Exploring Consciousness Through Dreams (Part 2)

What is liminal dreaming? Liminal Dreaming, which is the space between awake and asleep, hypnagogia, when you’re falling asleep, and hypnopompia when you’re waking up. So, liminal dream states are some of the most unusual dream states. I’ve had a lot of background working with dreams, lucid dreams and oneirogens, things that promote vivid dreams, different kinds of dream work. And a few years ago I started getting really involved in liminal dreams. It started with an experience where I was lying in bed and I realized that basically my body had fallen asleep. And my mind was still awake and I was having this dream and it had a little bit of narrative, but it’s kind of non-narrative. And that experience got me really interested and I started exploring a little bit and realize that hypnagogia and hypnopompia, they’re experiences that everyone has, we all go through them and they’re super weird. It all depends on brain waves: Most brainwave states and measured by EEG, are marked by one single sign wave. So right now we’re probably in beta. We’re going like eight, probably like eight to 13 waves per second because we’re engaged in the conversation. Feta, which is most usually has two sign waves, most have one. But hypnagogia and hypnopompia have nine sign waves. And so it’s by far the shortest brainwave period. And most of us, unless you train yourself to stay in it, you only spend minutes a day. If you think of subconscious and dream and sleep as the ocean, and you think of the waking rational mind as the land, the place where water crashes into land is super chaotic. That’s where all the waves are. And that’s where you surf. So liminal dreaming is kind of surfing the edge of conscious and unconscious. It’s learning to surf the space where you’re both dreaming and awake at the same time and kind of surf down the middle of them.

Jennifer Dumpert is a San Francisco-based writer and lecturer, and the founder of the Oneironauticum, an international organization that explores the phenomenological experience of dreams as a means of experimenting with mind. She also teaches the practice of Liminal Dreaming — surfing the edges of consciousness using hypnagogic and hypnopompic dream states.




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