Why You Want to Keep a Journal

 

When a lusty, ambitious young Scot named James Boswell first met Dr. Samuel Johnson, Johnson advised him to keep a journal of his life. Boswell responded that he was already journaling, recording "all sorts of little incidents." Dr Johnson said, "Sir, there is nothing too little for so little a creature as man."

Indeed, there is nothing too little, or too great, for inclusion in a journal. If you are not already keeping one, I entreat you to start today. Write whatever is passing through your mind, or whatever catches your eye in the passing scene around you. If you remember your dreams, start with them. If you don't recall your dreams, start with whatever thoughts and feelings are first with you as you enter the day, or that interval between two sleeps the French used to call dorveille ("sleep-wake"), a liminal space when creative ideas often stream through.

If you have any hopes of becoming a writer, you'll find that journaling is your daily workout that keeps your writing muscles limber. If you are already a writer, you may find that as you set things down just as they come, with no concern for editors, critics or consequences, you are releasing descriptive scenes, narrative solutions, characters - even entire first drafts - quite effortlessly. Some of the most productive writers have also been prodigious journal-keepers. Graham Greene started recording dreams when he was sixteen, after a breakdown in school. His journals from the last quarter-century of his life survive, in the all-but-unbreakable code of his difficult handwriting. First and last, he recorded his dreams, and - as I describe in detail in my Secret History of Dreaming, they gave him plot solutions, character development, insights into the nature of reality that he attributed to some of his characters, and sometimes bridge scenes that could be troweled directly into a narrative. Best of all, journaling kept him going, enabling him to crank out his daily pages for publication no matter how many gins or how much cloak-and-dagger or illicit amour he had indulged in the night before.

You don't have to be a writer to be a journaler, but journal-keeping will make you a writer anyway. In the pages of your journal, you will meet yourself, in all your aspects. As you keep a journal over the years, you'll notice the rhymes and loops or cycles in your life. Mircea Eliade, the great Romanian-born historian of religions, was a great journaler. In the last volume of his published journals, he reflects, during a visit to Amsterdam in 1974, on how a bitter setback to his hopes at the time he first visited that city nearly a quarter-century before had driven him to do his most enduring work. He had been hoping that his early autobiographical novel, published in English as Bengal Nights, would be a big commercial success, enabling him to live as a full-time novelist. Sales were disappointing. Had it been otherwise, "I would have devoted almost all my time to literature and relegated the history of religions to second place, even though Shamanism was at the time almost entirely drafted." The world would have gained a promising, and perhaps eventually first-class, novelist; but we might have lost the scholar who first made the study of shamanism academically respectable and proceeded to breathe vibrant life, as well as immense erudition, into the cross-cultural study of the human interaction with the sacred.

Synesius of Cyrene, a heterodox bishop in North Africa around 400, counseled in a wonderful essay On Dreams that we should keep twin journals: a journal of the night and a journal of the day. In the night journal, we would record dreams as the products of a "personal oracle" and a direct line to the God we can talk to. In the day journal, we would track the signs and correspondences  through which the world around us is constantly speaking in a symbolic code. "All things are signs appearing through all things. They are brothers in a single living creature, the cosmos." The sage is one who "understands the relationship of the parts of the universe" - and we deepen and focus that understanding by recording signs in our day journal.

Partly because I keep unusual hours, and am often embarked on my best creative work long before dawn, I don't separate my night journal from my day journal. All the material goes into one book - a leather-bound travel journal, when I am on the road, my digital data base in Word when I am home.  I try to type up my entries before my handwriting (as difficult as Greene's) becomes illegible and put the printouts in big ringback binders. I save each entry with a date and a title in my data files, so I automatically have a running index.

One of the things you'll come to see clearly, as you journal dreams over a considerable period of time, is that your dream self travels ahead of your waking self, scouting the ways. 

Robert Moss journals with lamassu, a dream friend since childhood

Through the dream gates to initiation

 

True initiation involves both ordeal and ecstasy. “The majority of initiatory ordeals more or less clearly imply a ritual death followed by resurrection or a new birth,” commented the great religious historian Mircea Eliade. “The novice emerges from his ordeal endowed with a totally different being from that which he possessed before his initiation; he has become another.”[1] The initiate is a made man or woman.

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 dream gates, 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 a 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.[2]

Contemporary dreamers who have never heard of Eleusis have dreams of the same quality.

At the winter solstice, just after her twelfth birthday, Rebecca had a powerful dream that carried her deep into the Otherworld. In her dream, she was invited to enter an immense hall. It was filled with robed figures she described as “wizards.” They came from many races and traditions; she recognized a “Merlin” character among a Celtic contingent. 

A woman robed in white sat enthroned above the throng. She beckoned to Rebecca to approach her. The male wizards ignored Rebecca except for the forbidding figure who moved to block her path. He challenged her to pass a test. Only when she had passed the test was she allowed to ascend the steps to the throne. “The High Priestess was slim and dark-haired. She seemed to be in her late twenties. She spoke to me by thought rather than words. She appeared outwardly solemn as she held court over all the male wizards, but kept cracking mental jokes that only the adepts caught.”

The High Priestess wore a striking pendant, which I asked Rebecca to draw for me. Her drawing showed an equal-armed cross, set within a circle. Crossed staves behind it make the pattern of a diagonal cross within a much larger circle, bordered by a two-headed serpent. The body of the serpent is engraved with writing in Greek characters. There are more inscriptions on scrolls that flank the central cross, which has four crystals in its setting. The wizard who challenged Rebecca wore a simpler version of the same pendant.

For a girl approaching puberty, this dream might carry many levels of meaning. But we spent no time in dream analysis. We celebrated the sense of strength and magic and possibility that Rebecca had drawn from it. She reveled in her special dream relationship with the High Priestess seated above all those powerful men. When I asked Rebecca to sum up the feeling of the dream, she said with little hesitation, “I am coming into my power.”

