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Pedro: Hey Sleepr, how are you?

Sleepr: Hey, Pedro. Nice to be here.

Pedro: I'm very happy to have you on. How's your day going? You've had a whole day at this point?

Sleepr: It's Monday night. Like 09:00 at night, but it's pretty good, just worked all day and a big day at the uni and just come home, made some food and had a nice cup of tea and just chilling out now. So had a good day.

Pedro: I don't want to be that guy, but it sounds like your mic is a bit like static.

Sleepr: Thanks for letting me know. Let me just try a few things.

Pedro: It looks like Sleepr is disconnected. We'll wait for him to get back on. That way we can have very solid audio quality. Bringing you back up to speak Sleepr. I think it is. That sounded better for a second. I don't seem to hear you anymore.

Sleepr: Testing, one, two, three.

Pedro: Sounds like it's still a bit of static. Anyone, if you're listening, can you throw up a thumbs up or thumbs down depending on how it sounds to you? No reaction. That would be nice if someone else. Because if it's on me, it might be on my end for all I know.

Sleepr: Is that any better?

Pedro: That is better.

Sleepr: I can hear you as well. I running out of battery whenever I'm on live so I've got to hook it up to the computer. But I'm all sorted now.

Pedro: I have an emulator set up on the computer. So basically spaces runs off my pc.

Sleepr: That's what I'm doing now as well.

Pedro: It works fairly well. I just had to do a couple of weird things to get more cores involved and shit. But anyways, that being said, I'm glad you've had a good day. So you're not full time art then, you're still at a university?

Sleepr: That’s right. Although it feels like two full time jobs. During the day, head into the uni and then come home at night and make the art.

Pedro: As a lecturer?

Sleepr: That's right. I teach subjects and also a program director where help write the curriculum and build the content for a couple of Bachelor programs at a uni and help manage the staff and student issues and all sorts of things like that. So half admin for the week and then half teaching.

Pedro: Is it enjoyable? I would not know what it is on that side of the university.

Sleepr: It is enjoyable when it's a real time moment with someone and helping them learn something that is complicated and you figured out is a really altruistic experience and moment. The admin stuff, not so much. You'd be shocked as to how difficult. And universities are notoriously large ecosystems of departments and processes and requirements and management and it's a really complicated beast to run. So initially, a lot of frustrations I had even with, why don't they do this better? And then you realize why. It's tough for everyone. So I’m chipping in to try to make processes easier, but certainly complicated.

Pedro: Fair enough. Let's straight into the questions and everything. And the first question before going more in depth is very basic. Why did you go through all of the PhD side of your life? Why did you then choose to do the art as on a digital format, first of all, to document all of this in digital format and then post it as an NFT instead of something else?

Sleepr: It was pretty natural progression. I was making art and posting it online probably ten years ago, and was just doing it as an expressive output. And then naturally have been swinging between the artistic and scientific and psychological documentation and just swinging between those different spaces and eventually did some research and study and then swung back into a more expressive route through some fortuitous chances with some individuals that I met that encouraged me to turn some of those artworks into NFT’s.

Pedro: Fair enough. So how did you get to the point? Did you already have a background in art before you started making the documentation of hallucinogenic, or were they correlated?

Sleepr: They're probably correlated. They definitely inspired an expressive route to come out inside. And I didn't really have an artistic background before experiencing. Encouraged and inspired is probably a really good word for that. The desire to document some really beautiful and curious and interesting things that I saw, but they were definitely the initial departing point.

Pedro: So before that, were you already in that process of university, Bachelor's, Master's in all this? Where does it situate itself in the life when you start?

Sleepr: I was very young that I started with the psychedelic stuff, so I was probably about 15 when I started playing around and trying different things out and had a really strange encounter that changed the directional track of everything for me. So I was still in school and very naive of anything in life at all, and particularly that experience. And it just really rocked my boat. It was a real game changing, life altering moment in time and had no context for it. I really couldn't even articulate what happened. It ended up really being logged as an internal experience and was in this real weird limbo land of trying to tell other people about what happened and try to understand it and try to figure it out and really wasn't able to get any answers anywhere about what happened. It was just the image coming to my head is this perfect, just big question mark, it's a real strange incident that happened. I was very young, and it took me a number of years to even get my bearings about that there's still mysteries left on earth. I was in a pretty middle class family that made me feel like most things were resolved, and there was a pretty clear plan of what to do in life, and there's not too much funny business going on. And then it rock the boat. There's actually a lot of mystery left here on earth. And this is one of those and humans are constantly engaged with mystery and with the unknown. And there's many areas in life, philosophy, religion, there's lots of areas that engage and interact with the unknown. So it's not entirely a new idea, but this is another niche little area that perhaps may give us some insight into other unknowns and other strange areas as well. So knowing that it was a clear abnormality that no one knew about, it was a really easy choice to choose what I would research if I was to continue higher degree education. So it was quite a natural evolution that came out of an experience.

Pedro: Did you ever understand the first encounter?

Sleepr: That's a good question. It's the exact same question that I've repeated many times, and it continually results in the same outcome, which is really strange. It throws me back to being not only that age mindset when I was 15, but also what happened when I was 15 was it threw me into a timelessness, as though I had died and gone into another dimension literally. I had just broken through a little veil and popped into another place that was really stable. So that continually is possible. No matter how much you throw at this thing, it's just like water off a duck's back, almost nothing sticks. There's a great quote, “Nature will not give up her secrets easily.” I really think that's a really beautiful way how do we find the seams on this space that we're in? It's very, very challenging.

Pedro: So, in that case, are there any other encounters that you've understood, or is it just continuously attempting to understand each one?

Sleepr: I understand 0%, and I quite literally, not even 0.01% because it's so mind bogglingly strange that I couldn't even make an inch of progress on it. And maybe the only inch of progress is that you have to reframe everything you know. So every belief system you have, you end up needing to re investigate it. And it doesn't mean you need to drop your own belief systems, but you do need to truly interrogate where the root of that belief system has emerged from and whether or not it's been adopted from somewhere else, or whether you're basing that belief system on a true foundation, that it's always real. Maybe it's something like telepathy. Telepathy isn't real. We can't send messages just back and forth to each other's minds. But then you experience it, but your brain is saying that's not real. And this constant tussle between experiencing something in real time and then the next flip on all that is, you've just made it up. And then you've experienced it for real. And there's all these cascading layers which, to be honest, is just insanity for the west. If you go out anywhere outside of the western little pocket of society, there's many cultures around the world that will adopt these things that go outside of our own belief system. So that's the only progress I've made on understanding any of these shenanigans. I've unpacked a lot of my own belief systems, and probably more neutral as a position on many of the things now, having experienced things that break the model of what I thought was possible.

Pedro: So would it be that you have experiences that counter the belief systems or beliefs you've had in the past, which then trigger self-reflection on where those come from and what they were? Is that how it works?

Sleepr: That's exactly right.

Pedro: So I was wondering if it was more of a conscious process of saying, there's so much shit happening in these experiences, I have to rethink what I'm doing but it's significantly more direct thing. Is there any belief system that you would share that was radically changed?

