Adventures through the Dream Gates: Meeting Great Turtle

 

This is a story about what you may gain if you stay with a dream after waking and let a fuller story unfold. I rediscovered it while engaged in a favorite pastime: opening an old journal at random and seeing what an experience I recorded years or decades ago may say to me now. Sometimes old mysteries remain unsolved. I often notice recurring themes and situations that help me to become more aware of my attitudes and behavior, providing a necessary witness perspective on my life roads.        
      Sometimes a dream I did not understand at the time has meaning and application for me today because subsequent events have provided a context. I notice again and again that I dreamed events long before they played out – hard evidence, of the only form relevant here, of long-range precognition.  I discover that I missed warnings or advisories that could have smoothed my path and try to learn from my lapses how to get better at discerning and acting on oneiric clues to the possible future.
      Sometimes a dream I recorded looks like a dramatic production, maybe an instalment of a streaming tv series, staged by a personal film crew behind the curtain of the world. Very often - and this is most interesting for me - my dream reports seem to contain memories of events in another reality: a real life world that is running on a different time continuum or in an alternate universe near or far from the ordinary one.
     The report that follows appears to belong to the latter category.The action is played out in another reality, starting with an alternate version of a country where I used to live. When I stay with the dream, something irrupts from the mythic depth, a great power of Earth and of deeper knowing acknowledged by the First Peoples of the land where I now live. The gift of connection with Great Turtle is a blessing in the ordinary world today, as it was eight years ago. 

January 3, 2017

Dream and lucid dream reentry

I save a turtle, Great Turtle saves me

My youngest daughter is driving. We are in London. I tell her to head for Green Park so I can walk the dog there. I wave in the general direction. However, she drives us into a very narrow, twisting street in an area I don’t recognize. It’s very dangerous. Cars and trucks keep rushing at us from around blind corners, in the middle of the road, which has narrowed so only one vehicle can pass at a time. We come to a stop at what is virtually a hairpin bend, and just avoid a collision with a car that shoots out from behind it. My daughter is quite upset. I persuade her to stay in the car while I walk the dog.
    The dog and I are now in a shopping area. Time has changed. It seems that shops in a colonnade at my left hand are just opening. We walk behind two short squat women. One turns into a shop; she may be going to open it. They bid each other goodbye and the second lady walks on with a dog with silky hair that hangs to the ground.
    My dog and I pass them. Unusually, he takes no interest in the long-haired dog. He is after something up ahead. I glimpse it under a lamppost. It looks like a pigeon that has gotten hold of a paper plate. My dog rushes at it, with me hurrying behind. It jumps up onto my left shoulder. I am surprised to see that it is a little turtle. The “paper plate” is its shell.
     I experiment with removing the turtle. It clings to me with determination. Since I have not figured out what to do with it – beyond keeping it away from my dog – this is okay.

My body is stirring in the bed. Grey light is spilling through the bedroom curtains. I am fully lucid. I am in London and in bed in upstate New York. I could leave the dream now, but I want to stay in it. I want to take care of the little turtle that is still clutching my shoulder. My sensations in my dream body are more acute than those of the dormant bdy in bed. 
    I walk with a protective hand over the turtle while I keep my dog on a short leash with my other hand. I look for a safe place to set down the turtle. There is a large garden on the next corner. Behind an ornamental iron fence, I see steps leading down to a pond. There is a sculpture garden and there are statues of animals – including a turtle – there. This seems like a good place to release my little refugee.
    I open the gate and walk down the steps. I tie the dog up while I set down the turtle near the pond. It seems fine now.
    But there is a tremendous stir in the waters. They fountain upwards. With a great roar an immense being rises from the water. Its great head looms over me. I look up at the leathery skin, the lures of the tongue, the ancient, heavy-lidded eyes. I know in this moment I am looking at Great Turtle, A’nonwara, the Teacher of the Deep. In its gaze, I remember the story of the Real People: how the Light Twin descended to the deep realm of Great Turtle, to learn how to wage the eternal battle with the Dark Twin.   
    Great Turtle wants me to descend to his realm. I let myself drop. I am on my back in the water, falling, falling. I have no problem breathing. I go through utter dark to a place of light. There is a world of light own here, in the depths of water. Here Turtle adjusts its form and becomes humanoid (nothing like the Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles, however). Knowledge streams into me, of how life came from another world to the world that was danced into being on Turtle's back.
    Tosa sasa nikon'hren. "Do not let your mind fall." Do not forget the higher world, Earhth-in-the -Sky, that contains the origin and purpose of life on Earth. When humans let their minds fall, they bring down the Dark Times. 

