Egyptian Silver: A New Dream Archaeology Assignment

 

In one scene in a dream last night, I have been given an object to deliver to a skinny, sketchy man I don't trust. I take it out of my bag and unwrap it. The object is flat, rectangular, silver, about the size and shape of a cigar cutter. It seems to be in two parts, with a cover that slides back. I notice at least three columns of Egyptian figures, one holding a staff of power and wearing a high crown. The figures look to be in the elongated Amarna style introduced under Akhenaten.

When I hold it up, the skinny man jumps back, face distorted in a rictus of terror. "Silver" I reassure him. Nope. He acts as if silver will scald him. Or whatever is under the cover. I don’t understand. I put the Egyptian object away carefully in my pocket.

On assignment: There was a lot more going on in my dream report. I'll just note where my initial Egyptian research took me. The Egyptians valued silver even more highly than gold though fewer examples have survived because of the corrosive effects of salt at the burial sites. The wealthy used silver for mirrors and certain amulets, including scarabs.

Nefertem was the deity most often embodied in silver statuettes. He is the god of the blue lotus. He is said to have been the first being to emerge from the blue lotus that grew on the mound that rose from the primal waters. In complementary myths of Memphis, he is placed in a divine family as the child of Ptah and Sekhmet.

He was both a deity of perfumes and healing, a lion-headed creator god and a potential sender of demon punishers and the Seven Arrows of Sekhmet. He was sometimes depicted as a child emerging from the blue lotus or an adult male crowned with the lotus. There is a bust in the Amarna style of the boy pharaoh Tutankhamun as Nefertem emerging from the lotus in the Cairo museum.

Photos: Top Silver scarab of Overseer Wah c 1900 bce; bottom standing statue of Nefertem with blue lotus crown, late period c 600-300 bce. Both in Metropolitan Museum of Art New York City. Photos in public domain.

The Way to Seshat's Library

 The gates are unbolted to you by Seshat!

These are words of a spell In the Egyptian Coffin Texts, where Seshat, the goddess of writing and patron of scribes, is featured as a gatekeeper.

As doorkeeper she may take on the function of a judge, deciding who may pass through the door she guards. In the Book of Thoth, Seshat stands with Shai, a personification of Fate. The soul traveler is instructed to say, "May the goddess open for me the road to the House of Life."

My painting was inspired by a shamanic journey to the Library of Seshat. The door was opened, quite literally, by the dream of a friend. She reported in high excitement that she had opened a book in my study - Budge's translation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead - and a doorway swung open, revealing a pathway to "a library even bigger than yours".

We journeyed together through the dream door, with the aid of shamanic drumming. I noticed, monitoring the scene from a witness perspective while at the same time fully engaged in the action, that the path we were walking was the body of an immense golden cobra.

Egyptian dreams: I’ll See Your Snakes and Raise You

Yet again, I am dreaming of Egypt, the Egypt of mythistory and the Egypt of the imagination. From last night's dream report:

A drama is unfolding in the courtyard of a villa in ancient Egypt. Huge snakes, larger than humans, rise above on of the walls, raised up like cobras. Sometimes there are five, sometimes seven. On the other side of the compound are beings who can appear as humans or cats. There is contention between these forces. I am here to mediate, to make a balance. I have no fear of the serpents and I know the cat people have my back.

I approach the door of the house with the typescript of a book. I know this is what is needed to make peace. What may be a snake or an arm darts through the open door and carries my book to where it is needed. I know this is successful.

 Later I am with leaders of an esoteric order. The chief is a very old, very large woman. She may be deceased, projecting a form like the one she had near the end of physical life. Her right-hand man, the Warden, is also very old but maintains a military bearing. He is wearing a dark blue suit of heavy wool. They want me to understand that the correct use and pronunciation of a word with hidden vowels is essential. I have to figure this out; they won't just give me the combination. I see the owl glyph, doubled, and hear the consonants M M. I play with sounds like Mama. Then I see the owl glyph followed by the glyph of an open mouth and hear the consonants as M R. This brings me to MARI – and maybe Mary? It seems she is the very heart of the mysteries. 

