Here’s hoping that your final days of 2011 are relaxing!

As I look back what happened this year, I’m happy to report that 2011 has been a year of growth for me.

Highlights: I started off the year by lecturing at Stanford University on the topic of sleep paralysis, published my first peer-reviewed article in March, and am now wrapping up the year with a new book launch on lucid dreaming.

Other highlights include three sleep related articles of mine that went viral on Business Insider and an article about wolf dreams that was republished on Care2, one of the biggest healthy living sites on the web. 

2011 was a big year for radio work too. I was interviewed 5 times via blog radio: all are still available to listen online and can be found in my Whereabouts page.

As for DreamStudies.org, you may be interested to learn that:

The top trafficked articles written this year were:

1. Binaural beats for lucid dreaming – is it pseudoscience?
2. The Neuroscience of lucid dreaming
3. Is lucid dreaming dangerous?
4. 10 ways to prevent sleep paralysis
5. 3 techniques to turn SP into a lucid dream

And some personal favorite posts of 2011 that you may have missed:

1. Archaeodreaming: lucid dreaming as a tool for exploring sacred sites
2. Do dreams have meaning? (a tour of the dreaming brain)
3. 3 ways to find your ground (and make your home more sacred)
4. Lucid dreaming Alchemy: a guest post by Mary Ziemer

What’s ahead for 2012?

There’s a good chance that my new experiences with sleep deprivation as a dad will inspire more articles about the science and culture of modern sleep.

And you can definitely expect more in-depth work on lucid dreaming, as well as the transformative potential of sleep paralysis and other spontaneous vision states.

Finally, I hope to break new ground (for me) by blogging more often, and delving into other topics in consciousness studies such as shamanism, near death experiences and more sacred archaeology.

In short, I plan to keep on following the muse of dreams and consciousness studies, wherever it may take me, and I hope you will enjoy the trip as much as I do.

So if there’s something in particular you’d like to hear more about, leave a comment below and I’ll add it to the mix.

Happy New Year!

(First Image Credits: Candle by shutupyourface.)

In the coming weeks, I may change the title of this blog from dream studies to sleep deprivation studies.

Why? Because my wife just gave birth last week to our son Connor Dungan ! Here he is only a few hours after delivery.

Both Connor and Wendy are doing well, safely ensconced at home. We are feeling so blessed by a healthy baby (over 8lbs, y’all) and a relatively easy delivery. 

I’m also overcome with gratitude for the midwives of The Bryn Mawr Birth Center, and my friends and family who have helped us make this transition into parenthood with their gifts of dinner,  errand-running, and infant wisdom.

Our sleep patterns have indeed shifted dramically as we adapt to sleep deprivation.  Once we realized that time doesn’t matter anymore, and that the baby is calling the shots, we have watched with fascination as we become untethered from the diurnal world.

That’s my take away so far: sleep is opportunistic when you’re caring for a newborn.  There’s no choice but to adapt. But we are designed for this: it’s actually not that hard once my own rigid self-constraints of what “good sleep” means has fallen away.

My dreaming in particular has become filled with intensity, no doubt due to the pressure of REM deprivation, which results in instant REM rebound anytime I close my eyes. 

It’s really trippy.

That’s all I have time for today, but I hope to be adding new content to DreamStudies soon. 

And my new lucid dreaming program –the Lucid Immersion Blueprint — is still ready to birth Jan 2, 2012.  (Just had to birth a real baby first.)

Interested in rubbing elbows with some of the top dream experts today?  I invite you to join me at the 10th annual PsiberDreaming Conference. The con is entirely online, hosted by the International Association for the Study of Dreams. This year’s theme is “Perspectives on lucid dreaming,” and the line up is pretty impressive. And I’m not just saying that because I’ll be there.

Keynote presenter Fariba Bogzaran: artist, psychologist and lucid dreaming researcher

Keynotes include psychologist Fariba Bogzaran, founder of the Dream Studies program at John F Kennedy University, and Robbie Bosnak, Jungian therapist and clinical psychologist. Integrating dream wisdom with modern life, both presenters have had a powerful impact on thousands with their books, workshops and trainings.  

