The Next Oneironauticum is Thursday, April 29

The next Oneironauticum will be Thursday, April 29, For this Oneironauticum, we’ll work with an auditory oneirogen, Robert Rich's electronic music score Somnium, a soundscape designed to promote vivid dreams. We worked with this same musical score two years ago in our Oneironauticum explorations and had great experiences with it.

Somnium is a seven hour psychoactive electronic music piece arranged to match up with the phases of sleep. Robert Rich, the composer, started giving live, all night concerts for sleeping Bay Area audiences in the early 1980s. During these sessions, Rich would alternate playing more active sound with what he called “slow foggy textures and strange ambient sounds”, timed to accord with the regular cycles of hypnogogic and dream-rich REM sleep. The music was specifically designed to increase the intensity and recall of dreams, in part by keeping dreamers closer to the border to wakefulness during sleep. See Robert Rich's liner notes for his comments on the piece.

The audience for these overnight concerts, in sleeping bags, would doze and coast through the varied dream states we all experience throughout the night. In the morning, Rich served the waking concert goers tea and, as with the Oneironauticum, people discussed their dreams.

As always, anyone is invited to participate remotely, joining our world-wide network of dreamers who go to sleep with the common intention of incubating vivid dreams by using the same oneirogen. If you want to participate remotely, you can purchase an MP3 of Robert Rich’s recording Somnium online, available for download, or buy a CD directly from Robert Rich's website. Remote participants can also try sleeping to a different music recording. Put on your Brian Eno ambient CD or light piano music on repeat, or just leave your iPod running on shuffle. Whatever works. Also, as always, dreamers can participate remotely simply by setting the intention to join us before going to sleep. All dream participants, those who attend the Oneironauticum and those who join remotely, are welcome to post to this blog. Contact us if you’re interested.

Falling into Color, by Jennifer

Initially, it took me a while to fall asleep. The 5-HTP excited my system; I felt my heartbeat elevated and my mind was racing. Eventually, I began to drift off. Then I felt a pull, almost like when a car engine catches, a downward motion into the sleep state. As I felt that pull and moved into sleep, I saw a bright green flash. In the dream I then had, I was in the loft, lying in the bed in which I was actually laying, dreaming myself in my real life position and place.

I woke from that dream quickly, and after a short while lying alert, I felt the pull and again saw the flash of green and sunk into another dream of me in the loft, but this time different colors like swirling clouds filled the space.

I repeated this process several times over the space of maybe an hour and a half, waking up, falling back into dream with the green flash, an increasingly deeper emerald green as the night progressed. Each time I fell back asleep, the loft space became more dream like, the colors brighter, other people in the space up and moving around, not talking but dream drifting among the others who remained asleep.

The final time I returned to this dream, after five or six awakenings, the dream changed into an ocean voyage adventure.

Mermaid Home, remote dream by John

My girlfriend was helping me settle into her mermaid home. Beautifully vivid colors for all of this, sun-filtering through the kelp from above, and our home made of kelp woven airtight about air bubbles, creating rooms that ranged in size and dryness. She did a morning ritual that involved swimming in fast arcs in tight spirals around the kelp, and that woke up all the fish that weren't nocturnal. She was teaching me which fish were OK to eat; I had to ask their names first, and any named Frank were OK to eat because they were both tasty and predators themselves.

I nearly ate one of her friends, an angelfish named Liza, who facetiously told me her name was Frank, then made hilarious squeaky fish noises when I grabbed her. My girlfriend chided her, saying, he's a big guy and he gets hungry...you don't want to fuck around with that. Liza's eyes got very big and she regarded me solemnly before swimming off with a flourish of her tail.

Dream Images, by lissa ivy

Watching Nova Dream Special

Teddy Bear Pelt

Supplies for Dreaming

Remembering the Dream, remote dream by Phil

The dream was about remembering the dream. Inside the dream I was anxious to hold on to what wasn't even there yet. Then the dream itself became a kind of mixture of city and map, so I could simultaneously hold on to what I was doing as I was doing it, but what that was... other than some momentary fumbling with flesh... I can't remember, until the city became bright yellow and bounded, a layer over the city with the consistency of glistening butter, a golden but soft city. I remember seeing a corner of this and that the wall of it was inclined inwards. That's all I have retained.

Mexican Bingo Card, by Christine

I had lots of short dreams, all very colorful and mostly involving animals.

In one dream, there was an animal film festival. In another, I saw a brightly colored Mexican Bingo card where all the boxes were Mexican cartoon versions of animals. When a square that was on the card was called, a bug would crawl onto that space to mark it.

Insects in my knee, by Vibrata

In addition to the 50 mg of 5-HTP, I added 12.5 mg of diphenhydramine to help me sleep.

In my first dream, the setting started out as somewhat familiar – the loft, warmly lit, lots of people - mostly this dream group. There was a festive fell to the gathering; very chatty and active. An armoire was delivered. It was very large. I had some large insects living in my knee. They were creating poison which could be collected from the pus in the wounds. I was wiping up the poisonous ooze, not necessarily upset, at first, but it gradually became quite disturbing and at that point I woke up.

After my pee break I went easily back to sleep (thanks to the diph) and in the next dream session I was trying to create these art pieces and was working on logistics. This was a continuation from the previous dream session. I could see finished pieces and felt pretty confident in them, but needed to finish more of them.

In the next bunch there was slightly less familiarity to the dream settings. I was at a bank and had some very complex transactions to do. The man I was dealing with showed me a code word I needed to write down along with my signature to verify authenticity. The word was "Challel", or something like that, with lots of tall looping letters. I did some signing of things but before I was done the "teller" (?) got a phone call from his wife. His children were with him. I was watching them while he spoke on the phone and a very young boy with an innocent face, maybe 3 or 4, was muttering to himself, saying extremely vulgar things about some woman. I grabbed him and asked him, "What did you say?" The situation evolved into a whole inquisition into the boy's dirty language and his exposure to sexual situations. It was too much drama for me so I watched from the sidelines while a whole tribunal was formed around the subject; a dozen or so people sitting at a long table to discuss the boy.

Perhaps at that point I left that scene to go outside. Even less familiarity and logic. I was on a street at night. There were people out and about and it seemed like a friendly atmosphere, though strange. I met a man and his old black dog and the dog and I hit it off. The man was totally fine with me taking his dog's leash and walking off with him. The dog was really happy to have someone walking him and he started to run. I ran, too, and in striking contrast to most dream-running experiences, it felt really fluid and light, effortless and even exhilarating.

I have a snippet of memory of seeing the Cirque du Soleil, and noticing some extraordinary costumes, all of them blue and sparkly. The costumes and set were all matching.

Overall, extremely colorful visions, long and elaborate sessions, very vivid. There was a dark, sort of night-clubby, saturated tone to much of what I was seeing, punctuated with occasional more sunny, crisp, summery scenes. Very pretty for the most part, except for the part about the bugs in my knee. Not terribly surreal - in fact upon reading over this summary, there's a lot in there that corresponds with what's going on in my real life. The overall "prettiness" is what stands out, and the experience of running without the usual ineffectualness.