Peaceful Futures Manifesto

Astralnauts

by Alija Blackwell

The astral’s been vivid.

My dreams are no longer things that fade away before I realize they were ever there. Sleep pulls me into otherworldly portals I can never forget because I know they are real.  Immersive lucid dreamscapes didn’t just happen to me. Climate migrations and the rapid change in our built environments transformed our sleeping patterns.

To fight off sleep deprivation and the nightmares that haunted us, dream tech became the panacea of choice. We thought the instant relief would heal our complex post-catastrophic stress disorders. Instead, the attacks on our sleeping minds came frequently and were always surprising.

We failed to escape. Each time, every time. The military grade manipulation tactics amplified through Durmi and weaponized across sectors engulfed us with illusions that infiltrated our dreams. Keeping us from rest and in a constant state of flight or fight was the main strategy for geopolitical upheaval.

Chronic traumatic childhood experiences skyrocketed with autonomous decentralized predictive policing, enforcing cycles of violence through on-demand regional turf wars. Our only respite was in the ever-lasting ketamine retreats, psilocybin supplements, and opiate medleys that blurred boundaries between pleasure and pain. We were conditioned for this through the psychographic data profiles collected by AlphaBet from our ancestors.

To break the cycles, we practiced fugitivity and resistance through dream collectives based across a distributed network of land-based healing homesteads. We rested deeply into the wound, instead of trying to escape through the metaverse. All we had to do was tunnel into ourselves to release a holding pattern on humanity for the past century created by a collective trauma response called Industry 4.0.

The western colonial grip on our psyches loosened for just a moment during global social unrest and most of us slipped right through its grasp. That’s when the transmissions came.

Now, we feel the futures. We reconnect to ancestral wisdom in our dreams, through the soil. We listen to lessons on natural ways of knowing and practice traditional Indigenous and Afro Ecological stewardship. We converse with future generations and celestials through our dreams to move with intention in the present.

Amnesia lifted, along with the faded stories we were told about ourselves and the borders we inherited. The attacks that once came frequently and were always surprising were met with transformative adaptive planning sessions in decentralized collective governance communities. Narratives of how we failed to escape in time, each time unraveled to reveal a network of pronatalists that could be dismantled through multilateral transgenerational healing infrastructure.

We draw from our dreamscapes to reorient city grids for regenesis. We cross-pollinate life-affirming experiences and institutions. Our housing is as biophilic and multi-use as the materials we upcycle in our spiralic economies of collective care.

Elemental transit ports flourished into mixed use developments for interwoven chosen families. Fluid political arcologies move like water to meet the ebb and flow of migrant communities’ needs. Managed respite was encouraged through community-led visioning using immersive speculative art to embody just rehabitation. Biomimeticists designed early warning systems to anticipate disasters by mirroring roots.

Despite our experience, we couldn’t believe it was really happening. We learned to travel at the speed of inner collective alignment. Dynamic affirmative consent and multispecies data sovereignty by default nourished tailored ancestral tech for rewilding. Regenerative systems cultivated the value of dreams, inner worlds, and interpersonal healing.

We know there is no awakening from the constant change, because time is non-linear.  What happens in the dream realm is sacred insight for the waking world. Our systems are built to intuitively evolve with quantum symmetry.

We are the Astralnauts. We travel the pluriverse to share this transmission.

Dedicated to the oneiric realm

  • Alija Blackwell leads the Oneiric Lab, a strategic foresight and immersive design consultancy. Through their creative practice in urban environmental planning, digital media, and data science, Alija engages the public imagination to reimagine pathways to resilient and just futures. Currently, Alija facilitates inclusive speculative design workshops to prototype futures artefacts of climate migrations. Their ongoing projects explore biophilic healing infrastructure, dream sovereignty and solar punk fiction.