Nearly three years later, in another spontaneous sleep dream, Rebecca reentered the great hall where she had encountered the High Priestess: 

"This time everything is different. Instead of everyone ignoring me, all the high priests from all the worlds bow down to me and hold out their arms to me.

"The High Priestess stands and holds out her arms. She says, Come, let me show you my mind. Only she does not exactly say it; she suggests it.

"She takes my hand. From her forehead a bright light emerges, and in the bright light I see a gate. I walk toward this gate. When I pass through it, I encounter three beings. The first is a bird-headed man who has given me guidance before. He shows me what happens to people who sell out their values in life. The second is a woman I know to be an immortal. She wears a crowned helmet and carries a shield and spear. She tells me, We are one and the same. The third is a man I do not know. I have the feeling this man will be important in my future life.

"When I finish observing this man, I see another gate to walk through. I travel in this way until the bright light dims and all I can see are the eyes of the High Priestess, shining against a dark rectangle that may be a mask."

These dream experiences accompanied Rebecca’s passage from girlhood into womanhood. In her outer life, no sacred ritual was conducted to mark this passage. But she was called through the dream gates, into a larger life.

References

1. Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation (New York: Harper & Row, 1975) pp. xii. x.

2. Carl Kerenyi, Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter (Princeton: Bollingen, 1991) pp.82-83

 

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

Photo: Marble head of a priestess of Athena from Pergamon, early 2nd century CE. She seemed very familiar when I met her again in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. 

Reality, Illusion and the Rupture of Time in Eliade's Strange Tales

Mircea Eliade is best known in English as a historian of religion, but he was also a prolific author of fiction and fantasy. He regarded the long novel published in English as The Forbidden Forest as his chef d'oeuvre, but many readers will find its loops and repetitions wearisome. However, his shorter fiction can be captivating while evoking some of Eliade's favorite philosophic themes: how the sacred is "camouflaged" in the profane, how at any turning we may encounter a moment of theophany, when the divine irrupts into everyday life and we are released from limits of time and space.
     I have been rereading the stories published in translation as Two Strange Tales. Perhaps we should call stories like this nonfiction fantasy rather than fiction. In "Nights in Serampore", Eliade makes himself a lead character. He assigns roles to actual people under their real names, in this case well-known people he encountered in India: the Russian (Eastern Orthodox) scholar of Islam Bogdanov, the Dutch Secretary of the Asia Society, van Manen, and Swami Sivananda (“Shivananda” in this version). The two Westerners, with the narrator (Eliade himself) are in the habit of driving to a rich man’s house in the woods near Serampore, sixteen miles from Calcutta, for long nights of talking, smoking and drinking in a lovely setting, in the perfumed air.

    A mystery develops. A Hindu professor reputed to be a master of tantra and yogic siddhis is seen on the road in his dhoti with the saffron stripes on his forehead. Questioned later, he denies having been there. He is spotted again, after Eliade has been discoursing on “awful” methods used to acquire occult powers in Hindu tradition, like meditating all night while seated on a corpse. That evening, as the threesome leave the rich man’s house, something strange happens during the car ride. It is taking far longer than it should to get to the highway, the trees are getting bigger and bigger. Eliade closes his eyes for a moment and when he opens them the jungle is wild and unfamiliar.
     They hear a woman’s screams. They get out of the car and follow a flickering light through the jungle. It brings them to charcoal burners, and an old, rather grand house. The owner receives them, but moves and speaks very slowly, using only an archaic form of Bengali. The visitors are confused. They forget the screams that brought them here. Then they remember something, and start to ask questions. The owner of the house informs them that they heard the screams of his wife as she was stabbed to death. Look, here is her body, being carried in on a bier.
    Eliade and his friends leave in discomfort and confusion. They can hardly stay when the lady of the house has just been murdered. Weary and drained, they pause under a tree where Eliade takes a nap. Eventually they find their way back to the car. The driver acts as though they never left. Confounded, Eliade and his companions retrace their steps. They return to the tree where Eliade took a nap. They see their footprints on the ground and follow them. They come to a clearing where the signs of their passage end. There is no grand house, no charcoal burners, no murdered woman being prepared for cremation.
    They learn that there was a great house at this place, but that was a hundred and fifty years ago, before it was burned to the ground. The case of the murdered woman, whose name was Lila, was notorious. She died resisting men who were trying to abduct her. It seems that Eliade and his friends were transported across time. Their adventure was not only metaphysical, since it produced physical effects – their torn and dirtied clothes, their footprints on the ground.
     When they seek to make sense of this, their suspicions fall on Suren Bose, the yogi magician. Could he have worked an enchantment, to distract them from spying on whatever he was doing in the forest? How could this be?
     Eliade’s question remains unanswered until he goes to a monastery in the Himalayas and tells his story to Swami Sivananda. The swami explains: “No event in our world is real, my friend. Everything that exists in this universe is illusory. Not only the death of Lila and her husband’s grief, but also the encounter between you, living men, and their shades – all these things are illusory. And in a world of appearances, in which no thing and no event has any permanence, any reality of its own – whoever is master of certain forces can do anything he wishes. Obviously he doesn’t create anything real either, but only a play of appearances.”
   When Eliade struggles with this, Sivananda stages a demonstration. The swami squeezes Eliade's arm and drags him along. Eliade staggers. Hi senses blur. Now he seems to be in a different time and place, back in the humid forest of the south. Sivananda makes him walk faster. He is again at the charcoal kilns, at the big house in the forest. “Wake me up!” Eliade pleads.

In his introduction to Two Strange Tales, Eliade discusses the importance of fiction in his work. Both stories turn on the use of supposed yogic techniques to wield occult powers. The mélange of reality and fiction in these stories, he observes, is well-suited to his concept of “camouflage”, of how the sacred is concealed in the profane. He writes that

in these two stories “camouflage” is used in a paradoxical manner, for the reader has no means to know whether the “reality” is hidden in “fiction” or the other way round, because both processes are intermingled. 

