The First Latvian Moon Landing

THE LATVIANS HAVE SUCCEEDED IN LANDING ON THE MOON!

This was the headline and basic content of one of my dreams on the first night of my residential workshop on shamanic lucid dreaming at a pleasant center on a rocky beach near Roja, on the Bay of Riga, over the Easter weekend. I took it as a wink from my dream producers, indicating that we would succeed in our efforts to bring back the dreaming here.  

     After all, the Moon not only has great attraction for dreamers; it was widely believed by the ancients to be the source of much interesting dream activity. In his treatise On the Face That Appears in the Orb of the Moon, Plutarch - the great biographer, initiate and priest of Apollo, who knew what he was talking about - suggested that the spirits of the Moon visit humans in their dreams, and that the souls of humans travel to the astral realm of the Moon in dreams and transit this realm on the way to birth and again after death.

     Many of the Latvians in my group are passionately engaged in reviving the knowledge and practice of the authentic ancient traditions of their country, dating back to before the invasions began in the 12th century. A folklorist and wonderful singer named Aina gifted us with dainas - traditional folk songs that celebrate oak and sun, stone and sea. The morning after my dream of the Moon landing, I asked her to help open our circle with a song of the oak tree:

I found in a field
a tall oak tree of spirit
his feet go into the earth
his head touches the sky

Oak tree, oak tree
how wide you are
the bee flies for three days
and can't get around you

In the last stanza, this song of oak teaches us to give a little in a strong wind, to avoid being broken.

The big storm boasted
"I'll break the oak."
Oak tree, stand strong
but let the wind shake your branches.

For the first time, I introduced a circle in Latvia to the core techniques of active dreaming: how to open a safe space to share dreams and guide each other towards action to honor our dreams; how to reenter a dream in order to go beyond a fear, dialog with a dream character, penetrate a mystery, or have more fun exploring the multiverse.

    In a moving dream reentry, one of the Latvian women succeeded in going back inside a recurring dream that had previously filled her with shame and dread. In the original dream, she found herself (again and again) approaching the shack where her great-aunt had lived and died in extreme poverty in the harsh times of Soviet rule. She had loved this great-aunt and had always felt bad that the family had not been able to do more for her. In the dream reentry, she entered the shack and had a loving reunion with her great-aunt, who gave her blessings and specific personal information she could immediately use in her life.

    On Sunday, the day of requickening, we moved swiftly through a series of excellent journeys: through the gates of remembered dreams and on to a Dream Library where travelers could gain knowledge on any subject, meet a master teacher and even look at the book of their own lives; and a Magic Market where the discovery of a favorite object from childhood released the spirit horse of vital energy and provided a way to reclaim the energy and imagination of a younger self.

     The fog rolling in from the sea inspired me to offered the sea-mist as the gate for a journey to the Other Side with the dual objective of timely and helpful communication with a departed loved one or ancestor, and of gaining first-hand knowledge of the geography of the afterlife. All of these journeys succeeded beyond my wildest expectations, if not beyond my dreams.
    My own visions, during all these lucid shamanic dream adventures, powered by drumming, became a deepening adventure in dream archaeology, giving me direct access to the world of Baltic mythology and the history and spirits of the land. In a walled garden, I experienced the meaning of ancient Baltic symbols in the forms of shaped flower beds, turning in certain patterns. On a flying horse, I was called east, to a black mountain in Russia, to understand one of the long shadows over Latvia. Through an amber tunnel, I found my way to the current residence of a deceased scholar of Baltic mythology who wants me to make his work known in English.
    In the last workshop session, I helped people to open their hearts and grow a waking vision of the fulfillment of their hearts' desires, a vision so strong that it wants to take root in the world. Then I had them identify three key problems in the way of fulfilling that vision - and journey again, with the drum, for guidance on how to overcome those challenges. This produced very practical guidance, as well as the energy that comes when we carry a vision we can hold not only in the mind but in the inner senses.
     We closed the circle, arms around each other, swaying a little like the great oak in the big wind. As people continued, in high excitement, to share their experiences, I felt that the dream of the Latvian Moon landing was fulfilled.

