, and at Colonel again, and asked something else. He gave me some answer. His tone said, “You’re interested in the right question, but you’re asking wrong ones.” I felt there was a catch, and that it was staring me in the face. But I couldn’t see what it was.

The catch was I was having a conversation about these coins instead of taking one.

Before I decided to try, I woke up.

I was laying on a hotel bed, two young women in white bathrobes looking at me: one by my side, dreamy, calm and relaxed, and the other leaning over my face, staring me in the eyes and saying with urgency:

— Have you memorized the dream?

Then I opened my eyes again. These dreams felt so real they woke me up, twice.

I told this story to every friend that I met in the next few weeks because they seemed like important and interesting news about reality—more so than what passes for news in the media.

What if there was an outlet of Russia, or maybe of the idea of Russia (my wife hates this line of thinking), that operated in people’s dreams?

What do I do if they make another contact?

I’ve been having a lot of vivid and some lucid dreams lately, and one of them kind of felt like “another contact.” It was a long dream with multiple chapters. I first escaped from some building that was crowded with military types, then from an empty institute of some sort, and eventually ended up in a vaguely South-American neighborhood that felt like Kowloon city, if Kowloon had city planners. It was during these getaways that I gained lucidity—the escapes were made easier by my ability to see the dream as a dream, and to bend the rules of gravity.

Having recuperated in the cozy slums of Peruvian Kowloon under the care of a foreign motherly figure, I was notified (via a text from a young lawyer I once met at a real-life police station, both of us detained after a protest) that the agent that had been pursuing me has found my new location and was waiting for me outside.

I stepped out to face her. I recognized her. We did some kind of a turn-based mental battle, and I won the first round. I did incur some damage, but not a lot; and they failed to take me captive; and I knew my Peruvian mother would be happy to make me a meal, and a good meal was all that I needed to heal.

After a break, I found myself outside the safe zone again, in bed with the agent. Round two took form of pillow talk.

We explained the way we saw our circumstance to one another, without judgment or hostility, but with a determination to protect our respective truths—like a couple discussing divorce.

I felt, like I often do in dreams where “I get it,” that I needed to write what was being said down, or else I’d forget my insights.

In the morning, I wrote this in my journal:

“The circumstance, as best as I can remember it now, was that my ability to become lucid, to bend and understand the dream world, was seen by the Institute as a weapon they needed; and perhaps, a weapon they had invented, made out of me—so, having failed to force me into submission, they were now trying to convince me to go with them voluntarily.

I had to explain that my ability’s foremost value was that it gave me freedom from them.”

What struck me in the first moments upon waking up is that this dream felt like it could have been mine, but it could have also belonged to the character I’d been developing here in Psychopolitica, Solomon Divanov, most recently the protagonist of my “Substack novel” project. I would have been fleeing Russia, and he his Town; my persecutors would have presumably been from the FSB, and his from The Psychopolitical Institute. And both of us could be trying to break free from the samsaric reality against the resistance of the archons.

This agrees with my vision. I want to merge my waking reality with the fictional world I have set out to develop, and I want to do it quite seamlessly. If my trips become the protagonist’s and his dreams spill into mine, if I have a record of having created his world and he has a theory of its relationship to mine—and if all of this happens naturally, so that I only need to write the truth down—then I just might make this thing run on real magic.

If you have ideas or experiences to share, I’m at nikita.s.petrov@gmail.com.