Beginning with a precognitive dream in childhood, I've had several transpersonal experiences. Even though I've had great difficulty trying to fit these experiences into the framework of mainstream belief and practice, I've always sought a way to integrate them into some kind of larger context.  

I've been fascinated by dreams all my life. When I was 12, I had my first precognitive dream, and a few years later, my first lucid dream (a dream in which I'm aware that I'm dreaming).  I've been keeping a dream journal and working with dreams in one form or another for decades. They're a wonderful source of insight. I do dreamwork in person with a couple friends, and I facilitate a local dreamwork group. For several years, I was a member of eDreams, an online dreamwork group. Members take turns submitting dreams for the other members to work with. In 2008, I attended one of Brugh Joy's workshops and was very impressed with his method of working with dream material.

I've had spontaneous lucid dreams since adolescence. A few of my lucid dreams have been published in The Lucid Dream Exchange, a publication devoted to information about lucid dreaming. In 2009, I gave a presentation on lucid dreaming to the Quad Cities chapter of the Institute of Noetic Sciences:

In the 70s, I became interested in shamanism and experimented with entheogens.  But because my experimentation occurred outside of a traditional context, it was a dead end (thankfully, metaphorically only!).

Since my 20s, I've had a few spontaneous out-of-body experiences (OBEs).  In the 1990s, I came across several resources regarding OBEs, including the book Journeys Out of the Body, by Robert Monroe.  Bob Monroe was a businessman who began to have spontaneous, uncontrolled OBEs and learned to induce them at will. I became interested in trying to deliberately induce an OBE, but was never successful.

In the late 90s, I learned about remote viewing, the use of other-than-normal modes of perception within a scientific protocol to perceive across time and space.  Remote viewing excited me for several reasons.  Because it was developed within the context of scientific research and was used for a time by the CIA and the U.S. military, it seemed as close to mainstream as the transpersonal could be.  It also held the promise of being able to develop the transpersonal as an ability, rather than a random spontaneous event.  I explored remote viewing for awhile and had some interesting, personally validating experiences.

While studying remote viewing, I learned that the Monroe Institute, or TMI, which Bob Monroe had founded, had been involved in the military remote viewing program. I became interested in the Institute's products for home use and its residential educational programs. The Institute uses Hemi-Sync, a sound technology developed by Bob Monroe, to allow people to explore altered states of consciousness.  In the late 90s, I began listening to the Gateway Experience series at home.  The tapes evoked some pretty amazing visionary experiences.  So, in 2000, I attended the Gateway Voyage residential program.  Since then, I've been to several other Monroe programs.  I've always come away with some experience or insight that I can take directly into my day-to-day life back home.

I've practiced meditation in one form or another since the mid-70s. In the mid-70s, I learned Transcendental Meditation, or TM. I still sometimes use the TM technique--it's simple and effective.  But I'm a fallen TM practitioner.  I never participated in the larger TM movement after I learned how to meditate. After attending the morning yoga sessions at TMI, I began studying yoga with Andrew and Adina Leavitt at the Classical Yoga Center in Iowa City. Andrew and Adina were trained at the Yoga Institute of Mumbai, India. From their lessons and from reading The Yoga Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita, I discovered that yoga is much more than than the physical hatha yoga that most people seem to think of here in the West. It is a practice for daily life. Through Andrew and Adina's eclectic teachings, I encountered Buddhist mindfulness practice via Pema Chodron's book Start Where You Are. I began reading about Buddhist practice and also worked with mindfulness practice in a more secular setting, via the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction at The University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics.

My interest in dreamwork and my friendship with a couple people who are interested in Jung and were students of Brugh Joy has led me into shadow work. A few experiences I've had at TMI, and Buddhist practices designed to develop compassion, also have contributed to my interest in shadow.  Shadow work, the integration of disowned aspects of self, has been very healing.

At the same time that I've been walking this path, I've also obtained a B.S. and an M.S. in computer science, and I have a minor in mathematics.  I've held down a job as a system administrator for about 20 years.  How to reconcile these two seemingly irreconcilable aspects of my life?