In dreams begins responsibility

 

I enjoy playing quote detective. The twin epigraphs in Yeats's poetry collection Responsibilities, first published by Cuala Press in 1914, make an interesting study that involves the valuation of dreams and the very nature of dreaming.
      In dreams begins responsibility. This can be read in several ways. What we choose and do in dreams has consequences. What will manifest in conscious life has its roots in what Yeats elsewhere called the "fibrous darkness". We are responsible for what we do or do not do inside the dreamworld. Or are we?
     Disowning responsibility for the actions of the dream self has been a popular cop-out among Euro-Americans for a very long time. Saint Augustine was one of  those who wanted to deny responsibility for he did in his dreams, since he was embarrassed that he continued to have sex in his dreams after taking vows of chastity. He tried to absolve himself by making a distinction between “happenings” and “actions.” Dreams fall into the former category. Things just happen to you and you can't be held responsible for them. [1]
     This is nonense to traditional dreaming cultures. They know the dreamworld is a real lifeworld, and hold dreamers responsible for their actions within it. Real Mystery initiates and conscious dream travelers - of whom Yeats was one - generally feel the same.
    Where did Yeats get his quotable quote? He gave the source as an "Old Play". Attributing a made-up quotation to an Old Play was a favorite ruse of Sir Walter Scott, and Yeats may have been following his lead. Some hear an echo of a passage in Nietzsche's Morgenröthe:

“Dream and responsibility. - You are willing to assume responsibility for everything! Except, that is, for your dreams! What miserable weakness, what lack of consistent courage! Nothing is more your own than your dreams! Nothing more your own work! Content, form, duration, performer, spectator - in these comedies you are all of this yourself! And it is precisely here that you rebuff and are ashamed of yourselves, and even Oedipus, the wise Oedipus, derived consolation from the thought that we cannot help what we dream!” [2]

In dreams begins responsibility. The line continues to reverberate. Delmore Schwartz, famous as the poet of Depression-era Brooklyn, wrote his story ”In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” over a weekend when he was twenty-one. He borrowed his title from Yeats's Old Play, but made "responsibility" plural. In Schwartz's story, his protagonist's dream double is in a cinema watching a grainy old silent movie. He puts us there, hearing the crackle of the projector, watching the black-and white frames. The movie watcher recognizes his mom and dad, on the hot afternoon on Coney Island when his father proposed. Seething with emotion, the young man in the cinema stands up and yells at his parents, across time, not to get married - and then later, not to break up. An usher hustles him out of the theater - and he wakes up, as the author may have done. [3]
    This gives a further slant on responsibilities that begin in dreams. In dreams, we look into secret places and travel across time. What if – more than just shouting at a screen – we could reach into a mind and situation across time and change something that might alter a whole history? Delmore Schwartz left that question unspoken but it may have occurred to Yeats, who maintained that we are required to question our dreams.   
    Yeats thought that dreams place responsibility on the dreamer to seek to understand what they offer - advice, a warning, an explanation, a deeper reality, conversation with higher beings, interaction with other dreamers. Dreams are to be questioned before sleep and to be examined on waking, to tease out their implications and the action needed. He saw the questioning of dreams as a form of divination. Yeats wrote in his mid-forties that “since I was a boy I have questioned dreams for [Maud Gonne’s] sake” [4] In the Automatic Script of 1919, on being told “don’t forget you are to have a dream,” Yeats asked, “On what shall I question?” [5]
    He was haunted across his life by the aching divide between dreams of a fully consummated love and a spiritual marriage with Maud Gonne, and her repeated refusal to accept him as her mate in ordinary life. There was the unavoidable sense that he had failed in one of the largest responsibilities his dreams had given him. Yet he never despaired of dreaming. He said that the dreams that had been “granted” to him – as opposed to the dreams he had “sought” through incubation, meditation or magical formulas - had been his truest source of knowing.[6]

