Dreaming of a transcendental 7D sensory cinema experiences

ari kuschnir
5 min readJul 21, 2020

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Nasa + Deep Dream Generator

I had a dream that may alter the course of the rest of my life. A protopian vision I just can’t shake about something so powerful and profound it seemed inevitable for our species. It was as best as I can describe it an ecstatic, futuristic, full-sensory 7D Cinema experience and that felt like being inside a mindblowing version Baraka/Powaqqatsi/Tree of Life with elements of Star Wars/Avatar. This THING was beyond EPIC and it wasn’t something you just watched or even experienced, it actually happened WITHIN and it changed you forever, in fact you knew it as soon as it began that nothing would ever be the same.

Beyond the 3D dome-type screens and holographic elements overlaid via AR like glasses, this FELT experience embraced all five senses in deep ways (the smells!) and was also directly connected to our minds and dare I say souls in real time. Intuition played a huge role in your choice making and what you got to see. The experience of being inside this sophisticated yet organic womb was transcendental and therefore you couldn’t just buy a ticket for it, you had to be invited by someone and at the end you would choose who to invite next, so you gifted the experience to someone else, like a golden ticket that was guaranteed to change someone’s destiny.

Inside, there were comfortable pod like seats and each person was in a round warm room, like a cozy living room of a distant but inviting future. There was a main control room that I wondered to where I could see the experience was being “mixed live” so it was l a living work of high-tech art that reacted to our real-time neuro and biofeedback individually and collectively as a group. We wore small unobtrusive devices that measured biometrics like HRV, Oxygen levels, heart rate, etc so the “scenes” would play differently if your heart rate variability was in fight or flight or in a more relaxed and restorative place, the goal I should say was always to inch you towards the restorative/gamma/transcendent type state where a breakthrough would inevitably happen.

Even though the experience felt personal there were lots of people there but you couldn’t quite see or feel them at first, it reminded me of the feeling when you peaked at the Back to the Future ride and saw all the other people having the experience on their Deloreans.

I kept wanting to get a sense of how they were making the experience come to life, so I would alternate between experiencing the blissful “interactive/immersive movie” and playing around in the control room totally in awe of how the art and tech came together. It was truly magical, these people were like shamanic craftsmen seamlessly orchestrating the most complex immersive production ever while creating personalized transcendental experiences for hundreds at a time. Peoples lives were being changed minute by minute, traumas overcome, soul parts restored, addictions cured. It was remarkable, the most profound and effective ART ever made, it was about you, it was you and everyone else. The experience was the ultimate psychedelic therapy, without the side effects or bad trip although at times you did have to face your darkest shadows, so it wasn’t pure bliss all the time, it was more like a ride with catharsis guaranteed and bliss on the other side of that.

The most profound thing by far was the story, it enabled anyone to quickly upgrade their operating system and way of being in the world by creating exactly what your mind/body/soul needed to restore itself and grow into a FULL Human. All the obstacles you had experienced were made to bear in compassionate and objective ways that would allow you to see the source of your pain and bravely overcome it. Some substance was released and inhaled in key moments to alter the chemistry and allow the healing to instantly take place.

The story wasn’t a linear narrative but at some point you BLENDED with the Mother Earth and had a deep felt experience of being the custodial species of the earth. It was made clear we had forgotten this simper truth and here it become undeniable, the earth needed us and we needed HERin order to co-EVOLVE and grow together. At times you felt like a tree, or you became a lion or the jellyfish or the ocean or someone else. You also saw what humanity was doing, it’s lower, selfish and fearful self taking over, the dark forces at play and how we had created our own monsters and our own hells by refusing to evolve and deal with our karma. This custodial species idea was in my subconscious as I recently came across it in Tyson Yunkaporta’s mind-expanding book Sand Talk which I consider essential reading at this point.

The ultimate moment of reverence was blending with the planet itself, it was as a living being! A wise and holy super-conscious GOD (not a dead rock) who was showing us how to live in Right Relationship with her. She was patiently waiting for us to evolve and we kept screwing it up, our cosmic brothers and sisters were also waiting for us to evolve almost like compassionate parents watching children do silly things.

Once you had experienced this, there was no turning back, you had experienced the feeling of a god-like planet which was beyond anything you could dream up as a human. It instantly clarified how you could help and be of service to others in profound ways that would add depth and meaning to your life and allow you to play a vital role in this society and planet’s evolution.

As I reflect on the dream and long for the experience, I sense we desperately need something like this in our culture right now and I wish I could just design it, fund it and build it. What could be more important than this? We see the rise of psychedelics, ecstatic experiences, cults, alchemy and flow states as the world’s meta-crises accelerate and unravel. Covid, inequality, climate crisis, racism and the deeper crisis of meaning is leading to records in loneliness, despair, nihilism, and suicide while we drown in narcissistic materialism in a mind-numbing loop. People are literally dying from lack of connection and meaning while sitting on what they they think is a dead rock in a random, chaotic universe with no meaning or purpose where we are all alone (the darkest collective projection of our worst fears). This vision and my intuition tells me the opposite is true and this new type of immersive therapeutic storytelling will play a key role in what happens next, in fact I’m convinced it’s a vital cog to move beyond the crossroads we find ourselves in. I’m writing this in part to make sure I follow through and enable some version of this to come to life in the next decade.

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ari kuschnir

Creating stories that activate better futures now. Founder of the new wave production partner m ss ng p eces