In a lot of ways, the project epitomizes the central mission of my work, which has always been about integrating the best of 21st century thought with the intuitive ways of knowing prized by our ancestors: dreams, visions and imagination. It’s also fulfilling the theme of my Substack here on the archaeology of consciousness: a physical book that not only records the imaginal but also uplifts it to a secured digital zone where new visionary themes are revealed. Can’t get more liminal than that.

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What is a connected dream journal?

The connected dream journal system lessens the friction of reporting, archiving, and analyzing on your dreams like never before.

It solves a problem I have personally had for years – how to get all the cognitive and mindfulness benefits of dream journaling by hand, and also be able to easily digitize the dreams for thematic analysis after the fact. If you’re like me, you might dozens of old notebooks of dreams, and no way to track changes in your dreams over time. Or, you’ve got a massive word doc with hundreds of dreams, but have missed out on immediacy of recording them and sketching the powerful visual images.

Now we can do both.

With the Elsewhere Dream Journal, you can record your dreams old school style—pen and paper— then scan the page using the Elsewhere app on your smartphone or tablet. The app digitizes your handwriting (it’s remarkably good at this: I have to correct only a few words each time) and then you can watch your dreams come alive with analysis and symbol mapping.

What makes this journal premium

A lot of thought went into creating this premium dream journal. I’m a total journal nerd and so are the folks at Elsewhere. The journal lays flat, and come with 150 digital scanning credits. This should be enough to scan every page in this book, plus some extra. It’s also got a writable patch on the spine for recording the date range of your dreams.

The paper is recycled and weighted at 120gsm: that gives it a robust texture to work with for most pen types. This is heavier paper than most lined journals on the market. It not only prevents ink bleed-through but also reduces ink ghosting (when you can see the ink from the other side of the paper). This art-friendly paper weight is important because a quarter of each two page spread is unlined so you can sketch the most significant images of your dreams with some light coloring (such as crayon or colored pencil). You can upload your own dream images into the Elsewhere Journal app as well, or generate a stylized (and ethically sourced) dream image as well.

The journal also comes with five pages of dream symbol stickers designed by artist Yoh Yasuda. Categories of dreams (like lucid, nightmare), common themes (being chased, flying, falling), and symbolic elements (tree, fire, flowers) let you easily mark your dreams for at-a-glance recognition later.

The possibilities of digital dream analysis

This is such a cool time to be a dreamer. I remember how, years ago, my dream researcher friends used to talk about how computing would eventually help us understand our dreams, and now it’s finally happening. On the free level of Elsewhere, you record unlimited dreams, get 15 dream interpretations a month, and a lot more features such as automatic tagging/symbol detection, charts, search, and export. But if you subscribe for $4.99/month, the full suite of Elsewhere’s analysis features is yours to explore, including more styles of dream interpretation, end-of-year dream reports and more.

The dream symbol tracking is one of my favorites. As your digital dream journal deepens over time, your personal mythology is revealed through patterns of how your specific dream symbols relate to each other, and to the dreamer’s own revealed attitudes in the dreams themselves.

Much of this deep analysis happens through the grace of machine learning and large language models, but this is no AI slop that was indiscriminately scraped off the web. For example, some analysis draws directly on the work of psychologist David Fontana and dream researcher Kelly Bulkeley’s datasets from the Sleep and Dream Database. I have to admit I was shocked at some of the insights the Elsewhere app gave me about my dream patterns. I take these lightly, as something to gut check against my own intuitions, but it’s great especially if you don’t have access to a dream group or trusted friends to share dreams with.

You can pick up the Elsewhere Dream Journal: A Place for Dreams, exclusively available on my newly redesigned Dream Studies Press.

Order here

We were a band of scholars, psychologists, artists, and indigenous cultural practitioners (ICP), headed up by Dr. Apela Colorado, founder of the Worldwide Indigenous Science Network. Dr. Colorado’s lifework and now her organizational mission is to support the rapidly shrinking indigenous lifeways. WISN has worked all over the world, from Siberia to South Africa, networking with ICP in a quest to amplify their visions of an ecologically sustainable planet. The mission for the trip is best encapsulated by the aims of indigenous science: to perpetuate earth-based knowledge systems and to link it with western science to find clues to foster bio-culture resilience.

Why the global push? So Westerners will hear, change our ways, and slow the apocalypse we have been accelerating towards for the last few centuries.1

Our trip to the Paleolithic caves of the Dordogne region of France is part of that mission, akin to traveling back in time to the deep ancestry of the West. The Dordogne is a beautiful region, known today for its wine and pastoral peace. But here, tens of thousands of years ago, the ancestors of today’s European peoples lived through an intense ice age. They hunted mammoth and reindeer, confined to slot canyons that buffered against the cold, living in shelters constructed of bone and covered with furs. And they left their marks on the inside of sinuous limestone caves that dot the landscape of canyons and high forested plateaus.

These caves and their marks turn out to be between fifteen and thirty thousand years old. Most were not discovered until the late 1800s and early 1900s. Of course, Victorian picnickers and backyard explorers did not realize the art was so ancient, or so fragile, or they probably would not have engraved their own initials directly over marks (or so I tell myself). A century ago, it was unthinkable that prehistoric people could have made anything so stunning.

These Paleolithic peoples were not just “artists” as we define the term; they were Dream Walkers. Their images of animals, geometric designs, and human/animal hybrids reveal a worldview tied deeply to the animal world but also a bizarre cosmos that is more familiar to dreamers and psychonauts than scientists. Sometimes an image emerges from a crack in the stone, as if the cave is not just a symbol for this other world, but the actual portal. Although Paleolithic cave art is undoubtedly nuanced, and distinguished by quite a few separate cultures, many specialists today support the idea that at least some of the work reflects their shamanistic or animistic worldview.2 We will never know the spiritual beliefs of these ancient folks, but there is no doubt that some of them came to the cave to dream with their eyes open, to encounter the numinous spirits that lived within, and to gain uncanny information about the imaginal world in the process. This is what it means to be a Dream Walker.

Today access to the caves is tightly controlled, and rightfully so. Most are privately owned or held in trust by the Ministry of Culture. Tours are short, conducted by park employees who discourage lingering in the caves.

On this front, we were truly blessed. Our guide was Pasqual Raux, a museum director and Paleolithic expert. He is more than that though. In his words, “I am paleolithic man.” He is a shaman in his own right, a master of drum and bullroarer. He also is an experimental archaeologist, and teaches how to flintknap and make fire and build shelters using the tools and methods of Paleolithic times. Pasqual allowed us unparalleled access to the caves after hours. We were able to take our time, do ritual in the caves, and also record sound and video. We prayed, sang, and made Paleolithic-era music with the help of bullroarer, conch and a bone flute. Another aspect of our work is archaeoacoustics, the study of how sound relates to ancient sites (a story for another time, I promise).

With my background in archaeology and consciousness studies, I was occasionally able to provide some context for other team members regarding cultural and biological evolution. And along with dream psychologist Daniel Deslauriers, I was holding up the “dream space” for the group. Yet, during the actual visits in the caves, I was largely on my own trip and able to attend to my interests in what Paul Devereux calls transpersonal archaeology.3 Practiced in phenomenology and Eugene Genlin’s Focusing, I centered myself before each visit in order to identify and acknowledge my own psychological projections. Much like we do in group dreamwork, accounting for projections allows for clearer vision, especially when in the presence of sacred landscapes. This simple meditation also supports the recognition of our own “ecological self,” which we can loosely define as the identity we each have in relationship with the natural world.4 I have included a link to the basic practice at the end of this article.

After each visit in the caves, I “checked in” again, journaling my experiences, impressions, somatic feelings and emotional responses as soon as possible. Often this was socially difficult, as other group members were breaking bread and opening bottles of wine, and the pull to be part of that was strong. At the end of the week, though, after visits to six different cave sites, I had a powerful data set that was written when I was still steeped in the energy of the caves. It’s a living document written while I was still in relationship with the underworld and the art within. I was a different person in those moments—not in my comfortable, isolated, rational worldview, but perceiving and feeling from a different point of view.

Ten years has gone by since this trip. I have found it absurdly difficult to write about. It’s just too…. big. But since then, I have been back to the caves once, this time leading a study on the effects of conducting ceremony in the caves on mood (as yet unpublished). I’ll have more to say about the cave as emotional amplifier in another piece, but today there’s a single moment I want share that is actually the impetus for starting this Substack. It’s the moment I was spiritually x-rayed by a 17000 year old painting of a bison.