Feelings: Excited, intrigued

Reality check: I am again immersed in Egyptian studies. Yesterday I was reading The Dawning Moon of the Mind, Susan Brind Morrow’s beautiful rendition of the poetic text from the Pyramid of Unis (also spelled Unas). Long ago I was stirred to the roots of my being when I read earlier translations  of related texts in the splendid recreation of chambers from the mastaba tomb of Unis’s son, Unis-Ankh, at the Field Museum in Chicago. I have been studying hieroglyphs again, partly inspired by the remarkable work of Normandi Ells, whose new book Hieroglyphic Words of Power is being published this year.  I have a hunch that I know the identity of the esoteric luminaries in the last scene. They dreamed of Egypt too. As so often, my dreams have set me research assignments. And maybe another book to write?

Drawings from Robert Moss journal

The dream world is my home world

The dream world is my home world, and has been from very early childhood.
    I first died in this lifetime when I was three years old. My great aunt the opera singer saw this in the tea leaves but didn’t talk about it until long after. What she did not see was that – as a doctor at the hospital in Hobart, Tasmania told my parents – I “died and came back”. That is still the term I prefer to use of these experiences. I don’t remember much of what happened when I left my body at age three, only that it was very hard to live in a body in this world after I came back, and that I felt that my home reality was somewhere else.
     At nine, I died again during emergency appendectomy in a Melbourne hospital. This time I seemed to live a whole life somewhere else, among a beautiful people who raised me as their own. I came back remembering that other life and that other world. It still wasn’t easy for me to live in the ordinary world, and I was nostalgic for that other world. The gift of these experiences,  and my persisting illness (I had double pneumonia twelve times between the ages of three and eleven) was an inner life that was rich and prolific, and an ability to move between states of consciousness and reality at will.
     At age eleven, I had the vision of a great staff of burning bronze with a serpent wrapped around it that seemed to fill half the sky. Right after that, I came very near death for a third time, back in hospital with pneumonia. But this time, I came back healed, and was able to live a relatively normal life – except that in my mind, the dream world was my “normal”. I later realized that my vision in the sky resembled a giant version of the serpent staff of Asklepios, the Greek god who heals through dreams.

I can’t remember a time when I did not understand that our personal dreams can take us into the Dreamtime, which is about more than the bargain basement of the personal subsconscious; it is the place where we find our spiritual kin on a higher level and remember the origins and purpose of life. That’s the way the First Peoples of my native Australian, the Aborigines, see it, and one of the few people I met in childhood who could confirm and validate my experiences of dreaming was an Aboriginal boy. He said of my near-death experiences, “Oh yeah, we do that. When we get very sick, we go and live with the spirits. When we get well, we come back.” He did not think it was extraordinary to dream future events, or to meet the dead in dreams, as I did all the time.
    I had to be fairly quiet about these things, growing up in a conservative time in Australia, in a military family. But as I grew older, I was able to do more and more with the gifts of dreaming. My dreams of ancient cultures led me to my first job, as lecturer in ancient history at the Australian National University. My dreams of possible future events enabled me to avoid death on the road, quite literally, on three occasions. Then, in mid-life, on a farm in the Upper Hudson Valley of New York, I was called in a lucid dream – also an out-of-body experience – into a meeting with an ancient Native American shaman, a Mother of the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk people, who insisted on speaking her own language. That changed everything and put me on the path of a dream teacher, for which there is no career track in Western society.

Most human societies have valued dreams and the dreamers for three principal reasons. They have recognized that in dreams we see the future, and this can help whole communities as well as individuals to make better choices. They have understood that dreams give us a direct line to the sacred, to the God/Goddess we can talk to, to the ancestors, to the animate spirits of Nature. And they have grasped that dreaming can be very good medicine. Dreams diagnose problems before they present symptoms; they offer imagery for self-healing; and they show us the state of the soul and can help us retrieve parts of our vital energy that may have gone missing through what shamans call “soul-loss”.
    In Western society, dreams are undervalued by those the English call the “talking classes”, especially in academe and the media. Yet we all dream, so this is common property. Ever the hardhead who says “I don’t dream” is only saying “I don’t remember” or “I don’t care to remember”. And when life is tough or he is going through a big life transition, his head may be cracked open by a big dream that will expand his understanding and maybe give him sources and resources not otherwise available.  One of the most common types of “big dreams” that can accomplish that is a visitation by a dead family member or loved one. 

