The Third Oneironauticum is Saturday, April 5

For the third Oneironauticum, we'll be practicing a meditation described by Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche in his book Dream Yoga and the Practice of Natural Light. Though this practice leads to lucid dreaming, it focuses primarily on the boundary between awake and dreaming, the passage of time between falling asleep and becoming conscious again within the dream. At this border, Norbu instructs us,the practitioner breaks through illusion and perceives him or herself.Tibetan Buddhists believe that this same thing happens at death, life ends and the bardo, which is like a dream state, begins, and that int he moment between dying and becoming aware of the bardo state, we havethe potential to find nirvana. Regardless of what you believe about consciousness and rebirth, the practice brings greater awareness into dream experience.

The practice consists of these basic steps:

1. Visualize either a white om, if you can keep that image clear (I've attached an om to this message if you need to see one), or a white A, and hear the sound aah (make the sound now so you can feel it vibrate) at your heart chakra. The image needs to be clear in your mind's eye, the color very bright. The sound should be distinct and visceral. Get a really strong visual of the symbol and a firm sonic fix on the sound, centered at your heart. Don’t worry about taking the practice any further until that happens.

2. If you get as far as having an om or A visualized clearly at your heart, visualize a second one at your throat, an a third at the crown of your head. Now visually connect the three with an imagined beam of light up through your head and then back down to your heart center. The sound should follow the image, climbing up and then descending down, resonating through your body.

3. Before you go to sleep at night, practice whatever form of this meditation works for you at the moment. If it’s the process of trying to keep the visualization clear in your mind, then do that. If it’s meditating on the sound and image at your heart center, do that. If it’s creating a vibrating, resonating chain, do that. It matters less that you get to the resonating chain bit than that you focus attention and intention on practicing whatever form of the meditation you have clear as you slip into sleep.

Allow me to repeat that, because it really matters. The most important part here is that you have some form, visual or aural, of the om or the A present as you fall asleep. If it’s the last thought you have as you slip over the border into sleep, then you’ve done it. The dreams will do the rest.

The different forms of the meditation should only be undertaken to the degree to which they don’t interfere with your ability to fall asleep. If you’re at all insomniac, don’t get too caught up in trying to get anything beyond visualizing the om or A at your heart, just think about it. If you fall asleep easily, perhaps try the meditation sitting up in bed for a while before lying down.

If you can’t get the visualization clear, print out or draw either an om or A and stare at it. Close your eyes and try to visualize it clearly. Alternate opening your eyes and examining the image and try to get it down. If you can’t get the sound clear, keep making it out loud, feeling it vibrate at your heart chakra. Meditate on the feeling. You want to reproduce that effect, without actually having to vocalize.

Other directions can get pretty advanced and esoteric here if you want to get deeply into it. Norbu instructs women to lie on their left sides, men on their right. Women can block their left nostrils while trying to fall asleep, men their left. People who have a hard time falling asleep can decrease the brightness of the om or A, or change colors to make it milder. People who still don’t get vivid reams after a while can visualize the red om or A (or just a glowing red ball) at their throat chakras, the color increasing in intensity each night. Or they can move the image or the ball up to their foreheads, to the third eye, and imagine it as white and glowing more strongly every night. If you get far enough with this that you want to get into this level of detail, go read the book.

We urge remote participation in the Oneironauticum. To participate remotely, follow the practice as described above throughout the day of Saturday March first. That night, when you set your intention to become lucid, add the intention to join us in the dream realm. All dream participants, those who attend the Oneironauticum and those who join remotely, are welcome to post to this blog. Contact us if you’re interested.

Sweet dreams!

Dream Journal Excerpt, by Vibrata Chromodoris

This entry is from the morning after the most recent Oneironauticum:

“I had a rather huge download of dreams and woke up twice that I can recall. Lying here this morning, reviewing them all in my head, what comes to me is that at no point during all of that dreaming did it ever seem “unreal” no matter how strange the circumstances. The “me” that is dreaming is accepting of the things being seen and felt as “real”. Then, upon awaking, it is simply and clearly understood that it wasn’t real. I suppose under certain circumstances — medications, physical illness, etc., there can be an overlap where the waking state at first seems unreal as well, and recalling events in the dream may have the quality of real memories. But normally I simply transition directly into being awake and knowing I was dreaming.

Another thing occurring to me this morning is that during my dream states of the past night there seems to be a constant flow of shifting and changing events in contrast to the awake state where there are long periods where I can sit and be still.

As far as noticing surroundings etc. in the dreams, what I am most aware of are faces — characters that don’t resemble people in my real life, but must be conjured entirely out of my imagination. I see them while I’m dreaming and notice their height, hair style, facial features and quality of personality.

