The Robert Moss BLOG

The White Goddess and the habit of coincidence

2012-01-25T15:54:00.000-05:00

The White Goddess is a "queer" and difficult book, as the author, the poet and novelist Robert Graves, cautions his readers in a foreword. The subtitle in itself may scare away some readers: A historical grammar of poetic myth. Yet it is a book I find myself returning to, again and again, over the years - though since I was a teen I have never been mad enough to try to read it from front to back.
The whole book is a celebration of the Goddess, as she may have been worshiped in matrifocal Old Europe, and other places, before the advent of patriarchal gods installed by patriarchal men. The material came to Graves, and came through him, in a marvelous flow; he dashed off the first draft (then titled The Roebuck in the Thicket) in just three weeks. Specialists will carp at his prodigious but errant scholarship, which is guided by rhyme and resemblance rather than any logical ordering. Few who are learned in the languages and customs of the Celts, in his day or ours, will accept him as an irreproachable source on the Battle of the Trees or the Matter of Britain.
Yet it is impossible not to thrill to the passion of a poet who proclaims that the business of poetry is to serve the Three-fold Muse, and restore the Goddess, and gives us the most rousing and transfiguring (if not the most literal) version of the Song of Amergin that has ever been sung in English.

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,
I am a hawk: above the cliff,
I am a thorn: beneath the nail,
I am a wonder: among flowers,
I am a wizard: who but I
sets the cool head aflame with smoke?

In writing The White Goddess, as in other inspired work. Graves was certain that he was not alone in his creative space. In addition to what stirred in his imagination, he noticed objects in his physical environment showed up in ways that suggested a hidden hand, from the realm of the Goddess. In a postscript he added to The White Goddess in 1960, he recounted that when he started on the first draft of that book

I had in my work-room several small West African brass objects - bought from a London dealer - gold-dust weights, mostly in the shape of animals, among them a humpback playing a flute. I also had a small brass-box with a lid, intended (so the dealer told me) to contain gold dust. I kept the humpback seated on the box. In fact, he is still seated there; but I knew nothing about him, or about the design on the box-lid until ten years had gone by. The I learned that the humpback was a herald in the service of the Queen-mother of some Akan State; and that every reigning Queen-Mother (and there are a few reigning even today) claims to be an incarnation of the Triple Moon Goddess Ngame. The design of the box-lid, a spiral, connected by a single stroke to the rectangular frame enclosing it - the frame having nine teeth on either side means: ‘None greater in the universe than the Triple Goddess Ngame!’ These gold weights and the box were made before the British seizure of the Gold Coast, by craftsmen subservient to the Goddess, and regarded as highly magical.

When he learned the meaning of these African objects, Graves suspected that an African version of the Moon Goddess had played a part in his inspiration. The story deepened after World War II, when he returned to work on his manuscript. He was now writing about the sacred king, first the consort and then the sacrificial victim of the Goddess in certain traditions. Now a collector named Georg Schwartz bequeathed to Graves "five or six more Akan gold-weights, among them a mummy-like figurine with one large eye." Graves was able to have this strange figure identified as the Akan king's okrafo priest, who in later times served as a surrogate victim, in place of the king. "The okrafo figurine lay beside the herald on the gold box, while I wrote about the Goddess's victims."
After publication of the first edition of The White Goddess, "a Barcelona antiquary" invited Graves to choose a stone from a selection of Roman gems. Among them was "a stranger", a banded carnelian seal from an earlier culture, engraved with a stag galloping towards a thicket with a crescent moon on his flank - the very image that had given the poet his original title, The Roebuck in the Thicket.
"Chains of more-than-coincidence occur so often in my life," Graves observed, "that, if I am forbidden to call them supernatural hauntings, let me call them a habit." He hastens to add that he's not keen on the word "supernatural", since he finds patterns of "more-than-coincidence" entirely natural, though escaping the explanations of science.
Call them a habit. I like that very much. Meaningful coincidences or correspondences do multiply when we are charged with passion, and in forward movement on the roads of life and creation, Goddess knows.

Dreaming with the Goddess

2012-01-24T07:46:00.000-05:00

Eyes of the Goddess from the Tarxien temple, Malta. Photo by Joan Marler

She has a thousand faces. She is virgin, mother and crone. She is creator, preserver and destroyer. She gives birth, endlessly. Her womb is the gateway of death and rebirth. She is Queen of Earth and Heaven. She fell through a hole in her world and danced our world into being on turtle’s back. She hid the sunlight from the world when she was abused by men and could only be lured back when shown her radiant face in a mirror. She is lover, warrior and shaman. She is the one who repairs the broken soul and raises the god in man with her breath.

Men tried to confine her to limited roles, to force her into wedlock with despotic gods, before the Church sought to bury her. But the Goddess returned as Mary, and now she is loose again, asking us to honor and embody her in the forms that please her.

I am only a man, but I serve the Goddess. When I was fourteen, she claimed me in one of her most fearsome forms, and from that dark night I wrote a cycle of poems titled Creatures of Kali. I have met the Goddess in the deep loamy earth, in molten lava, in the waves of the sea, as Spider Woman and Reindeer Queen and as Great Mother Bear. I feel her robe swirl in the shifting stars. I have received instruction from ancient priestesses, communicating across time, and from wise women of many cultures in our present world. I am conscious of walking in the footsteps of Marija Gimbutas, the great Lithuanian scholar of the Goddess, and it was in her native country that I made an indelible connection with the oldest living Goddess tradition in the Old World.
In a grand new adventure I'll lead in California in September, we’ll use the arts of shamanic dreaming, performance and ritual to reclaim authentic traditions from the cultures where women and men lived in balance under the aegis of the Goddess. We’ll find the deeper stories of our own lives – and the keys to juicier, more spirited relationships with partners and communities – as we enter into her mysteries. Details of the "Dreaming with the Goddess" workshop here.

Meeting Yeats in the magic cottage

2012-01-21T03:37:00.001-05:00

Yeats in the Magic Cottage, R.M. oil crayons

I have enjoyed a lifelong relationship with my favorite dead poet, WilliamButler Yeats. I have always loved his poetry and have been able – sinceelementary school – to recite long passages from memory. I have had dreams andvisions of Yeats and his circle for as long as I can remember. He was not onlya marvellous poet; he was a Western magus, one of the leading figures in theOrder of the Golden Dawn.

Since I was a boy, Yeats has appeared in my dreamsat night as well as my daydreams and willed journeys in consciousness. In dreams, I sometimes seem to be living in his era; at other times I seem to meet him in a separate reality. When drumming for groups, I have had had strong impressions of Yeats conducting experiments in "mutual visioning" in his own time, and have felt communication between us.
I dreamed I received amessage from Yeats inviting me to visit him at home. I was not sure where ‘home’for Yeats might now be, but it did not appear to be in Ireland. In asubsequent vision, in the hypnagogic zone, Ifound myself floating above my body, up through the ceiling, and then throughsome kind of mesh that looked like an intricately woven fabric or netting. Iwas drawn up as if a traction beam had been turned on. I was under nocompulsion, but I let myself rise on the intention of the one who was callingme. I had no doubt who that was. His lines were running through my head:

I shall arise and go there, and go toInnisfree…

Oh,yes, the early poem that has been quoted so often that Yeats himself got boredand irritated by it, vastly preferring the maturity and complexities of hislater work. But its rhythms helped me travel, helped me swim through the subtleair.

I passed through many landscapes,perhaps whole worlds. They were separated by dividing partitions that weresometimes like cloud-banks, sometimes like membranes that stretched to let methrough, and sometimes like woven fabric or netting. I came at last to whatappeared to be a pleasant country cottage on a winding path. The flower bedswere bright with colour. It seemed to me that, as I glanced around, the coloursat the edge of my peripheral vision would change. Behind the cottage was agentle river, and on the banks of the river, spires and towers that might havebeen those of Oxford.I began to drift along the path beside the river and saw another town beyondthe first, this one quite certainly Italian; the architecture was that of theQuattrocento Florence or the Urbino that Yeats had loved and sometimesthreatened to make his sanctuary from the critics and civil unrest in Ireland.

I was thrilled that scenes thepoet’s words had often conjured in my mind in lesser, drifting states ofreverie were now so vividly and palpably available to explore. I hurried towarda palazzo worthy of a Medici that looked as if it has been constructed thatday.

But again there was that tug ofanother’s intention, and I allowed it to pull me back to the cottage. Did thecottage really have a thatched roof before, or was that detail changed while Iwas looking elsewhere?

Through the door, long a hall, andthere was Yeats, sitting at a broad table covered with books and papers.Through the leaded glass window at his left hand I saw the cities along theriver; they changed from one to another at the blink of an eye. I was excitedto see that Yeats was continuing to study and to write. I wondered whether ithampered or helped his craft that his new work would not be published on earth.He was patient with me, letting me gradually awaken to the understanding that,from his new perspective, the most important from of publication might be toinspire others, to operate as one of those ‘teachers of the thirteenth cone’ hewrote about in A Vision.

He showed me a large blue crystallying on his desk. He was most insistent that I should use this blue stone forcreative inspiration and to open and focus the third eye of vision. This bluecrystal was a place in which to see, and a connection between the two of us.

He gave me some personal guidanceand an update on certain psychic crosscurrents involving individuals and groupthat had been caught up in psychic battles in the past, in the time of thegreat rift within the Order of the Golden Dawn and in the darker times of thestruggle between British magicians and the Nazi occultists. I asked Yeats whereexactly we were.

He told me very precisely: “We areon the fourth level of the astral plane”. It seemed this was a neighbourhoodessentially reserved for people of creative genius, for writers and artists andmusicians.

I felt immensely privileged to havebeen given this tour of Yeats’s environment. It was not clear to me whether helived in the cottage alone; I was not shown the private rooms. I did feel quitecertain that this Yeats was embarked on a vast new project, though its exactnature was not yet made clear to me.

Boiled cabbage

2012-01-20T14:37:00.000-05:00

We were going to what had been touted as the best Mexicanrestaurant in south-eastern Arizona, and my palate was set accordingly. But theMexican place was fully booked; a local Aussie who scouted the scene reportedthat the parking lot looked like “a can of maggots.” The fall-back choice wasdescribed on the sign as Mexican- Greek. An unlikely combo, but I was willingto adjust my palate. I told my tongue it could roll either way, from mole todolmades.
    Inside, the Mexican-Greek place was akitchen from the 1950s, formica under unforgiving lights. My scout got in aheadof me, and was swigging a bottle of Negro Modelo while a capering waiterfinished describing the special. “I’ll have it,” declared my friend. “What’sthe special?” I inquired. “Cabbage stuffedwith meat, with mashed potatoes.”
     Boiled cabbage and mashed potatoes? Ina Mexican, or even a Greek, restaurant?
     I was incredulous, and my taste budswere flashing emergency signals. “Do you have a menu?” The waiter shrugged. “Youcan look at the menu if you like. But the special is what’s fresh.”
    Now the reek of boiled cabbage iseverywhere. Under a Soviet-era leaden sky, I smell it in the barracks-like apartments, in theoffices of the newspaper where the censor outranks the editor, even in the lobby of the upscale building where my Polish apparatchik hosts reside. The Warsaw restaurant resembles a funeral parlor that has seenbetter days. No formica in sight, but rather heavy drapes and cabinets the sizeof caskets. Here the menu is set before me right away, but my hosts whisper forme to ignore it. “Have the special.” What is the special? “Duck with cabbageand potatoes.” I am not too keen on duck, or cabbage. I search the menu and askfor steak. No steak. The waiter speaks as if he is spitting. How about chicken?No chicken. Now his lip curls with contempt. “Have the special.” The push isstronger. But I won’t concede defeat. I’ll have pasta. No pasta.
     “I’ll have the special,” I agreed,and the Greek waiter smiled at his little victory, half a world and forty yearsaway from Warsaw in 1972, when I was a young journalist visiting Eastern Europefor the first time.
     The boiled cabbage dinner waswretched. I realized that I had agreed to it because, for a critical minute ortwo, I was catapulted from the implausible scene in a little Mexican-Greekrestaurant in Arizona into a time and place where waiters were little Gods andyou ate what you were told to eat.
     “Bloody bloke!” croaked the Greekwaiter’s father. He had been to Sydney at the end of World War II.
      My dreadful dinner gave me a story.You don’t have a story (it's been said) unless something goes wrong. I’ll put up with just about anything so long as it has entertainment value.
      “Bloody bloke!”
     I concede that the boiled cabbagewas more entertaining in hindsight than at the table.

Hand writing

2012-01-19T17:26:00.000-05:00

OnFriday 13^th, on my first plane trip of the New Year, I returned tothe art of hand writing, journaling by hand in my green-bound journal. Istopped using the green leather covers years ago; Levenger had ceased making refill pads for them and though I found substitute journals, they didnot fit the covers. At Christmas, my wife gave me a set of filler pads that fit.Chastened by customer protests, Levenger had returned to making them, thoughthe covers are now midnight blue instead of buff. The pages are sewn in, numbered, archival quality and (naturally) gilt-edged.

Though it is often a challenge for meto decipher my writing, even on the same day, I realize there are essentialreasons for me to return to the practice of writing by hand. The medium is themessage, and the tactile, sensory contact with this medium can bring unexpectedresults. There is the release (more complete than via the keyboard) from anyconcern about judgment or consequences. There is my tendency, when writing ajournal, to include sketches. And then there is a big dream, from some timelast year, in which I am writing a new book, quite different from any of thetwo dozen I have published so far, within the green covers of my journal. As Iform words on the page, I have the shiverish sensation that I am starting tomanifest the dream of fresh literary creation.

The first pages of the new journal contain notes from the road, on the synchronicities and symbolic pop-ups that seem to multiply when we are in motion, and on my current reading, which includes (for the second time) Olga Grushin's extraordinary novel The Dream Life of Sukhanov, which describes the revenge of the imagination on an artist who gave up his creative vision to live the privileged life of a Soviet apparatchik. My rowmates, on the second flight of the day, from Minneapolis to Tucson, contributed more material. They were both reading classic lit - (he) Lucretius On the Nature of Things and (she) Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe - so conversation was irresistible. Soon we were talking about different modes of writing.

Ann, who was sitting next to me, got me talking about my sense that the book that may be hatched from inside the green covers will be different from anything I have published before. "I will write from what I have lived, and what I know," I declared. "I will write about my travels in the dream worlds, and among those who are living on the other side of death. I shall write from the truth of experience, and study, but this time I'll offer it as fiction or narrative nonfiction, inviting readers into a universe they can share for a time without needing to ask, Is it true?"

Ann responded, "It's better to write a work of nonfiction and call it fiction than to write a work of fiction and call it nonfiction."

That was exactly what I needed to hear. Yes, I wrote it down carefully in the journal with the green covers, and drew a big balloon around it.

Dream archaeology in Romania

2012-01-09T12:53:00.000-05:00

The sphinx of the Bucegi mountains

“You ought not to attempt to cure the eyes without the head, or the head without the body, so neither ought you to attempt to cure the body without the soul….If the head and body are to be well, you must begin by curing the soul.”

These famous words about holistic healing are from Socrates (speaking in Plato’s dialogue Charmides) but Socrates wasn’t speaking for himself; he was quoting a military physician who had instructed him on the teachings of his “king and god, Zalmoxis.” This is the name of the ancient deity of the Dacians.

Zalmoxis was a man-god who died and was reborn, and who taught the immortality and transmigration of the soul, as well as the ways to heal soul and body. Mircea Eliade called him a "vanishing god". His legendary birthplace was a bear cave. His high priest was called the Great White Wolf. So we are also in the realm of the animal powers.

Since the Dacians did not keep written records, we know rather little about their spiritual practices and their god. But I hope to discover more, in the company of an intrepid band of shamanic dreamers and dream archaeologists, in the Bucegi in the mountains of Carpathia in October. Here, where the energy of Bear and Wolf is strong, we'll grow the "strong eye" of the seer and the shaman, and tap into to the archival memory of the land itself to open authentic connections with keepers of ancestral wisdom.

Dream archaeology is an original method I have developed over many years of study, teaching and practice. The dream archaeologist combines the skills of the scholar, the detective and the shaman and acquires the ability to travel across time - by the techniques of Active Dreaming - and bring back first-hand knowledge of essential things from the past (or future). This program is an invitation to high adventure and to participate in the healing work of cultural soul recovery. Details here.

Here, everything is dreaming

2012-01-09T00:18:00.000-05:00

Moe’uhane

Island Dreaming

Dreaming is soul sleep

but even more it’s traveling.

You may fly across the water

in your body of wind

following the drumming of the waves

to spend the night with your dreamlover.

Even goddesses do this.

Pele left her lava bed for threedays

to make love with her dream prince.

Being a goddess, she could bringhim home.

It’s harder for humans. Spend toolong

with your dream spouse

without bringing him home

and you sicken like rotting silver.

You need to check who you’resleeping with

because spirits take many forms.

If your prince is a water imp indisguise

you’ll go fish belly white andmoist

on the side that rests next to him.

You must learn the vocabulary ofdreams.

Never confuse a wild goatfish dream

that begins and ends in your belly

with a dream that comes true

because it’s the memory of a tripto the future.

Don’t mix up a wishing dream withrevelation.

Be alert to the visions that openand shut

like lobster pots, quick and true,

on the edges of sleep and waking.

Use the dreams that are given toheal a family

and dreams that show you how toheal yourself.

In beauty and terror, as redbirdsor lovely sharks,

as windflowers or razorbacks orhoneycreepers,

gods and ancestors are talking,talking.

They show us life’s hidden springs.

They compose songs in us. They give

night names for babies that arecoming.

They save our skins when they areworth saving.

Learn to discern when you cansweeten a dream

and soften the sharp future itportends

and when you have to swallow itstraight up.

For a second opinion, listen to thebirds

or to a bird-man who talks to thewind

or might sail a blossom canoe foryou

over submarine tattoos in a gourdfilled with water.

In the islands, everything has abody of wind.

In the morning garden, you noticethe pandanus

has walked to the far side of thepond

where the fish dream open-eyed;

a palm swapped places with anavenging angel.

Even the land snail goes flying atnight

and is the preferred scout of thefiercest goddess.

To become a native of these islands

you must grow double vision,reading signs

in the world and theworld-behind-the-world

without going crazy. Persevere

and all your dramas will lead

to the Place of Leaping

where fresh water meets salt water

and you’ll drop your old body

and travel on, as bird or fish orzephyr

to the land tourists never see onthe horizon.

Here, everything is dreaming.

On a white beach in the early light

a shark came out of the waters

and became a graceful silver woman

who claimed me as her mate,

there on the embracing sand.

She was so lovely I was not put off

by her hammerhead eyes.

