Night Gardens of Forking Paths

 

I try not to rush to organize my dream memories as a linear narrative. I love stories with a beginning, a middle and an end. However, I am also aware that in dreaming we may shift from one scene - or one world - to another. Dreams may be nested inside each other, or playing on many screens at the same time. Dreaming, we can act and observe simultaneously in multiple realities on multiple tracks.

My dreams from the last cycle of sleep overnight remind me of Borges' story “the Garden of Forking Paths”. Riffing on the detective genre, Borges anticipates the Many Worlds hypothesis in physics with his account of a legendary unfinished Chinese novel whose plotline is quite different from most narratives. In fiction, as in ordinary life, a character typically comes to a point of decision, makes a choice, and then the paths not taken fade away. In Borges’ fiction within a fiction, all possible outcomes of an event are manifested simultaneously, opening different event tracks. The proliferation of possibilities is enacted again and again along each track. The constantly-diverging paths may converge again, as the result of new circumstances.

In the Borges story, the stakes include life or death and vital wartime intelligence. My brief report from a dream excursion last night involves small decisions without scary consequences. I find it entertaining as a dream introduction to the forking paths of the Many Worlds.

Four Tracks to Prague

I deliver a wildly popular lecture to a big crowd in a castle near Prague. In the forecourt afterwards, I notice there are hundreds of Czech coins on the ground. I bend down, pick up a 20 korun piece, and present it to a young woman. She is embarrassed, pointing out that the coins were left as an offering. I tell her she can  use the 20 crowns (about $1) to make an offering in support of something she wants to manifest in her own life.  There is a wonderful sense of abundance, service and simplicity.

After many hugs with people from the group, I am alone and need to find my way from the castle to a hotel near the city center.

I explore at least four options. Though they are laid out here as a sequence, I think I travel on all four tracks simultaneously in the spacious reality of dreaming.

1. I follow the crowd from my lecture. I see lots of people walking to the city center along railroad tracks. I walk parallel to them, across the tracks. Then

2. I am on a train. A laughing girl puts a hat on my head that isn’t mine as we come to a station. I retrieve my hat from an overhead rack. It is soft tweed like an Irish walking hat. Someone has removed the leather band. When I try it on, the hat is too small for me and the crown has changed shape. It now looks like the "topper" on a cartoon leprechaun. I forget the hat because now

3. I am walking down the hill from the castle to a pleasant shopping district. I meet an elegant lady in furs from Vienna. She is sampling several fine wines and may be a dealer. She tells me, "I am here for the wine". We discuss sharing a taxi. Before this happens

4. I manage to hail a cab in a different neighborhood Solo again, I wait for the driver to make room for my packages. The taxi morphs into an armored military vehicle bristling with weapons. The soldiers are friendly and soon we are speeding along the highway towards Prague.

Feelings:  Entertained. Glad to have some new material relevant to one of my favorite themes: living consciously in the multidimensional universe.

Reality check: I was scheduled to lead a retreat in northern Bohemia this week, before the pandemic forced me to put a hold on in-person workshops and international air travel. I have taught and traveled in the Czech Republic many times over the past decade. Transit issues involving the Czech Republic are not an exotic element in my dreams.

I have taught and traveled in Ireland, have some Irish ancestry and am not a stranger to leprechauns.

I like good wines but not as much as the lady from Vienna, known only to me in the dream.

I love trains, though I rarely ride them these days. I am alive to the symbolic resonance of a train (as in training) and a track (as in line to a certain destination) in dreams.

The switch to a military vehicle in #4 may reflect security concerns in relation to literal travel.

My dream travel agent, also no doubt my dream scriptwriter, gave me at least four ways of getting to my destination As I noted, I don't think options 1-4 are a linear sequence. They appear to be glimpses of events unfolding on four parallel tracks in alternate realities, between which the focus of my dominant personality shifts back and forth. I am arriving at the station, amid the funny business with the hat, at the same moment I am speeding along a highway towards Prague, in the armored car.

Maybe this isn’t so different from life anywhere – except that in ordinary reality we are often quite oblivious to the fact that we walk in many worlds.

