Dream Goal: Build Civilization
It's more of a dream project than a goal -- this would be a long-spanning thing over many dreams. Equally as importing as experiencing it is writing+documenting it. This goal has served as a strong point of motivation that gets me looking forward to mastering my dreams, because I think it would be so cool to do this.
The task
The way I've envisioned it in my head: in a dream, I establish a persistent realm[1]. In that realm, I travel back in time to a world where there has been very little technological advancements, no cities, no civilizations. Perhaps just hunter-gatherer tribes of humans. Then the task is to meet these people, and help give them a head start on building up an advanced society.[2]
I think it would be really fun to build this up over time. I could go to the dream civilization, give them some help or teach them something, then come back in a later dream (or jump forward in time) and see how this tip I've given has changed their society. The cool thing is that I couldn't really predict how anything will go -- it's up to my mind (subconsciously) to decide the result of things. And I get to figure out how to respond to those results. In theory, it's an infinitely generated open-world video game in my mind.
Status on this task
Frankly, as of 2026 (13 years after I first discovered the concept of LDing), I feel very far from achieving anything close to this. But also, I don't think it is necessarily such an unrealistic task that it's not something I'll be able to do once I have consistent and high quality lucid dream experiences.
Mainly, I feel that I have a lot of foundational work to do in my dreams before I get to this point. There are the fundamentals of dream stability and confidence that I've struggled with for years. Then there is dream control and dream skills which I'd need, e.g. to transport myself to a persistent realm and be able to navigate it confidently, to travel forward (or backwards) in time, and so on.
Context / inspiration
My past self from November 2018 wrote this in Google Keep:
HUGE LD goal
Build civilization, following How to Invent Everything
How to Invent Everything is a book by Ryan North that talks at a high level about, well, pretty much how to re-build civilization from scratch.
That book's subtitle is "A survival guide for the stranded time traveler". I remember reading the intro to the book, which in a humorous way talks about this (obviously fictional) scenario where you are a time traveler and go back in time and get stranded and want to rebuild civilization.
I don't quite remember if my dream goal actually came as a result of reading some snippets of this book. But it's possible that it did. Even before the book, though, I generally had in mind that I was very excited to generally learn about how things work, and how things got to how they are. That general interest is what led to this book catching my eye. Then I think this book inspired the dream goal.
So yeah -- I've had this dream goal floating around in my mind for a while, and I've never acted on it. But it's come to be one of the strongest motivators for lucid dreaming for me. I think it would be so cool for me to pursue this as sort of a dream project.
Persistent Realms
A key aspect of this dream goal is the idea of persistent realms. Building a civilization takes time! And probably many, many dream sessions. And that's the fun part. It's a long-term project. The world where I'm building civilization needs to be persistent across many dream sessions so that it can build up over time. Otherwise, it would be like building a Minecraft world, but every time you close the game, the entire world is wiped. You need to save the state of the world between sessions. That's the idea behind persistent realms.
Related stuff
- Youtube video: "How To Make WIFI Starting With Only A Rock" (channel: Rune). I came across this video, and it's what motivated me to add this page to my digital garden! It's a fun video and obviously reminded me of this dream goal.