This is where the logo for the Archaeology of Consciousness comes from, the eye of the Bison — and it keeps me grounded in the aim of this project.

The download happened when we visited Font de Gaume. This limestone cave sits on a high bluff and consists of scores of maze-like caverns. Painted some 17000 years ago by the Magdalenian peoples, the polychromatic images on the cave walls are hauntingly beautiful.

We came to the principal panel of images, known as the Frise de 5 Bisons. One particular bison stole my breath away. In profile, its wide open eye stared hard at me. Into me. I suddenly felt an uncomfortable certainty that I was the one being scrutinized. I was struck. Spontaneously, our French tour guide whispered mischievously, “Who is the looker?” So I was not the first to be taken aback by this image—no, it is a common effect. This bison apparently has a message for all who come by for a look.

For myself, the feeling of being seen by the bison was akin to being hit over the head by a sack of bricks. And those bricks are filled with deep shame.

In the spirit of self-archaeology, here’s what I wrote in my journal that day.

Emotion from leaving the cave is neutral but high – a sense of sorrow and awe – sort of the feeling of leaving good friends or a good party. Heart full. Images and cave wall are so much more than photography can reveal. The one bison with the wide open eye: “who is the looker?” the guide said mischievously. What do the bison say when they look at us? That’s when I feel this deep shame, the shame of modern humanity and what we’ve done to the earth. We used to be guardians, shapers and regulators of ecology. That is our sacred role. And how we’ve blundered that. It’s hard to face that.

The bison looks back from a span of millennia—from one extinction event to another—and says, “So what are you going to do about this?” As incredible, awe-inspiring, and transformational my trip to the caves was, what comes out when asked about the my time with the caves is that I am currently haunted by Pleistocene megafauna who wants us to know that recycling our beer bottles and using public transportation is not enough.

Coming into contact with the voices of one’s own indigenous ancestors and their spirit animals is rough! Honoring that encounter has been even tougher: so much rationalization, denial, and then paralyzing emotion that only further prevents action. I started by painting the eye of the bison on a stone, using the same Paleolithic materials as my ancestors did (charcoal, red and yellow ochre, and a pine brush). That helped, because now I have a reminder of the question that has been put to me, currently sitting on the window ledge of my office space.

In March of the following year, I gave a presentation about the caves with my colleague Beth Duncan to the Society of the Anthropology of Consciousness in San Diego. These are some wonderfully weird humans who study culture, psychedelics, and altered states. We told a lot of stories about the caves, but I ended up leaving the bison story out. Somehow, there wasn’t time. (Resistance, denial…) Still, I experienced a tremendous release of energy. I felt like we were scratching the surface of what the Dream Walkers would want: to remind modern day people that the caves are not “just” a museum, but also a living place where we can still connect to the earth. A place where we can begin to find ourselves again. So we can, you know, stop fucking up the planet and come back into integrity.

Seemingly in response to giving this presentation, I had this gift of a dream the night after:

I’m standing outside a building near an alcove with a pile of suitcases and boxes behind me. Suddenly an enormous bison storms in and corners me forcefully so that I have to quickly climb the pile of suitcases. I have nowhere to go, hunched close to the ceiling. The gigantic creature noses up against me—its nostrils are the size of dinner plates and it deeply inhales and exhales several times, smelling me, taking me in. I submit and feel weirdly safe. I place my hand up against its rough and bristly snout and say/think, “It’s me.” I feel like it accepts me, wholly, completely (3/31/17)

The next day, traveling home again, the memory of the dream filled my heart with hope. It was palpable. As I looked out the window of the plane, over the clouds and brief glimpses of yellow lands below, I felt that indeed, the way has been opened. I’ve had enough dreams to say that I can’t conjure up that kind of encounter on the basis of day residue or lucid wishful thinking. It was a real encounter.

A decade later, the question remains, still: How can we reclaim our sacred ecological role on this planet? Can we even do it? Is it too late? I wrestle with this everyday, it is my existential ground. I don’t have the answer to this question—but I hope that by keeping the path of communication open to the dream walkers—past, present and future—of all those who travel between the realms, that we might find a way.

PRAXIS: Here’s my personal nature observation practice, which can be adapted for all kinds of fieldwork, or simply for personal use to get to know the place you draw your water. For more of the references and scholars behind the practice, and how I integrated it into rock art studies, see this piece on Academia.

To listen to the audio version of this podcast, choose your fav player here.

Host Ryan D. Hurd sits down with researcher Dr. Sheila Pryce Brooks …

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When the sailors entered her comfortable stone home, the men were sun-beaten and famished. They were invited to sit, and were fed fresh bread, strong cheese, wild honey, and plenty of good wine to wash it down. Unfortunately for them, the wine was poisoned with magical herbs. Within minutes, the men had forgotten who they were and were reduced to squealing pigs. So goes the introduction to Circe (Κίρκη) the so-called witch and minor deity. Homer’s Odyssey is one of the oldest tales in Western literature and also one of the first to accurately describe the neuroprotective powers of herbs.

Scholars have been trying to identify Circe’s herbs for centuries. Homer often applied describes Circe as “knowing many drugs,” so it’s not a stretch to call her a psychedelic herbalist. One possible identity of the shape-shifting poison is datura (Datura stramonium), also known as Jimson weed, a powerful (and dangerous) hallucinogen known as early as the Bronze Age that can cause—amongst other dissociative effects—people to feel like they are transforming into animals.^[1] In medieval Europe, Datura’s status amongst so-called witches (ie, healers/shamans targeted by the Church) is legendary. A potent salve made from datura may even be what literally lubricated the broom handles for the Witches’s Sabbath in the Middle Ages of Europe, allowing for ecstasies, complete with out-of-body experiences as well as visions of animal transformation.^[2] Datura is also full of anticholinergic alkaloids, a detail that becomes more important as we look to its antidote.^[3]

Another likely candidate is deadly nightshade (Atropa belladonna).^[4] In ancient Greece, nightshade was prepared for ceremonial use, associated with Dionysian worship, and known to cause trance-like stupors (and death, of course, if the recipe has a different intention in mind). Nightshade is also chock full of anticholinergic alkaloids. Still others suggest the poison may have been a concoction of several herbs well known in Homeric times, and may have contained henbane, mandrake and opium poppy. Henbane, by the way, was also known as “pig bean,” and, according to the first century physician Dioscorides, mandrake was also known as circea.^[5]

Odysseus’s Remedy

Luckily for Odysseus, when he knocked on Circe’s door, he had a trick of his own. That cunning god Mercury, who apparently was frenemies with Circe, had slipped Odysseus a new herb—this one had dark roots and white flowers. It was known as Moly. The herb protected Odysseus from Circe’s memory-destroying drink when she attempted to beguile him as well.

What was moly: a real plant or something invented from the mind of Homer and those who retold his tales over the centuries? Many plants have been suggested, but one has stuck in the popular imagination since the 1980s: the snowdrop plant, Galanthus nivalis. This delicate plant has been known in many cultural contexts to boost memory and also counteract certain poisons that cause delirium.^[6]

Today, we know snowdrop’s active ingredient is galantamine hydrobromide, which prevents the breakdown of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine (ACh) in the brain. This miracle compound is used around the world to improve quality of life for those suffering with cognitive decline and diseases such as Alzheimer’s. And when one has been poisoned by a wine full of anticholinergic alkaloids, something like snowdrop could reverse the intoxication.^[7]

Other scholars have poked holes in the moly=snowdrop hypothesis for many reasons, including translation confusions and also an over-reliance on ancient sources that may have conflated several plants. Another possibility is the sea daffodil family, as it has been found in Greek bronze-age archaeological contexts, and is especially prolific around shorelines. In particular, the variant known as the Illyrian sea daffodil (Pancratium illyricum) is abundantly found and native to the islands of Corsica, Sardinia, Capraia, and Elba, which is where Circe’s island is imagined to have been located (keep in mind it’s just as dangerous to assign a single geographical location to an ancient myth as it is a single plant to an ancient potion). Illyrian sea daffodil also has long, dark roots and is difficult to dig up, which is something mentioned as well in Homer.^[8]

Another sensible solution to the potion’s identity is put forward by a 2024 article in Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine: “we propose that ancient Greeks of the time may have used several species with AChE-inhibiting activity interchangeably due to their similar pharmacological activity and general appearance (white flowers and bulbs with dark-colored outer scales).” In other words, Homer’s myth may have been referring to a complex of herbs with similar qualities and effects, as opposed to a single plant. These were likely plants now classified in the Amaryllidoideae subfamily, which have at least a dozen genera of plants with AChE-inhibiting powers that were known to be found around the Mediterranean basin in classical times.