Top Photo: View from Nové Město nad Metují by Robert Moss

 

A Master of the Third Eye

“You know what a master is like,” she cautioned me.

“Oh yeah.”

“He’s as likely to whack you as to talk to you.”

I climbed the last steps to the master’s hermitage resolved not to submit to any slap-in-the-face treatment.

I found him with his feet in a tub of hot water. Steam rose and the air was pleasantly scented with mountain herbs as one of his handmaidens palpated his feet. I was curious to see whether she would dry them with her lustrous black hair, that fell to the floor.

“Move the chest,” he directed me.

I contemplated the great iron-banded box without enthusiasm.

“Where?”

He indicated the far corner.

I half-lifted, half-carried the heavy trunk to the place he indicated, wondering what he kept in it.

“Now bring it back. And don’t drag it. Pick it up.”

I felt the veins bulge on my forehead as I struggled to carry out these instructions. I nearly made it back. Then the trunk slid from my grip, landing painfully on my left foot.

The master waited until I had stopped howling before he spoke again. “Why do you come to me?”

“Master, I come to you because I wish to see.”

“Then why are your pig eyes open?”

“Master?”

I realized, at that moment, that the master’s eyes were closed. I understood that I was to close my own.

“Closer,” he commanded.

I felt the stir of movement. I heard the swish of the loose silk of his garment, and pictured his arm swinging back, fist clenched. Here it comes.

I intended to duck the blow, but something kept me in place, on my knees in front of him. What was that buzzing sound? It made me think of a bee, trapped behind glass. It came closer.

I felt burning pain as something pierced me at the third eye, like a drill bit. Immediately the girl was at my side, soothing my forehead with an ointment that smelled like yoghurt.

When she left off, there was absolute stillness in the cabin. Then I heard the soft slap of water from the footbath.

I opened my eyes. There was no change in the scene. The black-haired girl squatted at the master’s feet, as before. I felt no surge of enlightenment. I did notice that one of the master’s eyes was now open. Above and between his closed eyelids, it fixed me with its blue light, cold and unwinking.

I wrote this little story during a 15-minute timed exercise while leading an adventure in "Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming". It appears here unedited. The starter dough was a card I drew in a literary version of my Coincidence Card Game that included the words "third eye."I am leading "Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming" again this year at magical Mosswood Hollow, near Seattle, from May21-25 and in a green paradise near Česká Skalice  in the Czech Republic from September 12-16.

Image: "Watching" by Zen-Master on DeviantArt.

Dreaming in Bohemia

We turn nightmares into butterflies
We hear the counsel of elders
who change into trees at night
We share advice with our parallel selves
We make apple orchards with our minds
We wake up in different worlds
and know this dreaming is for real

Shooting stars applaud our good intentions
Thunderclaps tell us when it's time to stop
We build our houses on the threshold
You can't put butter on our heads
or reel us on with a limp noodle
We beat our drums with baby socks
We ride in the cosmic school bus
and walk in a castle of possibilities

- Žernov, August 27. 2018

Photo: Fire in the Apple Orchard by Robert Moss

Call of the Mountain Mother

She calls me again
to walk the avenue of sacred lindens
and climb the steep hill
that leaves me breathless
to where light falls
across golden fields and sleeping volcanoes.
She says, terrible and beautiful
in her majesty, "Show me what you can offer."

I unfold my tents in the market
that is already hot and busy.
I proffer dolls that were lost by little girls
and toy soldiers broken by lost boys
and a rocking horse that can fly across the sky
and mirrors where you can see more of yourself
whether you like it or not.
My tents open into each other
making a breezeway that can float you
to the place of the stuffed animals
whose shadows are giant lions and bears
that walk by themselves.

The Lady accepts what I have to give.
She calls me through the tent flaps
to taste the harvest she is stirring in her bowl
and enter her glorious embrace.
With apples and cherries on my tongue
I become a tree on her mountain
streaming with the juice of many fruits
putting roots down and down, deep and wide
able, on her fertile ground, to draw lightning
and hold it without falling, spreading wings of light.

from a journey to Mount Říp, in the heart of the Czech heartland.