The second epigraph to Responsibilities takes us to China. It is based on a misreading of a French translation of the Analects of Confucious, probably passed on to Yeats by Ezra Pound. The original text refers not to the Prince of Chang but to the Duke of Zhou, associated by the Confucians with public virtue. [7] The apothegm was originally constructed to mourn a decline in social mores and the growth of government corruption. However, the mention of a dream figure is what seized the Chinese imagination, so the Duke of Zhou came to be regarded as a patron – even a god – or dreams. The sorrow of Yeats’s second epigraph streams from the understanding that to lose contact with the greater minds that become accessible in dreams is to fall from one’s own greater self.    
     Yeats journaled his dreams and visions and engaged in many experiments to set up what we might call lucid and mutual dreaming. He spent a good deal of his time lying on his back in half-dream states. He learned the merits of entering a state of relaxed attention, open to the spontaneous flow of images. “One must allow the images to form with all their associations before one criticizes.” He agreed with Goethe that if one is critical too soon, images will not form at all. “If you suspend the critical faculty, I have discovered, either as the result of training, or, if you have the gift, by passing into a slight trance, images pass rapidly before you. If you can suspend also desire, and let them form at their own will, your absorption becomes more complete and they are more clear in color, more precise in articulation, and you and they begin to move in the midst of what seems a powerful light.” [8] He tried to stay with a dream or reenter it when he was dissatisfied or disappointed with what had been accomplished.
     He made this ringing declaration of his trust in dreams in an essay on Shelley: "I have observed dreams and visions very carefully, and am now certain that the imagination has some way of lighting on the truth that the reason has not, and that its commandments, delivered when the body is still and the reason silent, are the most binding we can ever know." [9]

 

References

1. Augustine Confessions  Book X Chapter 30. See discussion in Owen Flanagan (2000) Dreaming Souls: Sleep, Dreams and the Evolution of the Conscious Mind  (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) pp. 18, 179-183.

2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality. Cambridge University Press, 1997, p.78

3. Delmore Schwartz, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories (New York: New Directions, 1978)

4.W.B. Yeats, “PIAL Notebook” 8v, quoted in Neil Mann, “W. B. Yeats, Dream, Vision, and the Dead” in Matthew Gibson and Neil Mann (eds) Yeats, Philosophy, and the Occult (Clemson SC: Clemson University Press, 2016) p.158 n.18. The "PIAL Notebook", kept by Yeats from 1908 to 1917, was named after Maud Gonne’s Golden Dawn motto, Per Ignem ad Lucem ("Through Fire to Light") 

5. Steve L. Adams, Barbara J. Fielding and Sandra L. Sprayberry, Yeats Vision Papers Volume 2 (London and Iowa City: Macmillan/University of Iowa Press, 1992) p. 166. 

6. Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume I. The Poems ed. Richard J. Finneran. (New York: Scribner, 1997) p.601.

7. The source is Confucius 7:5, as translated by Guillaume Pauthier in 1858 and then retranslated by Ezra Pound in his Canto XIII. See Mann, “W.B. Yeats, Dream, Vision and the Dead” p.155 n.1 

8. W.B. Yeats, Mythologies (London and New York: Macmillan, 1955) p. 344. 

9. W.B. Yeats, “The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry” Essays and Introductions. (London: Macmillan, 1961) p. 65.

Where a Dream is the Price of Admission

In traditions where the importance of dreaming is understood, the right dream may be your price of admission to the good stuff.

It is common in Tibetan tradition for spiritual teachers to ask students to bring them a dream to determine if they are ready to receive important teachings. A student without a dream is regarded as blocked and possibly unclean. He is required to undergo purification and perform practices to reopen his connection with spiritual allies. He is not allowed to continue his studies until he can produce the right dream.
    Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche gives a personal example, from the time of his training with Lopon Rinpoche, in his book Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep. The story is doubly interesting because it involves long-range dream precognition. At 13, as a student,Tenzin dreamed he was handing out slips of paper with the Tibetan syllable A written on them to people boarding a bus.       He brought this dream to his teacher, who did not comment, but allowed him to proceed to a further level of instruction. Fifteen years later, waking events caught up with the dream. Invited to travel to the West for the first time, Tenzin found himself assigned to hand out slips of paper with the Tibetan syllable A on them to people boarding a bus. These were to be used in a meditation exercise.[1]
    When the French ethnographer Jean-Guy Goulet told the Guajiro (a South American people also known as the Wayuu) that he wanted to live with them and study them, they replied that they would only allow him to live with them if he “knew how to dream”. [2]
    In 1994, a dream proved to be my admission ticket to the Dreaming of an Aboriginal people in my native Australia. I dreamed I was carried back to Australia by a sea eagle, to a reunion with my mother, and then guided into the hinterland of south Queensland, to the banks of a muddy creek. Something immense was thrashing and rising from the waters. Nearby were Aborigines painted for ceremony. An elder told me, "This is the first of all creatures. This is the beginning of our world."
    When my mother died suddenly, three months later, I was grateful that the dream had prepared me for this event, through our loving exchange in the dream itself, and by how it inspired me to reach out to her and heal some misunderstandings. I flew back to my native country. After the funeral, I went "walkabout" for a few days, and found myself at an Aboriginal housing co-op in a dusty town in the hinterland called Beaudesert. When I started talking about dreams, I was told I needed to talk to Frank. Who was Frank? "Oh, he's our spirit man." Frank's place proved to be three days bush walk away, so this lead seemed like a non-starter.
    But Frank walked in as I was getting ready to go; shamans are tricky. He invited me down to the pub to talk. He sipped orange juice and sniffed me, literally, checking if I was another white fella trying to rip off his people yet again. Then I told him the dream. His manner changed radically. He sat very still, his eyes blazing like fire opals.
   "Oh, I guess you've come to me for a reason, mate. You've just told me the start of the creation story of my people, the Mununjalli, as it is told to made men. That thing you saw in the water was the bull eel. We say it is the first of all creatures."
    Yet a dream had taken me deep inside the Dreaming of an ancient and indigenous people. Because of my dream, Frank volunteered to show me the place of the Bull Eel Dreaming. Skirting quicksand and snakes, after many hours I found myself on the bank of the muddy creek from my dream. No bull eel in evidence that day, which was fine with me.[3]