     A favorite technique of mine aims at the imperceptible yet gradual transmutation of a commonplace setting into a new “world’, without however losing its proper, everyday or “natural” structure and qualities...The parallel world of the fantastic is indistinguishable from the given ordinary world, but once this other world is discovered by the various characters it blurs, changes, transforms or dislocates their lives in different ways. 

      Each tale creates its own proper universe, and the creation of such imaginary universes through literary means can be compared with mythical processes...The imaginary universes brought to light in littérature fantastique disclose some elements of reality that are inaccessible to other intellectual approaches.

    The second story, "The Secret of Dr. Honigberger", involves another real person, a colorful German-Romanian from Brasov. The narrator (Eliade himself) receives an invitation from a Mrs Zerlendi to inspect her husband’s Oriental collection. He arrives at the kind of house that often features in Eliade’s fantastic tales, “one of those houses that I never can pass without pausing for a closer look”, an old villa behind an ironwork fence and an overgrown garden with a dried-up pool, where a world disappearing from other parts of the city is strangely preserved. The main entrance is protected by a sunroof of frosted glass, of the kind that struck me when I visited Eliade’s old neighborhood in Bucharest, on a street near Mantuleasa.

      Eliade is seduced by an immense library of 30,000 books. We learn that Mr. Zerlendi was doing research for a biography of Honigberger, a German-Romanian from Brasov who became famous for his adventures in the East. However, Zerlendi disappeared many years before. Going through Zerlendi’s notebook, Eliade finds clues to what happened. Among all his composition books, Zerlendi left a journal written in Sanskrit, correctly assuming that it would take a rarely qualified investigator to recognize and interpret its contents. In this journal he recorded his experiments with yogic techniques, including the art of invisibility.
     Central to his practice was the kind of dream yoga or lucid dreaming that places high value of maintaining continuity of consciousness between waking, dreaming and other states.

After some time I woke up sleeping, or, more precisely, I woke up in sleep, without ever having fallen asleep in the true sense of the word. My body and all my senses sunk into deeper and deeper sleep, but my mind didn’t interrupt its activity for a single instant...

     I was astounded to behold, with my eyelids closed, the very same scene as I had with my eyes open…I saw in any direction I wanted to, I saw wherever I turned my thoughts, whether or not I had my eyes open. 

He sees others moving in their dream bodies.

The unification of consciousness is attained by means of a continuous transition, that is, one without a hiatus of any sort, from the waking state to the state of dreaming sleep, then to that of dreamless sleep, and finally to the cataleptic state. 

Eliade comments: “All the Indian ascetics that I have known who have consented to give me any explanations regarded this stage, the unification of the states of consciousness, as the most important of all. Anyone who did not succeed in experiencing this could never derive any spiritual benefit from following yoga practice.” 

     Dr Zerlendi applied himself to placing himself in cataleptic trance for longer and longer periods. He believed he had proved that he stepped outside time when he rose after 36 hours to find his face as freshly shaven as when he lay down. He laid in suspended animation for 12 hours without drawing breath. He declared, in his secret book, “I know the way to Shambhala. I know how to get there.”

     He made it his aim to transport himself to Shambhala. To do this he would have to step outside time. He practiced the art of invisibility as a step towards gaining the power of teleportation, de-materializing in one reality in order to re-materialize in another.
     Seized with excitement, Eliade smuggles the journal out of the house, in order to study Zerlendi's techniques closely. He will return the book covertly before anyone notices it is missing.
    There is a slight problem. When Eliade returns to the house to interview Mrs Zerlendi again. When he succeeds, nobody remembers him. He protests that he was working in the library for two full months. This is quite impossible, they tell him. There is no library in the house. There used to be one, but it was broken up and sold off twenty years before.
   Eliade goes to the house again, hoping that it will be as he first found it. Now the whole scene is falling apart, like a broken dream. The Zerlendi house is being pulled down.
    My favorite passage in the story: "I have always divided people into two categories: those who understand death as an end to life and the body, and those who conceive it as the beginning of a new, spiritual existence. And I never form an opinion of any man I meet until I have learned his honest belief about death." 

Nonfiction fantasy. I like the genre description I just invented. In Eliade's case, it not only means that he gives himself permission to use the identities and circumstances of "real" people, starting with himself. It means that the stories are derived from experiences in realities beyond the physical that may be no less real and sometimes intersect - magically or catastrophically -with the world of the senses. 


Quotations are from Two Strange Tales by Mircea Eliade, published (appropriately) by Shambhala (Boston, 1986). The translation is credited to Herder & Herder.

Art: "Nights in Serampore" by Christian Bode (2016)

How Mircea Eliade delivered his Snake

I love finding out how other writers do their thing. It's fascinating to learn how the great Romanian scholar and fiction writer Mircea Eliade – prolific in so many genres – sustained and generated his creative production under almost all circumstances. He wrote stories in a secret police prison. He hammered out books under the shadow of his wife’s terminal illness and of the Red Army occupation of his country. He went on writing in conditions of penury and exile and raw terror (the terror of History, he called it again and again). He started early, publishing in a popular science magazine at fourteen (when he aspired to become an ichthyologist) and basically kept it up till the end of his life.
    Some of his larger projects he had to put down and take up again over many years  This was the case with his huge autobiographical novel Noaptea de Sanziene (published in English as The Forbidden Forest) and with his pioneer study Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, an enduring inspiration to the neo-shamanic movement in the West since its first publication French in 1953.

     Then there are the books that Eliade wrote in a frenzy, abetted by both the demons of necessity and his greater creative daimon. I am thrilled by his account of how Șarpele (The Snake) streamed out of him over ten nights:.

I wrote the book in the course of ten nights, working between 11 and 3 or 4 a.m., in the spring of 1937.