Regardless of the specific plant they are found in, a lesser-known effect of galantamine compounds is that they increase dream recall. Not only that, but also dream vividness and lucid dreaming. That is, when taken in small doses in the middle of the night, dreamers have a tremendous likelihood to have vivid (read: bizarre and sometimes nightmarish) dreams, and to realize they are dreaming.

In fact, my own peer-reviewed experimental research suggests galantamine not only increases lucidity, but also transforms the content of our dreams as well, bringing more vividness, potency and eliciting healing encounters.^[9]

In the graph below, you can see the two highest ratings for pre-lucid and lucid dreams were in the presence of galantamine (G), tested with the methods of wake-back-to-bed (WBTB) and dream reliving (DR) — overall galantamine provided about a 2.5X boost to lucid dreaming prevalence. More information about galantamine research here.

Oneirogens: A forgotten class of drugs

The dream-enhancing aspects of galantamine put it in a little-known drug classification known as the oneirogen. The term is derived from the writings of the poet Baudelaire, who coined the French word ‘oniromantique.’ Today, oneirogens are defined as drugs that stimulate dreams or hypnagogic hallucinations (which occur in the lightest stages of sleep).^[10]

Many kinds of substances have oneiric qualities: plants like the snowdrop, as well as fungi, certain venoms, and even minerals. For example, Salvia divinorum—the black sheep of gas station highs from the early 2000s—is technically an oneirogen. When the herb is taken in small doses (not 20x concentrates) before bed, or in ceremony, a subtle sedative effect emerges that encourages vivid hypnagogic imagery while the visionary watches in sleepy delight.^[11]

Oneirogens are a forgotten class of drugs, which is ironic given that they help us remember our dreams, that natural altered state of consciousness we have every night. These are not gentle chamomile and spearmint nights; some of these substances are quite powerful and even psychotropic in intensity. Dream supplements do more than increase dream recall. When taken with respect and with a strong intention, oneirogens can reliably bring powerful and meaningful dreams full of insight, healing, and new information.

Also, oneirogens can drastically increase the likelihood of a lucid dream. Lucidity in the dream can radically shift one’s perspective as it is realized how all perceptions are, in fact, mediated by our own consciousness. Simultaneously, we come to know that we are in relationship with something wholly unknown, something truly Other. This realization ripples out into waking life, bringing new possibility, imagination, and power to our jaded post-modern meatspace.

As we poke at the tender spot between the material record and the imaginal, oneirogens play an important liminal role. They are both of the world and a way into new worlds. And, of course, they are an ancient pastime. Something about the ritual behaviors involved in taking these legal and safe substances ignites the dreaming imagination more than just hoping for good dreams. It’s not just the substances themselves, but also the powerful way that ritual action supercharges our intentionality and positive expectation. Ritual action is simply effective, cutting through the malaise of this increasingly weird post-truth world.

Some part of us remembers these old ways, as if the behaviors themselves are sketched into our bones and our DNA. When we combine ritual behavior, carefully selected plant allies, and a strong intention, the dream world opens up. Like Odysseus, when we next find ourselves shipwrecked on the imaginal shore, the question transforms from, “What did I dream last night?” to “What do I want to dream up next?”

This article is for educational purposes only. An earlier version of this essay appeared in RealitySandwich.com in 2023.

^[1] Guerra-Doce et al (2023). Direct evidence of the use of multiple drugs in Bronze Age Menorca (Western Mediterranean) from human hair analysis. Nature, Scientific Reports. 13, 4782.

^[2] Harner, M. (1973) The role of hallucinogenic plants in European Witchcraft. In Hallucinogens and Shamanism (ed. Harner M.) 125–150 (Oxford University Press).

^[3] Chorba, T. (2025). The Wine of Circe. Emerging Infectious Diseases, 31(4), 882-884. https://doi.org/10.3201/eid3104.ac3104.

^[5] Molina-Venegas R, Verano R. (2024). The quest for Homer’s moly: exploring the potential of an early ethnobotanical complex. Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine. Jan 20;20(1):11. doi: 10.1186/s13002-024-00650-7.

^[6] Schwarcz, J. (2022). Odysseus’s Snowdrop Odyssey. McGill Office for Science and Society. September 14, 2022.

^[7] Plaitakis A, Duvoisin RC. (1983). Homer’s moly identified as Galanthus nivalis L.: physiologic antidote to stramonium poisoning. Clinical Neuropharmacology. Mar; 6(1):1-5. doi: 10.1097/00002826-198303000-00001.

^[8] Molina-Venegas R, Verano R. (2024). The quest for Homer’s moly: exploring the potential of an early ethnobotanical complex. Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine. Jan 20; 20(1):11. doi: 10.1186/s13002-024-00650-7

^[9] Sparrow, G., Hurd, R., Carlson, R., & Molina, A. (2018). Exploring the effects of galantamine paired with meditation and dream reliving on recalled dreams: Toward an integrated protocol for lucid dream induction and nightmare resolution. Consciousness and Cognition, 63, 74-88.

^[10] Toro, G. and Thomas, B. (2007). Drugs of the dreaming. Rochester: Park Street Press.

^[11] Gonzalez-Trujano, M. et al. (2016). Depressant effects of salvia divinorum involve disruption of physiological sleep. Phytotherapy Research 30(7).

In this episode (S1:E6), Ryan D. Hurd sits down with dream researcher and author David L. Kahn to explore the archetypal landscape of lucid dreaming. Drawing from his new book Oneironaut’s Odyssey: Discovering Ancient Wisdom Through Lucid Dreams, Kahn shares vivid personal dream accoun…

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Here’s the link: Listen on the podcast player of your choice

The themes of this episode are probably the most important threads of my work and Kim’s work too, threading social justice, imaginal studies, and ancestral recovery.

In this episode, the conversation takes us into:

• Sacred Activism – how it differs from activism rooted in anger or shadow

• The Maui Wildfires – Kim’s firsthand account of the 2023 fires on Maui, and how the tragedy reshaped her activism and dreamwork

• Decolonizing Lucid Dreaming – A critique of the default Western paradigm of lucid dreaming, and a call to reconnect dreamwork with collective spiritual depth

• Recovering Indigenous European Medicine Ways – Kim’s journey reconnecting with her Italian and Irish ancestry, as well as the deep wisdom of the Paleolithic caves in Southern France

• Dreams as a Path to Collective Healing – we swap ancestral dreams, illustrating how dreamwork nourishes both individual and collective wellbeing

  Listen here

  And if you dig it, please leave a review on your podcast platform so we have a chance with the algorithms de jour!

  

I recently did a “Ask me anything” video for some advanced lucid dreamers and I thought y’all might like to see it too.

In this video, I riff on:

• the out-of body-experience I had at age 15 that changed my life

• the best evidence-based lucid dreaming induction tactics

• my thoughts on precognitive and so-called psychic dreams

• Sleep paralysis and lucid nightmare tactics

• The ethics and science of lucid dream sex

It’s a tale of soil sampling, rutted out roads, and an encounter with the collective shadow of the Piedmont.

The necessary backstory: my field partner Scott and I were doing a cultural survey for a proposed golf course in the woods, just off the side of a country road in middle Georgia. Two local guys in a flatbed pick up truck then stopped us and asked us some questions. Scott showed his card, then we excused ourselves for more shovel testing. Ten minutes later and we hear several cars return on the edge of the woods, with people calling out, “Come on out! We know you’re in there.”

We most certainly did not come on out. Rather, we made a beeline back to our own truck, parked off on a rutted out trail in the middle of the pine woods.

Keep in mind, I was a brand new field archaeologist. I mean, at this point I had a summer field school and also a year’s experience working in a university lab, but I was as green as it comes to the world of cultural resource management (CRM).

What follows is verbatim from my journal after I was home safe from what I referred to as The Event. I also want to showcase, that I have always loved the em-dash, even way back in the late nineteen hundreds.

