Blowing the light bulb on dreams

When I opened my email this morning, I found that a friend had sent me a link to a recent article on dreams in the New York Times. I sighed when I saw her comment that yet again, a major media organ has chosen to ignore the rich everyday experience of dreamers in favor of the kind of reductionist science that holds dreams to be "meaningless". I was reluctant to click on the link. At the precise moment I did so, the lightbulb in the lamp over my desk blew.

Synchronicity strikes again. When I replaced the bulb and read the article, I saw that the Times had indeed chosen to turn out the light on our understanding of dreams. Following a paper by Harvard sleep researcher J. Allan Hobson, the piece promotes the theory that the main function of REM-state sleep, associated with visual dreaming, is physiological. "The brain is warming its circuits, anticipating the sights and sounds and emotions of waking." Forget about any other functions of dreaming, and don't fret if you forget your dreams. All that's going on in dreams is that your brain is getting a nightly tuneup. Beyond this, dreams are "meaningless."

The poverty of this kind of thinking is risible. To try to understand dreaming solely by monitoring the behavior of the sleeping brain is like trying to understand how a TV series is made by poking around in the innards of the television set, ignoring the scriptwriters, the production crew, the actors and the imagination that conceive and make the show, and the technology involved in getting the signal to your home.

Contrary to the New York Times it isn't only a few therapists, New Agers and "ancient mystics" who think dreams matter. The common understanding of most human cultures, across most of our odyssey on this planet, is that dreaming is part of our survival mechanism and a primary source of meaning and course correction in our lives. Dreaming, we scout ahead of ourselves and visit the possible future, rehearsing for challenges and opportunities that lie ahead on our life roads. I speak from first-hand experience when I say that catching dream clues to the future, reading them correctly and taking appropriate action can literally save your life. Most human cultures - and many good physicians - have also understood that dreaming is medicine: our dreams diagnose possible problems in the body, and when we get sick, our dreams are a fecund source of imagery for self-healing and recovery. Most important, our dreams give us a direct line to sources of wisdom far deeper than the daily trivial mind . Without meaning in our lives, we are less than human, and dreaming awakens us to our bigger stories and helps to restore our inner compass.

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In my book The Secret History of Dreaming I report - with extensive documentation - many cases of how dreams have guided great lives and shaped great events in fields ranging from quantum physics to rock music. But the Times has a tin ear for humanity's dream song. It seems their writer did not even hear Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, when he told a crowd at his alma mater, the University of Michigan, last spring that a dream inspired Google and offered this sage advice to his audience: "If you have a big dream, grab it." Now, that's a comment on dreams worth hearing - and acting on.

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The article referred to above is "A Dream Interpretation: Tuneups for the Brain", by Benedict Carey, published in the New York Times on November 9, 2009.

Undefinitis and its remedies

It's hard to match a three-headed smoking dragon for drama, but our mountain dreamers came close last weekend with the enactment of a dream of a reality TV show volunteered by Donna S, one of our Connecticut dreamers. On Donna's dream screen, the lively host of the show is helping contestants to check whether what they think they want out of life is what they really want. With lacerating clarity, the show holds up a magic mirror in which people can see their desires and jealousies for what they are. The first contestant longs for the hair, the legs and the shoes of a cool, sexy blonde. The second contestant wants the fame of a star athlete beloved of the media. The third guest on the show aches for something undefined.

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Our dreamer chose Sara to play the host of the show, and Sara - a blonde, larger-than-life Italian American who has been bruised on her life road and come back laughing and full of soul - proved herself to be a natural TV diva. I slithered into into the role of "Dr Bob", a mix between Sara's shill and her ever-available resident talk therapist. We howled as the first contestant, after an elaborate makeover, struggled with whether or not to stay in her new blonde persona. Canned applause boomed when the second contestant decided the price of fame was something she wasn't willing to pay, as a swimmer in the group mimicked the actions of swimming breaststroke from New London to Bermuda.

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Then we came to the Undefined. The player cast as the woman of undefined wants entered her role so completely that our infallible TV host forgot she was there and gave her place to someone who wasn't in the script. As Dr Bob, the resident guru, I was obliged to intervene. I pronounced that the woman of undefined identity and longing was a poster girl for a malady that has reached epidemic proportions in our culture. I named this foggy beast. "The medical name for the malady is undefinitis. It is a very serious complaint, because the human is an animal that must define itself or be defined by others. Letting others define who you are and what you can do puts a fatal crimp in life."

