“All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.”
Edgar Allan Poe
What if this reality is a rigged computer game designed to make us forget we’re the players—while the game plays us?
What if we are dreaming this reality—and have become so lost in the dream that only when we begin to wake up do we realise that it’s a nightmare?
Poets, mystics and philosophers have described this reality as a dream for centuries. But what if they were being more literal than metaphorical?
What if physical reality is not what it seems, but rather an immersive holographic reality that your consciousness projects into, viscerally experiences and participates in co-creating?
A modern analogy is virtual reality. Put on a VR headset and within moments you’re immersed in a three-dimensional world. You look down and see a virtual body, move through virtual space and interact with objects and other avatars that appear real from inside it.
But you haven’t actually entered that world. Your awareness is experiencing it through an interface. The avatar is inside the simulation. You are not.
From my spiritual perspective, the human embodiment is both our avatar and our VR headset—the interface through which our soul consciousness experiences and interacts with physical reality.
The danger is becoming so immersed that we mistake the avatar for who we are and the rendered world for all there is.
Perhaps this is why the metaphor of the dream appears so persistently across spiritual and philosophical traditions. When we dream, an entire reality can form around us—people, places, sensations and events—and while immersed in it, we accept it as reality without questioning what lies beyond it.
Until we wake up.
The Soul as the Projector & Player
The VR analogy goes further when we consider the soul as a creator being.
The soul originates outside linear time, where there is no past unfolding into present and future—everything exists in an eternal now. Imagine an artist painting with consciousness itself, on a canvas that responds instantly and directly to whatever they dream of. Souls can manifest worlds into existence through the power of their imagination.
So we are not passively experiencing the hologram—we are actively participating in its projection and creation. But think of the difference between creating in a computer game’s editor mode versus entering the game as your avatar. In editor mode, you can imagine a mountain, place it and it is there. But once inside the game, your avatar is bound by its rules: to reach the mountain, you have to cross the distance to get there.
In the same way, when creating by proxy through a human embodiment, the timeless soul is bound by the four-dimensional fabric of space-time—turning instantaneous creation into a process of distance and delay.
And this is not a private game. There are many players. At the collective level, soul consciousness projects the pre-agreed consensus reality: the shared rules and parameters of the game that everyone participating experiences.
Think of these parameters as what is already built into the game before your individual story begins: a physical world of matter and biological bodies; gravity and other physical laws; space-time and the experience of distance and linear time; birth, ageing and death; the need for food, water and sleep; and a shared sensory reality that allows us to see the same tree, walk through the same city and interact with one another.
These are the common rules of the game. They provide the shared framework that makes a collective physical reality possible—but they do not determine exactly how the game will unfold.
Within that framework are multiple potential collective and individual timelines. The game has already calculated every possible outcome, so all possibilities exist as potential paths. Our collective and individual choices determine which timelines become activated and which collapse.
Each soul enters with an astrological chart and a range of potential experiences available to its avatar. But the story is not completely predetermined. The soul continues creating through the human embodiment from within the game, where our human consciousness, beliefs and intentions influence what we create and our choices and actions influence which trajectories unfold.
Free will is supposedly the wildcard—the capacity to make choices that can change the direction of the story and move us onto a different potential timeline.
Reality is therefore neither completely predetermined nor entirely ours to create at will. It is a layered co-creation between the consensus reality projected from soul consciousness, the potential collective and individual timelines within it,
Welcome to the Holodeck
To understand how this reality could be holographic, think of an ordinary computer game.
Everything you see is displayed on a flat, two-dimensional screen, yet it creates the convincing appearance of a three-dimensional world. Mountains rise in the distance, roads disappear towards the horizon and your character appears to move through space.
Information encoded on a flat surface is being rendered as the experience of a three-dimensional world.
Now imagine taking the computer game off the screen and putting the player inside it.
That is essentially the premise of the Holodeck in Star Trek. A person enters an empty room or grid, a programme is activated and suddenly they appear to be standing in a forest, Victorian London or on another planet. Instead of looking at the simulated world through a screen, they are surrounded by it, moving through it and interacting with it as though it were physical reality.
This is an easy way to imagine a holographic reality. We aren’t standing outside the hologram looking in. We are inside it. Our human embodiment is our VR headset and avatar within the game, allowing soul consciousness to experience and interact with an immersive three-dimensional world.
