Tracee
Stanley

*Note: This auto-transcript is only lightly edited. You might find some typos! 

Tasha
Hey, what’s up guys? Welcome back to the Consciousness Explorers Club podcast, the pod that’s all about mind body adventuring. So every episode, we’re experimenting with different mind body techniques for meditation to movement, energy to art, dreaming like today and waking and all the good stuff in between. We’re basically trying to see what happens to us when we go on these inward excursions. So we are your hosts. I’m Tasha. This is Jeff. Hello, I’m Jeff. And we’re super stoked to have you along for the ride.

Jeff
So today, we’re talking to Jennifer Dumpert, a San Francisco-based writer, lecturer and consciousness hacker. She’s the author of Liminal Dreaming: Exploring Consciousness at the Edges of Sleep. So I’ll just say personally, Jennifer has been a friend for almost 15 years now. She was a fan of my book, The Head Trip, that’s how we got to know each other, and then it’s just been an ongoing conversation we’ve had about dreaming, what dreaming is and how to explore these different states. So I found this conversation to be an absolute joy, not least because Tasha also is a massive dream nerd. So the three of us had a lot of fun getting into, you know, what is this thing called imagination? What is the value of this kind of way of thinking, this form of perception what she talks about? So we really got to go in a lot of fun directions here.

Tasha
Yes. And I absolutely loved the meditation that she led us on, which is her own spin on a yoga nidra which left me totally just buzzing I loved it.

Jeff
I guess that’s our introduction to Jennifer, Jennifer Dumpert and her book Liminal Dreaming and our exploration. Welcome, Jennifer.

Jennifer Dumpert
Pleasure to be here, indeed.

Tasha
So maybe you can just tell us a little bit about yourself and give us a little glimpse of what we might do. But, and then you can just lead us into the practice.

Jennifer Dumpert
Sure, I have been working with liminal dreaming. So with the dream states that lie between waking and sleep. Hypnagogia – when you’re falling asleep, hypnopompia when you’re waking up. So I learned a lot of meditations to bring myself into those states, when I was writing the book and even before then, that’s sort of what moved me to write the book. And then I started studying yoga nidra, which is practice, like many forms of yoga, that has its roots in ancient texts, although the way that it’s practiced today really comes from the 60s and 70s. So I studied a lot of yoga nidra, got certified in the I-Rest tradition and in the Yoga Nidra Network tradition. And so my, my own meditations are a combination of yoga nidra methods and then the meditations I came up with myself to bring myself into a deep hypnagogic state.

Tasha
Awesome.

Jeff
Should we say a little bit about the hypnogogic state or liminal dreaming? Just a few general things about kind of what this is and what people might expect there?

Tasha
Yeah, sure, just for like a complete noobs, who absolutely wouldn’t know what that word even means.

Jennifer Dumpert
So hypnagogia comes from the Greek “hypnose” (sleep) and “agagos” (going toward) and it’s that state between waking and sleep as you’re falling asleep, when you have both conscious mind, and yet access to dream space. And we all go through this every 24 hours when your leg jerks or your arm twitches, you know that you’re in hypnagogia often people see faces turning toward them or the deeper you go in, the more they become kind of narrative dreams structure, although they’re often non-narrative, free, associative, swirling, kaleidoscopic tours through your own imagery, memories, associations, and hypnopompia is on the other end. Hypnopompia is hypnosis again, and “Pompeii”, going away from, like pomp and circumstance, and that’s in the morning that really soft drift. Maybe you feel like you’re awake and you’re having a thought and then you realize, “oh, actually, no, this is still a dream” and you might float back and forth between waking and sleep. Overall, that’s a high level view of what these states are. Together, I call them the liminal dreaming.

Jeff
And this is our destination. In this podcast episode, we’ll be adventurers, prepare yourself for a deep dive a spelunk into the liminal dreaming space.

Tasha
Would you recommend that we lay down for this practice?

Jennifer Dumpert
I absolutely would recommend that you lay down somewhere where you can hear me.

Tasha
All right, I’m going to do it and I’m going to hope I don’t fall asleep in the middle of recording a podcast. If I do, someone just yell at me really loud.

Jennifer Dumpert
Usually, even if people fall asleep, they come back again. It’s amazing because you still do have some waking mind. It’s always amazing when I do these sessions where people are like, “wow, I don’t, I don’t feel like I heard anything that you said. But I heard immediately when you said to come back.”

