The Rise and Fall of Dreamhackers
Russian Dream school and its differences from Western one
First thing I have to tell about is the differences of Russian dream school (RDS) from current Western one. The Western dream school (WDS) is divided in two big blocks: secular and astral believers. First ones base their beliefs mostly on LaBerges works while astralers mostly based on Monroe's, Robert Bruce's and such.
In the year 2000 (when the history of Dream Hackers started as public phenomenon - the group itself were existing since 90s) the Russian dream school was drastically different from Western: the dominating views were Castanda's. You would not easily find words "LaBerge" or "Astral" at that time in Russian Internet - everything was about toltec dreaming, inorganic beings, flyers and other Castaneda's conceptions.
There was one thing which was similar to current state of Western dream school - at that time RDS was just as rigid, stagnant and dull as WDS now. Castaneda's works gave initial impulse but had come to their limits.
In this situation the appearing of Dream Hackers was like a Second Coming.
Start of Dream Hackers' Tale
Basicly Dream Hackers were a small group of fellows who were interested in LDing led by someone called Sergey Izrigi (an alias which means Sergey-from-Riga), lets call him SI. Lately some haters called them "cult" but it is not correct as they did not required any money, nor their leader required some sort of worship. It was just a small group of researches. Their activity for public was mostly a maillist and a website where the best letters from this maillist was placed.
Views of Dream Hackers
Dream Hackers proposed new approach to lucid dreaming. "Finding your hands (as Castaneda advised) is old and ineffective" - said SI, - "let's try Dream Cartography". According to his views a typical dream is quite small place. For example, if one dream he is on the street, it is very possible that this street, adjacent houses and some sidestreets are the whole space of this dream.
So the mapping of the dreams was proposed. The idea was to find similar dreams and provoke remembering of dreams which happened in similar place. They said, that most of the dreams happen in a quite fixed number of places.
Though at first Dream Cartography was just a trick with similar goals as Dream Diary (but more interesting) DH lately found that a lot of places not only repeat from dream to dream but may be found in dreams of different people. So the large part of DH's researching was about this "archetypical places" and trying to build an archetypical map which would incoporate all such places.
Lately they began to research a link between DNA, dreams, reality and stalking (a Castaneda's tech) but information about this issue was more scarce and it was about the time when the original group dissappeared.
The Fall of the Dream Hackers
It must be said that in essence original DH were and occult group. Not a bunch of New Age believers that meditate all the time and buy some freak stuff in New Age shops, not a community of LD forum, not a sect, but an occult group which tried "to hack reality" using an occult approach (which is similar to scientific in goal but differ in methods). And obviously they had their issues as any other occult or non-conventional science group has.
Some say they had enemies among other occultists, some say FSB got them, some say something else but in any case - in 2002 or 2003 the original DHs leaved the Net. It was claimed that founder have died. As a remark, such claims are often made by real hackers or crackers when they leave "the scene" due to force majeure circumstances.
The Legacy of Dream Hackers
Beheaded the DH's movement very soon divided to several groups. Some guy - a poors dreamer but sly for quick cash - combined ideas of DHs, conspiracy theories and some unrelated staff and wrote a book. Some others followed his example. Other groups claimed that they ARE true dreamhackers and first are just vultures. As far as I remember there were three of four groups of "true hackers".
Funny but books about DHs wrote by "vultures" immensely popularized lucid dreaming and Dream Hackers though obviously current DHs have little in common with original group.
The Role of Dream Hackers
The main achievement (in my opinion) was that stagnant and rigid RDS received an impulse to develop. It became obvious that Castaneda is not enough and is not an answer to all LD questions. In terms of tech I think Dream Cartography is a main gem.
The Language Barrier
Some groups from a "second" or "third" generations of DH tried to share their views on Western forums but in general they failed. The main reasons were:
* Poor language skills: the original articles were quite poorly translated to English
* Lack of Ajustment to Western mindset. As I said RDS was and is quite different from WDS. Such terms as "inorganic being", "point of assembly", energy concept are easily understood by most Russian dreamers be they secular, astral or occult, and whether one agree or not while for Westerners it may be quite a foreign concepts. Personally, when making an article about Dream Cartography I've adapted it for average Western secular dreamer so one would not be confused.