A point of departure for further focus for me may be on the experience of running in my dreams. I have recurring “events” in my dream states (and did again last night) where running take son a special quality — I can’t seem to will my limbs to move faster, and I struggle to cover more ground but can’t. It becomes a recurring sticking point, where the focus of the dream shifts entirely on running faster and being frustrated. I think this can be a place to become lucid, since it has such a distinct quality. It may be a place where the veil is more thin — my “real” body is paralyzed, and the dreaming body may be sensing that and is struggling to connect with the waking body. Perhaps can learn to recognize “dream running” in a lucid way.”

Border between sleep and dream, by Jennifer (aka Fer)

On the morning of the Oneironauticum, I woke up and observed the process I went through to remember my dreams, a sort of scan of memory, both trying and relaxing, an exercise of recall. I remembered two dreams that way. Once I had exhausted my thought process, while I still laid in bed in a hazy close to sleep/dream state, I then began randomly shifting through thoughts/images, the ocean, my home, the act of walking, a feeling of pleasure. Eventually, one of these images dislodged something and I remembered a third dream, and another part of the second.

In one of those dreams, I paced around a grassy rise thinking about what I would say to the Oneironauticum group the next night. I watched my feet as I did this, shifting around some pebbles with my toe.

Throughout the day on Saturday, I continually shifted my viewpoint and attempting to experience my surroundings and actions as if in a dream. At one point in the day, as I walked up the back steps from the laundry room watching my feet as I climbed, I realized I was wearing the same shoes as in the dream the night before. In that moment, the image of my foot in that specific shoe, the act of looking down at my feet, crossed the boundary between awake and dreaming like a tesseract, or a portal. The two worlds merged, or superimposed, a moment of being in both at once.

The night of the Oneironauticum, I had a hard time falling asleep, repeatedly drifting down to almost the point of sleep but then waking again. I noticed that each time I came close to sleep, I felt a tingly electric buzz throughout my body and a sort of pulling sensation, as if the sleep state had a physical suction drawing me in. When finally I fell asleep, I had a brief lucid dream. In it, I walked into a room and saw Jacob, one of our physically present Oneironauticum participants. Though a prodigious dreamer, Jacob has never actually become lucid in a dream. When I saw him, I remembered that fact and became lucid myself. I pointed to him and yelled "you're a dream!" As often happens, the excitement of becoming lucid woke me up. As I surfaced out of the dream, however, I realized I was experiencing the same sensations as I had sinking into sleep, the buzz and the pull. It was as if the border between conscious and unconscious exerted a gravitational pull that extended from the place where one passes from one state into the other, sort of like this:

Both the portal of the shoe moment, that landed me simultaneously in both waking and dreaming worlds, and my approach of the border, from both sides, between conscious and unconscious made this Oneironauticum very much about perceiving the boundary between waking and sleep.

Questions and Flashbulbs, Remote Dreams by Evan Bartholomew

On the plane:

I dreamed that there was a young girl who was applying at a school. It appeared to be some sort of monastery because I was there with another man wearing brown monk's robes. She was young, and was very sure that she wanted to be there. The other man asked her about her qualifications. She then mentioned that she had already passed SATs, and went on to list 3 other tests that she had aced, including some test called a Kaffsberg-Heinsberger, or something of that sort which was a quantum physics test.

The other man wasn't sure about letting a young girl in, but she seemed to know her stuff. She was asked to take a Doctorate of Divinity test, and then questions were asked. At first I was very intimidated by her, and was thinking that her intellect was beyond mine, but as the question of the tests were being asked, I realized that I actually knew the answers.

The first question was: How does the Spectrum crash? My first answer was "In the Body of a Man". Then I realized I needed to clarify, so I said "From a higher dimension into a lower dimension, as in the Christ, into the body of a man from a higher plane. From infinite multiplicity and refraction into condensed form and matter." As I said this, I could see a lightning bolt/prismatic spectrum descending from dimensional "space" onto a flat field of white moving energy which was the 3 traditional dimensions as we knew them plus the additional dimension of time, which is what created the motion. The bolt came from outside of time, and manifested _into_ time, and therefore had ripples and reflections in both directions of time and space from its point of entry. Reflections in the past are the stuff of prophecy and the reason that some have foreknowledge of future events, reflections in the future are the moments of religious mysticism that still occur regarding the original event.

The second question was "Why are happy dreams happy?" My answer was: "Because they are complete organisms". I could see the energy of a dreamer contained in moving dream which was like an egg of energy around it. The happy dreams fed on the happiness of the dreamer, who fed on the happiness of the dream, which then gave nourishment to the dream. This created a feedback loop. I could see the energies of dreamers contained in these loops, and as the energy loop increased they rose above the flat stream of matter and time, and began to experience dimensional space and started seeing prismatic reflections of the Spectrum.