Article first posted in April 2011

Photo: Sunrise on the Bay of Riga (c) Robert Moss

The need for dream archaeology

Marija Gimbutas, the great Lithuanian scholar of Old Europe and its Goddess traditions, declared with urgent clarity in The Civilization of the Goddess, her chef d'oeuvre:  “We must refocus our collective memory. The necessity of this has never been greater as we discover that the path of ‘progress’ is extinguishing the very conditions for life on earth." 

The new art and science of dream archaeology provides powerful tools for refocusing collective memory, exactly as the great Lithuanian scholar of the Goddess proposed.  I invented the term "dream archaeology".  It is the study of first and essential (arche) things with the aid of dreamwork and techniques of shamanic lucid dreaming. It is a discipline that enables us to access the living past, to enter into direct communication with the keepers of ancestral wisdom and heal the collective and cultural soul loss that is a feature of our age. 

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 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 in dreams. As dream archaeologists, we learn to work with such dreams, both through focused research and by learning the technique of dream reentry, which means making a shamanic journey through the doorway of a remembered dream to harvest more information, to deepen communication with the ancestors, and to travel beyond the maps. 

When we are already engaged in a line of research, we draw on the skills of shamanic lucid dreaming, as well as spontaneous gifts of the night, to find what cannot be located in ordinary ways, but can often be confirmed by subsequent dream-directed research. 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. 

After her death, Marija Gimbutas appeared to her friend and biographer Joan Marler in a powerful dream. Marija said fiercely, “You must remember us.” Joan understood that the great Lithuanian scholar of the Goddess was speaking from the realm of the ancestors, “a place of collective memory and wisdom”. She describes this encounter in an essay in From the Realm of the Ancestors, a magnificent Festchrift in honor of Marija that she edited. 

I have been privileged to lead six workshops in shamanic dreaming and dream archaeology in Lithuania. Each visit has been a grand adventure and a deepening encounter with the ancestors of the land. On my first visit to Marija’s native country, in the summer of 2004, 40 Lithuanians joined me at Nida to reclaim the arts of dreaming. With the aid of shamanic drumming, we made a group journey together through the gateway of an ancient oak, with the aim of establishing direct and authentic communication with the ancestors of the land. 

I found myself in direct contact with a priestess of Žemyna, the Earth Goddess. The priestess belonged to an earlier time, but seemed to speak from a place of amber light outside time. She instructed me in methods of healing and visioning involving the use of amber, and gave me symbols and words in old Lithuanian – a language previously unknown to me – that others in the workshop helped me translate. I am glad to report that I am returning to Lithuania in May this year to lead new adventures in dream archaeology and shamanic dreaming in Vilnius and Kaunas. 

Wherever I go now, I find myself traveling in two worlds. From behind the curtains of ordinary perception, the ancestors are calling. I am reminded again and again that one of the gifts of dreaming is that it opens authentic connections to the ancestors, offering us the chance to heal the wounds of the past and to perform cultural soul retrieval.

For much more on dream archaeology in the Baltic, and elsewhere, see my book The Boy Who Died Came Back

Photo: Žemaitiu alka, sanctuary of the old gods in Samogitia

 

 

Dreaming with the People of Amber

The first time I visited the Baltic, I dreamed of an ancient priestess who showed me the spiritual uses of amber. She brought me inside a chamber like the inside of an egg-shaped amber, glowing with golden light, and showed me how to use a smaller version of this amber as a place to see.

I have been on the lookout for the right egg-shaped amber since then. Its specifications were clear: it must be clear, light golden amber, natural but free of inclusions (such as ancient insects) and polished by hand. I found it, at last, on a cobbled street in the Old City in Riga last month, when we had to to leave the street we were on because construction drills were throwing huge quantities of cement dust into the air.

