The Dark Side of Shamanic Tourism

This is the Anthropology of Consciousness Review – Part III.

Shamanic tourism is gaining popularity every year. This segment of the ecotourism industry serves First Worlders who want to experience entheogens in a somewhat Indigenous context.

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Anthropology of Consciousness Review: Part II

Two great presentations to cover tonight from two experts in shamanism.

Author Hillary Webb gave a spell-binding talk about her participatory research into Andean cosmology. When she asked a respected Andean shaman about the worldview of complementary dualism that is at the heart of his culture, he replied, “It’s best to download it from the cosmos.” So she did, by grace of a San Pedro ceremony high on a mesa top.

Such participatory research can be helpful in breaking down constructs in order to perceive reality as it is experienced through other cultural mazeways. Guided by ritual experts, Webb described a new level of intuitive being-in-the-world that opened her up into “the place between will and surrender.”

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Anthropology of Consciousness Conference Review: Part I

I”m back from chilly New Haven, CT with a head full of ideas. The annual Anthropology of Consciousness conference was a blast, providing fascinating ethnographic reports, experiential research and some intriguing new perspectives of the role of consciousness in anthropology. Luckily there was a great Irish pub to help with the consolidation of this information after hours. So over the next week, I will report on my personal highlights of the conference in a series of posts.

Today, let me start with the vampire children.

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Consciousness, Spirit, and Amtrak

I”m getting on a train this evening, heading towards Yale Divinity for the 2008 conference for the Society of the Anthropology of Consciousness. Got my woolens and my soft brown shoes so I can blend in with the ivy scene.

Who am I kidding tho? I”m a southerner and to prove it I”ve got a sunburn on the back of my neck from last weekend’s hike in the palm hammocks.

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Psychogeography and Dreams

One of the most original dream-related sites on the web, urbandreamscape.com, has begun a blog detailing their dream incubation experiments: the Oneironauticum.

Jennifer Dumpert and associates discuss their participation in on-going group dreaming projects with an emphasis on how dreams and waking life meet through the perception of landscape and cityscape. It’s part slumber party, part experiential research, and sounds like a lot of fun.

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Are Boring Dreams our Western Heritage?

Since I”m in the business of pointing out good dream research, today I thought I would point out the opposite. Unfortunately, this fluff piece on dreams from The Daily Advertiser in Arizona is pretty typical of mainstream journalism. It’s an entertaining read, but devoid of actual journalistic research.

The title of this article “Stuff that dreams are made of is pretty mundane” sounds like a good dream research lead-in, but it’s actually a confessional by the author that he knows nothing about dreams and is bored by other people’s experiences. He writes, “Note: I would research the topic, but I never could figure out that complicated Dewey Decimal System. “

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Geometric Imagery in Lucid Dreaming

I figured my first peer-reviewed dream research post should nod to the one of the unrecognized classics in the field of lucid dreaming phenomenology.

This is correlated with, but not necessarily caused by, the fact that my current academic journals are boxed away somewhere in the barn behind a ten foot wall of hay.

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Lucid Dreaming: Conquest and Wilderness

My proposed lecture has been officially accepted for this year’s annual conference for the International Association for the Study of Dreams, located in Montreal from July 9-12, 2008.

The symposium is titled Ecopsychology, Cross Cultural Big Dreams, and Shamanic Lucid Dreams, also with Mark Schroll, Jorge Conesa-Sevilla, Curt Hoffman, with discussants Stanley Krippner and Judy Gardiner.

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