Sleepr: There's levels. And there's really strange ones right out there that feel more private. I am very vulnerable to share those because there's no context provided when I do share it. It's just, “Oh, that kooky guy now believes that thing whatever it is.” But I've consistently experienced. So the lowest levels, there is a consistent visual hallucinatory space that has really strange geometry. It's a constant, very colorful, almost like cathedral stained glass window, geometric space of things that you can see that's just really extremely common. And inside of those spaces, the next belief system up the chain of strangeness is there's a bunch of things that are pretty intelligent and alive and moving around and interacting with you. That's like close encounter of the third kind or something. And then they talk to you, and then they tell you things. It's like the close encounters of the first kind. And you initially think it's your mind imagining things, which, of course, it totally could be, but it's just really difficult to pin down whether it is or isn't you, whether they are external or not external. The things they say feel autonomous. They feel separated from you logically. Who knows why or what they are? But all I know is I'm interacting with something that's sharing its own perspectives on a lot of things that I don't know much about. And I'm interacting with it and learning from it. Even stranger up the pipelines are really strange timeline shifts, UFO's, aliens, and really weird timeline stuff. It's hard to talk about. Messages are getting sent from the future, which literally sounds like some terminator shit. You go look at quantum physics, and time is really malleable and slippery. It should be truthful and faithful to the experiences you had, even if you're just documenting your own insanity, is probably the only way to go down on the ship like Jack Sparrow.

Pedro: In those interactions that you have, how conscious are you? How aware of it are you, and how much can you control it yourself?

Sleepr: You're just absolutely exactly like you are right now. There's no drunkenness. Not even like a beer. You're not even had one drink of tipsiness. You're as straight as an arrow. Suddenly shit scared and as frightened as you can possibly be and trying to figure it out. You're just stressing out trying to get your head around what's going on, and it's happening so quick and so blindingly abnormal that you can't catch up. So you just keep letting go and letting go over and over and over. But you're very consciously thinking, I have to tell my friends about this. Who are you?

Pedro: If it's that scary, would you call it a pleasant experience in any way?

Sleepr: Not really. It's fucking terrifying. To be honest, at the peak mental stability, you have to be able to go. It's like bungee jumping or something. If you're absolutely having a terrible time in life, you don't really go bungee jumping just to throw your heart rate into an absolute schism and experience some wild thing and then come back. Maybe it helps some people, but it's not really that safe to do that. You should be really in a very stable mindset to be able to then expand your container of what's possible radically and then come back and be able to integrate it. It's been my whole life journey really is trying to integrate a lot of this stuff. I'll often have flashbacks throughout the day of things that have happened and someone will say something and I'll learn more about old experiences, I'll be able to integrate something more and more as these things as time goes on.

Pedro: Why continue doing it if it's an unpleasant experience? Is the advantage that you have from all the learnings worth that experience that fear and everything? How do you reconcile both sides?

Sleepr: It's a good question. I think there's this really deep innate quality of being a human that is about being an explorer and to engage the unknown. It's almost like an evolutionary quality that we must continue to seek more. We cannot rest on our laurels of where we are now. We must continue to expand the frontier. And if we don't, that will be the indicator of death of our civilization. Because Sleepr just wants to put on some tunes and scroll around on Twitter land and bounce around and just do nothing. I catch myself in the mirror and I realize there's an honor and a duty to be a human, and you need to do this. For me, this is really about honoring my karmic path. And I just landed somewhere. I landed in Australia. I landed in this experience that it came to me or I attracted or whatever happened, but here I am now, and I'm with it and will engage with the mystery face to face and become friends with it and learn as much as I can. And one of the ideas of a shaman, not that I'm really a shaman, but it's someone who goes out there and brings back something for the tribe. This isn't just my own hedonistic pursuit. Psychedelics are very, very different than a lot of other drugs. Many other drugs are for your own internal pleasure. Oftentimes they do help connect but there's different classes and types of drugs. Big ones are really engaging with a bit of a mystery. So I try to honor my path and think that. I genuinely do think that there's a lot that we can learn that would be very helpful for a really wide range of applications, not just about mysteries and unknown stuff, but I really think there's a lot of direct applications. One of my thesis is that the root of one of the most unexplored and least understood areas is the imagination. And there are a lot of words that describe the imagination. There's invention, there's mental imagery, there's imagination, there's dreams, there's ideas, there's novelty. What they're all describing is really the birth of something new out of an existing pool of things. But everything, every industry, whether it be math’s or science, engineering, art, all of it actually really relies on the imagination. Every single thing you see around you flashed into someone's mind at one point and it was birthed out. So that process of thinking of something new in your mind, we actually are very, very poor at discussing that process. We just intuitively recommend people to do it, or we just expect people to do it, or we just talk about the step that happens just after the idea you had in your brain. But we actually don't talk about the mechanics of the imagination very well and the neural engineering of the imagination, the processes that one can engage with too. Like, a gym, expand their capability of being good imaginers. So there's certainly a lot of research that we need to do on mental imagery, imagination, and it's because we just treat stuff like dreams and dreams and imagination and hallucinations as just all woo-woo stuff. It's tough to study, but also it's had a poor research history. Memory has had quite a lot of research history because it's seen as a very functional item. But strangely, imagination and mental imagery are quite poor. And psychedelics are very helpful in this because they show an extreme application of the imagination or mental imagery. And that space is just an extreme example, a bit like the large Hadron Collider or something. Here we are in a really unique situation for the imagination. So everyone uses imagination. I strangely see how we talk about artists as the only ones who use the imagination, it's not true. It's just artists have lent into that process and have become very good at it. But everyone intuitively has and does use their imagination all the time every day. People who even got friends who say, “I haven't got a very good imagination.” But I could point out 50 cases where they're really good at it. It's just more a linguistic trap that you don't really think. They don't think they're good at it.

Pedro: Fairly hard to get a clear definition of what imagination is, and it depends how it manifests itself in every different person.

Sleepr: I think so. At some point, the crutch of the word will just not be helpful. The generation of something new, it's often seen as an image in the mind's eye. The creative thought process is the the problem with words and just doing it.

Pedro: So about all the research that there is behind imagination everything, because the way I'm in the scientific field, I do mechanical engineering. A lot of things you come to expect from the science you learn in physics or in math. Is that you build a model to be able to predict what happens in the future with accuracy? So would you ever theoretically be able to reach a point where, through studying imagination, the mind, MRI’s, all of these different things, get to a point where you could actually explain how imagination works and maybe predict it with precision? Do you think that would ever be possible, or is it something else?

Sleepr: That’s a good question. Again, you probably got to keep whittling down the question a bit. So take the JPEG game. Al art is almost like a mechanical imagination. It's coming up with new ideas based on prompts of things we've never seen before, and we don't know what the end outcome will be, but it imaginatively came up with a solution, and that's starting to tag the process of creative divergence and combinations of existing elements and recombining them into a new combination. And with programming, you can just spit out, literally, if you ran Midjourney, just all day, every day on a supercomputer, you would just spit out literally a quadrillion pieces of artwork, and every artwork might theoretically get spat out. So you could completely dominate imagination's output, but there's not really that much of a difference between complete coverage, theoretically, or applied, because we're never going to look at 10 trillion and whatever it is, a quadrillion billion. And then the other is, you're actually describing the process of combination. So a more generalized algorithm of what an imagination might be. It's either probably going to be complete coverage or a generalized algorithm. I think you see glimpses of how we would think in a lot of software applications. But I think that there are qualities about how we think that may be really quite unique, and that we haven't really understood them very well yet.

