Liminal Dreaming: Exploring Consciousness at the Edges of Sleep

by Jennifer Dumpert

Overview

A dream hacker explains how to learn and use liminal and lucid dreaming to enhance creativity, healing, and consciousness exploration

At the edges of consciousness, between waking and sleeping, there’s a swirling, free associative state of mind that is the domain of liminal dreams. Working with liminal dreams can improve sleep, mitigate anxiety and depression, help to heal trauma, and aid creativity and problem-solving. Readers of Liminal Dreaming will learn step-by-step how to create a dream practice outside of REM-sleep states that they can incorporate into their lives in personally meaningful ways.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781623173043
Publisher:	North Atlantic Books
Publication date:	05/28/2019
Pages:	248
Sales rank:	859,219
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Jennifer Dumpert is a San Francisco-based writer and lecturer, and the founder of the Oneironauticum, an international organization that explores the phenomenological experience of dreams as a means of experimenting with mind. She also developed the concept and practice of Liminal Dreaming—surfing the edges of consciousness using hypnagogic and hypnopompic dream states. Dumpert has lectured and led workshops at festivals, conferences, and venues such as Summit at Sea, Lightning in a Bottle, Symbiosis, Breaking Convention in London, Entheogenesis in Melbourne, Australia, the Women's Visionary Congress, the Transformative Technology Conference, Esalen Institute, Ojai Institute, the New Living Expo, the International Association for the Study of Dreams, and Synergenesis. She has also taught online classes on Liminal Dreaming through the Evolver Network, and has appeared on radio shows and podcasts such as Expanding Mind, on the Progressive Radio Network, The Daily Beat, on BTR Today, C Realm, and the Dream Studies podcast.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xi

Part I Meet Liminal Dreaming

Chapter 1 Liminal Dreams, Liminal Mind, and an Oracle 3

An Encounter with the Oracle at Delphi 4

What Is Liminal Dreaming? 9

How to Read This Book 13

Chapter 2 The Basics: How To and Why 17

Learning Liminal Dreaming 18

Beginning Exercises 19

Benefits of Liminal Dreaming 25

Liminal Mind 34

Chapter 3 Hypnagogic Hypnopompia, Sleep Stages, and Science 37

Circadian Rhythms and Chronotypes 38

Brain Electrochemistry and EEG 40

Sleep Stages and Sleep Cycles 41

Learning Your Own Rhythms 69

Part II Practicing Liminal Dreaming

Chapter 4 A Plea for Practice, a Dog, and a Wolf 73

The Power of Practice 74

Developing Liminal Mind 80

Chapter 5 Dreamtime Cartography and Cognitive Liberty 85

Aristotle and Dream Perception 87

Unmapped Territory and Cognitive Liberty 90

Chapter 6 Imagination as a Faculty of Perception 93

Jung and Active Imagination 94

Sufi Mundus Imaginalis 100

Chapter 7 Sleep Paralysis and Liminal Dreaming at the Cusp of Death and Birth 103

Sleep Paralysis 103

The Shaman and the Psychopomp 108

Liminal Dreaming at the Cusp of Death 110

Liminal Dreaming at the Cusp of Birth 112

Chapter 8 Dream Incubation 115

The Healing Cult of Asclepius 115

Dream Incubation in the Modern World 119

Chapter 9 Yoga Nidra 125

The Structure of Yoga Nidra 126

The Eight Limbs of Yoga and Pratyahara 128

A Brief History of Yoga Nidra 131

Benefits of Yoga Nidra 132

Developing Your Own Yoga Nidra Practice 134

Yoga Nidra Scripts 135

Chapter 10 Lucid Dreaming and Liminal Dreaming 163

The "Discovery" of Lucid Dreaming 165

Tibetan Buddhist Dream Yoga 167

WILD Thing 170

Chapter 11 Oneirogens: Herbs, Roots, and Wires 177

Traditional Oneirogens: Plants and Other Subtle Allies 178

Consciousness Hacking: Technology and Mind 181

Chapter 12 Conclusion: Dreams at the Edge 189

Exercises Workbook 193

Feedback Loop (for hypnagogia) 194

The Vanishing Point (for hypnagogia) 196

The Morning Linger (for hypnopompia) 198

The Dali/Edison Method (for hypnagogia) 200

Voice-Activated Recorder Method (for hypnagogia) 202

Liminal Dream Dialogue (for hypnagogia) 204

Public Napping (for hypnagogia) 206

Dream Cruising (for hypnagogia) 208

Voice-Activated Recorder Method (for hypnopompia or REM) 210

Active Imagination (for hypnogogic or hypnopompia) 212

Waking Induced Sleep Paralysis, or WISP (for hypnagogia) 214

Dream Incubation (for hypnagogia and hypnopompia) 216

Waking Induced Lucid Dream, or WILD (for hypnagogia) 218

Waking Induced Lucid Dream, or WILD (for hypnopompia, then hypnagogia) 220

Bibliography 223

Index 225

About the Author 235

Editorial Reviews

Jennifer Dumpert is a dream scholar, dream hacker, dream weaver. If you’ve ever been curious to learn more about the cosmos behind your eyelids, the realms you visit every night, let her be your guide.”
—JASON SILVA, host of National Geographic’s Brain Games
 
“Falling asleep is not a loss of consciousness but an offering from the psyche to anyone with the wisdom to accept it. Jennifer Dumpert is pointing the way to a door that’s already open—one more accessible, sustainable, and transformational than any drug or virtual reality.”
—DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF, author of Team Human
 
“With patience, clarity, and insight Jennifer Dumpert, a seasoned dreamer, leads us through this land of hypnos, making available to the reader a third state of consciousness: neither day nor night but somewhere on the edge of both, a place of creativity, intuition, and vision. Many books put their readers to sleep. This one can take you to the edge of it and leave you there to dream.”
—GARY LACHMAN, author of A Secret History of Consciousness
 
“Liminal Dreaming provides us with an array of personal exercises—a pragmatic vehicle for directly experiencing this ‘wild psychedelic ride’ through imagination, mystery, creativity, and healing. By reminding us of the natural continuity between waking and dreams, this work reminds us of our own innate wholeness."
—RUBIN NAIMAN, PhD, clinical assistant professor of medicine, University of Arizona’s Center for Integrative Medicine

From the Publisher