I returned from this adventure feeling blessed.

I ran a reality check on the contents of my dream. I know Green Park and often walked there when I lived in London. I am certain I will never walk my little dog there. I have been in London with my daughter and we could make a future trip but it is most unlikely she would be driving. I don't think the dream anticipates a literal future situation, but rather an alternate reality which becoems the stage for a deeper - indeed a mythic - drama. 
    I live on what Native Americans call Turtle Island. I have great respect for the snapping turtle (the kind in the dream) and its cousin the sea turtle. They can’t retreat into their shells. Their underbellies are not armored apart from a tiny shield piece called a plastron. I have studied the cosmology of the Iroquois (the Onkwehonwe, or “Real People”) in which Great Turtle not only offers its back as a home for Sky Woman but becomes a form of the Great Teacher of the Deep. I have swum with sea turtles. 

I immediately made a drawing of Great Turtle. His fierce appearance reflects my original nervousness as this huge creature exploded from the water. His intentions, however, were wholly benign.

When I went back through my journal, tracking all my turlte sightings in both worlds over several decades, I rediscovered a poem I wrote to honor Great Turtle in 2012, five years before our unexpected encounter in Green Park:

A'nonwara (Turtle Dreaming) 

I am the turtle that does not hide.
I wear the armor of a knight, not a skulker.
My vulnerable belly says, Get me if you can;
I stick my neck out.

You call me slow, but on water
I am faster than you, and fast on land.
Deep down, I am the teacher you need
to show you how to fight the Dark One.

I am the broad back you live on.
Ignore me for too long,
go on harming my other children
and I will shake you off my back.

Journal drawing: "Great Turtle Rises" by Robert Moss

The Romance of Dreaming

 

On Valentine Day, romance your dreams. The romance of dreaming is played out beyond your present life and your present world. Through dreaming, as the Irish poet-painter AE (George Russell) promised, "Your own will find you". Someone you loved and lost five thousand years ago may call you to remember that romance, and look for its fulfillment in new bodies that have ancient eyes.

    Yes, I am a romantic about these things. But I am also a practical romantic. I know that we can dream the way to manifest the kind of love that transcends time, and also that dreaming will show us how to do what we love and let the world support us. However, this requires us to develop the practice of active dreaming, which involves not only growing our dream recall and keeping our journals, but learning to clarify the content of dreams and above all taking action to bring energy and guidance from the dream worlds into the physical world.
    One of my favorite teaching stories about this comes from India. It is sometimes called "The Sketcher of Pictures". It goes like this:

 

