On Monday, July 27, Dreamers Polly, Elizabeth, Kat, Emily, Amanda, Coco, and yours truly, Jennifer, gathered at Elizabeth’s beautiful house perched high on a hill with sweeping views of Marin. We spent some time talking about the phases of sleep and the kinds of dreaming that happens in different dream states. People sleep in cycles of approximately 90 minutes (it varies individually), usually five or six cycles a night. The phase of slipping...

For the July Oneironauticum, we’ll be working with Kava kava, a root traditionally used among Pacific Ocean island cultures. Also known as Piper Methysticum (Piper is Latin for “pepper”; methysticum, Greek for “intoxicating”), kava is known as a sleep aid that relaxes the mind without dulling mental clarity. Kava displays both euphoric and narcotic qualities, and is often used to socially cohere groups of...

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...

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...

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...