Two other notable presenters include Robert Waggoner, author of Lucid Dreaming: gateway to the inner self, and Jayne Gackenbach, one of the most prolific lucid dream researchers to date.

There’s over 25 presenters total, so I’m just scratching the surface here.

My presentation: introducing Lucid Immersion
Lucid dreaming is the art of knowing you’re in a dream while still within the confines of sleep. I’ll be presenting my personal method for increasing lucidity in dreams, based on material from my soon-to-be-released mastermind guide Lucid Immersion. Just like the best way for learning a language, you can go deeper with lucidity by saturating yourself in an environment where you eat, breathe and live lucid.

It’s really a meta-method, drawn from the latest lucid dreaming research (including many co-presenters’ work) as well as the wisdom of historic dreaming lore. My presentation at PsiberDreaming focuses on building a safe container for lucid immersion within the constraints of everyday life.

Not the Dragon, Laura Atkinson, digital art, 2010. A piece from PsiberDreaming 2010.

An Online conference – how does that work?
The PsiberDreaming team has been leading social spaces on the web for 10 years. That’s Before Facebook (BF).

Essentially, for each day during the two week conference—September 25-October 9— new papers and workshops will be unlocked. Participants can join discussions, and ask direct questions to the presenters.

Meanwhile, there’s a beehive of general discussion activity ongoing in the Dreamer’s Inn, and another area for dream sharing.

It’s not just text either: the conference will also display an online digital art gallery.

Contests too: including the popular annual dream telepathy contest, as well as contests for mutual dreaming and  other elements of paranormal dreaming.

I’m also excited to announce that moderators from LucidDreaming4all will also open a portal at the con. Five LD4all experts will be present to answer questions.

In case you didn’t know, LD4All recently celebrated its 15th anniversary, and remains the oldest lucid dreaming forum in the whole wide net.

Attend for free
The International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD) has made an offer that if you become a member before October 9, you can attend the PsiberDreaming Conference for free.

Members of the IASD receive a yearly subscription to the peer-reviewed research journal Dreaming and the popular magazine DreamTime. Members also can rev up their dream education by participating in online study groups monitored by dream experts and researchers.

The conference costs $45 for general public. $40 for IASD members, and $30 for students with a current ID.

Here’s where to learn more about the conference, check out the other presenters, and register.

Hope you join me!

It’s the last day of the year and I managed to find some time to myself in the middle of all the holiday parties buzzing around. It’s a good opportunity to review what happened this year on DreamStudies, and what’s coming next.

But first, some perspective. My wife and I moved three times in 2010, including a move from California to the fine state of Pennsylvania.  Hence the floating house. I’m amazed I got anything done at all, given that the bulk of the year was spent packing, unpacking, and repacking. My books spent almost as much time in boxes as they did on shelves. And we continuously reinvented ourselves, finally settling in Media PA, a forward-looking small town on the western side of Philadelphia.

It got real.

Life comes first, and then art. In between our juggling act of domesticity, I found the time to produce my first book. I wrote Sleep Paralysis: A Dreamer’s Guide as an e-book first because I know so many people who are suffering and are desperate for help.

Increasingly, though, readers asked me to publish it as a “real” book, and this turned out to be a great decision. I published with Hyena Press, a small press out of Los Altos, California, renaming the print book’s subtitle as “A guide to hypnagogic visions and visitors of the night” due to the additional content in the print book.

I was amazed how quickly this dream became a reality: from sending the files to my publisher to holding the book in my hands, the process took less than 6 months. We could do this because Hyena Press uses print-on-demand technology. As a non-fiction dream book about a highly specialized topic, with very little marketing to boot, the book is doing pretty well, and is regularly listed on Amazon in the top 50 dream books.

The book has brought a lot of press, radio interviews and accolades, including the opportunity to speak at Stanford University next month on the topic. I’m really excited for these opportunities to help remind our culture that visions and life-changing dreams still impact our society in the 21st century.

