A Flicker in the Dark

Picture half-a-dozen strangers sharing a week-long silent retreat. Nights are spent in pitch-black dormitories; mornings begin with a circle-check of dreams. By day three the notebooks brim with uncanny overlaps—similar serpents gliding through water, identical mother-child motifs, the same sense of being watched by an eye of light. The participants have not spoken, read, or scrolled a screen. Yet their inner theatres converge.

A psychologist might reach for Carl Jung’s “collective unconscious,” the notion that deep symbolic material is shared across minds. A microbiologist would usually shrug—until now. A speculative framework called the Microbiome Collective Unconscious proposes a literal, physical conduit for those convergences: gut bacteria that whisper with photons.

The real physics inside the fantasy

Biophotons are real.
Every living cell, bacteria included, emits ultra-weak photon emission (UPE) in the blue–near-UV range when reactive oxygen species relax from excited states. The flux is faint—roughly 10² photons cm⁻² s⁻¹—but measurable with modern electron-multiplying CCD cameras.
Some microbes sense light.
Even in permanent darkness, enteric bacteria possess photoreceptive proteins that modulate gene expression when hit by specific wavelengths. Evolution seems to have kept these sensors for reasons beyond sunlight navigation.
Horizontal gene transfer is bacterial gossip.
Plasmids leap between cells, stitching populations into genetic networks. If a cell could convert optical phase information into a structural tweak on a plasmid, the message would persist through replication.

These facts are uncontroversial. The leap comes when we imagine that phase-encoded photon pulses leaving one person’s gut could enter another’s, seeding gene-level memes across microbiomes. The metabolites those genes regulate—short-chain fatty acids, indoles, tryptamine analogues—are prime modulators of vagus-nerve traffic and, by extension, dream imagery and emotional colour.

Threading the causal chain

Encoding: Oxidative bursts in bacterial biofilms create coherent photon packets whose phase reflects the local metabolic milieu—effectively a “genetic meme” in optical Morse code.
Propagation: Photons scatter through intestinal tissue and abdominal wall. Most die en route, but a few squeeze out in the near-IR window where human flesh is semi-transparent.
Reception: Close-proximity bodies—yoga mats edge-to-edge or bunks a metre apart—bathe each other’s abdomens in this weak glow. Photoreceptive proteins in the neighbour’s gut respond, biasing plasmid-copy number or recombination events.
Translation: Over hours, new metabolic ratios reach the brain via vagal afferents and peripheral tryptamine circulation, nudging the dream-generation circuitry toward themes that match the “source” microbiome’s recent concerns—fear, bonding, ancestral threat.
Phenomenology: The sleepers awaken to archetypes: serpents, mothers, the cosmic eye—shared not by telepathy but by microbial light mail.

A roadmap from campfire tale to experiment

Phase-sensitive imaging
Place two volunteers in a dark chamber, abdomens ten centimetres apart, separated alternately by air, clear Perspex, or an optical phase scrambler. Record UPE with an EMCCD fitted with a polarising beam splitter. If phase carries information, the scrambled barrier should abolish correlations.
Genetic bar-coding
Feed donor volunteers a probiotic strain carrying a distinguishable plasmid barcode. After 48 h of overnight co-sleeping, sample recipients’ stool for that barcode. Its appearance would confirm photon-mediated—or at least contactless—horizontal transfer.
Dream-content statistics
Run a multi-night study with dream diaries scored by blind raters for predetermined archetypal motifs. Use cross-correlation analysis against the timeline of detected photon bursts to test causality.
Pharmacological block
Administer a photoreceptor-channel inhibitor (already used in optogenetic work) to recipients. If archetype sharing plummets while UPE flux remains unchanged, the receptor is implicated.

Each step forces the story to survive progressively sharper blades. Failures narrow the parameter space; successes open new questions—How much data fits in a photon? How stable is a meme encoded on a plasmid? How many nights before two guts “think alike”?

Why the idea matters even if it dies

Microbiome signalling is larger than chemicals. Demonstrating no optical cross-talk still clarifies the limits, channelling resources toward sounder mechanisms.
Low-light bio-imaging will advance. Building femtowatt-sensitive cameras for abdominal surfaces could translate to cancer diagnostics.
Dream science needs hard variables. Any protocol that quantitatively links gut activity and dream content—optical or not—enriches a field long starved of measurable levers.

Reasonable doubts on the table

Photon attenuation: Biological tissue swallows most photons; modelling suggests only a vanishing fraction escape.
Information bandwidth: Phase noise in a hot, scattering medium could drown any sophisticated encoding.
Alternative synchronisers: Shared temperature cycles, pheromones, or whispered rustles may already align dream themes without invoking light.

A single confirming experiment would therefore need airtight controls, replication, and pre-registration. Nothing less will push the idea from the fringes toward the centre—or shove it off the map entirely.

Closing the circle

Jung coined archetypes to explain why distant cultures paint the same dragons and mother goddesses. Whether his intuition pointed to a deep psyche or, in a roundabout way, to flickers born in bacterial metabolism remains to be seen. What is clear is that the human body glows, however faintly, and that the gut–brain superhighway listens to more than we once imagined.

In the dark dormitory, a sleeper turns, and somewhere in her abdomen a microbe fires a photon. Across the room another microbe may catch it—or not. The rest is the stuff of dreams, science, and those rare hypotheses daring enough to link the two.

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