I wonder what unexplainable lovechild

is swimming out there, in the deep.

Hawaii is a waking dream. I swam under the blue-white ghost of a rainbow there, in the midst of a pod of sea turtles. The tides of my blood move with the ocean, my breath flows with the wind, my body thrills to the sense of islands being born, in every moment, from fire beneath the water, and dying back. Early in March, on Pele's island, I will lead an adventure into deep dreaming and poetic consciousness, at play with the elemental powers. Still time to join if you feel the call; details here.

When the doctor met the Bear

2012-01-08T16:27:00.001-05:00

The two grandmothers of a physician whose practice was in Alaska showed up in a dream. One was Athapascan Indian, the other Euro-American. Speaking together, they told her, "Go to Robert Moss because it's time for you to meet the Bear."
The doctor had never heard of me, but when she googled my name, she discovered I was leading a workshop in Oregon, titled "Dancing with the Bear: Reclaiming the Arts of Dream Medicine." She booked a plane ticket, traveled down the Left Coast, and descended, in a group journey powered by shamanic drumming, into the Cave of the Bear. She had a heart-stirring experience of being welcomed into a family of healers, in the embrace of Great Mother Bear. She felt her body being opened and her organs renewed.
When she came out, she was different. The Bear energy was all around her. She told us she felt the bear's great but discerning paws covering her hands, helping her to heal others. She returned to Homer, Alaska, with our Bear song in her heart and with the energy robe of the Bear all about her. Now, when people come to her office, they get the best of modern medicine, and they also get the healing agency of the Bear.

The threefold death of Silver Wolf

2012-01-07T04:30:00.000-05:00

"Autochthon", RM journal drawing

After an early flight, a long day of teaching and a jolly dinner, I am glad to settle in to the guest bedroom in the rambling frame house my friend has turned into a cozy retreat center. It's quiet here, on wooded land, near a town with one of those wonderful Midwestern names: Strongsville, Ohio. I hear only the low murmur of the Rapid River, beyond the rise where there is said to be a ring of ancient stones used by the Iroquois for sacred ceremonies.
Soon I am wandering through the courtyards of dreaming. I am startled awake by a loud burst of laughter. Blurry, I look at the bedside clock. 3:00 AM. I strain to identify the source of the noise. There are many voices, coming from the sitting room downstairs. Are there intruders? I'm quite sure my host would not be holding a loud party in the middle of the night.
I pull on shirt and jeans and pad downstairs. There is indeed a party in full swing. The party-goers are quite elegantly dressed. A tall, lean man detaches himself from a group around the baby grand piano to welcome me.
"Who are you people?" I demand.
He says clearly and distinctly, "Autochthons. We are autochthons."
I recognize the Greek and try to recall the exact meaning. His keen dark eyes wait for my recognition. There is something anomalous here, stranger than the party itself. What is it? His hair is silver. It does not stop at the hairline, it covers the whole face, darkening around the muzzle. I am looking into the face of a wolf, atop the body of a man. The wolf head is not a mask.
Shocked, I tumble out of an inner court of the dreaming, rushing through outer courts that leave no mark on memory, back into the body that did not leave the bed.

Over morning coffee, I tell my host what happened during the night. She says, "I'm sorry I missed the party. Who did the Alpha Male say they were, again?"
"Autochthon. It comes from the Greek." My Greek is a shambles, but the meaning is with me now. "It literally means Sprung from the Earth. Aboriginal, indigenous."
The Wolf Man has told me, in the language of a Western scholar, that he and his kin are of the First Peoples of this land.

I need no persuading that this is the morning to go up on the rise behind the house and investigate the ancient circle of stones among the pines and birches. The sun is shining brightly as I walk with my friend up the winding trail. When we reach the stones, she lets me go alone between two boulders. I touch them lightly, and feel at once that one of them is an archive stone, holding the memories of the land across eons.
When I pass beyond the gateway stones, I freeze, because I am not alone within the circle. The Wolf People are all around me. Their faces are now human, but they wear wolf pelts over buckskins and broadcloth. The alpha has the head of a silver wolf lolling over his own.
In bright sunlight, these people are quite substantial. Their bodies are just slightly translucent. I can see the flash of reflected light on the river through the alpha's massive form, but he is more real to me than my friend, who waits respectfully outside the stone circle. Silver Wolf, I now call him, as he communicates with me, mind to mind.

I am of the Wolf People. I am their dreamer and I guide them on the roads of this world and the Real World. We have come to you because you dream as we do, and you walk on our paths.
You wish to know the soul, and what happens to soul after the body is left behind. I now invite you to enter my death, and know the truth about these things by living and dying as I have done.

I am excited, and terrified. In the Ohio sunlight, I am about to fall into a different world. It does not occur to me to dismiss Silver Wolf and his people as figures of fantasy or hallucination. They are real, and the offer is a real.
As soon as he receives my acceptance, Silver Wolf transports me into his experience of death, and life after death. I am inside his consciousness as his body is laid under the blanket of Mother Earth. And soon I am groaning and dry-heaving, because I have been buried alive. A heavy stone has been laid on my chest to prevent me from rising up. I know that what I am sharing is not the death of the physical body, but the deliberate confinement of an energy body that survives death. This is a husk that must be given to the Earth and kept away from the living. I will myself to leave this energy husk in the ground, to let it suffocate and start to decompose.
Now I am above the ground, levitating and then flying. The sense of freedom is exhilarating. I can travel anywhere I want, according to my desire and imagination. I can indulge my passions and appetites. I can revisit old friends and old places, and travel to new ones. I enjoy myself like this for a time, then my astral ramblings begin to pall. I choose to rest now inside a tree, in the sleep of the heartwood.
In a few Ohio minutes, I seem to rest here for years or centuries. Then I rouse, ready for new life. I am drawn to a scene of passion, of a couple engaged in the sexual act. I stream between them, into the womb of the mother. I see myself now, from a witness perspective, as a newborn, pink and small enough to fit inside a parent's palm. This part of me has been reborn as a bear cub.
Who is the I that is watching? I am spirit, I am mind. I can return to a home among the stars. But I - as Silver Wolf - am one of those chosen to stay close to the land and watch over the Earth and those who share life upon it. I will visit them in their dreams, and I will call their dream souls to me, to remind them of essential things that humans must know but are forever forgetting.

It is enough. My heart thumps as I return to the self that is standing in the circle of stones.
My friend is still waiting beyond the portal stones. "Did you feel anything?" she asks. "Was this really a place of power for Native Americans?"
"Yes," I tell her. "You could say that."

~
I have recounted this episode exactly as it took place, nine years ago, in the woods in northern Ohio. Silver Wolf, a great shaman of an earlier time, made me know the nature and fate of three aspects of soul and spirit by inviting me to share his experience of what happens after death. The knowledge I gained is indelible, and guides me in my shamanic work and teaching, and in continuing efforts to develop models of the multidimensional self and geographies of the afterworld.

The man who blew things up

2012-01-05T04:45:00.002-05:00

“Pauli Effect” is a term invented to describe the way themere presence of Wolfgang Pauli, the pioneer of quantum mechanics, tended tocause things to blow up, especially physics experiments and equipment. At leastone experimental physicist (Otto Stern) banned Pauli from coming anywhere nearhis laboratory.
Pauli was brilliant, but he was alsoa roiling mass of conflicted emotions. His mother’s suicide, his father’ssubsequent marriage to a woman half his age, his discovery as a young adult thathis parents had concealed the fact that three of his grandparents were Jewish,his heavy drinking and a disastrous early union with a cabaret dancer who ranoff with another man, all contributed his violent mood swings. The way thematerial world seemed to react to him is a case study in how mind and matterinteract, so egregious that we can hardly miss drawing the lesson that thoughtsand feelings are actions that change the world we inhabit.

Pauli's friend andcolleague Rudolf Peierls (a German-born physicist who moved to England andlater worked on the Manhattan Project) described the Paul Effect as follows:“This was a kind of spell he was supposed to cast on people or objects in hisneighborhood, particularly in physics laboratories, causing accidents of allsorts. Machines would stop running when he arrived in a laboratory, a glassapparatus would suddenly break, a leak would appear in a vacuum system, butnone of these accidents would ever hurt or inconvenience Pauli himself.”

When importantexperimental equipment in Professor James Frank’s laboratory at the PhysicsInstitute at the University of Gottingen blew up forno apparent reason, someone remarked that this could be the Pauli effect.However, Pauli was nowhere in the area; he was on a train, traveling to Denmark. It waslater discovered that at the time of the lab explosion, the train carryingPauli from Zurichto Copenhagenwas making a stop at Gottingenstation.

When he arrived at Princeton in 1950, an expensive new cyclotron that hadrecently be installed burned for no obvious reason, and there was againspeculation about the Pauli Effect.

Such phenomenahappened outside the laboratory.

When the JungInstitute was inaugurated in Zurichin 1948, Pauli attended the opening ceremony, since Jung had asked him tobecome a “scientific patron” and so represent the convergence of physics andpsychology. At the time, Pauli's mind was turnng on the tension between twoearlier approaches to knowledge represented by the alchemist Robert Fludd andthe scientifst Johannes Kepler. When Pauli entered the reception room for theJung party, a large Chinese vase inexplicably slid off a table, creating aflood that drenched some of the distnguished guests. Pauli saw huge symbolicsignificance because of the echo of “Fludd” in the phenomenon of thespontaneous “flood”. This incident inspired him to write his paper “BackgroundPhysics”.

On anotheroccasion, Pauli was sitting at a table in the window of the Café Odeon,thinking intently about the color red and its feeling tones. While thinking“red”, he was unable to take his eyes off a large, unoccupied car parked infront of the restaurant. As he watched, the car burst into flames and his fieldof vision was filled with fiery red.

In yet another,quite hilarious, incident in New York,Pauli was lunching with Erwin Panofsky, the famous art historian and two otherscholars. When they rose from the table after dessert, three of the men foundthat they had been sitting - inexplicably - on whipped cream, now smeared overtheir trousered rumps. The only one unscathed, of course, was Pauli.

According to hisclose colleague Marcus Fierz, “Pauli believed thoroughly in his effect.” He experienced an unpleasant inner tensionbefore things blew up. After the event, he felt relief and release from tension,even moments of euphoria. No doubt he enjoyed his ever-growing reputation forproducing wickedly strange phenomena. This was, after all, the man who dressedup as Mephistopheles for a skit in front of Niels Bohr’s circle in Copenhagen.

The best story on the PauliEffect is from Rudolf Peierls. Some of Pauli’s fellow-scientists plotted tospoof the effect attributed to him at a reception. They carefully suspended achandelier by a rope that they intended to release when Pauli entered the room,causing the chandelier to crash down. “But when Pauli came, the rope becamewedged on a pulley and nothing happened – a typical example of the Pauli effect.”

It has been suggested that thereason Pauli was not invited to join the Manhattan Project – which recruitedmany physicists from his circle – was that the directors knew Pauli’sreputation and were worried that he would blow up something vital.

For more on Pauli, his long collaboration with Jung, hisdreams and his contribution to the theory of synchronicity, please read thechapter titled “The Man Who Blew Things Up” in my book The Secret History ofDreaming, published by New World Library.

A different drum

2012-01-01T23:30:00.000-05:00

New Year's Day, 2012

The little synthetic drum that has been my all butinseparable companion for 12 years is alive.It has been ensouled by use. It has powered journeys into other realms ofreality for groups from the Baltic to Brazil, from Sydney to San Francisco. Ithas called in the spirits and the animal guardians. It has helped to guidesouls in their transitions on the Other Side, and to bring vital energy backinto the bodies of hundreds of people who have suffered soul loss. And throughall of this, its voice has grown. At its last major outing, in southern Brazil,two professional musicians approached me during the first break, astonishedthat one small instrument could lay down so many complex waves of sound. Theysaid they felt they were listening to a whole orchestra, of voices as well asprimal instruments. Was there something unusual in the fabrication of the drum,and some secret to my playing?
      “The drum is alive,” I told them. “Andbecause it has so much spirit, the spirits come to play when I am playing it.”
      But then there was a problem, thatbecame serious only after the long journey home from Florianopolis in October.My little drum was getting tired. The drumhead had developed permanentwrinkles, as any face might age, and dull spots where the sound no longer sang.So, with a deep sigh, I purchased a new drum. The catalog description wasidentical to that of the original drum, but everything else was different. WhenI played the new drum in a local circle, it did not sing. It merely spoke, in arather high register without the thrilling resonance and deep mysteriousundertones of its senior. So I reverted to my old drum. She gave her best,while telling me, I’m so tired.
     The first day of the New Year seemedlike the right day to set things right. I invited a dear friend, a sister of mysoul who has shared adventures in two worlds with me for many years, to comedown into the Cave where I write and dream, and asked for her help to energizethe new drum, to open its “mouth” and charge it with the spirit of my shamanicwork. That’s my friend (or at any rate her energy double) on the couch with thedrums in the photo.
     I gave her the new drum, to startour improvised ceremony, and took up the elder of my many drums, the deerskindrum on which I painted the sea eagle that was my ally in my boyhood and carriedme on its wings to deep places of discovery and initiation in my nativeAustralia and in the Scotland of my paternal ancestors. Ah, the elder drum wasin wonderful voice. We both enjoyed the waves of sound passing from its deeperthroat to the young drum. I sensed something more: a direct transfer of energy.This inspired me to repeat the operation with other primal instruments in theCave, with a goatskin bodhron out ofIreland, with a kangaroo-skin drum from my native Oz, with an Afro-Brazilian agogo, with an Iroquois turtle rattle.Each time, we felt something join the young drum, and heard its voice shiftuntil it began to sing.

Time, now, for me to take up the drum that has accompaniedme on the roads of the soul for the past twelve years. In wave upon wave ofsound, we released all we have shared and let it wash over the junior drum. Nowit was time to fulfill the transfer. I took the young one from my friend. Idrummed in the Goddess pattern of twin spirals, cycling between the worlds ofbody and spirit, creation and dissolution, life and death and rebirth. I shiftedinto a soft and coaxing beat, the kind that might call home a lost child or alover who has gone Away. I made thunder in the Earth. I called in the animalpowers and the bird tribes. I tested whether this young one could sustain abeat strong enough to carry a traveling soul to and from the Lower World andthe Upper World. And my heart smiled as the young one sang, and our spiritssoared with her singing.
The older companion she has replaced will have an honored place in my cave, as an elder among my speaking drums. I'll take her out from time to time, to sing in the woods and by the water, and to drink the light of sun and moon.

~

I have recorded my own CD of shamanic drumming for dream travelers; "Wings for the Journey". It was recorded in the woods among a circle of shamanic dreamers and is available from Psyche Productions.

The synthentic drums mentioned above are REMO "Buffalo" drums. I use a small 16" model because I like to pack my drums in my suitcase and avoid excessive questioning at airport security. The beater that comes with REMO drums is too short for my taste, however. I use hand-made long-handled beaters made to my specifications and the heads are encased in deerskin.

I painted a very simple image on my new drum; simple can be good. My personal name for the double spiral is the Eyes of the Goddess. It was through this portal, quarter of a century ago, on my return from a visit to Newgrange in Ireland, that I found myself traveling to an ancient Iroquois woman shaman who insisted on instructing me in her own language - the first of a series of encounters that led me to change my life. I published part of that story in Dreamways of the Iroquois. It continues to unfold.

Reports from the Other Side: Geraldine Cummins and F.W.H. Myers

2011-12-30T09:43:00.000-05:00

Geraldine Cummins (1890-1969)

She came from the same Anglo-Irish milieu as William Butler Yeats, and wrote two plays that were performed at his beloved Abbey Theatre. Her mentor was the famous Irish medium Hester Dowden, said to have been the model for the psychic in Yeats' spirited one-act play The Words Upon the Window-Pane. When she started practicing as a psychic medium, Yeats was one of the first people to consult her.
Her name was Geraldine Cummins, and her life story as author, suffragette, medium and possible secret agent during World War II, is quite fascinating. On November 7, 1941, a month before the United States entered the war, she gave a private sitting for David Gray, the American envoy to Ireland, at the American Legation in Phoenix Park, Dublin. By automatic writing, she channeled a deceased British prime minister (and past president of the Society for Psychical Research), Arthur Balfour, who gave a list of Nazi quislings in Ireland. She proceeded to deliver a warning in the name of the recently deceased mother of President Franklin D. Roosevelt: "My boy will have to make an important decision in the next few months. I want him to throw down the gauntlet." David Gray, who was married to Eleanor Roosevelt's aunt, transmitted the message to the White House.*

Yeats in 1932

Dr Wendy Cousins, a lecturer in the School of Nursing at the University of Ulster, has written an excellent essay on Geraldine Cummins for The Paranormal Review that has fired up my imagination, not least because of the connections with Yeats, whose adventures in the spirit realm are a theme of my own Dreamer's Book of the Dead.

I'll confine myself here to Geraldine Cummins' role in bringing through the possible afterlife adventures and reflections of F.W.H. Myers, the great Victorian psychic researcher whose driving cause was to prove the soul's survival of physical death. He died in 1901, before completing his masterwork, published two years later as Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. Given more time, he would have rounded out his immense dossier on the ability of consciousness to function outside the body with a thorough account of "spirit return" and the psychic mediums he studied.
Geraldine Cummins may have given him the opportunity to do better than that. She channeled two books in which Myers describes the afterworld as a resident. The first was published as The Road to Immortality, the second as Beyond Human Personality.
I cannot judge whether the material in these books came from the individual spirit of Myers, or from some essence of his personality and worldview communicating from a higher plane, or from a "secondary personality" of the medium. What I can say is that the content is immensely intriguing.

F.W.H. Myers (1843-1901)

The two books provide a Westerngeography of afterlife transitions that is plausible and suggests paths formeditation and for exploration and development as road maps for furtherjourneys.
The point of soul’s journey, the author insists,is “the evolution of mind”, and “the mind develops through manifestation.” He describes seven planes of reality and consciousness. In the manner of a classicist (which Myers was) the author describes the first level beyond the physical world as Hades. It is not to be confused with hell. It is an "intermediate state" where the traveling spirit begins to become aware of its condition.
The next level he calls the Plane of Illusion (or Terrene Imagination). Here the spirit lives in a dream world shaped by memories of earthly things. He may build himself a home, or a whole city, as he discovers the creative power of imagination. Inhabitants of this plane are drawn to different people and situations according to their desires, their affinities and their imagination (or lack thereof). The worldliest, most wicked, or most "animal-like" spirits don't prosper here. Beyond Human Personality contains vivid reports of spirits that slide back down into Hades and are then drawn back down to earth to occupy new bodies.
The right direction is up, always up. The next level up he calls the Plane of Color, or the Eidos (in the Platonic sense of ideal Form). You don't get there without assuming a new, and subtler body, and
that has to be earned. "Existence in this state is not governed by the senses. It is more directly controlled by mind. It is still an existence in form, and therefore an existence in substance. This substance is a very rarefied matter. It might be called an air of matter."
There are three levels above and beyond, rising to the Seventh Plane where "the spirit and its various souls are now fused and pass into the Supreme Mind, the Imagination of God, wherein resides the conception of the whole, of universe after universe, of all states of existence, of past, present and future, of all that has been and all that shall be. Herein is continuous and complete consciousness, the true reality."

