Dreaming for Epiphany

 

Whatever you do as the year turns, write in your journal! Write your dreams from the night, and your dreams of life for the coming year. Write, in particular, whatever you receive from dreams, synchronicity and spontaneous revelation over the last night of the Old Year and the first day of the New Year.

    If you were up all night partying - or the effect of your New Year's Eve reveling knocked your dreams out of memory - then record and work with the first dream that comes the following night, and whatever dreamlike symbols the world around you may give you.  
    In Japan they make a special effort to catch and work with the very first dream of the new year. Many Japanese people pay close attention to Hatsuyume, the first dream of the New Year. It may come in the night of December 31-January 1 but - since many may be up late partying or suffering the after-effects - it may come in the following day or on the night of January 1-2.     
     I would counsel you to stay alert for dreams for the New Year for a slightly longer period. In my mind the turning of the year rolls from December 30 until January 6, which is Epiphany in the Christian calendar, the day of “showing forth" when the Magi come to Bethlehem following their star, to honor the Christ child. Beyond the religious context, an epiphany may be a sudden revelation or perception of the reality or essential meaning of something important. It may be the gift of a dream.
    In hopes of a lucky dream to kick off the New Year, some Japanese invoke the Shichifukujin or "Seven Lucky Gods" and may place a picture of them under the pillow. These may not be part of our belief system, but we have other sources of guidance and blessing available, and it is always appropriate to ask for help and blessing if we do it nicely!

 If you are ready to dream in the New Year, you could set the simple intention: 

Show me what the New Year will bring. 

Or give this a positive spin by couching your request to your dream makers the following way: 

Show me the best that life holds for me and those I love in the year ahead. 

Be as specific or as general as you like, but ask in a way that excites you and reflects your willingness to receive guidance and enter on new adventures.
     Don't forget that dreams require action! Your first action is to record anything you remember from your dreams and the drifty state of hypnagogia. Share it with a friend, if you can, using our Lightning Dreamwork process. Walk with your dream and see how what is going on around you may illuminate the dream and how your dream may illuminate your world.
    If you saw things in your dream you don't want to manifest in the year ahead, comb through the material with the eye of a detective, asking Who, What, When, Where, How? If you can clarify the details of the dream and identify where it may play out in coming events, you may be able to take appropriate action to avoid an event you don't want to live through in your physical life. You can also try to accomplish this by going back inside your dream, in a conscious reentry journey, to see whether you can change the script where it was playing. You may want to try writing the story of your dream so it comes to a happy ending. If those approaches feel artificial, however, that may be telling you that physical action is required to reshape the probable future for the better.
    If your first dream for the New Year is full of promise, then celebrate - but make it part of your celebration, once again, to take action to embody the energy and promise of the dream and to help it to take root in the world. Don't leave the old year without your journal, and don't enter the new year without your dreams. 
    May your New Year be filled with abounding joy, and may you grow big dreams and see them take root in the world!

Art: Byzantine image of the  Three Kings in the Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna, 6th century.

Yeats' secret working mind and the importance of Edmund Dulac

I dreamed again into the secret working mind of W.B.Yeats, my favorite dead poet. Of a story he wrote, unpublished in his lifetime, from encounters with the ghost of an eight-year-old boy. Of a fierce poetic vision of a man who kept a severed head that rose up in the night with blazing eyes.
     When I sought to reenter the dream, it seemed the boy’s name began with H and may have been “Henry”.
     An inner voice spoke of the importance of Edmund Dulac.

I was thrilled. I knew there was a treasure map in this dream, and I wanted to use it immediately. I ran to my books. Dreams give us research assignments and sometimes these feel urgent. 
     I remembered that Edmund Dulac was a famous book illustrator and painter to the Faerie courts, and a friend of Yeats. I confirmed that Dulac painted the portrait of the poet's wife

Georgie that is on the cover of Becoming George, the vast (and vastly excellent) biography by Ann Saddlemyer that is in my Yeats collection.
     Dulac created images for the 1925 version of Yeats' extraordinary mystical book A Vision.These include the portrait of the fictional Giraldus – with something of Yeats’s hawk-like features – used as the frontispiece. My inner communication in the hypnompic state left me with the impression that Dulac may have been more involved in Yeats’s magic and encounters with the spirits than I had known.

Life called, and I left my research at this point, nearly four years ago, on the morning of January 9, 2012. Now that I have a little leisure to open old journals and follow their leads, I returned to the possible importance of Edmund Dulac.

    I discovered that the artist and the poet saw a great deal of each other in the dark time of the Great War. They attended a seance together in 1917 in which they tried to summon the Wise Men of the East, with the Orientalist Edward Dennison Ross on hand in case translation from Persian, Arabic or Turkish was required. [1]
    In a lecture on Art and Magic, Dulac declared in 1924 that “the greatest desire of man in all ages has been the establishment of a means of communication with the rest of the universe.” He joined Yeats in experiments in spirit communication, magical evocation and mutual visioning.
    They were both lovers of fairies and fairy story. Yeats painted the realms of Faerie with his words, Dulac with his brush.
    They worked together to bring Japanese-inspired Noh plays and mythic dramas, including "At the Hawk's Well" (which In saw in Toronto a few years ago) to stage and salon.
     Both sought a new mythology for their century that would make room for the return of Immortals from other times and dimensions. Both turned, again and again, to the legend of the Magi as a key to the confluence of spiritual traditions and the transformation of the Christian story. Yeats wrote an eerie, haunting, dream-infused story, "The Adoration of the Magi"(1897) and later a poem, "The Magi" (1914) 

Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye,   

In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones   

Appear and disappear in the blue depths of the sky   

With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,   

And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,   

And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,   

Being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied,   

The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

Three years later, Dulac painted an extraordinary picture of "The Three Wise Men" in the style of a Persian or Mughal miniature. The costumes and the stance of the Magi evoke different traditions, Persian, African, Chinese. The placement of the Virgin's hands around the infant Jesus gives him the look of a miniature Shiva Nataraj.
    I discovered this painting only today. In storage at the Williams College Museum of Art, it appears to have been overlooked by scholars and art historians until a remarkable researcher, Jaimee K. Comstock-Skipp, brought it to light in a wonderful article for Relegere. [2] I am grateful that round two of my dream-inspired research brought me to this.
    I still need to track the ghost story of H and the tale of the severed head. I may of course be required to write them, if my Yeats is willing. [3] Dreams set many kinds of assignments.

References

1. Christopher Blake (ed) “Ghosts in the Machine: Yeats and the Metallic Homunculus,
with Transcripts of Reports by W.B. Yeats and Edmund Dulac,” Yeats Annual 15 (2002).

2. Jaimee K. Comstock-Skipp “’ To be an Infidel or an Unbeliever…’ Five Wise Men: Edmund Dulac, W.B.Yeats, and The Magi” in Relegere: Studies in Religion and Reception 3, no.2 (2013)

3. For my dreams and visions of Yeats over many years, please see my books The Dreamer's Book of the Dead (Rochester VT: Destiny Books, 2004) chapter 8, and The Boy Who Died and Came Back (Novato CA: New World Library) chapter 37.

Pictures: (1) Edmund Dulac, "The Garden of Paradise: Fairy of the Garden"; (2) Edmund Dulac, "Mrs W.B. Yeats"; (3) Michio Ito as guardian in "At the Hawk's Well" (1916)