Minutes of the July, 2008 Oneironauticum
In attendance at the July 12 Oneironauticum were dreamers Erik Davis, Vibrata Chromodoris, David Shamanik, lissa ivy tiegel, Dean Mermell, Lesley Freeman, Christine Benvenuto, Matthew Wiegland, Leia, Tristan Naramore, and yours truly, Jennifer Dumpert.
Before going to sleep, we talked about topics relating to dreams, as we usually do. We discussed current research that attempts to explain why humans dream. Current theories include the idea that dreaming helps process short term memory into long term memory. We also discussed our recent dreams. I related stories from the string of lucid dreams I’ve had lately. In one, I found myself able to shoot flames from my fingertips or produce fire and hold it cupped in my hand. Both these ideas appeared in participants’ dreams.
We then bedded down and put on Somnium, a seven hour electronic music piece composed by Robert Rich, designed to match up with the phases of sleep and increase the intensity and recall of dreams. We slept on beds and futons spread out among the various open floors of Vibrata and David’s airy loft, wired for sound with speakers all through the space.
Over brunch the next morning, we shared dreams from the previous night. Several participants reported particularly strong hypnogogic imagery. Hypnogogia, that drifting state in which we see floating, drifting images that may coalesce into proto-dreams, happens at the onset of sleep. Robert Rich writes of Somnium, “the music is aimed at the nebulous territory that exists in your mind when you are hovering between awake and asleep, when you are still aware of your environment, yet detached, when your half-sleeping mind wanders into the realm of hypnogogic images and dreamlike non-linearity.”
The majority of participants also reported dreams involving water (pools, rain, the ocean). Somehow, as we all went to sleep, the water cooler was left partly open. By morning, the leak produced had sent streams across the kitchen floor. Throughout the night, as the water level decreased, the cooler let off occasional bubbling blurps of sound. Anyone familiar with water dispensers knows the sound; it’s the same sound you get when you pour liquid quickly out of a bottle. The event hosts (far away from the bottle spatially but still in audible range) and the two people sleeping near the bottle all consciously noted the sound during the night. Nobody else had any conscious perception of having heard a water-related sound layered over our dream concert.
Because the majority of us dreamed of water, and because the theme of the night involved sound, we concluded that most of us must have had our listening senses well tuned, such that even though we didn’t consciously perceive the sound that clearly indicated water, we clearly mostly processed it at an unconscious, dreaming level.