Oneironauticum Road Show June 12 and 14

On the nights of Friday and Saturday, June 13/14, I'll be joining Erik Davis, Dale and Laura Pendell, and David Presti for Visionary Practice, a retreat that addresses ritual and the reshaping of consciousness (see the Ojai Foundation website). As part of this event, I'll be leading a special session of the Oneironauticum.

As part of this special session, participants in the event in Ojai will be invited to partake of the herb Calea zacatechichi, a plant used by indigenous peoples in the Mexican state of Oaxaca for the purposes of oneiromancy, a form of divination based on dreams. In some Mesoamerican cultures, people believe that dreams happen in realms beyond those we consciously perceive and that the contents of dreams can convey meaningful messages or prophecy. The herb also induces lucid dreaming.

Calea zacatechichi, a member of the sunflower family, grows from central Mexico south to Costa Rica. The leaves are dried and made into a very bitter infusion. On both Friday and Saturday night, participants who choose to will explore the realm of dreams as visionary experience, using Calea zacatechichi as an ally.

As always, remote participation in the Oneironauticum is encouraged. Unlike our the oneirogens we usually select, however, Calea zacatechichi may be difficult to find. You can order it online from a large number of herb vending websites, and more exotic health food stores may stock it on their shelves. If you don't acquire the herb, however, feel free to join the group simply by setting your intention to participate in the Oneironauticum either on Friday, June 13, or Saturday, June 14. Or both! 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.

Murky Memories, a Lucid Flight, by Jennifer

For the most recent Oneironauticum, I took 4g of Melatonin, 200 mg of B-6 and 470 mg of Valerian. As was the common experience, my memories of movements through dream realms were uncharacteristically vague, though I woke sure that I'd dreamed epically and constantly all night. I had the sense of having spent much more of the night in dream space than usual, and less in deep sleep. Throughout the night, I often rose to the surface of consciousness, surfing that border just between asleep and awake. This happens often, but usually mostly in the morning during the few hours before I fully wake up.

Most of the dream snippets I remembered involved some sort of substance--sometimes a magic brew, though I think sometimes the form it took was unclear--that lots of people wanted. For some reason, it was important to share this substance. A sort of mystical bond or experience would result from group ingestion.

Several times during the night, I felt lucidity coming on. I’m usually alerted to this onset by a tingling sensation, excitement rising in my dream mind as I begin to recognize the appearance of the subject writing these words right now. Each time, however, the arrival of this me brought along too much waking consciousness (not surprising, really) and I came out of the dream.

Soon after sunrise, however (after one of my many brief wakings), I became fully lucid. I did the first thing that most people do: fly up into the air. I soared high above a football game, enjoying the sensation of swooping and banking. I could see the players on the field far below, and knew people must be amazed to see me flying through the air. Then the scene below me began to shift and I knew I was losing lucidity. I attempted to stay lucid by concentrating on the concretenss of my surroundings, a trick I learned from Stephen LaBerge during one of the workshops I’ve taken with him. It sort of worked, but then I looked down at what had become the shore of a vast lake beneath me and saw two badgers swimming to shore supporting a man and a woman who’d almost drowned in the water. (Yes, I know that badgers are not aquatic.) I knew I had to go help them and flew down. As I extended my hand to the badger’s paw to help it out of the water, the lucidity fled though the dream continued.

Minutes of the May Oneironauticum, by Jennifer

Dreamers Erik Davis, Vibrata Chromodoris, David Shamanik, Dean Mermell, Jacob Nasim, Christy Silness, Emily Butterfly, feline Marion, and yours truly, Jennifer Dumpert, met at the habitat on Saturday, May 31.

Amongst us all, we varied the relative amounts of B-6, Melatonin, and Valerian we took, from 3-5 g of Melatonin, 100-200 mg of B-6 and 470-940 mg of Valerian.

Several of our number were kept awake by busy minds for some time after bedding down. About half of us experienced a high degree of hypnogogia. A word derived from the Greek, like Oneironauticum (why are so many sleep related words of Greek origin?), hypnogogia comes from hypnos (sleep) and agogos (leading in). Hypnogogic images are those weird half hallucinations you experience as you slip into slumber, right on the border between asleep and awake.

Almost all of us reported a full night of constant, vivid dreaming. Mysteriously, however—considering the group, people who regularly clearly remember several dreams a night—most of us had extremely vague recollections of what had actually happened during these dreams. Most of us had woken during the night with a dream narrative in the mind, but by morning most of these had faded into unfixed images or snippets of story.

Over champagne brunch, we visited some of these tidbits, including various dream visitations by a beaver, a badger, and a squirrel. In the midst of a general conversation, someone said something that brought forward the memory of a chunk of dream narrative for someone else. We set to a task of coining a word for when something during the day triggers a dream memory. We considered dream flash, dream trigger, and oneiromnemonic.