The Next Oneironauticum is Thursday, April 29
The next Oneironauticum will be Thursday, April 29, For this Oneironauticum, we’ll work with an auditory oneirogen, Robert Rich’s electronic music score Somnium, a soundscape designed to promote vivid dreams. We worked with this same musical score two years ago in our Oneironauticum explorations and had great experiences with it.
Somnium is a seven hour psychoactive electronic music piece arranged to match up with the phases of sleep. Robert Rich, the composer, started giving live, all night concerts for sleeping Bay Area audiences in the early 1980s. During these sessions, Rich would alternate playing more active sound with what he called “slow foggy textures and strange ambient sounds”, timed to accord with the regular cycles of hypnogogic and dream-rich REM sleep. The music was specifically designed to increase the intensity and recall of dreams, in part by keeping dreamers closer to the border to wakefulness during sleep. See Robert Rich’s liner notes for his comments on the piece.
The audience for these overnight concerts, in sleeping bags, would doze and coast through the varied dream states we all experience throughout the night. In the morning, Rich served the waking concert goers tea and, as with the Oneironauticum, people discussed their dreams.
As always, anyone is invited to participate remotely, joining our world-wide network of dreamers who go to sleep with the common intention of incubating vivid dreams by using the same oneirogen. If you want to participate remotely, you can purchase an MP3 of Robert Rich’s recording Somnium online, available for download, or buy a CD directly from Robert Rich’s website. Remote participants can also try sleeping to a different music recording. Put on your Brian Eno ambient CD or light piano music on repeat, or just leave your iPod running on shuffle. Whatever works. Also, as always, dreamers can participate remotely simply by setting the intention to join us before going to sleep. All dream participants, those who attend the Oneironauticum and those who join remotely, are welcome to post to this blog. Contact us if you’re interested.