October 3, 1998
My hands are laced with seared flesh and scabs; my lips are sunburnt. Poison ivy on my forearm, too. Yah contract archaeology!

The first two days on the job were intense. No transit work; Scott simply set me up with a topo and lent me his compass—said to dig a hole every 30 meters or so. It was exhilerating and free to be on my own. Lots of briars—blackberry brambles and curtains of thorny vines—I learned after 15 minutes that, when I move, better keep that flannel on.

We’ve found four sites so far on this disturbed Georgia piedmont. So many erosion canals and gullies from a couple hundred years of lousy farming practices.

And being chased down that maze of jeep trails is something I’ll never forget.

Apparently we were as suspicious as they were to us. Looking back and seeing the 3rd guy standing up—military style—on the flatbed pick up was probably the most threatened I’ve ever felt.

“Looks like they’ve found a friend,” Scott jittered. Holy shit. Ten minutes of ripping through the woods, [Scott driving,] me calling the turns, as the truck gained on us.

At that point, I had already conjured up every scenario—the fistfight, the robbery, etc. I realized that the next turn would probably loop us back around to the original trail. We went right, and were home free, I thought. Then my heart sank—a huge log crossed the road. It was so fucking surreal, the archetype of despair. SK tried to get around it, but the slope too steep. We knew we had to face our pursuers. I left my wallet in the truck. Had my bowie on my belt. SK had a metal water bottle.

I just remembered—I brought out my plastic water bottle too! Why? Must of snagged it as a social prop totally unawares.

Scott said “What’s going on?” to the burly driver as he opened his door. The passenger got out too. And then the sun caught the shiny badge on his shirt.... a cop!

“Oh, officer, is it good to see you,” I said. Never been so happy to see a cop in my life.

“Keep your hands where I can see them!”

OK. Took a swig of my water bottle, put it down.

He patted Scott down, called in his ID. We checked out, of course. Only then did the sheriff talk to us like humans. The locals are “neighborhood watch.” We “got smart” when they asked us “reasonable questions” down by the road where Scott caught the passing truck’s attention.

Right. I remember Scott telling them who we’re working for and who owns the land. Scott only got apprehensive when the guy asked where we were parked. “Down the road, off the road,” said Scott.

What’s it to you? I wanted to say. I didn’t tho: observe and learn. This happened after Scott said he was an archaeologist and the guy jeered, “That’s a pretty fucked up job, don’t you think?”

We were city outsiders to this sheriff and his local deputy watchdogs. We mentioned we might of stopped for him if he had attempted to show his badge (they picked him up after the road talk), but [he said] the cruiser couldn’t make it down the trails. Good to know.

Damn, second day on the job and I’m getting chased by cops! Archaeology and the people... a delicate relationship.

The only thing I’ll add: after more than twenty years of reflection, it’s likely the sheriff and his boys were protecting a weed farm. The mythic shadow of the southern pine woods involves economic themes of repressed decadence played out on taxed out soil. It’s a storied tradition. Relatedly, I can’t tell you how many times, walking along stream beds, I’ve come across rusted out barrels from 1920s-era stills, scarred with criss-crossed axe marks just like the clay subsoil is scarred with plow marks.

And that, y’all, was my introduction to the business of archaeological fieldwork. It was all uphill from there.

This has been a long time coming!

The guiding ethos of the Dream Studies Podcast is to support ways of knowing that integrate the best of 21st century thought with the intuitive skills prized by our ancestors: dreams, visions and the imagination.

Dream Studies is an old school audio-only podcast designed to enchant your day while you commute to work, do the dishes, or even better, as you settle down to relax in your pajamas.

By the way, if you want to see the video version of the podcast, it’s a benefit of a paid subscription to the Archaeology of Consciousness

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Each episode, we explore dreams and related altered states of consciousness, with a focus on how to test these ideas on the ground. Guests include noted researchers, clinicians, dreamworkers and psychonauts, as well as scholars of religion, anthropology and the high weird.

In the inaugural episode, I sit down with dream expert Nicoline Douwes Isema for a wide-ranging conversation about where the field of dream studies stands today.. and where it’s headed.

Some of the things we talk about:

• How 100+ years of psychiatry and psychology inadvertently took dream ownership away from everyday people

• The role of AI in dream interpretation: pattern recognition vs. meaning-making, and how to use it wisely

• How dream sharing strengthens emotional connection (and yes, sexual intimacy) in relationships

• Team dreaming and collective dream work, how dreaming together is more than just a creative problem-solving tool

And because it’s Mothers Day today, I would be remiss to not mention that we shout out blessings to all the mothers of the world for asking their kids, “What did you dream last night?” Seriously, this is why I am able to do what I do today. Thanks Mom.

So the plan (such as it is) is to release a new episode every two weeks or so, in my usual slow publishing kind of way.

My ask to you: Subscribe, and listen all the way through so this new podcast has a chance with the algorithms out of the gate.

Bonus ask: Rate afterwards and share with your dreamy friends

How to Listen

Listen and Subscribe with Apple Podcasts​

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Or check out the home page for the podcast where you can choose the podcasting app of your choice including RSS.

From the journal archives: July 23, 2003. Adairsville, Georgia.

Delineated a historic site today

starting off in the waist-high brambles

blackberry and green briar. Found

cast iron implements of unknown use

whiteware

a brass button with a locomotive stamp.

The site wraps around

past the pushpiles of cleared trees

(“Copperhead city,” says Doug)

down the dirt track

where the Brooks brothers bet

a lemonade the year of make

of a Dodge hub-cap.

To the house itself, Pretty Boy Floyd’s,

flattened, probably relocated,

shoved aside.

I walk further down the tract,

then into the dark low woods of

a cedar and pine hollow and find

the outhouse, in dilapidated gymnastics,

hovering at a 45 degree pitch

above the clover and poison ivy.

Insider, I see the sitting board

with the hole carved out,

the wood smooth and saturated, first

from use, then decay.

half a milk jug

whiteware with blue transfer print

salt-glazed stoneware

a chert reduction flake.

From here the prehistoric component

stretches out into the woods

along the spines of three ridges

a low-density lithic scatter

(like them all), in the eroded

taxed out subsoiled 5cm of earth.

Striated yellow and red clay with

silt stone gravels, hardpan.

This took half the day. We ate lunch late, about

1PM, and amused ourselves by trying to toss a rock

onto a peanut.

Tricky little peanut bounces around impervious until Doug’s

spin-action toss crushes it.

Doug lost a lemonade despite

it all, because the rain came down

before we quit. A double-or-nothing

lemonade minus another lemonade to an earlier forecast.

In the Georgia summer, lemonade

is the only currency.

First, a caveat: I am not an expert of UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena). I don’t know and can’t comment on other aspects of the phenomena in an informed way. Nor can I apply my expertise to the question of legitimacy of non-terrestrial artifacts and biotics as is now being discussed in the halls of US Congress.

However, what I can do is show how my embodied research into sleep paralysis and related visionary experiences can provide some practical tools for those who struggle with these experiences and are scared to go to sleep in case it happens again. In this way, my contribution may viewed as being more relevant to the psychosocial and religious aspects of encounter phenomena.

As such, my contribution is meager but it’s also practical. Bottom line: I have found that folks can protect themselves from victimhood as well as eject from horrifying encounters when their boundaries are being crossed. And what’s more, modern folks can interact in a meaningful way with the hyper-rational and healing sources of information that emanate from these cosmic spaces too, as countless saints, visionaries and mystics have done for eons. Much of those practices are esoteric and unknown, but the phenomena emerges spontaneously from the uninitiated nonetheless. That is the thesis of my little book Sleep paralysis: Hypnagogic visions and visitors of the night, which has been in print now for 14 years, and is now in its 2nd edition.

Many alien abduction accounts have the earmarks of sleep paralysis, with the victims awakening in the bedroom, sensing a presence, noticing they cannot move, and finally, confronting a scary alien being. Sometimes, these accounts go on to describe how the alien takes the victim on a journey to the stars. As UFOlogist Jacques Vallee noted decades ago, the modern abduction narrative has many parallels to historic angel visitations and also of centuries-old fairyland encounters.2 In medical anthropology, this complex of narratives are known as supernatural assault. But far from pleasant, these accounts sometimes end up with the victims being tortured and sexually molested. The abduction account concludes when victims wake up in the bedroom, as if they never had left, but scared out of their wits.