Academically Speaking

I’ve also been slowly but surely working on my academic contribution to lucid dreaming: how to use lucid dreams in scientific research as a method to uncover biases and discover creative new insights. My chapter in Craig Chalquist’s Rebearths: Conversations with a World Ensouled is a poetic discussion of this lucid dreaming incubation method, which I applied when researching prehistoric rock art in Nicaragua in 2006.

A more formal description of this process will be published in the March 2011 edition of the peer-reviewed journal Anthropology of Consciousness. Reviewers from the fields of archaeology, museum studies, consciousness studies and psychology wrote commentaries on this article as well, making the entire article practically a third of the volume’s content.

My hope is that these articles inspire other scientists, artists and cultural creatives to look to their dreams for inspiration and possible solutions to their current puzzles.

DreamStudies continues to grow

Meanwhile, DreamStudies got a new sleek look thanks to MadBadCat Designs. I also installed a mobile theme so you can read the blog on the mobile device of your choice.

Visitors and subscribers have been steadily increasing, even when I don’t post for more than three weeks. That’s been the toughest part of blogging for me, finding a regular posting rhythm. Slow and steady: that’s been the pace of Dreamstudies for over three years, for better or worse.

The most popular posts of 2010 include:

Sleep Paralysis: Dreams of Being Held Down

The Neuroscience of Dreams

9 Ways to Wake up from Sleep Paralysis

Inception: Dream Researchers Expose Project Somnacin

The Succubus Reconsidered: Sexuality in Sleep Paralysis

Lucid Dreaming as a Shamanic Technology

The 5 most Effective Herbs for Sleep and Relaxation

5 Traits of Natural Lucid Dreamers

Inception and Mutual Lucid Dreaming

Avatar: A Dreamer’s Review

However, many of the traffic from these posts came from stumbleupon, google search or other sources, not from my subscribers. So I’d like to ask you what were your favorite posts from DreamStudies this year?  Also, what would you like to see more of?  As much as I appreciate getting good traffic, it’s really you, my core readers, who encourage and inspire me to keep this blog going. Your thank you emails, personal dream and nightmare accounts, and even your criticism make this labor of love so worth it. Thank you for that.

2011 – What’s coming next

My hope is to publish more regularly in 2011, and start writing some shorter blog pieces again now that I’ve built up my foundational material. I’m also working on two different ebook projects that I’ll unveil pretty soon. Many have also been asking me for more educational material for lucid dreaming, so stay tuned.

I’m also participating more with other dream education sites, such as the Dream Tribe. These creative partnerships wouldn’t be possible without the collaborative spirit of the Internet, and I’m convinced that a new age is dawning in terms of the interdisciplinary field of dream research.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to balance this with my freelance writing work, my local workshops and readings, as well as my family life in PA.  I can feel that 2011 is going to be a powerful year for dream studies — not just for my work, but for all those who are working on bringing dreams and imagination back into the fold of modern life.

So Happy New Year! May you sleep well and dream stronger than ever.

Don’t forget to leave a comment about what you’d like to see more of on DreamStudies.

A few nights ago, I dreamed of a house floating down a river. I ran up a hill to a bridge to see if I could jump on. On the way up, I noticed I was barefoot and my feet had great traction on the loose soils of the path.  I missed the boat. But then I saw that someone had left a dagger for me. I picked it up and appreciated its solid feel.

No doubt about it, my dreaming self has finally noticed I am about to leave California. My house is on the move and I’m bucking up for the journey. In less than a week, my wife and I will begin the 3400 mile adventure to the east coast. Destination: Philadelphia.  It’s a move back to our roots, closer to old friends and family.

I’ve never lived north of the Mason-Dixon line (California doesn’t count, it’s on a whole nuther plane of reality) but going to Pennsylvania feels like going home. As it turns out, all of my mother’s and some of my father’s ancestry spent generations in PA after coming off the boat from Ireland and Germany in the 18th and 19th centuries. Hey, there’s the boat again. Interesting.

Something comforting about these roots, especially because maybe some ancestral winter coping mechanisms will kick in. I don’t even have a winter coat, much less winter skillz. But I do have my new dagger for protection.