[Meditation]

Jeff
Come back here, woah!

Tasha
I didn’t fall asleep. I’m so excited.

Jennifer Dumpert
Congratulations. Did you drift?

Tasha
Oh yeah. This was Awesome.

Jeff
Can I offer a report? Because I’m curious for…

Jennifer Dumpert
Please

Jeff
There’s a few questions came up for me. This space is one I’m familiar with, I actually have guided you know, we’ve done workshops and kind of setting people up in to kind of lucid dreaming territory or hypnogogia stuff and I encountered some of the things that I usually encounter so, I’m excited to kind of get an expert view here.

So at first was the scramble to find a good place to lay down. And then as I did, I found a good spot, and I could feel myself start to relax. And I’m in a situation where the… I had a lot of energy going into it, so I knew it was going to be near impossible for me to totally drift off – if at all – and that’s something I often find myself in. I have a lot of energy you know, it’s related to the bipolar thing and as I was going, actually one of the strongest, first things that happened was my whole body filled with this sense of energy. I found the star induction really powerful. And I could feel this vibrating through my whole body, very charged. And I could still hear the sound of my son upstairs, my wife feeding him, you know so, I was aware of sounds inn the environment but it is very vivid kind of… So I’m very vividly awake. And yet this thing is coming up underneath me and my body, this very strong sort of energy. And as I kind of got deeper into it, I started realizing, “Oh, this is the hypnotic induction”. Because this is also familiar to me from both sleep onset and hypnosis. So that’s a whole thing we can explore around the hypnotic side of this.

But then I would go in, and then it’s sort of like, you’re in this place where I’m right in between. And I can see the images beginning and I had images of birds. And I don’t know if they’re primed from having done some reading in your book about the eagle that you’re talking about. And I kind of went to this place that’s very familiar to me sort of this clearing, that often I go to when I’m meditative, just sort of waiting and observing.

And so there’s flickers of imagery, but I wasn’t totally surrendered to it. I knew if I were down more, there’d be more imagery, I’d be able to follow the tendrils of sort of absurdity, the kind of associations. But I was still on the near side of this, the waking side of this. And so I guess I… one of my thoughts was, I mean, it seems like every place you go is interesting and valuable. And I can easily imagine having gone down further, but I imagine many people will have been like me that didn’t fall asleep, and yet, maybe began to slip into some kind of dream-like stuff. And so you really are in this mix between the two.

Anyway, then it sort of came to an end. But so there’s a question around, how far do you have to kind of go in for it to kind of be doing what you were intending? And the other thing was about the body energy? How, if you’ve heard that before, and what to do with that. And thus, ends my report, and I recognize that Tasha has a report to that, she may want to say more as well.

Tasha
Yeah, I felt for me, it was like, I had the surge of energy as well. And it went directly to my extremities, I felt very, very relaxed through like the whole middle of my body, and my hands kind of came alive. So I was like, laying there very, very spacious, like, you know, the, you know, he kept on bringing us to kind of the imagery of being like a galaxy. And my breath kind of felt like cosmic wind blowing through a galaxy. And my hands were just like, these alive little spaces. So I felt like, staying with those made… it kind of kept me much more spacious, where I think sometimes, you know, if you gather your attention towards the core, like in the heart, sometimes you do meditations there, or, you know, in the third eye or something, it has a unifying effect. It kind of like, pinpoints your attention. Whereas having my, my sense of self being these two disparate parts, like these two hands was very, like, just so much space, so and then everything you were saying was just kind of planting seeds in that space. And then I loved it when you started humming, I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I’m a musician. But anytime that there is music involved in a meditation, I’m so surprised and very happy. But I found it was just so primal, it felt like when your a baby and your mom’s kind of absent-mindedly humming to you and it’s just that lull is super safe space. You know, or just…

Jennifer Dumpert
Oh, I love that.