He had to deliver the completed work on “Book Day”, otherwise the publisher would not pay him. But at the same time he was teaching at the university and proofreading a scholarly book that had to be ready by the same deadline.

I was overworked, exhausted, and in order to stay awake I drank coffee; then, so I could sleep in the mornings I took sleeping powders. Every morning Ciornei [his publisher] sent a boy to pick up the 15 or 20 pages I had written during the night and take them directly to the printer. I did not reread a single page of the two hundred which comprise the book; nevertheless, Șarpele is one of my most successful writings.

He had plenty of ethnographic and folklore material relevant to his theme. He did not consult it. “The writer in me refused any conscious collaboration with the scholar and interpreter of symbols.” He discovered in this way that “the free act of literary creation can…reveal certain theoretical meanings.”

Indeed, only after I read Șarpele in book form did I understand that in this book I had resolved, without knowing it, a problem which had preoccupied me for a long time.

Naturally, after reading this I was eager to read the novel that emerged from these nocturnal frenzies. There is no English translation, and my Romanian is hardly enough to order coffee, but I found an edition in French, titled. Andronic et le serpent and devoured it in one night. Strange, sexy, wild and feverish, a remarkable birth from those ten incandescent nights.
    The story of how Eliade produced this novel  deepens my conviction that for some of us the all-but-impossible deadline is a great prompt to commit the creative act. This has often worked for me.

Source: Mircea Eliade, “Autobiographical Fragment” in Norman J. Giradot and Mac Linscott Ricketts, Imagination & Meaning: The Scholarly and Literary Worlds of Mircea Eliade  (New York: The Seabury Press, 1982) 123

Why you want to keep a journal

When a lusty, ambitious young Scot named James Boswell first met Dr. Samuel Johnson, Johnson advised him to keep a journal of his life. Boswell responded that he was already journaling, recording "all sorts of little incidents." Dr Johnson said, "Sir, there is nothing too little for so little a creature as man."

Indeed, there is nothing too little, or too great, for inclusion in a journal. If you are not already keeping one, I entreat you to start today. Write whatever is passing through your mind, or whatever catches your eye in the passing scene around you. If you remember your dreams, start with them. If you don't recall your dreams, start with whatever thoughts and feelings are first with you as you enter the day, or that interval between two sleeps the French used to call dorveille ("sleep-wake"), a liminal space when creative ideas often stream through.

If you have any hopes of becoming a writer, you'll find that journaling is your daily workout that keeps your writing muscles limber. If you are already a writer, you may find that as you set things down just as they come, with no concern for editors, critics or consequences, you are releasing descriptive scenes, narrative solutions, characters - even entire first drafts - quite effortlessly. Some of the most productive writers have also been prodigious journal-keepers. 

Graham Greene started recording dreams when he was sixteen, after a breakdown in school. His journals from the last quarter-century of his life survive, in the all-but-unbreakable code of his difficult handwriting. First and last, he recorded his dreams, and - as I describe in detail in my Secret History of Dreaming, they gave him plot solutions, character development, insights into the nature of reality that he attributed to some of his characters, and sometimes bridge scenes that could be troweled directly into a narrative. Best of all, journaling kept him going, enabling him to crank out his daily pages for publication no matter how many gins or how much cloak-and-dagger or illicit amour he had indulged in the night before.

You don't have to be a writer to be a journaler, but journal-keeping will make you a writer anyway. In the pages of your journal, you will meet yourself, in all your aspects. As you keep a journal over the years, you'll notice the rhymes and loops or cycles in your life. Mircea Eliade, the great Romanian-born historian of religions, was a great journaler. In the last volume of his published journals, he reflects, during a visit to Amsterdam in 1974, on how a bitter setback to his hopes at the time he first visited that city nearly a quarter-century before had driven him to do his most enduring work.

He had been hoping that his early autobiographical novel, published in English as Bengal Nights, would be a big commercial success, enabling him to live as a full-time novelist. Sales were disappointing. Had it been otherwise, "I would have devoted almost all my time to literature and relegated the history of religions to second place, even though Shamanism was at the time almost entirely drafted." The world would have gained a promising, and perhaps eventually first-class, novelist; but we might have lost the scholar who first made the study of shamanism academically respectable and proceeded to breathe vibrant life, as well as immense erudition, into the cross-cultural study of the human interaction with the sacred.

Synesius of Cyrene, a heterodox bishop in North Africa around 400, counseled in a wonderful essay On Dreams that we should keep twin journals: a journal of the night and a journal of the day. In the night journal, we would record dreams as the products of a "personal oracle" and a direct line to the God we can talk to. In the day journal, we would track the signs and correspondences  through which the world around us is constantly speaking in a symbolic code. "All things are signs appearing through all things. They are brothers in a single living creature, the cosmos." The sage is one who "understands the relationship of the parts of the universe" - and we deepen and focus that understanding by recording signs in our day journal.

Partly because I keep unusual hours, and am often embarked on my best creative work long before dawn, I don't separate my night journal from my day journal. All the material goes into one book - a leather-bound travel journal, when I am on the road. I try to type up my entries before my handwriting (as difficult as Greene's) becomes illegible and put the printouts in big ringback binders. I save each entry with a date and a title in my data files, so I automatically have a running index and (with Word) a search engine. I like to draw pictures from my dreams and some of these go in separate art journals.

One of the things you'll come to see clearly, as you journal dreams over a considerable period of time, is that your dream self travels ahead of your waking self, scouting the ways. You'll find you are creating a personal dictionary of symbols, far superior to any of that hand-me-down stuff you'll find in dream dictionaries in stores, because the snake in your dreams is not necessarily the snake in my dreams. You'll have starter dough for creative writing and art and a wish list for shamanic shopping.

