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http://oneironauticum.com/
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Sleep Raves - Have You Ever Been Part of a 'Oneironauticum'? Maybe It's Time You Tried
Humans have been using oneirogens to hack dreams for pretty much as long as we’ve been doing anything.
By Jennifer Dumpert / Van Winkle's
November 24, 2015


mugwort (Artemisia indica) in Japan
Photo Credit: feathercollector

Original published by Van Winkle's, a new website dedicated to smarter sleep & wakefulness, published by Casper.
Shop ▾

It’s midnight in a warehouse space in downtown Los Angeles. Instead of bouncing to a DJ, a couple dozen strangers snuggle down into sleeping bags piled and prepare to listen to a different sort of music. Somnium is a seven-and-a-half-hour composition by Robert Rich, specifically designed to optimize the dream experience. I hit play and climb into my own cozy nest.

At the same moment, people around the world do the same, preparing to listen to the track in their own bedrooms. Tonight, we’re an intimately connected community of dreamers.

We’re participating in the Oneironauticum, a worldwide slumber party I launched in 2008. It’s dedicated to the exploration of oneirogens — substances, sounds, scents and practices that intensify dreams. The word comes from the Greek oneiro, dream, and gen, to create. They work.

It is in our DNA to experiment with substances, and the urge to experiment with consciousness is an inherent part of our makeup. As kids, we roll down hills and press the heels of our hands against our eyes; as adults, we take drugs and have sex, dance ourselves into trance states or seek out the runner’s high. Dreaming is the original altered mind state. It’s also the most universally experienced one. We all visit bizarre, visionary worlds during the third of our lives we spend asleep.

It’s not surprising, then, that humans have been using oneirogens to hack dreams for pretty much as long as we’ve been doing anything. In ancient Greece, pilgrims flocked to temples of Asclepius to seek healing through consultation with early doctors; working with dreams was understood as being integral to healing. References to lucid dreaming appear in the Upanishads, the sacred Hindu texts that date back to at least 600 BCE. The Vigyan Bhairav Tantra describes ways to direct consciousness within the dream.

For many, consciousness experimentation motivates their experiments with oneirogens, but they’re used for a wide range of other reasons, too. Some traditional cultures, including the Chontal and Xhosa, used oneirogens to contact ancestors and bring back teachings from the dream world. In Tibetan Buddhism, lucid dream practices underscore the unreality of the world and help practitioners prepare for the Bardo. Siberian shamans used wild asparagus to induce flying dreams; today, an herbalist might suggest rose, rosemary or sage to prompt healing dreams.

Oneirogens themselves are consumed or practiced in a wide variety of ways. Some are teas and ingestibles that need to be taken or practiced at specific times during the night, as they are tied to specific sleep phases. For example, those that target the hypnagogic first state must be taken at the beginning of sleep or during naps. Particularly fast-acting oneirogens that target REM, such as galantamine (see below), are best taken after you’ve been asleep for five hours, when periods of REM sleep start to grow longer.

Sound and scent make excellent oneirogens, too, as hearing and olfaction are the only senses that aren’t completely muted during sleep. With scents, your brain probably won’t recognize what you’re smelling — and they won’t necessarily wake you up — butstudies have shown that different odors have specific effects on dreams. And in dreams, you can smell things wafting in from the waking world just fine.

Similarly, when you’re asleep, you can still hear, although it’s hard to know how your dreaming mind will translate what your ears perceive. Many apps provide audible oneirogens, including Dream:ON, iDoser and Yumemiru, and long soundscapes have been composed to stimulate the dreaming mind. The latter include Robert Rich’s Somnium and Max Richter’sSleep, which was broadcast live on the BBC in September. As an oneirogen, music also has the advantage of being easily accessible.

In my case, I’ve spent eight years experimenting with oneirogens, resulting in this catalog of their usages and effects. If you decide to try any of them, keep in mind that not everything works for everyone. Many factors contribute to how well an oneirogen will work for any individual. And while these substances are legal and considered harmless, it’s wise to check with your doctor beforehand, just in case.

***

Calea Zacatechichi
What is it?

This flowering plant is used by the Chontal natives indigenous to the Mexican state of Oaxaca, where there is a strong tradition of visionary plants. Traditionally, calea is used for oneiromancy, a form of divination based on dreams. The Chontal believe that dreams happen in realms beyond those we consciously perceive, and that the contents of dreams can convey meaningful messages or prophecy. They further maintain that calea clarifies the senses so the dreamer can more clearly perceive insights and bring them back into waking memory.