Tasha
Yeah. So for, you know, for me, it was like… I do a lot of sitting meditation and I find there the challenge is bringing my energy downwards, right. So it’s kind of the struggle against the cogitating mind or like conceptualizing mind. And this way, it was kind of like, I was bringing my energy upward, like, I very easily relaxed into it. And then I was like, let me just rise up a little bit to nestle into the sound. And the energy in my body and the energy of your humming was very wavelike. So I started getting these images of being on a boat and rocking gently on waves. And I was trying to like, look, is that is the image of the waves and the boat? Is it like a visual image in my mind? Or is it like a physical kind of wobbling, and it was a little bit of both. So I was in this very, in-between-y spot that was…

Jennifer Dumpert
Oh, yeah, you got to the space, man.

Jeff
Synaesthetic remixing.

Tasha
Yeah. Yeah, it was really good.

Jennifer Dumpert
Yeah, that’s beautiful. I love those. To both respond to what you’re saying, Tasha, and answer one of your questions, Jeff, there definitely are different levels of it. And one of the few people who’s written extensively on hypnagogia (or hypnogogia, both are correct. I say one just as the other, but they’re both correct) is my Ramidus, who wrote in the 80s, and he has his four stages of hypnagogia. But in my explorations, I also have found four stages of it, but mine are actually different. I mean, experientially. You know, at the latest level, when I’m a little bit more awake… you know, because you can be 20% awake and 80% asleep or the other way, or 50/50. You know, so when kind of like 80% awake and 20% asleep is like full, like full waking energy is there, but I’m just a little bit in dream space. And I found this one at the opera, I was at a not that good production of Carmen with my in-laws and I was like, “Okay, well, I’m just gonna drift in hypnagogia”, but I also wanted to, you know, track what was happening.

Tasha
I just love that you can be like, “Oh, I’m just drifting into hypnogogic”, it sounds so much kinder than being like, “This play is putting me to sleep like this sucks”.

Jeff
An amazing strategy for all in-laws.

Tasha
Yeah! Sorry, I’m just experimenting with some hypnogogia, I’ll be right back in a moment.

Jennifer Dumpert
I’m working.

Tasha
I love that.

Jennifer Dumpert
And I realized that I could, I could slip in and I could track the music. And every time the music changed, I knew that there would be like a new, new like words on the – because you’re reading the super titles, and I’d open my eyes, I’d read the words, and then I would go back in. And in that space, it’s very much, it’s very much access to memory, like access to childhood memory. I’ve had amazing memories from my childhood with these practices. Like you and super, full sensory, like the public pool. You know, where we used to go as kids and mine and my sister’s bathing suits and the smell of the chlorine and what the lockers looked like and everything, like full slick riding in our, riding, my sister pulling me in the wagon, when we’re kids – just whatever these full sensory memories.

Jeff
The Proustian movement back into memory. Yeah.

Jennifer Dumpert
And you know, actually the first paragraph of Remembrance of Things Past is hypnagogic dream. Yeah, it’s a hypnagogic dream. And then I can go like a level deeper when I’m still a little bit more awake than asleep, maybe 60/40. And because I can touch type, I can sit back with my computer in my lap, and do kind of a form of automatic writing. And then like, write, actually what’s happening

Tasha
oh, I gotta try that.

Jennifer Dumpert
I’m actually going read one, I’m going to read one of these to you just because it really gives you like, both the sense of like, what’s happening in my mind and being able to hear what’s outside. Okay, so here’s one of those:

Speared asparagus, cooking class. Two Christmas tree angels hold hands. Mostly awake. But the dream gets deeper in the mouths of the little sea creatures wiggling at the bottom of my field of perception, though, there’s no edge. Greet and pink. A set of cat ears in the very far distance. My upstairs neighbors yell, maybe a sporting event? The sound ricochets. The word ricochet? How do I spell that? Seems like it has a “CH” but not. Brazen hussy, crazier, a pulsating light off to the right.

So that’s just me tracking, you know. And then getting deeper is when I get like the free associative images like, I was talking about that kaleidoscopic swirl of memories, dreams, associations

Jeff
The guns.

Jennifer Dumpert
Yeah, exactly. And there’s a lot of those…. There’s some of those in my book, of what those dreams are. And then at the very, very deepest point of it, there’s actually a place when your body can fall asleep and your mind is still awake.

Jeff
Absolutely.

Jennifer Dumpert
Yeah, Jeff, I know you know this. Jeff and I have been having these conversations for so long.

Tasha
I love that… Well, I mean, he’s the one who put me on your book. That’s why I was like, I just gobble up all dream materials. Like “what? There’s a book about liminal dreaming that I haven’t read yet? Yeah, I bought it.

