Swan Inlet

 

For as long as I can remember, I have dreamed of swans. eyes closed and eyes open. Sometimes they lend me their forms. In a European city, in the twilight state before dawn, a swan rose from my third eye and we flew together over the river and the rooftops. 

This report I entered in my journal two years ago just flew out, seeking more attention. I will share it unedited: 

September 9, 2020

Dream

Swan Inlet

I stand in the woods near water's edge. The light over the bay is rosy gold, as are the waves. They move slowly. The water looks heavy and oleaginous. My guide explains that only swans are at home here. Other water birds avoid this inlet and don't swim in it. We watch a swan gliding into the swell, rocking with it, dipping its head and body after fish. 

Everything is suffused with that golden and rosy light. There is healing and magic here and the secret is with the swans.

Waking, I put myself back in the scene. I pick my way through roots and vines to stand at the edge of the bay. I take from it and the water in my cupped palm looks like olive oil in a spoon. It is lightly scented, a pleasing aroma. On my tongue it is warm and salted just right, like virgin dipping oil in an Italian restaurant. A swan is watching me closely. Will it share the secret? Can I rise on its wings as I did before?

I hope that the guide who was instructing me before will answer. But the only voice I hear now is my own. Swans fly over the oily waters in arrowhead formation toward the pink sun on the horizon.

                                                    ~

I think of Plato and the swans. There is a Greek tradition that Socrates dreamed the night before he met Plato that a young swan settled n his lap, developed at once into a full-grown bird and took off into the sky with a song that enchanted all hearers. [1]  In the Phaedo, Socrates says that swans sing most beautifully when they sense they are going to die. “They rejoice because they are about to approach the god whose servants they are.” This, we are told, should be a model for humans. 

Socrates says of himself that “like the swans” he is in the service of Apollo, “the holy property of a god.” Here, among swans, he gives the best definition of real philosophy, that it is “nothing other than practice for dying and being dead.” [2]

Before his death, Plato is said to have dreamed he shapeshifted into a swan.

I think of the swan in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, or "Great Forest Book", one of the oldest Upanishads, at least 2300 years old.. In a beautiful passage, the dreamer travels between worlds as "the lonely swan", flying in and out of the nest of the body. We are told that the dreamer is godlike in their ability to create in the dreamspace.

Here the dream state is described as a state of "emitting" [srj], a word that can also mean the ejaculation of semen. The dreamer "emits" [srjate] or projects "joys, happinesses and delights...ponds, lotus pools and flowing streams, for he is the Maker." We learn that as we grow the practice of dreaming, we can create realities. The word srj is also used to describe the way a turtle projects its head and paws from under its shell.

I think of the swan shamans of the Dane-zaa of the Pacific Northwest, who used to be called the Beaver Indians. Their word for a shaman is Naachin, which means Dreamer. As in the Upanishads, the Dane-zaa say that a powerful dreamer travels like a swan from and back to the nest of the body. ”The Dreamers are like swans in their ability to fly from one season to another. Like the swans that fly south in the winter, Dreamers fly to a land beyond the sky and bring back songs for the people on Earth.” [3]

I think of a shapeshifting Irish god who must become a swan to meet and mate with his dream lover. He is Aengus, and she is Caer Ibormeith, which means Yew Berry and hints at intimacy with death and the underworld. Yew Berry is under an enchantment, sometimes represented as a curse, sometimes - in the deeper tellings - as a gift. She does not stay in one form. She is a beautiful woman for one year. Then for the next year she is a white swan. Then the cycle repeats.  

The day of shapechanging is Samhain. Halloween. If Aengus would win the lady, he must find her on the liminal day, on a lake whose name is The Dragon's Mouth. At Samhain, Aengus goes to the Dragon's Mouth. He finds "three times fifty" white swans with silver chains around their necks, and one swan with a gold chain. He recognizes his love in the shape of the beautiful white bird, and calls to Yew Berry to fly to him. No, she tells him. You must change into my form.