If these victims have never had a lucid dream before or experienced sleep paralysis, they may say, “This was not a dream,” not realizing that hyper-realistic visionary encounters are commonly experienced along the sleep-wake continuum. In the west this includes the modern paradigms of lucid dreaming and reality shifting, but in many indigenous cultures, this way of knowing is much deeper than its signature of “I know I’m dreaming.” Our monophasic culture simply does not value (and sometimes, even acknowledge) the power of altered states of consciousness like lucid dreaming, remote viewing, out of body experineces and other visionary states for gathering valuable information.

Another caveat: I certainly don’t mean to reduce all uncanny phenomena to physical brain states, such as sleep paralysis and hypnagogia. Medical anthropologist David Hufford has been on this beat for decades, carefully recording anomalous experiences from a holistic perspective that neither strictly psychologizes nor materializes the accounts. In my edited two-volume collection Lucid Dreaming: New perspectives on consciousness in sleep (2014), for which Hufford contributed the essay “Lucid dreaming, sleep paralysis and the non-physical,” he writes, “I have been concerned with questioning, evaluating, and eventually challenging those academic ‘traditions of disbelief,’ traditions where ‘dream’ is a convenient means of dismissing extraordinary claims.”3

So we can say this: encounters are not just a dream, ie a fantasy. We have to do some unlearning to respect the power of dreaming, trance and lucidity with and without the bounds of sleep paralysis. To flip this disrespectful assumption, we could say the dreaming is an altered state of consciousness where mystical experiences, encounters with non-human entities, and uncanny information occur. Sleep and its altered states are entryways to multidimensional experience.

And given that Pentagon insiders are reportedly pushing back on disclosure(s) because of the ontological bloodbath that would occur in Evangelical circles, given that encounter is often characterized in government reports as “interdimensional,” and therefore, theological in nature — this seems deeply relevant to my work in dream studies. (Thanks go to transpersonal psychologist Shaye Hudson for the source here.)

I don’t have the time or interest to try to explain anymore to thick boundaried people what it’s like to experience an enchanted weird world. Again, my core motivation is helping folks who do have these experience to learn ways to protect themselves as well as work with the cosmic insights, healing encounters, and ancestral downloads that come from these profound experiences.

And that’s where this substack Archaeology of Consciousness comes in, because materiality is core not only to many encounter-related phenomena but also to the calling of —and protection from— visionary experience.

Enter talisman and amulets. I’m not necessarily saying that these objects are inherently magical. You cannot prove or disprove this line of reasoning in the waking world. Rather, I’m saying that amulets are effective when applied in altered states of consciousness, probably because we are neurologically primed to recognize objects with liminal properties.

As I’ve discussed here on Substack, amulets for protecting against supernatural assault go back for centuries. Just for one example, here’s a 7th century Mesopotamian incantation bowl that features an Aramaic inscription around a Lilith-type entity: perhaps the original sleep paralysis demon.

These bowls would be blessed by a Rabbi, and then buried upside down in the house it serves to protect. This text particularly shows that these entities (Lilin) are connected to dreams, as well as afternoon naps. Montgomery (1913) translated the text to read, “Thou, Lilin, male Lili and female Lilith, Hag and Ghoul, be in the ban of [Rabbi] Joshua.. and you should not appear to them [the married couple] either by dream at night or in slumber by day…”

The Lilith traditions are intense, and best documented in relationship to sleep paralysis by medical anthropologist Shelley Adler.

Adler reviews:

One of the most notorious manifestations of the night-mare entity is the female spirit Lilith. The earliest mention of a demonic being that appears to be related to Lilith is found in the Sumerian King list (circa 2400BCE), which states that the water of the great hero Gilgamesh was a Lillu-demon. The Lillu was one of four related evil spirits; the other three were Lilitu, a female demon (probably the prototype for the Hebrew Lilith); Ardat Lili, Lilith’s maidservant, who had sex with men at night and bore demonically hybrid children; and Irdu Lilli, Ardat Lili’s male counterpart who impregnanted women during his nocturnal visits4

Anyways, talisman are effective, and a part of the puzzle.

I’m certainly not alone (that, friends, is an encounter joke) in this notion that the findings of extraordinary experiences have been overlooked in the popular conception of the encounter phenomena — which is probably because these concepts have been used to dismiss the materiality of UAP. David Hufford’s works should be read alongside the work of Jacques Vallée and religion scholars such as D.W. Pasulka.

Rather than dismiss all these accounts as strictly psychological, it is more reasonable to assume that something more than our western atomistic science is at work here. We need more experienced hypnagogic visionaries in the field, dreaming at sacred sites and envisioning at locations where these events are prominent. We need to keep working on how to rematerialize the visionary.

If this interests you, and you are struggling with sleep paralysis and/or working with your own visionary proficiency (or working with clients who are), I’m leading a course starting March 3rd. It’s called Visionary Hypnagogia: sleep paralysis to sacred encounter. It’s hybrid course that bundles recorded lectures on sleep paralysis mastery with new live lectures and discussions on the extraordinary that happens in the imaginal realms of hypnagogia, lucid dreaming and visitations.

You can learn more about the course here.

This coming Monday February 2nd is Groundhog Day. (UPDATE: Punxsutawney Phil gave his judgment in the latest ritual of woodchuckomancy by seeing his shadow. Sorry y’all. Source here). I live in Pennsylvania, and Groundhog Day is big deal here. Monday morning, all eyes will on the little town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, where an accommodating groundhog named Punxsutawney Phil was extracted from his cozy home at the moment of sunrise. What Phil sees will be shared across the land and millions will take hope—or steely determination—from this little bit of squirrelly divination.

Will Phil see his shadow? (update: he totally did.)

If not, as the legend goes, we can hope for an early spring. If he does: that means six more weeks of winter. Of course, in the 125+ years of this tradition, Phil — and his ancestors— have only been right 36% of the time.

It’s an odd tradition but Punxsutawney Phil is more than he seems. Groundhog day isn’t just a random day; it actually falls midway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. So early February is marked in several ancient and modern traditions because it is a cross-quarter day, tracking our earthly progress around the sun.

This is a liminal time of alignment.

The Groundhog Day tradition of predicting winter in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania comes from early German settlers, known as the Pennsylvania Dutch. They brought this holiday tradition with them when they emigrated in the 18th and 19th centuries. In their homelands, they looked not to groundhogs but to… badgers. There’s really not a lot of badgers in Pennsylvania, but we have plenty of woodchucks. So when the Germans settled here, the badger magically transferred its power to our humble friend Marmota monax.

This odd tradition of predicting weather comes from the Christian observance of Candlemas, a day when when Catholic priests in Europe bless and distribute candles needed for winter. It is, in this way, a day of service. In certain parts of Europe, historically, Christians believed that a sunny Candlemas meant another 40 days of cold and snow. The Roman army, during the conquest of the northern country, brought some of this tradition to the Germanic tribes.

Here’s where it gets really interesting. Candlemas was probably influenced by even older traditions. In Rome, there was Februa, a time of cleansing. And in the Northern European countries, the Celtic holiday known as Imbolc. Both of these earth-honoring traditions were — and are — celebrated as a time of renewal and hope.

In Scotland and Ireland, Imbolc is a feast day. On this day, the Cailleach (pronounced “Call – yahhch”) gives her power over to the spring goddess Brìghde (or Brigid), so this feast is also known as St Brigid’s Day.

But let’s not be too hasty!

Winter is still here in the north, although it is getting weirder. (For this week’s polar vortex in the continental US we can thank the weakening of the arctic jet stream caused by global warming. It’s not ironic, it’s predictable.)

As the winter goddess, the Cailleach is a powerful being. Her name comes from the Old Gaelic word Caillech, a term meaning “veiled one.” As the winter goddess, she often is depicted as an old woman who lives in a small hut in the forest. Sometimes she is depicted in terrifying form: with blue skin, red teeth and one eye, her clothes adorned with skulls.

In Ireland, legend has it that the Cailleach would hope that the 1st of February would be bright and sunny. This would wake her up early and allow her to gather enough firewood to keep warm during the long winter which was still to come. But if the day was dark and gloomy, Cailleach would sleep through the day and be unable to gather more firewood– meaning the spring was on its way. Sound familiar?

So let’s review.

