The Next Oneironauticum is Saturday, September 27

The next Oneironauticum, is next Saturday September 27. For this session, we'll work with olfactory oneirogens (dream inducing substances). Folk remedies have long included herb stuffed pillows, used for curing headaches, colds, and other minor ailments. From this tradition, we also get the dream pillow, filled with flowers and herbs that hold a scent known to promote vivid dreams. As many variations exist on these pillows as there were grandmothers making them, but the most frequently used oneirogens include lavender, rose, mugwort, and chamomile.

Before sleeping, we'll make our own dream pillows using fresh herbs and essential oils to whatever proportion most suits each of us. As always, remote participation is welcomed. To participate remotely in the Oneironauticum, make your own pillow at home, or dab a scent onto something to be placed on your pillow. You may also, as always, participate by simply going to sleep with the intention to join us in our group dreaming experience. Anyone who participates, either in person or remotely, is welcome to post their dream experiences to this site. Contact us if you're interested.

Sweet Dreams

Eight Legged Elephant, by Vibrata

This turned out to be an extraordinary night of dreams, rich in detail and emotion. Dale Pendell’s calea zacatechichi liqueur was prominently effective right from the start, with a period of hypnagogic shopping through rows and rows of little items—bottles of pills mutating into little stuffed toys, all in great quantity and detail. I realized as I was experiencing this that the imagery may have been influenced by my day’s trip the grocery store. Once again, I’m reminded of the theory of the dream state as the brain’s way of processing memories.

The night’s dreaming was broken up by a brief trip to the bathroom (a lot of fluids before bedtime) and the Galantamine dosing. Each time I woke, I was reminded of the Eight Legged Elephant, an experience from the dream in the first period of sleep, after the calea. The imagery was so rich that I made my way through in all in a state of awe and each time I awoke, I was filled with excitement to have experienced it.

I was surrounded by creatures of all sorts, known and unknown. My cat Bohdi was there, but so was this strange elephant that was having a hard time getting a standing position because it had so many legs. I watched his handlers trying to help him up. The surroundings were rich in activity, sometimes distracting. The cats had been fighting and I noticed bloody gouges on their bellies.

There was a gathering, a party and a lot of consumption of intoxicants. We were talking about various substances, and there were a lot of people around, and in the confusion one girl took a bottle of ayahuasca that was sitting there and downed the whole thing. We were pretty concerned for her as she was about to leave for home and though she said she felt fine, we knew it wouldn’t be for long. I explained to her what she had ingested to try and prepare her for her journey.

My friend Seth paid a visit with a very strange device he had invented, some sort of teleportation-time-travel-helmet-telephone-thing. I was surprised and excited to see him. Only his head appeared, and I could hear his voice.

After the Galantamine, the scene was like a party with strangers in costumes and music and laughter. I had deep and emotional conversations with people. One woman and I talked with a puppet. The puppet seemed to upset her. I asked her questions about her feelings about the puppet and had an empathetic wave come p of deep childhood delight and joy, yet I could sense that she had a feeling of loss. I explained that I still knew how to be a child and that it was possible for her too.

I suppose that defines the difference between the first periods of my dreaming, with the calea, and the second part, with the Galantamine, was the depth of emotional and psychological responses. Dale’s brew produced a prolonged deluge of sensual imagery, inducing awe and excitement. The Galantamine dreaming was notably more mental, with thoughtful processing.

Divination Dream, by Christine

My intention this night was to dream for the purpose of divining. I went to bed hoping for some sort of prophecy. Unfortunately, I was very tired when I went to bed after an active day, which for me, can be the worst for getting good dreams. I went to bed a cross between optimistic and a little self-critical, not sure what to expect, hoping to get something, and wishing that I had slept more the night before so my chance of getting a grand vision would be maximized.

I had one dream during the divining part of the evening. A context for this dream is that I have spent a long time in my life studying the Tarot, a popular tool for future seeing, and my first deck was the Ryder Waite. These cards have a particular border around the central image for many of the cards cards, and the colors are notable in how they contrast one another.

In my dream, the general landscape was somewhere between a Ryder Waite card and a real life winter scene. It was midnight and a light snow was falling. The snow on the ground was bright. On it, lay a Reindeer. Living, breathing, lying on it's left side. I could only see it's hind legs and the back of it's body, but I knew it was a Reindeer. Keeping it in focus was a frame that was suspended in air, framing the Reindeer in the snow, with the dark sky behind it. This frame borrowed it's aesthetic from the Ryder Waite tarot, so what was on this "card" was one Reindeer, lying on it's side. Hmmm...

