The state of our soles

In dreams, the state of our footwear often suggests the state of our souls. You can hear the echo of "soul" in "sole". A dream of lost shoes may invite us to think about where on the roads of life we may have lost or misplaced soul. Sometimes you can reach back into that kind of dream in order to look for lost shoes, and that search may take you back to a place in your life where you lost something more important - vital energy and identity - that you can now reclaim.  

    Shoes not only have soles. They have ties, and the state of your laces or straps in a dream may say something about connections - "old ties" or new ones. A woman getting ready to attend a high school reunion in Manhattan dreamed she was urgently seeking shoes that would be comfortable for walking yet smart enough to suit her taste. A salesman in a fancy store persuaded her to purchase a pair of sneakers with laces made of genuine, but flexible, gold. She smiled at the thought that after all the years since graduation, her ties to her classmates were "golden", and that she would be comfortable with them in the big city. 

     A Freudian psychiatrist I know dreamed that her shoes were far too tight; they were torturing her feet and making it nearly impossible for her to walk. When she reflected on this, she realized that her Freudian approach was cramping her ability to do her job. She expanded her studies, embracing Jung and other approaches to the psyche and its healing. Now, in her dreams, her shoes usually fit just right. 

     In some dreams, we find ourselves wearing shoes that would be highly unlikely in regular life, except at a costume party. We seem to be cross-dressing, or wearing the footwear of a different historical period, or dispensing with shoes altogether in a primal landscape. When we inspect the bodies we inhabit in dreams of this kind, we sometimes discover that our dream self slipped into someone else's situation, in a different place or a different era. The state of our shoes in such dreams (and other details) may be a clue to connections within a soul family that includes personalities in different times.  

      That thought has been of great interest to me since I dreamed that I visited my favorite professor at a research institution where he was doing some remarkable work that involved pairs of shoes. The professor is Manning Clark, the famous Australian historian, who was a great friend and mentor to me when I was a student and a precocious lecturer at the Australian National University. Manning died in 1991, but I have had many intriguing encounters with him since.
     In the dream involving shoes, Manning showed me that he is now busily engaged in studying "parallel lives". This meta-historical approach seems to involve tracking how choices made and actions taken by two people living in different times impact each other's fortunes, by a process of causation that you can only grasp if you can step outside linear chronology. One of the pairs Manning had selected for study was Lenin and Dionysius of Syracuse (a tyrant of ancient Greece). Each time the professor finished work on one set of parallel lives, he moved a pair of shoes to a different position on the far side of his desk. This was evidently a kind of tally, but I felt the shoes signified something more. 

    There is an angel of shoes, or more especially sandals, the most common footwear when his name was most commonly invoked. He is Sandalphon, and his name is still important in the pathworking and astral travel protocols of certain Mystery and kabbalistic orders. He wears sandals in the presence of his Maker, and leather footgear in the presence of Shekinah, the Divine Feminine. Some say he was once the prophet Elijah, or Elias. He presides over the astral body and the soul journeys we make in this vehicle. Some believe he watches over the big journeys that precede birth and follow death, which involve putting on and discarding "garments", like soft shoes. 

     In the Terry Gilliam movie "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus", a well-heeled lady is whisked away to a paradise of shoe-lovers, and stilleto heels by top designer Jerome C. Rousseau dance along the seabed. 

     Common expressions involving footwear may provide clues to where your dream is walking. A few that jump to mind:

- Goody two-shoes
- if the shoe fits...

- well-heeled
- given the boot
- pulled himself up by his own bootstraps
- to know someone, you must walk in his shoes (or moccasins)
- if you were in my shoes...

- those are big shoes to fill

- get your skates on

- put on your dancing shoes

So - what's in your shoe closet, in your dreams?

For more on dreams that show the state of our soul - and can provide portals for soul recovery healing - please see my book Dreaming the Soul Back Home.

The state of your soles

Walking a lake shore, I come upon something small and white and solitary on the wet sand. From my original angle of vision, it looks like a tiny ribcage. When I come closer, I see it is a sandal with many straps. I feel I am looking at a symbol from a dream. Abandoned between the confident lakefront mansions and the cold lake, looking so much like part of a little person, the lone sandal makes me think of soul - a part of soul that has been left somewhere away from home.

      In dreams, the state of our footwear often suggests the state of our souls. You can hear the echo of "soul" in "sole". A dream of lost shoes may invite us to think about where on the roads of life we may have lost or misplaced soul. Sometimes you can reach back into that kind of dream in order to look for lost shoes, and that search may take you back to a place in your life where you lost something more important - vital energy and identity - that you can now reclaim.

     Shoes not only have soles. They have ties, and the state of your laces or straps in a dream may say something about connections - "old ties" or new ones. A woman getting ready to attend a high school reunion in Manhattan dreamed she was urgently seeking shoes that would be comfortable for walking yet smart enough to suit her taste. A salesman in Bloomingdale's persuaded her to purchase a pair of sneakers with laces made of genuine, but flexible, gold. She smiled at the thought that after all the years since graduation, her ties to her classmates were "golden", and that she would be comfortable with them in the big city.

