Throwaway account. I live in Providence and I've been part of this community for a year. I just found out something disturbing about the origins of shared dreaming research.
There's an abandoned factory in Providence where apparently the original "Ammonites" (Anastasia's group) lived and did their research. I've walked past it a hundred times. Last week I met an old guy at a bar who used to work near there and he told me four people died in that building in early 2008. Four people. In one night.
I've been trying to find news reports and I can't find anything. No obituaries, no police reports, nothing. Like it was covered up.
Does anyone in this community actually know what happened? Because we're all using techniques developed by people who apparently died in mysterious circumstances and NO ONE TALKS ABOUT THIS.
I'm not trying to start conspiracy theories but this feels important. What happened? Who were they? How did they die?
This is where I draw the line. You're talking about actual deaths. This isn't a game.
If people actually died trying to "migrate to a dream realm," that's a mental health crisis that led to suicide, not successful dream exploration.
This community needs a serious reality check.
You're not wrong about the seriousness. But you're wrong that it's incompatible with this being real.
Real things can be dangerous. Real things can be misused. Real techniques can have fatal consequences.
That's exactly why we moderate carefully and emphasize safety protocols.
They were my friends.
Lily, Martin, Oscar, Harlan, Anastasia. Five people, not four. And it wasn't mysterious. It was tragic and it was the result of going too deep, too fast, without proper safeguards.
They believed they could migrate permanently to the dream realm. Three of them succeeded in dying. Harlan tried to stop it and died trying. Anastasia... complicated.
This is why we have the rules we have. This is why we don't allow tunnel religion recruitment. This is why experienced people in this community are cautious about rapid escalation.
We're not hiding it. We just don't make it the centerpiece because we don't want to glorify what was essentially a cult suicide situation.
Learn from their techniques. Learn from their mistakes. Don't romanticize their deaths.
I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to be disrespectful to your friends.
But why isn't this documented somewhere obvious? New people should know the history.
Because every time we document it clearly, we get two responses:
Neither response is helpful.
The ones who stay and do the work carefully learn the history naturally. The ones who would be dangerous either leave or get moderated out.
It's an imperfect system but it's what we have.