Jennifer Dumpert
So yeah, so different stages. You know, I mean, people go to very different places during these meditations, during their own work, for sure.

Jeff
Well, that’s the you know, I want to since we went and did those stages, if we could just maybe return for a moment to that stage four. This is something I find this place to be very productive around teaching people about lucid dreaming, even though it’s a very tricky place. This is what Laberge would say is, your kind of this is where potentially you could have a wake-induced lucid dream. You could go, you could kind of go directly from waking into a dream while holding, keeping the tether of that sort of waking consciousness and, and I’d be curious about how what you found there, but what I’ve found that works here, and it’s so tricky, it’s such a delicate… it’s kind of like you’re bouncing on the head of a pin, that it’s all about the equanimity. That if I have any struggle, if I create any resistance, any ripple in the field, then I’ll disrupt the effect. I have to be completely frictionless. So I stay awake with no agenda other than just stay awake, but no gripping. And if I can kind of keep it utterly, utterly, like in that total, smooth, delicate mode, then sometimes I can just, I can… it’s like the dream starts to emerge all around me. And that thing I’m thinking about becomes now a scene that I’m inside and I keep that tether. But I think I’ve literally only been able to do that maybe half a dozen times in my life. I’ve had other near misses. Yeah,

Tasha
a trick that I use in that stage when I feel like “okay, my body is finally falling asleep…” And like you said, Jeff, your mind is in this totally equanimous place. And I just, as if I’m mentally already sleeping, you know, if you’re in bed, and you’re just changing positions, if you just like, roll over to your side, it feels like I’m rolling out of my body, if that makes any sense. Like, my body is asleep. And I’ll just take a mental roll to the left in my bed. And it’s like, I roll into a dream.

Jennifer Dumpert
Yeah, that’s great.

Tasha
Yeah, but it’s really hard. Sometimes I actually physically roll and then I’m like, dammit.

Jeff
off the bed.

Tasha
Yeah, that’s happened before I have like a scar on my eyebrow from doing that.

Jennifer Dumpert
Oh No, oh, no.

Jeff
The hazards of nighttime experimentation

Tasha
No kidding! Jeez.

Jennifer Dumpert
Yeah, you know, the most traditional lucid dreamers, the Tibetan Buddhists do say that the first step is learning facility with hypnagogia, is learning to be able to find yourself in hypnagogia and linger there. You know, of course, with as with all practices, if you do it and pay attention to it, you’ll get way better at it. I mean, it’s really great and easy as a practice, because we all naturally do it. Like I say, it’s, you know, externally, it’s an EEG state, we all go through it every 24 hours, at least once, you know. And so it’s a very easy practice, because really, all it is, is is pausing and looking around and being like, “Oh, wait, this is a place”. I mean, most of us think of it as an “on the way” it’s like a between spot, you know, but to actually be like, “Oh, no, actually, this is in itself a destination. This is a place where I can stop and have that experience.” And then you learn to have that equanimity, like you said, Tasha, where you’re in the space where you can really ride it. I mean, I’m not quite as on top of it as I was right when I was writing the book for the year after, when I was touring, when I was really spending a lot of time in hypnagogia.

But I still can go in pretty much at will. And I can stay there for 45 minutes or an hour, I mean, I can really, I can really hang in the space. And then from there, yeah, the access to the lucid dream space, like the WILD method, waking-induced lucid dream, (which you can find in my book or online). And you know, where in the hypnagogic state, you either remember a dream, or you have a strong ability to visualize the dream space where you want to go, and then you just sort of slide into that space from hypnagogia.

Tasha
I just really love that you’re like the first person that I’ve met who really puts the emphasis on hypnagogia. And not just as a passing through state, because it’s like, especially if you’re, I’m a kind of person that really likes I love subtlety, like I love, you know, the… there’s so much to learn and subtlety. And I think sometimes in the dream symbols are kind of whacking you over the head, you know, like this, this banana stands for a penis or something like that, you know, it’s very obvious. Whereas in hypnagogia, you have to kind of like, piece it together, or like wait for the meaning to rise up to you kind of, and a lot of not a lot of people talk about that. So yeah, I think that’s really interesting.