How does it work?

Smoked or steeped into an astoundingly bitter tea, caleahelps induce lucid dreams. It also produces incredibly vivid sensory experiences in the dreamworld; hence, it’s sometimes referred to as “the dream herb.” It often leads to memorable tastes, vibrant colors and beautiful, unidentifiable scents in dreams. Once, in a calea dream, I read a long text — a notoriously difficult thing to do in dreams.

***

Somnium

What is it?

During the 1980s, electronic musician Robert Rich performed a series of live, all-night concerts for sleeping Bay Area audiences. To maximize dreaming, he composed pieces that alternate sound textures to match the phases of sleep. The key of the pieces was to keep the mind as close to consciousness as possible, without waking it out of the dream.

How does it work?

In deep sleep, when the mind dives far below the surface of consciousness, the music becomes more active. During dream-rich REM sleep, when brain waves vibrate at the same rate as they do in an alert waking mind, the sound becomes quieter and more peaceful

Interestingly, this particular oneirogen sometimes brings participants into each other’s dreams. People also tend to dream of the place in which they’re sleeping. Working with Somnium, remote participants have often felt that they met the main group in the dream world.

***

Mugwort

What is it?

Perhaps our most frequently used oneirogen, mugwort, actually refers to several species of plants in the Artemisia genus. The plant’s oil contains thujone, the active ingredient in absinthe, and can be made into a tea. Dried mugwort can be sprinkled with mugwort essential oil, if you really want to go for it.

How does it work?

Mugwort supports long, epic, detailed dreams and also seems to improve dream recall. People interested inastral travel also claim that mugwort can help with the sensation of actually leaving one’s body. In Korean tradition, mugwort hot baths or mugwort steams taken late at night are used to induce vivid dreams.

***

Galantamine

What is it?

In its organic form, galantamine is an alkaloid derived from the bulbs and flowers of various plants. The form we use comes from red spider lily. Used to treat Alzheimer’s and other memory impairments, galantamine temporarily increases the brain’s levels of acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter that plays a very active role in dreaming.

How does it work?

To use this substance, set your alarm for five hours after you go to sleep, a time in the sleep cycle when REM sleep phases begin to get longer. When you wake, take eight mg (capsules are best) and fall back asleep.

Galantamine is the best quick path to lucid dreaming. Besides increasing the duration of REM, it seems to stabilize the structural coherence of the dream world. I first tried this oneirogen during a workshop I took in Hawaii with dream researcher Stephen LaBerge, who conducted clinical trials that concluded galantamine produces an almost six times greater likelihood of having lucid dreams.

This oneirogen also produces a much greater quantity of dreams. You may wake in the morning with the feeling that you’ve been active all night.

***

Silene Capensis

What is it?

This flowering herb grows in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. The native Xhosa people traditionally use it for their form of oneiromancy. The Xhosa believe that silene capensis facilitates communication with the ancestors, who provide guidance or prophecy. They call the root “Undela Ziimhlophe,” which translates to "white paths" or “white ways.”

How does it work?

Traditionally, the powdered root is placed in water and then whipped into a foam, which is then eaten. Remarkably enough, in certain individuals this oneirogen does produce dreams that feature wise figures or teachers, as well as the color white. Even without these traditional characteristics, Silene Capensis dreams often seem particularly meaningful.

***

Binaural Beats

What is it?

Although they’ve been around since the 1970s, binaural beats are currently undergoing a resurgence of interest thanks to certain phone apps that can so easily produce them.

How does it work?

Tones or frequencies are used to entrain brainwaves. When two different frequencies enter the head through the right and left ears, the brain synthesizes the difference between them. This creates a rhythm that stimulates or triggers a brain state.

Today, the vendors of apps that produce binaural beats claim to be able to produce all sorts of mind states, from drug experiences to emotions such as confidence or love.
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http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/refugee-debate-in-germany-needs-more-nuance-a-1067761.html
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A boat full of refugees on the Aegean Sea between Turkey and Greece. What would we do in their situation?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNJUBnUQylE  \!!
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Carol Grigg, "Earth Healer"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPe8gLe8OXk
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http://www.alternet.org/culture/how-corporations-and-politicians-use-numbers-lie-and-how-not-be-fooled
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Culture
How Corporations and Politicians Use Numbers to Lie — and How Not to Be Fooled

Do 8 out of 10 dentists really prefer Colgate?
By Larry Schwartz / AlterNet
January 16, 2016

Americans, as P.T. Barnum once noted, are not all that difficult to fool, and our nation’s somewhat weak math skills don’t help. A Pew Research Center report issued last year, which studied test results of 15-year-olds, ranked the United States 35th in the world in math. Not only has this weakness in understanding numbers created opportunities for mass exploitation by Big Pharma and other industries, it has led to needless and mostly unwarranted fear. While Americans don’t understand math, be assured that corporations do, and they happily use it to mislead and obfuscate in the name of selling their products.

