Minutes of the Inaugural Oneironauticum, January, 2008
Dreamers Sylvia Thyssen, Erik Davis, lissa ivy tiegel, Geneva Bumb Shanti, Dean Mermell, Vibrata Chromodoris, David Shamanix, and yours truly, Jennifer Dumpert, met at the habitat on a stormy Saturday, January 26, between 10:00 and 11:00 for the first ever Oneironauticum.
We assembled a dream altar, and spent about 45 discussing our dream lives and our intentions with the Oneironauticum. We bedded down at 12:30, to the sound of rain pattering against the windows. At 5:00, we woke and each took 4 mg of Red Spider Lily extract, or Galantamine. By intent, we lingered long in our various beds, rising at 9:30 after nine hours of sleep. REM cycles become longer and more common the more time you spend in bed. We rose and brunched and talked about our experiences.
Some commonalities arose in our group dreaming. Almost all of us dreamed about our gathering in some manner, most of us literally dreaming of ourselves in the space where we slept. Most of us also experienced particularly vivid dreams, with heightened sense of color, sound, and sensation. Many of us felt a strong sense that the dreams were *real*. Several people experienced overlap of dream and waking memory, confusing dream memories of dream experiences with waking memories of waking experiences, thinking things were happening in waking life that were in fact dreams, overlapping dream and waking sensations. Oddly enough, two of our party dreamed of cats under water.