I am suggesting that lucid dreaming is probably also why Elliot is a better hacker than everyone else (he problem solves and plans during his sleep) and perhaps also why Sam Esmail seems to be able to write, direct, and extensively discuss every episode of Mr. Robot without losing his mind.

Yes, I get it, this sounds like I am putting on a tinfoil hat just a few paragraphs after I promised that I would not, but as crazy as it may sound, lucid dreaming is both a real and a verifiable technique that people use to problem-solve while they are asleep.

In fact, for the people who can make it happen, it can be revolutionary.

Susana Martinez-Conde, in her Scientific American article, likens a person learning to control lucid dreaming to the awakening (no pun intended) of the character Neo in the first Matrix movie.

My suggestion, to be clear, is that Elliot (Angela and Whiterose) use lucid dreaming to problem solve and expand their abilities to become more powerful in the real world much like Neo uses his ability to control, assemble, and disassemble the “code” to become more powerful inside the Matrix.

In Elliot’s case, he learned at an early age, to problem solve while he sleeps. When we see what is happening while Elliot is dreaming, it appears to be surreal (surrealism means dream-logic).

In these moments, Elliot is being a reliable narrator, we are seeing what he sees. When he was trying to find out how to find Tyrell, for example, he was re-experiencing what Mr. Robot had seen as it happened. It is confusing to us because we see Elliot’s face where Elliot sees Mr. Robot’s face (they have the same face in real life).

It seems surreal because dreams are surreal and also because Elliot is experiencing himself doing things that he didn’t know that he did (Elliot has Dissociative Identity Disorder). To get why this is particularly strange, Imagine watching a real-time movie of yourself doing things you have no memory of ever having done.

Elliot’s life in his world is very much like Neo’s life in the Matrix in that he is always in a process of becoming aware of his world in new ways (remember that Neo himself started out as a talented Hacker embedded in a world that he finds out that he only partially understood).

Anyway, this is the second time the Matrix has come up recently in my reflections and that movie seems a clear influence on Esmail’s Mr. Robot (along with the works of Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, Brian DePalma, and David Fincher).

One other piece of evidence as to why I believe in this “Lucid Dreaming theory,” in the early pages of the Mr. Robot companion book “Red Wheelbarrow” there is a picture of an ouroboros (a snake eating its own tail).

One of the most famous real world examples of the use of lucid dreaming was the cracking of the Benzene Rings problem by August Kekule. The way Kekule “solved” the problem was by imagining the solution as an ouroboros in a lucid dream.

Angela Moss, meet Whiterose