REM Tripping: The art, science, and mystery of Saumnadism

I’m rock climbing with Terence McKenna, talking about you know, the usual, plant sacraments, human/plant synergistic bio-cultural evolution, extradimensional aliens, machine elves, 2012, Timewave zero…

As we make it to a cave nested within a cliff wall, a shimmering multi-colored crystalline plant is glowing at us. He’s guides me to it and explains it to me. We then eat it and an ethereal boundary-dissolving trip ensues.

Then I wake up, but I still here his voice. Is he in the room with me? Have I channeled him into waking reality? No, it’s just the looping Windows Media Player playlist that I’ve set up and piped into two small speakers on either side of my pillow.

Another night on an exotic tropical beach, Deepak Chopra and I rap about the quantum soup, I like mine spicy…

Sometimes I hang out with my future neo-tribal permaculture eco-punk farming community. That’s right, my dream come true, in my dream, fed into the Universal Studios Holodeck of the REM state.

Literally any linguistic content that’s input to the ears during REM sleep is seamlessly projected in real time as a cinematic dream movie. Those convos with Terence, Deepak, and scores of my other spoken word heros aren’t just creative fabrications from my dreaming subconscious (that may naturally happen randomly once or twice in a life-time), they are in fact that verbatim linguistic content funneling into my ears from external sound waves. I control the content of my dreams every night.

The most amazing thing is that the brain synthesizes the data so fast that it’s not simply a lecture where I get free, effortless imagined visuals of the speaker speaking to me. No it’s way more elaborate. Often the content is reworked into a dialog, a fitting scenario, an entire dramatic screenplay. It can be action/adventure, comedy, horror, drama, or all of the above. There’s added dramatic purpose to the content. If I’m using this Saumnadism
technology to study an era of history I’m there, like Data’s fantasy of being Sherlock Holmes in the Holodeck.

The worst trip was when I played a Teaching Company lecture series on mathematics and me and my partner woke up totally traumatized by the geometric matrix we were inhabiting. Ever heard of Flatland? Of course if you’re a math wiz then this would be heaven. It’s helped me understand cyberspace, as I’m a web developer I always feel unable to understand the visual landscape of the environments I’m creating with code. But now I can be in an Tron-like Drupal environment thanks to the Lullabot Podcast and understand CCK and Views in a whole new way.

All this by just putting a spoken word playlist on a loop with speakers in proximity to my ears.

It’s the closest thing to lucid dreaming as I have time to learn/master. And it’s not that I have a special ability for this. I’d be in bed with a lover and they’d experience the same cinematic journey, albeit composed of the fabric of their reality map.

What are the implications? Well, what do you dare experience. I’ve dosed myself with tons of Psychedelic Salon Episodes, tons of self help stuff, tons of 2012 stuff. It’s by far the most amazing learning tool that exists. I’ve heard of profound psychedelic experiences achieved by super advanced speed readers, but again, I don’t have time in my waking life to master anything but the next Drupal module in my 12-16 hour a day cyberspace-cyborg office robot existence. After an hour at the gym jamming Psytrance, I go to my Saumnadism realm to live and learn while my body rests.

I have a voracious appetite for knowledge and I feel like at this proximity to 2012, every decision counts, and I want to make informed decisions so I blast myself with endless amounts of data, and let my subconscious do the heavy lifting. Further, consuming data in this manner gives more of a “whole brain” learning effect whereby a visual, audio, and to some degree tactile experience is created around the information, all with no effort.

If you’re reading a book, the brain will automatically project a visual approximation based on your schema or cognitive map of reality, but it’s always choppy, disorganized, distractible, and only a phantom image, because you’re actually staring at text. Via the Saumnadism technology, you’re not seeing words pass by one at a time, you’re seeing entirely the world the words are creating. Of course just listening to an audio program during waking consciousness is more freeing to the visual cortex than reading a book, but still doesn’t compare to the complete emersion into the content in the dream movie realm.

For those who see and feel the ever tighter turns depicted on the road signs of the Novelty Wave, who feel the compression of tasking upon tasking upon tasking, this free do-it-yourself technology will increase your mental/spiritual/intellectual productivity by several hours a day or should I say night. It’s like in the Matrix where Neo downloads Kung Fu, or in Lawnmower Man when Job (pre-reintroduction of the Project 5 aggression formula) downloads human history via CD ROMS.

I’d love to hear of peoples’ experiences with this. Wouldn’t it be awesome to have an Evolver slumber party with a Terence loop going and in the morning people report their experiences?

The Entheogen: Awakening the Divine Within documentary describes shamanic cultures that assemble the tribe every morning for people to report their dreams to the shaman for interpretation and application in planning the best course of collective action.

I feel that tapping into this technology may radically accelerate our individual/collective consciousness evolution and our ability to grapple with the onslaught of data that overloads the feeble beta-state waking consciousness apparatus.

Sweet dreams…

P.S. I contacted a Neuro-Linguistic Programming practitioner who wrote an ebook called Neuro Linguistic Dreaming, as I thought to coin this phrase and apply it to my experience, and he wrote back with a better fitting name. The conversation is below:

Hello,
This question is directed at Joe. I just read your article entitled "neuro-linguistic dreaming". I found it after I'd tried to find a term to describe a practice I've been doing for sometime whereby I play 8 hour long spoken word playlists from my computer through a set of small speakers on either side of my head while I sleep. I've found this method to take learning to a new level as during the few hours of REM sleep, all of the words are seemlessly woven into the dream-scape as though a Hollywood production was being made out of the linguistic content in real-time like a magical script. I've been able to "hang out" with some of my favorite authors, lecturers, etc. in exotic places, or places that are appropriate to the content thus enhancing the memorability of the data many times more than if simply reading or listening and having to construct the environment/context with waking imagination.

For example, I was rock climbing in South America with Terrence McKenna looking for a rare plant, while we were conversing about the exact content that I was piping into my sleeping ears (which was one of his lectures on the Ethnobotany of Shamanism)....

Or attending a beach seminar by Deepak Chopra...

I'm wondering if you're aware of a clinical term for this. You seem to describe it briefly in the article in reference to Erickson pulling in the distant sound of birds. But I'm curious if there is a formal scientific terminology for the "utilization" of streams of linguistic audio targeted during REM sleep.

Thanks in advance for your time and consideration!

Please let me know if you have any insights into this, if nothing else, just a clinical term would be greatly appreciated.

Best regards,
-Ben

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Hi Ben,
Sorry for delay in reply.

It’s an interesting question and I don’t think there is a clinical term for it. Obviously it is a form of ‘hypno-sis’, however, I think the term would be something like ‘somnaudism’ (based on latin for sleep+listen). Sleepwalking is Somnambulism and sleep talking is Somniloquism.

If you are listening to your own voice then we could call it ‘auto-somnaudism’.

It’s great to hear that this works for you so clearly as I seem to remember mixed results in previous studies (don’t ask me to reference here!) Usually, sounds outside may subtly influence the dream but not usually so much. However, as it is your intention to utilise the recordings I your dreams, this may put you near to the art of Lucid Dreaming.

Thanks for the email. Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Joe.

Joe Cheal
The GWiz Learning Partnership