On February 1st or 2nd throughout history, we have a legend about shadows telling the future. We see a Winter Goddess transforming into a Christian priest, then in an unexpected move, shapeshifting into a Gaulish badger, and finally an American woodchuck.

What do all these legends have in common?

They point toward mid-winter as a time to observe and assess. To leave our cozy home and sniff the air. To read the room. In other words, it is a time for taking stock and fine tuning our intentions — and just as importantly a time for changing course if we need to. And if necessary, just like the winter goddess, take a long nap on gloomy days.

Emerge, observe, and assess.

The association of sleeping in — of course — is a reminder that this holy day is an opportunity to honor our dreams, and even call a dream. You can incubate a dream this week and ask — am I in alignment with my family, my community, and my own nature? Is it sustainable how I am of service to others — how I am spending my limited energy and attention?

Notice for a week what dreams come, and how they address the questions you have asked.

This is the blessing of the Groundhog.

If you miss Phil’s emergence Monday morning, I recommend the movie Groundhog Day to anchor your celebration. I watch it every year regardless. (In fact, I’m working out a new pagan calendar to honor a Bill Murray movie for each of the cross-quarter days, and it’s coming together so smoothly I may start a cult).

As Saint Bill Murray reminds us, “This is one time where television really fails to capture the true excitement of a large squirrel predicting the weather.”

But the historical context of these same spiritual behaviors (and I mean spiritual in the old way, as in, concerning spirits) is instructive, and illuminates the darker emotions around the holiday that can be vexing for children and adults alike.

Let’s start here: most of holiday decorating is done in the service of spiritual protection. These traditions are not centered around celebrating the divine child, the supposed reason for the season, but repelling harmful spirits. Wreaths of pine and spruce are evergreen amulets that protect doorways from bringing in disease and death. Garlands tied with red cloth have been used to ward off evil spirits for centuries. And like the woods people of Northern Europe have been doing since the time of Odin, we leave an offering of food at the table.

These are all ancient apotropaic agents, that is, objects and rituals used in liminal spaces to combat the uncertain terrors of the night.

Apotropia and the archaeology of belief

For centuries in Europe and the British Isles, magical objects have been placed in the threshold spaces of homes: above lintels in door frames, under windowsills, and concealed inside chimneys and smoke holes. Common examples include horseshoes, children’s shoes, sacred words, and iron crosses. Sometimes these objects are hidden; other times they remain in plain sight.^[1]

The material study of apotropia is known as the archaeology of belief, and despite the immense variation around the word, these ritual practices are quite common because there’s only so many ways that the human visionary experience can get mapped onto the calendar, the landscape and the architecture we create to focus natural forces already in play.^[2]

All over the world, thresholds, those spaces between places, are magical. Paradoxically, openings into the home provide the ability to move freely and welcome guests, heat our dwellings, and let in the fresh air. At the same time, they open the home to unwanted guests, foul smells and harsh elements. Fear resides here in the space in between, and also a secret dimension. Supernatural forces arrive and congregate here in these spaces between, existing in what archaeologist and folklorist C. Riley Auge calls a “temporal and spatial sector separate from mundane reality.”^[3]

This is why liminality feels dangerous: in the ambiguity lies a deeper cosmic ambivalence, an attitude where the line between the worlds, between the living and the dead, is erased. And that’s why liminal zones are precisely where magical objects provide the most comfort.

Isn’t that pretty much the deal with coziness and the winter vibe in general? It’s an apotropaic effect where we indulge in the contrast of being warm, safe and secure against a backdrop of the cold and unprotected. Coziness itself dabbles in cosmic horror, with warm tea and cookies in hand.

Mythic geography in liminal times

Earlier, I brought up the example of wreaths used to secure the home, and we see in another example the tradition of hanging mistletoe. In this case, the mistletoe brings tidings of health and even intimacy. Viscum album and all its varietals are poisonous but have a long history of use in ancient medicine. Pliny the Elder recorded how the Druids of Gaul considered mistletoe a sacred plant that had powers of fertility. Not any mistletoe was considered powerful by the Druids however; it was picked only from oak stands, part of the sacred landscape, or what historian Ton Derks calls a mythic geography. ^[4]

So if you’ve ever felt some strong cognitive dissonance on Christmas eve, this may be why. Children pick up on it pretty easily, too: they are simultaneously fascinated by and not-so-secretly terrified of Christmas Eve. And why not? The normal routine of sleep and waking and the emotions surrounding them is completely upended. Sleep comes late and is marked by multiple panicked awakenings at the normal sounds of the night. Was that the patter of reindeer feet? The ringing of bells? The sacred landscape—the unmapped, the spirit territories beyond the hearth— is loud and buzzing with activity. Again, the coziness effect is here, in a crystallized form we could call cosmic coziness, a full bloom of dopaminergic activity that quickens the pulse and deepens the satisfaction of the hearth.

To review: on Christmas eve, we leave the chimney clear for penetration by spiritual entities. By guarding all of the other openings of the house with amulets of protection, we effectively funnel all of the energetic vulnerability of the dark night into this sooty opening and invite a specific demi-god we call Santa Claus into our homes to induce cosmic coziness in sync with the darkest nights of the year.

Why spiritual protection?

It’s not just the pursuit of coziness though, and Santa isn’t always nice. The need for spiritual protection makes more sense when we look at the origins of these holiday traditions that still hover on the periphery of our awareness. St Nicholas, the Christian saint from Greece who loved giving gifts to children has been grafted onto the Yuletide celebrations that were held in honor of Odin the Wanderer, a shape-shifting, many-named god of the North who led the Great Hunt and rode an eight-legged horse. Of particular relevance here is the fact that Odin rewarded children who left food for his horse by filling their stockings with gifts.^[5] He delivered them, of course, by going down the chimney, a favorite entrance of witches and shamanic figures the world over.

But Odin isn’t the only smoky spirit that entered the home in pre-Christian Europe. Thanks to the Hollywood horror scene of the last decade, you probably know about the Krampus myths that come out of the Germanic traditions. Krampus: the anti-Santa, the devil in the details, the moral enforcer for all those little children who were not quite good enough.

Another mythic strand can be seen in Perchta, the 16^th century Germanic mountain goddess, who, like Krampus, had one good foot and one enlarged foot, often called a swan foot, indicating a penchant for animal transformation. If no one left an offering for her on her feast day, Perchta was known to slit people’s bellies open, pull out their entrails, and stuff them with straw. She came into the home around the mid-winter solstice, and also around the twelfth night, or January 6^th, and delivered gifts to hard-working children but a death warrant to slackers.^[6]

Unlike the beatific St Nicholas, Perchta didn’t need a dark consort because she contained the dual nature of judgment within herself: she could show up as a lovely white-robed woman or as an old hag, depending on the moral purity of the household. I guess you could say Perchta is a nondual Santa, transcending awe and horror.

In my neck of the woods, eastern Pennsylvania, the Germanic traditions hold a lot of sway in contemporary practice. American Christmas traditions come mostly through the Pennsylvania Dutch, those German-American settlers who arrived in large numbers in the Eastern woodlands during the 18^th and 19^th centuries.^[7]My children don’t explicitly “believe” in Santa Claus anymore but we still practice the rituals as the solstice approaches and the veil gets thin.

Yes, this week ahead, I will put up the wreaths, the garlands and the mistletoe.

Just like Dickens suggests, I will be on the watch for big dreams that are roused from that unspecified dread and over-vigilance (and the poor sleep that follows). And damn straight I leave out cookies and milk for the spirits.

Portions of this essay were previously published on Matt Cardin’s Teeming Brain, and still more is adapted from my soon-to-be-rereleased book Lucid Talisman: The forgotten lore of dream amulets.

^[1] Hoggard, B. (2019). Magical house protection: The archaeology of counter-witchcraft. Berghahn.

^[2] Augé, C.R. (2022). Field manual for the archaeology of ritual, religion, and magic. Berghanhn.

^[3] Augé, C.R. (2007). Supernatural sentinels: Managing threshold fears via apotropaic agents. Presented as the annual meeting for the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness, San Diego, April 1-3^rd.

^[4] Derks, T. (2010). Gods, temples and ritual practices: the transformation of religious ideas and values in Roman Gaul. University of Amsterdam Press.

