A Dreamer's Notes: The Cover Girl is Out of the Book

There are books that won't stay quietly on a shelf or a table unless you put them inside a birdcage. My book Conscious Dreaming once flew off a shelf in the Boulder Book Store in Colorado and struck a visiting shamanic teacher at the third eye. He bought it, read it, and invited me to his city to lead a workshop. 

Someone told me this week that that she dreamed the cover of Dreamgates, my book for frequent flyers. I was inspired to look up my report of an experience in the drifty hypnopompic zone between sleep and awake, when that book showed signs of life in an interesting way. Cover girls are one thing, but we don't expect book covers to start kicking up their heels.

January 4, 2020

Hypnopompic state

The Girl from My Book

Lying in bed after waking I become aware there is something like a television monitor above the right side of my head. It is superposed on the ceiling rather than in the ceiling. The colors are poster paint bright. There is a young fair haired girl in a white dress and a white horse under a huge leafy tree

They are familiar. Can this be the girl who is sleeping on a branch of a giant tree while a white horse grazes on the cover of my book Dreamgates? I recall now that in a dream before waking I was reading pages from Dreamgates aloud to a girl who needed help in transitioning between different energy bodies

The girl on the screen above me looks at me and says, "When I wake up here, I fall asleep there."

She shows me things beyond the picture on the cover of my book, which has become a living landscape. There is a primal beast the size of an elephant that makes me a little nervous until she demonstrates that it obeys her like a trained dog. Like the girl in my dream she wants to discuss subtle bodies and what happens when we travel beyond the astral plane. Perhaps she is the girl from the dream as well as the girl from the book tree. We'll be talking some more, when she falls asleep there and wakes up here.

I tracked down the drawing I made from this vision. The girl on the screen deserved some special recognition. Cover girls are one thing, but we don't expect book covers to start kicking up their heels.

"Were you happier in the life when you died, or the life you are living now?"

A story from the Bardo of Air Travel in the pre-pandemic era. Here is what unfolded when I was traveling with a copy of the French edition of Dreamgates in 2012:

I thought I would not have much of a story to share from my long overnight journey from upstate New York to Montpellier in southern France. No flight delays, no missed connections or lost bags, empty seats beside me on the first two flights, so no stories like that of the Death's Head Dominatrix (which you will find in my book Sidewalk Oracles).
    Then, on my last short flight from Paris-CDG to Montpellier, I took out my inflight reading, a book in French titled Les portes du rêve. A flight attendant immediately asked me if she could see the book. Leafing through it with mounting excitement, she saw that one of the driving themes is using dreams of the departed and conscious dream journeys to the Other Side to gain first hand knowledge of what happens after death.
    "This is my favorite theme," she told me. "I am passionate about it. I am going to get this book!"
    I now confessed that I was the author. I explained that I was reading myself in hopes of brushing up my French prior to opening a depth workshop near Montpellier titled "Faire de la mort une alliée" (Making Death Your Ally). Les portes du rêve is the French version of my book Dreamgates.
    Cabin service at my end of the cabin was now suspended while the flight attendant proceeded to fire a volley of questions. "To write about these things you must have had a near-death experience, yes?"
     Yes, indeed.
    People around us did not seem to mind that the coffee and juice was not being poured. An older couple next to me wanted in on the conversation. Violette, the wife, said, "We are all so hungry for first-hand information about what happens after death. I want to know what I can expect in the afterlife, and I don't want to hear it from priests or psychologists. I want to hear it from people who have been there! And I want to know how I can find out these things for myself."
    I quoted Montaigne. Puisque nous ne savons pas où la mort nous attend, attendons-la partout. I had forgotten that I don't speak good French as I quoted this wonderful counsel in the original version. "Since we do not know where Death will meet us, let us be ready to meet it everywhere."
    There was a stir of agreement from folks around us. I realized I now had an audience of at least a dozen people.
    "I can't think of any subject as important as what you are discussing," a man across the aisle contributed, writing down my name and the title of my book. A male flight attendant joined us, wanting the same information.
    I observed that we have two main ways of gaining direct knowledge of l'au-delà, the Other Side. We can communicate with people who are at home there, and we can make the crossing before death, to see for ourselves.
    This led to an urgent series of fresh questions, again centering on my personal experiences.
    I noted that I have never been content with the term "near death experience" for what happened to me a s boy, when I died and came back. On one occasion, when I checked out of my body during emergency appendectomy, aged nine, I seemed to live a whole life in another world. "I don't think I had a near death experience. I think I died and came back."
     More questions, more and more urgent.
     "Do you have no fear of death?
     "Do you talk to many people who have died?"
     "Are there many different places where people go when they die?"
     The short answer to those three, of course, is Yes, Yes, Yes. I gave highest marks to this question: "Were you happier in the life when you died, or the life you are living now?" 