The description of stages in the evolution of mind in which we become aware of oursoul families and our connectedness on higher levels is stimulating:

The higher the ego climbs on the ladder of consciousness, thenearer it draws to other kindred souls…In time they are able to enter into theother souls’ memories, perceive their experiences and be sensible of them as ifthey were theirs. Mind becomes communal in the last stages, for the spirit, theunifying principle, is tending all the time to produce greater harmony, andtherefore greater unity. [from The Road to Immortality]
-

* David Gray, U.S. Ambassador to Eire from 1940-1947 and a strong opponent of the Nazis, wrote a preface to Geraldine Cummins' 1951 autobiography, Unseen Adventures.

Speakers for the living

2011-12-28T13:13:00.000-05:00

Leonora Piper, William James's "White Crow"

I've been drawn back into the world of the Victorian spirit hunters, especially that great and eloquent pioneer of psychic research and psychology, Frederick (F.W.H.) Myers, and his famous American friend William James.

There is an amazing moment in one of James's sessions with Leonora Piper, the Boston medium James studied and consulted over many years and came to call his "white crow".* She was supposedly communicating on behalf of Richard Hodgson, a great friend of James who had been secretary of the American Society of Psychical Research. Though "tremendously athletic", according to James, Dick Hodgson had died suddenly playing handball, leaving two book projects unfinished - and a half-joking promise that, if he died first, he would communicate from the Other Side and provide evidence of survival.

James grilled the Hodgson personality over and over, seeking proof positive that it was the dead man talking, through the revelation of personal secrets and codes neither the medium nor the sitter could have known. The demands this approach imposed on Hodgson's memory (assuming it was Hodgson) became ridiculous. Assessing the notes from these long sessions (James conceded) bored him "almost to extinction".

But then something will come through that is thrilling even to a skeptical reader a century later. Here's what got me very excited, in the transcript of a "voice-sitting" on May 21, 1906:

Speaking through Mrs Piper, Hodgson tells James that Myers (who died in 1901) is with him. "Myers and I are also interested in the Society over here. You understand that we have to have a medium on this side while you have a medium on your side, and through the two we communicate with you."

The "Society" mentioned is the Society for Psychical Research, which was (and is) dedicated to producing evidence of "supernormal" (Myers' phrase) phenomena, including contact between the living and the deceased. Think about the statement made via Mrs. Piper's vocal chords. While there is a Society for Psychical Research on this side, there is a similar Society on the Other Side. They, too, hold seances or sittings with mediums. While James is listening to the voice of his dead friend through a speaker for the dead, Hodgson is apparently listening to the voice of his living friend through a speaker for the living.

Was this the ultimate folie de grandeur of a psychic charlatan, promoting her own profession - that of medium - to the status of indispensability on the Other Side? I have a notion that this part of the reading, at least, can be trusted. There are sensitives among us who are more able than others to pick up presences and messages from the Other Side. It's not such a stretch to suppose that in the same way, there are people on the Other Side who are better as inter-world communicators than others, and may even have the ability to call spirits of the living for a session with relatives or colleagues who are eager to talk with them.

* Having concluded that MrsPiper's communications were for real, even though the sources could not bedetermined beyond doubt, William James declared: "If you wish to upset thelaw that all crows are black, it is enough if you prove that one crow is white.My white crow is Mrs. Piper." [William James onPsychical Research edited by Gardner Murphy and Robert O.Ballou. New YorK: The Viking Press, 1960, 41]

Santa the Reindeer Shaman

2011-12-24T00:00:00.000-05:00

Sami shaman with magic drum. Etching by O.H. von Rode (1767)

In this holiday season, I received a cri de coeur from the mother of a young boy named James:

James just found out that his parents stuff his stockings each year instead of Santa Claus. He is crestfallen. I asked him if he remembered a story you told him about a real live, animal-loving "Santa" that lived long ago, and he did, but neither of us could conjure enough details to make a suitable retelling. Could you please give me a reference to find the story of this previous, real-life "Santa"? It just might save Christmas for a certain 5-year old boy who yearns to believe.

I remembered a conversation in which I suggested that the original Santa was a shaman of the Sami, a reindeer-herding people of Lapland, reputed to have the power to call up the winds and fly through the air, and that the reason his coat is red is that it was the flayed skin of a reindeer. I have seen Sami drums with images of a shaman flying through the three tiers of the shamanic cosmos on a sleigh pulled by reindeer. But while there is a rich ethnography on Sami shamanism, I could think of no source that would be suitable for a young boy. So I took on the assignment of writing my own version of the first Santa, addressed to a boy in danger of losing his belief in Christmas magic.

To a Boy Who Found Out It Wasn’t Santa Who Brought the Presents

Dear James

I heard you found out that it wasn’t Santa who put the presents in your stocking, but people who live with you every day.

I know this is a shocking discovery, and it would not be surprising if you felt cheated and confused.

This is also a very big moment on your journey of growing up. Actually, it’s not big, it’s ENORMOUS.

You have come to a fork in your road. If you let your feelings of disappointment and betrayal take you down the wrong path, you could very easily end up in the world of the Meanies who don’t believe in any kind of magic at all, and therefore never have any. Go the other way and you’ll come to know that, even if Mommy and Daddy filled the stocking, Santa is REAL. Not only is he real; he is MORE real than you could understand before you found out about the presents.

Let me explain.

When a story is as important as Santa’s, lots of people will try to tell it their own way. So you’ll hear that Santa was a saint who traveled the world producing marvels and good works many centuries ago. Or that he was a winter king in a great northern forest. Meanies might tell you he was dreamed up by slick advertising men so they can sell more stuff. It’s often said that Santa lives at the North Pole with his elves. Most children I know, and some grown-ups, picture him flying through the sky with a team of reindeer. They are more right than all the rest.

I am going to tell you the true and original story of Santa. Accept no substitutes.

Long ago and far away, where the sun shines all night on Midsummer’s Eve and never shows its face at Midwinter, a boy they called Dreamer lived with his family among the Reindeer People. They were a simple folk who lived on fish and the fruits of the earth, on reindeer milk and sometimes, in the hungry depths of winter, on reindeer meat. They followed the reindeer through the cycle of the seasons, forever in search of something to eat. They made tools and toys and holy statues out of reindeer bone, and when they danced around their fires, men and women both wore crowns of reindeer antlers.

Dreamer was an awkward boy. He couldn’t run or move as fast on snow shoes as the others. He wasn’t very lucky at fishing, and he couldn’t lift the great tree-trunks they used for their winter games of log-tossing. They called him Dreamer because his mind always seemed to be wandering somewhere else. He loved the reindeer, and sometimes his mother would find him dreaming among them, arms wrapped in sleep around the belly of a reindeer cow.

Even the wild reindeer approached him without fear. That was why, one hungry winter, his father made him go out with the hunters, to call the wild reindeer from the shadows of the evergreens. As a magnificent bull reindeer trotted towards him, the boy's father muttered, “Take him. He’s yours.” The boy trembled, with his father’s long bow in his hands, looking into the deep steady eyes of the reindeer.

Impatient, his father threw his spear. Blood spurted from the great heart of the stag over the boy's chest. He dropped to his knees by the body of the reindeer, asking forgiveness. “We do this so our people may live.”

His father punished him for his failure to take the kill by forcing him to skin the reindeer with his own knife, and carry the hide back to the village on his shoulders. Staggering under the weight, he wore the reindeer hide bloody side out, so he seemed to be wrapped in a bright red coat.

That night, while the boy’s father and mother were snoring under their sleeping skins, he woke and looked up through the smoke hole into a field of stars. Through the field, a reindeer was racing on flying hooves. It swooped down through the smoke hole and stood over the boy, so close the steam from its nostrils entered him. He understood, without human words, what he was to do. He was to make a drum, using the hide he had carried back from the woods, binding it to the frame he would carve from an evergreen. He would use a piece of antler as a beater. An old one who lived alone in the woods would show him things he needed to know to make the drum right.

I don’t know how much you know about drums. This was not the kind of drum you see at a concert, or in a marching band, or in a toy shop. It was the kind of drum you can ride. The boy did not know that until he made it, and learned to tap-tap-tap with his bone hammer until the winds changed and the air was filled with the sound of drumming hooves.

Another night came, at the darkest time of the year, when the reindeer looked down through the smoke hole and the wind whispered, Tomorrow. The boy walked alone in the gray absence of dawn to the tree that had provided the frame of his drum. He made himself a nest among soft needles the reindeer had not touched.

As soon as he touched the drum, the stag appeared, different from before. Now his back was covered by a scarlet saddlecloth. The boy understood what he was meant to do. He swung himself up, as someone else might get up on a horse. There was no bit or bridle; he just held on to the reindeer’s neck as he took off at a terrific pace, heading ever north across frozen marshes and ice floes, into a world of white. Ahead, he saw a huge glowing disk very low on the horizon. It seemed he was flying into the face of the moon.

The boy found himself in the presence of an immense being that blazed with light. It was like looking at the moon, caught in the bare branches of a giant oak. The boy’s vision changed and he saw a woman more beautiful than anything he had ever imagined, a White Lady crowned with great glowing antlers. He knelt before the Reindeer Queen. She smiled a moon-bright smile and raised him up and held him to her breast like a mother.

She told him, “Darker times are coming. You will need to become a man quickly, and more than a man, to help bring back the light. When the time comes, I will call you and show you what to do.”

When the ice broke up, monsters appeared in the inlets where the Reindeer People went to fish. The monsters reared from the waters with the heads of leering dragons, then disgorged terrible iron-clad men bent on killing and plunder.

The Iron Men stormed over the land. The boy's father, now headman of his village, gathered the herders and the older boys to defend their women and their tame reindeer. Fearing for his son’s life and contemptuous of his fighting skills, he ordered Dreamer to stay with the herd.

When the din of battle sounded across the hill, and the boy's mother armed herself with a bone knife, the boy took his drum and sat among the reindeer, in the long grass. He tapped with the bone hammer until he felt himself stretch and stretch. Then he was flying with the reindeer, through the arctic rainbow to the palace of the Reindeer Queen.

Bright as the full moon, she told him, it was time to meet Brother Bear. The great bear rose up before him like a shaggy mountain. Dreamer wasn’t afraid, well, not as much as he might have been if the Reindeer Queen had not made the introductions.

When Brother Bear opened his arms, the boy stepped forward and hugged him hard, though his arms could cover only a tiny part of the bear’s tremendous girth. When Brother Bear hugged him back, closing his mighty arms, Dreamer fell through the heart of the mountain, into the world of battle.

The Iron Men were baying victory. What landed before them, making thunder in the earth, silenced their cries. Sword-arms and spear-arms ceased hacking and cutting, frozen in mid-thrust. Brother Bear towered between the Iron Men and the herders. He reached down and plucked the invaders from the field like toy soldiers. He tossed them back towards their dragon boats. The remnants of the Iron Men broke and fled, throwing down weapons and plates of armor to speed their escape. Rejoicing, Dreamer's father ran to bring his wife and son the good news. He found the boy sleeping under his drum, among the reindeer. He poked the boy with the toe of his boot. “Dreaming again, eh? Rouse yourself, boy! Come and see how we won the good fight.”

As the boy struggled to his feet, very wobbly, the form of the great bear began to wobble too, fading to a thin mist, then gone.

When she called him again, the Reindeer Queen told the boy, “When you are grown, you will be wide and strong and big-bellied, like Brother Bear. And all who see you will smile and be jolly, except men of evil hearts, who will flee before you.”

So the boy grew to be a man, wide-bellied and jolly, fond of stuffing himself with summer berries and tracking the bees to the best honeypots in the trees. When he tapped on his drum and the reindeer came to take him flying now, they came as a whole team and he road in a sleigh that they pulled through the sky, since he was now too broad to ride on the back of a single animal. Whistling for favorable winds, he traveled far beyond the lands of the Reindeer People.

His biggest journey began when he was old, in the eyes of men, and the Reindeer Queen called him to tell him that there was new star in the sky, and its light was coming to the Northlands.

He flew to a place where the wisest of the wise were waiting for this star. He stood with them on top of a mountain, He saw the night sky open like a smoke hole to reveal the new star. Light came down from it like a pillar, and inside the pillar he saw the face of a radiant child that melted his heart.

He wanted to lay gifts before the child, but he had nothing except his beating heart.

“Drum for me from your heart,” the star-child told him. “Drum for the hearts of men, to help them open to give and share in peace on this night of the turning year.”

Santa has been doing that ever since. When he drums, hearts open like the roofs of houses, and shining gifts come pouring down.

Whoever gives in a spirit of love and joy on this special night has Santa inside him, or her.
When Mommy and Daddy were stuffing your stocking, Santa was there with them.

Now, I know that when you’ve seen something with your eyes it can be hard to believe a different thing unless you can see that with your eyes too.

So I want you to know this.

In a great museum in Europe there is a drum made of reindeer skin. On it is an old, old painting of a man flying through the sky on a sleigh pulled by reindeer. I’m not saying this is Santa’s drum. I think his drum is too lively to ever get caught and stuck in a museum. I am saying that whoever painted and used that drum knew how you make flying reindeer, and how you get down chimneys.

I first published this in 2008. Reposting by popular request.

Zeus lays a dream trap

2011-12-21T13:19:00.000-05:00

Zeus sends deceptive dream to Agamemnon
(Flaxman illustration to 1905 Riverside Press edition of The Iliad)

Literary dreams have shaped cultural understanding of whathappens in dreaming and may actually have influenced the way people dreamed incertain societies.

For the early Greeks, Homer was the closest thing to the Bible.

One of the things they learned from him was that the gods speak through dreams, but can also use dreams to transmit deceptive messages. Another lesson was that we want to check what is behind the mask of a dream messenger. A familiar face may be a disguise, and we want to grasp the motives and agenda of the guiser.

In a scene in Book II of the Iliad, Zeus decides to avenge the honor of his protege Achilles, who issulking in his tent, by making it clear to the Greeks that he is theindispensable hero. Zeus lays a trap for Agamemnon, the leader of the Greekhost, who has dishonored Achilles.

Zeus summons Oneiros and orders him to deliver a misleading message to Agamemnon. The name Oneiros means Dream. Here a dream is actually a dream messenger, an independent entity.

To carry out Zeus' command, Oneiros puts on the semblance of Nestor, a trusted comrade of Agamemnon, and visits thesleeping king in this form. Standing over Agamemnon's head, the dream visitor tells him - quoting Zeus himself -that the gods are no longer taking sides in the war.Therefore the Greeks should make haste to attack Troy,which will fall easily.

Trusting the dream,Agamemnon recounts it to his battle captains, and they launch their attack -only to find that the walls of Troyare not easily breached, and they cannot succeed without making amends toAchilles and bringing him back into the fray.

We understand from this tale the sources of the Greek suspicion of oneiropompoi, or "dream senders". We see that in dreams, as in other situation, we want to check the reliability of our sources.

Cicero observed, in his treatise on divination, “although these stories were made up by a poet, they are not farfrom the usual matter of dreams.”

Pink silk road

2011-12-20T07:32:00.002-05:00

Last night I dreamed I set up a director's chair for myself at the front of a huge gathering. Instead of canvas, the seat was pink shot silk.

Waking, I remembered an encounter with a curious figure in a thriller of a dream I recorded in August 2006 - a huge bear-like man dressed in a pink frock coat with an amazing pink tie that grew to any length he imagined.

Yes, I know Freud will be stirring now but I suspect there's much more going on, so I'll follow the pink silk road in my dreams and beyond.

Mad love and objective chance

2011-12-19T14:08:00.000-05:00

André Breton, portrait by Max Ernst

Coincidence multiplies when we pay attention, above all when we are charged with certain energies and moving outside the grooves of familiar routines and mindsets. André Breton, the French Surrealist, called coincidence “objective chance”. In his amazing narrative Amour fou (“Mad Love”) Breton shows us the state of mind, and the pattern of behavior, that turns us into walking synchronicity magnets.
What required is the kind of openness to the unexpected the French call disponibilité and, beyond this the choice of “lyric behavior”: the willingness to give oneself to the “dazzling revenge” of the imagination on a world of stubborn facts.
Breton describes how two people joined by passion or strong interest become a powerful double attractor for coincidence. "I would be tempted to say that two people walking near each other constitute a single influencing body, primed." He compares this phenomenon to "those sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors out of regions that were not before, producing flashes of lightning." The “single influencing body” is formed when he is traveling with his lover, but also when he is walking around the flea market with the sculptor Giacometti.
The sculptor is thinking about the undefined face of a woman in his current piece, and finds a strange mask that speaks to his need. Breton has harbored an odd desire to possess an ashtray shaped like a woman's high-heeled shoe, and finds a curious spoon in same shape. In the chance discovery of these trouvailles (found objects) we sense the hand of an unseen player behind the scenes.
Breton writes about how, if we pay attention, we may notice not only that life rhymes but that it can follow a poetic mode of composition. He describes how all the elements in a poem he write in 1923 manifested on a "Night of the Sunflower" in Les Halles eleven years later, as if the poem was taking root in the world.

Mad Love is a paean to the magic that comes when we go about the world charged with love and desire, magnetically drawing people and events to us in novel ways. Breton does pause to reflect on what happens when passion is thwarted by worldly circumstances; “Indeed passion, with its magnificent wild eyes, must suffer at having to mix in the human struggle”.

It is always with surprise and fright that I have seen...harmless complaints...grow more acute. They hone themselves on the stone of silence, abrupt and unbreakable by anything at all, quite like absence and death. Overhead, between the lovers, flies a rain of poisoned arrows, soon so thick as to prevent any exchange of glances. Then, hastily, hateful egotism walls itself into a windowless tower. The attraction is broken; even the loveliness of the beloved face goes into hiding; a wind of ashes sweeps everything away; the pursuit of life is compromised.

And if objective chance is still operating, its operations will be chancy, for we attract or repel different things according to the emotions and attitudes that live in us.....

Rose Gate among the stars

2011-12-18T23:18:00.005-05:00

There’s a garden among the stars

where flowers are gates to other worlds.

