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IASD’s PsiberDreaming Conference - an internet conference on the fringe topics of dream research

Whoa - this is interesting.

The International Association for the Study of Dreams has put together an INTERNET CONFERENCE on dreaming. It takes place Sept 21` through Oct 5.

Here’s a snippet from the site:

Between September 21 - October 5, 2008 join some of the world’s foremost experts on the subject of Psi dreaming for two weeks of cutting-edge papers, discussions, workshops, and chats. If you’ve ever had a precognitive dream, a lucid dream, or simply an “unusual dream” that never quite made sense, this is the place for you.

You might also be curious to know the blogger behind Dream Studies, Ryan Hurd, is presenting some of work on lucid dreaming in this conference, too!

Check it out.

PS And maybe I’ll see you there?

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Floatation Tank Experience Report - My First Time in an Isolation Tank / Sensory Deprivation Tank

Shortly after reading Lilly’s book, I discovered that someone in my own town has a floatation tank in their home which they rent out to curious folks like myself, in 90 minute sessions. I’ve just gotten out about 90 minutes ago. Here is my report of that session.

I get inside the tank and shut the door. I’m in pitch blackness and I’m wearing earplugs – this is strange already! I move to lie down and get comfortable. The water truly does keep me afloat. However, my neck doesn’t feel very secure so I get out of the tank to grab this bubble wrap material that they told me I could use to give my neck some padding.

I get back inside and all this movement causes some water to drip into my eye. The water is highly concentrated with salt, and it burns like hell.

I’m trying to get comfortable now with my neck being padded, but I’m having trouble catching my breath. Then I get salt in my left nostril, and it burns, and then – dammit! – now somehow water has dripped into my other eye, and it’s burning, too. This would be comical if it wasn’t for the pain!

The burning fades quickly, but I lie there for the next 30 minutes in a constant struggle to breathe and relax. It never happens, and I am never able to embrace the floatation tank experience.

It’s too warm in here and there is no air flow. The “fan” is so faint I could not even tell it was on until I rotated myself to be directly underneath it.

With my ears underwater and having earplugs in, it’s like it’s just me and my breath in here. This is bad news because it puts way too much focus on trying to breathe, and all this just exasperates the problem.

I decide to open the door to let in some fresh air.

This helps but I still can’t breathe easily.

With the door open, light is now coming in. This is distracting so I get out of the tank to turn off the light.

At this point, having not been able to relax or easily breathe the whole time, and then having to get out of the tank real quick to turn off the light – yes, I’m very frustrated! I’ve not enjoyed any of this so far at all.

The remaining time was much the same, and I never was able to experience the tank in the way it should be.

A hugely disapppointing experience.

I was supposed to do 90 minutes, but I left the tank early because I was so uncomfortable.

I felt bad having to tell the owner, a very kind woman with lots of energy – and the beauty of someone half her age - that my experience was unpleasant. She suggested that my breathing problem it’s due to some alignment with my spine, since it manifests only when I lie straight down on my back. Funny I had never really thought of this, I wonder if it’s true?

Amazingly, instead of charging me, she instead offered me a second session, free of charge. I’d very much like to take up her offer but I fear it will be much of the same – I simply won’t be able to breathe the whole time.

I’ve had problems breathing on and off for the last 4 years. When I lie down, I often can’t breathe through my nose, and this results in a cycle of trying to catch my breath, being to breathe good temporarily, and then trying to catch my breath again, and so on. When this was keeping me up for hours at night, I started using that nostril spray that clears your sinuses up.

I’ve just realized now as I type this that I should be able to do the same thing right before going in the tank and maybe then I can have a real tank experience.

On the plus side, there were a few brief seconds where I could understand the potential for how neat this could be, because your body really does float and it takes absolutely no effort. After doing this for some time, the weight of the body is so displaced and different than normal, it’s a really odd sensation. If I could have breathed and relaxed in total darkness in this state, it would have been very cool.But today was really not what I was hoping for at all and I’m honestly still kinda pissed off about it.

Grr!

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Isolation Tanks and the Potential For Lucid, Trippy, Self Transformative Experiences

I’ve been fascinated with the thought of floating around in an isolation tank ever since I first saw the film Altered States ten years ago.

Um - what is an isolation tank, you ask?