Share what you wish to share with those who are primed to hear and give you feedback in a respectful, non-intrusive way, following the "If it were my dream" protocol but keep the journal strictly private. This is your secret book. What you write in it is between you and your soul, and you write without fear of judgment or consequences. Go back to old entries and see what is looking at you now, as dreams spill into everyday life.

Continue and deepen your practice for long enough, and you may come to feel -as Eliade did -that your journal is the most important book you will ever write, and one of the most important you will ever read.

For practical guidance on keeping a journal, and many games to play with it, please see  my book Active Dreaming.

On making the most important book you'll ever read

When a lusty, ambitious young Scot named James Boswell first met Dr. Samuel Johnson, Johnson advised him to keep a journal of his life. Boswell responded that he was already journaling, recording "all sorts of little incidents." Dr Johnson said, "Sir, there is nothing too little for so little a creature as man."
    Indeed, there is nothing too little, or too great, for inclusion in a journal. If you are not already keeping one, I entreat you to start today. Write whatever is passing through your mind, or whatever catches your eye in the passing scene around you. If you remember your dreams, start with them. If you don't recall your dreams, start with whatever thoughts and feelings are first with you as you enter the day, or that interval between two sleeps the French used to call dorveille ("sleep-wake"), a liminal space when creative ideas often stream through.
    If you have any hopes of becoming a writer, you'll find that journaling is your daily workout that keeps your writing muscles limber. If you are already a writer, you may find that as you set things down just as they come, with no concern for editors, critics or consequences, you are releasing descriptive scenes, narrative solutions, characters - even entire first drafts - quite effortlessly. Some of the most productive writers have also been prodigious journal-keepers.
     Graham Greene started recording dreams when he was sixteen, after a breakdown in school. His journals from the last quarter-century of his life survive, in the all-but-unbreakable code of his difficult handwriting. First and last, he recorded his dreams, and they gave him plot solutions, character development, insights into the nature of reality that he attributed to some of his characters, and sometimes bridge scenes that could be troweled directly into a narrative. Best of all, journaling kept him going, enabling him to crank out his daily pages for publication no matter how many gins or how much cloak-and-dagger or illicit amour he had indulged in the night before.
    You don't have to be a writer to be a journaler, but journal-keeping will make you a writer anyway. In the pages of your journal, you will meet yourself, in all your aspects. As you keep a journal over the years, you'll notice the rhymes and loops or cycles in your life.
    Because I am leading teach workshops in Romania, I have been re-reading Mircea Eliade, the great Romanian-born historian of religions. Opening the last volume of his published journals, I found him reflecting during a visit to Amsterdam in 1974 on how a bitter setback to his hopes at the time he first visited that city nearly a quarter-century before had driven him to do his most enduring work. He had been hoping that his early autobiographical novel, published in English as Bengal Nights, would be a big commercial success, enabling him to live as a full-time novelist. Sales were disappointing. Had it been otherwise, "I would have devoted almost all my time to literature and relegated the history of religions to second place, even though Shamanism was at the time almost entirely drafted." The world would have gained a promising, and perhaps eventually first-class, novelist; but we might have lost the scholar who first made the study of shamanism academically respectable and proceeded to breathe vibrant life, as well as immense erudition, into the cross-cultural study of the human interaction with the sacred.
    Synesius of Cyrene, a heterodox bishop in North Africa around 400, counseled in a wonderful essay On Dreams that we should keep twin journals: a journal of the night and a journal of the day. In the night journal, we would record dreams as the products of a "personal oracle" and a direct line to the God we can talk to. In the day journal, we would track the signs and synchronicities through which the world around us is constantly speaking in a symbolic code. "All things are signs appearing through all things. They are brothers in a single living creature, the cosmos." The sage is one who "understands the relationship of the parts of the universe" - and we deepend and focus that understanding by recording signs in our day journal.
    Partly because I keep unusual hours, and am often embarked on my best creative work long before dawn, I don't separate my night journal from my day journal. All the material goes into one book - a leather-bound travel journal, when I am on the road. I try to type up my entries before my handwriting (as difficult as Greene's) becomes illegible and put the printouts in big ringback binders. I save each entry with a date and a title in my data files, so I automatically have a running index.
    Here are some games I enjoy playing with my journals that you may want to play too:

BIBLIOMANCY

"Bibliomancy" is the fancy name for opening a book at random to get guidance on a theme, or simply the quality and content of the day. I often use old journals in this way. For example, one Christmas Eve, after learning that a friend had developed a serious illness and was having other major troubles in her life, I reached blindly into a shelf of 30+ old travel journals, grabbed one without looking at the date, and opened it at random, I found myself looking at a short dream report from December 2003, just over five years before. The dream was about my friend. It stated that she had "accepted Purgatory for a year. This Purgatory is a room in her home that opens into the same realm." I shared this report with my friend, and we began to work with the meaning of "acceptance" and of "Purgatory". I also shared other reports in that old journal on tbe page before and after the "Purgatory" entry, since I have often noticed that when events start to catch up with an "old" dream, other "old" material around that dream can prove timely and helpful. The neighboring entry in that old journal involved ways of delivering spiritual nourishment, which we found highly relevant.

DEVELOPING YOUR OWN BOOK OF SYMBOLS

Tracking how symbols feature and evolve in your dreams and your experience of the world around you will give you your own encyclopedia of symbols, better than any of those dream dictionaries, because the snake or the train in your dream is yours not theirs. While it may open into the archetypal data banks of the collective unconscious, or super-conscious, those links are for you to explore and not to receive on a hand-me-down plan.

COLLECTING YOUR OWN ANTHOLOGY OF QUOTATIONS

When I was an undergraduate, writing book reviews for a local newpaper, I was fortunate to be assigned one of the first English-language editions of the Carnets of Albert Camus. I was struck by how the great French writer was fired up by the quotes he recorded from his eclectic reading. Etched in my memory is a grim exchange in the Carnets from a Russian source. Avvakum, an archpriest, and his wife, are trudging through a frozen waste. The wife asks, "How far must we journey?" "Until death, daughter of Mark." "Then, son of Peter, we must hurry on."