Pedro: That makes sense. The way you explain it, there's relating Al to it makes you think, imagination could be predicted and you could map it all out into models and everything for all of humanity, the thought of that is slightly terrifying that everything in that, basically the human mind isn't a mystery anymore, if that makes sense.

Sleepr: So it's tempting to think that way, but it's probably like the ChatGPT thing now. Wow, the ChatGPT is here. There's no more need for humans. And we almost packing our bags so quick. We've got to put up slight defense to just the complete takeover and roll over. So the slight defense might be you could just now run software that just changes up every single pixel in a thousand by thousand pixel grid endlessly and that would theoretically just come out with every single artwork, every single photograph. A photograph of your foot, of your cat that you once owned 20 years ago. Like, just everything is contained inside of a theoretical space and that's a completeness theorem on imagery. So every single possible new artwork is contained inside of a complete set, no matter how large that is if you just chose a random pixel by pixel amount. So it's all there. And the ChatGPT thing, Midjourney and all that, they're curious tangent points. My fear is they will lead us off track. I think they're very cool tools, and they should continue to explore them more and more, but they will just lead us on tangents and not really push us to the type of thing we should be studying that probably better spend our conservative energy on.

Pedro: So I don't know why my mind just goes off on this tangent and it comes back to the interactions you've been able to have while on hallucinogenic, which is do these because you have these thoughts on AL. And I wonder if those interactions that you have are more of a universal nature on wider questions of human nature, or can they also be about current events or what's happening to you in your personal life? Is it mostly one or the other? Is it both? Could you potentially talk about Al in one of those interactions?

Sleepr: I think so. Psychedelics experiences are pretty deeper dive into the lens, just like we were saying before about the root of your belief. And showing you what you believed in may not be true. Expanding your experiences so that you suddenly have to change your constituent beliefs. You can certainly try and engage with it at an Al level. The strangeness is like going up to a dog and you're like, “Have you seen the movie end of days?” You're trying to jam in a random thing with another living being. I've tried to figure out things in the past and been really humbled as to like, do you know I'm alive? And that you should just engage with me rather than overlay what you think you should figure out on top of this experience? If you went and met someone who really inspired you, and then you started talking about just things that weren't important or you weren't listening to them. So I've often been humbled to just learn from me. It's an often thing that they'll mention and say, just stop trying to figure it out on your own and watch what I'm doing. And then let's start from there. So I'm sure you could figure out more about Al through that. But generally, these entities and beings are so conscious and advanced that it would be a missed opportunity to really just disregard those conscious beings in that moment.

Pedro: I'm just going to interrupt for half a second. Apparently your mic is rugging again. It's going back to the static thing. I don't know if you can fix it like you did earlier.

Sleepr: Let me try.

Pedro: If that works. Muted that because the static was destroying our ears on my end anyways. Extreme static at the moment. It seems to still be static at the moment. I’m going to have to edit the in and out cuts for the upload on Spotify, but that's cool. Speaker is out. He'll probably join back in half a second and I'll bring him up. I feel like I have to keep talking so that people are entertained while we wait for Sleepr to get back on, which is probably a decent point, but I don't have that much to say. It's a very interesting topic. I have to keep this flowing. But at the same time, there's so much to say in this. It’s awesome. Let's see. Approve Sleepr to come to speak. He should be coming up in a half second.

Sleepr: Is that any better?

Pedro: It is a lot better.

Sleepr: We'll go for that.

Pedro: Hopefully we keep it up like that. So I slightly lost the foe, but I had another question to bounce off of. So when you have these interactions with beings, are they both people that you potentially could like real life people? Is it also more transcendent beings that you can't really associate to anyone in real life? Is it both? Is it neither?

Sleepr: They're definitely like transcendent beings. They're not like my Uncle Harry or not like my dog or anything like that. They're very classy, strange, knowledgeable, what you would imagine a different type of intelligence to be. They're extremely difficult to pin down and talk about what they are. But it's very conscious, autonomous, doing their own thing, and then will engage you in very direct manner, give you strict wisdom or give you context about what space you're in, try to very quickly teach you something. There's a rush, but very direct in the things that they know.

Pedro: How could you know they have good intentions in teaching you things or educating you in all of this?

Sleepr: A part of this man is about being really neutral and not just consuming or believing anything that you're told in that space. It's a lot about trying to engage and begin a bartering or a discussion process of learning. Oftentimes I've traded things. I've traded time in my body for wisdom and knowledge but that's only after a long discussion or a lot of figuring out with a certain being. But it's a very case by case basis. It's like walking into a pub. You scoped a room and some seedy guys over in the corner. This guy at the bar seems pretty nice. He's been quite gentle and kind. He'll buy you a beer. It's a case by case basis.

Pedro: What do you mean by when you mentioned trading time for knowledge?

Sleepr: I shouldn't have said it. I regretted it straight away.

Pedro: If you don't want to get it, it's cool.

Sleepr: It's cool. One of the things is that consciousness is also looking for experience in what it's like to be a human and what it's like to be on this side. And so by having autonomy to view through the suit I'm wearing, it's able to acquire knowledge from this perspective. And in a sacred and controlled manner, you can allow them to come through and look through your suit. And in exchange for some knowledge and perspectives from their suit, there's this interchange of energy and frequency and perspective that happens very complicated, very strange, really hard to wrap your head around what's going on but that's what it feels like.

Pedro: Can I go more in depth on that, or would you rather skip over it?

Sleepr: This is what it is. There's a lot of people I find and even myself, there's a stepping stone to getting up to these bits in talking about psychedelics and experiences on psychedelics. I think to the many people outside of the space, it just seems like it's a movie or something that you watch, and then you see some things and you come back but it's much entangled. These are long, long trips I'm having, whether they're 6 hours, 8 hours, 10 hours long in a dark room sitting on the floor with one candle and just engaging with a plant medicine that's been sacredly used for thousands of years and really trying to hone in on the edge case of weirdness to see what happens and to learn as much as I can. So, 4 hours, 6 hours in at a really peak ecstatic state some really, really interesting things happen. That's where the fragments of everything you knew start to dissolve out. Mushrooms are a really common one that at a point in time they begin to feel fairly conscious. The mushroom spirit will come through or the San Pedro spirit will come through or the ayahuasca spirit will come through. But mushrooms often had many experiences of engaging with them and trying to learn about them and who they are and so forth.

Pedro: So you haven't only done DMT. Has that been a major point of those experiences or has it really been a bit of everything?

Sleepr: DMT has definitely been the focus point. It's the one that works the most crisply, cleanly, persistently and no fail. It's like a SWAT team. You're just fucking in another space and then you're back out after ten minutes. It's almost too good to be true. The other ones are much more like lengthy, long waves of engagement. You get a lot more time, but trade off often the peak barrier leaping potential. So I often feel like I can leap barriers much quicker and easier with the DMT than having to struggle wade through the other ones.