All ancient and indigenous peoples that I have encountered, in my studies as an independent scholar and in my travels, understand that the dream world is a real world, maybe more real than the regular world of our consensual everyday hallucinations. When I told an elder of the Longhouse People, or Iroquois, about my dreams of the Mohawk “woman of power”,  he told me “you made some visits and you received some visitations.” There you have a central understanding, forgotten or ignored in much of Western psychology: dreaming is traveling. In dreams, soul or consciousness gets around, far beyond the body. In dreams, we may also receive visitations. The very words for “dream” in many cultures reflects this insight. In the language of the Makiritare, a shamanic dreaming people of Venezuela, the word for “dream” is adekato, which literally means “a journey of the soul.”

    As I explained in The Secret History of Dreaming dreams and dreamers have been central to human evolution, critical for soul and survival. Look at what is painted on the walls of the Paleolithic caves and you have evidence of the central importance of dreaming from as far back in the human odyssey as we can trace. The images are portals into a deeper reality, not simply hunting or fertility magic, but ways of connecting with the spirits, of calling through power, and of traveling between dimensions. On the most practical level, dreaming has always been a key part of our human survival kit. When we were little better than naked apes, without good weapons, dreaming helped save us from becoming breakfast for leathery raptors or saber-toothed tigers, by enabling us to scan our environment, across space and time, and identify possible dangers. 

    The ancient Egyptians understood that in dreams, our eyes are opened. Their word for dream, rswt, is etymologically connected to the root meaning “to be awake”. It was written with a symbol representing an open eye.  

   As dreamers, we are time travelers. With or without intention, we travel to the past and the future as well as parallel worlds. This can become conscious practice, and we can learn to fold time in the sense of being present, mind to mind, with other personalities in other times, sharing gifts and insights with each other. Our ability to travel into the future is essential to our survival and well-being. We not only bring back memories of future events for which we – and sometimes whole communities – can then prepare. We visit possible futures, and our ability to read our memories of the possible future and then take appropriate action can determine whether we can escape a future event we don’t like, or manifest one that we want.

    Contact with the deceased, especially in dreams, is natural and easy if we are open to it. It’s a very common experience. Our dead may still be around, because they have not yet moved on and that can be problematic if they don’t understand that they are dead (in the sense of not having physical bodies any more). Or they may come calling, for all the reasons we might call on each other in regular life, and then some. And in dreams we go traveling, and may find ourselves in realms where the dead are at home. These experiences have been the source of the enduring and near-universal human belief that consciousness survives physical death, and of countless geographies of the afterlife.

The trick is to live consciously in both worlds, always aware that at every turning, we have the power to choose. Even when conditions seem most difficult and confining, we have the power to choose our attitude, as Viktor Frankl taught us in Man’s Search for Meaning. And that can change everything. We want to develop the art of memory, remembering who and what we are in one order of reality while traveling in another. Jung came to suspect that we lead continuous lives in other realities, and I think this is exactly correct. The dreams we recall may be memories of other lives in other times – past or future or in parallel universes – and the versions of ourselves that inhabit those other realities may be dreaming in and out of our present lives, just as we dream ourselves in and out of theirs.

    Are we asleep in regular life and awake in the dream world? Sometimes it feels like that. When I close my eyes, I often have the sense of waking in another landscape, among people who may have been waiting for me. Then there is that phenomenon of “false awakening”. Within a dream, you sleep and wake up, to find later that you were in another level of the dream, not yet back in the body in the bed. Such experiences mark transits from outer to inner courtyards of dreaming, and when we learn to recognize what is going on, this deepens our practice of conscious dreaming.   

    I practice operating in multiple states of consciousness. When I am drumming for a group adventure in shamanic dreaming, for example, I am in control of my body. I am also scanning the psychic environment, warding the group. At the same time, I am engaged in a personal journey in consciousness that may take me deep into another reality.  Simultaneously, I may be looking in on the journeys of people in the group. When I am really on, I feel I can see the whole scene, physical and psychic, in 360-degree vision, as if it is all enclosed in a bubble and my awareness is at every point on the surface of that bubble as well as at the center. That begins to evoke what perceiving from the fifth dimension may be like.

Art by Robert Moss:  1. "Storm Bird Brings Me Back to My Body" 2. "Serpent Staff in the Sky"

Dreaming like an Egyptian

The ancient Egyptians understood that in dreams, our eyes are opened. Their word for dream, rswt, is etymologically connected to the root meaning “to be awake”. It was written with a determinative symbol representing an open eye.

