I am just starting to read about lucid dreaming, but Scientific American suggested that the Hollywood version (think Inception), in which you pick specific dreams to relive is not entirely fantasy, as they put it:

"Techniques to control, or at least influence, our dreams have been shown to work in sleep experiments. We can strategize to dream about a particular subject, solve a problem or end a recurring nightmare. With practice, we can also increase our chances of having a lucid dream, the sort of "dream within a dream" that Inception's characters regularly slip into."

Being able to choose and thoroughly examine a particular person or place and also to problem solve, as we saw in S2 E11 from Elliot, is also possible.

Thanks to a conversation with a person named X's and O's on Reddit it became clear to me that it makes the most sense to view Elliot's journey to find Tyrell as exactly what he said it was, a lucid dream.

This means that Mr. Robot went to meet Tyrell (Martin Wallstrom) and that Elliot was able to revisit that experience while the larger Elliot was asleep and they were "both" dreaming together. What we saw was surreal because dreams are surreal. Elliot was experiencing what Mr. Robot did through the lens of "his" dreams.

This also likely explains the surreal experience of Angela's (Portia Doubleday) meeting with Whiterose. It is likely that Angela was kidnapped (or detained) by inconspicuous man and inconspicuous woman and did meet with Whiterose (B.D. Wong), but what we were probably seeing was from inside Angela's dream. There is some reason to believe this was also a lucid dream since Whiterose makes reference to them having unique abilities.

I won't lie, at first, I kind of blew this off (because I don't believe that Mr. Robot is a Science Fiction series). I just assumed it was more of Whiterose's Red Herrings. But, in retrospect, Sam Esmail rarely wastes dialog.

So, and I could be wrong, I suspect that both Elliot and Angela have, at some point, learned to master the process of lucid dreaming. This might even explain what has allowed Elliot to become such a great hacker in that one of the most famous examples of lucid dreaming was about solving complex problems:

"In 1865 Friedrich August Kekulé woke up from a strange dream: he imagined a snake forming a circle and biting its own tail. Like many organic chemists of the time, Kekulé had been working feverishly to describe the true chemical structure of benzene, a problem that continually eluded understanding. But Kekulé’s dream of a snake swallowing its tail, so the story goes, helped him to accurately realize that benzene’s structure formed a ring. This insight paved the way for a new understanding of organic chemistry and earned Kekulé a title of nobility in Germany."

And just in case you think I am going too far, guess what image Mr. Robot draws as an entry on May 16th at 9:15 a.m.? Yup, a picture of a snake swallowing its tail.

This also potentially explains why Angela repeats the mantras throughout the day, she is trying to be as bold as she was in her dreams (where she can do whatever she wants).

I am thinking of a few other scenes during Season 2 that might be Lucid Dreams, but more on that in a later post.