The princess (and all women may be princesses, or queens) is dreaming. She dreams of the perfect lover, who satisfies her in every way. The dream streams like silk. It smells like jasmine and honeysuckle.
   She opens her eyes and howls with pain and loss, because although her surroundings are opulent she knows no one like the man of her dreams.
   Her father sees that she is very sad and asks what is wrong. When she tells him it has something to do with a dream, the king summons his wise men to listen to the dream and tell her what it means. They gather in a council chamber, ready to give their interpretations.
    As the princess recounts her dream, a wild man rushes into the room, his hair a white storm about his shoulders. He is a rishi who lives in the woods and cares nothing for the rules of the court. He grabs a piece of paper, makes a quick sketch, and hands it to the girl.
    When she looks at the picture, the princess is stunned. The rishi has captured the very essence of her dream lover.
     Abandoning the conclave of dream interpreters, she runs after the wold man from the woods. When she catches up to him, she begs him to tell her the identity or her dream lover. "Who is he? Where can I find him?" Clearly the rishi knows the man of her dreams.
     Good teachers don't give you everything all at once. The rishi says only, "The map is in your dream." Then he takes off into the woods.
     The princess thinks about it. What does it mean, that a dream contains a map? When she thinks about it some more, she realizes that she was not with her lover among the clouds. She was in a bed in a room in a house in a city in a certain landscape. Though she recognizes none of these places, she has vivid memories of them and feels she would know them again.
     So she sets out on the quest. In an Indian village, they may take hours to tell this part. There will be tigers, of course, and bandits, and deserts and snakes and all manner of perils. There will probably be elephants.
     But let's catch up with the princess at the moment when her quest is almost over, because there on the horizon, after long travels and many ordeals, she sees the city from her dreams. And now she is rushing through those streets the house from her dream, and up the stairs to the bedroom from her dream, where she finds her lover rising from his dream of her.

 

It sounds like a fairy story, but there are no fairies in it, or any of the gods, demons and others from the rich forests of Hindu mythology. There are only humans, and what humans can do when they learn to make maps from their dreams and have the will and stamina to follow their maps.
    Through the perfume of romance, we receive a lesson in practical romanticism. Do the work in dreamwork. Recognize that dreams require action. Learn - why has it taken you so long? - that a dream is a place. Because you have been there, you can go there again. This can bring you, in this physical world, to place of your dream lover. More often, it will bring you to places in a more spacious universe where you can rejoin the beloved company of your soul, those who love you across time and space, even when you make each other crazy.
   Give a hug to someone you love on Valentine Day. Bring flowers or chocolates if you must. But don't let the day pass without sharing dreams.

Illustration: "The Sketcher of Pictures" by Robert Moss

 

Real and Really Real

 

There is a yawning gap in understanding between mainstream Western psychology and neuroscience and the oldest and continuing indigenous understanding of what goes on in dreams. It is understood in every indigenous tradition I have heard about - and no doubt by all our ancestors if we go back far enough - that the dream world is a real world. Compare the view of the yogis, and you look in a mirror: for those who practice the yoga of illusory forms, waking life and dream life are equally illusory; for dreaming cultures, they are both real. 

Some dreaming cultures say more. The Seneca Iroquois say that the dream world is the real world. An Aboriginal people of the Western Desert say that the dream world is “really real”.

If you know that the dream world is a real-life world, as opposed to a rummage sale in the basement of the personal subconscious or a chemical wash in the brain, then you know that what happens in dream time does not stay in dream time. There are consequences. You bear responsibility for what you do and do not do. You are in a field of interaction with other folks, some alive in both worlds, some dead in one. You encounter beings other- than-human. 

You may walk with gods of the upper air, you may fly as a swan, you may prune rose bushes in the garden of the home you will inhabit in your next life. You may eat a peach in an orchard of tigers, you may find the girl with apple blossom in her hair,  you may study with a master who died on Earth millennia ago or has yet to be seen down there.

Illustration: Fig Tree on Magic Island. RM with NightCafe

Wyrd and weirder

 

Read the Eddas (literally the “great-grandmothers”) and the Icelandic sagas with care, and you will find not only Viking battle stories, but some profound insights into the human condition and the interconnectedness of things.

The key word here is Wyrd, from which “weird” derives. Wyrd is often translated as “fate” or “destiny” but it is related to weohrtan, which means “to become”. Wyrd is best understood as a web of connection, joining everything that happens in this world to movements in other worlds. 

Events that may appear to be separate in time or space are connected by threads that are fine, supple and strong. Any movement in any part of the web may be felt anywhere else. Omens point to patterns, they are not just about something that is going to happen in the future. If you know the ways of Wyrd, you use them to read the patterns of connection. If you are a master of these things, you may be able to pull on the threads to change the patterns.