Pedro: Because that's what I was going to mention because it seems like you're doing so much. And from my research, DMT will last up to 15 minutes. But you have a lot of others like mushrooms that last 4 hours. I don't think you mentioned LSD, which is 12 hours.

Sleepr: Definitely. LSD is okay. I've really tried to focus on the organics even though LSD is very cool. But just not being where I've focused attention on.

Pedro: That makes sense. So that's actually really crazy. In all the learnings that you have, what learnings are they? Because there's so many you could have, I doubt they're giving you a marketing crash course. So what kind of things do you learn?

Sleepr: I think this is a loop of all the things we mentioned at the start, but this is what happens when you die. Learning about the death and birth incarnation cycle, learning that there are multiple and higher dimensions, learning how to think, learning how to see in multiple viewpoints and angles at once. I've had many experiences where suddenly I can see almost in 50 different perspectives at once. Like, just the craziest fucking type of visual experience you could ever imagine showing me how everything's connected in the world, and that there's not one single thing that isn't connected to everything else. And there's a really beautiful magic that weaves through all of the mundaneness that we engage with so that there's nothing in the world that's not full of spirit or not full of magicness. Even the cup of tea on your table, it's throbbing with spirit as a church. And the ability to tap into that at will is a really beautiful ability that you are able to cultivate through many experiences. So lots about life and death, lots about perspectives, how to think, how to see, who you are, who you think you are. You probably have a lot of beliefs about who you think you are, that may not be true, and an encouragement to go investigate those things. And all the art I make even the titles and the stories and the descriptions and even random scenes that I've done, they're all this tapestry of these rich, otherworldly experiences. They're all about taking that whole huge world of things that I've experienced and trying to tell part of those stories. They're almost like home videos of a hidden world.

Pedro: Would you say the art is somewhat of a copy paste of one of the scenes that you see or a replica of what you're seeing? Or was it more of you attempting to translate the entire experience into an artistic piece?

Sleepr: That's a great question. There's a number of key pieces. There's some key pieces, a much smaller percentage that are trying to directly document a moment in time. Some of them are really genuine attempts at trying to do that. There's a beautiful piece called “Complex Daydream”, and that's what it is. It's a complex daydream. And I have a lot of thoughts about the art. But one of them is that, all the experiences I have come through, no matter what medium I'm touching, they all have this twist and spirit and strange aesthetic that's drawn from the experiences I've had and from that space and the way that the things look over there. So the strangeness is I'm actually potentially documenting more truth through the meanderings than the attempt at a real crisp, Polaroid snapshot copy of that exact moment in time. I've actually flipped a little bit in thinking that I've probably captured more similarity and resonance of that space in some of the works that are just meanderings that go down a bit of a daydream. It's always still in there. It never goes away if that makes sense.

Pedro: I think it does. I'm not completely sure because I can't say that I can relate to it. I think it makes sense somewhat.

Sleepr: You can't vouch for it. And that's probably the exit of it always. And actually, ironically, that was the entire thesis of the PhD, “Who can vouch for it?” Even if there's ten people in a room who have experienced it, how do we actually vouch, how can we get consensus on this to begin to start trying to figure it out? So consensus and vouching is a crucial puzzle piece to the whole thing.

Pedro: Discussing it with other people who've done these similar hallucinogenics, have they shared similar experiences to you? And what are the similarities? Because maybe they see different beings, but they get different lessons, or they have the same lessons, different beings, things like that. Are you even able to compare and contrast the different experiences you've had when it's so hard to put them into words?

Sleepr: That's the problem is that one person will say, I saw these angels, and they came down in this bright room, and other people will say, I saw these beings, or these entities, or I saw this face coming out of the walls. They actually all may have been seeing the same thing or not. So one of the problems is the words you use for things gets really tough to start drawing correlations. Even when you say, I saw I was in a tunnel. There's, by definition, an infinite amount of tunnels. There's wide ones, there's short ones, there's tall ones, there's twisty ones, there's curly ones, there's bright ones, dark ones. You can generally help with. A tunnel is helpful in a description. We can make some progress, but there is a point in time where it just peers out into not being helpful. I haven't really thought consensus, and I cannot tell you how complicated the things are that you see. So a tunnel is like just a drop in the ocean. Imagine watching all of Netflix on fast forward and then being like, so what did you see? You're like, I don't know. I saw, there was always people running around, it’s almost just a complex dream when you wake up in the morning and you're like, “Oh my God, I was in that whole world.” And it's almost gone as you're speaking it out loud. I think there's a memory resistant. There's an inbuilt cognitive process that actually shuts off access to the memories because it's too strange how consistently your memory disappears of these experiences. It's just beyond the capacity of what you have container for and have an understanding and context for. So when you don't have that, it just disappears in the end.

Pedro: Has that capacity improved over time?

Sleepr: It actually has. That's a good question. And you definitely get your eye in more and you get more familiar with the patterns, and you go, “I've seen this 30, 50 times.” You're able to retain much better details just simply through experience of practice of it. I've definitely found my capacity to remember has increased over time.

Pedro: I was going to ask you how you remembered all of it in one go. I had one experience with LSD where I had these thoughts that were very much cyclical. I didn't realize they were cyclical at the time. But basically at one point, I was with friends and I was like, “I'm saying the most interesting shit in the world. I need to record this so I can hear it back later.” So I recorded it on my phone, and at the end of all of it, I looked at my phone and I had a six hour recording of every roughly five minutes me saying, “We need to record this because it's really fucking awesome.” So it's just that thing where it's a fun story as a first time. I don't know if it's something that is normal or not, but at the end of the day, I don't remember any of it at all. And I'm like, was it awesome or was it just something? I have no idea.

Sleepr: That's pretty standard behavior. I think to the outsider, it seems just lunacy. And even if you were to video record it or audio record yourself, it's probably like the DJ on the web. But you're a DJ in real life, if you just curled up in a ball just rolling around just saying bullshit. But internally, what's going on for you may be an extremely potent and religious experience. So it may take you years to unpack what happened with the loop getting stuck in a peak and trough loop cycle. So I've certainly experienced that as well, these looping behaviors. I think what that's really doing is you study mechanical engineering, you begin to look at the neural engineering of how cognition works. You begin to start understanding the architecture of the brain and the mind and who you are, that you are a construction of thoughts in a sequence, in a series, and you're actually a little computer machine. And if you tweak the machinery, if you just connect this wire to this one, suddenly you're in a loop. And that might just be a neural activation in a certain spot that's heating up physically in the brain and adding these energetic waves that are triggering little loops. But normally, we just walk around thinking, I'm this person that's not a construction. And what you're doing is starting to tweak and play around with the machinery of mind, and there'll be some winners and losers in this process. They'll be the guy who's just stuck in the loop for 6 hours or 8 hours, and then we figure that out and then move on to the next one. And hopefully next time you can say, “This is a loop. I'm going to diffuse the energetic wave, bring it back to stability, and then realign it and move along or something like that.” When they began neuroscience, a lot of it came out of the war, so people would get shot in the head, and they'd get shot behind the ear, and then suddenly they couldn't see any color or they couldn't remember any names of anyone or they couldn't see any faces. And they're going that part of the brain must do this, and this part of the brain must do that. And this is the greatest mystery around, is beginning to tap in and explore the machinery of mind. And even when you do a lot of that, you still realize, “Wow, there's a ghost in the shell.” There's still something moving around in there that's really super mysterious and amazing. And that's what the next level of real fascination is once you tweak all these areas, then actually you may be able to connect with the spirit of the mind or the spirit of who you are. And does that spirit transcend through the body? Can you escape the machinery? That's what Buddhism, that's what many pursuits of knowledge are about is escaping the machinery of the construction of who you are and the types of beliefs and pains that you go through. The idea that life is suffering, that may be a faulty mechanism of the architecture of mind, that the way that the brain has been programmed for pleasure, that it has actually begun to be programmed incorrectly. And the pursuit of Buddhism is about trying to escape the programming that has been evolutionarily hardwired in. So Buddhism is really about this battle between the machinery of mind and the spirit, the ghost in the shell.

