The Next Oneironauticum is Saturday, May 30

The next Oneironauticum is on Saturday, May 30th. For this session, we’ll be working with nicotine patches. Advanced oneironauts swear by the effectiveness of patches to promote vivid and sometimes also lucid dreams. In fact, the packaging of the patches I bought lists vivid dreams as a side effect, and instructs the user to remove the patch at night and apply a new one in the morning if vivid dreaming becomes overwhelming.

Patches come in varying strength and should be applied according to your tolerance for nicotine. Stronger patches produce stronger effects, but may also interfere with your ability to sleep or cause nausea. If you’re very sensitive to nicotine, as I am, you may want to get a weaker patch and cut it into halves or quarters.

Because I’ll be in Japan, all participation in this Oneironauticum will be remote. To participate remotely, apply your patch on the night of Saturday the 30th and join us in the dream world. You may also participate by simply going to sleep with the intentionto share in our group dreaming experience. Anyone who participates is welcome to post their dream experiences on this blog. If you’re interested, contact us.

Conversation, Memory, Land. Remote dream by Michael Rynne

I am staying at my family house. Johnny Rotten is there wearing some quite conservative clothing. I am delighted to see him and have a lot of experiences to relate to him. He listens though I have a feeling that I am talking too much. I tell him that it is interesting that he is there because earlier in the day John Lydon (his real name ) was here also. He tells me that the name is pronounced Lay-den not Lie-don.

Later I am staying with friends in a different area. I have an old Citroen 2Cv which is parked among trees. I leave the house and walk out into the neighborhood. I suddenly recognize that I am in a neighborhood I spent time in in another dream. I am shocked because where the beautiful wooden Victorian houses that were in the previous dream are now burnt and blackened patches of yellowed grass in the dry summery fields. I am saddened because in a previous dream I had lived happily in an ornate wooden Victorian that was on the corner there. There was a long grass covered lane behind the house lined with mature Beech trees, now gone. A railway track with a freight locomotive is there now. I ask someone what happened but the can only say that they think that there was a fire. In the previous dream I had a difficult time getting used to the other people in the house but eventually overcame whatever problem I was having and felt very secure and comfortable there.

I am seeing a topographical model of the coast of West Africa. It is constructed out of plaster on a very large scale. My eye moves in an arial view along the coast. the sea is blue and the land is various browns and yellow for the sand at the shore. As my eye moves along I am looking for somewhere to 'hide' and soon am relieved to see that the inland mountains begin to rise up and I can see the dark green of forests in between the peaks. Then the topographical model changes into a real landscape which I am now seeing from the perspective of a helicopter. I turn to the left and swoop down into the shade and safety of the forest.

Dream Images, by lissa ivy

Deep Sea Sponge

anointing oil

meta dreams, by David

I didn’t remember dreams until morning, when I began to get vivid fragments separated by time, mostly meta dreams about Oneironauticum.

One set of fragments involved a gallery where we’d gathered for our dream group. The first gallery contained carvings made into dark, baked clay. The second contained portraiture as done by a seven year old—not a younger child—enameled against a white back drop occasionally framed by round bits of chrome or mirror. The third gallery had nothing in it except varying gradations of white throughout, similar to Jay DeFeo’s “The Rose”.

In another dream, the group of us sat talking before going to bed. The conversation revolved around dreams and about the group. People discussed the effect of heavy meals on dreams. One person talked about the time he was turned away when he showed up for Oneironauticum drunk.

In the last dream, after departing from the group in the morning I was travelling east in my car on Ashby in Berkeley, and I had to take a right onto “International Blvd”, which was a somewhat poorer, very ethnically diverse street lined with various markets and restaurants. I was behind a long slow queue of cars also making the turn-off. A moment passed, and suddenly I was now coasting unimpeded down the street on a bicycle, my arms outstretched and the wind in my face.

Racoon Professor, remote dream by Michael Matthews

I was a PhD student in mathematics and I got a paper back that had ridiculous comments on it (I was writing a proof that related the Fibonacci series to the differences in successive squares, and in the dream, I saw the connection), written in pidgin English with lots of misspellings. One of them said "these stupid thought, stupid, stupid", and another said "vury confusing, ow" and at the bottom of every page was a percentage, usually 0% or 4%, and at the top of the first page was written 64%, which made no sense whatsoever, because it was neither the total of the individual percentages, nor the inverse, and that's what set me off.

