Dream symbols: Your car may be your Ka

A bright blue vintage car pulls in front of me as I walk my dog in the park today. It has just arrived, to join a classic car show that is getting underway. The dreamlike moment sets me thinking, about how the state of your dream car may be richly symbolic. It may reflect the state of body or soul, of work or relationship. Your car may be your Ka. It may represent what gets you around.Its condition may remind you to check your engine, or replenish your energy.
    The dream car may be your literal car, on a road you'll take in the future. It could be a time-travel machine or an energy vehicle that can take you to worlds of wonder and adventure. If it's a convertible, it may reflect your ability to change your life. If is's a 4x4 or an ATV, it may reflect your ability to get off the maps and make your own path
    Dream automobiles are not confined to ordinary rules of the road. One dreamer shared an adventure with me in which she is riding in an open cabriolet, through a pleasant countryside. They mount a hill, and cross a high plateau that ends abruptly. A voice tells her, "You can make it different."
     She finds herself suspended in mid-air, above the ocean. There is a moment of fear. Then the car shapeshifts into a sea plane. She enjoys the exhilaration of flight, then realizes she does not need borrowed wings in order to fly. She swoops and soars, then plunges deep into the ocean and feels herself absorbing deep powers of healing and remembering. In the ocean, she now recognizes a pattern of islands, and comes to realize that this landscape is vitally alive. Each island is also an "I-land", representing someone who has touched her life. There is a profound and joyful sense of unity,of the ability to connect with anyone and everything in this vital panorama.
    All starting with a car. There's a clue to magic in the type of car: a convertible. The word speaks of the power to change, to shift, to convert one's attitudes, one's way of getting around, one's life style.
    The dream car may of course be a regular car, and when there are problems on the roads of dreaming, and the car seems to be the familiar one, we want to check right away on whether those problems could possibly play out in ordinary life. To my certain knowledge, I was spared from possibly fatal road accidents on three occasions by dreams in which I saw myself driving into collisions - and was able to harvest specific information from the dreams in order to avoid those collisions. 
     Our car dreams can show us such nitty-gritty things as whether we need to get the brakes checked, or the oil, or the tires. When car dreams are as literal as this, we may notice that the symbolism comes in with the waking situation more than in the dream. If your dream warns you of a possible future collision, in addition to doing the survival stuff by avoiding that collision, you may want to reflect on where different aspects of your life, maybe relationships or obligations, are coming into conflict. If the theme is a flat tire, maybe you want to ask yourself how to avoid becoming over "tired".
     One of the few kinds of automobile I was ever truly passionate about was the old Jaguar XJ6. I owned one in England and bought a used model when I first started living in the United States. That undermined my waking passion for Jaguars, because that 1973 XJ6 - bought from a dealer in New York City! - was off the road more often than it was on it. The only mechanic I could find to work on it when I was living out at Sag Harbor was a German mechanic who would bawl at me whenever I brought the car in, "Once again you bring me this British piece of shit! Why don't you understand that the English can't make electronics?"
    So I gave up on Jaguars in regular life, but in dreams I found I was still often driving one. I dreamed I was driving a racing-green XJ6 at high speed, taking a corner at over 100 m.p.h., when everything stopped abruptly. I got out, dazed but unharmed, to inspect the car, and found that a man in a white doctor's coat was there before me. Under the hood, looking over his shoulder, I saw what looked like a set of medical gauges for things like heartbeat and blood pressure.
    The medical mechanic turned to me and said, "This is a beautiful vehicle, Robert. If you smash it up, don't think that you'll get another just like it immediately. Watch how you use it."
    I got the message! I started paying closer attention to how fast and hard I was driving my body.
    These days, when I dream of a car that seems to be an analog for my body, it is most often a vintage Rolls-Royce - a bit chunky, showing its age and its British antecedents, but all in all not a bad ride.
    In the English language, "car" sounds like "ka", the Egyptian name for an aspect of soul that operates like an energy double, travels outside the body in life, and continues with a life of its own after death that requires care and feeding. So when I hear about dream cars I often ask whether the dream is also about soul, and the care and feeding of soul.
    A dream car, for me, may also be a time travel machine. I've been picked up by drivers in vintage cabriolets and grand touring cars who have whisked me off on adventures in past eras worthy of Indiana Jones.
    Suddenly the memory comes to me of driving with my father a year or so after his death. It was hard to see much through the windows, so I opened the door, to encounter a great roaring wind, and realized we were flying higher than an airplane through an area of turbulence. I closed the door in a hurry. We got to a place where my father wanted to show me things about his new life.
    So the dream car may also be an energy vehicle, something that helps you to travel to other dimensions, your modern (or not-so-modern) version of the vimanas, the chariots of the gods.
    Feel like a spin?

