Lucid Visions: The Forgotten Fourth State of Consciousness
Garnet Dupuis
Garnet is an Integrative Health Care Specialist with broad international experience. A respected educator, inventor, consultant & practitioner, he has taught multi-disciplinary methodologies in major US universities, pro sports teams, US Marine Corps and Navy Seals. Garnet has presented at health related conferences in the US, Eastern Europe and Asia. He has invented a number of advanced technologies including the newest Brain Engagement device, the neuroVIZR. Having lived around the world, ne now lives happily in the tropical mountain rainforest in Northern Thailand where he is deeply involved in wild animal rescue and conservation work. Garnet is a life long spiritual practitioner in the Tibetan Dzogchen tradition.
Garnet Dupuis explores "Lucid Visions," the forgotten fourth state of
Just because something is uncommon does not mean it is abnormal. We are naturally made to experience non-ordinary states of consciousness; they are a necessary psycho-emotional nutrient and the root of our creativity and self-healing.
Summary
- Modern society suffers from "fourth state deficiency syndrome" due to artificial light robbing us of darkness and natural time in biological transitional states. - The fourth state is a natural biological occurrence between waking and sleep, known as hypnagogia and hypnopompeia, acting as a necessary psycho-emotional nutrient. - Accessing this state allows a shift from conceptual thinking to a perceptual "proto-consciousness," enabling intuitive flashes and symbolic insights that the ego-driven brain cannot process. - Deep conscious relaxation serves as the "golden key" to entering the fourth state, requiring one to stay lucidly aware while letting go of ego boundaries in total darkness. - Neglecting the fourth state leads to a loss of self-regulation and creativity, as this state is vital for the brain’s ability to self-organize, self-heal, and solve complex problems.
Article
Lucid Visions And The Case For Reclaiming Darkness
At Biohacker Summit 2022 Helsinki, Garnet Dupuis Argued That Modern Life Had Starved The Mind Of A Vital State Of Consciousness
Late in the first day of Biohacker Summit 2022 Helsinki, as the glow of screens and stage lights still held the room in their grip, Garnet Dupuis offered a provocation that cut through the conference’s usual fascination with complexity. His talk, *Lucid Visions: The Forgotten Fourth State Of Consciousness*, did not begin with a promise of futuristic enhancement. It began with a loss.
“There’s a thief living amongst us,” Dupuis said. “I think the thief is electricity.”
Not electricity in its totality, not the machinery of modern civilization itself, but artificial light, which he described as a quiet force that had robbed contemporary people of darkness, and with it, of one of the mind’s oldest biological rhythms. Speaking on Friday, 3 June 2022, in Helsinki, Finland, Dupuis framed his presentation not as a niche spiritual curiosity but as a public health argument. Modernity, he suggested, had produced what he called “Fourth State Deficiency Syndrome”.
It was a striking phrase, memorable partly because of how simply he delivered it. “Simple things done well work well,” Dupuis told the audience. “Oftentimes we pursue solutions in complexity because the simple things aren’t really being done very well.”
The Forgotten Interval Between Waking And Sleep
At the heart of Dupuis’s presentation was the claim that human beings do not merely cycle through waking, sleeping and dreaming. There is also a fourth state, the transitional terrain between waking and sleep, and again between sleep and waking, known as hypnagogia and hypnopompeia.
These threshold states, he argued, are not incidental blurs at the edge of the day. They are biologically essential, “a necessary psycho-emotional nutrient” for the brain’s self-regulation, creativity and adaptive intelligence.
To make the point, Dupuis reached back to older contemplative traditions, invoking an ancient Tantric idea of “the so-called fourth state”, a junction linking sleeping, dreaming and waking. The challenge, as he presented it, was not whether this state existed. It was whether modern people had become too distracted, too illuminated and too hurried to notice it.
His answer was unequivocal. Society had not only neglected the fourth state. It had pathologised many of its expressions.
Where older cultures may have treated visions, intuitions and symbolic insight as gifts or forms of knowledge, Dupuis suggested that modern urban culture was far more likely to dismiss them as irrational or unstable. This, he implied, was not simply a cultural bias. It was a narrowing of consciousness itself.
From Conceptual Thinking To Perceptual Awareness
Dupuis described the fourth state as a shift away from ordinary conceptual processing and toward a more primary perceptual mode. It was a movement, in his words, “from the conceptual world into the perceptual world”.
“Instead of looking, simply see,” he said. “Instead of listening, just hear. Let it come and stay on its own.”
That distinction formed the philosophical centre of the talk. In everyday waking life, the mind is tasked with organising, naming, interpreting and controlling. This is useful, even necessary. But Dupuis argued that such top-down cognition can also dominate too completely, suppressing other forms of awareness that are better suited to intuition, symbolism and spontaneous problem-solving.
