The night of the Oneironauticum, I had a hard time falling asleep. Over the last couple weeks, I’ve been practicing Dream Yoga throughout the day, behind the wheel, at my desk, on the subway. As I sit and write now, I can easily visualize, and auralize, a glowing white om humming at my heart center. Even though the practice comes naturally now, however, it’s incredibly difficult to maintain mental focus as I slip closer and closer to the...

A few days before your last dream night, someone who knows about my dream thing sent me the link to this blog. Then I was surprised to read what you wrote yesterday about staying conscious as you fall asleep, because that’s what I do almost every night! On the night the dream group met, I did the meditation while I was falling asleep. I didn’t practice it before, so maybe I wasn’t that good at it. The best thing for me was the...

I dreamed of...

Dreamers Erik Davis, lissa ivy tiegel, Xavi, and yours truly, Jennifer Dumpert, met at the habitat on Saturday, April 5. The morning after, Naropa Sabine swooped in to give his dream account. Saturday evening, we discussed the Tibetan Dream Yoga meditation. Norbu’s instructions stress the importance of practicing whatever form of the meditation works, simplifying the practice if it keeps you awake, complexifying it if you fall asleep too...

For the third Oneironauticum, we’ll be practicing a meditation described by Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche in his book Dream Yoga and the Practice of Natural Light. Though this practice leads to lucid dreaming, it focuses primarily on the boundary between awake and dreaming, the passage of time between falling asleep and becoming conscious again within the dream. At this border, Norbu instructs us,the practitioner breaks through illusion and...

This entry is from the morning after the most recent Oneironauticum: “I had a rather huge download of dreams and woke up twice that I can recall. Lying here this morning, reviewing them all in my head, what comes to me is that at no point during all of that dreaming did it ever seem “unreal” no matter how strange the circumstances. The “me” that is dreaming is accepting of the things being seen and felt as “real”. Then, upon...