Paris Solo Oneironauticum, by Jennifer

As the final weekend of April approaches, I must explain the absence of an April Oneironauticum. After the Consciousness Conference in Tucson at the beginning of the month, my spouse and I have spent the balance of the month in Paris, from whence we shan’t return until early May.

I lived in this city 21 years ago. During that time, I slept a lot, and for the first time ever spent a lot of time alone. As a result, my dream life grew ever more vivid. A few months into my residency, I had a dream that proved to be a turning point in my oneiric experience. I wrote about the experience in Dreamflesh Journal:

I notice several eerily familiar toys arranged in a storefront, and I stop to look. A flood of realizations arises. First, I know that am dreaming, asleep in a bed in a tiny one room apartment in the servants’ quarters of a ritzy Paris condominium. Second, I recognize the setting: a dream version of Delaware Avenue, a main drag in Buffalo, New York, that passes by my parents’ house. I know that this dream street crosses the river into Canada, and that my dream version of Toronto is right on the other side of the border. Memories recalled within dreams often prove false upon waking, part of the construction of the sleeping mind. When I woke from this dream, however, curled in the bed of my Parisian home, I truly remembered having had those other dreams. In my dream world, I had created alternate versions of places I know well and then juxtaposed them to create consistent settings, places I revisited so often that my dreaming self knew the layout as well as this waking me knows my neighborhood.

This dream marked my first perception of an alternate subjectivity, a self that I inhabit who has her own memories, characteristics, and tendencies. Now I can inhabit this other being with a fairly high degree of self consciousness, most easily in the morning when I coast close to the border of waking. This is not lucid dreaming, because it is not this me—the one writing this page—who I experience myself as being. Perhaps a better phrase would be alternate self dreaming, or other dreaming. What’s most strikingly similar between the two states, however, is the experience of self consciousness while dreaming. Probably for this reason, lucid dream techniques serve to strengthen my experience of this self.

As I wrote in the Dreamflesh article, over the course of a few months in Fall 2006, I began to have the opposite of lucid dreams, my dream subjectivity popping to the fore of my waking mind. Now, here in Paris, I find myself self aware within that alternate consciousness often. A few days ago, my dreaming self reclined on her back looking up at a dazzlingly beautiful sky, radiant silver lines of cloud looping and furling around each other against a glowing, deep blue background. As I (she) laid there, I thought about my experience of self, of how comfortable my body felt, how appreciative I was of the beautiful scene in front of me. I also thought about my actual physical body lying in the same position in my bed, eyes closed. I wished that me could open my eyes and see the glorious show in the sky, but I knew that wasn’t possible. So the dream me stayed there looking up at the clouds, watching, for a long time.

Surfing the Edge, by Jennifer

The night of the Oneironauticum, I had a hard time falling asleep. Over the last couple weeks, I’ve been practicing Dream Yoga throughout the day, behind the wheel, at my desk, on the subway. As I sit and write now, I can easily visualize, and auralize, a glowing white om humming at my heart center. Even though the practice comes naturally now, however, it’s incredibly difficult to maintain mental focus as I slip closer and closer to the edge of sleep. At the point of final approach—the moment when I can feel myself relaxing into sleep—the focused image disintegrates and sound dissolves into the buzz of the border crossing. The meditation breaks apart and my efforts to grasp it again wake me back up.

Not surprisingly, the practice has overall yielded more success maintaining consciousness moving from dream into waking than the other way around. Keeping awareness slipping into sleep is much harder. The morning of the Oneironauticum, I surfaced close enough to awake to recognize that I felt Very thirsty. In the dream, I knew there was a glass of water on my bedside table. All I had to do was wake up and reach over and take a drink. But I didn’t want to wake up. I tried drinking a dream glass of water, but it didn’t work. If anything, it made it worse, like pouring parched dryness down my throat. I decided to try and sink back down into the dream and finally managed, but it took a while. Instead of a solid wall between sleep and awake, the boundary point has become more like a pane of glass that I can see through.