Pedro: I just had a flash to one of my not low, but cheap. Just one of my literature classes, we were talking about Moby-Dick, and they have the whole theme about the machinery and also just interconnectedness of people. This actually matches what you were saying. It's very weird for me to relate a high school class that they don't want to listen to something I find very interesting.

Sleepr: That's cool. I never connected to Moby-Dick. Everything's connected. So all roads lead to Rome.

Pedro: It's because they have the whole mechanic side, and they talk about it a lot through the lens of the captain and then through the lens of the crew. They have a lot of interconnectedness. I can literally remember quotes from. Flashbacks to high school. At one point you mentioned just as a glimpse, you said, a religious experience. And I wanted to ask is, does this give you any perspective on the different religions that there are or the different spiritual practices that there are? Does it make you more religious, less religious?

Sleepr: Definitely. It's a very private endeavor, but I feel extremely spiritual. Something I've only begun feeling recently is this just extreme overwhelming desire to just worship, to just give in to this divineness. And when I look at the Islamic tradition and that they have this dedicated room and time per day to just pray to God. This is extreme desire to connect to the higher power, whatever that is. So I don't really have a religion that I'm following. It's more spiritualism or a connectedness to something more, but it's extreme for sure. It's very rich and fiery inside. It's just this feeling of something more than the mundane. The rejection that this place is just rocks and just a dead end and there's more going on. And I really think the word I resonate most with is mystery. It's a good word. The very first door is like, I don't know anything about this thing. I know 0% about it. All I know is that there is this door to something else and beyond that is all encompassing and all interesting.

Pedro: It's a lot. You have all these different experiences that I say, they very clearly radically change your life. But at the end of the day, is it something that you would recommend to someone to attempt it or try delving into it? How to ask this because you have all this change. Is the change something you would recommend, or is it something that should only be brought to certain people?

Sleepr: I have multiple perspectives on that. One is, I never want anything like that to be gate kept and really fervent believer in that. There's been a lot of gatekeeping done by many law enforcement agencies around the world, and they're scared that we've missed out on something that was important to us. You can apply this in many different ways. You can become just a drug go who's sitting at home and it's not really helping their cause. It can pretty easily turn into something that's not helpful, but it's a tool, like a hammer. And you can build houses or you can bash someone over their head with it. It's a tool. And one of the things is, I think something like DMT, it's endogenously produced in the brain, so it truly is in everyone anyway. But we end up building these really large stories around it saying that it's really foreign thing and you should just not do that because that's not normal or not natural or something. I don't know many things about it. All I know is my path, and my path has been very hard. It hasn't been easy. Part of the difficulty was learning and engaging with these things at a really young age. So I really wish if I was 25 or 30 and then had it, I feel that would be a much more sensible approach. I feel like if you've got a stable context around you, if you've got friends, if you've got some family, if you've got a stable home then those are good things to have. If you're really stressed, if you're really depressed, then it's not a good thing to have. It's pretty simple. But, for me, my experiences now, maybe once every three months, once every six months. I don't drink. I haven't had a beer in probably five years. I don't smoke, I don't do anything. I'm a crispy clean. Except every now and then I will have an extreme heroic dose and just dive full head blown into the capacity of what this human container can do. It's like stress from work or something.

Pedro: On a significantly more basic question, because it's true that it's gatekeeped by a lot of government agencies. And to my knowledge, and I don't know anything about Australian law, DMT wouldn't be legal in Australia, right?

Sleepr: It's a curious point, but DMT that synthesized, extracted out of a plant is very illegal. You would get on the same charges as heroin. But it's the national flower of Australia, and it's on every single street around where I live. It's in the acacia tree. So the Australian sporting teams wear the green and gold. That's what Australia wears in sporting events. But that's from the acacia wattle tree, which is this yellow little flowers on green leaves. Anyway, it's the irony, this is just crazy drug laws that are really old that haven't really been investigated that we need to ban all DMT. And they even tried to ban all plants that contained DMT. And to the huge laugh of that, there's actually a billion hectares of DMT trees in Australia. Anyway, they're everywhere.

Pedro: That's hilarious. That's a very, very, very ironic, to be honest.

Sleepr: That's why I like the context of why DMT landed to me. It was just fucking everywhere. At the parties, at bush dwarfs, at psychedelic dwarfs. It was just going around everywhere. That's the subculture that was the plant that was growing around here.

Pedro: Fair enough. Is it something that's typically extracted from the plant?

Sleepr: Yes, that's how it always is and that’s interesting.

Pedro: Then I had another question that was still on the same line of more basic real life things, how does this affect your career in universities and all that? Like, beyond what happened with your PhD. I imagine it has a direct impact on what you're doing.

Sleepr: Who the fuck Sleepr? No one knows really. And that's a sad point and a positive point. I think there's dual benefits to anonymity, but part of it is I can't really talk about this stuff now. The irony is I was studying it very vocally and publicly at another university and that was fine. It's legitimate research, a few looks and judgments. But at my current university, it just wouldn't really fly. I don't think there is an academic integrity freedom policy at the universities that particularly probably for very causes like where you are guaranteed a freedom to study what is important without fear of persecution. Because I'm not full time that researcher, I'm not really in that department. I'm in the art department. So the art people, they just think we're smoking bongs in the basement which is fine, but it's not quite what's happening. Anyway, I just don't really mention it. I've had a number of students who find out about it and then have long discussions with them, help point them in the right direction. So things like this are only problems when they become problems. I just don't be too vocal and public. And they don't really want to tamper their brand. That's probably the main thing. But the irony is it's very genuine research that would probably be something they'd be really interested and curious about.

Pedro: So that affects university. But then in terms of the whole Sleepr persona, and in terms of the Sleepr artist, I was wondering. So the whole artistic endeavor starts with a DMT more or less and with wanting to document that.

Sleepr: That's pretty much where it all started.

Pedro: So how does this evolve into being an artist that posts your art on auctions and getting to Sothebys and having, like, a proper artistic career where you're actually selling it for money and everything? How does those two work together?