^[5] Siefker, P. (2006). Santa Claus, Last of the Wild Men: The Origins and Evolution of Saint Nicholas, Spanning 50,000 Years, New York: McFarland & Co., 2006, 171–173

^[6] Grimm, J. (1835). Deutsche Mythologie (1835). From English released version Grimm’s Teutonic Mythology (1888).

^[7] Igou, B. (1998). “Pennsylania German Christmas Traditions,” Amish Country News, Winter 1998.

I just exposed my children to It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown and I have some misgivings.

Let me just preface this by saying that whenever I have the urge to share something with my kids that’s from my own childhood without previewing it first, there’s always a question in the back of my mind; what weird culture shadow is going to pop up that I forgot about but will probably be what they remember most?

The Great Pumpkin did not disappoint in this regard. You have probably seen the special: It’s the usual depressing Charlie Brown venue that weirdly breaks into a nostalgia fest for The Great War. We move suddenly from the anxieties of six year olds to images of occupied France and barbed wire. Then Snoopy’s doghouse gets totally shot up by artillery, as he imagines himself as a WWI fighter ace set against his arch nemesis The Red Baron.

So instead of getting my kids into the season of Halloween as I had hoped, I instead found myself explaining to them about the original western front and the weaponization of biplanes and the mechanics of trench warfare.

And then, in case there’s any doubt that this film is lionizing the Great War (and not WWII), Schroeder gets on the piano and starts with some really intense ballads from the era. At one point, Snoopy—the unflappable, capable and steady ace—breaks down completely, wailing in agony and loss.

Here’s the lyrics to the first stanza and chorus of that song, “There’s a long long trail a-winding,”

Nights are growing very lonely,
Days are very long;
I’m a-growing weary only
List’ning for your song.
Old remembrances are thronging
Thro’ my memory
Till it seems the world is full of dreams
Just to call you back to me.

Chorus:

There’s a long, long trail a-winding
Into the land of my dreams,
Where the nightingales are singing
And the white moon beams.
There’s a long, long night of waiting
Until my dreams all come true;
Till the day when I’ll be going down
That long, long trail with you.

I’ll just cut to the chase: Snoopy’s post-war trauma, and perhaps a long lost love, is the star of the show.

To think this was broadcast prime time in 1966, during the height of the Vietnam war. Half the TVs in America tuned in. Of course, there were only three networks back then, but how many stiff-lipped WWII veterans watched from their armchairs? How many aged WWI vets? According to the Nielsens, whatever they felt, they didn’t turn off the program. Schulz needed this win, because he was under tremendous commercial pressures to replicate the popularity of his Christmas special (which is also super depressing, BTW, and yet collectively we love it). In a moment of inspiration, Schulz leaned into Snoopy’s popularity, capturing the market with PTSD.

And until 2020, when Apple bought exclusive rights, the Charlie Brown Halloween special was broadcasted for free every year, reminding us all that the reason for the season is depression, disappointment and trauma.

One final thought—because shadow and trauma is inexhaustible—remember the last scene, when Linus and Sally are waiting for the Great Pumpkin? Linus’s disappointment is in crescendo, but then, a commanding figure shows up, rising in the moonlight as a shadow. Linus quivers in ecstasy, and then faints when Snoopy is revealed, in his fighter pilot guise.

I’m not sure what the original audience is to make of this. Clearly Shulz is tapping into his own war nostalgia/trauma, and he ropes everyone along, including all those families who have soldiers overseas in one of the most morally indefensible wars of the century. Meanwhile, the children are directed to identify with Linus, waiting for some false god that comes bearing treats, some kind of hybrid Santa Claus / Death figure. We’re told the Great Pumpkin never shows—that’s the theme of the whole show honestly, “expect less”—but actually, collective shadow is revealed. The child faints, and is left with a sort of numb disappointment. Charlie Brown himself remains unmoved, depressed and hollowed out, as usual.

To take it deeper, the setting of the pumpkin patch as a scene of revelation is full of an uniquely American nostalgia for mythical lost times, as the pumpkin is an indigenous cultivar that was widely adopted by pioneers and then shamed into association with poverty and want by the 17^th century. Professor Cindy Ott suggests that despite the millennia long indigenous cultivation of this most useful and edible squash, our current wistful and nostalgic associations of pumpkins with farm life cemented in the late 1800s when the term became more of one of endearment. (Side note, after watching Gilded Age recently, I was inexplicably furious every time the character Aunt Eda intoned the name of her precious little dog “Pumpkin.” I found myself muttering to my wife “f*ckin Pumpkin.” Now I know why).

In conclusion, the shadow of indigenous trauma underpins this whole endeavor, the original American sin of colonialism, of a national identity built on the ashes of what was once a thriving continent of peoples that, according to indigenous archaeologist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz in her book An Indigenous people’s history of the United States, numbered in the range of 150 million people (three times the population of Europe in the 15^thcentury).

This emotional undercurrent is part of the American psyche, a confused sense of shame mottled with longing for a deeper relationship to ancestry, landscape, and belonging.

Now you know why we are obsessed with pumpkins and why there’s a quantitative, material footprint of one variety or another of Cucurbita genus, the orange winter squash, dotting the yards and stuffed into pies across the US.

Wistful nostalgia, lost love, with an orange splash of generational collective trauma.

A hopeful note, I guess, is that the yearly pumpkin craze is pretty much propping up small scale family farms these days, producing 1.2 billion pounds of pumpkin a year.

Anyway kids, happy Halloween!

I’d love to know if you’ve seen this film recently, and how you felt afterwards? What did I miss?

However, the “dreams we remember for the rest of our life” are not the Big Dreams that contemporary dream researchers have demarked, but rather a watered down “catch-all” category that is based on the dreaming public’s perceived importance of particular dreams, rather than a set of features and characteristics unique to the experiences themselves.

So what are the real Big dreams?

Before we can talk about that, we need to talk about the continuities, or the so-called “little” dreams. These typical dreams are the bread and butter of our dream life: chaotic stories, funny pairings of people from the past with situations of the present, anxiety dreams, etc. These dreams are largely drawn from our personal past and tend to be loosely put together. We use narrative and story to help structure these experiences so we can talk about them.

Features of Big Dreams

Big Dreams seem to be cut from a different cloth. Most importantly, they feel more real than real life, and a strong “felt meaning” is experienced in the moment. I think some visitation dreams definitely fit this description. But the other categories really set Big Dreams apart from ordinary dreams.

The most common elements are:

• abstract geometric patterns and kaleidoscopic mandalas,

• the experience of flying, floating or falling,

• encounters with mythological creatures and strange, intelligent animals

• feeling awe, fascination, fear and terror, and a sense of “Other”

Unlike ordinary dreams, these dreams are not easily picked at with standard dream interpretation procedures like psychoanalysis because very little personal history is encoded in these larger-than-life experiences. Big mystical dreams also have a consistency unmatched by ordinary dreams; in other words, their structure is cleanly focused, and the delivery to consciousness resembles waking visions of shamans and saints more than other nocturnal dreams. These could include emotionally intense dreams, powerful dream journeys, and visitation dreams of the dead.

Shamanic Roots of Big Dreams

The term “Big Dreams” came from Carl Jung, who seemed to dream in an archetypal way much of the time. But he made the distinction after visiting an East African tribe in Kenya, the Elgoni, in 1925. According to Jung, the Elgoni have a strong dreaming culture (80 years ago anyways – they have been successful at staying out of the eye of Sauron for many years since). They explained to Jung that there are little dreams and big dreams. For the Elgoni, big dreams were seen as collective dreams. The dreamer was dreaming for the community, for the landscape, and perhaps for all of the world.

This shamanic style of dreaming matched well with Jung’s own experience, and it gave him further insight into his theories of the collective unconscious (as a side note, later in life, Jung revised his earlier essays about the collective unconscious and moved away from theories dealing with “racial memory,” instead framing these shared experiences in a way that is more parsimonious with today’s evolutionary psychology: as bodily expressions transformed metaphorically into cognitive symbols that all humans share due to our common biological heritage.)

Archetypal Dreams and Mysticism

Consciousness researcher Harry Hunt has studied archetypal dreams for 20 years, and has done more than anyone in helping re-frame these experiences in light of cognitive psychology as well as the world’s mystical traditions.

