The Next Oneironauticum is Saturday, March 28

The next Oneironauticum is on Saturday, March 28th. We'll be working with a Waterlilies Somalixir created by our pals at Al-Kemi. The formula combines several sorts of Waterlilies: Blue Nymphaea caerulea of Egypt, Mayan Nymphaea ampla, and Eurpoean Nymphaea alba.

Water lilies are thought to contain very pleasant psychotropic qualities (Some theories name Blue Nymphaea caerulea as the "lotus" eaten by the lotus eaters in Homer's Odyssey), and to promote vivid dreams.

Visit Al Kemi to purchase the Waterlilies Somalixir or learn more about it.

As always, remote participation is welcomed. To participate remotely in the Oneironauticum, simply enjoy your oneirogen wherever you’re sleeping on the night of Saturday the 28th and join us in the dream world. You may also, as always, participate by simply going to sleep with the intention to share in our group dreaming experience. Anyone who participates, either in person or remotely, is welcome to post their dream experiences to this blog. Contact us if you're interested.

Sweet Dreams!

Alien Visitor, by Vibrata

The alien visitor dream is what I remember most vividly. It was kind of frightening at first, then turned out much differently.

An alien was being hunted. It (or maybe “he”?) had tremendous powers to defend himself. The people chasing him were people I knew, though I’m not recalling who exactly. They were in a large warehouse and the alien could hide practically in plain site. His persecutors were trying to use guns and explosives to kill him, but in the end, he was more powerful. I don’t recall if he killed anyone. I do remember being very afraid to look directly at him. (at times in the dream, I was the alien. At other times, I was his ally, and an observer.)

The dream took a turn when the alien prepared to make his exit from our world. He had come to the conclusion that this was a hostile place, and was appalled by the way women are treated here. He gave a farewell statement, and it won him several friends, me being one of them. He prepared to leave.

I don’t have a clear picture of what he looked like, just that he was lizard-like, with very bizarre eyes. At one point I do remember embracing him and feeling a deep love. I was among several people wishing goodbye to him, knowing we’d never see each other again. In spite of the prosecution and hatred he experienced, he felt a great love in return, and compassion.

This was a comparatively vivid dreamspace than I’ve been used to of late and what stood out for me was the depth of emotions and the clarity with which I was perceiving them, as well as the distinctly “philosophical” flavor to the content of the dreams.

Adventure in a City with Canals, remote dream by Gnat

In a giant cavern, fed by rivers, or maybe an underground city with canals. The action is primarily in one small section of a turning basin in a canal (widened to allow ships to pass/turn etc). There are docks sticking out into the water, lots of cranes for raising things, and people around but not crazy busy. And there is no sky above, just darkness, but not night.

There is a navy ship of some type with little other navy ships, the captain is addressing a gathering of people/navy crew in smaller boats and two navy sailors pretend to be dolphins and leap up out of the water to salute him.

To get away I, floating in the water, grab the end of a very fast kayak like boat with a motor, a bit worried about the engine and once he gets going my finger gets caught in an opening and I can't let go, we roar past my destination and finally I worm free and let go, but don't stop very well and have to swim against my momentum.

At some point I am on sort of a street corner, as if in NYC where they do construction and have a canopy of scaffolding, but this is over water, and the "sidewalk" is some type of floating carpet on the water.

I have to cross one section that is missing carpet so I clamber up onto the scaffolding (nervous for some reason? something in the water, animals?). While up on the platform I realize there is an image on the carpet.

Sort of a cartoon of a pumpkin creature/sprite, a flame/ice creature/ sprite and some other cutesy character/thing, and they're all in a box.

Someone says "Hey, look at those other symbols", it is some friend of mine and we have been trying to figure something out about the city, and the symbols next to the characters at the bottom right are three ladders with bulges in them at various points and....I can't see them now but there were more.

Then suddenly in the vacant lot to our right (really more of an alley of trash, not water this time), suddenly the three creatures appear in a box, alive now, but sort of sitting in a broken tv case or something.

Dying then Fading Away, remote dream by Bill

Along with one other man, I was a war hero who was assassinated and it was being covered up. We were shot during a presentation of some medal of bravery, in front of an audience. I spent the majority of the dream as a fading, clumsy ghost.

There were some uncomfortable details, like I visited (as a ghost) the guy who was writing my obituary for the newspaper and it was all wrong, it was just boilerplate stuff, and I was screaming at him that my middle name was not Donald, I did not have any brothers, etc but it didn’t matter, my obit was going to press completely wrong.

Worst was the fact that it was a political assassination and a cover up. No way that they were about to look for the guy who killed me, everyone who witnessed the shooting was in on it. I was merely being made to go away, but as a war hero. One upside was that I got to be buried in some fancy military cemetery in a really good-looking uniform and there was all this pomp around it, but as the dream went on, I was fading from existence and it was very, very sad and confusing.

Another interesting detail is that there are indeed all these “ghost enablers” among us here and now. Much like Buddhists with their pet hungry ghosts, the enablers do things like spill food and perform other types of general littering in order to feed the ghosts, because we cannot open containers, boxes, doors, jars, etc. We can only eat off the ground and without using our hands. The enablers see ghosts in places like supermarkets or restaurants and then deliberately spill food so we can eat. Seems like ghosts are sort of like clumsy pigeons.