Sleepr: I think that's the super beautiful story was making these works and posting them online and really had no traction at all. I'd gotten into a gallery in Australia that someone had seen my work and thought it was amazing and said, I want to put all this up. And was printing out the digital works and saying there was a limited run on them and trying to make certificates and trying to basically describe digital limited prints, which photographers were doing as well. So it was nothing super inventive, but it was ironic that that was a manual process of what might come. No one bought anything. And spent years and years trying and showing the work and putting it on websites and just really no one looking at it. It just really wasn't a space for anyone to look. And then I got a very fortuitous message by George, who's in the crowd now. And he gave me a chance of a lifetime, and he said, “I'd love to buy a piece. I think you've got great work. I'll buy it if you put it on Solana”. I just put some works on Rarible and was just starting to see the space unfold. I had no clue about anything. I just was really trying to just get my head around the very, very first steps of the whole space. And then George bought the first piece, Belle bought the second piece and then we decided to throw some works on Holoplex and start auctioning works off. And it's just been a really beautiful, truly a really organic process. Over the past year and a half, it's felt every step has been earned, and every step has been exactly one step more than the last step. There's never been a really gigantic leap, except for these points that you look back on, that was a really gigantic leap. But even in the context, they feel it's very natural folding. This is at a rapid pace. And what I feel is I've been so lucky in this space to have support and have a chance at going out and rocking it. But something like Sotheby's was a really cool opportunity. That feels like a really big milestone, but there's all nuances that actually make it just still one step.

Pedro: I was going to mention Sotheby's because I'm not an artist. So I recognize it as a big name, but I don't know how much being invited by Sotheby's is a big deal as an artist or not.

Sleepr: I think it was a really big deal for me. Certainly felt like a leap for the Web 3 space to hop into the traditional art world space. I think that search for legitimacy is something that's been desired and will always be desired for the NFT space. We do feel we're in a bubble. But only a bubble, because other people are playing other games that aren't connected. But when they do start connecting, you start feeling like this is the same thing that they're doing over there. It's just we're on a different medium. We're actually ahead of the tech curve. And even I saw today or yesterday, the Sotheby's Metaverse has just come out where they've developed a whole new marketplace that will now house highly curated top tier artists with much lower percentage fees and much easier trading. So it's going to be an arm of their traditional auction house, which they were still figuring out when we did the auction for Hong Kong Sotheby’s and for down the rabbit hole. So even over a couple of months, you can see their rapid transformation of building infrastructure to support this new emerging fine art space.

Pedro: That's pretty cool. Does that allow you to have context within Sotheby's and be somewhat at the forefront of this new expansion? Or are you more of a passenger on that journey?

Sleepr: That's a good thing. They certainly aren't inviting me to their launches, but I'm in their field of view. I'm sure they're taking notes on artists who are in the space and working. So it was a really successful bridge over and a successful auction, and everything went really well. And they were really super happy with it. So it was a good outcome. I think this is quite a competitive space. And if that's the top tier these guys are selling $50 million Picassos and then they're trying to sell a $5,000 NFT. It's just a very different league of art selling. So it's a very premium pool that would take quite a long time, you'd have to be dead to make an impact over in Sotheby's, maybe.

Pedro: Fair enough. You'd have to be dead to make an impact as a, a very enjoyable prospect as an artist, I imagine.

Sleepr: That's the irony.

Pedro: That's how it goes. How you reconcile art and documenting it. How much is it still science based do you think? Because originally, it's very much for a PhD thesis. How much did your approach change to documenting your experiences when you stopped having it in the form of a PhD?

Sleepr: I think a lot of it was just relaxing the rigidity of what was needed for the PhD. So the PhD was all about complete replica snapshots of what happened, and any variational wiggle room out of that was a failure or incorrect. So that level of rigidity was loosened. And even over the past year and a half, through the past couple of series that I've released, each one you can actually start feeling the rigidity keep releasing. But at the same time, like I mentioned before, there's this quality that maybe it's more truthful through the fiction or through a relaxed approach. Maybe more comes through subconsciously, or maybe more comes through in the play of it rather than trying to capture this. I often think the relationship of surface and essence. On the surface, something looks like something, but really the thing that you're actually talking about is often this essence that is invisible and you can't document it other than maybe through a whole range of tactics that weren't actually there, but it actually feels closer to being there. There's a number of works I've done that have that quality where this feels like I'm in a DMT trip, even though actually my DMT was slightly different than that. So there's a play that comes through and that's enabled a lot more expression and craftsmanship to come through in that pursuit.

Pedro: So did it help you to get out of that? I guess it did help to get out of the rigid mindset of. It has to be scientific, it has to be a PhD, like all these restrictions.

Sleepr: That’s right. And this is where privatized scientific research comes in. I have long plans for Sleepr and I have a lot of cool things I want to do. There's a lot of stuff that can come out of this. But in a university context, there's a lot of rules and red tape and things you can't do. Whereas something I'd love to do is fund an art trip for five grand or something and take an artist into Peru and take ayahuasca with shamans and then create artworks of that and document the journey and the process in a more free flowing way that might actually yield better results than then would happen in a lab that had all of the approval and scientific documentation and the rigidity. So privatised funding, that this underground research angle is what art has always been about and what art does really well is it has a pure pursuit, but bends the rules. I think that can actually yield even better results. And the proof is in the pudding. Psychedelic research was pushed underground for the past 30, 40 years. It's slowly little bit coming out now, but not much. But if you look online, there is just complete crisp documentation of every single facet of the whole thing, psychological or pharmacological or botanical. Everything's been documented in high detail with no funding, just by passionate people on the Internet. And we've done a lot more progress than using the mainstream badge of legitimacy. I think that is already wearing out what is legitimate and where's something legitimate? The truth just comes through no matter what.

Pedro: I'm realizing right now that we've spoken so much about all these experiences and all your art and everything. And there are questions that I typically ask that I just haven't been able to hit. You were mentioning there's so many things you want to do with Sleepr, and I was going to ask, what exactly are the next steps? Because you can continue documenting and everything and, and making your art, but what do you want to achieve? Because making that art is beautiful, maybe you want to have more reach. Maybe you have a further goal, what is Sleepr’s end goal?

Sleepr: There's immediate goals, like short medium term goals and there's really long goals, like short and medium term. There's a very, very clear path to what Sleepr needs to do. And it's to continue the quality climb within the existing infrastructure that's here. So I think somewhere AOTM on ETH is probably a really good goal to aim towards. I think some really prominent collectors would be great to have. A more mid-term goal would be to be in museums. I would love to be having works locked away so they really last the test of time. And then beyond that, I'm really locked into the JPEG game. That's what I want to do most. I don't really want to expand the thing out and spread wide. I want it to be really deep in a pinpoint way because nothing else is actually what my passion is. I mentioned the Sleepr world recently, and that's really cool. Actually, just a bit of fun to put some Sleepr works on clothing items or maybe make some really cool, sweet, abstract figurines or just to play with the Sleepr world a little bit more. But it's not really my goal. I want to make works that are game changing. And so depths is the key in the JPEG game, making them extremely premium, making them really, really important socially and culturally and scientifically, perhaps, and then long, long term. Sleepr, whether it's in the Sleepr incarnation or as something else, I would like to develop a hallucination research centre. I want to develop a space that is able to hire artists or to fund artists or have artist residencies, and to begin to build up a repository that is building out these maps of hyperspace. That's what I would love to do as this in between art, culture, science, but one person can't do the job. Sleepr would be an artist at the center. But there are many other wonderful artists in the space who are doing such amazing work that they should have a redefined goal. And part of it is also then to communicate out to everyone else what our goal should be. What type of work should we be promoting? What type of work should we be cheering on and encouraging? We can do anything we want. What do we choose to want? And not saying everyone has to do this, but I would like to promote that as an arm or an option in the pool of options out there that this is also a really cool, legitimate angle. Of course, I love watercolor abstract flower paintings as well. I truly do. I love just all sorts of art as cultural consumption. But having a mission in the art space is a really niche missing detail. There's a mission missing for some artists to spend their time on. So they create a container and a space in a place that mission can be that we basically, we're the bungee cord experts, and we develop bungee cords to wrap around these artists, and then we kick them off into the 6th dimension and then they come back with a napkin and some scribbled drawings.