Jennifer Dumpert
No, I completely agree with you.

Jeff
And that’s a good bridge actually into, I mean, we could have a fascinating discussion about lucid dreaming, but staying right here in this liminal dream space, what are some of the ways that people you know, use the space? What are some of the… What have you learned about that space?

Jennifer Dumpert
Oh, so much, you know, a lot of what I’m doing is really just consciousness exploration. You know, so it’s, you know…

Worrrrrd!

Tasha
That’s what we’re here for

Jeff
Oh, yeah, we’re into thaaat.

Tasha
Yeah, sort of, sort of. We should name a podcast after that or soemthinng

Jennifer Dumpert
I mean, you know, you’ll see that phrase over and over again in my book as well. You know, for me, that’s really, where the fascination is and you know, I mean, even REM dreams, even the dreams we have, you know, with the banana, etc., those are much more like waking life, right? You’re still a subject moving through an objective world having experiences, except, you know, whatever you might be with a bunch of squirrels on Mars, but you know, but you believe it at the time, right? You find it credible. And so it’s much more waking experience but liminal dreaming is just totally different. It’s a totally different experience. And it’s one of those

Jeff
It’s so true.

Jennifer Dumpert
Yeah, you know, it’s like the same reason that people meditate or take drugs or, you know, sweat lodges or or, you know, fast or whatever, trying to get to these extra ordinary outside of ordinary states of consciousness. And this is like the easiest, most available, you know, free hangoverless, legal way of going into the states. So, I mean, just that in of itself, is wonderful, but then there’s all sorts of other you know, it’s a great form of meditation because really all there is in all of your consciousness is the unfolding moment of now, you know, there’s whatever is happening, but like at the deeper points when you’re more asleep, that can get a little bit more narrative like maybe snippets of a narrative experience. But a lot of times, it’s not just a swirling free association. And so you don’t have self and other really all there is is like the consciousness, and all there is is the swirling unfolding of whatever arises in your mind. So that’s an extraordinary state to be able to track.

Tasha
Yeah, and I found like, more to that point that I find maybe the things that I learn in lucid dreaming tend to be a little bit more yeah, like subject-object or, you know, a lesson or something like that. Whereas the things that I glean from hypnagogia, it almost arises like a knowing like, it just it dawns on you, you just kind of know something, you just like a random image. And you know, something, I don’t know, if you’ve any, if either of you have had that experience, but it’s less like, it’s less narrative and kind of just comes all at once. Sort of

Jennifer Dumpert
Fully. Yeah. And and actually, it’s creativity is one as another one of the major things. And I was just talking about those four states. And in a normal like talk or workshop when I’m going blah, blah, blah, as opposed to this where we’re talking about practice, which I love doing. But you know, if I’m like giving a talk or a workshop, I have a part of the talk or workshop in which I describe these four states, and, you know, whatever. And I actually came up with that part of the talk in hypnagogia, when it became apparent to me what was happening and how I needed to write that.

Jeff
That’s so funny. I had an identical experience, writing Head Trip, I would deliberately mine hypnogogic for ideas about the book, some of them that came up through there were completely terrible. And some of them were totally awesome. But but to speak to both your points and, you know, the sense of arriving, sometimes I think about the difference between a kind of horizontal mind and a kind of vertical mind. That there’s the horizontal mind of kind of rational progression, there’s even the horizontal mind of something that’s a little more free associative. But then there’s the vertical mind, that’s just a pure thing that just arrives, unbidden. It comes up, and it’s kind of like the pure out of the source, pure creativity, the idea that comes from completely left field. And this is, of course, why people use hypnogogic for problem solving, because they’re in the single track all the time, or many tracks, but they’re in this kind of linear track of waking consciousness, and that has a particular rigidity to it. You know, it kind of crowds out whatever else material might be there. But as that thins out and gets looser, then now there’s space for these sort of like vertical intersessions, you know, to kind of emerge up arrive in our experience.

