Sleep, dreams, meditation, deep concentration and other altered states of consciousness have in common that they weaken the ego-tree’s normal dominance over experience. In the EC/HE theory this is not mysterious — it is Attractor Dynamics under altered conditions.

In the ordinary waking state the ego-tree’s established attractors dominate experience completely. The recognition mechanism reads the world through familiar patterns. New impressions are immediately interpreted through existing understandings. Experience is rapid, efficient and limited.

In dreams this dominance weakens. The ego-tree’s heaviest attractors — identity, chronology, physical limitations, social norms — lose their organising force. What appears is not chaos, but a different attractor landscape: earlier, lighter and more fundamental attractors that are normally masked by the heavy ego-structures. The logic of dreams is not wrong — it is a different reading of KNOWING through a different attractor landscape.

This explains the distinctive character of dreams. Transformations occur instantaneously because heavy attractors do not brake the reorganisation. Time is non-linear because sequential focusing is not bound to the ego-tree’s chronological structures. The impossible is possible because the attractors that define “impossible” in the waking state are not active.

Meditation is a deliberate and gradual weakening of the heaviest ego-attractors through voluntary withdrawal of FOCUS. What appears when the dominant local attractors fall silent is the same as what appears in dreams — but with consciousness intact and oriented. The result is access to deeper layers of the attractor landscape: higher understandings, clearer recognition, and in deep meditative states direct contact with structures in KNOWING that are normally completely masked.

Psychedelic states operate through a different mechanism but with similar results: they disturb the neurochemical structures that maintain the ego-tree’s dominant attractors, and thereby open experience towards a broader attractor landscape. What is experienced as “expanded consciousness” is in the theory’s framework not something added — it is something uncovered when what normally conceals it is temporarily weakened.

All these states point towards the same thing: the ordinary waking ego-tree is not the only — and not the deepest — way of reading KNOWING. It is the most stable and socially functional. But beneath it, and to the side of it, there exists a richer and more nuanced attractor landscape that has always been there.

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