     The Egyptians believed that the gods speak to us in dreams. As the Bible story of Joseph and Pharaoh reminds us, they paid close attention to dream messages about the possible future. They practiced dream incubation for guidance and healing at temples and sacred sites. They understood that by recalling and working with dreams, we develop the art of memory, tapping into knowledge that belonged to us before we entered this life journey, and awakening to our connection with other life experiences.

     The Egyptians also developed an advanced practice of conscious dream travel. Trained dreamers operated as seers, remote viewers and telepaths, advising on affairs of state and military strategy and providing a mental communications network between far-flung temples and administrative centers. They practiced shapeshifting, crossing time and space in the dreambodies of birds and animals.

     Through conscious dream travel, ancient Egypt’s “frequent flyers” explored the roads of the afterlife and the multidimensional universe. It was understood that true initiation and transformation takes place in a deeper reality accessible through the dream journey beyond the body. A rightful king must be able to travel between the worlds.

     It seems that in early times, in the heb sed festival, conducted in pharaoh’s thirtieth year, the king was required to journey beyond the body, and beyond death, to prove his worthiness to continue on the throne. Led by Anubis, pharaoh descended to the Underworld. He was directed to enter death, “touch the four sides of the land”, become Osiris, and return in new garments – the robe and the spiritual body of transformation.

     Jeremy Naydler’s Shamanic Wisdom in the Pyramid Texts makes a convincing case that the palace tombs and pyramid texts of Egypt are about much, much more than funerary arrangements; that the Egyptians traveled beyond the gates of death while very much alive, not only to bring back first-hand knowledge of the afterlife, but to enter into sacred union with the gods and enthrone their power in the body, and so acquire the spiritual and sexual potency to marry the worlds.

      The dream guides of ancient Egypt knew that the dream journey may take the traveler to the stars – specifically to Sothis or Sirius, the “moist land” believed by Egyptian initiates to be the source of higher consciousness, the destination of advanced souls after death, and the home of higher beings who take a close interest in Earth matters.

      When we look for ancient sources on all of this, we are challenged to decode fragmentary texts, some collated over many centuries by pious scribes who jumbled together material from different traditions and rival pantheons.  Wallis Budge complained (in Osiris) that “the Egyptian appears never to have relinquished any belief which he once had”. We won’t find what we need on the practice of ancient Egyptian dreaming in the fragmentary “dream books” that survive, any more than we’ll grasp what dreaming can be from the kind of dream dictionary you can buy in drugstores today.

      We gaze in wonder at the Egyptian picture-books displaying the soul’s journeys and ordeals after death – and the many different aspects of soul energy that survive death – and quickly realize that to understand the source of such visions, and the accuracy of such maps, we must go into a deeper space. We must go to the Magic Library.

      In Hellenistic times – the age of Cleopatra – dream schools flourished in the temples of Serapis, a god who melds the qualities of Osiris and Apis, the divine bull. From the 2nd century BCE we have papyri recording the dream diaries of Ptolemaios, who lived for many years in katoche, or sacred retreat, in the temple of Serapis at Memphis. A short biography of the dreamer has been published by the French scholar Michel Chauveau in his book Egypt in the Age of Cleopatra. Ptolemaios was the son of Macedonian colonists, but like ancient Egyptians he was called to the temple by a dream in which the god appeared to him. He seems to have lived for years as a full-time dreamer, whose dreams guided him not only in his spiritual practice but in handling family and business matters beyond the temple walls.

     In this later period, the Egyptian priests who specialized in dreaming were called the Learned Ones of the Magic Library. What marvelous promise is in that phrase! What profound recognition of the magic and wisdom that is available to us through dreaming!

Adapted from The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

The Dream Interpreter at the Sign of the Bull

νύπνια κρίνω, | τοῦ θεοῦ πρόσταγ|μα ἔχων·
τύχ᾿ ἀγα|θᾶι· Κρής ἐστιν ὁ | κρίνων τάδε.

I judge dreams, having the mandate of the god.
To good fortune! The one judging these is a Cretan.