Tasha
Okay, I have an experience of that, that I want to share with you guys to get your, I’ve always wanted to know what what other people who are into this, think of this experience, but I was this it’s a hypnopompia kind of experience, I was waking up. And it was like six in the morning. And I just had this image of a friend of mine’s face. And we’re like, not even close friends. I hadn’t seen her for years. But I saw her face and she looked sad. And I immediately had this… I just knew that her father had died. And I was like, I woke up and I was like, like, while I was still in the hypnopompic. I was like, oh, I should tell her her dad is dead. And then I woke up and I was like, Well, that was weird. That was just a dream. And I found out two days later that her dad had died around that exact time in the morning. Yeah, but I was like, Yeah, but I don’t tell people that because they’re like, don’t start thinking that you’re psychic.

Jeff
Now we’re going into that, right? Cool

Tasha
I’m really interested to hear you guys are the experts. You know, tell me about it.

Jennifer Dumpert
When it comes to the space of belief, I am neither a believer nor a disbeliever as a general rule, you know, I mean, I take experiences at what their value is. Just the fact that it’s experience. The only experience of this sort that I myself I’ve ever had was in a hypnagogic dream on a lawn in London, dreaming that my cat had died and my cat across the world and Buffalo, New York did in fact die around that time. Yeah, it’s often around death and people’s deaths that those weird experiences happen. But there’s a there’s a really strong correlation around liminal dreamspace and death. And I had this actually really amazing experience when my very beloved aunt, who was my godmother were very close. And she died. And so I did deathbed, you know, and sat with her during her dying and, you know, help take care of her. And after she had no longer had any more waking consciousness in her life, and before she got to a place where she was just sort of gone, you know, a week or so before she died. She went through this, this period of a week or two, where she was in hypnagogia. And I immediately recognized it because, you know, that’s my work and she was like, you know, I’m… She was with Ziggy Stardust at the mall with her neighbors and they’re talking dogs. And you know, and my family’s like, “no, Robin, you’re not at the mall Ziggy Stardust”. I mean, I’ve had I’ve had conversations with people who are in hypnagogia, you can talk to people in hypnagogia sometimes, and they’ll respond, it’s a nonlinear conversation. And then I much later found out that actually the guy who was the director of the hospice where she died in Buffalo, New York, super coincidentally, is a guy who does this work, Dr. Christopher Kerr, about the fact that dying people are often in hypnagogia. It’s that, a space.

Jeff
That’s interesting. My friend, Patricia Pearson, wrote a book about dying. And she did have a whole chapter on this, the kind of dreamlike space that dying people seem to often go preceding death and often talking about going on a trip. And it’s like, it’s already kind of like they, they start to… in this literal way, they’ll pack a bag, you know, they’ll be like, “Oh, I have my ticket, I got to get my train ticket” And it’s sort of like, all that starts to seep into their life. And it’s really interesting.

Jennifer Dumpert
And I think, you know, boy, howdy, there’s a lot of reasons to try to, you know, gain some facility with limited dreaming, but preparation for death is a darn good one.

Tasha
Absolutely. And that’s in the Tibetan tradition. that’s the entire dream yoga process, right. You’re practicing every night for the actual journey to wherever.,

Jeff
For bardo takeoff.

Jennifer Dumpert
Right. Again, the in-between worlds. You know, “liminal” comes from the Latin limin, like a doorway or threshold. It’s neither both here nor there, neither awake nor sleep, both awake and asleep. And these liminal zones, like Bardo is liminal zone.

Jeff
I feel like just Tasha, I want to circle back to your thing, I just wanted to say that, when I wrote ‘Head Trip’, I got so many emails about people describing similar experiences in consciousness more generally, but definitely in dreams and, in hypnogogic and it’s really interesting, you know and I tend to have a outlook similar to Jennifer, it’s like, if they’re meaningful as experiences, then they’re meaningful. But from the point of view of consciousness, I mean, it points to the big mystery of everything, you know, you can believe we’re separate, and there’s isolated places, and they’re over here, or you can believe that it’s all part of one thing. And if you believe that, which, you know, I basically do, then, you know, all bets are off. A lot more becomes possible, but they do seem to be sort of more rare experiences. And certainly, it’s interesting to…

Tasha
Yeah, and we don’t have a culture that, you know, really encourages even talking about people having experiences like that. And so sometimes I wonder if people felt more comfortable talking about it would more people have experiences like that, you know, you’d…

Jennifer Dumpert
I think the answer is generally yes. Yeah. I had the same thing as Jeff, you know, when after my book came out, and there’s a there’s a chapter in the book about, you know, death, about liminal dreaming and death and the psychopomp and the shamanic journey between the worlds and I too both… I got a lot of emails and then, you know, in classes and workshops, whatever, I had people come up and so often it was around somebody’s death. It was around well, I, you know, I knew this person had died, or this person came to say goodbye to me, or things along that line.