I see a Lady stepping from a constellation of stars into a boat in the sky. I want to meet her. This will be a far journey, and I want the drum to give me fuel and to help me to return safely. My friend is a good drummer,and she is ready to provide what I need.
     When I get my body settled on the sofa in order to slip out of it, the Lady has vanished. I search for her in the field of stars. I see something like a pink rose, out there in the wild blue. Is this her sign?
     The rose calls me, unfurling its soft petals, revealing a portal. I slip into the heart of the rose. Now I am sliding down a chute that might be its stem. I make a soft landing in a gentle scene, a Victorian garden where a table is set for high tea. A handsome, very properly dressed Victorian lady is pouring.
      I roam the garden, wanting tounderstand why I was drawn here. Young children are playing here, including agirl on a swing. A pleasant clergyman in country tweeds is playing with them. I know at once that this is the Rev. Charles Dodgson, known to countless readersas “Lewis Carroll”.

As I observe him among the children, I realize I am present at the inception of some of Lewis Carroll’s best ideas. He looks at a rabbit burrow and the roots of a tree with the eyes of one of the children. With this borrowed sight, he can picture Alice dropping down the rabbit-hole into another world. As a child smiles at ginger cat in the garden, he sees the smile on the face of the Cheshire Cat. As he contemplates the pretty young girl swinging high into the air, he gets the idea– not actually used in the Alice books, as far as I can recall – for another way of entering another dimension. The swing goes up above the bar…and you’re off into another world.

I borrow from where his imagination will lead. I think about the “Drink Me” bottles Alice found, and decide to see what will happen now if I drink from the one that makes you very much smaller.

Quick as thought,I am shrinking so fast I don’t even have time to see how that blade of grass grew as big as a royal palm, or how that ant became a black six-legged elephant.
Dropping between the smallest of particles, I enter a universe as big as the one I came from, a cosmos contained within a speck of a speck of a speck, something you couldn’t find even with an electron microscope. This revelation is as simple as cracking your head open. It’s about finding the infinite in a grain of sand, as the poet did. It’s about universe hopping, pearl by pearl, on the necklace of Indra.

I am eager to explore this fresh universe, full of promise. And to find the Lady.

But something falls across my path. It moves jerkily, an armored, jointed, mechanical thing. Its shape reminds me a little of cardboard periscopes I played with as a boy –the kind with joints that enabled you to peek around a corner. But this metallic thing is taller than a skyscraper. At its end is a rectangular hollow or “mouth” that might be an immense suction cup.
Guard yourself, says an inner voice I have learned to trust. With this, an impermeable, transparent shield goes up, and I know I am safe, and invisible to whatever intruded.

Steer for the Light Ship.

   I see it again now, in the distance. It looks like a kind of space station. I understand that it is a place of transit and communication with higher intelligences as they move in and out of range of human thought bands.
   I will go there on another journey.
   For now, I am content to come back to the body on the couch, settle in, and stretch and wiggle around to make sure I did not leave too much of myself out there in the field of stars..

The fragrance of the pink rose is still with me. I sip a glass of wine and write with its beauty within and around me:

There’s a garden among the stars

where flowers are gates to other worlds.

Try the pink rosebud that opens shyly.

plunge through its smooth and fragrant folds

into the Victorian garden where tea is laid

and sweet girls play and show a blushing priest

a bunnyhole that leads to Wonderland

and a ginger cat issues opaque directions.

Take the dare of the “Drink Me” bottle

and you’ll become inconceivably small

even faster than Alice,so fast you won’t see

a grass blade rear into a royal palm

and ants turn into six-legged horses.

You’ll grow, by diminishing, into a world

vaster than the one you knew before,

you’ll swim among stars no telescope has seen,

you’ll find light-ships among the galaxies,

immensity held in the iota of a speck

that eludes the electron microscope

but not the home-drawn voyager.

As I enter another Northern winter, I am doing what I often do in this inward time: mining my old journals. I have previously published the Rose Gate poem, but not the narrative of the journey that inspired it. Yes: I have made (and guided) many other journeys to universes within the inconceivably small.

Homage to the Pink Rose. Photos by Kirsten Love Lauzon.

Where's the Hitch?

2011-12-16T10:59:00.001-05:00

In his autobiography, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens declared, “I personally want to ‘do’ death in the active and not the passive and to be there to look it in the eye and be doing something when it comes for me.” It seems he fulfilled this wish, chronicling his struggle with esophageal cancer until he succumbed to pneumonia, a side-effect, yesterday, aged 62. I knew Christopher when we were both in our 20s. Though I often disagreed with his opinions - which veered from youthful Trotskyite verbal bomb-throwing to neocon advocacy of America's disastrous war in Iraq - I admired his blistering wit, his ferocious literacy, his wicked contrarian courage. He never met a tide he wasn’t willing to throw himself against, preferably with a bottle of Johnny Walker Black (his “breakfast of champions”) in hand.

Fare well, Christopher Hitchens. You denied God and gods, and spurned the heaven of religions as a "celestial North Korea". You are now entering a larger geography than you knew in the 60-some countries from which you reported. May your many gifts, and your delight in the dance and slash of words, serve you on the road of this immense journey. May you avoid leaving any part of you stuck in a bottle of Johnny Black. May you file fresh accounts from new territories, and find native guides who will help you to understand what you are experiencing. May your paths be open.

Life as Marcella

2011-12-15T16:28:00.006-05:00

I am Marcella, called the Songbird because of my voice and because I can make men’s bodies sing. I can write my story in my own hand, because my father paid for a tutor. He was a merchant who sailed to the Bosphorus and the Black Sea.

Bruno brings me figs and young green olives of Lucca, the best of the new harvest. The cloth of gold that trims my dress belonged to my mother. The mad monk of Florence tried to kill her for wearing it, under his sumptuary laws. Witch, they called her, as they call me, though none dares to raise a hand against me so long as I have the favor of the bishop. I confess that I sewed the mouth of a toad shut to punish a calumniator for speaking against me and to silence his abuses, and that I melted a wax imago of Cosimo’s organ after he raped me.

I will never marry, but I know men and they know me. There is no one in the city as practiced in the arts of love, though there are acts I will not perform, not even for the bishop.

Bruno will guard my body with his life, and he is as strong as a bear. But I know I will not be allowed the fullness of my years. I have no wish to survive the withering of my body, still firm and juicy as a maiden’s after forty summers.

I will heed the wishes of my sisters of the Hive. We are about in all the countries of Christendom and in many that have never heard of Christ or accepted his message.

I wrote these lines after leading a group journey to a Chamber of Mirrors where you can look into the lives of personalities in other times who are part of your multidimensional family. Participants in the workshop were asked to write an autobiographical statement in the voice of a personality of another time. The voice that wanted to speak through me was that of Marcella. Her reference to her mother's persecution by a "mad monk" (evidently Savonarola, a Dominican who ruled Florence and staged the notorious Bonfire of the Vanities before he was excommunicated and executed in 1498) suggests she lived in 16th century Italy. I am glad to know her, because in most of my impressions of past lives closely associated with my own, I have found myself linked to men, typically men of power.

Where are the women? I have often asked myself. Oh, there is that woman of the future; I feel her even now, as I write. She is a priestess and a scientist, working to restore our world, seven generations into the future. Dreaming is central to her practice and that of her Order, and I am driven by a sense of obligation to her, the obligation - through my work as a dream teacher - to help make her possible.

Perhaps Marcella and I will now be able to share gifts. In psychological terms, such episodes may mean that I am getting more deeply in touch with my female side, and I would be happy with that. Except that the encounter also feels transpersonal. Jane Robert's Seth insists that "the entire reincarnational framework must involve both sexual experiences. Abilities cannot be developed by following a one-sex line. There must be experiences in motherhood and fatherhood." Perhaps I am making a little progress.

Marcella hints at an Order of women content to call themselves a Hive. I have encountered this language, and similar women, in other times and other lands, "in all the countries of Christendom and in many that have never heard of Christ or accepted his message", just as Marcella says.

Detail of a 16th century portrait of an unknown woman (sometimes identified as Lucrezia Borgia) by Bartolemeo Veneto.

Robin Hood, Changing Woman & the Battle of Britain

2011-12-09T06:47:00.006-05:00

I am walking with companions across hills and fields with a view to London and the English Channel. A war is being waged in the air. Though the main battles are far away, large pieces of debris – and small airplanes that look no bigger than crop dusters, some even smaller – come crashing down around us.

There is no sense of panic. The falling planes and pieces of metal seem to be coming down very slowly, slowly enough to dodge them even if they are coming straight at us. I do this several times. Their substance also seems softer than shrapnel or metal. I feel I could push them away with my hand as if they were merely cardboard or felt (and may do this too).

I lead my group down into London, to a square near the dockyards. No sign of modern traffic congestion. We gather a great group of people, mostly women, in the square. We sign and dance in a circle. Around us, at the cardinal directions, heraldic devices are set up on posts. We are singing and dancing to bring change.

I lead the group in singing an old song of Changing Woman

There is a woman who weaves the night sky
See how she spins, see her fingers fly
She is within us from beginning to end
Our Grandmother, sister and friend
She changes everything she touches
Everything she touches changes

The women, in particular, love this. We spin faster and faster, turning deosil (to the right). Then I pause the group, and step into the center of the great circle.

I notice with clarity, for the first time, the devices set up on the post that is now facing me; I think this is on the north side of the circle.

There are the words “ROBIN” and “AIR”, separate, and in capitals. There is a symbol that at first appears to be an anchor but I think is a bow and arrow. With a thrill of excitement I realize that these devices are related to Robin Hood and that the square was the scene of a drama from his life. With this recognition comes the sense that we are succeeding in calling up ancestral forces to help with the battle that has been raging in the skies and could soon reach the land.

Now I hear the great voice, loud and merry, of an Englishman who is coming to join us. I can now withdraw from leading the people and leave him to take charge.

Feelings: Excited, stirred.

First thoughts: I feel like I was a time traveler in the period of the Battle of Britain. Though I appeared substantial to those around me, I seemed impervious to things that would ordinarily wound or destroy a body – perhaps because I was moving in a subtle energy body, or had unusual powers, such as the ability to slow the experience of time (so the falling planes appeared to be coming down in slow motion) and to thin and loosen the molecular structure of objects.

Was I in my present body, or in the body of a contemporary person? Not sure.

It seems one of the key assignments of my dream self was to help call up ancestral forces, to awaken the sleeping powers of the land to support the living in a struggle for survival. An incident in the “psychic Battle of Britain”, perhaps…

Bear tracks to the cave of the vanishing god

2011-12-06T18:14:00.012-05:00

My day began with my little dog pushing his bushy face against mine as I lay back on the pillow. I petted him and sang to him. Without considering the content, I found I was singing the Romanian version of a song to call the spirit Bear that is a favorite in my workshops.

Romanian friends helped me make the translation when I taught in Bucharest a couple of years ago.

Nu plânge micutule

Ursul danseze pentru tine

Don't cry little one
Don't cry little one
The Bear is coming to dance for you
The Bear is coming to dance for you

After walking the dogs, I went online and found a Romanian Facebook friend had just commented on the article I posted here about the Vapor Drinker I met while traveling to Santa Fe for the board meeting of the Society for Shamanic Practitioners last weekend

When I told him I am returning to Romania in October 2012, to lead an adventure in shamanic dreaming and dream archaeology in the Bucegi mountains, he replied:

Ursii te asteapta! "The bears are waiting for you."

I shared today's Bear story with the physician who is the current president of the Society for Shamanic Practitioners, who told me he loves bears after I led the group in singing the Bear song. He told me that his grandfather was Romanian.

Right after this, I received an email from my coordinator in Romania telling me that she is considering a workshop site called....The Cabin of the Bears.

Good stories can have many installments, or sequels. I suspect that this one is going to go far.

There is a tribe of gypsies in Romania called the Ursari, or Bear People. They go from village to village dancing with trained bears at fairs. -

The Bear may also be at the heart of the ancient mystery religion of the Dacians (in what is now Romania). Herodotus and other ancient Greek writers mention a mysterious god of the Getae named Zalmoxis. Most likely (the etymology is disputed) this name means "Bear Skin" or "He Who Wears the Bear Skin", deriving from the tradition that the infant Zalmoxis was wrapped in a bear hide (zalmon, in Getic).-

On a deeper level, the Bear connection involves the Underworld journey. Zalmoxis is one of the god-men who dies and is reborn. He goes down into the Underworld as the bear goes down into its cave, to hibernate. Zalmoxis reappears after three years to impart the "knowledge of the skies" to humans. Central to his teachings was the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, and the idea that we cannot heal the body without healing the soul. Mircea Eliade wrote a monograph about Zalmoxis subtitled "The Vanishing God".

To know Zalmoxis, perhaps, we have to dream him. Romania seems ripe for fresh adventures in dream archaeology, in which we use the techniques of Active Dreaming to open direct channels to ancient knowledge, and then use the best of modern science and scholarship to confirm our leads. -

The vapor drinker and the hungry road

2011-12-05T11:29:00.013-05:00

Albuquerque-Santa Fe, New Mexico

In The Famished Road, Nigerian author Ben Okri takes us deep inside the lives of those who are at home (and not at home) in the worlds of the living and of the spirits. This extraordinary novel seized me with the first lines, which I had to read over and over, not for comprehension, let alone to turn them into a pale paraphrase, but to let them dwell fully inside me:

In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.

I took the book as my in-flight reading on my journey to New Mexico last weekend for a board meeting of the Society for Shamanic Practitioners. The narrator is a boy of the kind called abiku in Nigeria, who may be fated to die young because he has spirit companions on the Other Side who want him to return to them soon and will do almost anything to pull him out of the land of the living. Madame Koto's palm-wine bar is his constant hangout, and its clientele make the denizens of the Space Bar in Star Wars look like country club golfers in plaid pants.

I was seized by descriptions of how, as the living raise a glass or a fork or a cigarette to their lips, the spirits pressing thick about them dive in to get the first taste. The spirits drink the vapor of booze or food or smokes rather than the solid stuff. By my experience and observation, this is very much how it is, though few in modern Western society are able to perceive it. I have never met a genuine alcoholic, for example, who is not afflicted by a press of dead drunks trying to get another drink - that is to say, the spirit of the bottle - through them.

I was thinking about this when I deplaned at Albuquerque airport. On my way down to baggage claim, I was greeted by a crescent line of cheery people ringing handbells, with a large explanatory sign that read: "ENCHANTMENT. Albuquerque Handbells Ensemble." Nice.

As I rode the last escalator down, I was astonished to see a lean man in dark glasses puffing on a cigarette. Not something you expect to see in a U.S. airport these days. When I got closer, I saw that he was not blowing smoke. Rather, as he sucked on the tube, a fine mist - a vapor - rose around him.

After I took my seat at the front of the airport shuttle, he came up the steps, still sucking on the strange cigarette. "Excuse me," I spoke to him. "I would like to know about your ghost cigarette."

He took this as an invitation to take the vacant seat next to me. He explained how the e-cigarette, as he called it, simulates the act of tobacco smoking by using heat to vaporize a propylene glycerine liquid solution into an aerosol mist that is inhaled.

I told him about the vapor drinkers in the novel. "When I saw you, I thought a character had stepped out of Madame Koto's bar." He laughed and shared part of his life story. A writer and artist, he has traveled the two worlds, experimenting with lucid dreaming and the shamanic use of hallucinogens. He quickly agreed with me that the most powerful dreamers and shamans have no need of chemicals beyond those produced in their own bodies. He told me about his friend Francis Huxley's early work in Amazonia and Haiti, adding two books to my always immense reading list.

He had lived in Bali, and gave me a thrilling, step by step account of rituals of village exorcism in which the powers of good - barong - must be mustered against evil spirits led by the terrifying demon queen, the Rangda.

All of this made for a wonderfully fast and fun ride from Albuquerque to Santa Fe. As we got off the bus, I noticed another man carrying a marvelous leather bag shaped a bit like a tall drum. "It's a goat," he told me when I complimented him on his carry-on. "I got it in Africa forty years ago. It holds everything I need for my trips." I looked more closely and saw that the bag had indeed been fashioned from a whole goatskin.

I make a round trip by airplane most weeks of the year, and this frequently involves from 10 to 20 hours of travel each way. When people ask me how I can do it, I respond that I am hungry for the road of fresh experience and everyday magic. Coincidence multiplies when we are in motion. Of course, this requires us to be open to the gifts of chance encounters, and the play of the Trickster, And to notice how life rhymes, as when the vapor drinker popped out of the book after a sign promised Enchantment.

Knights of dreaming

2011-11-30T08:26:00.003-05:00

I am with a group of gentle but fiercely dedicated people whose cause is the Earth and the other species with which humans share life on the planet. One of them is a man who spends most of the year in the far north, monitoring changes in the oceans and the ice cap. He is troubled that the survival of a certain genus of giant whale may now be at risk. He shows me video he recorded during close-up, deep-sea encounters with two of these whales. Fascinating to watch their mating habits. Troubling that Earth changes generated by humans may be threatening their survival.

Next, I am leading a weekend workshop. I am delighted by the caliber of the participants, and by the gender balance in our group of about forty people. There are nearly as many men as women, which is rare in programs devoted to inner work. Some of the guys are keenly interested in developing practical applications for the Active Dreaming techniques, and for bringing them into social and professional networks to which they have access.

I sit with four of these men on a grassy knoll under some trees during one of our breaks. I would guess that their ages range from the late 30s to the early 50s. They are all educated, self-made men who have been successful in different fields. Some have created their own businesses. They know how to get things done, and they are excited to have a project that goes beyond any previous venture. One of the guys feels that helping people to follow their dreams is a noble cause, and tries to express this by saying, "We want to revive the original idea of the duke." This sounds a bit grandiose, though I recollect that this title of nobility derives from the Latin dux, or "leader". I gently deflect the medieval fancy, while thinking, in the same moment, This is great. These are the knights of dreaming.

My little dog pulled me out of my dreams at this point, this morning. But I rose into the day feeling very happy and grateful that such promising connections were made, overnight. These were social dreams. I have no doubt that the encounters were real. I'll be alert to see how they can now manifest in waking life.

Proof that dreaming is more than hot air

2011-11-29T12:21:00.005-05:00

A Russian friend living in New York has just provided proof positive that dreaming is more than hot air. She received an email from her mother, who lives in St Petersburg, recounting a dream.

"My mother writes that in the dream she is flying in a hot air balloon over St. Petersburg and showing the University to a friend of mine who is visiting the city. "My mother spent half a century at the University, studying and then teaching and doing research, and is quite attached to the place, so her part in the dream is natural. What seized me was this: one of my friends from graduate school is going to St. Petersburg this winter and recently discussed his plans with me. My mother has no clue about these preparations and has never met the guy - except in her dream."