We are such dreams as stuff is made on

The concourse is longer than I remember, with more turnings and more choices. Maybe I turned the wrong way when I last had the choice. Walls and ceiling are covered with little white ceramic squares, like tiles in a bathroom. Or a morgue. There are movie posters on the walls, but graphics and titles are indistinct under a changing wash of murky colors, shifting from bruised purple to poison green.
      I slow to a stop, wondering whether I should turn back. In this moment, color drains from the scene. There is only black and white. Definition is sharper. Shadows are knife-edged. I can read a sign that says BARDO. It points forward and back. Underneath it, helpfully, is a second sign I know from roundabouts in France: TOUTES DIRECTIONS. I see that indeed I am at a kind of roundabout. Tunnels go off in all directions. As I spin to appraise my situation, I lose all sense of direction. I am not sure I can find my way back now. Which way should I take.

     Ask Ka.
     The statement is made in a precise and neutral voice, classless and accentless. I am not sure whether it comes from inside or outside my head. I don’t know what it means until something is illuminated in the tunnel ahead of me, as if caught by the flash of a camera. It looks like an old-time phone booth.
     I walk towards it and more light comes on – a crescent of brightly colored bulbs on top of the booth, a warm syrupy light inside. The sign on the box, next to a slot for coins, reads ASK KA. Behind the glass is a round-bellied figure with curling mustaches and a turban. His eyes swivel to look at me. The illusion is remarkable. There is life – or lively death – in those eyes, and in the smile lines around them, and in the rise and fall of torso and belly.
     I have seen figures like this at fun fairs and outside magic shops. The last time was on the subterranean level of Pike Place market in Seattle, when I popped a quarter in the slot and a fortune-telling dummy named Zoltar decanted a scroll that – as I recall – was on the money if rather generic.
     I fish in my pocket for a quarter to see what Ka can deliver.
     Your money is not currency here, says that neutral voice.
     Ka is staring at me.
      Think of something that makes you want to be in a body.
     This is crazy stuff, but it gets pictures moving in my mind. Sex. Love. The kids. Swimming in the lake.
      Ka’s tongue come out of his mouth and lolls over his chin whiskers, pink and plump and obscene. He points at his tongue and I hear the word
      Bacon.
      “Bacon?” This is insane. But Ka is nodding his head vigorously.
      I look more closely at what I thought was a coin slot. It is actually designed to take something else.
       “Get your tokens here,” says a voice behind me. I turn to find a vendor on a tricycle. The handlebar supports a platter of crispy bacon.
      “How much?”
      “Just one strip for now.”
      “I mean, what is the charge?”
      “You mean, what is your charge. You are charged with eating one strip of perfectly crispy bacon for Ka every day you are in the body.”
       “But I don’t usually eat breakfast.”
       “Bacon is not only about breakfast. It is a religion.”
       “I’ll see what I can do.” I don’t want to miss the chance to ask Ka. I detach a strip of crisply bacon from its fellows, resisting the temptation to grab another for myself – I am suddenly ravenously hungry – and feed it into the slot on the front of the fortune teller’s booth.
       I watch Ka’s white-gloved hands come down to collect the bacon. As he raises it to his mouth, a second pair of hands appears. He is sprouting limbs like a Hindu deity. With his extra hands, he smooths out a piece of paper, writes on it carefully, rolls it into a scroll and drops it into a chute. The scroll comes out the bottom, neatly tied with a thread.
       I retrieve it. As I untie the thread, I glance at Ka. His jaws are definitely working. Some of his hands are now making mudras.
       I open the fortune scroll and read the impeccable Copperplate:

We are such dreams as stuff is made on.


Drawing: "Ask Ka" by Robert Moss

My second shadow

3:00 a.m. 

A malleable time, when I am often wandering between the worlds. As I walk into a neighborhood park, my shadow walks before me. A second shadow walks right behind. Who is there? I turn, and recognize the second shadow is also my own. 