    A Freudian psychiatrist I know dreamed that her shoes were far too tight; they were torturing her feet and making it nearly impossible for her to walk. When she reflected on this, she realized that her Freudian approach was cramping her ability to do her job. She expanded her studies, embracing Jung and other approaches to the psyche and its healing. Now, in her dreams, her shoes fitted just right.           

    In some dreams, we find ourselves wearing shoes that would be highly unlikely in regular life, except at a costume party. We seem to be cross-dressing, or wearing the footwear of a different historical period, or dispensing with shoes altogether in a primal landscape. When we inspect the bodies we inhabit in dreams of this kind, we sometimes discover that our dream self slipped into someone else's situation, in a different place or a different era. The state of our shoes in such dreams (and other details) may be a clue to connections within a soul family that includes personalities in different times.

     That thought has been of great interest to me since I dreamed that I visited my favorite professor at a research institution where he was doing some remarkable work that involved pairs of shoes. The professor is Manning Clark, the famous Australian historian, who was a great friend and mentor to me when I was a student and a precocious lecturer at the Australian National University. Manning died in 1991, but I have had many intriguing encounters with him since.
     In the dream involving shoes, Manning showed me that he is now busily engaged in studying "parallel lives". This meta-historical approach seems to involve tracking how choices made and actions taken by two people living in different times impact each other's fortunes, by a process of causation that you can only grasp if you can step outside linear chronology. One of the pairs Manning had selected for study was Lenin and Dionysius of Syracuse (a tyrant of ancient Greece). Each time the professor finished work on one set of parallel lives, he moved a pair of shoes to a different position on the far side of his desk. This was evidently a kind of tally, but I felt the shoes signified something more.

    I am thinking now of that lone sandal on the lake beach. There is a sandal angel, very important in the pathworking and astral travel protocols of certain Mystery and kabbalistic orders. His name is Sandalphon. He wears sandals in the presence of his Maker, and leather footgear in the presence of Shekinah, the Divine Feminine. Some say he was once the prophet Elijah, or Elias. He presides over the astral body and the soul journeys we make in this vehicle. Some believe he watches over the big journeys that precede birth and follow death, which involve putting on and discarding "garments", like soft shoes.
    I think also of the symbolism of everyday life. The other day, I noticed a pair of women's high-heeled shoes, muddied and scuffed, abandoned under a tree on a gritty urban street. And I thought again about those dreams in which shoes that are lost or abandoned can reflect soul loss. 

    In my book Dreaming the Soul Back Home, I discuss shoe dreams as one of the main categories of dreams that encourage us to ask where soul has gone and make sure that we have proper grounding when we are walking our soul paths. The state of our soles may indeed reflect the state of our souls.

Abandoned shoes (c) Robert Moss

Dead Professors Society

William N. Fenton

I am taking one of my favorite dead professors to lunch. Not the Australian historian, or the Romanian scholar of religions, but a great American ethnographer of the Iroquois who was very generous with his wealth of knowledge and experience when my dreams spurred me to study the traditions and dreamways of the Six Nations. I have the professor take a seat in my kitchen while I call a taxi, giving my street address.

I woke from this dream in the early morning light with warm memories of this professor. His name was William N. Fenton, and he was the doyen of scholars of the Iroquois. His field work began in the 1930s, and until just before his death in 2005 his energy for research was unflagging and he continued to produce remarkable books, including his vast history of The Great Law and the Longhouse and a memoir that was published posthumously under the title Iroquois Journey.    
     I made contact with Bill Fenton after I moved to a farm near Chatham NY in 1986 and was called by dreams to revisit the life of Sir William Johnson, the wild Anglo-Irishman who became King's Superintendent of Indians in the eighteenth century, and study the traditions and dreamways of the Longhouse peoples he knew so well. Fenton invited me to lunch in the Patroon Room at the University at Albany
     We talked about how Johnson, as a new arrival from Ireland, won the friendship of the Mohawk Indians. To win acceptance and adoption among these people, Bill insisted, “You have to be a participator. Johnson ran with them, hunted with them, sang with them, loved their women." He recalled how in his early days of field work at the Tonawanda reservation, he was allowed to join in the singing. “Though I was always a bit off-key, I was soon being introduced as ‘a man who sings with us’.” 
     Bill Fenton became a wonderful friend and counselor. We lunched regularly at his

The young William Johnson

favorite Albany restaurant, Jack's Oyster House. He talked about fly fishing, about how a Jesuit missionary to the Iroquois at Kahnawake can be considered the founder of modern anthropology and - without any grandiosity - about how he had helped to inspire Edmund Wilson to write his book Upstate. When I talked about my dreams and visions of early America, he confided that he was rather proud that he was a direct descendant of Rebecca Nurse, who was executed as an alleged witch in the infamous Salem witch trials, in 1692.
     One night Bill and his wife came out to the farm for an intimate dinner party. We stood together in front of a maple with a forked trunk, looking at what appeared to be the shape of a long-haired shaman or sorcerer in the tree. He recalled reading somewhere about a Native shaman whose spirit took up residence in a tree. I told him I had dreamed this, and had written the scene in a draft of a book in progress. Over cognac in my library, in front of a blazing hearth, Bill said to me, "I have never met any man in this century who reminds me so much of Sir William Johnson."
      Today, after my dream encounter with Bill, I was working with the copy edits for the sections of my new book that describe my "Years of Writing Dangerously" when I embarked on what I thought would be an historical novel about Sir William Johnson and his world in the eighteenth century. I looked closely at all the details in my text, and checked and rechecked my source citations, remembering that Bill was a careful and exacting scholar.