The night of the Oneironauticum, I tried my best to maintain the focus of the practice right up to the moment I fell asleep. As I approached the moment and felt my attention slipping away, I repeatedly jerked myself back awake. This reminded me of what often happens to me, and to many other dreamers, at the moment of becoming lucid in a dream: my attention focuses on the moment with a sudden, sharp intensity—imagine catching something interesting in the corner of your eye and turning quickly to look at it—and it wakes me up. Finally I let go and drifted off to sleep.

That night, my dreams were filled with controlled spaces and structure. The dream kept trying to reveal its architecture to me, breaking off into sub-sections of dream that provided support for the other parts, showing me foundational areas. In one dream, I found myself trapped in one area trying to get into another part of the dream that I could see, the feeling a bit like being stuck under ice. I yelled out, a thing I rarely do, and woke up the other dreamers in the room.

Remote Dream of Bees, by Cynthia Briggs

A few days before your last dream night, someone who knows about my dream thing sent me the link to this blog. Then I was surprised to read what you wrote yesterday about staying conscious as you fall asleep, because that's what I do almost every night!

On the night the dream group met, I did the meditation while I was falling asleep. I didn't practice it before, so maybe I wasn't that good at it. The best thing for me was the sound. While I fell asleep, I tried to imagine the sound in my heart. I even hummed out loud a few times so I could feel it.

For me, falling asleep is like getting really confused for a while, and then a dream starts. The night I did the meditation, I was concentrating on the sound and then I forget what I was doing. For a while, there was nothing like a story that makes sense. Instead I had a bunch of random thoughts and pictures in my head. This is what usually happens. It's like a tornado comes and breaks apart whatever's in my head and swirls it all around. Then once I fall asleep, it goes back to being a story, except now it's a dream.

I don't usually remember these dreams really well, just a little. I do remember that in this dream, I was walking through a field and there were lots of bees buzzing all over the place!

Dream Images, by lissa ivy

I dreamed of snow

The Minutes of the Third Oneironauticum, by Jennifer

Dreamers Erik Davis, lissa ivy tiegel, Xavi, and yours truly, Jennifer Dumpert, met at the habitat on Saturday, April 5. The morning after, Naropa Sabine swooped in to give his dream account.

Saturday evening, we discussed the Tibetan Dream Yoga meditation. Norbu’s instructions stress the importance of practicing whatever form of the meditation works, simplifying the practice if it keeps you awake, complexifying it if you fall asleep too easily. You fine tune the practice until it’s just the right amount of intensity to keep your attention focused right up to moment of falling asleep.

We discussed among us times that we’ve maintained awareness as we pass from waking consciousness into dream consciousness. We all had examples of once or twice when we’ve slipped directly from sleeping to awake without missing a beat, dream subjectivity becoming waking subjectivity without losing consciousness. Sometimes this takes the jarring form of false awakenings. Other times it’s a smooth surfacing, a gentle transition. Xavi and I had also both once or twice experienced passing directly from an awake state into dreaming consciousness. Clearly rarer and more difficult to achieve, this is the transition the practice promotes.

Before we went to sleep, we all practiced the meditation together, with the large white om lissa ivy brought sitting on the table in the middle of our group.

My apologies for taking so long to post these minutes; I’m writing from Tuscon, where I’m attending Toward a Science of Consciousness, a conference put on annually by the Center for Consciousness Studies. It’s taken a while to get this minutes out because I’ve been engrossed in the fascinating sessions. I started out the week by attending Stephen LaBerge’s workshop on lucid dreaming. I’ve taken workshops with Stephen before, and they’re always fascinating and enlightening. He talked for for a while about the dream state as a conscious state. The world is experienced, subjectivity exists. This gives rise to a very core question: what is consciousness? A perfect line of inquiry to consider after our Dream Yoga Oneironauticum.