In the fourth state, he said, those suppressive habits begin to loosen. “The ego boundaries start to soften and melt,” Dupuis told the audience. “When that mental movie of me evaporates, delicious information and inspiration start to happen.”
It was an evocative way of describing what many people recognise only fleetingly: those sudden insights before sleep, the image that arrives unbidden, the solution that appears not through effort but release.
The Entropic Brain And The Case For Letting Go
To bridge mysticism and neuroscience, Dupuis turned to the language of the entropic brain theory, presenting consciousness as a dynamic tension between expansion and suppression. The brain, he suggested, possesses an innate capacity for far wider experience than ordinary waking consciousness allows. What keeps that range in check is a form of regulatory compression, a “secondary consciousness” that maintains order.
This suppressive function, he said, is useful in daily life. It keeps perception stable, action coordinated, reality consensual. But it is poor at solving certain kinds of problems.
The fourth state, by contrast, permits access to what Dupuis described as “metastable criticality”, a liminal condition in which the mind is less rigid, more fluid and more capable of self-organisation. He linked this process to the relaxing of alpha-wave dominance, describing alpha activity as a kind of cerebral “policeman” that keeps experience tightly managed.
The implication was clear. The mind does not always need more force, more stimulation or more information. Sometimes it needs less control.
“The golden key to the fourth state is deep conscious relaxation,” Dupuis said. “It is the gateway where we must practice staying lucidly aware even as we let go.”
Darkness As A Biological Need
Few parts of the talk landed more forcefully than Dupuis’s insistence on darkness itself. For millennia, he argued, humans spent long stretches awake in low light or total darkness. Firelight, he noted, shaped experience differently from electric light. The flicker of natural flame, he said, historically helped settle the mind into calmer states before sleep, creating a bridge toward the visionary threshold of the fourth state.
Today, by contrast, the transition into sleep is often abrupt and exhausted: screen on, lights on, mind overstimulated, then collapse. What is lost in that sequence is not only rest, but the lucidity that can arise before rest takes over.
Dupuis urged the audience to reconsider the value of simply being awake in the dark. Not sedated, not distracted, not entertained. Awake, still and perceptually open.
“Artificial light is robbing us of darkness,” he said. “We have for millennia spent significant time in the dark, and we do not spend enough time totally awake in the dark anymore.”
That line carried more than nostalgia. It was the foundation of his diagnosis. If the fourth state is a built-in feature of healthy consciousness, then the erosion of darkness is not trivial. It is a form of deprivation.
A Deficiency That May Underlie Modern Distress
Dupuis’s broadest claim was also his boldest: that neglect of the fourth state may sit beneath a range of modern difficulties, from poor creativity to impaired self-regulation to sleep disorders themselves.
He did not present the fourth state as a magical cure. Instead, he cast it as a missing condition, a prerequisite that allows other interventions to work more effectively. A complex adaptive system, he argued, can only regulate and heal itself properly when all its natural states remain accessible.
In that framing, the fourth state becomes less an exotic fringe experience than a biological requirement. Remove waking, and the organism suffers. Remove deep sleep, and it suffers. Remove dreaming, and it suffers. Why, Dupuis asked in effect, would the fourth state be any different?
His answer was that it was not different at all. It had simply been forgotten.
The Radical Simplicity Of Practice
For all the theory in the room, Dupuis kept returning to practice, and to practice stripped almost bare. No elaborate protocol was required to begin. What mattered was darkness, conscious relaxation, and the discipline of not slipping immediately into unconsciousness.
There was something almost unfashionable in the simplicity of it. While the biohacking world often gravitates toward devices, data and ever finer optimisation, Dupuis argued for a subtler form of training: letting go while remaining aware.
He cited historical figures such as Thomas Edison and Salvador Dalí, both associated with techniques for catching insights at the edge of sleep, holding objects that would drop and wake them as they drifted. The point was not anecdotal glamour. It was to show that the threshold state had long been recognised by artists and inventors as fertile ground.
For Dupuis, however, no special genius was required. The capacity belonged to everyone because the state itself was natural.
A Talk That Asked The Audience To Remember What The Mind Already Knows
By the end of *Lucid Visions: The Forgotten Fourth State Of Consciousness*, Garnet Dupuis had done something unusual at Biohacker Summit 2022 Helsinki. He had made a case not for adding something to human consciousness, but for restoring something ancient that modern life had crowded out.
His closing appeal was neither technological nor doctrinaire. It was an invitation to respect the fourth state, to cultivate it, and to see whether it might help where more forceful strategies had failed.
In a culture that prizes brightness, speed and productivity, Dupuis’s argument stood almost as a form of resistance. Creativity, self-healing and deep insight, he suggested, do not always arrive through effort. Sometimes they arrive when the lights go out, the ego quiets, and the mind is allowed to hover at the edge of sleep without falling through it.
It was, in the end, a plea for darkness, and for the lucid visions that darkness still makes possible.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2022 Helsinki