Minutes from the May, 2009 Oneironauticum, Detailed Dreams, by Jennifer
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 distinct, very linear, clear dreams, I also had several shorter dreams. The three longer dreams featured several of the same people. The first of these involved a discussion with my teacher/guru/friend Danny about the nature of discourse and the most clear way to convey a thought. When I coasted toward consciousness after this dream, I remembered what we said about those things, but by the time I woke up, I had forgotten. In fact, I completely forgot about this dream, which I had early in the night, until the third of the long dreams, which I had later the following morning.
In the second dream, I made miso soup for Danny, his lady Merrie, and my friends Katherine and Trout. The process got slightly awkward; I put a pot of water on a burner then forgot about it while I gathered up bowls and materials so that most of it boiled off, and when I added more in ended up not quite enough. When I served the soup, I gave everyone very detailed instructions about how to prepare and then eat the meal.
In the final long dream, Danny and I told Merrie, Katherine, and Trout the history of Rajneesh, from his establishment of an ashram in Pune through his transformation to Osho, his arrival in the U.S., tales of sex and violence practices, the poisoning of the local Oregon populace to win an election, the the Rolls Royces, and finally his deportation and return to India. The history had great detail and took a long time to tell.
The shorter dreams included one in which I was a man in conflict with a former friend who had been blackmailing me. When I refused to continue paying him, he became violent and chased me on horse. After politely greeting a group of older men on a ghetto stoop, I hid in their yard. The blackmailer rode up and addressed them rudely, so they pretended not to have seen me. In another short dream, someone had put flowers in pots and statues of Jesus all over the top of my van. I looked up in a window and saw Katherine in a window looking sad. I realized she had put them there. In yet another dream, I forged large metal nails with Polly and several of her friends.