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This Mutant Mind Meld Podcast was recorded very late at night at the Star Water Bar in the Arise music festival in Loveland, Colorado on August 9th, 2014. Topher Sipes is a lucid dreaming teacher and digital artist. Or talk wasn’t edited so we start out with a bit of random banter as we set up to have the conversation. While most people stay up late at festivals, that often doesn’t work for me as I usually get up insanely early—frequently 3am or even earlier—-because pre-dawn is my favored creative zone (see Pre-Dawn Window Zone). On this occasion, instead of trying to fight my usual sleep schedule, I went to sleep relatively early and got up at about 2:30AM. As often happens even when I am not at festivals, I frequently overlap with my night owl friends who are still up when I am just getting up (please don’t message me on Facebook pre-dawn!). At 2:30AM at a festival, things are pretty lively and I felt well rested and decided to imbibe a legal edible (this is Colorado) and check out the night life. I soon ran into Michael Garfield, Mitch Mignano and Topher Sipes. After a series of interesting conversations, Topher and I decided to record a podcast at the Star Water Cafe which was starting to shut down just as we began recording. The very gradual shutting down of Star Water became an interesting sound collage in the background of our dialogue.
The list of things we discussed may give a feeling for the late night and THC-infused context :
- Cognitive sleep state, telepathic bleed through and the movie Scanners
- Parallel realities, multiple perspective auto-erotic experiences and ego transcendence
- Archonic time police versus the guild of time shifters as an autonomous internally generated bardo
- Cephalization, neurological simulacra and the growth of interiority as an evolutionary teleology
- Interactive performance art as collective lucid dream
- The evolution of video game technology and its influence on dreaming
- Using off-the-shelf hardware to incorporate players’ archetypal dominants into
- individualized video game interactive narratives
- Flotation tanks as lucid dreams on demand and to augment VR
- Pulling back the frame to observe real time liminality
Topher Sipes
Art, Design & Visuals
www.tophersipes.com
ARTheism dance-imation performance
www.artheism.net
I took the top image of Topher at the Star Water Bar while we were dialoguing. The next two photos were taken the following day when Topher taught a seminar on lucid dreaming.