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The issue raised in our dream theatre was one for all of us to address. After further games and group journeys, in the cause of curing undefinitis, I asked everyone in our circle to write a clear, simple answer to the following question: How will I live my life? Here's a sampling of the responses:

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- I will live my life with the wonderment of a child

- I will live as a knight who chooses the hard way, for honor and duty

- I will live in the Now

- I will live my deepest passions

- I will live authentically

- I will live on the Earth in bare feet

- I will live to serve with a joyful heart

- I will live as if every day is the start of a new life

- I will live as if today is a good day to die

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My own contribution: "I will live as a chooser, who chose the conditions of this life and chooses to remember the life contract he entered before he came here."

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We need to watch for the symptoms of undefinitis, in ourselves and others. We need to be able to state who we are and what we think we are doing (though this is always going to evolve). We want to play with the idea that - however confining or harsh our circumstances may appear to be - we always have choice. Every day, we choose the story we are going to live, even when we forget we are doing this.

A Russian dragon on Magic Mountain

I spent the weekend up on a mountain in the Adirondacks leading one of my favorite retreats. Our shamanic gatherings on Gore Mountain - held twice yearly - are reserved for active dreamers who have worked with me in depth and are committed to becoming dream ambassadors, soul healers, speakers for the Earth and full citizens of the multiverse. This is where we push the envelope and often test-fly new techniques in a wonderful natural setting where the Deer energy is strong and dragons are sometimes seen.

The heart of this mountain is red garnet, and so it isn't hard for us to raise dragon fire in our circles. This time we found we were entertaining a dragon who had traveled far to appear on our mountain. He came in a dream of Louisa, a brilliant Russian-American scientist who was born in St. Petersburg. By the fire late on Saturday night, she told some of us a dream in which she had a close-up encounter with Zmey Gorynynch. "Zmey" is Russian for "dragon", and "Gorynych" means "Son of the Mountain". Zmey Gorynych is an enduring figure in Russian folklore who survived all Soviet attempts to extirpate "reactionary" beliefs and superstitions. He lives deep in the realms of the nechist, dark and unclean and tricksterish forces you must approach with great care if you are foolish or brave enough to approach them at all. He has three heads, and is a great drinker and smoker.

As the fire crackled and sputtered, we listened to Louisa's dream adventure. "I am in a small boat, paddling upstream on a river through a magic forest. I am in quest of something. The way is hard, and the shadows of the woods are scary, but I am determined to find what I am seeking. I come to a waterfall and somehow find the strength to row my boat up the falls. On the mountain above, I come to the burrow of Zmey Gorynych.

"Two of the dragon's head are sleeping. The third is smoking. Zmey Gorynych is a terrible chain smoker. He blows smoke in my face and asks what I want. I start asking him questions about things I want to know. He interrupts me with a great puff of smoke and hisses, 'You bother me with this nonsense? You should ask something that matters - like, What is the purpose of my life?'

"I know that this isn't really a question I should put to a three-headed dragon whose breath stinks. But I ask him anyway. 'What is the purpose of my life?' He responds by spitting on me. As his spittle lands on my forearms, the skin crackles and turns into scales.

"I want to get out of here now, but the darkness is falling. Zmey Gorynych takes me under his wing. His heads take turns sleeping, watching and smoking, so there is absolutely no chance of slipping away. I spend the night in the armpit of the dragon."

She woke laughing. The dream adventure was such a grand romp that I suggested we might try to bring the whole group inside it. Louisa willingly agreed to let her dream be used as the script for dream theatre, the pinnacle of improv, and often wildly funny, energizing and healing. The next morning, she cast some of the men in our circle to play the dragon, and a hyper-fit woman who abhors smoking to play the cigarette they are swapping between the heads. Other actors portrayed the contrary current on the river, the pressure of the falls, the boat and the strange walking trees in the magic forest. In our rehearsal, Louisa watched another dream actor play herself. When she stepped into her own role, the performance had deepened to the point where it took little imagination to believe that Zmey Gorynych was in the space, speaking and puffing and snoring and belching through the orifices of three otherwise most civilized men - an architect, a physician and a civil servant - who heaved and thrashed at one end of a long sofa, which a humorous financial planner from Connecticut, playing the body of the beast, lolled and drooped over the other.