I looked up from reviewing my paper and the professor was a raccoon, standing upright on a desk with little black rimmed glasses that accentuated his mask and a tiny labcoat. He was lecturing the class on the poor work they'd done and told one woman "you stupid face, small brain", and he had a really annoying, raccoony voice (i.e. a little more bass than a chipmunk, and with a bit of a drawl). I started mocking the way he was talking, and he threw a pinecone at me, so I started throwing everything around me back at him, and several of my classmates (who had just previously been cheering me on), started saying "aw, he's so cute! don't hurt him" and things like that, so I began pelting them with debris too. Finally, I worked my way to the front of the classroom under a withering hail of pinecones, grabbed him and tied the sleeves of his labcoat like a straitjacket and hung him by the collar on the coat rack. While he gibbered and chirruped angrily, I wrote out a proof that I actually used in 10th grade to make fun of Don Ricklefs (my supposed teacher) after he'd had to copy out of a book the proof that 1 does not equal 1. This made the raccoon furious and I started rubbing the chalky eraser on his little black nose, but then my girlfriend came in and gave me a "really, now" look and I grabbed her by the hand and we ran out of the building.

Physical Sensations and Dream Fragments, by Jennifer

Immediately after getting into bed, I slipped into hypnagogia, that half dream state that comes on at the onset of sleep. Because I usually fall asleep easily and quickly, I rarely spend time in hypnagogic states (as opposed to hypnagogia’s twin on the other side of sleep hypopompnia, the half dream state that occurs as we wake up, perhaps my favorite realm of being). I really enjoy the weirdness of hypnagogia, however, so spending the half hour or so in that half sleep drift was really a treat for me. Most of the imagery involved people, crowds passing in front of me, individual faces coming into focus, shifting viewpoints so I saw feet and legs passing by, hazy views of many people standing clustered together.

Not long after falling fully asleep, I woke to find myself overheated, sweating enough that the sheets were damp. I also felt and heard an unpleasant, almost sickening buzz that flooded my entire nervous system. I threw the blankets off and lay feeling sick until I managed to drift off again, only to awaken again shivering, teeth chattering cold, still awash in the nervous buzz. This pattern repeated several times for the first hour or two of sleep, then subsided.

Throughout the rest of the night, I dreamed many short, vivid fragments of story, also unusual for me, who generally remembers two or three clear narratives every night. In one fragment, I walked through a New York City East Village tenement hallway through a crowd of shady looking characters. As I went by, I realized I had interrupted one guy selling hashish to another. At first everyone tensed up and I feared what might happen, but then the dealer said that since I’d realized what was going on and had tried (albeit too late) not to notice, it was OK. In another dream fragment, I drove my VW van, Baby, to a remote cabin. There, Erik and I talked on the phone and agreed to break up. He drove away in my van. Another fragment involved several young kids running from the police on abandoned urban streets at night. In another, the Oneironauticum group gave a performance from the attic eaves of a house through a missing wall to crowds gathered in the street below. In yet another fragment, several us walked down a country road. We came to a fence we needed to jump, and I placed my hand on top of it, pushing myself across and over it with one fluid, graceful motion. The sensation was very vivid.

Minutes of the April Oneironauticum, by Jennifer

Participating in person for the March Oneironauticum were dreamers Erik, lissa ivy, Geneva, Christine, David, and yours truly, Jennifer.

We gathered at my and Erik’s home, also known as the habitat, between 10:00 and 11:00 where we discussed some of our recent dream trends. Then we sat down around the living room table and each measured out a third of an ounce of olive oil into the small bowls I had prepared for mixing our anointing oils. We then each mixed 20 – 25 drops of a mix of essential oils: Myrrh, Sandalwood, Sage, Mugwort, Roman Chamomille, Lavender, and Rose, mixed according to the qualities we wanted our anointing oil to possess. Once we’d made our oils we, rotated around the table smelling everybody else’s blends.

Around midnight we anointed ourselves. Some of us anointed at temples, shoulders and chest. Others went for glands: pineal (third eye), thyroid (throat), and Apocrine (under the arms). Amidst the fragrance of the oils, we went to bed. That night, the majority of us set an Oneironauticum record by sleeping more than ten hours. In the morning, we discussed our dreams over brunch.

Most of us reported numerous but fragmented dreams. Half of us recalled several of these fragments quite well, while the other half reported that the images scattered as soon as they woke up. A couple of us (Geneva and me) got the sense of having “overdosed” somewhat with the anointing oils. We both felt somewhat dizzy and sick in the earlier part of the night, experiencing sweaty, hot discomfort and cold, shivering spells. These feelings faded later in the night.