I woke up for a bit on the plane, and then started slipping back into dream. There was a spirit in front of me, but it was a long beam or rod of light, which was casting prismatic reflections off of it. I was thinking of my conversation with Erik the previous day about entities, and as it moved closer to me I let it know that I wanted it to keep its distance. The experience was neutral. I was aware of it, and it was aware of me. We both had spiral vortexes of energy moving around us, and I could see that some of the reflections were thoughts, ideas, etc. If I had allowed it to move into my field I would have felt the core energy of the beam, but its emanations would have manifested in my mind as thoughts, feelings, dreams even...

Later Saturday night:

Antiques: someone had left a few antiques to me and Ray. We were trying to decide what to do with them. We were going to keep them, but remembered we were trying to sell everything to move to Hawaii, and that they didnt really go with our stuff anyway. They were worth 30,000 or something. I remember there was an old table, and some other items, but my memory is a bit hazy.

Had a semi-lucid dream. It would have been fully lucid, though I was so tired from sleep deprivation that I wasn't really in focus in my waking consciousness, so the dream awareness was groggy as well. I dreamed that I had sat up in bed, but I became paralyzed and was slipping back into a dream. Chelsea, my friend who I was staying with, came into the room and noticed that my body was half up in bed and was pushing me back down into a lying position. This was incredibly realistic. I had multiple awareness, one of being in a dream, and one in which I was aware of the room and of her pushing me back down onto the bed so I was comfortable to sleep. Both of these were dreams though, and she wasn't in the room at all.

Then I had a Flashbulb. When I move from waking state into a dream, past sleep paralysis, its almost like a flashbulb effect, where there is an intense flash of light and a "pop" into another state of being. It's the shift into another dimensional environment. I had a flashbulb, and woke up in bed at the house I was staying at in San Diego. As least I thought I woke up in bed. I rolled over onto my side, but I actually rolled out of my body. I was a bit shocked and snapped back in with another flashbulb effect.

Dream Images, by lissa ivy

Look at Your Hands

Dream Journal

Wacky Wedding, Remote Dream by Xavi

Gabriella and I were to be married. We had lots of relatives visiting, and we were all scurrying around to get ready. The setting was my house in Ashland Oregon, but this time it was a 2 room wooden shack that was all diagonal and disheveled. The ceremony kept getting postponed due to time and bad weather. 2 days of getting ready had passed and we were still trying to get it together.

I walked over to the edge of the yard and looked out over the edge of the cliffs and saw an amazing sea of clouds stretching to the horizon, which was bathed in a molten yellow gold sunset, with pearlescent blue and pink highlights. It was so alive and wonderful I had to call my dad over to see. He didn’t really seem interested. It was almost as if he didn't believe me. By the time I convinced him to come see the sunset, the light had faded and turned to muted tones with some red light still visible. And by the time he walked up to the edge to see, the whole scene had become dark, and we were staring out at the same space, which was now a sea of rotten brown mud and sludge and waste. There was this pale white naked obese man sitting in a rotten wooden row boat playing a violin back and forth… "urr-urrr-urr-urrr-urrr-urrr" the most horrible dark side of the violin…

Remarkable Coincidences, Remote Dreams by Debra Dixon

Having never heard of the Oneironauticum and before receiving the invitation through her dream group to participate, Debra, who lives in Adelaide, South Australia, awoke from the following dream on Saturday morning:

I was in a car that stopped to pick up more people. We all got out. I saw every one get back onto the car. I didn’t want to get back in because it was now too crowded. Adults were in the front cabin. Three or so (~8 to 15 year old) children were sitting (on their bums with there knees up) close together in a peculiar little cabin at the back of the vehicle.

The vehicle moved off. I sadly watched it go away without me. I wondered if I could catch a bus to where ever the vehicle was going. But I didn’t know the number of the bus and I even if I did I didn’t know where to catch the bus. I felt sad that I was missing out of being where these people were going.

Next I was there. I was in a small wooden church hall. I guess there were about 50 people there sitting on chairs. I was feeling, happy and privileged to be among them. There was a monk in a brown robe sitting on the floor of a slightly raised stage. He began asking the audience how they got here. I think others had given an answer then I called out to him and said “that lady over there is my mum and she did all the work to get me enrolled to be here. {My mum was a spiritual hippy, in the mid 70’s until she died on 21st of Jan 1981 aged 45, when I was 21}

In the dream, the monk sitting crossed leg on the floor asked his assistant to pass out cards. I got one and immediately started trying to read it. Some one next to me pointed to some thing on the card. I, perhaps a bit rudely, told who ever it was to stop talking to me as I was trying to read. The part that the person pointed to was the name on the top line of the writing which read T. Lobsang Rampa.

