The practice of dream incubation entails engaging the dreaming mind to help address personal or intellectual questions, encourage healing, or to enliven intuition and boost creativity. The origins of modern medicine include dream incubation. In ancient Greece, pilgrims seeking cures for various ailments flocked to temples dedicated to the god Aesclepius, where priests employed many methods including interpreting dreams that resulted from dream incubation.

On the night of November 3, people around the world will join together to form a community of intentional dreamers. Using the same oneirogen-any sound, substance, or scent that promotes vivid dreaming-this community has been meeting in dream worlds since January, 2008. For this Oneironauticum dream sharing event, we'll be working with lucid dreaming, either using Galantamine or the MILD Technique.

We've all been visited by the spirit of creativity. A flash of inspiration causes you to compose a new song, paint trailing vines on the kitchen furniture, or write an article that eloquently expresses some of the ideas that float through your imagination. It's a marvelous feeling when the muses of creativity grant you their gifts. But sometimes you have to work to seek inspiration and try to harness your creative power. Difficult though that often proves, you can use liminal dreaming to woo your muse.

What do you do when the weekend rolls around? For many people it's time to open a bottle of wine, smoke some pot, or even swallow something stronger for a deeper journey. Tweaking consciousness is hard-wired into the human experience. Little kids roll down hills and spin in circles. Adults take intoxicants to achieve altered states. We love to leave the everyday behind and experience ourselves in new ways. The impulse is natural, but many of us worry about the long-term adverse health effects, as well as next-day hangovers. But you don't have to ingest poisons to play with your mind. Next time you have the urge to experiment with your consciousness, consider the original altered mind adventure: the dream. And if part of the fun involves taking substances to see how they affect you, try an oneirogen.

For this Oneironauticum, we worked with an auditory oneirogen, Robert Rich’s electronic music score Somnium, a soundscape designed to promote vivid dreams. Dreamers were able to join us from anywhere simply by playing Somnium wherever they were sleeping. Somnium is a seven hour psychoactive electronic music piece arranged to match up with the phases of sleep. Electronic musician Robert Rich started giving live, all night concerts for...