Wyrd is beyond the gods. The web precedes gods and men and lives after them. We call it a pattern, but like the Tao, as it plays through the Book of Changes, it is in constant motion. A lively guide to these matters is Brian Bates’ “documentary novel” The Way of Wyrd, where an Anglo-Saxon sorcerer instructs that “Wyrd itself is constant change, yet because it is created at every moment it is unchanging, like the still center of a whirlpool. All we can see are the ripples dancing on top of the water.” [1] Yet by studying the ripples you can detect what is moving at the bottom of the water, or far away across its expanse. 

Because we are part of Wyrd, we can never see the whole. So we look for ways to see enough to help us navigate. Carving and casting runes is a way. So are dreams, and those special moments when you awaken to the workings of the deeper pattern. “Man is touched by wyrd when he becomes involved in matters whose nature and origins extend beyond existence on earth,” Germanic scholar Paul Bauschatz explains. “There are times…when apparently ordinary activities acquire special significance, and it seems likely that at these times daily life is touched and colored with elements beyond our limited perceptions.” [2] There is room to re-weave the threads of Wyrd. 

Jenny Blain, who has participated in the revival of ancient Norse seiðr, or shamanic rituals, observes that “this concept of Wyrd is one that is being developed within the community. Though often translated as 'fate' and sometimes equated to 'karma', it has a more dynamic sense. People are active agents in the creation of their own personal wyrd, or ørlög. Their deeds and vows, strands of ørlög, become part of the fabric of Wyrd.” Those who work the seiðr  rituals feel they are “'reading' Wyrd, seeing along the threads of the fabric to possible outcomes. Others within the community consider that seiðr in the past involved active interception of the fabric, 'tugging' at the threads,"[3] 

In English, the word “weird” derives from Wyrd. It declined from common usage in England until Shakespeare revived it, with a sinister twist, with the Weird Sisters in Macbeth. It retained some of its original meaning a little longer in Scotland, where if you called someone “weirdless” you were saying that he was unlucky. 

In more recent times, to call something “weird” is to say that it is strange, uncanny, hard to explain and maybe spooky. A “weirdo” is someone who is very strange. Yet thanks to a campaign that started in Austin, Texas, “weird” has been making a comeback. Austin is the first North American city to sprout a poster campaign to keep the city weird. Keep Austin Weird. Other cities followed suit.

One of my favorite books on Northern European traditions is The Well of Remembrance by Ralph Metzner, who embarked on a quest to reclaim the mythic wisdom of his ancestors from the Nazi curse. He was drawn to Odin, not as a war god but as the poet-shaman wandering between the worlds, facilitating direct and personal revelation. In the course of his quest, he writes, “Often I felt as though I was seized, or inspired. I would think of Odin and get insights or answers to my questions, including questions about the meanings of certain myths. Or I would suddenly find pertinent myths that I had not known before. Strange though it may sound, I would have to say that much of what I am relating in this book has been directly given to me by Odin.” [4]    

I have had similar experiences since Tolkien told me in a dream, many years ago, “You must study Scandinavian mythology.” I was at first reluctant to follow that advice, partly because of the long shadow of the Nazi attempt to hijack the gods and symbols of the North.  As I began to walk this ancestral path (I have Scandinavian blood on both sides of my family) in my reading and travel and in my dreams, I was rewarded by special moments of encounter and discovery that left me in no doubt that forces beyond the veil of the world were in play. During a trip to Europe, I had a personal vision of Yggdrasil, the World Tree, from which I wrote a poem.

Since then I have had spontaneous encounters, usually in the fertile space between sleep and awake, with Odin and Freiyja, with Idunn and Loki, and with a powerful völva, or seeress, of the old ways.