Big Pharma doesn’t only target consumers with its misleading advertising; it also targets your doctor. And why not? Sadly, a medical degree doesn’t necessarily mean your doctor is a numbers whiz. In a report in the journal Psychological Science in the Pubic Interest on doctors’ ability to analyze relevant statistics, they were asked, “If my mammogram is positive, what are the odds that I actually have cancer?” Doctors were given all the information needed to answer that question accurately, and a startling number of them still got it wrong. In fact, only 20 percent of them got it right. (The answer, by the way, is a 10 percent chance.) Of those who got it wrong, 60 percent erred drastically on the side of doom, saying the chances of having cancer were 80 to 90 percent. So if your doctor was in that group, and you got a positive mammogram result, she would have told you that you almost certainly have cancer.

The pharmaceutical business, no surprise, is a big numbers abuser. How many advertisements have we seen touting the wonders of a particular drug? “Lowers risk of heart attack by 50 percent!” Well, yes it does lower the risk by half. Dig a little deeper and you discover that your risk of heart attack has dropped from two in a million all the way down to one in a million. That’s a 50 percent drop! Of course, your original two-in-a-million risk wasn’t all that risky, and side effects from the drug might include a few nasty things, but hey, details.

This is known as reporting test results in relative, rather than absolute, numbers. Big Pharma is well aware that saying your risk drops from two in a million to one in a million isn’t so remarkable. They also know that using phrases like "50 percent less risk" will fool most of the people most of the time. They can defend themselves by pointing out that they aren’t outright lying, after all. An osteoporosis drug once claimed to reduce hip fractures by the same whopping 50 percent. Again, technically true, and it sounds impressive. Unmentioned was that out of all untreated osteoporosis sufferers, only about two percent are at risk for hip fractures. So the drug reduced the risk of hip fractures from two percent of all osteoporosis victims to one percent of all of them, from two in 100 to one in 100. Doesn’t sound all that fabulous when stated in those terms, especially when taking into account the often higher cost of many of these drugs.

The concept of relative and absolute risk is important. Big Pharma loves relative risk and hates absolute risk. Relative sells pills. Absolute, not so much. Any medication can claim to cut your relative risk of getting a disease by huge percentages: 10%, 50%, even 100%. But if your absolute chance of even getting the disease is tiny, than the relative risk, no matter how impressive sounding, is also small. Why take the medicine if you are probably not getting all that much benefit from it? Or why not take the generic lower-cost med that offers more or less the same results?

Cooking the numbers isn’t confined to prescription drug marketing. It wasn’t that long ago Colgate was advertising that 80 percent of dentists recommended its toothpaste. And it sure seemed convincing! Eight out of 10 dentists recommended Colgate, and one was supposed to extrapolate that only 2 out of 10 recommended other brands. That’s a landslide. Better buy Colgate!

Hold on. A closer look at the study which yielded that result showed dentists were asked what brands they would recommend and were allowed to choose as many as they wanted. So yes, eight out of 10 dentists chose Colgate. But eight out of 10 may also have chosen Crest or Aim or any number of other brands. No surprise, the ad was eventually banned as being misleading.

In the late 1990s, Centrum, the vitamin maker, made the alarming claim that nine out of 10 Americans were not getting all the nutrients they needed from what they were eating. Ninety percent of us were deficient! We better buy Centrum to make sure we get the proper nutrition. And that is essentially the message of all vitamin manufacturers.

The numbers, however, have obscured the truth. Centrum got those numbers from a completely unscientific survey taken between 1976 and 1980 in which Americans were asked what they ate on the day of the survey. Only nine percent of the participants said they remembered eating their recommended daily allowance of fruit and vegetables. So nine out of 10, or a whopping 90 percent, did not eat their daily allowance that day. Left unsaid was that any one of the 90 percent “deficient” may have eaten more then their daily allowance the day before, or would eat more the day after. A one-day survey is not an adequate sample to indicate overall diet. Not to mention the fact that adequate nutrition can be obtained from other sources and need not be measured in recommended daily servings. For instance, a 15-minute walk in the sun might get you plenty of vitamin D. But information like that doesn’t sell any vitamins. And so far no one has figured out how to charge for sun rays.