This looks like a clear case of dream telepathy, wonderfully animated by the dream producers. What makes the mother's telepathic hit all the more interesting is that a trip by a foreigner to St Petersburg in the dead of winter is an eccentric move, because of the weather.

Trying to record in the night museum

2011-11-25T10:16:00.005-05:00

I am delighted by the detailed reports dream travelers have brought back from a journey to a museum where they can find secrets from other lives and other times.

As they share their adventures, I am taking more care than usual to make notes in my travel journal. Although I am using a new ballpoint pen, the flow of ink is erratic. I shake it to try to improve the flow, then try writing letters again where previous efforts have left only indentations on the paper. When I press down hard, the results are worse than before. I try writing lightly, letting the tip of the pen just skim the paper. This works better.

I write and rewrite the title of the third journey report, stated clearly by a woman in the group as

LOUVRE MUSEUM

FAKE DOUBLE

By this, she appears to be saying that she went to an alternate Louvre museum, in the imaginal realm. She found that inside, it had double walls. She could step through any wall and find, an arm's length behind it, a second wall, behind which the real treasures were to be found.

She had a particular interest in a mystery of the American Civil War, involving "two lost names". She found the names. I duly recorded the first: "Orlando Orlando or William Orlando." I wrote down the second name also, but can't recall it write[*] now - since I woke to realize that I was doing all this recording inside my dream, not in a literal journal.

The dream content was quite typical of workshops I lead where a frequent and popular group exercise is to travel to a space like a library or museum where it is easy to find portals to other times, or speakers from those times. The literal-ness of the dream (in the context or how I spend my days) makes me feel that my dream self either (a) went ahead of me, across time, to lead a program I'll lead in ordinary reality in the future or (b) taught a workshop inside the Dreamtime, which would not be a novelty.

The trope of trying to record something inside a dream will be familiar to many dreamers. Sometimes we are quite convinced we have journaled everything - until we wake, to find the relevant page in the bedside notebook blank. Still, the physical-seeming effort of having to write over and over to get ink on the page did succeed in imprinting a few memories that remained in my waking brain.

* I'll leave the slip, on the principle that we want to notice what's showing through our slips. Clearly, a message for me is WRITE NOW.

Dancing with the Bull of the Midi

2011-11-21T07:07:00.008-05:00

Pomegranates are red in the tree.
I have not tasted the seeds, this time.
A blue gate creaks on its hinges.
I may go through it when the sun is high

and the wild boars dream of truffles.

Down from the dry garrigues
in a stir of dust and juniper
on thundering hooves the black bulls come.
No keeper can contain them
when they are called to the sea.

Pounding white sand, unstoppable force.
My heart leaps at their running.
I leap on the back of the strongest bull
laughing like a Minoan boy dancer
who has found his ride to the Goddess.

The bulls surge behind and around me
a black tide over the white foam
that throws up the great dark breaker
Persephone may have known. The memory
of a thousand corridas is red in his eyes.

He rakes his great horns
as the reaper swings his scythe
in a field of Van Gogh yellows.
He takes me over the kidneys
and tosses me over the sea. Is this Death?

I am witness now, to the man
thrown into the sky. Can he be so young?
My second self is swallowed by fire.
No, he has gone through. He is born again
from the yolk of the sun. He is not the same.

Now he is dressed to kill, in matador garb.
He is on his way down, flying, not falling.
His stiff arms, held before him, give me
no time to consider, or check

whose face he is wearing. I open. We are one.

- Hameau de l'Etoile, October 22, 2011

Dream archaeology at Bandelier

2011-11-20T08:31:00.005-05:00

Bandelier National Monument, New Mexico

I am staying at a friend's house outside Santa Fe in a house, a contemporary adobe villa with extraordinary views across desert and mountains. The phrase Big Sky really applies here - you can watch the weather rolling in from fifty miles away. The night sky is extraordinary, a grainy, pulsing field full of quite animate energies. Natue feels quite personal here

I make a day trip to Bandelier - the Anasazi site around which there were terrible fires earlier this summer. I have two encounters that are the stuff of dream archaeology.

On the trail to the falls, I feel the presence of mountain lion. Further along, I lie down under ponderosa pines and sense a different presence. When my inner sight comes on fully, I perceive a short (maybe 4 feet tall) very dark-skinned man who tells me his name was Patasihone; he pronounces this as “Pah-tah-see-HOH-nay”. His name and identity have something to do with Rabbit. I glimpse him hunting small animals in an earlier time, millennia ago. He lives very close to the earth. I ask to enter his Dreamtime. He lets me slip into a world in which humans and animals are very closely related, to the point where they might even exchange forms. He is as much a jackrabbit as a man. There is simplicity, even innocence, here.

I experience something different in front of the petroglyphs at the Long House site, where the Anasazi built apartments into the talus of a volcanic cliff. An ancient guardian reaches into my mind. He tells me that white people still know next to nothing about what really went on here, but that he will show me certain things, because I am "one who sees.".

The wall becomes transparent like a window. I see beyond it the scene of an ancient rainmaking ceremony, in which the shaman-priest holds up and vibrates an enormous snake - not sure if it is alive or stuffed - while a helper makes the sound of rolling thunder with tools that resemble mortar and pestle. These people have many ways of invoking and placating the animate forces of nature.

I am a visitor in this desert landscape. I come from a part of the continent where it rains a lot. I have a question for the rainmaker. Do you also know how to stop the rain? I receive the mental equivalent of a slap in the face. Stupid white man. Why would we even want to stop the rain? Oops. Contact is interrupted, for now. Next chance I have, I'll choose my words more carefully in mental conversation with a rain priest.

This is an excerpt from my travel journals for July, 2000.

Dream Archaeology and Vanishing Smoke

2011-11-18T10:11:00.007-05:00

Albany, New York

I had a grand time introducing the practice of dream archaeology, in the context of my dream-driven research into Iroquois traditions, to a standing-room-only crowd in my Neihardt Lecture at the Albany Institute of History and Art last night. I was honored to have been invited to present the third annual lecture in memory and celebration of John G. Neihardt, the remarkable poet and scholar who gave us Black Elk Speaks, the classic and essential work on spiritual vision in Native American tradition. Neihardt's dreams were his passport to the Lakota holy man, just as my dreams have been my passport to wisdom keepers of other cultures, from the Mohawk to the Mununjalli of Queensland

Dreams guide us to the necessary past, to the history we need to know and use. Dreams may also trigger and direct specific lines of research. Dreaming, we have direct access to the realm of the ancestors. Sometimes they reach to us, in dreams, as an ancient priest of Nippur appeared to the Assyriologist Herman Hilprecht when he was puzzling over the meaning of two fragments of agate or as an ancient atetshents (“dreamer”) and clanmother of the Mohawk people called me to work that required me to study her language and reconstruct the shamanic dream practices of her tradition. We can choose to reach to the ancestors through dream incubation and by developing the skills of shamanic dreaming.

The practice of dream archaeology involves reclaiming authentic knowledge of ancestral traditions, including those that may have been buried or suppressed in the course of history, through a combination of careful research, active dreamwork and shamanic journeying across time and between dimensions. The dream archaeologist combines the skills of the shaman, the scholar and the detective.

We let dreams set us assignments. Secrets of the past, of which the waking mind may know nothing or very little, come to us in dreams because we are ready for them, and because the ancestors speak to us. As dream archaeologists, we work with such dreams through focused investigation, tracking that strange word, looking again at the fragments of that figurine.

We also carry our exploration into the dream space, by learning to go back inside a dream, wide awake and conscious, as an archaeological team may penetrate to previously hidden levels of a site, or the inner caves where the great revelations are to be found. I call this technique dream reentry. It is practiced wide awake and conscious, and may be a joint venture by a whole group of active dreamers. We use shamanic drumming to fuel and focus our expeditions, using a dream image as a doorway to harvest more information, open direct dialogue with the ancestors, and go to the deeper levels of reality where the meaning of things can be found.

We are open to the phenomenon that Yeats, with poetic insight, called the “mingling of minds”. This means that when we give our best efforts and passion to our chosen work or study, we draw the support of intelligences beyond the everyday world, including those of past masters in the same field.

Dream archaeology guided my research and writing, at every turning, in the creation of the three novels that comprise my Cycle of the Iroquois - Fire Along the Sky, The Firekeeper and The Interpreter - and in the retelling of Iroquois cosmology and the reclaiming of ancestral methods of shamanic dreaming in my nonfiction Dreamways of the Iroquois.

Last night I spoke in the presence of the Four American Kings - portraits by Jan Verelst of three Mohawk chiefs, and a Mahican, who were received like visiting sovereigns when they sailed to England in 1710 and were received by Queen Anne. I found myself dreaming into the life of one of them in the late 1980s. His name was Sayenqueraghta, a name I translated as Vanishing Smoke. A Mohawk of the Bear Clan, he was the grandfather of Joseph and Molly Brant. His dreaming and his war magic are reflected in the extraordinary tatttoos on his face and chest, meticulously copied by the Dutch artist, who must have wondered at their meaning and perhaps at their energy as the Mohawk posed in the typical posture of an Old World grandee.

In my novel The Interpreter, I describe the London experiences of Vanishing Smoke and the Mohawk war leader and skilled politician called Hendrick by the Dutch and the English from their own perspective. This includes the shock of finding themselves in a roiling city of over 700,000 people, when the largest city they had previously seen (Boston) had a population of only 5,000, and the Mohawk population on traditional Mohawk land had fallen to just 580 thanks to smallpox and flight to Canada.

The historian in me required me to check every detail in the historical records of the trip. The dreamer and novelist in me then enabled me to add what is not in the documents - for example, how a Bear Clan Mohawk might respond to the torment of a chained bear being mauled by attack dogs for the pleasure of gamblers, when the four "kings" were taken to a bear pit in Hockley-in-the-Hole for what the Englishmen of the time considered fine entertainment.

Fire Along the Sky and The Firekeeper are now available in handsome new editions from Excelsior Editions, an imprint of the State University of New York Press. A new edition of The Interpreter, with Vanishing Smoke on the cover, will be published by Excelsior in February 2012.

Dreaming four selves on the Brazilian shore

2011-11-07T11:07:00.004-05:00

Praia Morro das Pedras, Santa Catarina Island, Brazil

She is standing on the shore, watching a huge ship, as tall as a skyscraper, being readied to put out to sea, under and iron-gray sky. She feels something pulling away from her, like an animate shadow. It pulls loose, and she sees a second self moving away from her, to join all the people on the giant ship.

She hesitates. Is she losing a part of herself? Should she follow this second self, on board the boat? Her other self seems old and stooped, and deeply tired. The people on the boat appear gray and somber. She decides to let go whatever has parted company with her, and watches the cruise ship put out to sea.

Now there is another change in her. She is lifting up, into a light-filled space above the clouds. She feels herself expanding and growing brighter. The sense of spaciousness delights her. She feels blessed by the radiant energy that is streaming through this changing self.

She looks down, and sees the person she left behind on the sure. This person is shrinking as quickly as her self on the higher level is growing. But she's not sure she wants to leave the person on the sure behind.

When the Brazilian dreamer shared her story with me, I observed that the dream presents four selves: the one that left on the boat, the one that stayed on the shore, the one that ascended towards a Higher Self, and the one who was witness to all of this. If it were my dream, I suggested, I would be glad that something old and tired - a burden I had long carried - had now been released, across salt water, the great medium for spiritual release. My instinct was that the shadow person on the boat never really belonged to me, but may have been a something from a departed family member or from a therapy client that had been "hitch-hiking" in my energy field for years. This suggestion brought a strong aha of recognition from the dreamer.

For me, the welcome challenge of this dream was to bring energy from the Higher Self into the body and life of the ordinary self on the shore. The dreamer clapped her hands, happy to accept this assignment. In the days of journeying, performance and celebration that followed, we saw her bringing that moreness through, with flashing eyes.

Dreams not only introduce us to many aspects of our selves; they open ways to live consciously with the energy of a Greater Self.

Dreaming giant waves of change

2011-11-04T11:16:00.006-04:00

Morro das Pedras, Santa Catarina Island, Brazil

One of the happiest - and most life-transforming - dreams that I heard in Brazil was a dream of a giant wave.

The dreamer had been working at a job that was well-paid but felt empty. She wanted to leave her job and study to become a therapist, but a crowd of doubts and calculations made her keep putting off a decision. How would she pay her bills? What would her family say?

Then she dreamed she was standing in front of a giant wave that reared up higher than the tall office building in Sao Paulo where she worked. Instead of fearing the wave, or trying to get out of its way, she was filled with joy. She woke with a sense of elation and the deep certainty that if she made her move, all would be well. She left her job, was accepted for a psychology course, and felt life opening up in many rewarding ways.

When she told me this dream, over cafezinho and papaya at the breakfast table, I reflected on our different responses to the theme of the giant wave in our dreams. Some dreamers find themselves fleeing in terror from a great wave. This may reflect the fear of something in life that threatens to overwhelm our understanding or resources. It can also be a window on an event in the outer world; thousands of people dreamed of the tsunamis in the Indian and around Japan before they took place.

As for the Brazilian dreamer, however, a giant wave in a dream - when viewed with satisfaction or joy during and after the scene - may betoken a time of positive change, and mobilize us to move forward decisively in the direction of change. Years ago, I dreamed I was walking with an animal companion, a deer named Bear. We came to a vast expanse of dry land. The land was fertile, but it was thirsty. We stepped out onto the red earth, and I saw a tremendous wall of water racing towards us from my right. With great satisfaction, I turned my back to the wave, and got Bear to turn also, so we were poised to catch the giant wave and ride with it.

I woke with a sense of elation, like the Brazilian dreamer. When I went back inside the dream, by our technique of conscious dream reentry, I found that the wave had swept over the land and rolled back. Now plants - especially papyrus plants, I noticed - were sprouting everywhere. My happiness increased, since papyrus was used in Egypt as writing paper. Before my delighted gaze, the plants now became trees whose fruits were books, new books to be delivered. The dream and its sequel mobilized me to get on with writing a fresh series of books.

Soul and dreaming in Brazil

2011-11-03T18:56:00.004-04:00

Praia Morro das Pedras, Santa Catarina Island, Brazil

She dreams of a beautiful three-year-old girl she wants to bring inside the house. The child hears her call, but when she tries to respond, she can't come, because she is tied by a blue ribbon that goes down into the earth. The dreamer knows that at the other end of the ribbon, hidden from her view, is a powerful man who is controlling her against her will.

When she wakes, the dreamer is initially confused about the identity of the child. This could be her daughter, although her daughter is now a grown woman. As she reflects on the dream, she realizes that she is dreaming of her own child self. With this comes the determination to bring home her lost child.

In the workshop, she resolves to make a journey, through the doorway of the remembered dream, to understand what has happened and to find a way to bring her three-year-old self back into the home of her body and her current life. She feels the edge of fear, but she is reassured by the fact that she has friends in the group who will travel with her - as I drum for the journey - and will bring their power animals and their own spiritual guidance and good intentions to support her in soul recovery.

At the end of the journey, her eyes are shining and her cheeks are wet with tears. She reports that she found her beautiful little girl, and managed to detach her from what was binding her. When she tried to understand what that was, she saw photographs of her grandfather, a stern man who insisted that women should be kept in their place. During the drumming, she held her child self very close, rocking her gently, promising that if she came home to her adult self, she would be safe and life would be fun. When the drum sounded the recall, the dreamer felt herself flying back to her body with her child self riding piggyback on her shoulders.

She readily agreed that her first step would be to indulge her three-year-old with things she would enjoy - some chocolate cake, with strawberries, from the buffet, and later some time with the swings and slides and jungle gyms in the playground that was conveniently nearby. She also resolved that from now on she would say what she needed to say, and speak truth in the face of male power.

"I feel the sun has come back in my heart."

This was one of many journeys for soul recovery I led in my recent workshop in Brazil. Again and again, we confirmed that the right dream can provide the portal for a journey of healing to reclaim vital energy lost along the roads of life.

Provençal blue

2011-10-26T06:22:00.013-04:00

lo País d'Òc

Over the past week, the ruling color of my dreams, sleeping and waking, has been Provençal blue. I led a six-day training for teachers of Active Dreaming, my first teacher training in Europe, at the Hameau de l'Etoile, a restored medieval village near Saint Martin de Londres in the Midi. Gifted dreamers eager to become guides and ambassadors to the deeper life came from Sweden and the Netherlands, Germany and Estonia, Britain and Romania, Italy and France (of course). We shared wonderful adventures in two languages and in two worlds, and the work was deep and true.

Doors, shutters and gates at the Hameau were painted in the colors of memory, nostalgia and sweet yearning, tested and tempered by the seasons.

Even the doors to the rest rooms were Provençal blue.

I would have loved to have plunged into the deep blue dreams of the splendid pool at the Hameau, but it was a little too cold for that in late October

After the training, I found my way through a chaos of tram lines under construction to the heart of Montpellier and stopped for a beer at a cafe in a quiet square in the university quarter. Here the doors were a deeper blue.

On my last day in southern France, I visited the magnificent medieval city of Carcassonne, the scene of mass tragedy when a Pope ordered a crusade against the Cathars in 1209. On a high terrace within sight of the donjon, with the noise of a brass band rising from the street, I lunched on a cassoulet of white beans, duck and Toulouse sausage, and found the blue trim of a window another invitation to go dreaming.

Turkish delight

2011-10-13T22:36:00.003-04:00

I've been enjoying a new riff of Turkish synchronicity this week.

First, I received the image of the cover of the new Turkish edition of my book THE THREE "ONLY" THINGS.

Second, within a minute of that, I received an invitation (from a different person, someone I have never met) to lead a workshop at a beach resort town on the Turkish coast next year.

Third, within 30 minutes, a friend posted a comment at my Dream Gates blog in which she mentioned that she will be in Turkey next summer and has been dreaming that a tiger will be her guide in this trip. At the exact moment I read her post, I was cutting the picture of a tiger from a greeting card I had received to use as a bookmark.

Sometimes it's hard to avoid noticing that there are things that WANT to happen, and forces at play (in the play of coincidence) that help us to get that message.

I wrote a previous piece about an amazing (even by my standards) case of synchronicity or "mental texting" involving Turkey at my Dream Gates blog. On that occasion, exhausted by long investigation of an incident of alleged dream sending in the time of Suleiman the Magnificent, I said out loud, around midnight, "I need a Turk!" (to help me with documents in Turkish in the archives of the Topkapi Palace). Two minutes later, I received an email from a doctor in Turkey (unconnected with the latest riff of coincidence) who readily volunteered, when asked, to help with my research.