On Sunday morning, Debra awoke from this dream:

I was on some kind of excursion with a group of mostly adult students. We walked around pretty city (or large town) street’s looking at architecture and talked about how nicely the town was laid out.

Then we went to have lunch (or something), we drank wine or beer or some kind of intoxicant, which didn’t taste like alcohol (from wine glasses that were a bit triangular, a bit cone-shaped) but I don't remember eating. Then we went back out onto the street. Among the people walking on the streets I could see life-size bronze statues of people (mainly men). The life size bronze statues moved in a normal, flexible and relaxed manner. I asked some one beside me “do you see what I see?” Then I said “maybe I am drunk from the wine or overtired (and hallucinating) because maybe I didn't get much sleep last night, but I can see life-size bronze statues walking around among the real people on the street.” They had that distinctive brown-green metallic sheen that all bronze statues have.

Remote Dreaming (mostly forgotten), dream habits, by Nat Ward

i was bad and didn't write it down fast enough...

so I missed some, but the gist of it was as follows,

crap....now I can't remember....
I remember remembering in the shower...
and now it escapes me....feh!

just on the tip of my brain,
people...gun shot wounds....someone famous, not winston churchill but someone like that...

people standing behind a desk.

actually, while I'm writing, in my dreams I have two themes I remember over and over again.

One is that in my dreams there is a version of Grinnell (my college) that is always Grinnell, but in no way architecturally like grinnell. The real Grinnell is sorta faux collegiate gothic, the dream Grinnell is extravagant high victorian gothic. Lots of greenhouse like collonades, victorian windows with cast iron frou frous, stairs, lots of stairs, rooftops we wander over, long dark halls with lots of dirty windows not letting in much light, but giant windows.

And the other theme/thing is very often my dreams follow the following plot.

I am someplace public (county fair, britney spears concert (no joke)) with a girl, we go through an entry/arch/door/hole in the hedge into a private place (often lush and green, under trees, very middle earth). She will kiss me and a bit later we will be attacked by a threat.

In the ones I remember the girl was often some girlfriend of a friend, and the threats are always a bit odd. One was slavers that instead of dogs had cupids that snapped their bows like whips and the arrows bent and lengthened until they stuck someone and they fell asleep. From them we hid in the sub basement of a buddhist temple and as we ran i dove into the eleveator and the whip/arrow just missed me as the doors closed.

The first half is wonderful but turns to terror of the last bit.

This type of dream happens yearly at least.

There's also the third standard which involves driving up a hill and then the car misses a turn and tumbles to the bottom where its banged up but still drivable. Except the time it fell in a lake and I almost drowned. These are scary.

Oh, and one where I ran along a boardwalk that went through tunnels along a beach and over water and it was failing right behind me and there were alligators. But that was just a one-off.

Oh, and one of my faves. I am riding a bike down a treelined/trellis covered path with a girl on the back and as we ride it turns into a hover bike flying just above water and an alligator is following us very quietly with a v shaped wake in the water. But its very happy and nice. This too is a one off.

Minutes of the Second Oneironauticum, by Jennifer

Dreamers Erik Davis, lissa ivy tiegel, Geneva Bumb Shanti, Dean Mermell, Vibrata Chromodoris, David Shamanix, jacob Nasim, Christy Silness, and yours truly, Jennifer Dumpert, met at the habitat on Saturday, March 1.

We had all spent the day contemplating elements of waking life as if they'd been dream things (see direction below), after paying attention to the experience of remembering dreams that morning. We all went to sleep and awoke about nine hours later and shared our dreams over champagne brunch.

Much of our conversation centered around the nature of reality, and of the Tibetan Buddhist concept of the world as composed of thoughtform. We noted how unquestioningly we accept the goings on in our dream worlds as reality when we're asleep (unless we become lucid). In the same way, we rarely question the reality of the waking world. Therefore, thinking of all components of daytime existence as dreams strongly affected several members of the group. We ultimately agreed that everyone's exeprience of the objective world is ultimately conditioned by her or his own subjectivity--how we think about things, our emotional outlook, natural tendenices, and so on. All people can only perceive a world colored by their own subjectivity, so perhaps there is an objective reality outside subjectivity, but nobody is experiencing it.

Dean read us excerpts from Kilton Stewart's perhaps questionably researched but very moving account of Senoi dream practices, originally published in 1951 and reprinted in that sixties classic of consciousness and dream states, Altered States of Consciousness, edited by Charles Tart. We felt kindred to these people who would built social interaction around dreams, and who prioritized dreams within their world outlook. As a meta-comment on the group, we decided that our intent could be described as thinning the veils between waking and dreaming life.