The text is on the shingle of an ancient dream interpreter at Saqqara in Egypt in the Ptolemaic age,  2nd century bce. Scholars debate the identity of the god he declared to be his patron, but a good guess would be Serapis, a composite deity who melded aspects of Hades, Osiris and the Apis bull. Serapis was a lord of death and of healing; the famous pool at Bethesda belonged to him before it became part of the Christian story. We know that the training of a kathodos, or candidate for initiation, in the ancient precincts of Serapis centered on incubating and working with dreams. We have records of a candidate in the time of Cleopatra being assigned to spend a whole year recalling and reporting dreams to his mentor.
    The image above is a wonderful gypsum copy of the stele mounted in front of the dream interpreter's kiosk. In the painted scene a bull approaches a horned altar. The bull was sacred in both Egypt and Crete and was the favorite animal form of gods around the ancient Mediterranean and Middle East. A very dramatic form of dream incubation was practiced in a mausoleum of bulls at Saqqara where the supplicant slept amongst mummified bulls encased in giant sarcophagi.
    The dream interpreter at the sign of the Bull plied his trade near the Anoubeion, the House of Anubis. Very appropriate, since the canine-headed Anubis was the patron of dreaming and soul travel as well as the guardian of the portals to the Otherworld. This was a busy commercial district, with constant traffic between two great temple complexes at either end of the street, the House of Anubis and the Serapeion, the Temple of Serapis. There were lost of vendors and small businesses. The dream interpreter sat in a booth behind his sign, waiting for trade. By identifying himself as "Cretan", he may have hoped to appeal to the Greeks and Macedonians who now ruled Egypt under the Ptolemies, in the wake of the conquest by Alexander the Great.

We don't know exactly what the dream reader at the sign of the Bull did for his clients, but his prime location suggests that he did not lack business. In his age, it was generally believed that dreams are a field of interaction between humans, gods and others, and that dreams often reveal the future. Everyone knew that dreams are important, so important that help may be required to determine the exact meaning, to decide on appropriate action to be taken, and to disperse or ward off bad energies that may be operating during the night.

   According to Aristotle (a skeptic in regard to dream precognition and transpersonal communication) we need help with the meaning of dreams because the images are distorted: “dream-pictures, like pictures on water, are pulled out of shape by movement”.

    An older and more popular view was that we need help in discerning the origin and nature of dreams because not all of them speak truth. Some may be deceiving messages dispatched by evil spirits or manipulative “dream senders” (oneiropompoi). The Greeks thought that Egyptian sorcerers were especially good at this.

   It was said that we may need help in reading dreams because “the gods love to speak in riddles” in order to test us and goad us to expand our understanding.

The prime requirement for a dream interpreter, according to Artemidorus, the most famous practitioner of this trade before Freud, is “a gift for resemblances.”

   Our dream interpreter at the sign of the Bull claimed something more, a special connection with a greater power. "The mandate of the god."

For a full discussion of ancient dream interpretation, please see chapter 2, "Interpreters and Diviners" in The Secret History of Dreaming.

Egyptian Gates to the Otherworld

What can we learn from ancient Egypt about soul travel and viable gates to the Otherworld? Among the dense menagerie of Egyptian deities and practices evolved over 3,000 years, so far as we can fathom them through scholarship and far memory, five distinctive themes emerge:

1.          1.  Shapeshifting is a preferred model for soul travel

The gods assume the forms of birds or animals. Humans, in assuming the god forms, take the shames of the same birds and animals. Shapeshifting is one of the shortest passages through the terrors of the Underworld to the heavens of the blessed. In facing down his adversaries, the journeying soul may assume successive forms including those of his most terrifying challengers, such as the crocodile god Sobek.
    This type of shapeshifting is not reserved for the deceased. It is a model for the living of how to journey most effectively in the subtle body. There is a clear continuum here with shamanic practice. Just as in Egypt the gods show themselves as birds or animals, the animal powers – in shamanic cultures – are not confined to animal forms but may display themselves as humans or gods.

2. Feeding and Preserving the Energy Double

The Egyptian cult of the Ka was an incredibly elaborate magical industry devoted to escaping the “second death” and ensuring the survival of the dream body or astral double close to the realms of the living. It is clearly based on the recognition that different aspects of soul and spirit go to different places after physical death. The Ka has its own priests, responsible for its care and feeding. In the event of their death or dereliction, the Ka may be sustained by objects or images placed in the tomb that supply magical food and support. The Ka interacts with the living. It can travel from its house – the sarcophagus or a separate house or statue inside the tomb – through special doors, just as it sees through special eyes. It may influence the living for good or bad. It may be the source of prophetic dreams. It may stand guard over tomb and their treasures, as in the magical tale of Khaemewas and the Book of Thoth.

