Flying Books and Nights of Healing

Boulder, Colorado

I was at another of my favorite independent bookshops, the Boulder Bookstore, to talk up Dreamgates last night. As soon as I stepped across the threshold, the image of two nuzzling deer jumped out at me from a bookshelf devoted to staff picks. The deer are on the jacket of a new book by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, the author of a wonderful book about dogs, The Hidden Life of Dogs and a marvelous novel about an ancient people who live very close to animals, Reindeer Moon. The new one is The Hidden Life of Deer and - in the wake of extraordinary shared experiences of healing and transformation last weekend on a mountain where the Deer spirit is and has long been primary - I had to get it.

     I was reminded that it was in the Boulder Bookstore, many years ago, that a visitor from the Midwest looking for something else was struck in the third eye by my book Conscious Dreaming - flying off a shelf for no apparent reason - soon after its publication in 1996. He bought the book, got in touch with me, and arranged to host my first Active Dreaming workshop in Madison, Wisconsin. There are magic bookstores, and flying books.

    We drew a lively crowd for my talk and afterwards a woman in line at the booksigning asked if she could tell me a dream. When the line had thinned a little, and I could give her full attention, she told me: "I dreamed I was on the beach with my ex, though we divorced 20 years ago. He was flicking sand and grit at me from a towel, like a bullying brat. After a while I stood up to him. I grabbed the towel away from him and told him I wouldn't put up with this any more, Everything was going to change. After that he morphed into Bill Cosby, looking sweet and a little sheepish. I woke up feeling really good."
   The story got better. The dream was confirmed by a coincidence: "The following night I turned on the Larry King show on TV. The guest was Bill Cosby. He was talking about bullying and how to stop it."

    We agreed this felt like a wink from the universe. The dreamer was sure that profound work of emotional clearing and healing was accomplished on the "night shift". Many other dreamers - including this one - had have deep experiences of emotional healing similar to that of stopping the bully. The ancients knew that extraordinary healing, on many levels, becomes available in the night, and they made a practice of preparing for that and asking for it nicely. The shrinks we've been discussing in the comments on my last post ("From brainless to mindless?") would do well to invest some time in learning about this.