Minutes of the June 2008, Oneironauticum at the Ojai Foundation
The most recent Oneironauticum took place during a weekend retreat at the Ojai Foundation called Visionary Practice: Ritual and Reshaping Consciousness, led by Erik Davis, Dale and Laura Pendell, David Presti, and yours truly. Not surprisingly, my part involved presenting and discussing dreams as a type visionary practice, one we all experience regularly. I also talked about how to integrate dreams into daily life via creative practice. The Urban Dreamscape provided my model. On the night of Friday, June 13, workshop attendees, along with remote dreamers, participated in an Oneironauticum.
The workshop marked a special time in the history of a remarkable organization. Sitting on land first purchased in 1927 by Theosophist Annie Besant—who believed that the transformation of humanity into the more evolved “sixth race” would happen in California—the Ojai Foundation played a major role in disseminating a particular kind of mythic, spiritual consciousness into culture. Throughout the 1980s, the Foundation (nicknamed the Wizard’s Camp) hosted workshops led by a range of remarkable figures, including: Joseph Campbell, R.D. Lang, Jean Houston, Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham, Terence McKenna, Ralph Metzner, Francis Huxley, Andrew Weil, Robert Bly, Jose Arguelles, Joanna Macy, Tsultrim Allione, Riane Eisler, and Thich Nhat Hanh. The Foundation also offered dream-focused retreats and classes. As is the way with institutions, however, various factors converged in 1990 that shifted the focus of the foundation to providing education in the Way of Council, a form of group communication practice. Our weekend workshop marks a return to the concerns of the Wizard’s Camp, the first of other such sessions that will run alongside Council training and practice.
For that Oneironauticum, we worked with an infusion of Calea Zacatechichi prepared by Dale Pendell. Calea is a bitter herb native to Southern Mexico and Central America. The Chontal natives, indigenous to the Mexican state of Oaxaca, use it as a means of inducing vivid dreams and practicing oneiromancy, a form of divination based on dreams. Calea is taken as a tea brewed from the leaves of the plant (did I say bitter already? Yeeeach!). The leaves are also smoked, generally in combination with the tea.
Dale’s brew, tastier than any other Calea Zacatechichi I’ve had before, proved quite potent. The group drank all together at the end of Friday’s sessions, just before retiring to our respective rooms to sleep. The next day, we gathered to share our experiences.
Most participants reported waking effects of the Calea. Several people entered into altered, dreamy states within 20 minutes to half an hour, and one retreat attendee who stayed offsite ended up having to concentrate hard on his slow drive home. Participants described general feelings of playfulness before sleep, and some also experienced heightened sensuality. A smaller number reported significant dreams, though several people did discuss having very vivid dream experiences. A couple people reported what they considered meaningful dreams. One of these dreams invoked the retreat itself. This is the most common interesting oneiroic experiences of the Oneironauticum: participants—whether remote or sharing sleeping space—dream of other Oneironauticum dreamers.
On Saturday night, we all enjoyed a different Calea Zacatechichi brew in the form of a liqueur Dale distilled. An Oneironauticum extra, this elixir bridged dreaming and waking worlds quite successfully, and made for a fine celebratory drum and dance circle around the fire.