Avatar: A Dreamer’s Review

Avatar is the movie James Cameron has been dreaming about for over 20 years.  It took that long for the technology to catch up with his vision.  Worth it?  Yeah, worth it.  I usually only see movies in the theater if something is guaranteed to blow up.  Avatar met this requirement, and if you wear the 3D glasses, exceeded it.  Beyond the explosions and mind-numbing CG goodness, Avatar is a film I recommend for dreamers everywhere.

As lucid dream writer Rebecca Turner suggested, the movie actually feels like a lucid dream.  Let’s see: a man goes to sleep, wakes up in a new body, and cavorts around in a magical world full of waterfalls and long-legged sexy smurfs.  Except for that last detail, this is the proto-typical lucid dream.

Read more

Lucid Dreaming and Narby’s Cosmic Serpent

I’ve been re-reading the Cosmic Serpent by Jeremy Narby. A highly recommended narrative about an anthropologist’s journey into the realm of ayahuasca cultures in Amazonia. It blew me away and the second reading is just as good.

Narby is an ethnobotanist, and he makes the key observation that, while Western scientists have freely picked from the fruits of indigenous plant knowledge, these same scientists do not believe the indigenous claim about how they received their staggering encyclopedic understanding of the most diverse ecosystem in the world.

Read more

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.”

Read more

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.

Read more

New Feature on Dream Studies: Book Reviews

I just published my first book review on Dream Studies, hopefully the first of many more to come. This expands one of my primary goals on this site, to provide readers with access to excellent consciousness studies and dream studies material that can be otherwise hard to find on the web.

After all, when you do a google search on dreams you are likely to find a number of cheap ad-sense optimized webpages with bad dream interpretations that have nothing to do with contemporary research. I find this intolerable and I”m here to help separate the wheat from the chaff.

Read more

Dreaming as Shamanic Archaeology

Just found an interesting article by Dr. Ron Masa about his practice of shamanic dreamwork. He tells a story about a women who discovered through her dreams a generations-old trauma that has been passed down through her father’s lineage.

Many psychologists have suggested that deep family-of-origin issues can be seen to manifest in our dreams, but this pattern of dream interpretation is usually overlooked. Masa suggests that dream interpretation is multi-layered, and never a simple equation. However, our heritage is certainly part of the story. He writes:

Read more

Lucid Dreaming, Shamanism and the Paleolithic

I just uploaded a new essay about the deep history of lucid dreaming and its potential role in Paleolithic rock art.

There’s always a danger of projecting our ideas about dreams into the past, especially the deep past, but as archaeologist David Lewis-Williams has reminded, humans cannot refrain from dreaming. I take this a step further and suggest that our ancient ancestors were quite capable of incubating visionary states within their dreams.

Click here to read: The Prehistory of Lucid Dreaming.