Tasha
Yeah.

Jeff
Well, I wanted to ask you, Jennifer, about, you have a great discussion in your book around the kind of knowing that dream knowing is or that imaginal knowing is, you know, that it’s a, that it itself is a kind of sensing, you could say. And I wonder if you could say a little bit about how you think about that?

Jennifer Dumpert
Absolutely. So the the doorway into liminal dreaming is imagination, right? So what kind of happens, as you’re going into it, or often, the first thing that that happens is that your, your imagination kind of kicks in, you know, and then your imagination is open while you’re slipping into this state. The Sufis actually thought that imagination was as much of a faculty of perception as seeing, hearing, touching, whatever and in their mind, because the only way to perceive the highest divine is through imagination, it’s actually the most important sense. You know, I mean, the world is in a feedback loop with us and our imagination. And for example, right now, imagine walking from where you live to the closest store. And if you were giving me that map and somebody who lives next door to you was giving you that map, you might say, “well, you know, pass the church on the left, and then there’s the garden where there’s, you know, big sunflowers, and, you know, the red house with the barking dog”. And somebody else might say, “oh, yeah, well, you know, pass the big oak tree”. And, you know, I mean, so it’s like, what we see in the world and what we’re experiencing is in some part made of imagination, you know that there’s, there’s a feedback loop. And so imagination really is this, it’s really determining a lot of what we see, you know what we understand. I don’t want to go too far into the new age, “you create your own reality”, because if you live in a war-torn world, or, you know, abusive childhood, or whatever you did not, you know, create that. But that said, your experience is going to determine how you perceive the world and you know, what the world is. And so your imagination, really is a perception. It’s kind of like the entre chein et loup, which is the French idea of, at the liminal zone of sunset, you can’t tell us something as a dog or a wolf. Whether it’s a safe thing or a dangerous thing. You know?

Jeff
I love this point. And I love bringing it to imagination in this way, because traditionally, when people talk about the science of perception, they’ll say, yeah, there’s top down, there’s kind of what we’re seeing in the moment with our senses, but that’s being shaped by our history, by our memories, by our expectations, but it’s always put out in this sort of, it’s presented in this very dry way. But the way you’re presenting it is really interesting that it’s like that, that the world as it’s occurring in this moment is continually being shaped with this inner process that’s extremely creative, and rich, and imaginative and moving and informed by all sorts of things beyond just some dry sense of a linear A-toB of where we were. Because I mean, the the human underground is vast in many directions. And so this is a much more interactive, enriched and mysterious and juicy kind of presentation, I feel like.

Tasha
And it feels like, you know, we’re using the term liminal. It’s like so many people imagine that liminal is in between states. But the liminal ness is also in between us and everything else. You know, it’s spatial as much as it is linear.

Jennifer Dumpert
Yeah, that’s great. And it actually, when I was, you know, in my young 20s, I think I read this essay by Aristotle called “On Dreams”.

Tasha
Yeah, I read that too.

Jennifer Dumpert
Yeah, yeah. And that’s, and it blew my mind and a lot of this kind of comes from comes out of that. You know, and basically, what Aristotle is saying is like you see things, you hear things, you have these kinds of perceptions, you see a dog running, and hear a bell ringing, and then those things go into the your inner universe, and that most of the time, you’re like when your intellect, dreams, you know, ideas, memory, all of this stuff isn’t actually you interacting with the outer world, it’s you interacting with your version of the world, with your imagination, your imagined version of the world, out there. And that’s really mostly what we’re doing. So it’s, it’s a great way of sort of understanding how you’re moving through the world.