3. Testing Alternate Routes to the Neterworlds

The Egyptians studied and tested various itineraries for traveling to heavens, star worlds and neterworlds. In several thousands of years of evolution, magic and experiment, they developed a rich geography of the afterlife, peopled by a host of gods and demons who set trials and obstacles in the path of the journeyer.
    The Book of Gates depicts the departed soul having to confront a series of terrifying gatekeepers who may all be personifications of the Great Goddess. In other funerary texts, the pilgrim soul has to evade the nets of an implacable Soultaker, brave up to the attacks of a series of monstrous beasts in a passage through utter darkness, or survive a dramatic life review in the hall of judgment where the heart is weighed against the feather of Ma’at, the divine embodiment of natural law. Go out with a heavy heart, and you are consigned to the ravening monster Ammit.
    The Egyptians believed that it helped to cast off from this earth with a good route map, and to know the names of those you will meet. A well-equipped traveler took a map and recognition codes with him into his grave.

4. Knowing the Names

Knowing the names of the entities you’ll meet along the way was one of the best ways to prepare for these journeys. Egypt was a land of magicians, and the hekau (magic words) were thought to bring things into manifestation; Heka, the god who personified Magic, rides with Ra in the solar barque along with Sia (Intelligence). Knowing the secret names of the neteru and how to vibrate the hidden vowels was one of the highest magical arts. There is a thriller about hhow Isis gleaned the secret name of Ra by catching his spittle to make a scorpion that stung him. Because it was made from his own spit, it had the power to kill; Isis promised a cure at the price of learning his secret name. Now she can wield his power. On the roads of the neterworlds, the journeyer assumes the powers of his challengers – and sometimes their forms – by speaking their names.

5. Way of the Heart

It is easy to get lost in the thickets of exotic names and directions, in which many pantheons and rescensions over millennia meet and merge and morph, in cohabitation with earth spirits and perhaps star travelers. Let’s notice that the Egyptian craft of death is also a plan for larger life, at home in multiple worlds from the Duat to the Akhet. Of special interest are the Way of Ra and the Way of Osiris (they merge in mystery texts and vignettes of Osiris transforming into Ra, or birthing him from within his mummified corpse). The Way of Ra is the story of the 12 Hours in the funerary texts, in which we see the Boat of Ra go through many levels of the Underworld and survive many challenges before it is reborn. It may also open into the Way of the Sun Behind the Sun, the opening of a stargate that may lead to the intelligences of the Sirius star system>
    The Way of Osiris requires the experience of death and rebirth within a Mystery or shamanic initiation. It becomes enfolded into the ethical teachings implicit in the scenes of the Weighing of the Heart and the 42 assessors.
    Let’s observe that throughout it is the heart that provides the operating center and purpose for the journeys. While the brain is discarded, the heart remains in the chest, sometimes protected by a heart scarab of carnelian.
    Approaching the place of inquisition and judgment, the traveler is reminded to call on his heart – the Ka of his heart – to speak and act for him.

My heart, my mother
My heart, my mother
My heart of my becoming

Photo: Hathor in the Louvre by RM

The Ka of Mau has restored the crown

Ann Arbor, Michigan

The tall cabinet is the kind that is sometimes called a secretary. There is a pull-out writing surface between the drawers below and the glass-fronted bookcase above. There are intriguing objects visible behind the glass - statues, vases, family heirlooms. However, the object that I want to access is on top of the cabinet. To get to it, I will need to climb onto the opened desk part of the secretary. The whole thing is rickety and I doubt that the desk can bear my weight. A friend volunteers to hold everything steady but I don't trust her ability to do this. I don't want to risk breaking the contents of the secretary. They belong - or once belonged - to an extraordinary older woman I regard with great respect and affection.
   So I turn to other things.
   I am startled by the arrival of a whole pack of cats. There are at least six or seven of them. They are long-eared, short-haired, lean and wiry and very supple. They stretch and sport and show themselves off in different postures. All vary Egyptian, I think. Wait a minute. They are Egyptian. I am sure of it.
   A gray cat separated herself from the others. She springs up on my lap and gazes intently at my face. Her eyes are strange. I expect the slit eyes of a regular cat, but these eyes at first seem blank. Their substance - light gray in color, and flecked found the edges - makes me think of a statue. I also think about ancient bronze mirrors.
   I read the cat's fierce intention. She wants me to know that she is my helper, and that she will bring what belongs to me if she has my approval. Absolutely.
   She springs to the top of the secretary with one bound and jumps down with something in her paws that looks like an enormous flower. She brings it to me and places it in my hands. It is so light and beautiful. I recognize the white conical center piece and the high flanking ostrich plumes. This is the atef crown of ancient Egypt.
   A voice in the dream says, "The Ka of Mau has restored the crown."