Pedro: That's a lot. And it's really cool. I think the whole idea of a place to research it sounds like a very big mission and on that line of the artist's mission and everything. I was wondering if this was a fairly lonely mission for you because not that many. You're the only artist I know who's doing this. To your knowledge, are you the only one? Is there someone that you can share this journey with in a more personal way than your art or not that your art isn't personal because that's definitely not the way, but in the sense that you can really interact with them and share with them and someone that can relate to that?

Sleepr: I certainly am not the only one because there is a visionary art subculture. Alex Gray is a wonderful, beautiful artist who did the tool album cover and this beautiful tunnel of eyes. Even from the sixties, there was psychedelic artists who were getting super inspired and then making this type of imagery that had this fluidity. So there have been artists around for a long time. There are a number of visionary artists out there who do espouse these ideas. They do really shout them out. I'm documenting these fusions as well, and I'm taking these complex hallucinations and geometry and I'm documenting them in my paintings and in my artworks. And so there are other artists out there who are doing it. But it's definitely a solo mission. It's always been a solo mission. And the PhD was just like this crazy solo mission. I was just locked off from the world for a long time, and I just went as far as I could down this rabbit hole as I really could before I just started really just losing connection to important things. So until it became unhealthy, you can research too much and go too far down rabbit holes like that. So it's always been a solo mission, so it's not that big deal for it be too solo. But I feel so supported in this community. I just feel so loved and so appreciative to just be with homies and hang out. I feel so cheered on every peace and it's such a wonderful experience. I really never feel alone in this space. But building that research center thing, it's probably a bit too far down the risk curve of NFT’s, at least which is already at the extreme end of risk curve.

Pedro: We're talking about the far end of risk curve while toying around JPEGs on the Internet. That's quite fucking funny. It's definitely true. Not only JPEG’s, but also arguably legal activities. Are you ever worried about that, actually, on the legal side of things?

Sleepr: I think most of possession is the offense. They have a hard time. I just say lying, I am lying. For anyone watching all of this was made up, but it's possession. Possession's the key. So just sort your shit out and then be free and voice the thing that's important.

Pedro: Fair enough. As long as you cannot be screwed by that, that's what matters. When it's with good intentions, then one question that I feel is really important, and you've probably been asked this so many times, but maybe in a different way, people have definitely asked you and you've probably already wondered, is this just all in your head? Is this just molecules hitting certain receptors in your mind and it fucks everything over and you start seeing things? So how do you reconcile that question which you can't really answer with the idea of the immense depth of worlds and space that you can explore?

Sleepr: It's a really legitimate question. Actually my supervisor said exactly that question halfway through the PhD, and it was exactly this she said, “What if it's not real?” And I said, but it really happened. It really happened. I don't know what it means. I don't know what the implication is. I don't know where those places are. I don't know what the beings are. But I really did see a place. I really did see a being. I really did talk with them. I really did all that but I don't know what that means now. And it's a really keyt cognitive shift where you just go back to being truthful about what your experience was and not needing to overlay what that then means on top. And that's a completely truthful point of view and that's mystery. You just retain authenticity and truthfulness in saying that this really happened. I really did get stuck in the loop. I really did see this tunnel of colored light and eyes. But I don't know if that's another dimension or if I don't know if that's in my head or I don't know what it is. And even at the end of the day, it would be very fascinating to find out why that happens, even if it is just all in your head.

Pedro: Just even asking the question I realized that, couldn't you technically argue that everything you do in life is just all in your head potentially, in a way?

Sleepr: For sure. There's a real epistemological problem with that type of thinking about getting to the bottom of truth and it's a common knot you can just get caught on in. You never be able to prove anything. You can't even prove that if we're seeing the same color red, let alone if I'm seeing fucking dimension number twelve. Talk about red, it's the same problem. So, actually, we just live with those problems and just get on with it. Sometimes they're really important to dig into, other times they feel unhelpful to the general cause that you're on. And so it's just probably navigating that a little bit. Certainly everything you do is one of the trippy thoughts you can have is there's really no world out there. There's only ever a reconstruction in your brain. The light gets hit your e and it's converted into an electrical signal. It's reconstructed in the brain. You don't ever experience the external world. You only experience your construction via the machinery, via the computer. You're only ever watching a live stream on YouTube, the YouTube screen of your mind. You never get out of it and see the real thing. And so then it really helps to understand about beliefs. So if you're in a shitty mood or life is terrible or everyone's against you and you're the victim and guess what? No birds will be chirping when you walk down the street. But if actually there's magic woven throughout everything, and suddenly you notice the ray of sun hitting your arm, then you hear the birds and there's a beautiful sunset. Suddenly there's magic everywhere and you're seeing a different world. Two people are seeing a different world based on the internal belief system. So it's all interestingly complex and messy.

Pedro: Is it ever a struggle for you? Because I asked that question and that question already has an endless amount of possibilities that can probably be terrifying because that fear of the unknown, does it ever get overwhelming? Do you get answers to them? Do you just managed to set them aside and understand that you'll never have an answer? How do you get over all of that?

Sleepr: That's a really, really good question. People have killed themselves over the concepts of infinity. That's the representation of that infinite scalability. There's no end to the limit or to the concept. You just have to at some point accept the mystery and accept the limitations of the hardware that you've got and you round off the edges. That's the point of infinity is at some point, you just pick some really big number. But actually, the concept of infinity is that it is so many more times bigger than even that number that you just thought of. I find that stuff really interesting. The exploration of concepts like infinity. I think you should live with it.

Pedro: The concept of infinity just reminds me of a math class where you do, when you're studying the limit of something as you go towards infinity. A lot of people struggle with the idea that it's not just that choose 1 million or 2 or 10 million. It's really like there's always plus one each time.

Sleepr: That's right. That's the key plus one. And actually it's the description of an algorithm, of an engine, it's the description of the general pattern. That is what it is. It's not actually this fixed thing. It's the plus one. That is what the description is. On a lot of DMT trips, I'll see it's these geometric grids and geometric structures, but they have a fractal nature to them. Ralph Abrahams was a mathematical genius of UCLA and he was very adamant that there was a fractal. You were peering into the fractal geometry of nature itself through DMT. So fractals are a geometric mathematical description of infinity that's seen in lots of different shapes and contexts in nature. So actually you build a cultivate relationship with infinite and fractalness through these experiences as well.