But what is the game itself made of?
What Is the Game Made Of?
This is where the aether comes in. From the Ancient Greek aithēr, aether describes an invisible substance described as space—the fifth element beyond earth, water, air and fire.
Now look at the seemingly empty space around you—between you and the wall, between one object and another. What if it isn’t empty at all? Imagine it instead as the aether: the invisible medium filling the game, from which physical reality takes form.
Think of the pixels on a computer screen. A face, a tree, an ocean and a city look completely different, but underneath they are all different arrangements of the same pixels.
The medium remains the same. The pattern changes. Consciousness is the creative intelligence and energy is its conduit. Consciousness carries information and intention; energy transmits it through the aether, creating different patterns within it. Matter is the rendered form of those patterns—the part of the game our human senses experience as solid physical reality.
And this brings us back to fractals.
A fractal is a pattern that repeats in different forms and at different scales, with each part remaining an expression of the larger whole. Applied to soul consciousness, imagine the same soul expressing through multiple timelines simultaneously. Each version may be living a different timeline based on making different choices and having different experiences, but they are not separate souls—they are fractal expressions of the same soul consciousness.
Think of a computer game in which the same player has several versions of the same avatar running through different versions of the game at once. Each avatar experiences its own storyline from inside its timeline, but at the level of the player, all of those experiences belong to the same consciousness.
And because each fractal expression belongs to the same whole, what happens in one timeline can affect the others. A shift in one expression can ripple through the wider soul consciousness and be reflected across its other timelines.
This is why healing something in one timeline can affect the whole. If a wound, pattern or distortion is healed through one expression, the change is not necessarily isolated to that timeline—it can ripple across the other expressions because you are changing a pattern within the whole.
This also connects with quantum immortality: the idea that if the avatar dies in one timeline, the consciousness continues through a version of the avatar that remains alive in another.
So holography and fractals describe two different aspects of the same model: holography explains how reality is rendered, while fractals explain how soul consciousness can express through multiple timelines while remaining interconnected as one whole.
Different timelines. Different expressions. Same soul consciousness.
How Do We Interact With the Game?
Our human embodiment and energetic field are our interface with the game—like a VR headset, controls and avatar combined. Through them, we perceive and interact with the hologram.
But the exchange works both ways. We receive information from the game, while continually imprinting information back onto it.
Within our individual reality, the life script provides the basic storyline, while our choices create different parallel branches or timelines. And our inner state—our beliefs, emotions, intentions and expectations—also imprints upon the field, influencing what takes form in our external reality.
We don’t just experience the game. We interact with it, influence it and change the path we take through it.
Forgetting Ourselves in the Game
But imagine becoming so immersed in a game that you forget you are the player. You identify completely with the avatar, accept the boundaries of the game as the boundaries of existence and assume that what your avatar can see and perceive is all there is.
You forget yourself in the game.
This, for me, is the essence of spiritual awakening: the gradual recognition that we have mistaken one layer of reality for the whole thing—and the avatar for who we are.
The limits of the human embodiment are not the limits of soul consciousness. The limits of the rendered world are not the limits of existence.
Which brings us back to Poe’s “dream within a dream.”
Awakening begins when we remember that we are the dreamer. But the deeper awakening is realising that the dream itself has become a nightmare.
The Game Is Rigged
Imagine entering a computer game with your memory wiped every time you play. You don’t remember who you are, where you came from, what happened in previous rounds, that you are the player rather than the avatar on the screen—or even that you are inside a game at all.
The avatar’s starting conditions aren’t neutral either. The astrological blueprint operates like an attempt at predeterministic coding, loading particular patterns, relationships, vulnerabilities and challenges into the game before the character has made a single conscious choice. It can also function like a player profile, flagging potential disruptors for targeted energetic interference designed to sabotage and divert them from the authentic purpose and timeline the player planned and intended.
Because of the memory wipe, every time you enter, you have to learn the rules from scratch. And the game continually reinforces the amnesia: programming and conditioning you to identify completely with the avatar, keeping you preoccupied with survival and trauma, and dividing your attention across so many screens, demands and crises that you rarely have the time or space to question what is actually going on.
The more absorbed you become in playing the avatar, the easier it is to forget you are the player.