So DreamStudies is going to be quiet for a couple weeks. I’ll try to update the comments at wifi hot spots at random cafes across the U.S. We are planning a fun trip along the way back east, with stops at some our favorite parts of the American West that include themes such as cannibalism, dinosaurs and hot springs.

And if you happen to live in Iowa, you’re cordially invited to my lucid dreaming workshop in Iowa City on August 20th. The workshop is at Heartland Yoga. For information, email info at icheartlandyoga.com

I realized yesterday that DreamStudies is now 3 years old! This blog has stayed with me as I’ve moved all over the U.S.: from California, to Florida, back to California and now onwards to Pennsylvania later this summer. Also, in that time, I finished my thesis on lucid dreaming, got married, became a freelance writer and Internet consultant, and ate a vast amount of peanut butter and pickle sandwiches. Three years is middle-aged for the blogosphere, but still a toddler in terms of covering the worlds of consciousness and dream studies.

Just now, I did a little google-mancy, and typed “three year old toddler” into the box, and up came this quote from Disney’s WonderTime:

By the age of 3, children have had enough personal experience to master many of life’s simple concepts. Their next challenge is to build on them.

That sums up the status of my mission at DreamStudies pretty well.

A Quick Look Back

I’ve laid much of the foundation in the last three years, covered some major dream theories, and ways to work with your own dreams, although neither of those series were as popular as my articles on lucid dreaming, especially the primer on lucid dream sex.

Representing the dark side, I’ve focused on lucid nightmares, sleep paralysis and occasional tale of jungle sorcerers. Representing the light, I’ve looked into geometric imagery in lucid dreams, as well as lucid dreams in Christianity and the paleolithic era, and the importance of big dreams.

Along the way, I’ve covered more esoteric topics, including the prehistory of hallucinogens, head shrinking,  ancestral dreams, the integral science of consciousness, and a seemingly random, but critical to my sanity,  guide to nature awareness.

I’m noticing I need to reorganize my content again, it’s getting long in the tooth.

And the Way Forward

But more importantly now it’s time to start integrating these concepts and schools of thought. In my first post about the interdisciplinary study of dreams, I wrote:

This portal was created because there are few outlets in the blogosphere that address dream studies from multiple perspectives. While I have lots of opinions about dreaming and the realm of consciousness studies in general, my intention here is not to defend a camp but explore the terrain. Further, I am not here to conquer the terrain, but to take notes in a tiny leather journal like a gentle 19th century naturalist who has a quick eye and a slight limp. As depth psychologist Craig Chalquist likes to remind me, “we are cosmographers, not conquistadors.”

A nice intention, but I’m biased as hell towards certain perspectives, so my map of the state of contemporary Dream Studies is skewed, and it must be skewed. I can’t eradicate my biases, and any attempt to try just destroys my relationship to the Other, because my construction of reality depends on my ability to project a pattern into the void — and if I’m lucky — find that pattern mirrored back. So, yeah, I defended camps along the way – and my hope is that I can continue to do so, but consciously and transparently.

What’s coming next for DreamStudies

With a little luck, this next year will see more about my first love, lucid dreaming, as well as more guest posts from excellent dreamers and visionaries. (My guest authors rock!  In fact, an article by Oneirology blogger Lee Adams on “dreams as the original psychedelic” is still one of the most popular posts of all time on this site.)  I’m also hoping to start exploring more connections between dreams, archaeology, sacred sites and the human visionary capability. Throw in some healthy apocalypticism and a wee bit of transpersonal psychology too.

Owlie, my alter ego, at last year's IASD Dream Conference in Chicago.

Besides that, I’m not sure exactly. But the paperback version of my Sleep Paralysis ebook will be out later this summer: no dates yet. I’ve also got a few articles out that explore the role of dreams in cognitive archaeology: but no dates yet.

