The Next Oneironauticum is Saturday, April 25

The next Oneironauticum is on Saturday, April 25th. For this session, we’ll be working with anointing oil. In ancient medical practices, oils infused with herbal remedies were smeared on the skin, allowing the recipient to absorb healing properties. Later, anointing became a form of consecration. Today, anointing oils are often used to promote dreams.

Those of us sleeping in the same space will each craft our own individual anointing oil from olive oil combined with essential oils. We will choose which oils we use in varying proportions to suit our specific dream intentions. Remote participants can also mix their own oils. Create a blend that’s 10 to 15 percent essential oil and 85 to 90 percent olive oil. As a guideline, 20 drops of essential oil in a third of an ounce of olive oil will achieve a proportion of 10% essential oil. Just before bed, rub a small amount of the oil into your temples and on your chest or throat.

We’ll craft our anointing oil from high quality olive oil and essential oils with oneirogenic properties or traditionally used for anointing:

• Myrrh: The principal ingredient in Biblical holy anointing oil, acts as a sedative, believed by some to promote astral travel.
• Sandalwood: A traditional anointing oil ingredient, induces calm, alert, meditative states. Promotes heightened sensuality.
• Sage: Good for treating insomnia, increases self awareness.
• Mugwort: Promotes visionary, psychedelic dreams. Used to induce lucid dreams.
• Roman Chamomille: Calms sleep, acts as a sedative. Counteracts nightmares.
• Lavender: Increases alpha waves and promotes tranquil, calm dreams.
• Rose: Works as an antidepressant, promotes happy, pleasant dreams.

You can also purchase dream anointing oils from well stocked vendors of herbal products or online. Check out Alchemy Works’ dream oil or Mountain Spirit’s dream oil.

As always, remote participation in Oneironauticum is welcomed. To participate remotely, anoint yourself with your dream oil wherever you’re sleeping on the night of Saturday the 25th and join us in the dream world. You may also 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 on this blog. If you’re interested, contact us.

Blue Face Tattoo and Handwriting Trickiness, by Lena

I dreamed of being at a party in our actual physical location, with the same group of us who were sleeping at Dean's for Oneironauticum. A huge, bulky guy with an incredibly vivid blue face tattoo, where his entire face was the blue color, was there in addition to all of the rest of us. Everybody seemed to know him; he was quite a happy, friendly guy. Juliana had painted her face the same vibrant blue in some sort of solidarity with him, since she was his good friend.

I kept waking up and writing down my dreams. I could see the handwriting clearly, not like my usual attempts to read in dreams which rarely succeed, due to the letters moving around or morphing. Here it was all clearly readable, but each successive dream was written down in a different handwriting --one dream in small, precise print, the next dream in curly cursive, the next in a sloppy expansive hand -- none of which were my own handwriting in waking life.

When I actually woke up in the morning, I sincerely thought I would have a bunch of dreams written down, but when I opened my notebook, it was blank.

Vivid, Beautiful Perceptions, by Dean

I walked at night down a boardwalk or pier that stood only a few inches above the water line. Candles along the sides of the pier reflected in the water, shimmering and vivid. The sounds of the waves slapping against the wood echoed gently, and a golden light suffused the entire scene. I could see and hear everything totally clearly. Everything felt totally peaceful.

In slow motion, I walked along the pier looking for a house boat, but I was so engrossed in the beauty of the situation that the goal didn't really matter.

Images from the Oneironauticum, by lissa ivy

Dean's Disassembled Piano
Hands and Tea
Stalking Brunch Fruit

Vehicles, remote dream by Nat

In Seattle, visiting my posse, a Hasidic Jew plays chess with a giant man on a lawn covered in moss up a side street. We are meeting in a hotel/office building. I'm dropping off t-shirts for the bar I work at. People talk of the new Chinese restaurant in the mall. We go by, it’s very bad but friendly and open looking.

My boss from the Hideout picks me up at the airport in the driving rain in a tiny convertible chitty chitty bang bang looking car towing a giant flatbed. Cabs don't pick me up. But the airport is in the middle of nowhere, dark, and tiny. The plane/rocket starts with a cough of a rocket engine and fire. Dawn arrives.

I'm riding my motorcycle, but by the end of the trip I'm in my car. I'm obsessed about cleaning my very dirty glasses but they are a bit broken so I use little onions to fix them. I miss the turn in my car while falling asleep and end up in Cleveland, an hour away, and have to drive home again. A 15 minute trip turned into three hours I think sadly. And me falling asleep...