Feelings on waking: Gratitude, delight, surprise
Reality: I am preparing to open a workshop in Ann Arbor titled "Dreaming Like an Egyptian". Cats were sacred in Egypt, were sometimes mummified, appear in many statues, and were known to have Ka souls that were fed - like those of humans - after death. The atef crown combines the conical white hedjet crown of Upper Egypt with twin ostrich plumes. Osiris wears it. So do Sobek, the crocodile god, and others,

"Mau brings me the atef crown" drawing (c) Robert Moss June 13, 2014

Winged soul in the sky

Ba amulet in the Brooklyn Museum

I've been a speaker at a conference attended by a group of dealers in art and antique jewelry. I was impressed by the beauty of jeweled belts that two of them have in their stock; they tell me the best of these come from Jordan.
    Now I am outside. The world around me is shimmering. I marvel as the landscape becomes a field of crimson, streaming like silk. High above, to the left, I see a golden winged figure. Is it a golden bee, or a hummingbird?
    Ba.
    Clear as a bell, the one syllable is spoken in a beautiful feminine voice.
    I remember Egypt, and how the ba soul, seen as a human-headed bird, takes flight from the heart. The gods of Egypt, the neteru, have ba souls too. The sun-god Ra, as I recall, has seven and they take many forms. The benu bird the Greeks called the phoenix is a ba of Ra.
    I rise before the sun, thinking of the sun god, because of that vibrant field of red, and that glorious golden winged soul.

- from last night's dreaming

Breaking news on Egypt from a time traveler

We need guidance on where the crisis in Egypt is going, and what it will mean for our world.

Close to a hundred of us are gathered in the meeting room, trusting that the speaker will give us the guidance we need. He is African-American, of later middle age. Scholarly and quietly authoritative, he holds the lectern easily but with enormously sober demeanor. We follow every word, deeply engaged

He tells us: "What is coming will be worse than anything seen in Germany in 1868."

When he voices that prediction, some people, especially the older ones among us, burst out in various sounds of shock and dismay. They don't want to believe him. He shakes his head mournfully and forcefully, and says "Mark my words."

Breaking news from Egypt, on the dream screen. Of all the dreams relating to Egypt that I have heard over the past week, this report, from a gifted New York dreamer named Margaret, may be the most fascinating.

What can the dream speaker mean, when he predicts that what is coming in Egypt will be worse than anything seen in Germany in 1868? On waking, this reference was mysterious to the dreamer, though she is no slouch at research and resolved to do some digging into 19th century history.

Bismarck was my first association. I dimly remembered writing an undergrad paper on how the Prussian statesman triggered a war in order to make an empire. My memory of the details was foggy, but Auntie Google soon gave me what I had forgotten. In 1868, when relations between Prussia and the France of Napoleon III were tense because of a struggle for the Spanish succession, Bismarck used deception to start a war. He tampered with a letter from his own monarch, Wilhelm I, to make the text read like an insult to the French - goading Napoleon III to declare war. The Franco-Prussian War that ensued was a disaster for the French, leading to the loss of Alsace-Lorraine and the declaration, in the hall of mirrors of Versailles, of the German empire in 1871. This was the birth of the German Reich, and it eventually gave us the Great War and all that followed.

1868 in Germany also saw the publication of a viciously anti-semitic novel titled Barruel , which depicts Jewish leaders plotting world domination. Material from this was used by those who concocted one of the most evil forgeries known to history, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, used by the Tsar's secret police and later by the Nazis to justify the assault on the Jews.

I don't know whether these are the associations Margaret's dream speaker had in mind, when he spoke of Germany in 1868, since I was not in that dream gathering. But it's not hard to see some relevance, in an age when wars are triggered and justified by false information.

Margaret adds: "I felt, both in the dream, and afterward, that our speaker was a time traveler who himself had suffered, and knew suffering -- and survival." Who better to ask about history - of the future or the past - than a time traveler? And we are all time travelers in our dreams.