 References

1. Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep (Boston: Snow Lion, 1998) pp. 12-13.
2. Jean-Guy Goulet, “Dreams and Visions in Other Lifeworlds” in David E. Young and Goulet (eds) Being Changed by Cross-Cultural Encounters (Peterborough, Ontario; Broadview Press, 1994). p. 22.
3. The full story is in my book Conscious Dreaming. (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1996).

News from The Secret Commonwealth

 

In a book titled The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies, Robert Kirk (1644-1692), a Gaelic scholar and Anglican vicar at Aberfoyle in Scotland,  describes a “secret way of correspondence” with the invisible world: a means of crossing between ordinary and nonordinary reality at will. Kirk subtitled his work “An Essay of the Nature and actions of the Subterranean and for the most part Invisible People, heretofore going by the names of Elves, Fauns and Fairies and the like.”

Subtle bodies The inhabitants of these realms are not disembodied. They have “light changeable bodies, like those called Astral, somewhat of the nature of a condensed cloud. They shape-shift and can make their “bodies of congealed air” appear and disappear at will.

Middle nature: The fairies are “of a middle nature betwixt man and Angel,” like the daimons of the ancient world. Kirk discusses rival opinions in his parish about whether the “good people” are spirits of the departed, clothed in their subtle bodies; “exuded forms of the man approaching death”; or “a numerous people by themselves.” He suggests that all these descriptions may be valid for different groups.

Doubles. Kirk reports that each of us has a double who is fully at home in the Otherworld. The old Scots Gaelic term for this double is coimimeadh (pronounced “coy-me-may”), which means “co-walker.” Kirk improvises a series of synonyms for the double, including: twin, companion, echo, “reflex-man,” and living picture. The double resembles the living person both before and after she or he dies. The double survives physical death, when the co-walker “goes at last to his own land.” When invited, the co-walker will make itself “known and familiar.” But most people are unaware that they have a double. Since it lives in a different element, it “neither can nor will easily converse” with the everyday waking mind.

As natural as fishing As a man of the Church, Kirk goes to great lengths to argue that there is nothing ungodly about “correspondence” with Otherworld beings, quoting reports of visionary experiences in the Bible. He also contends that it is as “natural” to encounter the inhabitants of the Otherworld as it is to go fishing; both involve moving into another element. Yeats brings this to poetic life in "The Song of Wandering Aengus", where a man fishing with a hazel rod catches a little silver trout that becomes a girl with apple-blossom in her hair.  

Kirk reassures us that we are dealing with “an invisible people, guardian over and careful of man,” whose “courteous endeavor” is to convince us of the reality of the spiritual world and of “a possible and harmless method of correspondence betwixt men and them, even in this life.” 

However, local legend has it that members of the Secret Commonwealth found the minister too mouthy about them and carried him away one summer evening when he was walking on a dun-shi, a fairy hill behind his house.  He was taken before his book was published. It remained for Sir Walter Scott to discover and publish it in 1815. The frontispiece is a watercolor drawing  hy Sir D.Y. Cameron depicting the Hill of the Faitries at Aberfoyle. Bailie Nicol Jarvie describes this hill and its legends in Rob Roy.