    That was a tough one. I confessed that I was so in love with the people of the other world who raised me as their own when I went away from this world at age nine that I had a hard time living in the body of a nine-year-old boy when I came back. "I suppose I was in love with Death. I have learned to make Death an ally rather than a lover. I want to be ready to meet him anywhere, everyday. I also want to use him as a counselor who can help me to make my life choices with the courage and clarity only Death can bring."
     The flight attendant had returned to her regular tasks, but kept coming back to rejoin the conversation. When we landed, she was waiting outside the baggage claim with some of her colleagues. They were all very interested and wanted my website and book information.
    "You see, we are making you some good publicity, so you will have to keep teaching us about l'au-delà here in France."
    There was a synchronicity at play in all of this that make it a marvelous confirmation, one of those secret kisses, a bisou from the universe. An hour before I left for the airport, I had sent my favorite editor a few pages from a book-in-progress, from a chapter titled "The Boy Who Died and Came Back." That became the title of the book itself, and I recounted this episode in an introduction titled "Kiss of Death".    

I want my new book in my arms

For me, the genesis of a creative work is both tactile and magical. It involves the urgent desire to touch and caress, and the sense of bringing something into manifestation from the imaginal plane where it already exists. I want to share the feelings, keen as the desire for a perfect lover, that helped to bring one of my most adventurous books (Dreamgates) into my hands, and then into the hands of its readers.

The feeling comes in strong. I want to touch it, stroke it, leaf back and forth through the pages, linger over details of typesetting, the pleasure of rereading an especially felicitous passage. Stroking my previous books, reading over drafts, letters, journal entries, won’t hack it. I want the real thing, the finished thing, bound and sewn.

     I know it’s there.

I have known for quite a time (well over a year) that my new book already exists. This is confirmed when I go through my journal and commonplace book. A paragraph here — and here, and here — a page or two there, are leaves from the finished product. Sure, I have recorded them out of sequence and need to figure out how to shuffle them to match the pagination of the actual book. There are big gaps where material had been left out in transmission. But these are not drafts, despite garbles, typos, and screwups by the filing clerk in my brain. They are the book — the actual, finished book — coming through. 

     I think of a bronze by Ipoustéguy in a sculpture garden in Washington, D.C., that shows a man moving through a solid door. An arm is coming through, up to the elbow. A leg is jutting through, up to the knee. A face bulges round as a moon, penetrating the membrane that only impersonates a solid barrier. My book has been coming through like that.

     Now I want its whole body in my hands.

     I could pause and give myself a lecture on the laws of manifestation, of bringing things into the surface world from the imaginal realm in which they are born. But I am not in the mood for a dissertation on Platonic forms or the Mundus Imaginalis of the Persian philosophers.

     My need lives in my body — in my loins, in my gut, in my nerve endings. I want to cradle and caress, to touch and be touched.

     Can I write from this?

     I can do better. I can deliver.

     My naysayer has nothing to say. My brakeman can’t stop the train. (The brakeman lives in the logical mind, as anyone knows who remembers his Greek; phren, “logic,” is related to phrenon, which means “brakes” — and “damper.”) Coming through!

     You could call my condition relaxed attention, or attentive relaxation, as my fingers trip and skirl across the keyboard. I don’t mind what you call it. As the screen fills and refills, as pages spill from the printer, I am simply bringing a book from my dream library into my physical space, to enjoy it with all of my physical senses.

Text adapted from Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and Life beyond Death by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Photo at top: "Man Passing through Door" by Jean-Robert Ipoustéguy in the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.

Dreams of initiation

In dreams and twilight states, we are called to a deeper life. Training and initiation, as well as direct experience of the sacred, lie beyond the dreamgates.

