In memory of SAO – a retrospective, celebration and dreaming
SAO dream image: 2005 Psiber Dreaming Art Gallery: I was beating my own heart to fragments
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“Shawn Allen O'Neal [SAO] passed on Sunday evening, March 23, 2008. Only a few close friends were aware of his angina-like symptoms in the few years leading up to his death (and his steadfast refusal of participation in the medical profession, in spite of being told he should), so his heart attack was sudden and a surprise. It was especially a surprise since he had quit smoking, was regularly exercising, and was by all appearances in great physical shape” (Message from Tshock/Jake).
SAO we mourn your death, and celebrate the life you shared with us. We recognize you as a great dreamer, perhaps the highest praise we can offer anyone in this community of online dreamers, a wonderful artist, and a magnificent thinker about dreams and dreaming.
Just 11 days before your death you bumped up an old thread from 2007 containing a dream of yours from 2006. You said the dream “may have been one of the most important in my life”. It is included here, because of its significance to you in that it lead you to stop smoking and made you feel “as happy about it as Harry's avatar looks”. It is also included because of the significance of the theme of death within it, and because you noticed the crazy horse as “the symbol of death”.
SAO dream from 10:02 AM 2/12/2006
“Was in a strange house with big steps leading up to a 'foyer' or small front room and then a hallway down the middle with four identical rooms on each side, like a 'boarding house' (or possibly a 'bordello'). Raw bluish-gray wood. Very old, (a slight Japanese feel, austere). Was pursuing and burning vampires. I had a long lighter, like a barbecue lighter. All you had to do was catch them on fire once, by their hair or clothes or whatever, and they'd begin to 'combust'--but the process was slow and very dangerous. It would take their heads forever to burn up, (the extremities burned relatively quickly) and they became more and more enraged as the burning progressed. When the fire would reduce them finally to just heads they would be at their most dangerous, (causing 'telepathic violence' all around them), but they would also get progressively more impaired in this state and so their energy would get more and more powerful and unpredictable. I was catching them here and there, (they moved with preternatural speed) waiting for their bodies to mostly burn up and avoiding attack until I could stomp their heads out like big pieces of coal. At one point a number of them caught me just inside the front door and I ended up lying face down on the floor with a 'main' female vampire holding my legs. A circle of vampires gathered around me (all female) to help hold me down and she 'introduced' me to them by name. Going around the circle counterclockwise the vamps got older and stranger. I couldn't look directly at some of them. The only name I remember was 'Titchiba' and she seemed very familiar--an old woman. (I knew the name was famous but couldn't remember why at the time--it's a character associated with the Salem witch trials I later realized by Googling). The ones who were older than her got very weird, not human, only partly physical. (They were like things that had been flayed of skin, anatomical models, very muscular--but mostly made of semitransparent energy with some
rotten looking vestiges of physicality clinging, fungus-like, to them here and there). One (other vampire) arrived riding up the front steps and into the foyer on a skeletal horse, very very bizarre. Its (the horse's) skull was like a goofy cartoon with 'real' eyeballs loosely perched in its sockets that it couldn't quite control so that they were crossed most of the time. It was 'funny' and cartoonish but also quite terrifying and 'real'--a very strong mix of feelings which made me somewhat nauseous. (I knew instantly I was literally looking at a 'symbol of death'--and knew also I was probably about to be killed by this crew of vamps--but I felt more awe at the sheer weirdness of this beast than terror). I couldn't move in this position to see the rider clearly, but the crazy horse rolled one of the blackened almost dead heads (one I had 'killed') up to me with its nose, (the head was still taking loudly and angrily--apparently urging the other vamps to do away with me) and then (the horse) put its head very close to me, the hard skull nuzzling me--crazy eyes a-goggle. It produced an enormous snaky pink tongue, which stank horribly, and began to lick my face.”
Sao - Shawn Allen O'Neal
To delight in SAO’s life follow these links:
SAO’s own website: http://www.myspace.com/siderealdrive
The s.a.o.s.d. web site designed by his friends: http://www.saosd.org/
SAO’s dream inspired art work and music: http://www.asdreams.org/psi2008/artgallery/sao.htm
An indexed collection of SAO’s precognitive dreams and thoughts about precognition and dreaming in general (mainly from the IASD Bulletin and the Psiber Dreaming Conferences):
http://www.asdreams.org/psi2008/artgallery/sao-collection.pdf
The IASD thread of comments on SAO following the announcement of his death: http://dreamtalk.hypermart.net/bb2005/viewtopic.php?t=2903
Here is a taste of some of SAO’s dream ideas:
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(July 24, 2005): “The ability [to know precognitively] would not exist to drive us towards final predestined ends in mounting anxiety, but seemingly occurs to gently, perhaps entirely subliminally in the usual course of things, inform of us of imminent probabilities in order to better equip us to deal with them”. |
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(September 20, 2006): “Why shouldn’t it be possible for my ‘future self’ to channel information to my ‘past self’? Isn’t that, perhaps, precisely what I’m doing when I look out my window and think about how strange it is that my long-ago self has ‘already seen’ this.” |
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(August 2, 2007): “Most of my dreams also contain ‘psi’ elements, but this hardly discounts the possibility of other levels of meaning – many other levels of meaning, some barely articulated. I don’t think it’s possible for anyone to dream ‘just psi’. We surely do not dream as a simple response to our preferences, dreaming is a much more vital and rich experience.” |
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SAO’s last message (March 11, 2008): “[Dreaming as a continuum] seems almost obvious to me--about the only time it doesn't in fact, is that moment after awakening, when you're grasping at what just happened ... ‘like stars extinguished by the chatter of dawn.’” |
Farewell SAO
Ed Kellogg writes of SAO
"I only knew Sao through his online presence. When I came up with the idea of having an Art Gallery as an essential part of the first PDC, I'd really wanted to oversee it myself. However, given everything else I had to do setting up the first PDC, I decided to ask Sao to oversee the project. What little I'd seen of his art had impressed me, and I knew of his deep interest in psi dreaming. At the time asking him felt a bit risky, as I did not know if I could rely on him to set the gallery up as I wanted it set up, or to follow through on the job. After all, at the time I didn't even know Sao's given name of Shawn Allen O'Neal! In retrospect choosing him for the job proved one of my more brilliant ideas, as he not only set it up the way I'd hoped, but brought the gallery to the next level through his own sense of design, and by contributing quite a bit of his own art. Incredible dream art, matched to some pretty wonderful dreams - art that in my view through its sheer presence even made the first "open to everyone" PsiberDreamer's Art Gallery a cut above IASD's "peer reviewed" annual conference show.
Unfortunately, that pretty much sums up all I know about Sao - I still don't know what he looked like, what he liked to eat, what sort of clothes he liked to wear, his favorite books, what sort of education he had, his hobbies, favorite sports, whether he had children - or even a pet, etc. Which seems too bad. If I had known him at all well, I would have proposed setting up a "Psychopompic Dreaming Contest" this year, as I feel confidant that he would have enjoyed participating in one last PDC - if this time from the other side! But to set it up properly as a contest, requires someone who not only can serve as an experienced dream judge, but who also knows enough about the details of Sao's life that they could distinguish dreams of him from dreams with him.
Ah well, I expect that Sao will show up anyhow in the dreams of this years PDC participants anyway, but it seems likely, even a bit sad, that few will recognize him when he does."
Please leave a comment or thought or a dream for/with/about SAO.
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