Finding the green book in the tree library

2011-10-11T10:08:00.005-04:00

Rhinebeck, New York

At the end of our first evening session in my workshop on Shamanic Lucid Dreaming at the Omega Institute last weekend, I gave the group one of my standard homeplay assignments: to approach the night with intention. I urged our dreamers to set a juicy intention: to go to a tropical paradise, to have dinner in Paris, to seek healing or life direction or a tryst with the perfect dream lover.

The next morning, a lawyer in our circle was eager to share the dream he had entered after setting the intention of meeting with higher intelligences. He found himself in a familiar setting, a law office where he asked two junior members of the firm to help locale a green book he needed to bring a case before a higher appellate court. It seemed that to locate this book, it would be necessary to go two levels above the regular law library. One the first level above were the golden books for intermediate cases; the green book he desired was above those, and he would need to find it for himself.

As the lawyer went up, he found the scene changing. The wall beside him was now covered with bark, like a tree. He realized, to his wonder, that he was ascending a tree library. Going got harder. He was now climbing an Indian ladder; the rungs were little broken-off branches. Nervous, he was unable to get up to the place of the green book. But he woke with excitement and a strong desire to find what he was seeking.

This exciting dream invited one of the core techniques of Active Dreaming: dream reentry and tracking. The lawyer readily agreed that he would like to go back inside the dream, with the aid of shamanic drumming, and that he would be happy for the 25 people in our group to accompany him, as trackers, and bring back our impressions. I was especially delighted with the dream because I had had many prior dreams and visions of a library inside a tree that seemed - inside the trunk - to rise as high as a skyscraper.

This time, the lawyer succeeded in scaling the tree, found his book, and experienced direct contact with what he felt was an intelligent being on a higher level. In my own journey through the portal of his dream, the green book appeared to me with the green scuffed leather covers of my own travel journal. When I opened it, I found the pages of this version were blank. This filled me with an eager sense of possibility: of the potential to start life - and a new book - with fresh vision.

Solving things in the solution state

2011-10-08T09:53:00.000-04:00

As I lay in bed early on a rainy Saturday morning, it occurred to me that the drifty state after waking can sometimes be - quite literally - the Solution State.

I did not initially have narrative dream recall. Instead, I found that my mental field was like an ocean of clean, translucent oil, in which many images and ideas were floating and bobbing. I could reach around and choose some of them to mix and match, and to bring into clear resolution. As I did this, I was given very clear solutions to a number of specific problems and imagery sequences I could now develop - or allow to develop - into movie-like sequences, with plot lines and voiceovers.

I was in the realm of hypnagogia, specifically in the hypnopompic zone that follows sleep. In my Secret History of Dreaming I report how creative breakthoughs in all fields have often been accomplished in this twilight state of consciousness, when connections that escape the daytime mind are made fluidly, and solutions arise.

Experiences of this type take place in a matrix that could be called a "solution" in the sense that many elements and possibilities are suspended in it - and that creative people have the ability, in that state of relaxed attention (or attentive relaxation) to enter the Solution State to bring through solutions.

Salvador Dali, Three Sphnxes of Bikini

Dreaming with Nehallenia

2011-10-05T11:09:00.006-04:00

Amsterdam

She appears each time I start drumming for the group journeys in my shamanic workshop at the De Roos Center in Amsterdam. She stands at the prow of a ship, looming out of a deep sea fog. She is robed, though her long golden hair floats free. Sometimes she has a dog, sometimes a basket of fruits or loaves of bread. When I go deeper, I see that her boat is part of a the back of a tremendous sea serpent, that may itself be part of the swell of the ocean.

I know her name, though its meaning is mysterious. It survives in inscriptions on votive altars erected by merchants and ship captains who credited her with safe passage through storms at sea. They called her Nehalennia. She was venerated at Celtic and Germanic sacred sites on the North Sea, especially on the island of Walcheren, and at Cologne.

She was the patron of voyagers; seafarers and traders made offerings to her for safe passage and success in their transactions. According to one etymology, her name derives from the proto-Indo-European root *neh₂u- (boat); so her name could be translated as "Lady of the Boat" or "Goddess of the Vessel". Others find the source of the goddess name in the root *nek- (death, to bring) in the reconstructed proto-Indo-European lexicon. We could then translate Nehallenia as "Death Bringer", which makes some of the scholars twitchy but seems to me to bring forth a central attribute of the Goddess who opens the doors of life and death and rebirth.

Nehallenia is depicted as a lovely young woman enthroned within a seashell, with a basket of fruit on her lap and a dog nearby, gazing up at her adoringly. Often she has her foot on the prow of a ship, and a boat rope in her hand.

Her other close animal companion is the dolphin. In my dreaming, she is the patron of astral as well as physical journeys, just as Elen of Britain is the maker of roads as well as dreamways. For the Celts, the happy afterlife on the Islands of the Blessed requires a crossing by water. And in ancient Europe (as in Polynesia) one of the favorite forms of transportation for the Otherworld voyage is the dolphin. Ripe fruits are often carved over the top of Nehalennia’s shrines. She offers abundance and ever-renewing life, as well as safe passage through the Otherworld, before and after death.

I am glad for the presence of this kindly Death Bringer and Lady of the Sea, here below sea level, where it sometimes feels like the Netherlands is also the Nether World.

The Dream People are waiting for you

2011-09-30T07:32:00.000-04:00

You are on the road of your ordinary life, maybe on the morning commute, by car or subway or on foot. Things are not moving swiftly or smoothly. You are worried you’ll be late. Now it seems you may not be able to get through at all, on your familiar route, because there is a major obstruction ahead. The way is torn up, or blocked. Hard to see whether this is because of new construction or an accident.

Weary and frustrated, you notice an amazing being, slipping with a dancer’s grace between the stopped cars or people. There is something familiar about this figure. As it approaches the mouth of a tunnel, you realize, incredulous, that this figure is you – that is to say, an amazingly supple and youthful version of you, radiant in its beauty. The figure proceeds to fly up the tunnel, which leads upward. How can this be? Oh, that’s right. You must be dreaming. Wait – if you are dreaming, you can fly too. How could you ever forget?

Now you are flying up the tunnel, exhilarated by the speed and your freedom from the clogged traffic you have left behind.

You come out in a high, fresh place in the woods. A clean, sweet wind lifts your hair and shows you your way. You come to a meeting space, a lodge among the trees constructed from what the forest gives willingly. A great circle is gathered on the dirt floor, around a fire. The people here live very close to the Earth. The firelight reddens their skin as they sing and drum together. You stand, hesitant, in the door of the lodge, not wishing to intrude.

But an elder rises from the circle and indicates that you are welcome, and that the Earth people have a place waiting for you. You sit with them. You sing with them. You feel the depth and comfort of being welcomed home.

After a good long time, when the fire is gentle, you rise from your place and move to the center of the space. You bow to the fire, and stretch out on the ground next to it.

One by one, the Earth people approach you. One of them takes glowing coals from the fire and places them over your eyes, saying, “We do this to open your eyes, so that you may see clearly.”

Another places glowing coals over your ears, and sings, “We do this to open your ears, so you may hear clearly.”

One places a hot coal on your mouth, saying, “We do this to open your mouth, so that henceforth you will speak only truth.”

The wisest of the wise places a red-hot coal on your heart, and you feel it sear a passage through your body. The wise one sings, “We do this to open your heart, and to open the passage between your heart and your mouth, so that henceforth you will speak and act only from the heart.”

When you rise from your place by the fire, you are not the same. You go out among the trees, and you promise to the wood and the wind and the stars, “Henceforth, I will speak and act only from the heart.”

This is the story of a watershed experience in my life that put me on a path for which there is no career track in our culture: the path of a dream teacher. I have retold the story, as I do in my workshops, so you can make it your own, if it calls you. For more on the tradition that was opening to me, please read my Dreamways of the Iroquois.

Rescuing my lightning-struck friend

2011-09-28T09:00:00.011-04:00

He is quite alone, out in the midst of a choppy sea, on a moonless night. Great thunderheads roll over him. Forked lightning burns the waves. I see him turn ghost white, then he is gone, under the dark waters.

The man in this dream was my closest friend in my last year at high school and my first years as an undergraduate. I had lost contact with him decades before the dream. I woke from the dream with the grim certainty that my friend had died.

When I returned to Australia to speak at a Mind, Body, Spirit festival some months after the dream, I was approached by a middle-aged woman I did not recognize until she told me she was my friend's younger sister. She was eager to know whether I had heard anything from her brother. She explained that he had developed a serious drug addiction and had been in and out of halfway houses for years until he vanished altogether. The family feared he had died of an overdose.

When I shared my terrible dream, we agreed that being struck by lightning in a stormy sea could be a metaphor for the effects of a drug overdose on the brain.

Life went on, the years passed, and then I met my friend again, in a waking dream, during my workshop on death and dying last weekend.

I had invited members of our circle to make a journey to the Other Side for "timely and helpful" contact with a person who has passed on. While drumming for the group, I had the sense of a beautiful angelic presence that had guided me on similar expeditions in the past. Gently but firmly, this spiritual guide led me to a person and a place that had not been on my itinerary.

I saw a wild thing in a cage, with matted hair, frothing at the mouth, a bestial creature that barely seemed human. I was horrified to recognize something of my friend. I understood that he was still trapped in his drug addiction. I had no idea how to proceed. It would surely be imprudent to try to release this ravening, unreasoning creature from the cage.

The thought came to me, This is not your friend, only the body of desire that confines him. With this thought, I saw a second version of my friend. He was beautiful. He looked the way I remembered him from the nights when we stayed up until dawn writing poems that we read to each other, and talking about Pascal and Nietzsche, Camus and Rilke. This second, superior version of my friend was translucent; I realized I was looking at his body of light. Why was it here, with the thing in the cage?

I then saw the cord of attachment between the two energy bodies. I knew what to do, because I have often found it necessary to help the living to detach from unhealthy connections of this kind. I pulled the energy cord out of my friend's subtle body as you might unplug an electrical extension cord. I was moved to tears as I saw him rising into the Light. The thing in the cage could be left to disintegrate, as heavy energy is meant to do after death.

The Goddess with weapons in her hair

2011-09-16T03:07:00.008-04:00

New York City

The "Mother India" exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan is a must-see. This finite, elegantly curated gathering of Goddess images from India opens us to the almost infinite, ever-changing forms of the Great Mother: as creator and destroyer, as life-giver and death-bringer, as warrior and source of regeneration.

The largest group of images are of Durga as protector and demon-slayer, riding to battle on a tiger or lion against Mahisha, the buffalo demon, and legions of his cohorts. Or simply standing, primed and ready for action, with weapons brandished in her many (often eighteen) arms or bristling from her hair. I loved the miniature statue of Durga in copper alloy from the Ganges basin, from the 2nd or 1st century BCE, with the ultimate spiked hairdo. The hairstyle remained in vogue for centuries, as other figures reveal.

Pages from the Devi Mahatmya show Durga, often accompanied by a lean and hungry Kali, putting the demon armies to rout. One of the most interesting drawings, from Rajasthan and dated c.1760, shows Mahisha's human form - that of a soft and pampered maharajah - emerging from his vast buffalo body after Durga has cut off the animal head.

To balance all the fighting goddess images, we have voluptuous yakshi - this one is identified as a tree spirit - curvaceous celestial maidens, generous Lakshmi figures pouring gifts from cornucopias, and an absolutely beautiful Saraswati, giver of knowledge and music, playing the vina. This Saraswati was painted in 1947-8 by Y.G. Srimati.

Through the Moon Gate

2011-09-14T11:33:00.005-04:00

I have known since I was a very small boy in Australia that there are worlds beyond physical reality, and that we can journey to those worlds and gain first-hand knowledge of the multidimensional universe and about what actually happens after death.

When I was nine years old, I was woken up to these possibilities during a crisis of illness. I was rushed to hospital in Melbourne after complaining of a pain in my lower right abdomen. The medical staff found that my appendix was about to burst and I was wheeled into an operating room in short order for an emergency appendectomy.

Under anesthesia on the operating table, I found myself hovering above my body, somewhere up near the ceiling. I decided I didn’t want to watch the bloody work with the scalpel and flowed through the door and along the corridor to where my mother sat hunched and weeping. I couldn’t stand her pain, so I drifted off to a window, to the brightness outside, to the colors of spring and the laughter of young lovers seated at a sidewalk table, drinking each other’s smiles. I felt the pull of the ocean. I could not see the beach from the hospital window, so I floated through the glass and out onto a ledge where a blackbird squalled at me and shot straight up into the air. I followed the bird and sailed over the rooftops.

I saw a huge moon-round face, its mouth opened wide to form the gateway to Luna Park. I swooped down through the moon-gate – and plunged into darkness. I tried to reverse direction, but something sucked me downwards. It was like tumbling down a mineshaft, mile after mile beneath the surface of the earth.

I fell into a different world. It was hard to make out anything clearly in the smoke of a huge fire pit. A giant with skin the color of fine white ash lifted me high above the ground, singing. The people of this world welcomed me. They were tall and elongated and very pale, and did not look like anyone I had seen in my nine years in the surface world. They told me they had dreamed my coming, and raised me as their own. For the greater part of my schooling, I was required to dream – to dream alone, in an incubation cave, or to dream with others, lying in a cartwheel around the banked ashes of the fire in the council house.

Years passed. As I grew older, my recollection of my life in the surface world faded and flickered out. I became a father and grandfather, a teacher and elder. When my body was played out, the people placed it on a funeral pyre. As the smoke rose from the pyre, I traveled with it, looking for the path among the stars where the fires of the galaxies flow together like milk.

As I spiraled upward, I seemed to burst through the earth’s crust into a world of hot asphalt and cars and trams - and found myself shooting back into the body of a nine-year-old boy in a Melbourne hospital bed.

It was a little hard to discuss these experiences with the adults around me at that time, and we did not yet have Raymond Moody’s useful phrase “near-death experience” to describe an episode of this kind. One of the doctors said simply, “Robert died and came back” – with memories that made me quite certain of the existence of worlds beyond the obvious one, and of the fact that consciousness survives physical death.

There is great contemporary interest in the NDE in Western society, and this is a very healthy thing, because to know about the afterlife, we require first-hand experience, and need to be ready to update our geographies and itineraries frequently in the light of the latest reliable travel reports. In ancient and traditional cultures where there is a real practice of dying, near-death experiencers – who may be called shamans or initiates – have always been heard with the deepest attention and respect.

There is a Tibetan name for such a person, delog, pronounced “day-loak”. It means someone who has gone beyond death and returned. The famous Tibetan Book of the Dead, with its detailed account of the possible transits of spirit after death, emerged from the experiences of such travelers.

But to have first-hand knowledge of what lies beyond death, we do not have to go through the physical extremity of an NDE. We can learn through our dreams, the dreams in which we receive visitations from departed loved ones and others who are at home on the Other Side, and the dreams in which we travel beyond the body and into their realms.

Our dreams open portals into the multidimensional universe, including the places we may travel after physical death. As we become active dreamers, we come to realize that dreaming is not so much about sleeping as about waking up – to a deeper reality and a deeper meaning in life, and death.

Little worlds

2011-09-13T10:39:00.001-04:00

I loved toy soldiers as a boy and still have some on my desk, and in my games they would come alive. I also remember breaking some of my favorites when I was too ill to hold them on a hospital tray; one of those injured toy soldiers has been a important link for me in reaching to a younger self to support him in a time of pain and loneliness.

This relates to my long-running dream series (going all the way back into childhood) of living dioramas. Over and over again, I find myself looking into a miniature building or landscape - and then discovering that everything in the scene is alive. I can move the "pieces" around, or shrink myself to their scale and observe or interact with them on their own stage, which often proves to be a place in another time or another country

By dream train through Greeneland

2011-09-04T12:04:00.007-04:00

I am given an exciting new writing assignment, on a high floor of a vast modern complex. In the office made available to me, I discover a gift. It is a copy of the first edition of a novel by Graham Greene that was republished under a different title that is better-known today. The pages are yellowed and the spine a bit cracked, but this book is precious to me. The card with it informs me that it was the personal property of the ruler of an East European country, "as well known as Lenin in his time", who treasured it.

What do you do with a dream like this? Simple. You walk with it to your favorite used bookstore, which just happens to be a few doors down the street, a mixed blessing since the stock is forever moving up the street into my house (I am not the Kindle type). The shelf elf hadn't missed a beat. On top of the new arrivals in fiction was a handsome recent Penguin edition of Graham Greene's Orient Express. I glanced at the publishing history to verify my hunch. Yes. This is the novel that was originally published in Britain in 1932 as Stamboul Train. The American publisher wanted the title change, and Orient Express has stuck.

When I stepped back through the looking glass from my dream situation, a mirror reversal took place. In the dream, I got the first edition of a novel later published as Orient Express. In the bookshop, I got the latest edition of a novel originally published as Stamboul Train. Naturally, I purchased the book, even though I knew it was highly likely that I already had a copy among my sizeable collection of books by and about Graham Greene.

I stayed up until dawn to finish Orient Express. This was no hardship. The book is beautifully crafted and the smallest scenes are etched in memory. Greene called this novel an "entertainment", but it is very noir, shadowed by tyrants and secret policemen, back-stabbings and betrayals.

The main plot device may seem formulaic. The fates of a mixed bag of characters - crook and chorus girl, Socialist revolutionary and scoop-hungry Lesbian reporter - intertwine as they ride a train together. But Orient Express transcends the formulas because of the author's feel for character, which is deepened by the use of dreams. As the passengers nod off on the the train, they slip into dreams. Early in the story, Myatt, the importer of currants en route to Istanbul, sees the crooked dealings of an associate as a set of floating balloons he proceeds to pop.

Held by the police in a Serbian train station on a terrifying night, the chorus girl Coral Musker drifts off into twin dreams:

She dreamed first that she was a child and everything was very simple and very certain and everything had an explanation and a moral. And then she dreamed that she was very old and was looking back over her life and she knew everything and she knew what was right and what was wrong and why this and that had happened and everything was very simple and had a moral.

Greene adds: "the second dream was not like the first, for she was nearly awake and she ruled the dream to suit herself." He is describing a form of lucid dreaming. The brief passage hints at something further. We start out in life with the simplicity of the child; if we live long enough, and grow enough, we rise above the complexities and confusion of adult life and achieve simplicity again.

Greene's own dreams at the time he wrote Orient Express were full of "disquiet" (as he noted in A Sort of Life); they color the moods of the novel and orient its plot. I was reminded that Graham Greene, a consummately professional writer capable of tapping out his daily quota whatever his excesses the night before, and a profoundly worldly and world-weary man, was also a prolific and dedicated dreamer. He benefited greatly from being encouraged to recount his dreams as an adolescent. He has cracked up at school and run away, a huge embarrassment to his father, the headmaster. He was packed off for London for three months to be sorted out by a shrink with an eclectic approach who treated Greene, then 16, by asking him to tell a dream at 11:00 every morning. Often Greene had dreams. When he did not, he would make something up.