    A deliciously shiverish moment, especially since I had been thinking about Egyptian forms of the the double and the multiple self.   

    I look up at the moon, and the street lamp behind me, and my rational mind concludes that their twin effect produced my twin shadows. Still, I wonder where my energy double may have been traveling in the borderlands tonight.

photo by RM

Don't let me sleep too long

Don’t let me sleep too long.
If I leave my bed for more than a few hours
I come back jet-lagged
and sometimes with bruises and bite marks
I didn’t get in the world where I left my body.

When the body sleeps the soul travels
and it does not go naked.
It makes its excursions in a subtle form
whose adventures and misadventures
can leave astral stigmata.

In a cold land near the Northern Lights
women preparing corpses for the funeral pyre
place moss on their tongues and caw like ravens
to scare away hungry ghosts
that gobble spirit bodies like chitlins.

If you are drinking pour a little for the thirsty dead
because the subtle body is also a body of desire.

If you’re out there, you’ll learn that to go beyond the Moon
you must leave your astral body behind. Make sure
you put it in a locker where thieves can’t take it.

It’s late and my double is eager to go wandering.
It could come out through my toes
or through my groin, or my core.
It could fly from my mouth or rise from the fontanel -
the right way, says the yogi, to go out at death.

Leaving my body tonight, I don’t plan
more than a temporary death.
I might go to the mermaid cove
or the island of apples or a tower in the clouds
but I’ll be back unless you let me sleep too long.

-        -   Mosswood Hollow, July 14, 2017

Art: Willliam Blake, illustration for "The Grave", a poem by Robert Blair

Freud among the breathing idols

London

The exhibition on the Egyptian Book of the Dead at the British Museum is the most exciting Egyptian exhibit I've seen. A portal image just inside the doors is worth the price of entry: a statuette of the ka-soul of Senoru, master of horse, clasping his ba-soul, depicted as a human-headed bird, to his heart.

The exhibition was crowded (Egypt is the perennial favorite of museum-goers) but there was good flow control. Kids were able to push their programs into slots and receive an Egyptian spell in return - for example, for changing into a bird, a snake or a crocodile.

Figures from 3,000 or 5,000 years ago, sculpted to hold an aspect of the soul, or a spirit that would "answer" for it (shabti) in the afterlife, or to guard a tomb, seemed strangely alive. I was reminded that the Greeks, who were fascinated by Egyptian statue magic, described such figures as "breathing idols".

It was strange to go from this to the Freud Museum, in the modest brick house at 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead where he lived for the last year of his life. It is filled with literally thousands of statuettes of gods and other supernaturals, mostly Egyptian, that Freud collected in Vienna. Some fifty are stationed like a battalion of soldiers on his desk. He placed others, like palace guard, between himself and patrients. He claimed to know all of them intimately and would choose different ones to stroke or consult - with his focused gaze - during sessions with patients.

I had known that Freud was a collector of antiquities, but the vastness of this collection is stunning. He compared his practice of psychoanalysis to archeology, in the sense of digging things up from buried levels of consciousness, and it seems that archeology was his favorite area of reading.

Freud, the doubter of the soul and its survival of physical death, who denied that life has any ultimate meaning, surrounded himself with images of ancient gods and spirits. He was surely aware that the Egyptian figures he collected were ritually ensouled, and thus believed to hold a part of the spirit of the dead, or something of the power of a god or psychic guardian.

In the British Museum exhibit was a beautifully carved torso of a dead woman, used as a kind of interworld telephone. A letter addressed to the funerary bust by a survivor began:

How are you?
Is the West [region of the departed] being good to you?
Look, I am one you loved.

May I see you fighting for me in a dream?

Did Freud's "breathing images" come alive in his dreams? My bet is that they did - and also that it is rather unlikely that he left records of those encounters, which would have run so contrary to his rather narrow doctrine of what goes on in dreams.

He did speak of how his art collection illuminated his understanding of symbols and colored his theories about neuroses. No surprise to find a picture of Oedipus with the sphinx on his wall. I see that a fellow-Australian, Janine Burke, has written a study of Freud's collection titled The Gods of Freud published, so far as I can ascertain, only in Australia. Naturally (since bibliophilia is an incurable condition for some of us) I have now ordered it from Oz.