Grandma subdues pirates, by Paul

Big swashbuckling scene, three musketeer looking guys with long hair and mustaches jumping around fighting pirates with swords. The pirates were real bad guys, gristled and dirty with bad teeth, but they were really good with the swords and it looked like maybe they would win. I knew that if they won then everyone else on the ship would be killed.

Then my grandmother came out of the cabin and started bustling around and every body sort of stopped, as if it had been me and my cousins as kids play fighting. We all sat down and ate sandwiches.

Lego City, by Bill

In my dream, I visited a landscape version of Hollywood that I've been building and visiting for the past 4 or 5 months. I much prefer the dreamscape to the real hollywood now. I discovered that certain, if not all, buildings are lego-based, meaning they can be picked up by some god-sized hand and set down and snapped in place in a different part of the city, thus rendering useless the dependence on such structures as bearing-providing landmarks.

There was also a really neat thing where all the citizens of the town had to return their garbage to a store-type place. Once you were done with a bag of potato chips, or a six-pack of soda or what have you, you had to take it to a place and put the trash back on the shelves in order, just like a supermarket in reverse. it was really fun and everyone did it.

May minutes, Detailed Dreams, by Jennifer

Because yours truly, Jennifer, was in Tokyo, the May, 2009 Oneironauticum consisted of remote participation only. After an evening of wandering amazed through Shinjuku, I returned to my cute little apartment in Yoyogi Hachiman, unrolled my futon, and applied my patch. Because I’m sensitive to nicotine, I used a 7mg transdermal patch (the weakest strength) cut in half.

The patch produced vivid dreams all night long. In addition to three distinct, very linear, clear dreams, I also had several shorter dreams. The three longer dreams featured several of the same people. The first of these involved a discussion with my teacher/guru/friend Danny about the nature of discourse and the most clear way to convey a thought. When I coasted toward consciousness after this dream, I remembered what we said about those things, but by the time I woke up, I had forgotten. In fact, I completely forgot about this dream, which I had early in the night, until the third of the long dreams, which I had later the following morning.

In the second dream, I made miso soup for Danny, his lady Merrie, and my friends Katherine and Trout. The process got slightly awkward; I put a pot of water on a burner then forgot about it while I gathered up bowls and materials so that most of it boiled off, and when I added more in ended up not quite enough. When I served the soup, I gave everyone very detailed instructions about how to prepare and then eat the meal.

In the final long dream, Danny and I told Merrie, Katherine, and Trout the history of Rajneesh, from his establishment of an ashram in Pune through his transformation to Osho, his arrival in the U.S., tales of sex and violence practices, the poisoning of the local Oregon populace to win an election, the the Rolls Royces, and finally his deportation and return to India. The history had great detail and took a long time to tell.

The shorter dreams included one in which I was a man in conflict with a former friend who had been blackmailing me. When I refused to continue paying him, he became violent and chased me on horse. After politely greeting a group of older men on a ghetto stoop, I hid in their yard. The blackmailer rode up and addressed them rudely, so they pretended not to have seen me. In another short dream, someone had put flowers in pots and statues of Jesus all over the top of my van. I looked up in a window and saw Katherine in a window looking sad. I realized she had put them there. In yet another dream, I forged large metal nails with Polly and several of her friends.

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.