Invited to improvise and take the dialogue with the dragon further, Louisa astounded all of us by asking what is certainly the last question I would want to put to a dragon of this type: "What do you eat?" This brought the house down. Aching with laughter, we skipped what is often the final phase of dream theatre: the interview with the players, when the dreamer gets to hear from everyone in the cast, speaking from the role they played. Some things are too good to discuss, let alone analyze. Belly-laughs are healing, and what we never want to forget in working with dreams is that the most important thing is to seek every opportunity to bring vital energy from the dreamspace into embodied life. Спасибо большое ( Spasibo bolshoe). Thanks a lot, Zmey Gorynych!

Churchill, Einstein and the Making of Immortals

Over the weekend I journeyed through the doorway of a recent dream, intent on exploring a most interesting locale, an upscale pub-restaurant called The Huntsman's Arms. I confirmed my impression that the pub is a waystation on the Other Side, and had several memorable encounters with deceased family members and friends and with the enigmatic proprietor, the Huntsman himself. All good Halloween/Samhain fun. In my conscious dream journey, I noticed Winston Churchill looking in on a gathering in a saloon bar. The former statesman was floating in midair, like a human zeppelin, puffing on his eternal cigar. Over many years, Churchill has been a recurring figure in my imaginal life.

The latest sighting prompts me to ask: just who are the great figures of the past who turn up in this way, dead yet seemingly immortal? Who, in the collective psyche, is Princess Diana? Who, in the Catholic imagination, are the saints who are believed still to be working miracles and turning up in visions?

Answers are likely to be slippery, because we dream and perceive in so many different ways, on so many levels. Musing on this theme, I found myself reflecting again on my serial dreams of encounters and "thought experiments" with Einstein; my recent blog post "Einstein's Probability Bundles" is one example. In another of my Einstein dreams, the great scientist welcomed me at the wooden gate of a formal Chinese garden. He led me to a tea house and introduced me, inter alia, to Richard Wilhelm, who gave the West the first translation of the I Ching that works for practical purposes of divination. In the course of our conversation, Einstein made reference to a certain "Fechner", a name previously unknown to me.

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I did some research and found that Gustav Fechner was a German psychologist and physicist of the 19th century, credited with pioneering the science of "psychophysics". Fechner, a firm believer in the soul's survival of physical death, attempted to define the different modes and subtle vehicles in which consciousness can both survive death and make itself known to others. In Richard Wilhelm's lectures on the I Ching I found a note on Fechner's psychophysics of the afterlife that goes to the quick of my inquiry about what is going on when Churchill or Einstein turns up in the imaginal lives of the living. Fechner suggested that after death the departed acquires a "body of immortality" that is "formed in the thoughts of other men...formed by their remembrance of the deceased". This body of immortality is "a body of a higher grade, in which the deceased can continue to live" and appear to the living. The great and famous, whose image in life is magnified by the attention and hopes and beliefs of millions, and whose memory is carried by just as many, could presumably take on a "body of immortality" that would enable them to appear and operate like the demigods of the ancient world or the saints of believers.

I wasn't sure that I was ready to post anything about this until I stopped in at my favorite used bookstore on Sunday afternoon. This is one of those happy places where shelf elves are often at play, and are sometimes embodied by the bookseller. The assistant on duty this weekend - a gentle and mature historian and scholar whose day job is at an area college - chose to recollect, out of the blue, "When I was a boy my father gave me a complete collection of Winston Churchill's speeches, on vinyl of course. I was thrilled by them. My wife put them on disk for me and I've been listening again, and they are no less thrilling. It feels like Churchill is one of those people who can reach across time, into many people's minds."

Into Seshat's Library

I have no biological siblings, and I make up for this by "adopting" a sister or brother from time to time. Many years ago, I adopted Carol Davis, a very gifted dream teacher and counselor, as one of my sisters, and she has companioned me on many explorations of the multiverse. She was with me on All Hallow's Eve, when I guided a group of dreamers on journeys to have timely and helpful interaction with the departed in their own realm.

I was reminded of a big journey Carol and I made some time ago, when one of her night dreams gave us a portal into the imaginal world of ancient Egypt. Since I find myself in an Egyptian mood at this hour of the night, I want to share my report of our shared journey, which is a lively example both of what Yeats called "mutual visioning" and of the practice I have come to term "dream archeology", in which we use the techniques of Active Dreaming - especially conscious and interactive dream travel - to gain authentic first-hand knowledge of ancient traditions, and then use the tools of scholarship and science to verify our findings.

