LD4all origin story
Written on the occasion of LD4all 30 year Anniversary
25 may 2026
In a time where there were faxes. No smartphones. Computers were considered “new technology”. CD-rom the new “interactive media”.
Internet was dial-up. Or if you were lucky - your school or institution had a connection to this “Information Highway”. The term “internet” didn’t even exist as such. Rather:”HyperSpace”. And you Surfed it. Virtual Reality was a term that carried sci-fi tones.
And from this time, which seems an entire different era from where I’m writing this from this time, (may 25th 2026) LD4all has it’s roots.
In the early 1990’s I studied digital media design (“beeld & media technology”). This combined my passion for everything new technology and creating digital art. Actually creating digital art was already something new those days.
I discovered lucid dreaming. I read the book “creative dreaming” by Patricia Garfield and from there had my first lucid dreams. I was so excited about this that I wanted to tell the world. You can actually know you are dreaming while dreaming, be in your own private spiritual virtual reality, how cool is that?
In 1995 I was accepted into the Master of Arts degree programme. And for that I had to design a master’s project to graduate. And I immediately knew: My Master project is going to be about lucid dreaming. And teaching people how to become lucid.
First, I thought of making an interactive space somehow. Interacting with this space would resemble being in a dream and through interacting there it would give the viewer more insight in lucid dreams. Even thought of making some kind of VR set-up (a very futuristic option xD).
But that didn’t really land.
And then we got an introduction class to “The Internet”. Our school had fancy computers for making 3D art, and those also came with an internet connection. We were shown this new thing called a browser and how “hyperlinks” worked. yahoo.com was the front page of the Netscape browser.
I was immediately hooked and saw possibilities. Joined newsgroups (alt.dreams.lucid). And my desire grew to create something on this “world wide web” about lucid dreaming. But not in the grey-background-blue-links kind of way, but in an entirely new and interactive and creative way. So it would be less:”read this huge document about lucid dreaming” and more:”come explore this dream-like environment and be inspired - and along the way: learn about lucid dreaming”.
And - most importantly - by creating something on this world-wide accessible new medium, I could reach the world. (In these days, that was something entirely new - the fact that everyone can create something and put it “online”, and then can be reached worldwide.)
And that is what my project came to be. A website about lucid dreaming.
Because I was an art school student of course this all had to be very conceptually designed and explained and show my understanding of the medium and so on. So I set out to make a very conceptual design. Quite literal. Very static. But very explainable.
I named my project:”Through the Mirror - Beyond Dreaming”. Through the Mirror, because I used to step through mirrors a lot in my lucid dreams. Beyond Dreaming, because lucid dreaming is something more than “just dreaming”.
But I got stuck. Designer’s block. I had created something that, while still being interactive, basically still was “click through to the next page” kinda thing. And it began to feel completely boring. This felt not inspiring at all.
And then it hit me. I’m designing a project about lucid dreaming. Why not literally use my own lucid dreams to help me design it? And I decided to go and look at my project in my next lucid dream. Just let the dream show me what its supposed to look like.
And that’s exactly what I did. I remembered to look at my project in a subsequent lucid dream. And I saw a monitor with the design. I looked at it intensely, trying to remember as much as possible, and when I woke up I immediately sketched the layout. And I remembered also the colour scheme (soft pastel gradient background) and how everything had thick black outlines.
That lucid dream unlocked inspiration. From then on, I knew exactly what my project had to be. It was a complete turnaround from the previous design.
And I brought that dream into reality. Officially, on may 25th 1996, when I announced the site in alt.dreams.lucid. I graduated with flying colours.
And now I hear you asking, but where does LD4all come in?
Through the Mirror - Beyond Dreaming existed on whatever homepage I had at the time. With a very long URL. There wasn’t even Google yet or something called “Search Engine Optimisation”. But people found it. And loved it. And it grew, and evolved.
At one point in the websites evolution I felt a need to have my own official domain and not this long homepage url with all the / and ~. And then the next question was: what domain? ThroughTheMirrorBeyondDreaming.com was too long. TTM.com was taken. Everything else I could think of also.
I scrolled through a list of suggested domain names on the provider’s page. And LD4all.com hit me. That’s the one! So I registered it.
And here we are.
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I hope you enjoyed reading this blast from the past. 30 years. Never would have imagined that it all still would exist for so long, and that I would meet so many incredible people through it. That a whole lucid dreaming community would form around it. And we are still here. Maybe in 30 years from now, I will write another one of these and look back to this current time as another era.
-pasQuale