The symbols I derived from the dream are that it was a card representing the element earth and the physical world. It also appears significant that the time of day is night in the the animal pictured appeared to be in a state of deep dreaming. I looked up Reindeer to find information on their symbolic meaning. This was the more interesting thing that I found. "...persistence, and resoluteness, and an interpretation from a teacher in the Vajrayana Buddhist tradition who wrote, 'Deer are shy by nature, and their presence in a landscape represents a dimension where fear is unknown."' I've heard that Reindeer antlers have been used for divining. Many times since our dream night I have gone back in my mind to the image of that Reindeer, sleeping soundly in the midnight snow and I feel my body relax as I watch this animal expand and then sink into the ground with each cycle of breath. I wonder what he is dreaming about.

Early in the morning I had many dream fragments which stand out. I suppose if I wanted to, at the time, I could have woven them into a narrative, but I didn't and now, they stand on their own.

• getting fish on College Avenue during the Christmas holiday. I am one of the few people out and it feels peaceful and quiet outside.
• drinking soda and wondering where I got it.
• a dog
• climbing through a crack in a wall to get out of the building where I was
• preparing for a group recital
• a rainy day

Rolling Stones' New Bass Player, remote dream by Bill

I dreamt that I was chosen to play bass for the Rolling Stones, sort of a live audition thing.

The key elements were being mysteriously picked up in a limo, being poorly dressed, and puttering about on a private jet.

I was wearing a pair of grey levi's and a button-up plaid shirt tucked in. I looked like I was a regular guy whose wife dressed him with whatever was on sale at Mervyn's, and of course this contrasted with the Stones' own faboo sense of style, but no-one was picking on me or anything.

I remember being in the limo (remember that I have a history of Stones/Jagger dreams, and this is the third or so that involves an anonymous limo ride to destiny) and being with 2 guys who had picked me up, they were friendly/winkey but elusive like, "we'll let you know what is going on shortly, my friend" and eventually we get to the airport. In fact the limo-at-airport was a hoot, because we were following the standard over-road signs ie: "Main Terminal - United" "All Departures" or a dedicated lane Iʼd never noticed before for "Rolling Stones Jet" and as we are driving the limo directly out to the tarmack they tell me "OK, it's like this: Mick and Keith saw you play bass on youtube and they wanted to try you out for some shows over in Asia, and that is all we know. you should be able to handle it just fine, kid"

We drove right up to the Stones' private jet and I boarded like one does at the burbank airport, no tunnel just up the stairs. Once on board it was what you'd imagine of a private rock 'n' roll jet, smoking clearly permitted and little party enclaves all around, wide seats, scantily-clad stewardess with great champagne, beds, drapes, etc. Lots of rock n' roll-looking businessmen talking to each other. Really great! It seemed to be about 1976 or 77, style-wise.

The two guys who had been driving me sorta said 'well kid, you're on your own now, have a good time, we've packed your black fender bass over there for you and we'll deal with getting you some new clothes once we land" and then during the flight, I was sorta nervous, sitting there wondering who to talk to, and I decided to listen to some music from my bag. I was fumbling about, when all of the sudden Keith Richards comes over and is like "well, you must be Bill the bass player! how do you do, mate! I'm Keith, what sort of tunes you got there for us?" and - this I remember VERY CLEARLY - I had a floppy disc of the Replacements "Let It Be" LP, professionally marketed as a retail format, as there were LPs, CDs, cassettes, 8-tracks, there were also floppy discs.

Turns out that Keith was a HUGE Replacements fan, so we sorta sat there for a bit listening to the disc, smoking cigarettes and discussing rock music.

Mick joined us and I got an introduction, but he was a bit aloof; very much like "oh Bill, right. well, welcome lad'

He asked if I had rehearsed any of the new music for the show I was to be playing tomorrow with them in Japan, and then it hit me: I had no fucking clue what songs we were going to be playing and beyond partying with them on the plane, I had no opportunity to learn anything. no rehearsal time, no sleep time, nothing.

I remember being not worried about it though, since I had heard so many of Bill Wyman's mistakes over the years. I knew that the bass could be a bit loose, but them's big shoes to fill, y'dig?

Dream in the San Francisco Hills, remote account by Nat

Starts with myself, and Fur and Erik and Vivek and someone else driving up into the hollywood hills except transfered to san francisco and made much more strangely rural. Actually it looked a lot like pismo. We drive around and eventualy end up parking near a steep grassy hill next to stores that looks sort of Japanese (the whole place, streetsigns etc). And we start to walk up a steep steep path and into a super green lush japanese forest where the path winds around and small structures hide in the shadows.

At one point we have to jump 2 feet over a stream from one old building/dock to the next and I notice that the whole house is filled with something strange and it scares me so I trip and land on my chest and slide a bit backwards towards the water but get up and am fine.

At one point three black cranes pas us going the other way in a single file line and we move to let them past.

Minutes later three tall men in black overcoats pass us going in the direction we are and we move over for them too.

And somehow I think they are the same three creatures.