    My own journals are peppered with quotes from all over, from sources celebrate an utterly obscure, ranging from the message I may have spotted in the first vanity plate I saw on a certain morning (BCRE8V) to a spell from the Egyptian Book of the Dead or a "snapper" from Mark Twain.

HELPING KIDS TO JOURNAL

If we are privileged to have access to young children, one of the greatest gifts we can give them - and in the process, ourselves - is to encourage them to record dreams and stories in a boom that will become a journal. I did this with my own daughters. When they were very young, they would do the pictures and I would write the words for them. They took over more and more of the writing, as they got older, until, at age nine, they were keeping their journals by themselves and for themselves. Then the same thing happened in each case. They said to me, in effect: "That's it, Dad. This is my secret book and you can't read it anymore."
   Now that's a journal. The secret book of your self and your soul, not to be shared with anyone without permission, which should not be given lightly.

When life deals you a tough hand, you'll find that as you write your journal, you are practicing spontaneous self-therapy. You may be able to write your way through whatever ails you. There's a great release, perhaps a catharsis, in saying what you need to say in the safe space your journal provides. When you see and state things as they are, you already begin to change them. Keep your hand moving, and you may manifest the power to re-name and re-vision symptoms, challenges and difficult situations in the direction of resolution and healing.
    As you keep your secret book, you'll discover more, and more will discover you. You'll find yourself straying off the tame and settled developments of the everyday mind, into the wilder borders of imagination, where the Big story of your life can find you.

For more games to play with your journal, please see my book Active Dreaming. For a template for keeping a dream journal, please see chapter 7 of my book Dreaming True.

A dream word puzzle on New Year's morning

I find that odd words and phrases in my dreams are often clues to fascinating things if I take time to do the puzzles (and this may take quite a while). In my early morning dreams on New Year's day, I was excited to discover an English translation of a story by a favorite author (Mircea Eliade), typeset but not yet published. Now lucid, I leaned into the dream, trying to retrieve some of the text. I got this:

His colleague had the voracity of a threshing sheave.

I understood that this was reference to a character's sexual appetites. The wording is doubly odd, in English. "Voracity"is an actual English word. Your spellcheck demons will try to substitute "veracity" but that is a different creature entirely. "Voracity" is rarely heard in English, but - as the quality of being voracious - it fits the context beautifully. But "threshing sheave"can't be right, surely. There is a threshing flail. And there are the sheaves of grain that are produced after the threshing is done. Has the translator conjoined two words that aren't meant to be spooning each other? Hmmm. I have learned never to step away from the first version of a word or phrase a dream gives me, however unlikely or resistant to translation it may seem to be. Time to go to the dictionary. I am now reminded that "sheave" (singular) is another good English word. A sheave is a pulley with a grooved wheel for holding a cable or rope (see photo above). The grooved wheel spins inside the frame of the sheave, allowing the rope or cable to move freely and smoothly. A sheave can be used to redirect a cable or rope, lift loads, and transmit power. Not hard to see a potential metaphor here, involving the sexual act, a grade above "screw". Was the author striving for some fresh metaphor here that has not quite managed to make itself at home in English? I may ask Mircea, if he is available..

A bibliomancy game for the New Year

I bet you have done this some time: opened a book at random to get a thought for the day. Maybe you have done it with a question or theme in your mind, to see what response the book will give you. You can do this to get a second opinion on a dream, or on why your partner hasn't called you to day, or on what the quality of the day will be. Doing divination by the book has been going on as long as humans have had anything resembling pages that could be turned or shuffled. The Sybilline books of ancient Rome were actually a stack of loose leaves. Many, across the centuries have turned to a sacred book, as Lincoln turned to his family Bible. Many have consulted books that are reverenced in a certain culture, like the works of Homer or Virgil, Dante or Rumi. The formal name for divination by the book is bibliomancy. When you are content to work with just a line or two on the page in front of you, the exact learned name is stichomancy, meaning divination by the line or verse. You can play the game with any book at all, one you notice in the New Arrivals at a library or bookstore, one that a shelf elf pushes off a bookcase at home, one a friend is reading on the bus or the airplane. Sometimes it's fun to give yourself coordinates. You'll pick a book - any book at all - and go to a certain page and find a certain line and see what is there for you. Typically, you'll need to read around the line you selected, up and down a line or two, to get a finished sentence or thought from the book. At the turning of the year, I like to play games that offer a chance to sneak a peek at coming attractions over the next twelve months. Dreams remembered on or around New Year's Day are especially interesting. You can set the intention to dream into the coming year. I like to do this by setting an intention along these lines:

Show me the best things I can manifest in my life over the coming year,

Often, I will cast I Ching or tarot, or both, on New Year's Eve or New Year's Day, for a first flavor of the coming year. This year, I am recommending to dreamers who play with me that we all do bibliomancy by the number, on or around the first day of 2016, The number, of course, is the number of the coming year: 2016. Applied to book divination, it gives us a few options. You could go to page 20, line 16. Or to page 201, line 6. Or to chapter 20, line 16. You get the idea.
Give it a try. And yes, you're allowed to do it more than once.

I gave it a test-run just now. I set the general intention: "Show me something I need to know about 2016". I took a book from my shelves that I had intended to reread in my current study of Mircea Eliade. It is his Portugal Journal, detailing his personal life from 1941 to 1945. I turned to page 201, line 6. The first three words are

write a novel

 I go back to line 5 for the beginning of the statement and on to line 7 for its conclusion. I now have

I must write a novel someday with "Foreign Affairs" in it and bring to light the strange freemasonry of these individuals. And write it I will.

Yes, Mircea, I think I must. Multumesc.