He notes in the Multiplicity of Dreams:

“The archetypal dreams of long-term meditators and other highly intuitive subjects, with their geometric (mandala) designs and forms of luminosity, convey an ineffable portent that when articulated sounds metaphysical and spiritual. These are more abstract levels of imagistic self-reference, based on structurally complex visual-kinesthetic synesthesias, with visual structures predominating. It is exceedingly difficult to see how such dreams could be based on the Freud/Foulkes model of translation from verbal-propositional thinking” (p. 32).

That’s a mouthful, and quoting Hunt is always dangerous because it makes me responsible for translating!

Hunt is suggesting that archetypal dreams may have a different process than little dreams. His main point is that these expressions and experiences are not linguistically based and may not be formed from personal memory sources either.

Returning to the shamanic Big Dreams of the Elgoni, perhaps these intense experiences with “Other” reveal communication with the larger-than-human community through our personal mythic and metaphoric artifacts of dreaming. Those half-human/half-animal dream figures seem to have their own agendas – as such they could be seen as expressions of our connectivity to our present ecological community.

It’s no wonder Westerners describe horrific dream visions as well as benign, given our disconnect from the natural world and our techno-industrial assault on the living fabric of life itself.

Even without assigning “inter-species communication” or “Gaia consciousness” it seems plain that we are resistant to ecological information (and other collective levels of suffering) that comes through our dreams.

That’s definitely one of my strong biases – that ecopsychology (the study of our minds in relation to our environment) has the most inclusive way of looking at our behaviors, our emotions, and our visionary states.

From here, we can frame Big Dreams as evidence for a “collective unconscious” that is not rooted in the distant past (or phlyogenic memory) but instead that bubbles up from the present moment, from our present relationship to the Others in our lives.

Are cosmic dreams really earth-bound projections? Or are we accessing information that we must filter through our hominid minds first?

And ultimately, I wonder: even if this is only a metaphor for our personal and communal journeys through life, how can we learn to listen and learn?

More and more I’ve come to appreciate how my time in the field as an archaeologist grounded my inquiries (literally) about consciousness, dreams and our paradigms of reality. I had fun riffing on those topics with Jason in this episode.

Give it a listen, we talk about:

• How ancient cultures honored dreams and altered states compared to our modern perspective

• The way that dreamwork breaks down the Western monophasic worldview by inviting intuitive ways of knowing

• Inducing vivid dreams with dream supplements

• How listening to voices in the landscape parallel the relationships to our dream figures

• The debate between dream control vs. choice-making in lucid dreams

• Why facing fear in lucid dreams can transform our waking courage

Here’s the Spotify link.

Listen and let me know what you think/feel!

This article is part two of the exploration, and is more focused on my actual lucid dreaming practice as it relates to landscape and sacred sites in general.

Lucid dreaming, the art of self-awareness during the dream, can be an opportunity to investigate the local landscape where you are embedded in relationship. It’s not about dream control, but about directing your focus, and then watching to see what happens once the wish is planted.

What comes up in the dream space? What emerges?

In an ecopsychological context, I see lucid dreams as much more than a simulation of the landscape or the “real world.” They are real moments in time, existentially speaking. They are real exchanges that take place in the shared imaginal space between my awareness and the landscape as it reveals itself. To say it again: these dreamed exchanges take place. They are rooted and embedded, just as we are.

That’s why I say full-on dream awareness—lucidity—is really about sense of place. It’s an understanding about where you are rather than who you are. In fact, dream scenery can often determine your self-construct and corresponding dreambody, as well as the way you think, react, and make choices. When I’m lucid, even if I don’t think “This is a dream,” I know that here, in this place, the rules are different.

This grounded approach is how I began to use lucid dreaming in archaeological field research. Lucid dreaming in this light is an example of what late anthropologist Iain Edgar called imaginal research methods, which he defined as:

“An active process in which the person ‘actively imagining’ lets go of the mind’s normal trail of thoughts and images and goes with a sequence of imagery that arises spontaneously from the unconscious. It is the quality of spontaneity and unexpectedness that are the hallmarks of this process (2004:7).”

While Edgar defined these methods as occurring in waking life, of course, lucid dreaming still fits as long as one does the central practice of letting go and attending to emergent imagery and experience. I asked him about this once sitting in a bar at a dream conference, and he agreed enthusiastically.

As I practiced it on Ometepe Island, my method called for the incubation (or intentional calling) of lucid dreams about the concept of ‘‘rock art’’ so that I could interact with this theme in imaginal space.

Simply by walking through a dream wall or through a bizarre threshold like a mirror, I would enter a chaotic space known as imageless dreaming that is void of representational imagery, including my own perceived dream body. When I moved into imageless lucid dreaming, I began to practice the phenomenological èpoché. This meditation, based on the work of Edmund Husserl, is centered on receptivity, the present moment, and openness of heart.

I understand èpoché as an embodied practice in which I note my expectations, thoughts, and emotions without “hanging on” to them, similar to many forms of Eastern meditation practices. Mostly, it is a period of waiting in the dark, a practice in patience and inner trust. By developing this attitude of receptivity and openness in this inner space, I found that the dream would often re-emerge spontaneously, and always in surprising ways. I began to question who am I? in this process of spontaneous emergence, and what are the associations between my re-emergent self and the new dream ecology (that’s a story for another time).

I am lucky to have lucid dreams spontaneously, but still, only occasionally. If I want to increase them so that I have several lucid dreams a week, then I have to do some practices. There’s an entire industry built around teaching folks how to lucid dream, and when I have my lucid dreaming expert hat on, I’m part of that industry, although I take a lot of care to build safety as lucidity can be destabilizing for those who are not psychologically healthy.

Still, lucid dreaming is learnable and safe, and the methods are not gated. Most folks can figure it out after reading a book, or even a blog post about it. That said, there’s no one foolproof way to induce a lucid dream. So what I recommend is to create an immersion effect, by practicing several lucid dreaming induction methods simultaneously. I wrote a whole book about this but you can keep it really simple.

Here's how I incubated lucid dreams on site:

On Ometepe Island, I journaled or read about rock art and Nicoya archaeology before bed, priming my mind. During the day, I had a reality check practice, in which I would say ‘‘I am aware’’ when I gazed at rock art features in my daily visits, followed by doing a practice that confirmed if I was in the dreamworld or not. One of my favorite of these so-called “state checks” is holding my nose and then trying to breath. In a dream, I can still breath. I waking life, I feel a bit like a moron as I wheeze through my fingers.

In the middle of the night, after about 6 hours of sleep, I would wake up and do some meditation (about 30 minutes) or some journaling about my intention to go lucid. My alarm clock for this was howler monkeys braying in the pre-dawn, but you could just set a timer.

That was it—except maybe also culture shock—but it was enough so that the cognitive links between dream awareness and rock art sites were established and ready for when my vigilance kicked into during REM sleep.

When I would successfully get lucid in a dream, the research entered into what Charles Tart used to call a “state specific science.” I would remember to visit a rock art site and would essentially wander around in the dream until I found myself in contact with the images or on the scene of a boulder site.

I kept the focus loose, as sometimes overly specific intentions can create frustration and a game of cat and mouse. Rather, I set the intention and accepted what showed up.

From there, I would attempt a soft stance of dream witnessing and participation, my applied interpretation of phenomenological epoche. This process is about becoming aware of one’s beliefs coupled with an attempt to suspend these beliefs in order for observable phenomena to arise. In this respect, phenomenology is actually a Western meditation method.

Waking up takes a little work too. The dreams were jotted down on scrap paper as soon as I awoke, sometimes by flashlight, and then more fully fleshed out when I had time, usually in the mornings before breakfast or other free time during the day.

This is a crucial point: as an imaginal research method, the value of lucid dreaming is really on the spontaneous and the emergent imagery. Trying to control the imagery of a dream is really antithetical to the whole practice. Set your boundaries and intentions, and then, accept what shows up. When we respect the landscape of the dream, autonomous figures and forces (the animals, the shadows, the emotions) really do come out to play within the dream.

Rather than pushing them away, or trying to control these Others, we are given opportunities to face this emergence in the dream, which psychologist Michelle Stevens called “autonomous visionary material.” It’s that a better term then the grab-bag term the unconscious? What emerges may feel completely unrelated to the site you are researching, but that’s ok. Journal the dreams anyways. Often we are processing our own biases and fears about this place, and using metaphors from other times in our lives. It’s messy but stick with it, it’s a cleansing process.

Forging these relationships is how we can regain our place in the wilderness of dreams, not as conquistadors of consciousness but as tenders of the meeting ground.