The ancestors are calling, calling. And they can use the worldwide web as well as the web of the worlds. It is amusing to note that “wired” is an anagram for “weird”. A woman named Kim shared the following story. “Sprit likes the wires. The Web, in particular. The deities who work fate, don’t they spin and snip threads? My Mom's picture popped up on a dating app my ex-husband is on. He sent a screen shot. I'd just asked my Mom that morning for a sign that she was there. He had been on that app over a year, and he showed me how faces appeared as you scrolled through and how you could indicate interest or not. My Mom was never on a dating site, and certainly wouldn't be suitable to his selected age range. I think that via the Web, we can have communication with the Other Side.”

 

References

 1. Brian Bates The Way of Wyrd: Tales of an Anglo-Saxon Sorcerer (London: Century, 1987) 75

2. Paul C. Bauschatz, The Well and the Tree: World and Time in Early Germanic Culture (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982), 28

3.   3. Jenny Blain, Nine Worlds of Seid-Magic: Ecstasy and Neo-Shamanism in Northern European Paganism (London: Routledge, 2002), 15

      4. Ralph Metzner, The Well of Remembrance: Rediscovering the Earth Wisdom Myths of Northern Europe (Boston: Shambhala, 1994) 10

 

Text adapted from Sidewalk Oracles: Playing withSigns, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Oh Baby! Don't You Love to Fly in Your Dreams?

Nothing beats the sensation of flying on your own in dreams. Frequent fliers have their preferred styles. Some fly with their arms out in front of them, Superman style. Some swim through the air, some pedal. Some sprout wings, or borrow the wings of a bird, or become a bird. Some perform aerial acrobatics. Some are content to drift and gaze and ride a thermal.

It's fun to whizz around the multiverse as a point of light or a disembodied thought form, but I relish the carnal, corporeal quality of many of my flying dreams. In the big OBABE (out-of-the-body-into-another-body) experience [*] that brought me to an ancient indigenous arendiwanen ("woman of power") I knew the joy of catching the right wind and the mild discomfort of brushing the dried-up needles of an old blue spruce as I flew on the wings of a red-tailed hawk tailored to my size.

If I am not getting around in the air on my own, the next best thing is to catch a ride in a seaplane. This sets the mood for Indiana Jones type adventures, though I was flying in seaplanes in my dreams long before those movies were dreamed up. Sometimes I have a flight companion: a wise professor who used to look old but now appears to be younger than me. He is excellent company and isn't scared to go where medieval cartographers cautioned. "Here Be Dragons".

This matter of dream flight raises so many interesting questions. Try any of these as conversation starters. Do you fly in your dreams? Do you enjoy it? What is your preferred style? What is your takeoff procedure? Are you aware you are traveling outside your physical body? What kind of a body are you in now?

[*] Pronounced "Oh Baby". Yes, I made this up.

Trainer Bikes for Dream Fliers

There are flight schools for oneironauts. You can sign up for some that I lead on this side of consensus reality, but of course you won't stay there for long. You must dream your way to a real school of this kind. I train dream pilots and lead flight missions, on the far side of consensus reality, several nights a week, and what happens in the dream world sometimes stays there.
     I enjoy comparing what goes on in other flight schools. Every shamanic lineage and Mystery order has created one. Some have been operating for many centuries.

During one of my dream rambles, I discovered a flight school with period French ambience and interesting training equipment. Here is my journal report.

