Liminal Dreaming

Exploring Consciousness at the Edges of Sleep

By: Jennifer Dumpert

Narrated by: Jennifer Dumpert

Length: 8 hrs and 24 mins

Publisher's Summary

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

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

©2019 Jennifer Dumpert (P)2019 North Atlantic Books

Critic Reviews

“Jennifer Dumpert is a dream scholar, dream hacker, dream weaver. If you’ve ever been curious to learn more about the cosmos behind your eyelids, the realms you visit every night, let her be your guide.” (Jason Silva, host of National Geographic’s Brain Games)

“Falling asleep is not a loss of consciousness but an offering from the psyche to anyone with the wisdom to accept it. Jennifer Dumpert is pointing the way to a door that’s already open - one more accessible, sustainable, and transformational than any drug or virtual reality.” (Douglas Rushkoff, author of Team Human) 

“With patience, clarity, and insight, Jennifer Dumpert, a seasoned dreamer, leads us through this land of hypnos, making available to the reader a third state of consciousness: neither day nor night but somewhere on the edge of both, a place of creativity, intuition, and vision. Many books put their readers to sleep. This one can take you to the edge of it and leave you there to dream.” (Gary Lachman, author of A Secret History of Consciousness)

Developing a liminal dream practice

When we say “I had a dream,” we nearly always mean the kind of nighttime dreams that occur in REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, dreams in which we experience ourselves to have a body embedded in a tangible dreamworld, taking part in an unfolding narrative. Liminal dreams are not REM dreams, and they generally lack a “dream self,” a stable dream environment, and a storyline. Surfing liminal consciousness, we’re more likely to experience coruscating lights, symbols and geometric patterns, images flowing one into the other, faces turning toward us, voices overheard at a distance. Jennifer Dumpert compares liminal dreaming to a psychedelic trip that is safe, free, legal, and has zero negative side effects.

By “Liminal Dreams,” Dumpert is referring to hypnogogia and hypnopompia, the brief stages of Theta brainwave pattern we pass through as we are falling asleep (hypnogogia), and again when waking up (hypnopompia). So the first lesson of this book is that, contrary to popular opinion and obsolete science, we DO NOT dream only in REM sleep. It’s just that our dreams in non-REM sleep stages have a different character than we are used to labelling “dream.”

The unique and potentially useful character of Theta dreaming, before and after deeper sleep, is that we naturally have access to waking consciousness during these periods – and can train ourselves to have even more. In hypnogogia and hypnopompia, dreaming and waking consciousness blend and blur. We’re aware of the physical world and the dreamworld at once. Dumpert describes numerous benefits of developing a liminal dream practice, including self-discovery, spiritual development, boosting creativity, seeking answers to specific questions, and even just for the fun of it.

Another exciting possibility offered by liminal dreaming, especially hypnogogia, is the use of our natural Theta state on the edge of sleep to “set up” lucid dreams in REM. Dumpert goes into some detail regarding Tibetan Dream Yoga, a Buddhist practice developed over hundreds of years to induce and refine lucid dreaming. The first stage of a monk’s training in TDY involves mastering liminal dreaming as a bridge to the deeper practice. If lucid dreaming is on your consciousness bucket list, Liminal Dreaming could be the book that gets you there.

Rich with exercises as well as explanations, Jennifer Dumpert’s Liminal Dreaming: Exploring Consciousness at the Edge of Sleep is a practical manual for developing and benefiting from the liminal dream state. I learned new things about dreaming in general, not just hypnogogia and hypnopompia, and I’ve been working with dreams, mostly in a Jungian context, for 30+ years. Well done.

I listened to the Audible audiobook edition of Lucid Dreaming, narrated by the author. Jennifer Dumpert is the expert on this subject, and IMO she is exactly the right narrator for her book. But be warned, she speaks *V-E-R-Y*S-L-O-W-L-Y*. If this bothers you, as it did me, just set the Audible app to play at 1.25 speed. At that rate Dumpert’s narration flows with the tone and pacing of the best audiobooks out there.

Great content, but...

There's a lot of fascinating content here, and well written. However I wish there had been a different narrator. Sometimes the author isn't the ideal choice for an audio version. To me, her delivery was so dry-- not only feeling-wise, but the vocal fry had the opposite effect of putting me in a dreamy state of mind. But I appreciate everything else about the book and will refer to it again... just have to get past the voice.........

this book opens doors to exploring the unconscious

Jennifer playfully and skillfully lays out the experience and ways to access the semiconscious states of liminal dreaming. She has a quick and fun and inspiring mind, that understands a great deal about the biology of sleep, the history of western and Eastern exploration of the unconscious, and the value of exploring it through sleep. For me using liminal dream state to explore the unconscious was most helpful as lucid dreaming does not come easy. The book has lots of tools/practices to build skills and insight into exploring liminal dreams. I recommend the book to anyone who wants to explore dreams both as a window into lucid dreaming or as a thing in itself.

Changed my life

This book is extremely clear and understandable to me even though I came to it with a limited understanding of Buddhism and the closely related Tibetan Bon tradition. The book is written by a former monk in the Bon tradition.

The author explains the theory and practice of the Bon tradition of Lucid Dreaming (Dream Yoga). He also explains being conscious and meditating while the body is asleep and not necessarily dreaming (Sleep Yoga). The purposes of Dream and Sleep Yoga in the Bon tradition are psychological well-being and, ultimately, Enlightenment. While I have not followed the specific methods outlined in the book, I have successfully begun Dream and Sleep Yoga. Had I not read this book, I would not have realized that I could meditate during sleep and in this way progress towards my spiritual goals. This has changed my life, and I will be forever grateful to the author.

The specific methods in the book involve aspects of the Bon tradition like goddesses, spheres of light, and chakras. Instead, I used Western methods to induce Lucid Dreaming and an awake mind while sleeping. For me, getting my body to fall asleep while I retain waking consciousness is doable, whereas I have not been able to realize in the middle of a dream that it is a dream (and, thus, achieve Lucid Dreaming). Western methods exist for both Dream and Sleep Yoga in the many books on Lucid Dreaming and Hypnagogic Dreaming.

As a note, Jennifer Dumpert's book, "Liminal Dreaming" on hynagogic dreaming and Ryan Hurd's book, "Sleep Paralysis" helped me to enter the Mind Awake & Body Asleep state. But I also had done over a year of practice with the Robert Monroe Hemisync (binaural beats) techniques. I think that Hemisync was very helpful in achieving this state.

I bought both the audiobook and paperback of "The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep." I listened to it four times and am now reading portions of it. The book has explained to me a good deal about consciousness, life on Earth, and Enlightenment. It has opened the doors to me for a whole new spiritual path. Thank You!