“An isolation tank is a lightless, soundproof tank in which subjects float in salty water at skin temperature. They were first used by John C. Lilly in 1954 in order to test the effects of sensory deprivation. Such tanks are now also used for meditation and relaxation and in alternative medicine. Isolation tanks were originally called sensory deprivation tanks. Other synonyms for isolation tank include float tank, floating tank, floater tank, flotation tank, REST tank, flotation baths, John Lilly tank and sensory attenuation tank.”

-Wikipedia Entry on Isolation Tanks

Ironically, the film Altered States is even (loosely) based on the work of John Lilly, although I don’t think in real life he de-evolved into an ape and went on a rampage attacking people and eating raw animal flesh. :)

A few days ago I happened to find a nugget of gold at my local used bookstore. Sitting on the shelf, almost offensively in the new age section, I saw John Lilly’s definitive book on his research into isolation tanks, titled The Deep Self: Profound Relaxation and the Tank Isolation Technique.

Published all the way back in 1977, this book is a bit of mixture of 2 things – scholarly research into sensory deprivation via the isolation tank & how it effects the brain, and the philosophical underpinnings of the experiences and what it means as far as reality/mind.

About half the chapters convey a very scholarly approach on the topic at hand, covering everything from how to build a tank, to problems, obstacles, issues you might have in using the tank, to what to expect in the tank, to how they conducted their research, and so on. This is based on 20 years of research.

The other chapters are somewhat strange and occasionally hard to follow  - these are the chapters with Lilly espousing his ideas on reality, but (for me) too often draped in very scientific and mathematical terms.

It’s more than that though – he has this unique angle of how he writes & even a separate vocabulary of words and concepts that now, in 2008, sound quite odd to me. For instance, he regularly uses words such “biocomputer” , “metabelief”, “cybernetic” and “inperience”. External reality becomes e.r, and internal reality becomes i.r. Lilly constantly jumps his words together using a bracket or hyphen to connect similar concepts, resulting in very odd sentences such as “most other minds are not prepared to hear-understand-grasp what it means to explore-experiment-be-immersed-in such states.”

But don’t get me wrong here – it sounds like I’m putting down Lilly, and I’m not. He’s become a sort of personal hero to me, as I feel drawn to his passion for wanting to understand and his bravery and dedication towards using himself as a research subject, even at the cost of his own personal life and professional life.

I truly think he was tortured by his search for understanding, and this passion was the guiding principle of all his actions, no matter what the cost.

On page 72, he writes:

“Many of my former colleagues disavowed me…I understand their belief systems and the power such system have over our minds. I do not recriminate them, nor do I blame formers friends for not maintaining contact with me.

In my search (for “What is Reality?”), I have driven myself (and hence, close associates-relative-friends) to the brink of the loss of all communicational contacts for months at a time…. I have explored and have voluntarily entered into domains forbidden by a large fraction of those in our culture who are not curious, are not explorative and are not mentually equipped to enter these domains.”

These chapters on reality contain some of the most fascinating pieces in the book, with Lilly mapping out stages and ranges of consciousness/experience and exploring the old mind / brain / body problem (but in a way that I felt he was adding to the argument, and not just rehashing the same old ideas).

Finally, at the end of the book, we get to read logs of peoples experiences in the tank!

This is maybe the best part of the book.

Really, I had no idea just how far out you can go through sensory deprivation inside one of these tanks.

Some of the experience reports are so far out there, I have to wonder if they were conducting the experiment in combination with a psychedelic substance. (Lilly and friends were no stranger to LSD and other drugs, by the way!)

I want to quote at length from these logs, because I think the reports of the actual experience make for a more immediate understanding of what isolation tanks are all about.

Take a look at these excerpts:

“Gradually I seemed to make a head-on 180 degree roll so that I was facing down into an impenetrable night. Dawn broke from the eastern horizon, illuminating a vast desert of glittering sand a hundred feet below me. The sand became transparent and directly below me was a polished black granite monolith……in the center…was encased a sculptor of Jill. The effigy was of monumental size… when her eyes met mine, two lines of graphite streaked across the desert, straight to the source of sunrise beyond the distant mountains.”

“Immediately experienced floating out of body shell. Roamed and sauntered through a kind of cosmic park, full of density but infinite boundaries. People’s images occasionally came in and out of this…. Then as wondered on this, sudden enlightenment  - there is no such things as separate consciousness.”

“Although nothing happened in the first two sessions, hallucinations were experienced nearly every time thereafter…. They would continue for hours. I was always aware that I was hallucinating and part of my mind was nearly always making observations. There were the usual out of body…hallucinations…. When I moved my hands (actually in the water) I would see them move and sky appear between the fingers. I have later had imaginary flights over scenery. “

“I lost boundaries and time sense, immediately disappeared and I experience total peace and a feeling of unity…. What I experienced was a continuous void that was not boring, yet empty, not engaging, yet full.”