I am walking on the beach. The colors are the wonderfully vivid hues of poster paints. The sea is French blue, with fluffy little whitecaps. The sand is oriole-yellow. There is a distinctly French Impressionist quality to the whole scene, so much so that I feel that if I turn around quickly, I might catch a glimpse of the artist who has just painted it - and maybe the scene will end at the edge of his canvas. Yet the scene is entirely alive.
    I walk with a male companion, studying the scene. He is wearing a frock coat and a top hat, has a neatly trimmed black beard, and is swinging a walking stick. I notice that everyone on the beach, like my companion, is dressed in the clothes of another era. The women wear full bathing costumes, and the men wear sleeveless tops with their bathing trunks. There is something more remarkable. Nearly everyone has a cycle. More sedate couples ride bicycles - including at least one tandem bike, built of two - along the esplanade. Others are riding on the sand, or through the shallows of the water. More daring cyclists are riding in mid-air, ten feet off the ground.
    While many of the bicycles are intact, some are just the vestiges. One lady sits on a padded seat, gripping handlebars and pedaling away, but below her the bike has vanished - no frame and no wheels, A beaming boy is riding high into the air, riding a bike that is invisible except for the handlebars. A dashing young man with hair like a raven's wing and an artist's silk scarf billowing from his neck is showing off, doing aerial acrobatics, on a bike that has completely vanished, while he has his fists clenched as if gripping the handlebars and his legs are cycling away.
      My companion explains to me that this is a school for dream fliers. "All the bicycles you see are training bikes. As dreamers become conscious that they are dreaming and grow their understanding of what is possible here, the machines become less and less necessary. The bicycles fade and finally disappear." I follow his upward glance and see some high-flyers among cotton-wool clouds who move through the air like swimmers, or rocket-men. [September 22, 2008]

When I turned up this report many years later, I decided to return to the scene of the flight school with trainer bikes and see what is going on now. I have developed a method for revisiting a dream whose simple name is dream reentry. You can do this right after you awaken from a dream, which may be the best time, because the scene is fresh and so are your feelings around it. You can also do it years or decades later if the dream still has real energy for you. I lay on my back, pulled the memory of the school on the beach up on my mental screen, and willed myself back inside. My first strong impressions were kinesthetic. I foud myself gripping the handles of a bike. I did not need the handlebar to fly. However, I thought it would be fun to experience what others did with a prop like this. As I tightened my grip, I was off - whizzing far from the scene of the flight instructor and his cadets on the beach. I was speeding ten or twenty feet above golden fields of grain, wind in my hair. I was delighted to see I now had a companion, a black Shepherd-Labrador mutt pacing me on the farm road below, reveling in his run. I abandoned any thoughts of a further agenda, giving myself to the sheer pleasure of flight in the company of a dear friend. [December 29, 2021]

I wonder whether the Marquis of Dreams, Léon d'Hervey de Saint-Denys, found the flight school on the beach. It feels like they belong to the same period and the same culture. The marquis was the first to use the term "lucid dream" (rêve lucide) in his book Les rêves et les moyens de les diriger: observations pratiques, first published anonymously in 1867. His "practical obseravtions" did not include guidance on dream flight or astral travel. Howver,his book includes a memorable page from his journal in which he dreams that he leaves his body as if dead. He finds himself with a “savage" tribe, engaged in their battles.  He decides to go the Moon, and is there quick as thought. He describes a cratered landscape that is quite real to him. He decides to go back to earth. As he descends into his chamber, he sees his body lying in the bed before he gets back inside it.

The marquis was a sinophile and in his essays on Chinese, literature and his selection of Chinese poetry and fiction for translation, his imagination must surely have been fired up by the frequent description of dreams as excursions by the aerial hun soul and "roaming with immortals". In Poésies de l'époque des Thang he writes that "sometimes it is the spirit of a sleeping man who takes advantage of the body's sleep to travel alone through space, crossing distances with the speed of thought."

Journal drawings by Robert Moss

Oracles Full of Omphê

 

There's oomph and then there's omphê. In ancient Greek, omphê [ὀμφή] is the divine voice. It may speak through an inspired priestess, or through a special tree, or the cry of birds, or a lightning storm. Before you can hear it, you may feel your world shaking.

