Hi all -
Long before I encountered formal meditation, I was interested in altered states of consciousness. As a kid I read Omni magazine articles about how to lucid dream. I would also try, repeatedly and with great conviction, to astral project through the walls of my bedroom (alas, without success – all I managed to do was fall off my bed while performing a psychic “roll out” from my body). In high school I got into psychedelics, and in my 20s and 30s explored every kind of psycho-spiritual technology. The interest is ongoing.
I love meditation for its grounding in The Now – unadorned – things as they are. I love these other explorations for the way they expand what is actually available in The Now. The human experience of reality is unquestionably broader and weirder than most of us recognize. Even over a typical 24-hour period, we visit fascinating states of waking, sleeping, and dreaming that we then either forget, or fail to notice anything valuable about. Yet each state has its own specialized form of knowledge and insight. Each is a unique window into who we are, and into this world we seem to find ourselves in.
In the mid-2000s I wrote a book about the psychology of all this called The Head Trip. The book’s original illustrations and website are still online: you can peruse a comic-book wheel of consciousness, where you can click on sections of the wheel and read short previews of twelve different states of consciousness.
I’m excited to revisit some of this at a special “Dream Architect” event in Asheville, North Carolina, at the Ayurprana Listening Room (ticket info below). Electronic musical instrument designer Tony Rolando of Make Noise synthesizers will improvise an ambient soundscape as I guide our audience in a trippy eyes-closed flat-on-the-floor meditation. Our destination: some of the states available at the porous transition zone between waking and dreaming. The event is a fundraiser for Blue Ridge Public Radio, which played a central role in supporting locals during and after the Hurricane Helene floods in late 2024. Join us if you’re in the area.
In honour of that event, I thought I’d offer something different. This meditation is all about drowsy relaxation, with an extended version that can be listened to before falling asleep. The idea is to cultivate more sensitivity to the transition from waking to sleep, to get curious about any unspooling hypnagogic imagery, and — if you’re able to maintain enough delicate equanimity — to point towards the beginning of a lucid dream. Lucid dreaming truly is bananas. Happy to write more about the why and how of lucid dreaming in a future post if there’s interest; it has a long pedigree in advanced meditation.
For fun, I’m pasting in a comic I wrote for The Walrus back in 2008, illustrations by Paul Kim. The text was inspired by Jules Verne’s classic Journey to the Center of the Earth.
Ok friends - happy exploring!
Jeff
PS - Curious: are people liking the new Friday post schedule? One plan for an extended signal of support is Sunday night Do Nothing Project community sit, the occasional Tuesday spontaneous guided meditation on Substack Live, and the recorded meditation and post on Friday. With Homebase Hang Out for a monthly practice check in. Steady rhythm of practice, day in, day out.
A few quick notes—
The next Do Nothing Project happens this Sunday November 2 at 8pm EDT, on Youtube. Link here. Soon it will move to Substack Live, so be ready for that!
New to Home Base? We have over 50 guided meditations in our library. Check out the most popular ones here.
Dream Architect with Jeff Warren and Tony Rolando
AyurPrana Listening Room, Asheville, North Carolina
Thu, Nov 13, 7:30 PM EST
A Note from Kelly Kelbel of Make Noise and The Experimental Meditation Club:
Friends, let’s stay true to what we do and experiment. Our meditation teacher and pal, Jeff Warren will invite you into lucid dreaming, guide you into hypnagogic states, while Tony provides the dream scape. This will be a chance for a journey through inner space, accompanied by sounds both harmonic and dissonant. In this liminal space, feelings surreal, you might find sounds that are familiar, from our own landscape, or discover the unfound sounds, the unfamiliar, that will unlock another layer to you. Sometimes in the liminal space we are called to face the unknown, what we fear, but it can also be a place to find out what is possible. We are here to explore, maybe even to play. Really, who knows what will happen! Come find out.
Kelly came across Jeff Warren’s work via the Calm App, when she did his Intro to Meditation course out of desperation and fear of her advanced cancer diagnosis and aggressive treatment. He makes meditation accessible. In our Experimental Meditation Club convening, she’s shared what she’s learned about equanimity from Jeff, and his tool Welcome to the Party.
In 2023, Tony and Kelly went to Jeff’s meditation retreat in Boone, worried that they were volunteering to be in a cult, and instead made a friend, and deepened their meditation practices. You can check out this retreat at the Art of Living.
Maybe without Jeff, Kelly wouldn’t have stuck with meditation or wouldn’t have created Chemo Sessions. Maybe the Experimental Meditation Club wouldn’t exist. Who knows?! How cool is it that Jeff is here with us getting into the layers of consciousness and play.
