Overview

Integrated Book, Web Portal, Television Series

Dancing with the Trickster — Toward a New Understanding of Consciousness is a multi-platform media production that includes a book, an interactive community website, and a documentary television series. The focus in on stories of “ordinary people who’ve had extraordinary experiences” and the perspectives of leading experts and researchers seeking to understand the deeper reality that these phenomena imply. Overall, Dancing with the Trickster is a shared journey where the producers, experts, subjects and audience are participating in a collective process of discovery.

Going Deep With Extraordinary Experiences

Variously called “anomalous,” “paranormal,” or “transpersonal,” such experiences include hearing voices, hallucinations, near-death or out-of-body experiences, altered states, precognition, and telepathy. They can be enlightening and joyful, but are often disturbing, or even frightening. But in any case, if approached with an open mind and with expert guidance, such events can have positive, life-transforming potential for the experiencers.

As these stories are shared and explored through the book, community website and television series, Dancing with the Trickster will canvas the underlying theories informing the various sides of the debate about what are “normal” experiences and what are “anomalous”, or even “pathological.” The history of thinking about anomalous experiences will be conveyed from a variety of cultural perspectives: What might be considered pathological in one culture may not be in another. What is exceptional for one person might be commonplace for someone else. And as many have observed of human nature: it can be a very fine line between insanity and genius.

Finally, we’ll distill down what we all can learn from this highly subjective realm of the extraordinary about ourselves, the nature of consciousness, and reality itself.