Your VR headset has a deliberately restricted bandwidth, showing you only a fraction of what is happening around your avatar. Outside its perceptual range, parasitic entities feed upon your energy, manipulate your thoughts, emotions and exploit trauma without being visible through your ordinary senses. You can’t defend yourself against players you don’t know are in the game.
Your avatar can also be hacked from inside the game. Etheric devices and energetic interference operate like malware installed into the avatar—disrupting its natural functioning, influencing its perceptions and handicapping its ability to navigate clearly.
Even the avatar’s basic supplies are compromised. The air it breathes contains chemical spraying; consuming food and water can expose the body to contaminants, heavy metals and microplastics. Instead of giving the avatar clean fuel, the game continually exposes it to substances that can burden the human embodiment.
It’s hard to play at full capacity when the avatar itself is being degraded.
There is another way the game cheats. Think of all the cookies, pop-ups and terms and conditions we accept without reading. We click ACCEPT without really knowing what access we have granted.
The game can work the same way. It shows you the agenda for the world your avatar inhabits, but disguises it as entertainment. A film tells you that your reality is a simulation and you are being used as a battery—but because you believe you’re watching fiction, you don’t recognise it as a disclosure of the truth about your situation. You don’t object or resist.
The same principle could apply in less obvious ways. Your favourite singer makes an occult symbol on stage. Technically, you’ve been shown the sign—but because you don’t know what it means, you assume it’s part of the performance and keep watching, singing along and returning to the concerts. Within the rules of the game, that continued participation could then be treated as acquiescence to whatever the symbol disclosed—including energy harvesting or the use of lyrics as spellwork.
The disclosure was visible. Its meaning wasn’t.
And that’s the loophole: the developers exploit your ignorance and interpret your silence as consent to it.
And when we finally begin to realise something is wrong, the game supplies its own explanations.
We’re told Earth is a school and the traumas written into our life scripts are lessons we’re here to learn. But what school wipes our memory before every class, then expects us to pass the exam? Without memory, we cannot build upon what we’ve learned. It’s a system designed to make us fail—so we have to repeat the course.
Then there’s karma: we’re told we return to clear debts from lives we cannot remember, while accumulating new karma because each life comes with baked-in karmic ordeals. So even as we repay the old debt, we create more—the debt continually renews the sentence.
The game erases our memory, scripts the adversity, then uses the consequences to justify another round.
Forget. Suffer. Return. Repeat.
And in our fugue state, when we ask questions about what we are and where we come from, the game gives us a false origin story. We’re told the game created us, we’ve always belonged to it, and becoming one with it is how we get home—when really, it’s how the game assimilates the player.
Then come the non-player characters posing as trusted guides. They appear as allies who know the game and where we need to go—but they’re working for those who rigged it. They give us false instructions, send us chasing the wrong goals, lead us into traps and keep steering us away whenever we get too close to the real mission.
We think they’re helping us navigate the game, but we’re being played by the game.
How Free Is Our Free Will?
This raises an uncomfortable question: how free is our free will inside a rigged game? If we enter with no memory, limited perception, predetermined programming and unseen interference—and our choices and consents are manipulated through trauma, conditioning, obfuscation and false guidance—when does choice become an illusion?
Our free will has been subverted. We may still make choices, but we are making them within conditions deliberately designed to influence what we choose.
And then comes the ultimate reset button.
The avatar dies. When it has run out of lives, the player begins to remember there is something beyond the game—only to be persuaded, pressured or deceived into logging back in and starting another round.
Another incarnation. Another avatar. Another memory wipe. Another round.
And the game keeps rebooting until the player finally realises it was never really a game.
We were made to believe we were here to play, while our energy powered the machine and our fear, pain, suffering and trauma became resources harvested by those who created and rigged it. No wonder the system works so hard to keep us logged in.
Some of us begin to remember that we have been caught in this loop for thousands of years—rebooting, forgetting and playing again.
Others remember something different: we logged in deliberately.
Because if you wanted to hack a computer, expose its corrupt code and bring down the programme controlling it, you would have to get inside the system.
But however we entered this nightmare within the dream, the way out begins with the same thing: remembering what we are.
The nightmare depends upon us remaining asleep inside the dream. The way out is to wake up within it.
To remember that we are souls, not the avatars we have been programmed to believe we are. To reclaim our energy, sovereignty and authority over our own consciousness and refuse to keep feeding the machine.
And finally, to realise:
The power keeping the game running was ours all along.