“When I saw The Matrix, I was obsessed. Something in me resonated with this idea of waking up from life. This idea has been playing games with me for a long time. I wonder, especially with my lucid dreams and my belief while on psychedelics that death is not real, if something subconscious in me is trying to wake up.”

In this part of my conversation with geologist Alicia Downard, we talk about our dreams. We discuss how in a dream, our mental physics engine effortlessly renders a world according to natural laws, and how I have noticed that my mind uncontrollably projects new images that are similar to examples I see, like a GAN (Generative Adversarial Network). I share my journey with lucid dreaming, and why I think that the moment I realize I’m dreaming, I try to kill myself by jumping off a building.