Minutes of the May, 2008 Oneironauticum
Dreamers Erik Davis, Vibrata Chromodoris, David Shamanik, Dean Mermell, Jacob Nasim, Christy Silness, Emily Butterfly, feline Marion, and yours truly, Jennifer Dumpert, met at the habitat on Saturday, May 31.
Amongst us all, we varied the relative amounts of B-6, Melatonin, and Valerian we took, from 3-5 g of Melatonin, 100-200 mg of B-6 and 470-940 mg of Valerian.
Several of our number were kept awake by busy minds for some time after bedding down. About half of us experienced a high degree of hypnogogia. A word derived from the Greek, like Oneironauticum (why are so many sleep related words of Greek origin?), hypnogogia comes from hypnos (sleep) and agogos (leading in). Hypnogogic images are those weird half hallucinations you experience as you slip into slumber, right on the border between asleep and awake.
Almost all of us reported a full night of constant, vivid dreaming. Mysteriously, however—considering the group, people who regularly clearly remember several dreams a night—most of us had extremely vague recollections of what had actually happened during these dreams. Most of us had woken during the night with a dream narrative in the mind, but by morning most of these had faded into unfixed images or snippets of story.
Over champagne brunch, we visited some of these tidbits, including various dream visitations by a beaver, a badger, and a squirrel. In the midst of a general conversation, someone said something that brought forward the memory of a chunk of dream narrative for someone else. We set to a task of coining a word for when something during the day triggers a dream memory. We considered dream flash, dream trigger, and oneiromnemonic.
I vote for “oneiromnemonic”, because it’s so easy to pronounce 😉
How about “déjà rêvé”?
Or deja view?