Carol shared a powerful dream with me, in which a young woman leads her from one of my workshops along a passage into a library where she meets the Egyptian goddess Seshat, and is shown shelves filled with books of different times and a crystal window that opens onto both the past and onto many "drawing-board futures" – futures than have not yet been fixed.

In the dream, the portal is a dark bookcase Carol finds beside her in a circle in which I am sitting at the north; a book by the Egyptologist Wallis Budge is on a lower shelf. As she bends down to inspect the book, she feels a hand on her right wrist. A young woman tugs at her, drawing her into a long hallway. The floor, walls and ceiling are light ivory. The young woman talks to Carol about meeting someone she has wanted to meet. Carol struggles with the name. She gets something like "Shasta" and thinks, No, that’s a brand of soda. The young woman smiles at Carol’s embarrassment. Carol looks down and notices she is now wearing a lovely long white dress. They go through a curtain of feathered wings, into a library. Carol knows this is the library of Sesha, or Seshet, or Seshat….she’s getting closer to that name now.

The owner of the library appears and greets Carol as if she knows her. "I hope you will be able to remember. I precede Mary."
"You know Mary?" Carol is stunned.
"Of course. We are connected. I know many. You must remember."
She leads Carol to the windows of the library. Carol sees geometric designs of cities on many boards. Some are surreal or futuristic, some ancient; some are "on the drawing board" and may or may not be constructed. Carol feels she could go through many different windows, to different cities. On the library shelves are artifacts: a star, writing instruments, engravings on stone that include a carving of an ibis. There are papyrus scrolls that appear to be new. There are beautiful flowers on Egyptian vases.

I was intrigued and excited by this dream. Carol and I made a date to meet privately and travel together back into this dreamspace, with the aid of shamanic drumming, to learn more.

As I drummed for us, I found myself moving deep into Carol's dreamscape. I approached the bookcase and found Wallis Budge. He showed me praise names of Seshat, transcribed in his books, that we could use as an invocation that would open the gate to her library.

The passage from the bookcase to the library of Seshat was on the back of an immense cobra. Its scales gleamed golden, with crimson flashes, against a dark void. As we traveled together, I noticed that Carol did not realize what she was walking on, which may have been a blessing since - while Carol is an intrepid dream traveler - the idea of walking on a giant snake could be distracting. She walked a few paces ahead of me, on the cobra’s flattened head through an open archway, high above, into Seshat’s library.

In the library, I was drawn at once to a window set in a deep niche. The glass appeared to be a crystal several inches thick. Through the window, I looked into a sea world. Mer-people live here. They ride larger sea creatures for faster transportation. Their cities are underwater. This may be another vision of Atlantis, the Moist Land.

I turn to the goddess. Her eyes are lapis blue, purplish blue around the pupils. Her headdress is a seven-pointed star.She tells me she is the original Stella Maris, the Star of the Sea. This is a fundamental sense in which she precedes Mary (who was given the borrowed praise name). From her library, I am able to view the original of the XVII Tarot trump, the Star. The Book of Seshat is concealed – and revealed – through this image.

I sense the presence of Thoth/Tehuti. I am told he presides over a parallel library. I want to know their relationship and their story. Did they come to this Earth together? My sense is they are truly "extra-terrestrial gods". They are brother and sister. Thoth came first, at a time when Earth was a very savage and primal environment, the time when baboons were wiser and stronger than the ancestors of homo sapiens. He established a forward base on the Moon for his work in transferring language to humans and effecting the link with higher consciousness. Seshat came later, she instructs me. She descended directly to Earth, and therefore may preserve a more direct connection with the Star from which both of them come.

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At the end of the journey, we shared our travelogues and found that our reports were very similar. Carol had experienced walking a path of golden light, but had not - as I noticed - realized that she was on the back of the giant cobra. By traveling into the multiverse in this way, as partners or in groups, we can achieve objective confirmation of our experiences of the deeper reality, and advance the work of reopening living connections to the past that matters, and of mapping the imaginal realms.

Einstein's probability bundles

When we go dreaming, we travel through the curtains of our everyday understanding, beyond the walls of our physical reality; we get out there. Through synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence, the powers that live in that deeper reality come probing or poking through the veils, and sometimes this brings us awake to the hidden logic of events and the reality of a world-behind-the-world.