I could not resist posting a note on my Facebook page about my encounter with Bill. It drew a wonderful response from a woman named Christine. She reported that "while working on a college project a few years ago, I read so much of Fenton's work that I would have long dream conversations with him. Those dream conversations really helped me create a stronger, more focused presentation." 

      I was eager to clarify whether she dreamed of Fenton before or after his death in 2005. Christine responded, "This particular project, a paper and presentation on Iroquois healing herbs and traditions, was done in 2009, long after Bill died. I spent many hours immersed in my topic, and kept returning to his books - they became a touch stone for what I was doing. In my dreams he would often point out where I needed to expand on my research or concepts that needed to be included. I once jokingly pointed out to my professor that Bill was a much more accessible professor, since I could sleep and work at the same time!
     "It was in the those dreams that I realized how important it was to discuss the culture and history of the Iroquois, rather than just the herbs, because of the way healing and medicine is embedded in the Iroquois way of life. It was a fascinating project, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and all the more so because the dreams were so vivid. It's been a while since I had one of those dreams now, so please give Bill my best regards!"   

     Christine is clearly a full member of the Dead Professors Society. It is a very special club, but don't go looking for an application form. It is invitation only. Look for the invitation in your dreams.

     

Visits with my favorite professor

I am with my favorite professor, Manning Clark. We sit in a cafe, discussing my progress towards a PhD dissertation. He is delighted I am working for my doctorate, but the content of my dissertation will need careful thought in order to satisfy all three supervisors. While Manning will support whatever I choose to do, the other two supervisors - Australians of a younger generation, with a different approach to academic research - are going to want me to demonstrate the ability to do exact research and analysis, and would like me to include some Australian material in my dissertation.

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In my outline, I have borrowed an idea from Spengler that 5,000 years ago there was a fundamental change in human societies that can be observed all over the planet. While Manning is happy for me to play off this sweeping notion, he counsels that the other supervisors won't like Spengler.

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This is a very friendly, relaxed conversation, and I am greatly enjoying my time with Manning.
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I wake cheerful, sunny and optimistic.

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Some background: Manning Clark, Australia's famous narrative historian, was chair of the history department at the Australian National University when I arrived there as an undergraduate in the late 1960s. He was a wonderful mentor and friend. He encouraged his students to read Dostoyevsky and Faulkner, Freud and Jung to understand the springs of human action. Raised on the King James Bible, he exhorted us to find "the ditch where we are digged". I vividly remember the dinners at Manning's house where he put vodka in the soup to loosen tongues. Manning's constant help and encouragement kept me on an academic track for a short time (I was appointed Lecturer in Ancient History at the ANU at the ripe age of 21) when I was powerfully tempted to do other things - like becoming a full-time journalist or joining the Australian foreign service.
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Manning died in 1991. Since his death he's turned up in some very important dreams, always as guide and friend. Once I met him in a building that resembled the Institute of Advanced Studies at our old university in Canberra. In an airy, light-filled space, I watched him move a pair of shoes across a broad table each time he completed a section of the new research he was doing. Puzzled and intrigued, I asked him about the nature of his new work. "I'm working on parallel lives," he explained. He demonstrated what this meant by showing me how he had found close interweaving between the life of Lenin and the life of Dionysius of Syracuse, an ancient Greek tyrant. From being a historian of lives lived in Chronos time, it seemed that Manning had become a meta-historian, working to trace the interplay of lives unfolding in different times. When I thought about the shoes he was moving about on his desk, the symbolism came home to me. My professor is matching up soles. Sounds like...?
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I've noticed before that my favorite professor tends to turn up in my dreams when I am embarked on new writing projects requiring detailed research and careful selection of materials. I'm not planning a PhD dissertation; I started on one four decades ago but gave that up to go off to see the world and sniff cordite as a foreign correspondent. However, I am again teaching some university courses and I am currently working on several new books.

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It's nice to feel Manning's benign presence, which will remind me to cherish my Australian identity and what I can bring to my work from my Aussie connections, including the link with the Aboriginal people who believe that our personal dreams can take us home to the Dreamtime, where everything truly important has its origin. His counsel will also encourage me to stay away from cloudy generalizations like the Spenglerian cycles of history. It will draw me, again, to the pursuit of trans-temporal history, which sounds like an oxymoron but may be a key to understanding how things really work, through the interplay of personalities in different times and dimensions.

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Portrait of Manning Clark (with his dog Tuppence) by Arhur Boyd (1972). This used to hang in his home in Canberra and is still on view there for 6 months of the year (in what is now the Manning Clark House); for the rest of the year it is in the National Portrait Gallery.