Kirk's successor as minister at Aberfoyle, the Rev. Dr. Grahame, in his Sketches of Picturesque Scenery, recounted that as Kirk was walking on the fairy hill, he sunk down in a swoon, which was taken for death. “After the ceremony of a seeming funeral,” Scott continued the story in Demonology and Witchcraft , “the form of the Rev. Robert Kirk appeared to a relation, and commanded him to go to Grahame of Duchray. ‘Say to Duchray, who is my cousin as well as your own, that I am not dead, but a captive in Fairyland; and only one chance remains for my liberation. When the posthumous child, of which my wife has been delivered since my disappearance, shall be brought to baptism, I will appear in the room, when, if Duchray shall throw over my head the knife or dirk which he holds in his hand, I may be restored to society; but if this is neglected, I am lost for ever." According to this story, Kirk did appear at the christening, and “was visibly seen;” but Duchray was so gobsmacked that he did not throw his dirk  and Kirk went away again.

Kirk lived in a world not yet "dispeopled of its dreams" as Andrew Lang wrote in his introduction to a 1893 edition of The Secret Commonwealth. Lang proceeded to discuss experiences of the co-walker:  "All things universally have their types, their reflex: a man’s type, or reflex, or ' co-walker' may be seen at a distance from or near him during his life—nay, may be seen after his death. The gifted man of second sight can tell the substantial figure from the airy counterpart."

Lang was especially interested in the kind of double that goes ahead of you for which the Norwegians use the term vardøger, who "was often seen of old to enter a House, by which the people knew that the Person of that Likeness was to visit them in a few days....It may have occurred to most of us to meet a person in the street whom we took for an acquaintance. It is not he, but we meet the real man a few paces farther on. Thus a distinguished officer, at home on leave, met a friend, as he tells me, in Piccadilly. The other passed without notice: the officer hesitated about following him, did not, and in some fifty yards met his man. There is probably no more in this than resemblance and coincidence, but this is the kind of thing which was worked by the Highlanders into their metaphysics."

Illustration: Robert Kirk Goes Away. RM+AI

Celtic Shapeshifting

In the dream, I walk through a house, speaking with fervor about my plans for a new class on Celtic shapeshifting. I walk briskly between rooms, waving my arms like a swan on the water. Standing in the kitchen, I declaim the first lines of the Robert Graves version of the Song of Amergin

I am a stag: of seven tines,

I am a flood: across a plain,

I am a wind: on a deep lake,

I am a tear: the Sun lets fall. [1]

I repeat the phrase, "Celtic shapeshifting". I say it again as I leave the dream. The Song of Amergin claims affinity with all animate life, with the swan and the stars, with a tear the sun lets fall. I also feel breeze from the tale of Tuan mac Cairill, who survived the Flood as a mighty salmon, and became a hawk and many other creatures after. [2] How can I not recall his kinsman Fintan mac Bochra, who changed form when he changed his moods?

In his prose poem "Stone Boat", the poet John Moriarty gives us this grand Irish shifter of moods and forms. Once he has been paid with a story - in the Celtic way, you never come in to the good stuff without a story. sung more than spoken - Fintan reveals, "At Connla's otherworld well it was that I first realized that being human is a habit. It can be broken. Like the habit of going down to the river by this path rather than that, I broke it. And so it is that, although I always know who I am, I can never be sure that what I am going to sleep at night is what I will be when I wake up in the morning. In me the mutabilities of sleep survive into waking. What I'm saying is, my shape depends on my mood."

Then Fintan gives a lively poke: "You only need to break the habit once, the habit of being human I mean, and then you will be as you were between death and rebirth. Between death and rebirth our bodies are mind-bodies, and that means they are alterable. Alterable at will. We only have to will it and it happens, we flow from being a swan in Lough Owel into being a hind on Slieve Bloom into being a hare on Beara." [3]

Through the texts, we hear ancient bardic voices celebrating and affirming our connection with all living things in an animate, conscious world, and the shaman's ability to recruit allies in many realms and borrow their forms and their powers.

In his book Becoming Animal, David Abram tells us that "traditional tribal magicians or medicine persons seek to augment the limitations of their specifically human senses by binding their attention to the ways of another animal... The more studiously an apprentice magician watches the other creature from a stance of humility, learning to mimic its cries and to dance its various movements, the more thoroughly his nervous system is joined to another set of senses...Like anything focused upon so intently, the animal ally will begin visiting the novice shaman’s dreams, imparting understandings wholly inaccessible to her waking mind."[4]

Sometimes, of course, the forms are unwelcome, the result of a curse or of karma.

