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Make the regular deck of playing cards your cyberdeck.
KardtricK turns a regular deck into something like a cyberdeck in Neuromancer: a way of interacting with a vast, simulated environment.
But not the electronic world of data.
Your own internal world, which you will find goes on for a long way.
Each card becomes inseparable from a word, and an image.
Through a simple mnemonic system, a single keyword is attached to each card.
This is not difficult to learn. A smart person can grasp the logic of the deck quickly. I have taught the whole deck in ninety minutes.
To be clear: this is not a special deck like Magic: The Gathering. It is a regular deck of playing cards, to which one keyword is attached to each card.
The Basic Move
Each card receives a keyword by mnemonic method.
The K sound always signifies the Club suit. In the Major System, T and D always signify the number 1.
So CAT is a natural keyword for the Ace of Clubs:
- C/K for the Club suit
- T for 1
That gives the card a word.
Then the word is placed into something already alive in the mind: a line, an image, an idiom, a little story.
Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle
Now the card has a place in memory.
From there it can be linked to an action or a state check.
When you see a cat acting strangely, or appearing with unusual emphasis, check whether you are dreaming.
That is the move.
A card receives a word.
The word is fixed to memory.
The word is then connected to an action.
State Check
A state check is a simple test to determine whether you are dreaming.
The basic KardtricK state check is this:
Try to fly.
If you float, you are dreaming.
If not, it is probably reality.
What Happens
Soon, whenever you see the Ace of Clubs, you will think:
Cat.
That is the point.
The card and the word become linked.
This system began as a card-counting technique: fixing a word to a card so it could be recalled immediately.
Once that link is in place, the card can carry more: images, phrases, actions, state checks, dreaming techniques.
And that is where the deck begins to open.
In dreams, almost anything can happen.
You can fly.
So why don’t you?
Usually because you have not yet had the moment of ignition: realizing that you are dreaming, and deciding to act.
For most people, the first time this happens is a genuinely new experience.
KardtricK gives you lucid dreams, and many ideas about what to do with them when you get them.
Using the Deck
Before sleep, you can go over the cards mentally, or play a game of solitaire, moving through the words and their stories as you play.
In practice, you can do this any time of day. The cards are meant to be used.
Before sleep simply gives it emphasis.
Think of it as setting a background task, apprising yourself of a battery of dreaming techniques.
Or focus on one.
It is up to you.
Later, one of the planted elements may return:
- the card
- the keyword
- the image
- the action
- the state check
When that happens, the system has begun to function.
What You Will Have
When you are done learning the system, you will have one word attached to each card.
One regular deck.
Fifty-three cards.
Fifty-three words.
Each word is set into a small story, often something that already existed in your mind: Mother Goose, a familiar idiom, a simple image, a memorable line.
Those stories are then associated with dreaming techniques.
And there you have it.
53 words that change the world.
Interhuman Dreaming Language
As you acquire these words attached to stories and linked to the playing cards, you will notice something else.
They become detachable and independent.
The deck is the foundation, but the system does not remain confined to it.
What you are building is a memory castle, based on the memorized words linked to the cards.
From day to day it becomes useful mnemonically: a place to store images, make associations, and move ideas around.
It is, in that sense, a complete course in mnemonics.
But these words are not yours alone.
They can be shared with others, people you teach, people in your family.
And so, in some sense, like an aboriginal tribe, you will be dreaming in a shared language.
We call this the Interhuman Dreaming Language.
The Larger Frame
You can also take KardtricK as an N-LARP.
In that frame, it is a live action role-playing game about solving the problem of nuclear weapons and other global catastrophic risks on planet Earth by culturing dreaming.
KardtricK gives you lucid dreams and many ideas about what to do with them when you get them.
By the same token, you can take the practice as participation in a larger effort.
The premise is simple:
Bringing more dreaming into the world stands opposite to nuclear weapons corpus as a way of life.
KardtricK is a way of seeding the world with new springs of dreaming.