“Moving into an absolute void (experienced as consciousness of the interstellar space.) Timelessness. No difference between minutes and millions of years. Ending up the experience with feelings of regeneration, purification, refreshment, clarify.”

(This last quote is from Stan Grof. You may recognize his name. Interesting, I also saw Andrew Weil in the name of tank loggers, along with Richard Feynman (Yes, the Richard Feynman of quantum physicists fame. He spent something like 35 hours in the tank for Lilly’s research), and Ralph Metzner. )

…..

I really cannot believe how “far out” these logs read though. Many times over, I get the impression that floating in the tank, consciousness becomes like that of a dream. Sometimes people can direct the hallucinations, creating a sort of waking life lucid dream hallucination. This just blows my mind!

Why don’t more people know about this?

Why isn’t the use of these tanks more common?

I am now on the hunt for a tank in my area, as I really want to try out the experience* for myself!

*or as John Lilly would say, inperience.

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Poppy Seed Tea Can Kill You

This is really interesting:

http://poppyseedtea.com/

The parents who run this site had their son die after consuming a large dose of self-made poppy seed tea.

The site was set up as a “information service” to others about the dangers of how it can happen.

It’s not full of crazy hype. It just is what it is.

Much respect to these parents, who in greiving for their son, have set up a sensible website aimed at harm reduction.

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A Book Review of Food of the Gods by Terence McKenna

The Food of the Gods, by Terence McKenna, is the story of humanities relationship with different plants and how these relationships effect and reflect our cultural values.

By the last page, the book has taken a somewhat discontinuous step into a different territory, with McKenna penning a manifesto of sorts on the integration of psychoactives into our current culture. He calls our culture the Dominator culture, and sees the use of consciousness-expanding plants as part of the Archaic Revival, a reference to the return of a  pre-monotheistic, integrated, “whole” way of living that we as a species once had with our environment and each other.

History buffs may find the first few chapters more exciting than I did. Being very ignorant of the specifics of history, I could not more challenge McKenna’s findings than agree with them – I can only take them at face value.

The book became most fascinating when it leads into the introduction of sugar, spices, and tea into the last few centuries, and how these substances caused an upheaval of society and are directly related to the enslavement of fellow human beings.

I found myself raising an eyebrow at some his theories on TV as a drug, and I was surprised how quickly he dismisses monotheistic religions in such a manner that his contempt and dislike for monotheism is obvious.

Where his writing is most engaging is the topic of our modern relationship with drugs, and why it is that our culture sanctions the use of certain substances (caffeine, sugar, alcohol) and shuns the use of others (marijuana, for example.) In a culture based on competition and dominance, we’ve embedded plants into our daily life that help promote these types of behaviors.

For instance, why is it that it’s socially acceptable to hype yourself up on caffeine and sugar at work but not marijuana?

McKenna’s point is that caffeine and sugar feed into the goals of “dominator” culture, whereas substances like marijuana (and other psychedelics) promote a less competitive, less egocentric individual.

The types of plants and substances that ultimately promote “dominator cultural values” is what we, as a culture, promote and use, and anything that’s a threat to these values is either illegal, shunned, or both.

This led me to think about my own life:

In the morning at work, what do I do? I drink Diet Cherry Coke or coffee, or both. I tell myself, I need some caffeine. I know soda isn’t healthy for me, but I justify it because I need the pick-me-up of caffeine to help me at work.

And then in the evening or in the night, what do I often do? I drink alcohol, something that’s going to relax me, mellow me out. Often I’ll drink alcohol because I want to wind down from the stress of work, or the stress of life.

It’s impossible to imagine switching these, isn’t it? I would never drink alcohol at 8am, nor would I drink coffee at 10pm at night.

This example is by no means dramatic or even interesting; in fact, it’s its blatant regularity and trivialness in our day to day life that I find fascinating in contrast to McKenna’s arguments on how our cultural values are evident in the plants, drugs, and substances we allow or omit.

The other topic I found most fascinating was his discussion on DMT and just what the hell the mind-bending experience of DMT means… I will resist elaborating, and instead, insist you read the book to find out. (Spoiler: unfortunately this topic is only skimmed. I believe he covers this more in depth in another book of his, which I’m going to read next.)

…. 