Here’s some dates I got:

I’ll be at the annual conference for the International Association for the Study of Dreams next week in Asheville, NC, June 27-July 2, presenting How to Win Fiends and Influence Demons: Sleep Paralysis as a Portal to Extraordinary Dreaming. If you are in the Southeast U.S., check out the dreams conference. We’re mostly harmless, but then again, dreamworkers do tend to dabble into more shadow work than most sane individuals (hence, the toothy owl-monster guardian of dreamstudies: Owlie).

So, onward, towards the second tier, towards integration, and projecting patterns into the void!

But unlike three years ago, I don’t feel like I’m talking to a void anymore, so I’d like to ask you:

What would you like to see more of at DreamStudies?

This is a great opportunity to see with your own eyes how many of us there are working towards radical change.  Radical change, am I serious?  Yes, I mean the intense work ahead of us to transform our dream-phobic society into a Dreaming Culture.

More than even, our personal and collective imaginations are critical for ensuring the future of our society, our species, and life on this planet.  Dreamers spend too many nights waking up with apocalyptic nightmares.  We spend too much time actively repressing our creative visions with the techno-rational mandate that it was “JUST a dream.”

And we, as a culture, share too many visions to not network about their possible interpretations and the action steps we can take to prevent our worst nightmares from actually materializing.

Note, that’s just my personal rant about the importance of Dream Studies; the talk on Friday will no doubt go far afield from these clumsy ideas.   Please join us, and share your dreams about the future dreaming in Northern California.

For more information, call the The Dream Institute, located at 1672 University Avenue in Berkeley, CA 94703 at the historic Fox Commons.

At the moment, apostrophes and single quotes have gotten lost in the migration. If they appear as quotation marks, do forgive us. If you find some other reason we should be concern, please leave a comment.

If you left a comment over the holiday weekend, it might be missing as well. Again, we- no I-  apologize. I will probably find it in time.

We’ve scheduled the migration to our new server over the holiday weekend. The change should be imperceptible if all goes well. So  I have written this note for our own benefit. It is the frontpage marker to let us know that the DNS addies have propagated across the cybersphere.

Please bear with us, note that the site might be down for a time and we might be unstable for a day or 2.

So if you read this post, please disregard it. It is a temporary post to mark the new servers and will likely disappear by the time Mercury goes direct.

Cheers.

madbadcat graphics

Sometime in the next month I’ll be redesigning the site and adding new features. I”d really like to know what you think about some new directions the portal could go in. What is most important to you – hearing about new dream research, being exposed to cool dream-inspired art, or my how-to articles” Or, fill in your own answer; I”m uniquely blind to what brings ya’ll back post after post.

So check out the poll on the left sidebar and let me know!

And of course if you”ve just stumbled across me for the first time – I”d love to hear your opinions too.

1. If I don’t do my stretches in the morning, my back is stiff all day and that makes me grumpy.

2. Sometimes I drink coffee, but the habit sneaks up on me and soon enough I”m drinking three cups a day. Then I get stomach aches. So I go cold turkey and drink black tea for a month or so until I have one innocent cup of coffee usually because it’s a romantic setting like a cafe in San Francisco on a foggy day. Rinse and repeat.

3. I have been a champion of dental floss since I was a kid. I have been known to lecture people on the benefits of flossing, and I”m even tempted to go into it right now. Once I mailed a friend some dental floss because I was worried about the health of his gums.

4. I can’t remember the end of most movies I”ve watched. Maybe I get too caught up in the drama, dunno. This amuses my friends to no end but I don’t mind because for me, everything is always a surprise.

5. When I sip a beverage, I make two tiny lip smacking sounds afterwards. Apparently I do this all the time.

6. I became an atheist in the 6th grade immediately before my mother made me swear on the Bible that I didn’t eat the chocolate bar that was in the freezer. That was the only way I could convince myself that I hadn’t sinned, because if God didn’t exist, then the Bible was just some random book, and my lie was harmless. My spiritual convictions aren’t so defensive these days, and I apologized to my mother a few years ago.

So I”m tagging six others to let this meme metastasize some more: Jonathan, Laura, Ben, Chia, Gyrus and Jacob. And Danielle for good measure, who has the oldest blog I know. It won’t hurt my feelings if ya’ll don’t do it. Really, I’ll be okay.