Up All Night with the Daimon

 

My creative daimon is the most demanding of the spirits I seek to entertain. I use the word “daimon” as Yeats did, to describe a spirit that is forever driving me to do the most difficult things “among those not yet impossible.” Real angels (not the greeting cards kind) are forever saying, Get Up, Wake Up, Get On With It. My creative daimon operates the same way. He has never heard of a body clock. He has no interest in what time it is, or how much sleep I get, and knows that what I most need to do with this body is to create with passion, entertain the spirits, ignite creative and healing fire in others... and marry the worlds. 
    I felt the wind of his wings in the middle of the night in Paris in May, 2013. I was staying in a studio on the Street of the Moon Man and the Sun Woman, as I renamed this section of the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis because of the statues a couple of blocks away. After a long day leading an Active Dreaming workshop, followed by dinner at a pleasant brasserie opposite the Gare de l'Est, I rose at 1:00 a.m. and sat at a table to work on the  book that was published as The Boy Who Died and Came Back. 
      In France, it seemed natural to write about my "far memories" of other lives lived here, and to narrate how I have used the tools of dream archaeology - marrying shamanic dreaming to scholarly research - to investigate one life in particular: that of Charles d'Orléans, the medieval poet-prince in whose name Joan of Arc went to war. Three hours later, I was satisfied with a fresh 3,000 word draft and had written a couple of shorter pieces, so I thought I might put my body back to bed in order to be rested for the morning workshop session.
     Flat on my back around 4:00 a.m., I found my body was nowhere near flirting with sleep. I considered my situation from the perspective of a greater entity I felt was with me in the space. I sensed the wind of his wings. I rose from my body to join him and look down at the Robert body sprawled under the sheet. From this perspective, I had no concern, no worries, about how much sleep the body in the bed might get, or what might be done with it, as long as it served my creative purpose. I agreed with the daimon: let’s get that body up. Let’s get on with the new book. So I did, and turned out another 2,000 words. When the time came to shower and dress and get myself to the workshop, I was charging on all cylinders. Writing is a workout, and the creative act is energizing and healing. And the extraordinary becomes easy when we entertain our creative spirits and borrow their wings.
     I have learned this:
- When we are passionately engaged in a creative venture - love, art or something else that is really worthwhile - we draw support from other minds and other beings, seen and unseen.- - -
-  We draw greater support the greater the challenges involved in our venture. Great spirits love great challenges.
- Whether we are aware of it or not, all our life choices are witnessed by that creative spirit that that Yeats called the daimon. The daimon lends or withholds its immense energy from our lives according to whether we choose the big agenda or the little one. The daimon is bored by our everyday vacillations and compromises and is repelled by us when we choose against the grand passion and our life Work, the “talent that is the call”.
- The daimon loves us best when we choose to attempt what is all but impossible, and may be perceived as quite impossible by the daily trivial mind.

Text adapted from The Boy Who Died and Came Back: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Photo: On the Street of the Moon Man and the Sun Woman

 

 

 

Dreaming Expands Our Humanity: Report from Paris, 1944

I'm in Paris early in August 1944. People are hungry and torn between hope and despair. Allied armored columns are speeding towards the capital, according to the BBC and the underground newspapers passed hand to hand. The word from Free French General Leclerc is Tenez bon. Nous arrivons. "Hold on. We're coming."

But not all the French are looking forward to the Liberation. I listen to frantic conversations of once-comfortable bourgeois merchants and functionaries who grew fatter by serving the Germans, and ordinary Parisians who obeyed Marshal Pétain's appeal to "collaborate" with the Militärverwaltung in Frankreich, the German Military Administration in France.

I look in on women who were kept as mistresses by German officers. Some have been living in luxury, in swank hotels, with running champagne and silk stockings. I watch them huddled together, talking about survival plans. They are terrified of what will be done to them when their protectors are gone. I watch some of them pleading with Hans or Otto, Don't leave us. Take us with you. 

A Wehrmacht colonel feels sympathy, but there's nothing he can do except to give his mistress his gold cigarette case. He has no idea what will happen to him, when Paris falls, as he knows it must. His comrades will simply dump the women they used and leave them to the mercies of their countrymen. Some will be stripped of their finery and their hair, beaten and shamed and used for rough sex.

~

I woke from this dream feeling oppressed, in a hotel off the Boulevard Saint-Germain during a visit to Paris in December, 2013. To clear my feelings, I trekked out to Montparnasse to visit the Memorial Maréchal Leclerc and the Museé Jean Moulin. I sat in a little theater with a wrap-around screen watching multiple images of Paris in the last days of the Occupation.

I wondered why I had dreamed into the situation of the people I had viewed the previous night, people who had made unpleasant choices and were facing unpleasant consequences, people who would not be among those jostling to cheer the Americans and the Free French as they entered Paris. Maybe one of those women was kept in a room in my hotel, under the Occupation.

