I would love to see other suggestions from members for possible guest interviews for aholecek to consider. Here are some of mine:
Alexandra Kitson - I’d love to hear more about her current Lucid Loop project, and her thoughts on how lucid dreaming may inform virtual reality design (and vice versa).
Clare R. Johnson - author of Mindful Dreaming and current president of The International Association for the Study of Dreams. Here is a 10-minute video of her discussing “Can lucid dreaming help us to die?” with Dr. Keith Hearne
You are on it Arthur, all great suggestions. Stay tuned, we have a terrific line up of guests coming up. And can surely include these folks. I’ve seen some of your links, but not the one with Keith, will check it out.
Thanks!
You’re welcome, Andrew, and yay! I’m glad you like my suggestions. I thought of another one: Jayne Gackenback, who has done groundbreaking research on connections between lucid dreaming and videogames.
EDIT: after writing this post I rewatched portions of the first webinar and remembered that you briefly mentioned Gackenback in response to my question.
Great suggestion again Arthur, Jayne has made terrific contributions, and I’d love to chat with her. Jay Mutzafi is a friend in the LA area (I did an interview with him on his Lucid Sage podcast years ago), so he can connect us. Jayne’s anthology with Stephen LaBerge, Conscious Mind Sleeping Brain is a classic. Check it out.
Groovy. I’m pretty sure Jay is living in Portland, Oregon these days (unless he moved again). I had a great conversation with him last July during a Portland visit. I remember the interview you did with him on his podcast (episode 14), I quite enjoyed it!
Kristen LaMarca, Ph.D. is an avid lucid dreamer whose primary interest focuses on the therapeutic applications of lucid dreaming. After attending her first Dreaming and Awakening workshop in 2007, Kristen returned for a second helping in 2010 and became increasingly involved in the program while working through training to become a clinician.
In addition to assisting with research experiments conducted during the workshop, Kristen will begin our morning sessions with guided meditations and group discussions on dreams of the night. She will be working directly with participants to help them develop and hone the skills for a fulfilling lucid dream practice. As an experienced practitioner of dream yoga and meditation within the lucid dream state, Kristen will also share her insights into a discipline that has resulted in much personal reward.
David Jay Brown. I haven’t read his book Dreaming Wide Awake: Lucid Dreaming, Shamanic Healing, and Psychedelics, but I’m interested in the relationship between psychedelics and lucid dreaming/dream yoga and wonder if psychedelics could be another beneficial (occasional or very occasional) daytime practice along with illusory form and VR.
I also have a couple questions about guest interviews that I haven’t seen answered… Will they be recorded with a live online community audience? And if not, will there be an opportunity for us to suggest questions? Thanks!
Hi @Evan - You can post your questions for Andrew / and for guest speakers in the Andrew Q&A section.
The webinars will also provide you the opportunity to ask questions live, it’s highly encouraged! Check out Episode 001: Why Night? Club Why Now? to get a sense of how it works.
@Evan, have you read Dumpert’s book on liminal dreaming? It’s on my to-read list and I’m looking forward to checking it out. The liminal dreaming (hypnagogic/hypnopompic) states are so interesting! I agree with you that she would be a very interesting guest interview here.
Hi @ArthurG. Thanks for the reminder! I was waiting for it to come out and then forgot about it. After reading your message, I checked Amazon and saw that it was finally released a couple days ago. I’ll probably start reading it pretty soon and will let you know what I think when I’m done.
Yay! Looking forward to your report @Evan. Depending on what you think about it, it might move higher up on my to-read list.
On Jennifer Dumpert’s website is a list of book tour dates (under “Upcoming Events” on the left-hand side), in case you are interested in that. I’m thinking about attending one of them if it works out schedule-wise.
I found this one-hour video by Jennifer Dumpert Liminal Dreaming: Dreamwork at the Edges of Consciousness, but haven’t listened to it yet. A friend of mine went to see one of Dumpert’s book tour dates and said it was quite good; she mentioned that Dumpert can apparently drop into hypnagogia at the drop of a hat and did so at the talk – closing her eyes and describing what she was seeing.
It was interesting hearing @aholecek talk about how fascinated he is by the hypnagogic state in his interview with @kristenlamarca, and it would be really cool if perchance he does a deep dive into that topic with Dumpert at some point.
I’d be interested in hearing you interview Sergio Magana who approaches lucid dreaming from the Mexican Toltec tradition and would provide an excellent non-western perspective about the ancient lucid dreaming practices native to this continent. He and Charlie Morley did a “World Tour” together a few years ago so he’s out in the public with his teachings. I believe interviewing Sergio would be a very educative exchange of ideas for us to experience.
Jennifer Dumpert had an interesting 1.5 hour conversation with the host of Adventures Through The Mind podcast – you can listen to it here. I found the last half hour the most interesting; in that section they talked about oneirogens (practices and substances that enhance dreaming) and the relationship of liminal dreaming to death.
Working with fear, that’s another [use of liminal dreaming]. Again working with sleep paralysis is one way to do it. But there’s darkness in the mind, right? There are things that arise. In liminal dreamspace, because you retain waking consciousness in that space, things that arise that might be darker. You know that it’s not real, unlike in a REM dream – those can be very terrifying, because in the dream you accept what’s happening as real, just like you do in waking life. But in liminal dreamspace you know that you’re in it, you have the consciousness of the world around you, and so when fear arises, you actually have the mind to be able to say “OK, this is interesting. This is the fear that’s in my own mind, but it’s not actually an immediate danger.” And in fact the most traditional lucid dreamers, the Tibetan Buddhists, used liminal dreaming to teach themselves lucid dreaming, and one of the two main reasons they did it was to keep your cool during the bardo. In the bardo there’s a lot of both very seductive and very scary creatures and images that arise – the bardo being the liminal space between death and rebirth the Tibetan Buddhists feel that we go through. And in the bardo space if you could keep your cool when things are very frightening, you have a better rebirth is what they think. Someone like Alex Grey…talks about psychedelics as practice for the bardo, and I think that liminal dreaming can give you practice for the psychedelics! and the Tibetans thought also for the bardo, so that you are not as drawn in, both by the seductive and the frightening images that arise. [this quote starts about 52 minutes into the podcast episode]
This makes me even more interested in Dumpert as a potential Night Club guest. (Aside: evidently the correct pronunciation of her last name is DOOM PEAR.)
I listened to that interview as well. She gives a very interesting tip for working with hypnagogic imagery…which is to gently breath into the imagery in order to strengthen it. You can hear her explain that idea in more detail during the last 11 minutes.
Over the past three days I have been experimenting with that technique quite a bit…and one time it ended up working excellently.