"Battle of the Pyramids"(1798-1799) by François Louis Joseph Watteau. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Valenciennes

Banishing Desert Demons, then Over the Arch of the Bridge

I was up in the middle of the night, initially feeling quite unwell and oppressed as I tried to keep up with the troubling news from Egypt, visiting many international news sites to get some global perspective.

When I returned to bed in the early hours, as soon as I closed my eyes I had the vivid impression of mountain walls rising high into the sky, in a desert landscape. There was the strong sense of a firestorm coming, as if the air is filled with a combustible gas that a single spark will ignite. Above the mountains, I saw demonic figures rear and whirl, not fully substantial yet, but taking form.

I don’t often see demons. My guess is these desert demons are ifrit, the worst of the djinns in the demonology of the Arab world. Their substance, as I recall, is fire. I have no desire to help them materialize in the noosphere now, and bring in the burning times. So I banish this image, washing my inner screen with light.

My thought returned to Egypt, and I wondered whether I had been give a glimpse of forces at work in the reality that is hidden from ordinary perception.

Sleep took me, and I dreamed:

Over the Arch of the Bridge to Happy Adventures

I am with a group of very fit younger people. They are wearing dark blue crew neck sweaters and matching pants and watch caps. They may be Special Forces, though I don’t see weapons.

I follow them up the rise of a great arch above a very long bridge. The shape of the arch is reminiscent of Sydney Harbor Bridge. As I go higher, I find that the material of the arch is flimsier and flimsier. There are gaps through which it would be easy to fall. Sometimes there is just a loose flapping panel, inside the outer rim, between one section and the next. I can’t keep up with the young people. At the same time, my dream body is operating much better than my physical one.

At the high point of the arch, I realize I must be dreaming, but don’t want to test this by letting myself fall to the water far below. I notice that there now seems to be no bridge surface below; the arch would therefore be the only way of crossing without taking a different route or mode of transportation altogether.

I get across safely. I am now involved in a whirl of conference and workshop activity in a city among mountains and connect quickly with wonderful new friends.

I wake much restored, physically, emotionally, mentally.

My dream of crossing the bridge reminds me a bit of a dream at the start of the financial crisis of 2008 in which I am in a high performance car and find myself plummeting down a near-vertical descent with no chance of stopping or turning back. Eventually the slope levels out and becomes a floating bridge. My car slows to a stop just before crashing through the plate glass windows of an upscale retail center. I took that dream as guidance to sit back and let the money crisis work its way through. The Arch dream also comes out okay, but here definite action and forward movement are required.

I am especially interested in whether others are dreaming into the current world crisis. "As within, so without"; it is sometimes difficult to sift what in a dream is about our personal world and what relates to the world out there. The same dream may involve both.

The Art of Heronry

I am studying the art of heronry.

You are a master of patience.
You can wait on one leg,
A spearman poised and immobile,
Longer than I can wait on two (or three).
Your standing stillness cons the fish
Into disregarding you, as a dead branch
Or a boring relic from an old shipwreck.

You don’t need anyone to tell you
When the time is GO.
In that instant, you strike without delay,
Your purpose straight and swift and clean
As a stabbing spear, taking your prey.

I am relieved that even you
Have to work to get airborne,
Flapping and beating your great gray-blue wings.
When you are up, and stretch out your body,
You exhibit the whole history of flight.
You show yourself as the Feathered Serpent,
The one that grew wise enough
To make a home in another dimension.

I love the way you practice love.
You put on a gaudy show for your intended
Sprouting twin mating plumes.
When your gallantry prospers,
You are willing to work in intimate partnership.
I have seen you, ferrying twigs in your beak
To your mate in the frame of your nest in the trees.

High-flying bird of the heart,
I like your business arrangement
With the busy engineer of canals and dams;
Where the beaver builds, you build too.

Humans, who fly only in dreams and machines,
Know you as an ancient ally and exemplar.
You brought First Woman from the Earth in the Sky
Breaking her fall on wings spread like magic carpets
To dance a new Earth into being.

Egypt knows you, and the mystery of your rise
From the sexy serpent of Earth
To the master of air and of water.
Egypt calls you the ever living, the phoenix bird
Born again and again from the ashes of the old life,
Endlessly birthing your winged and shining self.


photo by Chris Harshaw