Since posting my recent dream of the Synchronicity Beast, I've been thinking of other dreams that have influenced my understanding of these things. I recorded one of the most important at the end of 2003. In this dream my mentor is Einstein. He has appeared in a number of my dreams, talking in a stage German accent, sometimes at machine-gun speed, about such things as the physics of time travel and the code of the I Ching. I have retained a healthy skepticism about whether my dream Einstein could possibly be connected to the great scientist, since I have a hard time wrapping my head around the simplest principles of physics. Whoever my dream Einstein may be, behind the familiar mask, he does have interesting things to reveal and to teach about the nature of multidimensional reality. Here is my 2003 report, exactly as I recorded it in my journal:

December 30, 2003

At Play Among the Manifestations of Time

A passage opens, like a long cylinder lined with silver and bronze-colored rods, angling up into the sky. As I speed up through it - shooting up effortlessly - I become aware that I am about to encounter someone who can instruct me on the workings of time and the content of the future. I come out high above the ground and look up at a huge revolving structure, something like a Ferris wheel on its side. At the end of each spoke is a different object, or rather bundle of objects. As the wheel revolves, I notice that the spokes go up and down at all angles, making the general shape of a sphere.

At the hub of the wheel is "Einstein". He appears with his wild fluffy hair, in rumpled clothes, as he has appeared in other dreams. From the center, he works an engine that enables him to toss down bundles from the ends of the spokes. As one spoke dips, another rises, producing a seesaw effect. As the bundles fall to earth, Einstein instructs me that this is how the unfolding of events in time actually takes place: not in the serial fashion that is a concession to the limited human mind, but in the releasing of probability bundles, packages of time + energy whose contents will be unfolded over a certain period. The unfolding of events will be influenced by the dropping of subsequent probability bundles.

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When I notice a riff of coincidence - things popping up that you know are connected, though there is no causation involved on the physical plane - I think of those probability bundles, fired from another world into this one, to burst across our space and time like multidimensional pinatas. The world "quantum" means "bundle" or "packet", so this image may be a clue to how quantum effects are manifested on a human scale.

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What I like best about the dream image is that the machine that fires the probability bundles closely resembles something you might find in an amusement park, evoking a game greater than the ones we spend most of our lives playing. Heraclitus said (fragment XCIV) that life in time (aion) is governed by a child at play (pais paizon) moving pieces in a game (pesseuon) on another level of reality. The child is also a king. Classical scholars wrangle over how to translate the word pesseuon in this tricky text. Are the pieces in play something like dice? Dream Einstein has the solution: they are probability bundles.

The Synchronicity Beast bursts into the world

I recorded just one short dream report from last night:

My dreamspace is filled by a great animate power of synchronicity. It is growing bigger and bigger, until it bursts into the physical world, like a great Mother Bear with many cubs. While most people can't see her, they'll find the tracks she leaves, mysterious but meaningful, and for at least a moment they'll slip free from linear understanding into the dream logic of the world-behind-the-world where synchronicity is born and grows, again and again, until it has to burst into everyday reality.

I was thinking about this, walking in the park and watching red and gold leaves skittering away in a moody wind, when my BlackBerry throbbed in my pocket. I found a fresh email from Robyn Johnson, a poet, photographer and teacher of Active Dreaming who lives on the edge of a nature preserve on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State.

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She included the photos above, with this report: "Look who came strolling into our backyard from the neighboring preserve! Yesterday I was working on my computer just before dusk and looked up to see this mama and her two cubs. They nosed around exploring and then came up towards the house.

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"When I grabbed my camera and slipped out onto our deck, mama called to her babies and scooted off into the preserve. I’m sure they’re around for the free salmon dinners being served up daily compliments of the coho, in the bay. It was a day of synchronicities. When I looked up to see these magnificent beings I was writing an email to my daughter congratulating her for a breakthrough story she wrote about her dreaming. It was also my mother’s 94th birthday.

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"I awoke this morning singing our Bear Song. What a thrill seeing those three bears."

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I shared Robyn's sense of blessing. The timing of her message, with the three bears, seemed lovely confirmation of what I had dreamed, about the synchronicity beast growing bigger and bigger until it simply HAS to burst into the world, perhaps for a salmon dinner...