Reality Check for Lucid Dreaming

This is cool and it really works. Moving across thresholds is crucial to our experience and construction of reality.

From Youtube filmmaker Adam St John:
This video is a supplement for training yourself to do reality checks whenever you walk through doorways. The goal is to habitually perform reality checks whenever you walk through doors or enter rooms. This will help you lucid dream.

On this note, I attended an amazing lecture on the role of thresholds on fear and ritual objects this past Spring at the annual conference of the Anthropology of Consciousness. C. Riley Auge, in her brilliant paper Fears and Apotropaic Agents, discussed how thresholds are by their very nature liminal places for us.

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Lost in transition

I”m in the middle of a move so my life has been a bit frazzled lately. Transitions are rough times, but they also have a very magical quality to them. I”d like to submit, quite seriously, that moving is an altered state of consciousness.

This does put U-Haul in a rather awkward position, but consider all that is involved with moving. All the regular boundaries must be dissolved – physical, mental and otherwise – and for a while there we are suspended in between. Neither here nor there. We leave behind not only our ecological niche, the place where we draw our water, but also our habits, routines and conditioning. We leave our community and enter unprotected spaces. Our diets suffer because we can’t control our food intake as well.

Then there’s the shock of re-entry. I don’t know what’s more dangerous, actually: moving someplace where you know no one or someplace where everyone knows who you used to be.

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Electric Dreams closes its doors

I”m sad to report that the oldest site for dream studies on the web has published its last issue. Electric Dreams has been providing cutting-edge dream theory and information for fourteen years. Yeah, that’s long before “google” became a verb. Indeed, the associated networking site Dream Gate paved the way for other on-line communities in the early days of the “inter-web.” Virtual space and dreaming go way back.

In an internet era dominated by child pornography and terrible poetry, Electric Dreams tackled the issue of free expression in digital space, refusing to be censored. Let’s face it: dreams have a nasty habit of showing us the ugly bits. The cyber-sharing of dreams snowballed into the larger cultural movement of the 1990s, moving the study of dreams beyond limited medical models and into the realm of culture, spirituality, and ecology.

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