The habit stuck. He kept copious dream journals, right up to his death. They fueled much of his creative work. Some of his novels (The Honorary Consul is one) began with a dream. Sometimes a dream would fill in a gap in a plot. Often he would attribute his own dreams to his characters; frequently he felt he was dreaming their dreams. When he was writing A Burnt-Out Case he dreamed as his character Querry and could insert his dream without change in the novel, “where it bridged a gap in the narrative which for days I had been unable to cross", as he reported in Ways of Escape.

Greene gave a ringing testimonial to the creative role of dreaming in a writing life in his memoir Ways of Escape: "The unconscious collaborates in all our work; it is a nègre we keep in the cellar to aid us. When an obstacle seems insurmountable, I read the day’s work before sleep and leave the nègre to labor in my place. When I wake the obstacle has nearly always been removed: the solution is there and obvious – perhaps it came in a dream which I have forgotten."

For a full account of dreams in Graham Greene's life as a writer, please see The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Harriet Tubman and the leopard dreaming

2011-09-03T12:17:00.007-04:00

She moves through the night woods on leopard feet, vanishing and reappearing. Her night vision guides her unerringly to the frightened people hiding among the sweet gums, or scrunched down inside a mudhole, aquiver for the sound of dogs or horses, coming after them. The leopard, osebo in the language of the Ashanti, is an impeccable hunter. It also knows how to hide.

In West Africa, the leopard is a powerful dreamtime ally. Up to the present day, there are tales of the abakwa, the sorcerer who can shapeshift into the body of a leopard, and is greatly feared because of the leopard’s stealth and delight in the kill.

In my dreams of her, Harriet Tubman was not confined to the human sensorium. She could not only fly like a bird; in the swamps and forests of the New World, she could sense and move with the grace and precision of an African night hunter.

Is this idle fancy?

Franklin Sanborn, writing in 1863, described her as “the grand-daughter of a slave imported from Africa” with “not a drop of white blood in her veins.”

Many years later, a reporter for the New York Herald called up these memories in an interview: “The old mammies to whom she told dreams were wont to nod knowingly and say, ‘I reckon youse one o’ dem Shantees, chile.’ For they knew the tradition of the unconquerable Ashantee blood, which in a slave made him a thorn in the side of the planter or cane grower whose property he became, so that few of that race were in bondage.”

Memories of gossip heard in childhood are not evidence that Harriet had Ashanti blood, but the story suggests that the Ashanti were known where she grew up, and she was associated with them in people’s minds. The Ashanti, a warrior people of the Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana) built a powerful kingdom after 1680 with a standing army of 80,000 men, half equipped with firearms. Their chiefs, called “masters of firepower” or simply “big men”, took slaves from enemy tribes and sold them to the Europeans in the trading ports via Hausa middlemen; they boasted that no Ashanti could ever be made a slave. Nonetheless, it is likely that some Ashanti were captured and sold by their enemies.

The shipping records of the Chesapeake slave trade suggest that Harriet’s ancestors were brought to America from this part of West Africa. Nearly all of the slaves brought to Maryland ports came direct from Africa, and the vast majority came on big London vessels that picked up their cargoes along the Gold Coast or from Upper Guinea. Maryland planters were constantly asking for slaves from the Gold Coast; they had a reputation for strength and stamina and craftsmanship.

West African slaves brought to Maryland’s Eastern Shore did not lose their identity and traditional practices overnight. Recent archeology shows the survival of key elements of West African culture under slavery in North America: in the miniature boats and other items placed in graves, in the bones and carved objects used in divination kits. When Minty Ross was growing up, the Christianization of African slaves had barely begun.

Harriet said she inherited special gifts – including the ability to travel outside the body and to visit the future – from her father, who “could always predict the future” and “foretold the Mexican war”. [Sanborn, also Bradford, Scenes 79-80]. She spent a lot of time with Ben Ross in the timber gangs, splitting and hauling wood for the Chesapeake schooners. In their quiet times in the woods, maybe they revived something of the atmosphere of the Sacred Forest of the Ashanti, and the practice of West African dream trackers accustomed to operating outside the body, sometimes in the forms of animals.

We have an interesting source on Ashanti dreaming in Robert S. Rattray, a British “government anthropologist”. A few months before the New York Herald announced Harriet’s “Shantee” roots, Rattray was rowed ashore to the sweaty, dusty coastal city of Accra, on his way to the Ashanti homeland.. Rattray became a passionate student of the Ashanti, who called him “Red Pepper” because of his blazing red hair. He was a Scot who went native in a big way, dancing as wildly as a woman possessed (according to one of his critics) and also “chasing after” African women (according to another). Though sometimes baffled by the mobility of consciousness among the West Africans he interviewed, he did his best to record Ashanti dream practices in a weighty 1927 study titled Religion and Art in Ashanti.

“To the Ashanti mind,” Rattray explains, “dreams are caused either by the visitations of denizens of the spirit world, or by spirits, i.e. volatile souls of persons still alive, or by the journeyings of one’s own soul during the hours of sleep.” In the Ashanti language, “to dream” is so dae, which literally means “to arrive at a place during sleep” – implying travel.

For the Ashanti, what happens during these dream travels are real events. If you sleep with another man’s wife, for example, you are held to be guilty of adultery and may be punished for it.

Flying is a common experience in Ashanti dreams. “If you dream that you have been carried up to the sky…and that you have returned to the ground…that means long life.” This certainly held true for Harriet Tubman, who lived to be ninety-one.

Rattray describes an Ashanti practice for disposing of a “bad” dream by confiding it in a whisper to the village rubbish dump, which may also be the communal latrine.

His account of the practices of Ashanti dream hunters may have direct bearing on our understanding of how Harriet Tubman dreamed. One of his informants described how his dead brother guided him on the hunt. “I often dream of my brother who was a hunter, and he shows me where to go. Any antelope I kill, I give him a piece with some water.”

The same man’s dead uncle gave him dream prescriptions. When a child was ill in the house, his deceased uncle showed him some leaves to administer as part of the medicine; “I did so and the child recovered.”

Like other indigenous peoples, the Ashanti believe that if you are not in touch with your dreams, you are not in touch with your soul. “If one does not dream for eighty days, it means that one will become mad.”

"Harriet Tubman with Guides", R.M. drawing (2003)

For more on Harriet Tubman and how she used dreaming to guide escaping slaves on the Underground Railroad, please read The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss, published by New World Library.

Dick Cheney remembers a dream, ten years late

2011-08-29T11:36:00.005-04:00

The New York Times has revealed that after undergoing heart surgery in 2010, Cheney had “a prolonged, vivid dream that he was living in an Italian villa, pacing the stone paths to get coffee and newspapers.” Naturally, a bunch of shrinks and analysts have jumped in to analyze the former Vice President's dream and get quoted in major media.

I have two comments. First, it would be great if Cheney had had this dream when he was first in office. Second, it would have been splendid had he then acted on the dream by retiring and leaving the country.

I have to wonder what Cheney was dreaming when he was in office, and going through more surgical procedures than Darth Vader. Did he ever listen to his dreams? Did he compare what he wanted to believe about Iraq (for example) with dream material that might have been showing something very different from what his favored analysts were telling him, with the spontaneous objectivity of dreams. Did he listen to dreams about his heart, and dreams that might have revealed what the heart, instead of the ravening ego and its power-centered agendas, was saying?

Dreams are a corrective to waking delusions, as Dostoyevsky so memorably showed us in "Crime and Punishment". Plutarch, the great ancient philosopher and biographer who inspired several of Shakespeare's historical plays, demonstrated the same thing, writing of dreams of ancient tyrants that spoke as the voice of conscience, warning them to correct their ways. We are all in trouble when our leaders don't listen to their dreams. In Plutarch's telling, ancient tyrants who spurned their dreams ended badly, some to be carried off, after death, to Hecate's recess, a very dark hollow in a very bad neighborhood in the astral realm of the Moon.

The Devil is out of the deck

2011-08-28T10:30:00.006-04:00

A venerable teacher is going to speak to an advanced circle, including myself, on trump XV of the Tarot: the Devil.

He explains that the Devil card is missing from the deck.

I open a locked inner section of a cabinet, turning a key in a drop-down door. I keep my personal Tarot in this secret place. I want to offer the teacher the fifteenth trump from my own deck to illustrate his talk.

My “deck” is a beautiful hand-crafted book whose covers open on leather hinges. The cards in this deck are intricate black-and- white drawings, with some patches of color.

I remember the Devil in this deck as an elegant figure in a hooded red robe. No horns or chains.He looks like a handsome Renaissance prince, seated in a walled garden. The background is black and white. The intricate architecture of the design reminds me of the drawings in the Dream of Polyphilo.

I leaf through the book to find the Devil. The cards are held within the pages by little corner pockets like those you might find in an old-fashioned photo album.

The Devil card is missing. I check again. It is definitely gone.

With a start, I realize that the teacher must have been speaking of my deck. The teacher will give his talk on the fifteenth trump, with or without the card.

dream reentry

I traveled back inside the dream, to hunt the Devil. I found him riding a black horse through a field of grain.

I followed him into a church or cathedral. He was utterly at home here. He suggested that it is he who is worshipped in many churches, under different names.

The library room from the dream took on great solidity. The table with the huge books revealed carved dark legs, and a carved bookstand that seemed to be fixed to the table-top. Some of the books on the table are chained because if they are not kept under restraint they may go flying off by themselves.

The cabinet of polished wood with the locked compartment where I found my Tarot deck also contains glasses and goblets. The key to the lock is gold and resembles the Vatican keys.

I study the people in the library room. Some of the women are familiar; there are men I do not recognize. The teacher is wearing a fine pleated purple robe, with a soft Renaissance hat. I do not see his features clearly, but I have the sense he is my older or wiser self.

I know now that the Devil who is out of the deck is a prince of the church. He is often on the loose!

Research:

No Devil in a hand-painted Tarot deck has survived. This is one of the four cards missing from the Visconti-Sforza “wedding deck” (the others are the Tower, the three of swords and the Prince of Coins).

This is an "old" report, which appears (with the little sketch) in a hand-written journal entry dated December 8, 2001. I am planning to offer new classes in "Tarot for Dreamers" in 2012, so I am especially interested in how I have been dreaming Tarot since I was a teen.

Tarot card from the world: Piece of Sky on the Ground

2011-08-25T12:17:00.009-04:00

A piece of sky has fallen to earth. The piece in question is a panel from an outdoor stage setup at the lake house in my local park, that was being dismantled when I walked the dog this morning.

I felt I had been dealt a living Tarot card from the world.

My mind went to the traditional Iroquois teaching that we must "remember the sky" in order not to fall into the Dark Times in our lives or our world. Tohsa sasa nikonh'ren, as they say in Mohawk. "Do not let your mind fall." Meaning: don't let your mind fall from the knowledge of Earth-in-the-Sky, the world-beyond-the-world that holds the origin and meaning of the human adventure here below, on the Turtle's back. I write about all of this in Dreamways of the Iroquois.

Reflecting on these things, I walked home under light rain, and found another Tarot card from the world. On the sidewalk on my own block, two cages were being offered for sale. The handwritten notice began: "AIRLINE APPROVED. $25." You could pick a rigid or a collapsible cage. I know, I know, from one point of view they are just crates for animal transportation that someone no longer wants, maybe because they not longer have pets, or are not planning to move again. But a larger symbolism stirred me. Forget the sky, forget the bigger story, fall to earth and forget what you came here, and sooner or later you'll find yourself in a cage, perhaps one conveniently prefabricated and supplied at a good price by others.

In a big dream reported in Active Dreaming, the Lion told me: "Humans are the only animals that choose to live in cages."

Interesting, what the world gives us to play with on any day, if we are open to the dreamlike play of symbols in everyday life. Baudelaire was right: we are walking in a forest of living symbols that are looking at us.

Thunderbird seismology

2011-08-24T07:30:00.004-04:00

This just in from a friend in California, in the wake of Tuesday's 5.8 earthquake in Virginia, whose effects were felt far and wide on the East Coast - but not in the Bay Area, at least not in any ordinary way:

"On Monday I told a good friend that I had seen three Thunderbird classic cars within two days. This struck me as curious. She remembered that just before the Haiti earthquake I saw a big Thunderbird in a dream that left me shaken. After that earthquake struck, I felt the Thunderbird was my way of seeing it in advance.

"On Tuesday, I started to feel that my dream symbology was shifting into regular life. As I drove near my home, a green classic convertible Thunderbird met me at the intersection. I rolled down my window to tell the adorable grey haired couple in the front seat that I loved their car.

"I came home to the news of the Virginia quake. And the hurricane.Coincidence?

"Wait. As I write this, I think I'm feeling a small quake right hear at home. [Pause] Yep. 3.6 on the Richter scale. Nothing for where I live, but it's right on the Hayward fault, which is ready to blow. Dang... The Thunderbird god is busy".

We have different ways of knowing things, and I am much in favor of collecting practical omens, ones that prove to be reliable indicators of what a day may bring. Seems like my California friend has developed a seismic sensor that may work better than seismology generally offers, since we are rarely told in advance when an earthquake will hit.

Meeting doubles on the many roads of time

2011-08-22T10:52:00.007-04:00

I am having a grand time demonstrating how it is possible to step in and out of the bodies and life situations of doubles on parallel event tracks, and how this can be used for healing and mutual empowerment. For this demonstration, I have chosen doubles from my present lifetime, alternate Roberts who made different choices. All times are accessible.

I jump into situations that belong both to a parallel past, a parallel present, and a possible future, but the time in each scene is always Now. I can make choices in all these situations. In the place of an alternate Robert, for example, I choose to behave generously, avoiding blame and shame, in an incident involving a former partner after the time when (in ordinary reality) we had separated.

My demonstration is in the service of teaching others how to do these things, at a workshop that has become a very exciting group experiment.

I allow the group to watch my moves, which look to them as if I am stepping in and out of sliding doors. We proceed to develop a simple new model of doubling and travel between parallel universes.

Feelings: Excited, almost elated.

Reality: Several much more detailed dream reports from the past week seemed to involve jumps of this kind, into the situation of doubles on alternate event tracks. I found two of these experiences, involving former partners, to be very healing and resolving - beautiful, really - and woke from them energized and happy. I have crafted and led a number of group experiments in visiting doubles in parallel universes, and I am interested in developing a model of understanding that will bring together current speculation in physics (where is is now widely hypothesized that we are living in one of possibly infinite parallel universes) with the experience of dreamers, who go to parallel worlds (by my experience and observation) most nights.

Follow-up: When I got online after this dream, I found an announcement for the English translation of a book by French physicist Jean-Pierre Garnier Malet. He has developed a "theory of doubling" In his Théorie du dédoublement, Garnier Malet suggests that the "doubling" of time and space is a "law of physics" that offers us "temporal openings" - opportunities to step in and out of time and by so doing, change our possible future for the better. These opportunities are enhanced when we become conscious of the existence of our doubles and draw on their superior knowledge. I learned about Garnier-Malet's work when I was teaching in France in November 2010, and picked up French-language copies of a couple of his books.

In Le double... comment ça marche? (so far only available in French) Garnier Malet urges us to learn to "drink time", as a thirsty animal drinks from a stream. He explains that this means "drinking information from the past and the future during sleep. Dreams are there to allow us to do this. Haven't you noticed that dreams put us in a different kind of time?." I think I am in favor of drinking time, maybe even ready for a binge.

A Sufi master transfers an evil destiny from this world to a dream world

2011-08-16T10:37:00.000-04:00

Writer and scholar Musharraf Ali Farooqi, whose works include a wonderfully spirited translation of The Adventures of Amir Hamza, alerted me to a most interesting story he discovered in an Arabic manuscript. The story involves a 12th century Persian Sufi master, Abdul Qadir Gilani, and how he is said to have saved the life of a merchant by transferring his evil destiny from this world into a dream world. The manuscript is a book of parables; the key passage is quoted from another book titled Behjatul Asrar or Behjatul Israr, attributed to Abdul Qadir Gilani himself.

Musharraf Farooqi has generously shared his translation:

A merchant named Abul Muzaffar visited his friend Sheikh Hammad and informed him that he was departing to Syria with a merchant caravan, and asked for the Sheikh's prayers for his safe return. The Sheikh told him to postpone his plans for it would have dire consequences. He told him that robbers would rob and kill him.

As the merchant was returning from the Sheikh with an uneasy mind, he crossed paths with Abdul Qadir Gilani who asked him the reason for his distraught looks. When Abul Muzaffar told him about Sheikh Hammad's prediction, Gilani told him not to worry and to depart for the journey with an easy mind. He assured him that no harm would come to him.

The merchant followed his advice, departed for Syria as he had planned and returned after turning a good profit. During his return journey he misplaced his purse of gold coins when he reached Aleppo and went to sleep with a troubled mind. He dreamed that robbers had attacked the caravan and looted all his possessions and killed him. He awoke from the nightmare in terror and found himself safe and also remembered where he had kept the purse.

When he returned to Baghdad he wondered whether he should first call on Sheikh Hammad or Abdul Qadir Gilani. Abul Muzaffar met the former in the bazaar who told him that he should convey his gratitude to Gilani because God had transferred his destined fate, about which he had been warned by Sheikh Hammad, from the world of wakefulness into the world of dreams by Gilani's praying seventy times for him.

Musharraf Farooqi asked: "II wonder what you make of it and if you have read any references about such a transference of destiny from the world of wakefulness into the world of dreams."

My response: I am familiar with apotropaic procedures for averting an unwanted future event, especially one foreseen in dreams, and have actually used some of these myself. While I enjoy the way the author here speaks of sending an evil event from the physical world into a world of dreams, in today's language (as recognized in mainstream physics) we might speak of shifting an event into another parallel universe.

In this story, what might have happened is revealed in a dream. The attack and murder seem to be taking place, in the dream, at the same time they would have unfolded in physical life, except for Abdul Qadir Gilani's intervention. I have seen dreams of this kind myself.

However, the process that is most familiar to me is that we foresee an unwanted event in dreams and then take action to avert it. Some cultures have rituals for this. A traditional Iroquois practice was to play-act part of the content of an evil dream in the hope that this partial dramatic enactment would fulfill the dream, while containing its consequences, so it would not have to manifest completely. As described in my Dreamways of the Iroquois such play acting could be very fierce; thus a war chief who had dreamed he was taken by enemies and fire-tortured to death had himself burned with red-hot knives and hatchets.