We finally get to the tiny Japanese restraunt in the woods we've been heading towards and they're upset we're missing two members of our reservation and instead of paying a big fee for each missing person we've taken three random people who wanted to eat but didn't have reservations and they sit with us.

The dinner is very involved but it has faded from my memory. One woman with us drank tons of sake and when I looked over at the bar she was almost naked but looked like a fat wrinkled old man with a loin cloth on. I ate these little crunchy fatty things that later when I looked at them looked like giant bugs, but then like candy.

The guy serving us was moving to Chicago to teach inner city kids how to work with Tax Software, and Business Software and he was going to be in Pilsen but he said there were "windmills nearby" and he would be at 19th street and Bourbonais but he thought 19200 was 19th, when actually its 192nd. And that puts him deep in the industrial area. So we looked at Fur's iphone and the sattelite photo showed it was a weird harbor/residential/industrial area with some oil wells and maybe windmills on a spit of land that was only a few blocks wide and looked like someplace in Jersey.

Then I woke up.

Complex Narratives and Unexpected Visitors, by Jennifer

During the first part of the night, after drinking the delicious calea zacatechichi liqueur, I had a very complex, detailed dream. Three different dream narratives of more or less the same string of events all ran simultaneously, or else they went back and forth. In the first one, I left the place where we’d conducted Oneironauticum, a small wooden house at the end of a long rural road. I started to walk home, realizing I was barefoot and this might be problematic (a common experience in my dreams). Eventually the road turned onto a busier, more urban stretch. I passed through a large, rusted, part boat, part old market, with stalls where people sold various things. I edged along a filthy, crumbly bit of sidewalk by the side of an ancient swimming pool.

In the second narrative, several of us got in a truck and drove away from the wooden house, that was also a bar where people asked us questions about how the Oneironauticum had gone. The truck rounded the corner from the rural road to the more urban one. We stopped at a small store, the kind that’s attached to a gas station and only sells nasty food in packages. From the parallel dream, I knew the old market lay further down the road, so I urged the group to drive there to find food.

The third narrative started at the end of the rural road. To get back to the city, I boarded a large boat, like an ocean liner. We traveled up the coast, passing the decrepit old market on the left. I saw San Francisco in the distance. Then a large, dark cloud suddenly appeared from the direction of the city. Everyone else ran for cover but I stood on the deck as the cloud surrounded me.

After waking at 5:00 to take the Galantamine, I dreamed of us, in the space where we slept. We’d all woken up some time around the middle of the night and several dreamers participating in the Oneironauticum (in the dream, many more than actually slept in the space) had decided to go home. Many other people had arrived, however, wanting to participate. A few different crowds of people wanting to join milled around the space; they’d all heard about the Oneironauticum and thought it sounded cool. It seemed to me, however, that they might think it was a kind of hip hop event instead of a phenomenological dream group.

Minutes of the August Oneironauticum, by Jennifer

In attendance at the August 16 Oneironauticum were dreamers Vibrata Chromodoris, David Shamanik, lissa ivy tiegel, Geneva Bumb Shanti, Christine Benvenuto, and yours truly, Jennifer Dumpert.

During the evening, before sleeping, we discussed dream states, as we so often do. Thanks to Jeff Warren’s excellent book Head Trip, I’ve recently been introduced to mind state called Hypnopompia, the mirror twin of hypnagogia. I thought the two were the same state, both hypnagogic states bookending either end of sleep. But in fact, where hynpagogia refers to the onset of sleep, when we drift through phases of dream imagery (see my previous post, hypnagogic bliss), hypnopompia refers to the first stage of waking, when our recently dreaming minds try to make sense of reality. Probably my favorite state of being, hypopompia—for those of us who experience it strongly—feels a little bit like the confusion of being born again every day.

For the evening’s oneirogen, we enjoyed leftovers. We began with the calea zacatechichi liqueur Dale Pendell made for the Oneironauticum held during a weekend retreat at the Ojai Foundation called Visionary Practice: Ritual and Reshaping Consciousness, led by Erik Davis, Dale and Laura Pendell, David Presti, and yours truly. The Each dreamer started out with a small glass, and then, well, it was so yummy that we all had another. In the end, we drank the bottle (in fairness, it was a small bottle). Then we went to bed. At 5:00 a.m., we woke and each took 4mg galantamine, an extract of Lycoris radiata (Red Spider Lily).

Our experiences with each substance accorded with those in past Oneironautica. The calea zacatechichi caused most of us to dream of each other, or to feel as if we or someone else in the group had woken up and was moving around the room. The calea evoked emotional responses. Once we took the Galantamine, however, our dreams became more vivid, very detailed and clear, mentally sharp.

If you're interested in reading past posts about these oneirogens, see the Galantamine archive, the June Oneironauticum road show invite, the minutes, and my account.