A misunderstanding of numbers can also lead to fear-motivated behavior, and you can be sure the marketers are aware of that fact. In 1995, a warning was sent to almost 200,000 doctors and pharmacists in the U.K. that a new iteration of a popular birth control pill could increase the risk of life-threatening blood clots by 100 percent. That sounds terrifying, right? 100 percent! It was enough to get many women to discontinue using the pill. That action helped contribute to 13,000 abortions the following year. The actual risk? The older generation of the pill had a one in 7,000 risk of blood clot. The new generation had a two in 7,000 risk. A 100 percent increase, yes, but in absolute terms, the risk went up from .014% to .029%.

This past year it was announced that the World Health Organization was classifying bacon as a group I carcinogen. Bacon-lovers despaired. It seems that eating two slices of bacon increases the risk of colorectal cancer by 18%. Misunderstood by the public was that this was the relative risk, not the absolute risk. More plainly, taking in the entire population, the risk of getting colorectal cancer at all is about 5%. So if you eat two slices of bacon, your 18% increase of risk is 18% more than your absolute 5% chance. If you are a typical math-adverse American, your head is spinning right now, but what this means is that your overall risk goes from five in 100 all the way up to six in 100. Not exactly a jaw-dropper when put in those terms.

Politicians and their marketers have learned their business lessons well when it comes to using numbers to strike fear in the populace and sway opinion. Politicians routinely spew numbers that, under scrutiny, either don’t add up or are just plain wrong. They know most voters can’t, or won’t bother to add them up or find out the actual truth, and that when people hear numbers, they naively believe they are hearing something scientific, or based in reality. Michelle Bachmann told us in 2013 that “70 cents of every dollar spent on food stamps goes to bureaucrats.” The fact that only one third of one percent goes to bureaucrats shouldn’t stand in the way of a good statistic. Rand Paul told us last year that, “nine out of 10 businesses fail,” as he sought to blame President Obama for wasting tax money on businesses like Solyndra, the solar panel maker. The actual failure rate is about 50 percent after five years.

And then there is the Donald, whose supporters tend to believe because he is a successful, and as he says, “very rich” businessman. In trying to appeal to his conservative base, Trump ran off a series of murder statistics in a tweet this year that was striking in its claims. Only 16 percent of Caucasians were killed by other Caucasians. (Wrong. 82 percent is the correct figure.) Ninety-seven percent of African Americans were killed by other African Americans. (Wrong. 90 percent is the correct figure.) Eighty-one percent of Caucasians were killed by African Americans. (Wrong. Only 15 percent.) Just two percent of African Americans were killed by Caucasians. (Wrong. 8 percent.) Trump used his false statistics to cast black people as the culprits in white murders when the truth is white people are mostly killed by other white people. And even more true is that most murders happen among people of the same race.

In another statement, Trump called for the cessation of all Muslim immigration, based on a survey he cited which said that 25 percent of those polled agreed that “violence against Americans here in the United States was justified as part of the global jihad,” and that 51 percent agreed that “Muslims in America should have the choice of being governed according to Shariah.” Utter hogwash. That “poll” was conducted by a virulently anti-Muslim organization, the Center for Security Policy. Beyond that, the poll itself was fatally flawed, being only an opt-in online survey with a small sample size of only 600, using a question format (agree/disagree questions) that statistically people have been shown to answer “agree” to, and targeting a population (U.S. Muslims) many of whom are first-generation with limited English proficiency. Moreover, the survey participants were U.S. Muslims, meaning their answers, accurate or not, had no bearing on the Muslims Trump was proposing to bar.

If it sounds like we’re picking on Republicans, it’s because there is cause. A study from the non-partisan Center for Media Studies in 2013 came to the conclusion that Republicans lie three times more than Democrats. And a favorite method of political lying is the misstatement of numbers. Politicians and industry and charlatans get away with it because numbers sound impressive to people who don’t understand them, and this includes the mainstream media that reports the numbers without challenge, as if they were fact. If we hear fancy sounding numbers and math intimidates us, we tend to accept the truth of what we are hearing because math has street cred. Mathematicians are smart, and if someone strings together a bunch of numbers and looks confident, we will, more often than not, accept their “smartness.” To paraphrase a famous wizard, “Pay no attention to those numbers behind the curtain!” And so we don’t, especially if the alternative is to do our homework and better understand the math.

Larry Schwartz is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer with a focus on health, science and American history.

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