I have seen gentler, improvisational versions of such rituals of containment work. So we see that while the Syria-bound merchant's life was supposedly saved by the devout prayers of a saint, there are things that ordinary dreamers can do for themselves to shift a "destiny" from one event track to another.

Soul of a book

2011-08-13T14:06:00.006-04:00

A man is with me in my writing cave. He wants me to help him fit a book he has written into my computer. I am reluctant - I have so much to do, and he wants me to do this on my computer? I know I could do what he asks, though the operation is anything but a routine data transfer. It involves taking a whole life-size, embodied energy and transferring it into the computer. This life-size energy may be the whole form of my visitor, who appears as a shadowy figure in a long flapping coat, his features indistinct in the grainy dark.

While considering his request, I tune into the reminiscences of a group of middle-aged women. they are talking on a terrace overlooking a lake. On this side, it's a very orderly lake with manicured borders. It may be one of those man-made lakes created for expensive developments and gated communities. But on the far side of the lake, things are wild. There are islands over there, and wild men, and the ladies are giggling a little as they recall adventures that had with the wild men when they were quite young.

I need to understand what was going on with my male visitor, who wants me to put his story into my computer. I'm lucid now, and want to converse with him, but it seems he has moved on, at least for now. I have the impression of two images he has left with me. They remind me of Tarot cards, except that they are three times as long, in proportion to their width, as any card from a deck. One shows a series of fire triangles, making a high column. The colors are mostly reds and oranges, with sparks coming of the edges. The other card depicts what looks like a crescent beach in the moonlight. This "beach" card is a window; as I look at it I see that the whole scene is alive and watch the waves rolling in.

Feelings: Intrigued, slightly disappointed I was slow to grasp what might be going on with my visitor.

Reality: I am ready to consider new book projects, having completed another non-fiction book this week. I am open to new ideas and new characters (for fiction). I recently had the experience - leading a group journey - of realizing that books, too, have souls. Was my caller the soul of a possible book? Or a parallel self who has actually written the book, in a parallel world? Now that would be an interesting writing partner!

Question: What is going on with the male visitor who wants me to transfer his story to my computer? What can I learn from the women? What is the significance of the "calling cards"?

Action: Draw the calling cards. Done (see above). Further action: have a go at writing narrative in a new first-person voice (of someone other than my present self).

A universe inside a stone

2011-08-11T10:00:00.005-04:00

I am intrigued by tales in which we find a universe inside a very small space, such as the space between subatomic particles. These give us a window into what physics is telling us about the nature of hidden dimensions, and they provide a context of understanding for dreams and visions in which we experience these realities directly.

In the vast Yogavasistha the sage Vasistha entertains and instructs the despondent Rama with a series of tales that include his first-hand account of his travel to and from a world of beauty and magic that he created in subatomic space.

At a certain time in his life, the sage recalled, he wished to leave the “busy world” behind and live in a quiet place “free from all imaginings, where I would be invisible to everyone.” Through “yoga and imagination” he created a little hut in a “far-distant corner of the space of emptiness” and lived there unmoving, in the lotus posture, meditating. A century passed in a flash.

In my meditation I saw the thousands of universes that are nested one within another, even inside the smallest atom of a stone.

He surfaced from meditation and heard the beautiful voice of a woman. He searched for her. “I went into the space of my mind and saw countless worlds, all unable to see one another.” After many years, he heard the sound of a lute, and followed to a beautiful young woman singing sweetly. She was a celestial magician [vidyadhari]. Vasistha wanted to know how she came to be here.

She told him her home was inside a tiny atom of a stone in a peak of the mountain called Lokaloka (World-Not-World) “which encircles the disks of the worlds on the outer rim of the universe”. She was the wife of an ascetic scholar who created her from his imagination but never consummated their marriage, because he was wholly given to his studies and meditation. As “the most beautiful woman in the world” she was frustrated. She flew to the sage to seek release for both of them.

She invited Vasistha to visit her world, and by magic, made it possible for him to fly with her to it. At the border of her realm, the sage could at first see nothing. She told him this was because he had become too remote from the worlds of manifestation. In order to see her “illusory” world of forms, he must recall his life experiences from before the time when he achieved full enlightenment. Vasistha went into trance and saw “as in a dream, a great stone and a whole universe inside it.”

In the world inside the stone, Vasistha met its creator. The creator opened his eyes and told him: “As you are to me, so I am to you; this is a mutual story. For a man who is dreaming becomes a man in another man’s dream.” The beautiful woman created an illusory world out of her own desires; now it would end. He withdrew his mind from external images, and the world collapsed in fire and flood, into stillness.

Vasistha looked at the stone again, “like a country boy standing at the door of a palace”:

Everywhere I looked, in every single atom of it, I saw a whole universe. Each of these worlds was different from the other; some had a few resemblances, some more, some no resemblance at all. Some were made entirely of rock, some of water, some of air. In one of them I saw Rama killing Ravana, and in another I saw Rama being defeated by Ravana. Then I understood that all of these worlds were the ideas of various people. Each person imagines his own world, and that becomes his world.

He went back to meditation in his hut in the corner of emptiness. His body was gone. In its place was a magician [siddha] seated in meditation.

Vasistha decided to stop imagining this place. As his mind fell “from the sky to the earth” the magician dropped from the hut that had ceased to exist, still in meditation, falling like a stone. Vasistha roused him with some difficulty, using rain and thunder and hail. They swapped life stories, become friends, and agreed to live together in a world of the magicians where each eventually found a congenial home.

Much to dream and reflect on here! We see how worlds are made by imagination and how what is conceived in the imagination takes on its own life. Vasistha creates a beautiful woman in a trance, and then she comes to him when he has emerged from his trance.

It seems that others can live in our self-created worlds. While some mental worlds ceased to exist when we cease to imagine them, others continue. The people we dream are dreaming about us. We have interesting doubles in the multiverse.

The incredibly large can be found within the incredibly small.

Parallel worlds coexist at every level of the cosmos.

Source: Yogavasistha 6.2.56-94. There is an elegant summary in Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty's Dreams, Illusion and Other Realities.

A place to write from (Red Ink)

2011-08-01T06:57:00.007-04:00

Write from the place that is raw
from the night when you lost your skin.
Write of the time in the war-torn city
when your heart was a quivering bird in your palm
and the blood pool kept filling, and you knew
no doctor could heal this wound
though the world would end if you failed
to keep the wounded lover alive for three days more.

Write from the night you wished yourself dead
and spirit flew from your heart, winged by your desire,
down to the lightless lands of the dead
that no one escapes without help.
Write from the day when, incredibly,
there was enough of you topside
to bribe the ferryman with the ribcage boat
and carry home the part of you that married Death.

Remember the promises you made her:

"You'll never be hurt again." "Every day you'll make poetry."

Write from the night you could not keep those promises
and had to hold the young lover in you by force,
rough as a jailer's armlock, soft as lambskin,
when she thought the one you were losing now
was the one she lost before. And when your heart
breaks again, hold her fast, willing a greater power
to embrace and join you, and write from that.

Dip your pen in the blood pool. This is the time for red ink.

- Mercy-by-the-Sea, July 31, 2011

"Deer Sacrifice" drawing by Robert Moss

Tarot confirms: courage is fear conquered by love

2011-07-29T09:43:00.005-04:00

When I pull a Tarot card for a message or theme for the day, I especially like to use decks with which I am unfamiliar. This way, I can spend time studying fresh images and attributions before my mind slips into the grooves of old understanding.

Yesterday, I picked the Tarot of the Spirit. I was not thrilled when my daily card proved to be the Five of Wind. This is the 5 of Swords in other decks, which often speak to me about mental conflict and biting tongues; in my personal book of Tarot, one of my names for it is "Harpies crapping on your head". In the Tarot of the Spirit, there are the familiar five swords, but they are broken. The background is dark and murky and seems to be crawling with unpleasant things that might become more unpleasant still if you led your imagination dwell on them. The card is tagged "FEAR".

My inner skeptic and my gut instinct both rose up in the presence of this card. Though 5 of Swords issues are always a possibility, I downright refused to believe that Fear would be an issue for the day. I scanned my body, my feelings and my sense of where the day was going. No way.

Wait. I had somehow managed to leave a card in the pack. I shook it out and found the Father of Fire, equivalent to the King of Wands in other decks. He is depicted here as riding to battle on a great black charger with fiery flanks, lance in hand. Now this is a fellow who knows how to tackle fear, with passion and courage and creative flame.

I marked the second card as part of my guidance for the day. In a Tarot reading, as in any other method of divination, it is the slip-ups and "errors" - the cards that fall from the deck or wait in the wings (as in this case) - that let through the pure stream of synchronicity.

I had a radio show booked for later that day, with Gary Goldberg, the cultured and spirited host of "In the Spirit" at WRPI. It was a delightful and highly animated conversation. Halfway into the show, Gary asked me if I would read a passage from my book Active Dreaming. He had already selected the excerpt, and directed me to page 177 of my book.

When I opened Active Dreaming to that page, I felt shivers of recognition as I proceeded to read aloud the title of this section:

Courage is fear conquered by love

The passage continues: "Courageousness is different from fearlessness. If you are fearless, you may be merely crazy or reckless, or lacking in imagination. Courage is the ability to go through fear because you are driven by something that is stronger than fear. Courage is a quality of the heart; you won't find it anywhere else."

My morning Tarot was correct: Fear was a theme for the day. And so was the Father of Fire, riding the wind horse of spirit, with the passion that carries us through fear.

Queen of Disks

2011-07-28T01:59:00.004-04:00

I met her in this form in a dream: as an African matriarch seated under a baobab tree in the marketplace in her village, with the heaped fruits of the Earth around her.

She has made divination marks on the ground with her forefinger according to an ancient system of geomancy.

She wears a flowing red garment and the most wonderful multi-colored headgear.

She is the quintessential Earth mother.

Through the Sun-behind-the-Sun

2011-07-26T09:14:00.004-04:00

One of my favorite forms of bibliomancy (divination by opening a book) is to pluck an old journal from my shelves or file cabinets, open it anywhere, and see what turns up. Since I have been keeping journals for many decades, there is a vast amount of material to draw from.

Sometimes I find that an "old" dream was a preview or rehearsal for events that are manifesting in my life today. When waking events catch up with a dream in this way, the dream may hold more than evidence of long-range precognition; it can offer practical and specific counsel on how to handle a developing situation.

An old report may offer a thought for the day, a spur to action, or a reminder of what the soul knows and what the soul needs. It can offer creative fire and inspiration, as I found today.

I played my game today with a travel journal from April, 2002. I was excited when the journal sprang open to a page with drawings I had made to illustrate the stages of a journey that I made while drumming for a group during a "Dreamgates" workshop I was leading at the Esalen Institute.

My notes read:

1. I rode the bull/chariot through the face of the Sun.
2. And rose as the bennu/phoenix to the Sun-behind-the-Sun.

3. And ascended to a place of clarity & beauty that looked like a giant eye, suspended in space, from afar. A voice says: "You have found your way back."

Since one of my writing themes today is "soul in the multiverse", this came as a welcome reminder of how much is possible when we master the arts of shamanic dream journeying in the cause of connecting with the Greater Self and exploring the larger reality.

From Cave of Paintings to Chariots of the Gods

2011-07-21T08:57:00.009-04:00

I did not expect her. She was Chumash. I had heard the word, but knew nothing of her people. She sat drumming under a tree, dressed in blanched skins. She was as real to me as the members of our circle, and much more visible, since the only light in our room was a candle, while in her space - visible to me when my eyes were closed - everything was bathed in white light.

I made a mental note to find out about the Chumash later, while I continued drumming for our group journey. Our dream travelers were members of an shamanic circle I have been leading for many years. We had agreed that tonight, we would go through the Tree Gate to a Cave of Paintings like those created by shaman artists in Paleolithic Europe, and by indigenous peoples in North America, Australia and Africa in more recent times. We did not focus on a specific cave, rather on the idea that the images we found painted on the rock walls would help us to enter the Cave Mind: to understand and even participate in the experience these sites were intended to facilitate for those who created and used them. We agreed to touch the painted images and see how going skin to skin might bring the great animals alive. We wanted to see whether the rock walls might yield like membranes, allowing us passage to deeper levels, perhaps to the realm of the Goddess and ancestral wisdom keepers.

While drumming for the group, I let my traveling consciousness slip down through the roots of a tree, bent on our assignment. I was surprised to find myself immediately in a verdant and dramatic landscape. Great waterfalls streamed down a giant's staircase, to the watery depths of a gorge far below. A nut-brown Native man, with black hair in a basin-cut, indicated that down there was where I needed to go. It would be a long descent. But I threw off my clothes - I realized that I had been wearing a bear skin - and took the plunge, over the falls, plummeting straight down into the watery depths of the gorge.

My body was washed clean by the cool green water. This Cave could be entered only by water, but I had no trouble breathing as I swam down to find the opening. The Native man remained close. The Cave entrance, when I found it, seemed too small for me, just a narrow slit in the rock. But I realized I had changed my body type, and become short and wiry like my new companion. With his mind, he urged me forward, through the crack. For a moment, this world went completely dark. Then I felt movement, and my inner light came on, showing me a writhing mass of snakes, their fangs ready for attack. Was this a trap, or a trial? I willed myself forward, telling myself the snakes could do me no harm, pushing them back like vines or creepers.

I came out in a womb-like space. I glimpsed rock paintings, one of them of a huge creature whose shape was unfamiliar. I did not have time to inspect it carefully, because it surged from the wall, filling my field of sight as it presented me with an enormous open maw, easily big enough to swallow me whole. I was reminded of the sandworms in Dune. I briefly considered trying to blow myself up to equal size, in bear form, but rejected this as time-wasting an unnecessary. I chose instead to dive into the mouth of the beast, as you might push an envelope into a mail drop. Utter darkness, churning, willing myself forward. On and on, very far now, it seemed, from the body I had left on the chair, drumming - though I was still in full control of that instrument.

At last, my inner light was restored as I came to the first of many doors. They were of many designs, mostly two-leaved doors. I lost count of how many opened before I came out in an airy space suffused by soft blue light. I had the impression of giant feathers, as if a great bird had recently taken flight from this space. A far wall shimmered and became transparent, and through it I saw the vessels used by far travelers who came here, eons ago, to forge a link between higher consciousness and an evolving species on this planet.

A luminous intelligence, moving like a blue ripple in the air, gave me a talisman that I recognized: a winged disk. I knew it from different cultures and far memories, especially from Egypt and from Persia. In the form given to me now, the winged disk was unquestionably a vehicle, such as Persian gods and kings were shown riding, powered by xvarnah, radiance.

Holding the winged disk, I passed from the place of blue light to a Cave of the Goddess, where fierce warrior women stood ready to challenge but welcomed me when they saw what I was carrying. I received healing and blessing in the realm of the Goddess. Then it was time to bring all of myself back to the body in the chair, and sound the recall signals for all of our group to come back from the places where their dream souls had traveled.

Quiet time, when we were all back with the lights on, for drawing and writing from our travels. Then story time, and what excellent stories were shared? Of finding a green world under the shell of a turtle goddess. Of touching the belly of a painted horse and becoming a white stallion, thundering across a plain. Of a Fish Speaker, coming alive from a painted image to deliver the message of Water. Of meeting an Eye Goddess, like one depicted in ancient Anatolia.

The professor in me always wants to ground visionary adventures of this kind in research. So I have been looking into the unexpected appearance of the Chumash woman drummer. I find that - previously unknown to me - the Chumash were great rock painters, and a whole cosmology, a star map, and a chart for interdimensional travel may be contained in their Painted Cave near Santa Barbara. A Chumash name for that cave is alahalukin, which means "that which comes around." From the perspective of humans, sun and moon and stars come around, including the big Bear in the sky, Ursa Major, which the Chumash call the Guardian. And so do winged disks, those ancient chariots of the gods.

The Tower

2011-07-20T08:07:00.004-04:00

I take the lid off
I tear down your plans
and your structures.
Only a crazy man calls on me.
They were so scared of me

in the time of sorcerer princes

they kept me out of the deck

under lock and key

between readings.

You ride now on cobbled streets

beyond my ramparts

to the palace of desires and hauteurs

of sweet airs and embraces

where once you forgot your duty

and the needs of the people

until I brought the roof down.

Remember, falcon rider.

Grail Night

2011-07-16T11:21:00.007-04:00

Knight, you came to this crossing before
bold and green, fired up for the quest,
and did not know that this was always the place:
this stony beach, the crabbers and fishing nets,
the wind-blown houses across the dark waters.
Now you have ridden your horse to the ground
your armor is rusted, your sword crosted with blood,
your hair bleached to bone. You can see now
that no adversary bested you except yourself;
you refused no battle, fled from no fight.
But in your war for the world you forgot
the world-behind-the-world you were fighting for.
You don't like what you see in the mirror of the water.

Plate by plate, iron by iron, chain by chain,
you cast off your armor. This is taking off your skin.
You are so raw a teasing zephyr tears your flesh.
You cling to your sword, but the waves rebuff you.
To make this crossing, you must lay down your arms.
In unsteady hands, you raise the great iron
and bury your pride and your rage in forgiving earth.

Salt eats your flesh. the swell buffets you,
tosses you, hurls you down into stinging sand.
When you come up gasping, black birds batter you
and you know that furies you aroused have found you.
Is it death you have come to meet at this water gate?
You swirl into blackness. When the swirling stops
you are flat on the far shore, looking up at her lovely face.
"I called you in dreams," she reminds you
with only the edge of reproach. "But year after year
you would not listen. And still, you are here."

In a cathedral room, open to the heavens,
you are washed with light. You remember the quest.
Can the Grail be here? You range through the house
seeking, only to return to the great sky-lit space.
She says, "Be still, and open. Stand like a tree,
open like a flower, like a chalice, at your crown."
You remember the crown you once wore
and you let that go, and open. "Drink the light."
You drink deep, and something opens deeper in you
in the cavity of the heart, a cup is filing with light.
Light streams from the heart, pure waterfall, and you know
you have found the Grail, in the one place it can be found.

- Mosswood Hollow, July 15, 2011

Graphic: Sangreal by Arthur Rackham (1917)

Why we dream

2011-07-12T10:09:00.004-04:00

"Wny do we dream?" asked the blue butterfly girl, looking around the circle of animals she had invited to her tea party by the garden gate.

"You dream so we can always be together," said Bear, without hesitation. "You dream so you will always have a friend. "

"You dream so you can see," said Hawk. His golden eyes flashed.

"You dream so you can learn to be brave like me," said Lion.

"Nonsense," said Mr. Fox. "You dream so you can tell stories about me."

"Grandfather," the girl looked into the tea water. "Why do we dream?"

Grandfather Teller's voice bubbled like a pot about to boil. "You dream because humans are the animals that tell stories about all the others."