-----

For more games of bibliomancy, please see my book Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life

At home in winter with the Muse

When my schedule is entirely my own, as it mostly is when I am at home on cold winter days, I do whatever I feel like at any time. I don't think about sleep until it falls upon me. When that happens, I let my body fall into bed. Very frequently, I then find myself engaged in a marvelous adventure in another reality, where other players are waiting for me.

      In the Hittite language, you don't say "I fell asleep". You say, "sleep fell upon me" or even "sleep seized me." I learned this from Alice Mouton's excellent work Rêves hittites. My relationship with sleep is sometimes like that of one who is willing to be seized. I notice that when sleep falls upon me like a lion on a goat, what follows is often a powerful and numinous experience, sometimes an encounter with a greater being.    

     Who are those beings who are lions as well as humans who I so often find waiting for me, as if I am late for lunch or the theater, when I am seized by the need to lie down?
     What was that instrument I was playing after sleep fell on me and obliged me to take an early evening nap? It looked a bit like a set of pan pipes, but I strummed it with my fingers. It seemed to be organic, vegetal, like a dried gourd with multiple tubes, orange and yellow in color. The music it made was enchanting. I was playing it in a jungle setting, near where a river joined the sea, maybe somewhere along the coast of Brazil.     
     I write scenes and questions like these in my journal at any hour. Its what writers do. It's what active dreamers must do if they are going to get really good at dreaming. 

     At 1:00 a.m. on one of these winter nights I sit down to a plate of linguine with home-made bolognaise sauce, heavy on garlic, fresh-grated romano and a glass of fine St. Emilion. Since I skipped dinner and this followed an early evening nap, does it count as breakfast or a late supper? My body is thankful either way.

    If the Muse is looking for me she will almost always find me prowling around indoors between 3:00 and 5:00 a.m. On winter days at home I often take an early evening nap and then stay up until after lunch. I grab a couple of sleep periods - rarely more than a couple of hours each - in a 24 hour cycle. Sleep researchers call me a "biphasic sleeper". Few of them seem to grasp that it is not necessary to sleep in order to dream. I am a biphasic sleeper and an omniphasic dreamer.
    One of my favorite ways to dream is to laze in bed in a state of horizontal meditation after waking. It is in this liminal place between sleep and awake that marvelous things become available. I find myself looking at a parade of faces, or a kind of travel video, offering multiple itineraries and destinations for lucid dream expeditions.
    I check in with my dreaming family at any hour. There are hundreds of them gathered for my new virtual course in Active Dreaming for The Shift Network, sharing fabulous narratives of mystery and adventure,or terror and beauty, inviting each other to play dream detective and shaman of the breakfast table or the supper club. Who was that African princess with gold dust on her face? Who was that tall young Irish lady, regal as one of the lordly ones of the Sidhe, who showed me an illustrated book filled with magic and ancestral tears?
    I flit like a hummingbird from book to book in my personal library, drinking from different styles and visions. I am reminded by Marguerite Yourcenar, in Dreams and Destinies, that a dream report can be written as a prose poem, without need of developing the story or adding commentary or analysis. I am dazzled, again, by the crazy-brilliant mind of Philip K. Dick, as he follows his own manic encounters with God (or the Archon), pre-Socratic philosophy, a Roman Empire that never ended, and mind-incinerating quantities of dope in his autobiographical Valis. I consider Seth's insistence in The Nature of the Psyche that each of us is both male and female and picture him in conversation about this with Jung. 

     I leaf through old journals, choosing passages to develop as stories or use as teaching examples, noting recurring and evolving themes. I find evidence on every other page that I am leading continuous lives beyond my present body. I am amazed by all that would be lost to memory, had I not made it my practice, over all these years, to keep a detailed journal. Did I really have so many dreams of sheep; of a gray sheep as big as an elephant who led me to a spiritual guide, of blue sheep who alerted me to the fact that I possessed unclaimed riches in a place I thought I had left behind? 

     An unavoidable and perennially fascinating theme is the importance of the house in dreams. Often the dream house seems to provide a structure within which we can meet and grow our relationship with many aspects of the self, I take a sip of Bachelard's Poetics of Space (I can't swallow too much of this at one sitting in English translation) on the houses of imagination:

1) A house is imagined as a vertical being. It rises upward. It differentiates itself in terms of its verticality. 2) A house is imagined as a concentrated being. It appeals to our consciousness of centrality.

In all of this, of course, I am putting out lures for the Muse. One of these winter nights I may again write a love poem for her. I did this in seeking fair winds and caresses for The Boy Who Died and Came Back.

Sing in me, creative spirit
of the boy who died and came back
and the man who flew through the black sun
and returned to walk the roads of this world
as the envoy of a deeper world...

     I come upon my notes from Mircea Eliade on theophany, the moment of revelation when a divine agency shines its light through the ordinary world and you cannot fail to notice because everything is different. I remember how when I last landed at Bucharest, Eliade's city, a woman previously unknown to me, a literary translator, greeted me at the baggage carousel by crying out. "You are a writer!" I allowed that I was, and we had a heady conversation while waiting for our bags. When we parted company, she gave me this blessing: "May the Muses kiss you." 

     I hope this will happen again soon. I like my body when my creative writer is at home and the Muse is with him. Muscles better and nerves more. She is a glorious, ardent and insatiable lover. She keeps this body up for whole nights before she lets it drop for a couple of hours of regenerative sleep. I don't complain, any more than you would complain after a perfect night of love, as you watch the stars go to bed over Copacabana, or the dreaming spires of an Old World City, or the Mountains of the Moon. 

    I have seen writers complain that their work involves sweating blood. Maybe, but when the creator is home, in the arms of the Muse, what you sweat isn't ordinary blood. It is ichor.

Graphic: Muse reading from a scroll. Boeotia, 5th century bce. In the Louvre.