The amber is beside me as I write. It takes me back inside a big dream I saw on my second visit to the Baltic, when I taught in Vilnius and traveled through Samogitia. I titled this dream "The Mud People and the Amber People". In the dream, I was out in deep woods at night and found myself sinking into sticky mud while creepy things moved about me. I came to the house of a ragana, a witch, among the roots of a crooked tree. She had painted the upper part of her face chalk-white, from the hairline to the cheekbones, so that it resembled part of a death's head, or perhaps a venomous spider. While she scuttled away from me into hiding, nasty slithering things rose from the mud.

I was glad to find that an enormous Bear was now with me, as my bodyguard. While willing to fight the witch's familiars, I also recognized that I had strayed into her territory, and that she had reason to fear intruders. Instead of engaging in battle, I called down Light, and a bright shaft of golden light immediately descended from on high, like a column of amber coming down from the sky. It worked a traction beam, lifting me straight up, high above the mud and the wood witch.

I found myself inside an enormous egg-shaped amber, in the company of wise women. It was like the amber room where I had first met the ancient Baltic priestess, expanded to the size of a mother ship. The leader told me: "You must understand that there are the Mud People and the Amber People. You belong to the People of Amber. Your duty - and that of those you train - is to build bridges and walkways so people can get across the mud safely. You must avoid allowing yourself to be sucked down into the mud. You must remember to call on the power of light amber to heal and guide, and on the power of dark amber to cleanse and remove the darkness."

That seems like an agenda for more than one landscape. I have offered that dream as a space of light and healing that others can enter. Several groups - most memorably in my recent workshop in Kurzeme (northwest Latvia) - have traveled together, with the aid of shamanic drumming, through their own dark woods into that space of amber light, and have brought back energy and guidance.

The full report of my dream of "The Mud People and the Amber People" is here.

Life rhymes: Baltic calling

Coincidence runs in riffs, and working with it may involve pattern recognition over time and the kind of poetic consciousness that notices what rhymes in a day, or a week, or a longer period. Sometimes this kind of thing is hard to miss.

When I deplaned at Heathrow airport on a recent trip, I discovered that I had booked myself on the wrong coach to Bath. The woman at the National Express office who sorted everything out for me, saving me a couple of hours on the bus, had a name tag that read "Daiva". I recognized this as a popular Lithuanian name derived from a word for "goddess".
     I can't currently recall more than a few words of Lithuanian, but the word for "thank you" is hard to forget, because it sounds like a sneeze.
    "Ačiū!" I thanked Daiva for her help.
    "You've made my day," she told me. "People notice my name, but you're the first to come in here who knows where I'm from."
    After the ride to Bath, and a brisk walk from the bus terminal, I arrived at Pratt's hotel on South Parade, where I was welcomed by a tall young woman who proved to be Estonian. She corrected my pronunciation when I tried out my one Estonian phrase, also one of my favorite sayings in any language: töö õpetab tegijat. "The work will teach you how to do it."
    Back in London at the end of the week to lead a workshop for Alternatives, I met another Lithuanian woman, Marija, who shared a challenging dream of her childhood home and bravely agreed to reenter it, with the help of her sister and a third Lithuanian who had come to that workshop. Marija's conscious dream reentry journey, aided by her travel companions, brought through wonderful healing and resolution.
    The rhyming here is pretty obvious, its meaning quite deep for me. I am returning to the Baltic in April to teach Active Dreaming in Estonia and Latvia. A Lithuanian edition of my book The Three "Only" Things will be published later this year. I wrote in The Dreamer's Book of the Dead about my experiences of facilitating cultural soul recovery with a group of 45 Lithuanians during my first visit to their country, back in 2004, when I found myself in direct contact with an ancient priestess of Zemyna, the great Earth goddess. Right after the London workshop I received an invitation to teach in Lithuania for the fourth time.
    As I sat down to write this note, I received email confirmation that a book on Baltic mythology that I had sought unsuccessfully last year had at last been located and shipped: Norbertas Velius' The world outlook of the ancient Balts. At the precise moment I finished this note and hit the "save" button, an email came in from Ere, the dreamer who is arranging my visit to Tallinn, confirming our travel plans. She's the one who gave me the original Estonian words of that marvelous life principle: the work will teach you how to do it. Yes, it will.