Here’s an interesting quote:

“The Archaic Revival is a clarion call to recover our birthright, however uncomfortable that may make us. It is a call to realize that life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience upon which primordial shamanism is based is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego and its fear of dissolution.”

- Terrence McKenna, Food of the Goods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge - A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution

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Dream Journaling Through Life, Marriage, and Divorce

Few readers of this blog know this, but I am going through a divorce right now. In fact, I am 3 months separated.

It would suffice to say this is a pretty terrible period of my life.  The upheaval this has caused in my day to day living is one reason why my work on Dreaming Life has been so spotty for most of 2008.

What I find interesting and want to talk about in this article is how I can see reflections of my marriage and divorce in my dreams.

…

I got married 4 years ago last month.

Around that time, and for many months, I had dream after dream of fighting off sexual encounters with women.

All the dreams were of the same theme: a woman trying to seduce me or otherwise become intimate with me, and my struggle against it.

In most of the dreams, I would not do anything sexual with the woman. Sometimes I would.

These were weird dreams & I often felt guilty about having them. Here I was just recently married, and I’m having dream after dream about trying not to have sex with other women!

I know these dreams were about my (unconscious) anxiety of being committed to one woman for the rest of my life. Having had a step-father who had an affair and seeing first hand the horrors this brought on to the family, I believe my psyche had a fear of myself somehow doing the same thing.

Even though I very often told my wife about my dreams, I never mentioned these dreams to her.

After some months, they faded away & I didn’t think about them anymore.

…

Fast forward a few years, and you can see from my dream journal some crazy shit.

In March of 2007, after a gut-wrenching experience of seeing my wife performing tango for the first time, a hobby that came to be one of the biggest points of tension in our relationship, I had the following dream, as noted in my dream journal:

Some horrible dream with <my stepdad>  in it…
He’s sitting on the couch, and he gets up, and I’m trying to push him back
He suggests/threatens that maybe he should go see her/touch her/in some way interact with <my wife>, and I’m forcibly trying to push him back

This is the same step-father who had an affair.

In this dream he represents what I saw her dancing as; a threat to our marriage. And here I am struggling between my wife and my step-father, trying to push him away, and he keeps fighting to get at her.

…

The weeks after we physically moved out from living together,  I have many emotional dreams on change, fear, feeling suffocated, and so on.

Here’s a snippet from June 19th, 2008:

I’m outside and suddenly there’s a enormous force in the atmosphere, pulling everyone and everything out, uprooting them. I realize it’s the end of the world -  this is it, some natural disaster, global warning, something - and I’m going to die.

I try to think to myself of something important, of something to hold on to while/if I’m going to die, and I tell l myself “I love <my wife>.”

Having a dream about the end of the world is bad enough, but the end of this dream was just… brutal.

I woke up and felt terrible. What was this all about? Holding onto my feelings for my wife when everything is changing? It was incredibly painful.

The next week on June 24, in my journal I find a summary of a different dream as:

>intense dream - unable to move, captive, going to die.

And so on.
…

While we were still together, I recall a dream of drowning and trying my hardest to keep my head above the water. (Which I did!)

Long before this, there was this dream of beautiful cinematic quality, again touching on the end of the world theme. It’s our final moment, and we know this. We hold each other tightly, exchanging a final  “I love you.” Then we die together, arm in arm, as we (and the world) burn up in ashes.

…

And now in the present, where I am struggling with just going to work and staying afloat and deciding what to do with myself and my life, it’s interesting to see how this manifests in my dreams.

Hours ago I was in a different world, one in which I experienced many things such as being paralyzed by fear and unable to move or make a decision, with dreams of humiliation, fighting, and belittlement.

It’s no coincidence that I had these dreams last night after an evening of some rough emotional reflection my life.

 …. …. …..

In summary:

Well, there is no grand summary, or happy ending to this story. Life is rough.

But like my Grandma said to me recently:  this too shall pass.

And dreams will continue to live out our intense, internal emotional states, whether or not we even pay attention to them.

I think it’s enjoyable and rewarding to pay attention though.  The stories that our dreams tell create a parallel world of that internal emotional state, complimenting the real life story of our waking life. It’s wild and weird and sometimes even painful to notice. Yet sometimes - helpful, too.

…

This blog post is different from most of my previous posts.

It’s more personal. Open. Fluid.

And I feel like this is really me writing.

I aim to take this blog to on a more down to earth, even casual, level, here on Dreaming Life.

I figured this post would be a good time to formalize that intention.

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