DreamStudies is 3 Years Old

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.

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?