It occurred to me, yet again, that one of the functions of dreaming is to expand our humanity. In a hotel bed in Paris, I traveled back across time into life situations of people who were compelled by history to make terrible choices. I was reminded that the typical Parisian during World War II was not a Resistance fighter but someone who was simply trying to survive, to put food on the table, to get through.

I was in Paris in 1970, a year after Marcel Ophüls' tremendous four-hour documentary film  Le chagrin et la pitié ("The Sorrow and the Pity") was released. The film showed how collaboration was normal for most of the French under Vichy, and all the justifications for it beyond acceptance of military defeat. A government committee ruled that the film “destroyed the myths that the people of France still need”. 

More recently, French historian Patrick Buisson has claimed in a book with the provocative title, 1940-1945 Anneés  Erotiques (“1940-45 Erotic Years”) that a remarkable number of French women traded sexual favors with the Germans. He floats the idea - infuriating to many - that for some French women this amounted to a kind of sexual liberation. Photos from Nazi archives, like the one above, were displayed in a big exhibition in Paris showing what look like high times shared by Nazi officers and French girls, generating more rage and disgust.

So perhaps I was dreaming not only into French lives in 1944, but into the continuing challenge, for the heirs of Occupation - in which everyone's family had a story - to come to terms with history. Mulling this, I recognize that those of us who are born and live in countries that have not suffered invasion and occupation in recent generations are truly privileged. It is a challenge to our empathy and imagination to grasp fully the history of other peoples.

I recalled a Latin tag from my school days. Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. It is from Terence (aka Publius Terentius Afer, writing around 170 BCE) and it means, "I am a human being, I consider nothing that is human alien to me."

Dreaming, nothing that is human is truly alien to us.

Nights with the daimon

My creative daimon is the most demanding of the spirits I seek to entertain. I use the word “daimon” as Yeats did, to describe a spirit that is forever driving me to do the most difficult things “among those not yet impossible.” Real angels (not the greeting cards kind) are forever saying, Get Up, Wake Up, Get On With It.
    My creative daimon operates the same way. He has never heard of a body clock. He has no interest in what time it is, or how much sleep I get, and knows that what I most need to do with this body is to create with passion, entertain the spirits, ignite creative and healing fire in others... and marry the worlds. 
    I felt the wind of his wings in the middle of the night in Paris in May, 2013. I was staying in a studio on the Street of the Moon Man and the Sun Woman, as I renamed this section of the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis because of the statues a couple of blocks away. After a long day leading an Active Dreaming workshop, followed by dinner at a pleasant brasserie opposite the Gare de l'Est, I rose at 1:00 a.m. and sat at a table to write some of the book that was published as The Boy Who Died and Came Back.
    In France, it seemed natural to write about my "far memories" of other lives lived here, and to narrate how I have used the tools of dream archaeology - marrying shamanic dreaming to scholarly research - to investigate one life in particular: that of Charles d'Orléans, the medieval poet-prince in whose name Joan of Arc went to war. Three hours later, I was satisfied with a fresh 3,000 word draft and had written a couple of shorter pieces, so I thought I might put my body back to bed in order to be rested for the morning workshop session.

   Flat on my back around 4:00 a.m., I found my body was nowhere near flirting with sleep. I considered my situation from the perspective of a greater entity I felt was with me in the space. I sensed the wind of his wings. I rose from my body to join him and look down at the Robert body sprawled under the sheet.
   From this perspective, I had no concern, no worries, about how much sleep the body in the bed might get, or what might be done with it, as long as it served my creative purpose. I agreed with the daimon: let’s get that body up. Let’s get on with the new book. So I did, and turned out another 2,000 words. When the time came to shower and dress and get myself to the workshop, I was charging on all cylinders. Writing is a workout, and the creative act is energizing and healing. And the extraordinary becomes easy when we entertain our creative spirits and borrow their wings.
     I have learned this:

* When we are passionately engaged in a creative venture - love, art or something else that is really worthwhile - we draw support from other minds and other beings, seen and unseen.

* We draw greater support the greater the challenges involved in our venture. Great spirits love great challenges. 

* Whether we are aware of it or not, all our life choices are witnessed by that creative spirit that that Yeats called the daimon. The daimon lends or withholds its immense energy from our lives according to whether we choose the big agenda or the little one. The daimon is bored by our everyday vacillations and compromises and withdraws its presence when we choose against the grand passion and our life Work, the “talent that is the call”.

* The daimon loves us best when we choose to attempt what is all but impossible, and may be perceived as quite impossible by the daily trivial mind.

- adapted from The Boy Who Died and Came Back: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Photo: On the Street of Moon Man and Sun Woman (Rue du Faubourg St. Denis) by RM.