It seems comic now, but it was really really uncomfortable, largely because I was fading away. I figured that the fade is in relation to how present you are in folks’ thoughts. The less people that are thinking about you, the more you fade therefore you become less visible to the enablers and get less food, in short the rest of eternity is spent becoming more confused and befuddled, aggravated, hungry, opaque, etc. unless you are like Princess Diana or Adolf Hitler or John Lennon or someone big like that, who gets fed well because they are being thought of all the time by at least someone.

Swashbuckling, by Dean

The night we took the Somalixir, at around 2am, I got a call from Russia that woke me up, but what's weird about that is that the phone was turned off upstairs and I could barely hear the downstairs phone.

At the time, I was dreaming that I was some kind of swashbuckler (dressed in, I think, 16th century blue ruffles and tights) and leaping huge distances around a castle with my rapier while fighting the enemies of the king. I felt like I was in a late 1950's MGM production, laughing and thrusting away merrily with my sword. It was the nearest thing to a flying dream I'd had in years, and I think I would have gotten into flying if the call didn't come.

I heard the far away phone in my dream and thought, oh, that's probably Lesley, I should probably get it, and surfaced through SO MUCH LAYERED DREAMSTUFF. I could barely hold the conversation when I got to the phone. Then I easily slipped back into sleeping/dreaming again, for more nuanced and detailed adventures. For me the Somalixir is also a sleep aid. Kind of like melatonin but it feels much nicer to me. I'm generally such a light sleeper, and I find it hard to get back to sleep once I wake up in the night, but last night I woke from dreams a few times with very detailed memory and went back under again in what seems to me to have been only a matter of minutes. I woke up feeling better rested than I had in a while.

Finding Light Again, by Erik

I generally do not remember my dreams, but with the Dreamtime Somalixir I recalled many fragments of many dreams, a few accompanied by quite vivid images. There was a fair amount of emotional turmoil in the dreams, with other people being upset and myself being a bit torn in different directions, but it was not a typical anxiety dream, more like a deeply emotional one where I was really seeing and feeling peoples pain, the wounded animals inside our human challenges

At one point I kept going to suck more nitrous oxide, even though my balloon kept breaking, and though I don't remember getting particularly high, drugs in dreams are often signs of multiple dimensions and forms of consciousness.

The most vivid and charming part of my dreams was a scene where I was stumbling down a forest path in dusk’s deepening shade. I was shod only in white sweat socks, and as the light dwindled and the damp chill grew I felt an urgent call to return to the safety of the well-lit town above. But I continued plunging into the gloom, until I made a turn to the side and stumbled down into a radiant meadow. The sun was shining, full and warm, and I realized I still had some glorious moments to savor in the late light of day.

animate, inanimate, and rice pudding, by Jennifer

The entire night after I took the Dreamtime Somalixir felt like a dreamtime carnival. I woke rested, but with the sense that I’d traveled far and had days of adventure.

Early in the night, I received a lesson on the basic nature of the world. Everything can be divided into two categories, I was instructed: inanimate things (like rocks) and animate things, divided into three sub categories, the first of which was black birds. The dream gave me no information about the other categories.

Throughout the rest of the night, I kept dreaming further details about how to understand the inanimate things. The details appeared as lessons but without a teacher. I was simply made to understand things, with the assistance of illustrations and facts. The way to measure inanimate things, I learned, was to displace them in water. There was also a diagram of a mountain that kept reappearing in subsequent dreams, each time with different sections in detail or dotted line with information that told me some new thing: its age, varying degrees of slope, kinds of rock in each strata.

I must have had at least a dozen dreams that night. The weirdest thing, though, was that I kept thinking I was awake then I would start to think about something and the thought would expand out into a dream. Early in the morning, I had woken up, or so I thought, and as I laid in bed I remembered the rice pudding we’d seen on a menu that day but hadn’t ordered. Then there was a spoonful of rice pudding and it began to glow and vibrate, and, finally, to emanate the nature of rice pudding-ness out into the universe. Several other times throughout the night, I remembered that first dream and wondered about the birds, then the waking thought became a dream. One time, birds filled the bedroom, squawking loudly so I feared they’d wake Erik up. Another time, my mind followed a bird from my mind out the window and into the sky.

The Dreamtime Somalixir is supposed to be useful for promoting lucid dreams. Its effect on me was similar but slightly different: instead of causing me to become conscious in my dreams, it brought my conscious mind to fore such that I thought I was awake until some strange occurrence made me realize I was dreaming.

Minutes of the February Oneironauticum, by Jennifer

After some complex logistical issues were conquered, the February Oneironauticum included dreamers Erik Davis, Vibrata Chromodoris, David Shamanik, lissa ivy tiegel, Dean Mermell, Jacob Nasim, Juliana Meowth, and yours truly, Jennifer Dumpert.

Most of us found the Dreamtime Somalixir very powerful. Several of us had dreams that included birds or flying. When I reported this to our pals at Al Kemi, who created the Somalixir, they told me that one of the ingredients, Wild Red Asparagus, is used by Siberian and Chinese shamans to fly & have flying dreams. A few of us also looped through conscious states and dream more readily than we normally do, with a sense of continuity from one dream to the next. We generally agreed that in addition to promoting vivid dreams, the Somalixir worked as a sleep aid; mostly we all woke feeling particularly refreshed.

Interestingly, some remote participants who joined us by holding the intention to dream together but who did not take the oneirogen also had very intense dreams.