Philostratus wrote of Dodona, the place of the great oak oracle of Zeus and Dione, "this place is full of omphê."  It is un univers sonore, Stella Georgoudi takes up the chorus. [1]

The divine voice is different from the human voice though it may use human vocal chords. Homer's gods might seem to feel and behave like humans, especially in their domestic dramas, but they have powers that mortals cannot understand: amazing speed and strength; an endless capacity to shapeshift or disguise themselves; invisibility. Then there is the voice thing. The voice of a god can be thunder or leaping fire or the roar of ocean or a graveyard hiss that stills the breath. "Whereas gods have the power to imitate the voices of mortals, no mortal without divine assistance can speak with the voice of a god: a mortal voice (Homer uses the term audê) is different from omphê or ossa, a divine voice. Gods not only have different and remarkable powers of voice production, they also have (or once had) their own language." [2]

Omphê is the voice of the Pythia when she speaks for Apollo. In the Argonautica it is also the voice of a talkative crow who speaks to the seer Mopsos [Apollonius of Rhodes III 927-939]. Even at Delphi, famous for prophecies delievred in poetic speech, omphê could be heard in the voices of birds, especially crows and herons and wrens. [Plutarch, Pythia].

In the Odyssey,the hero visits Dodona to ask the oak whether he should go home or remain in hiding. Zeus speaks to him from the oak. It is not specified whether the divine voice was heard through the rustling of leaves or the creaking of bark or the birds among the branches. One way or another, the will of Zeus was audible from the oak.

In Ovid, an oak at Aegina sprung from an acorn from Dodona speaks when it starts to tremble and its branches shake without wind. [Metamorphoses VII 629-630]

Athena, the daughter of Zeus who sprang fully-armed from his head, carved an oak bough from Dodona into the prow of the Argo, endowing Jason’s ship with prophetic power in the perilous voyage for the Golden Fleece.

Sophocles calls the oracle oak poluglossos: polyglot, many-tongued, many-voiced. To hear it can be like hearing a crowd. The voices may rise and swirl in any language, and of course in the language of the birds. Wasn't the oracle founded by three black doves who flew here from Egypt?

The Hesiodic Catalogues speak of three doves who lived in the oak tree. They may correspond to three female shaman-seers known as the Black Doves. The far-seers at Dodona prophesied in a shamanic ecstasy, and “afterwards they do not know anything about what they have said.” [3] Herodotus called them the Black Doves, Peleia Mêlaina. [Herodotus II.55]

The oracle at Dodona was older than the Olympians, always dedicated to the Goddess as well as the God. In its heyday, it was full of noises at the trembling edge of omphê. There were the many voices of the variable winds in the leaves, the rush or babble of nearby streams, the chanting of barefoot priests sworn to live close to Earth Mother, the prophetic speech of the black doves advising clients. In later times there was also the  clash and clang of bronze cauldrons suspended from the trees. They sounded like gongs when the winds pushed them together. 

References

1. Stella Georgoudi, “Des sons, des signes et des paroles : la divination à l’oeuvre dans l’oracle de Dodone”in Stella Georgoudi et al (eds) La raison des signes. (Leiden: Brill, 2012). P.71

2. Elizabeth Minchin, "The words of gods: Divine discourse in Homer's Iliad" in Sacred Words: Orality, Literacy and Religion (Leiden: Brill, 2011)  pp.17-35.

3. Walter Burkert, Greek Religion. trans. John Raffan. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1985) p.114

Photo: Remains of the oracle of Zeus and Dione at Dodona in Epirus

 

If you can't remember your dreams

 "I can't remember my dreams."

1. Ask your cat to share a dream.

2. Be kind to wisps. You may have a tiny something from a dream if you don't close the door right away.

3. Write in your journal every day, whether or not you have a dream to report.

4. Wake up to the fact that you don't need to go to sleep in order to dream. The world around you will speak to you in the manner of dreams- through signs, symbols and synchronicity - if you pay attention.

5. Try to assure the beautiful bright dreamer in you that you are safe and you are fun. She may have been in hiding for a long time.

6. Find friends with whom you can share dreams and personal stories in a fast, fun way that leads to action to embody creative and healing energy from another world in ordinary life. Make dreamwork socially rewarding, and you have a strong incentive to bring a new story to the table every day.

7. .Learn the Lightning Dreamwork process. Accept no substitutes!