Pedro: The fractal side of things, even when you look at the mathematical representations, it's always fairly like surprising to see them. There's that name of the really famous fractal.

Sleepr: The Mandelbrot?

Pedro: That one itself is just so surprising to just observe.

Sleepr: When you go look at Mandelbrot, there's free software that you can look through. So Mandelbrot is 2D. It's just like a pixel. It's like looking at a monkey Dao picture versus a hyper real 3D render of the monkey Dao. But when you see that, when you actually navigate in 3D through those fractal environments, that's some crazy shit. And that's just like a math equation that's converting into those 3D virtual representations like those 3D environments. And I often think, when my math’s teacher was an old white moustache banging on the chalkboard with the duster saying how important these equations were. It was like, “That's what you were trying to say.” There's these insane landscapes that he, he didn't have the tools to help really visualize the beauty that he could see of those descriptions of patterns and relationships. Anyway, Mandelbrot all fractal stuff is very, very, very interesting and very on point.

Pedro: It's fucking crazy just because if you visualize that while on a trip, it must be just on such another level. And I remember reading through your article that you do use 3D for your art. What software do you use? How do you even manage to get to get it into three dimensions?

Sleepr: I used to use cinema 4D, then I was using blender now. I was using unreal gaming engine. I was doing texturing and shading in substance and across a whole bunch of software then drawing things in illustrator and going through Photoshop and shit like that. I think the 3D stuff having a good general understanding of geometry and specialness enables you to just start constructing the spaces in a really interesting manner. There's a really beautiful quote from Frank Gehry, who's the super famous architect, but when they were saying, “How do you think of the spaces and the architecture that you build?” He's like, “Interesting space is everywhere.” Look at this waste paper basket. It's filled with trash. It's not really interesting at all. But imagine all the empty space inside of that waste paper basket. That is incredible forms that you would never organically think of because you've just been conditioned in a way of thinking about space as a bunch of cubes and spheres and maybe it's a dome. But, actually, if you break out of a lot of containers and beliefs that you've got about something and you re-approach it sometimes in the complete opposite way then you can find some really unique angles onto things. So a lot of work for me is about exploring specialness in really unique ways. Looking inside things and under rocks and inside rocks inside a rock is such a cool concept. That would be an amazingly beautiful cave. But it's all triggered from these experiences of strange space and then you take that as inspiration and then use real world concepts and technical shit in software to try to wrangle it out. I've used software for so long, it's just like flying a plane now. I'm so far down the rabbit hole in terms of software that I'm doing these little tricks that are just deep, deep off in the left hand corner of the menu. It's some strange technique that I have a deep theory and belief for of why I'm doing that and why that works. But the software itself is critical to. It's like the pen that you draw with. It's just another tool for visualization.

Pedro: My mind is mildly fucked at the end of all this. It's crazy. Because I see your artwork and I don't even manage to imagine how I'd go about creating that on blender of all things, because it's just not that easy. How far down the creative process do you go on blender? Do you just create the shapes? Do you give them the color and the texture? How far down do you create the lighting?

Sleepr: So 3D is very helpful for a lot of things that are a pain in the ass to calculate manually. It's great for calculating shadows. It's great for calculating correct perspective. Some recent works that I've done recently, that's just a slight angle like you're looking at a street scene, and then you might just twist the scene a little bit, stand off on the road a little bit of an angle. And then you might fish eye the lens a little bit. So it's a little bit bulged. And you might put a light, cast some shadows over here, another light. You're setting up these theatrical scenes, a stage for these characters to dance on top of. Then you block out the general gist of those shapes, try and figure out a lot of compositional problems. I’m leveraging the benefit of 3D. But I hate how 3D looks. It just looks like off and like a computer thing. And strangely, how the brain works. There's all these, like, negatives and then double negatives of how the brain calculates what's real and what's not real. And there's the uncanny valley. So if you tried in 3D to make these things look really real, they go up the curve for ages, but then it's just still so far off. My brain is just screaming. Not real even though you've got correct textures and the lighting and it's 3D, it's shading and everything but it's just off and you might be 1% off. But instead, if you actually took it to be 20% off, so that's why super flat is really helpful because what it actually does is it releases the tension in the brain to try to tell you it's real. So I'm settling into that this isn't real. But then the double negative trick is that actually everything's calculated correctly. This is real. This is just a filter. Like someone took a photo on their phone and then put some filter over the top on Instagram or the iPhone thing. So actually it is real even though it's less real. And you actually can fall deeper into the world by going further away from trying to satisfy what the biology of vision is just like a fucking supercomputer art. You don't want it go up against the eyeball. It'll just cream you every time. So you just actually try and skirt around it and hack through another angle. And then the use of color as well, so there's all these assumptions with color. Like a darker shadow behind, something will indicate that it's further behind. If it's lighter or more saturated, it will be closer. Mountains in the distance will look less saturated, more grey, because of the atmosphere and mist in the air. But what if you did the opposite to that, what happens then, or what if you did three correct shadows and then two incorrect shadows, what happens then? There's infinite options in what you can do with any one image. Someone could give me a picture of an apple. And there's so many theoretical tactics you could use on that apple that could just fuck with your mind. And not just optical illusion stuff, but get under your skin. That's one of the things I really hope for with Sleepr is that they get under your skin. There's these tags in them that you remember them later. Sometimes I'm even looking at the work, and then I'm looking at it, but I'm not even looking at the screen anymore. I'm looking at the roof or my foot, but I'm still looking at it. I don't even know what's going on. Sometimes there's this vibe, this vibration in the work that's resonating at a really strange level. So there's technical tactics that you can employ at a software level, and then there are biological tactics that you can employ that. You should have an understanding of what happens in the brain with vision and what the machinery, what is happening in cognition. How are people feeling, thinking? What are the assumptions? What are the blocks? What are the ways to get around things? So there's a wetware level, then there's a software level. But that's still just going to keep the artwork in the realm of this space. So what you want to do is have the magic level or the DMT stuff as this infusion to just help kick it off to the next level. It's that triple combo that's starting to showcase some serious work that could go up against. I don't know, it could go up against and that could be well remembered.

Pedro: It's crazy. I'm very sorry. I have to cut this off now. I'd love to continue this discussion longer, though. Typically now real time for you to shout anyone out, literally anything you want to say that's unprompted, go for it now.

Sleepr: I'm just so thankful for everyone. I honestly can't express how much I appreciate. And not that I want more likes, but I just really feel everything. I just really want to make everyone proud. I want it to be very authentic and a real mission. Sleep is for the people. I think all I said that.

Pedro: Awesome. Well, with that being said, thanks everyone for joining again, especially to the ones that come here, I appreciate it a lot. Next one is on Thursday with Gaius, actually, for those of you who know him. And so there's the tweet up top. If you want to grab Persida novelty by Sleepr, get the address to me within the next 2, 3 hours because otherwise I won't count you in. It's limited. I meant as many as there are people who request it. Sleepr, thank you so much for having answered quickly and made time for this.

Sleepr: Thanks. I really appreciate you. Appreciate it.

Pedro: Thanks a lot. And on that note, thanks a lot for listening and talk to you another time.