The Minutes of the Third Oneironauticum, April, 2008
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 easily. You fine tune the practice until it’s just the right amount of intensity to keep your attention focused right up to moment of falling asleep.
We discussed among us times that we’ve maintained awareness as we pass from waking consciousness into dream consciousness. We all had examples of once or twice when we’ve slipped directly from sleeping to awake without missing a beat, dream subjectivity becoming waking subjectivity without losing consciousness. Sometimes this takes the jarring form of false awakenings. Other times it’s a smooth surfacing, a gentle transition. Xavi and I had also both once or twice experienced passing directly from an awake state into dreaming consciousness. Clearly rarer and more difficult to achieve, this is the transition the practice promotes.
Before we went to sleep, we all practiced the meditation together, with the large white om lissa ivy brought sitting on the table in the middle of our group.
My apologies for taking so long to post these minutes; I’m writing from Tuscon, where I’m attending Toward a Science of Consciousness, a conference put on annually by the Center for Consciousness Studies. It’s taken a while to get this minutes out because I’ve been engrossed in the fascinating sessions. I started out the week by attending Stephen LaBerge’s workshop on lucid dreaming. I’ve taken workshops with Stephen before, and they’re always fascinating and enlightening. He talked for for a while about the dream state as a conscious state. The world is experienced, subjectivity exists. This gives rise to a very core question: what is consciousness? A perfect line of inquiry to consider after our Dream Yoga Oneironauticum.