I have been in many shapes before I attained a congenial form. [5]

Now I am away with Aengus, following fire in the head into an enchanted apple orchard to catch a silver trout that becomes a lovely girl with apple blossom in her hair.....[6]

References

1. Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux 1986) p.13 2. Kuno Meyer “Tuan mac Cairill’s Story to Finnen of Moville”, appendix to The Voyage of Bran to the Land of the Living. (London: David Nut 1897), pp. 285–301
3.John Moriarty, "Stone Boat" in Dreamtime (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2020) p. 21

4. David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010) pp. 217-8

5. Cad Goddeu, "The Battle of the Trees". Graves version, White Goddess p. 30.
6. W.B. Yeats, "The Song of Wandering Aengus" in Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, 1958) pp.66-7.

Illustrations: RM+AI

Azurite Call

I had a crystal and showed many how to see in it and an even larger number to see visions according to the method of my Order.

-  Yeats, Memoirs 

My favorite dead poet showed me around a magic cottage he said was on the fourth level of the astral plane. He let me handle an azurite crystal and recommended that I should use one for scrying in the spirit vision as he and his Mystery associates did. Back in the ordinary world, I could not find an azurite crystal that matched his, though I can create one in meditation and use it as a spyglass, a laser pointer, or a transporter. I was inspired to return to the primal art of divination by rock reading and to embark on new expeditions to worlds we can find inside a stone. Here is a little more of the story, playing across many years.

Twenty years ago, in the Library of the House of Time, a place in the Real World beyond consensual hallucination, a dead poet called me to climb a steep spiral staircase I had not noticed before. When I reached the top, he transported both of us to a different locale: a pleasant country cottage. Flower beds bordered the path. From the window of his study, I could look out over changing landscapes, including the Byzantium and Renaissance Italy of his poems. He showed me secret journals and held up a marvelous deep blue crystal.
   “The azurite crystal,” he specified. He urged me to use it to open the third eye fully and see what I most needed to see. I had the impression that the crystal is not only a spyglass but a transporter. It can carry the user – if he is prepared and ready – as far as the Blue Star.
    Yeats explained that his magic cottage is on the fourth level of the astral plane. That did not sound high enough, in terms of the Theosophers' atlases of astral and causal planes. But it is the poet's place and I must assume that he knows his own address.
    After this encounter, I wanted an azurite spyglass. A gemmologist friend doused some of my blue fire by telling me that it is almost impossibe to find an azurite crystal as large as the one in Yeats's fist. I settled for a chunk of azurite stone, the size of a shooter marble but rough. The stone was held precious by both Egypt and Ireland; the Egyptians crushed it to make the blue pigment with which they colored the skin of gods and kings; the scribes who made the Book of Kells used powdered azurite to paint capital letters. This is the blue of deities and of royalty.
    If I unfocus my eyes and look at it close up, my blue stone becomes a mountain range, with a glacier or cool river of lighter blue falling down its slopes and a great open-mouthed fish in its waters. There is something of the lemniscate, the infinity sign, in the general shape. As I let my imagination loose as a leopard in this world, I see intricate knotty designs, pictographs, giant faces. A great beast with open jaws, a low brow, a great sloping muzzle. It could be a bear, or a boar, but when I see it in profile, it looks most like a lion
    I am shocked to find a face within the face. This is definitely human, and it is the face of a king. Strong and stern face, long-nosed, piercing dark eyes, slightly slanting, a short beard. Above his head, crenellations that suggest a crown. Is he the master of the Beast, or does the Beast have his head?
    I turn the stone and it shows me a second face, that might be at home on Easter Island. Another turn reveals a bird-woman, with heron legs and a beak.
    I contemplate the Beast who holds the head of a king as Yama holds the Wheel of Life on the walls of Buddhist temples. My mind turns, like the wheel, to another life and another journey.
    Before Yeats called to me from the turning stair, I made an expedition to a site in the Real World we call the Cave of the Ancestors. I found the opening I needed behind the hard spray of a waterfall. I searched rock paintings for messages. I was called by the glow of light from a standing stone to brave a mess of black adders. The stone became translucent, showing me the figure of a man who was desperate for help. Bearded and crowned, torn and bleeding, he was ready to destroy himself if his appeal to another time and another world went unheard. Something gave me the courage to drop my body and track him through the electric blue light inside the stone into his broken kingdom, to do battle with a dark power.
    Now I am holding another world between my thumb and forefinger. There are endless worlds, as Vasistha taught Rama. Any number may be found inside a stone. 

Drawing: "Yeats in the Magic Cottage" by Robert Moss