    The hunger for transcendence, through a primal, direct encounter with the sacred, leads people down strange and dangerous byways: into experiments with hallucinogenic drugs, into dubious cults and ersatz Nativism. Yet the authentic call to initiation continues to resonate in our dreams. And through the dreamgates, it can be followed to a genuine consummation. Arguably, it can hardly be pursued in any other way since — whatever the externals of ceremony and culture — true spiritual initiation and apprenticeship always take place on the inner planes, in a deeper order of reality.

    Even in societies where Mystery initiation was regarded as central to human fulfillment, and its gates and secrets closely guarded, the validity of an individual dream calling and initiation was honored.
    There is a fascinating story about this from the Hellenistic world, preserved by Sopatros, a teacher of rhetoric. A man dreamed he had attended the epopteia, the crowning revelation of the Eleusinian Mysteries. He recounted the secret rituals of the Telesterion in vivid and accurate detail to an initiate of the Greater Mysteries. But in ordinary reality, the dreamer was not a “made man.”
    The initiate to whom he told his dream was shocked that he was speaking openly about things he had no right to know and denounced him for sacrilege. He was dragged into court, where his accusers demanded the death penalty. However, the defense argued successfully that the gods themselves had played the part of the hierophant in his dream. His dream of initiation was recognized as true initiation; the dreamer would now be respected as an epoptes — one who had “seen” and gone through the sacred fire.

     Contemporary dreamers who have never heard of Eleusis or other ancient Mystery rites have dreams of similar quality.        
     A woman with no classical education dreamed she was at a banquet that reminded her of the Last Supper, except that the feasters at the table were wearing curious masks. One of them had the face of a raven, another wore a veil, yet another a Roman helmet. Her own head was covered by a lion mask fashioned from a canvas-like material, possibly oiled paper. When she shared this dream in one of my workshops, I realized she was describing, as if from the inside, a communion rite of the Mithraic mysteries, whose initiates donned masks and headgear of this type according to their grades.

Adapted from chapter 7 of Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and Life Beyond Death by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Image: The Ninnion Tablet depicts Iacchus leading Mystery initiates to an encounter with Demeter and Persephone. Found in the sanctuary of Eleusis, and dating from the mid-fourth century BCE, this red clay tablet is the only known original depiction of the Eleusinian rites of initiation. Now in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.

A book to live...or die...by

Sonoma, California

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Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover. The new edition of my book Dreamgates has a beautiful cover, designed by Tracy Cunningham, that makes you want to step inside it. Flying to California this week to talk about Dreamgates at a series of fine independent bookstores that are bravely weathering current conditions - Book Passage in Corte Madera, Readers Books in Sonoma, Copperfields in Sebastopol - I saw the cover work its magic.

Like all well-trained authors, I had a copy of my new book with me along with my in-flight reading. A young woman - an editorial assistant in her 20s - sitting next to me on the first flight caught sight of the gorgeous cover and asked if she could have a look at it. She went straight to the last pages of Dreamgates, where I tell the story of a weave of dreams and synchronicity that guided me on how to publish my first book on dreaming (Conscious Dreaming) and led me, a year after a crucial guiding dream, to a scene in the Embarcadero cinema in San Francisco where that dream unfolded, in ordinary reality, in front of my eyes. My rowmate exclaimed, shiny-eyed, "I want to live like this." She proceeded to devour as much of the book as she could before we landed.

On the second flight (Chicago-Oakland) my rowmate was a feisty lady aged 75 who's lived for 20 years in Carmel, California. She, too, asked to see the book with the gorgeous cover. She opened it at random to a section that explores the idea that we can "design a home in the afterlife". This didn't faze her one bit. "I've put all this time and effort into making myself a perfect home in Carmel," she said. "I'm 75 and I guess it may be time for me to start looking seriously into real estate options on the Other Side." She leafed through a section of Dreamgates about visiting our departed loved ones in their present environments, not only to have timely and helpful communication, but to gain first-hand knowledge of conditions in the afterlife. She told me, "I'd love to see what my husband's been up to since he died thirteen years ago. You mean this book can teach me how to do that?" I showed her the section in Dreamgates that contains simple and practical instructions for making a conscious dream journey to meet a loved one on the Other Side. She announced she would get the book and give this a try. She added, patting the book, "I think I want to die like this."

I felt charmed and blessed that in chance encounters on two planes on launch day, Dreamgates was judged a good book to live - or die - by. That seemed to cover a lot.