Aengus changes, becoming the long-necked bird. They mate, in beating splendor, above the deeps of the Dragon's Mouth. They fly together back to the palace of Brugh na Boinne - Newgrange - and the love music they make in flight is so lovely and lulling that all the land is at peace and people drift into pleasant dreams and stay there for three days.  [4]

References

1. Patricia Cox Miller, Dreams in Late Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1994) 3.

2. Phaedo 64a.

3.  Robin Ridington, “They Dream about Everything: The Last Dreamers of the Dane-zaa” in Ryan Hurd and Kelly Bulkeley (eds) Lucid Dreaming: New Perspectives on Consciousness in Sleep (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2014) vol. 2, 194.

4. Jeffrey Gantz, trans. and ed., "The Dream of Óengus" in Early Irish Myths and Sagas (New York: Dorset Press, 1985) 107-112. I have used Yeats' preferred spelling for the name of the Irish god of love and dreams. For my full account of this story, see Robert Moss, The Dreamer's Book of the Dead (Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books, 2005) 18-21. 

Photo by Romy Needham

Journal drawing by Robert Moss

Shamans as dreamers, dreamers as shamans

The shamans who interest me are world-class dreamers who can travel between different worlds in the multiverse at will.
    They know the roads of the afterlife because they have died and come back. They walk with Death at their left shoulder, as an ally, not a dread.
    They know where to find lost souls and how to guide them to where they belong, in one world or another.
    They travel in the company of animal spirits, and can borrow their senses and use their forms.
    They are time travelers who can scout out the future, repair the past and heal ancestral karma.
    They are poets of consciousness who entertain the spirits by bringing them fresh words. They heal body and mind and re-enchant the world by telling better stories about them.
     

Let's go back to the beginning. In all the descriptions of the shaman in the literature – as wounded healer, as guide of souls, as walker between worlds, as negotiator with the spirits – there is an essential element that is rarely featured strongly enough, and is sometimes missed altogether.
     First and last, the shaman is a dreamer. Shamans typically receive their calling in dreams, and are initiated and trained in the Dreamtime. The heart of their practice is the intentional dream journey. They may incubate dreams to diagnose for a patient and to select the appropriate treatment. They travel – wide awake and lucid – in their dream bodies to find lost souls, to intercede with the spirits, to fight sorcerers and to guide spirits of the departed along the right roads.

     In indigenous North America, the dominant word for "shaman" (and also for "healer" or spiritual elder") means Dreamer, as in one who dreams strong, one who can dream for others, one who can travel at will into other realities. In Mohawk (a language I had to learn because of my dreams) the word is "rateshents". Among the Dane-zaa of northern B.C. and Alberta, the Naachin, or Dreamers, are the shamans who travel between worlds and open roads for others.

    Anyone who dreams, as the Kawahiv, an Amazonian dreaming people say, is "a little bit shaman". We stand on the brink of claiming this power when we remember our dreams and start to develop the practice of working with dreams as daily practice.
    Dreaming, a contemporary American woman finds herself in a different body, traveling with her clan beside a river in a primal landscape untouched by the ax. She knows the lives and relations of these native people intimately and feels the coming of a hard winter.    She sees an eagle flying near the river, and someone tells her, “You can go fly with it.” She is afraid to go too far from the river, so she waits until the eagle hovers overhead. Then, as she told me later, 

I fly an eternal moment with this magnificent bird: beautiful brown, glistening feathers with golden speckles. Eagle is above me, beside me, then lands in the river. I land downstream and float on the warm white foam. The river is blanketed in white foam.

    After I dry off, I fly over the river again. I see turtles where Eagle had flown and landed. The turtles are a darker green. They are solid on the foam, not moving, just peacefully sunning themselves.

The dreamer asked me how she should approach the meaning of this dream. For me, an experience of this kind requires not analysis but honoring. Her dream was a journey into the life circumstances of an indigenous people, an entry into a “past” life that might be a previous experience of her own multidimensional self, or that of an ancestor of the land where she lives, or of her wider spiritual family. Within that life experience, she learned what indigenous dream shamans know: you can become an eagle.

The story of the woman who flew with the eagle is adapted from Dreaming the Soul Back Home by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Drawing by Robert Moss