Watch what stories you are carrying

I see that I must be more careful about the books I select as my travel companions. This week it felt like a mischief-making tree spirit leaped out of a book onto the train track in front of me.
    On Monday I set off to New York City on Amtrak. This was the first time in ages I had gone to the city by train. It can be a beautiful ride. The line runs along the Hudson River most of the way, and it was a fine day to view the fall foliage and the play of light on the water.
    My attention flitted back and forth between the shifting landscapes through the window and my first literary selection, an excellent collection of cross-cultural studies on the practice of dreaming. among indigenous peoples titled Dream Travelers and edited by Trent University anthropology professor Roger Ivar Lohmann. If you consider a scholarly text safe reading, read on.
    I was soon immersed in Lohmann's account of his own fieldwork among the Asabano of Papua New Guinea. They consider dreams to be real experiences; you make visits and you receive visitations. Dreaming is a field of interaction with beings of various kinds, including the dead,  the fairy-like wobuno, wild nature spirits and witches. "Supernatural encounters are frequent; nevertheless, they are odd and exciting. They are long remembered, the source of many tales around the hearth." *
    In dreams, spirits might provide guidance that would lead to a successful hunt, especially when the hunter made certain offerings. Dreams could also reveal when a malevolent spirit was the source of illness or misfortune. It seems that in this part of the island, tree spirits are especially engaged with humans. Before recent Christianization, an elder told Lohmann, "When a man was sick, people would dream that a tree spirit or other thing had hurt him."
     I was startled by the idea that a tree spirit might attack a human. I read on, in the New Guinea elder's account, "I myself have dreamed when someone was sick that the tree spirits made him or her sick."**

     At this precise moment, less than fifteen minutes into my journey, the Amtrak train came to a shuddering stop. After a long pause, it was announced over the crackling intercom that "a big tree fell across the track." After another pause, a conductor rushed up and down the aisle yelling that the tree was on fire. "There's smoke!" We couldn't see what was going on, but we were next told that the "big tree" had brought down some power lines.
    After a long wait, we were told that the train was going back to Albany-Rensselaer, where we had started. We had to shunt in reverse the whole way, agonizingly slowly. Back at our point of departure, we were left to meditate upon life for a long time before we received word that railroad crews had succeeded in clearing one of the two tracks leading to New York City, but we would now have to wait for an incoming train to come through before we could leave.
    I got to Penn Station nearly four hours late. A ride scheduled to take 2 hours 25 minutes took over six hours. When our train resumed the journey interrupted by the falling tree, I put the anthropology book that did not seem able to contain tree spirits back in my overnight bag.
   I contemplated the demonic cat on the cover of the second book I had brought with me. It is one of my favorite novels, Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, in which the Devil comes to Moscow with an amazing entourage. I reread it for pleasure every few years.
    But not today. I recalled that in the opening scene the Devil, traveling as a foreign professor, makes the accurate prediction that a certain person will be beheaded before the end of the day - by a tram. Not a train, but near enough.
    Over a late dinner in Manhattan, I mused with a Russian friend about a recurring pattern in my travels: the stories I am carrying proceed to play out in my experience of the physical world.
    I once  took off from Bucharest with a Romanian fantasy anthology that included Mircea Eliade's story "With the Gypsy Girls". I was drawn deep into Eliade's eerie tale, in which a man is lured into a bizarre alternate reality from which he cannot return. I found by the end of that first flight that I had been drawn into a very strange parallel reality of my own. I wandered lost all night, stranded at Warsaw's Chopin airport among Russians and Ukrainians who lacked Schengen visas and lay sprawled on every surface like the dead on a field of battle. I managed to extricate myself only two days later. I wrote about that here.
     On another plane, I was reading a memoir by one of Churchill's bodyguards when a stranger dressed as Indiana Jones took the seat beside me. When I asked him about his costume, he declared that it was "the real thing." He proceeded to tell me that his clothes were made by "Churchill's former bodyguard" - Peter Botwright, who designed the costumes for the Indiana Jones movies. That was just one element in an amazing episode that seemed custom-made for me by some designing minds just behind the curtain of the world. I tell the whole story in the introduction to The Three "Only" Things.   
   At a newsstand at Prague’s Vaclav Havel airport, I once found a new bilingual edition of the folktales of Czech writer Karel Jaromir Erben. This became my reading on the first leg of a very long trip home from Europe that ended in a weird limbo of late-night train stations that were not part of my itinerary. My journey took on the coloration of Erben's dark, compelling verse fantasies in which (for example) a woman leaves her husband's bed every night to lie with the dead. You can find that story here.   
    There was the time I was reading A Story Waiting to Pierce You (Peter Kingsley's book on Tibetan-Mongolian shamanism) and got, for my neighbor on another plane....a dominatrix wearing a top hat and Death's heads on the backs of her gloves. The full story is in Sidewalk Oracles
    Back to my latest story. Late Monday night, after walking uptown from Penn Station and checking into my hotel, I was sitting with my Russian friend in El Mitote, a lively Mexican restaurant on the upper West Side. I sipped a margarita and quoted Borges: "The mind is dreaming. The world is its dream."
    "Good thing you did not spend too much time today with The Master and Margarita today," my friend observed. "Strange things are known to happen when people get involved with that book."

    In the Mexican restaurant, the Dia de los Muertos had come early. Skeletons in flouncy skirts and tight jackets were dancing on the wall.
    In the light of the morning, I found Dante standing in a little triangle of green between my hotel and Lincoln Center. Of course. Story within story, all unfolding within the great Commedia. At the television network where I recorded a show, I was greeted by a young woman named Angel. Things seemed to be looking up.
    Memo to self: when you travel, check what themes and plots you are carrying with you.

*Roger Ivar Lohmann, "Supernatural Encounters of the Asabano in Two Traditions and Three States of Consciousness" in Lohmann (ed) Dream Travelers: Sleep Experiences and Culture in the Western Pacific (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) 191.
** ibid, 193.