Dream Body/Physical Body, by Jennifer

The Waterlilies somalixir produced physically tangible effects on my dreams.

During the earlier part of the night, I dreamed a tall, thin man with dark curly hair in a pony tail and a pink seersucker shirt. He complained to me that the Somalixir didn’t actually do anything. I showed him that if I loosened my jaw a little, it would vibrate rapidly back and forth, clearly an effect of the somalixir.

In a later dream, Erik and I rode in the back of a bicycle rickshaw driven by an old Hispanic man, our guide in a foreign country. He carried a bird feeder made from a hollowed out piece of bamboo that hung from a rod meant to be stuck in the ground. I said I wanted to buy one and he directed me to a very run down, third world-looking supermarket. That part of the dream was in Spanish; he called the bird house an ave casa, the literal translation, though I don’t know if that’s what it’s actually called.

In the market, I went to use the bathroom. When I finished and tried to stand up, I could only rise slightly, not enough to pull my pants back up. I realized that my physical body was lying in bed spooned against Erik, my knees bent in against his, and that I wouldn’t be able to stand up straight in the dream without also straightening out my physical body and waking him up.

Since I knew it was a dream and I didn’t want to disturb Erik, I stayed half standing, dream and physical bodies both bent into the same shape, and started to read a magazine I saw lying there. In it, Micah—one of the alchemists who created our Somalixir—had placed an ad for her and my going away party.

Through a small window, I saw one of the store employees peering at me standing awkwardly with my pants around my knees. Then, though I knew it would wake Erik up, I stood up to pull my pants back on. As I did that, I correspondingly stretched out my physical body, waking up both Erik and me in the process.

crocodiles and butterflies, remote dream by Michael

My girlfriend and I were living in London in a ramshackle place with the bathtub down a ravine where a highly variable creek flowed through. Aside from the inconvenience, a very large crocodile occasionally appeared down there and would lay across our tub (being many times too large to lay in it) and make bellowing noises. I built a door that kept him out when we wanted to bathe, but we couldn't keep it closed too long or the pressure from the creek would push it in.

The four kittens we had were more problematic, as they liked to go down by the creek and play (suspicious, as they were so tiny as to be barely able to walk). My girlfriend solved that by dumping a bunch of litter in a closet and almost burying them in it. No idea why that worked, other than that it seemed to put them in an immobilized stupor. Any time we pulled the kittens out of the litter to play with them, dozens of tiny Monarch butterflies would burst up out of the mess and the kittens, once de-stupored, would race around trying to catch them, but not even coming close.

Minutes of the March Oneironauticum, by Jennifer

Participating in person for the March Oneironauticum were dreamers Erik, lissa ivy, Dean, Juliana, Stacy, Lena, Chreos, David, Yvette, and yours truly, Jennifer.

We gathered at Dean’s house in Bernal Heights between 10:00 and 11:00 where we spent the first hours discussing trends we see in our dreams. Both Lena and I described some of the places we revisit in dreams though we’ve never seen those places in waking reality. Chreos talked about a period of spontaneous lucid dreaming he’d experienced in his youth. Juliana mentioned her prophetic dreams. David questioned whether he actually dreamed in color. Several of us had shared the experience of being able to jump long distances, not quite flying but close, as well a repeated anxiety dream of learning we hadn’t actually finished high school. We also shared our most frightening dreams: Erik’s gray alien, Dean’s pure dread, my lunging creature in the closet.

Around midnight, we took the Waterlilies Somalixir and went to bed. Over the last months, as we’ve been working with the spagyrics sent to us by our pals at Al Kemi, several of us have found we have better results with 5 – 6 drops instead of the 1 – 3 recommended dosage. In the morning, we shared our dream experiences over brunch.

The strongest common effect involved powerful physical sensations. In one of my dreams, I became acutely aware of the actual position of my body in the bed where I slept. The movement of my dream body became inhibited by the posture of my physical body. Dean walked down a pier in slow motion with firelight beautifully reflected on the water and the sound of waves lapping against the wood. Erik listened to excellent music, including some reggae. Juliana had music too, the same soundtrack that often accompanies her Oneironauticum experiences, “The F Word”, by Sound Tribe Sector 9. Lena dreamed colors, vivid blues. David also dreamed blue, thinking to himself in the dream “Oh, I guess I do dream in color!”