Jeff
It’s interesting, it reminds me, I’m recognizing we’re kind of getting down to the short strokes here in terms of time, but just as one aside, I remember one time, Jennifer, years and years ago we were chatting and you were telling me about this amazing practice that you had, where you would have a dream, and it would the next morning, it would be with you. And you would kind of think about some of the details and write a few of them down so it was fresh with you. And then you would go and you would place the dream somewhere in the city of San Francisco where you still lived. Like you would you would look in some – and this is my, I’m paraphrasing, so you can obviously explain it better if you like, but you would say maybe see a street corner and be like, “Oh yeah, that sign the way that sign rolls like a wave that’s kind of like the ocean part of my dream. And this cornice over here in this building is sort of like the whale in my dream. And this feeling of sudden heat that I had is like the red car right there” or whatever it is and you kind of place the elements into the real quote “waking world” and then having done that for years, your experience as you would walk through the city as you’d be walking through this sort of landscape of both the city and your dreams because there’s so many dreams that you would placed, so really remixing these two forms of consciousness and creating this other thing. I just thought this was the greatest idea ever and experience ever.

Tasha
Like consciously taking the wall down between them.

Jennifer Dumpert
Yeah, exactly. Using the city as a dream journal in a way. And the way that you describe it Jeff is great. And using those sort of bite-sized pieces of dream and placing them along architecture, or you know trees or whatever so that the sweep of my eye across it would be the the narrative of the dream from beginning and end. So yeah, it’s great because it’ll be like, “I’m walking down the street, oh, I gotta buy some tomatoes, gee I really should call my mother…. Oh, yeah, there’s that weird dream? Oh, right.” You know, where you’re actually in it. And yeah, I started it when I lived in New York and did it there and then moved to San Francisco and did it here. I still do that.

Jeff
And what was the effect of that of like walking? And having done that? What would you how did it affect how you, you know, your experience?

Jennifer Dumpert
Well, for one thing, my relationship with my – and it’s all within my neighborhood, within the confines of what I think of as my own neighborhood, which is pretty urban. For one thing, I have way more intimate relationship with my neighborhood, you know, where I really look at places and I notice the changes, because I really look at them. It serves as dream journal, because I really remember everything. And then, just like Tasha said, it really breaks down those barriers, you know, where I can be, you know, suddenly, in the space of the dream outside of my dry cleaner. There’s a dream that goes over top of my dry cleaner which was the one your sort of remembering Jeff with the whales. And it’s this wonderful confusion of the liminal of being, like thrown back into this, like being in both spaces simultaneously.

Tasha
That’s awesome. I’m gonna start doing that, like immediately.

Jeff
There’s so much we could just… we’ve barely scratched the surface here. We’re just gunna have to get you to come on again and do a different kind of practice. And we’ll maybe we’ll do… who knows what. There’s so much to talk about here. But maybe it’s a place to I mean, I don’t know if there’s anything that you feel like you need to say or you want to say that hasn’t been talked about that’s important. And then maybe just leave folks with a little bit of information about you, where they can find your book, or your website or whatever you got going on out there.

Jennifer Dumpert
Okay, I am going to pitch in one more thing is it’s a great way to go into the visionary, like Jungian active imagination, going into hypnagogia, coming out, doing something creative, going back in, coming out, because it really does sidestep your normal patterns of thinking and can open you up to these amazing experiences. So for visionary experience and creativity, fantastic.

Jeff
Peerless. Two thumbs up, the hypnagogic state. Peerless for visionary experience and creativity.

Tasha
Sold take my money. Oh, my gosh, I hope that creeps into my dream tonight. Jeff standing in the corner of my hypnagogia pitching me on it. Yeah, where can we find it?

Jennifer Dumpert
I tweet a dream a day and I’ve been doing that for 11 years.

Tasha
Whoa!

Jennifer Dumpert
on Twitter as Oneirofer. And then I have a lot of websites, you can start anywhere you can go to, probably the easiest to remember here is liminaldreaming.com. I have many websites that are all cobbled together like bad editions on a house so you can get to any of them from any of them. So liminaldreaming.com is probably the best place and, you know, I’m terrible at doing things like uploading my talks, but some of them are there.

Jeff
And of course, that’s the name of the book too, Liminal Dreaming: Exploring Consciousness at the Edges of Sleep.

Tasha
This was so awesome. This is like a thing that is very near and dear to my heart. So it’s awesome to talk to such an expert on the topic.

Jennifer Dumpert
I have really enjoyed this immensely. And I look forward to seeing you in the liminal realms.

Tasha
Thanks for tuning in to the Consciousness Explorers Podcast. Don’t forget to subscribe. And if you’d like this episode, give us a five star rating on Apple podcasts. See you next week for a whole new adventure.