With the daimon in Paris

Paris

Real angels (not the greeting cards kind) are forever saying, Get Up, Wake Up, Get On With It. My creative daimon operates the same way. He has never heard of a body clock. He has no interest in what time it is, or how much sleep I get, and knows that what I most need to do with this body is to create with passion, entertain the spirits, ignite creative and healing fire in others... and marry the worlds.
    I felt the wind of his wings in the middle of the night in Paris. I was staying in a studio on the Street of the Moon Man and the Sun Woman, as I have renamed this section of the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis because of the statues a couple of blocks away. After a long day leading my Active Dreaming workshop, followed by dinner at a pleasant brasserie opposite the Gare de l'Est, I rose at 1:00 a.m. and sat at a table to write some of my new book. In France, it seemed natural to write about my "far memories" of other lives lived here, and to narrate how I have used the tools of dream archaeology - marrying shamanic dreaming to scholarly research - to investigate one life in particular: that of Charles d'Orleans, the medieval poet-prince in whose name Joan of Arc went to war. Three hours later, I was satisfied with a fresh 3,000 word draft and had written a couple of shorter pieces, so I thought I might put my body back to bed in order to be rested for the morning workshop session.
   Flat on my back around 4:00 a.m., I found my body was nowhere near flirting with sleep. I considered my situation from the perspective of a greater entity I felt was with me in the space. I sensed the wind of his wings. I rose from my body to join him and look down at the Robert body sprawled under the sheet. From this perspective, I had no concern, no worries, about how much sleep the body in the bed might get, or what might be done with it, as long as it served my creative purpose. I agreed with the daimon: let’s get that body up. Let’s get on with the new book. So I did, and turned out another 2,000 words. When the time came to shower and dress and get myself to the workshop, I was charging on all cylinders. Writing is a workout, and the creative act is energizing and healing. And the extraordinary becomes easy when we entertain our creative spirits and borrow their wings.

The Man with the Moon & the Woman with the Sun

Paris, 10th arrondissement

There they are, on a little grassy island where the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis meets the Boulevard du Magenta, a few blocks north of the place where I am staying and leading an adventure in Active Dreaming in Paris this weekend. I admire them from all angles, recalling Yeats' lines

Though I am old with wandering
through hollow land and hilly land
I will find out where she has gone
and kiss her lips and take her hands

and walk among long dappled grass
and pluck till time and times are done
the silver apples of the moon
the golden apples of the sun

And I am thinking that the Turkish sculptor Cem Sagbil must have a fine instinct for how things operate in regions of the mythic universe that I have come to know well, and that work for me. I am one of the most lunar men you are likely meet (not to be confused, I hope, with "lunatic"). I have traveled much in the astral realm of Luna, and conversed with some of its more interesting residents. I have led shamanic group journeys to this realm. In my life I have been blessed to be balanced and warmed by the energy of the Solar Feminine. I resonate with traditions in which the Sun is a Goddess, as in Japan (Amaterasu), and the Baltic (Saule) and among many Australian Aboriginal peoples, and where the Moon is a male deity or at least a leading man to the Moon Goddess.
    I wander on into marché Saint-Quentin and admire glorious displays of cheeses and charcuterie, impossibly fresh and glistening fish, live eels and flowers that promise "20 Ans de Passion", Twenty Years of Passion. I buy a bag of cherries and munch them for breakfast, before coffee and croissant. I have to go back to the Moon Man and the Sun Woman and have my photo taken standing between them, balanced or otherwise, juggling dreams and spheres.
     This feels like the gentle beginning, in the Parisian spring sunlight, of another of the mythic irruptions that have stirred and confirmed or redirected my life. I like the word "irruption", which means a "bursting through". A mythic irruption, in my personal lexicon, is when archetypal powers of a deeper world break through the curtains of our ordinary perception and consensual hallucinations and carry us into a deeper game. This can be profoundly subversive of regular plans and expectations, of course. It can come as a blessing, as when we feel that an unseen hand has been placed over us, to protect, or that a sacred guide and ally is coming through - under many masks, or naked to our view (if we are able to look) - to help us find our way, as Athena came to Odysseus and spoke through a beam of the ship called Argo.
     So, on a lovely spring day in Paris, I give thanks for the day, and for the sense of the imminence of powers of the Otherworld within this one.  And I reflect that part of the practice of living consciously at the center of the multiverse is to be myth-prone, or even mythopoeic: to be willing to engage with those deeper powers, and in doing to make anew the myths worth living and reliving, telling and retelling, in the neverending, never static story of the interplay between humans and the more-than-human.

At the Round Point

I have found the rond-point of the old Roman city of Nîmes. Rond-point is the French term for a traffic circle or roundabout, but this is more than a part of the road system. It is the point where everything comes together. Here there is no confusion. From here, the patterns of life and of history can be read clearly.
    The discovery is repeated in other cities. The scene shifts to London, and again I am at a Round Point, a central circle. Here the archives are opened. Priceless documents from the earliest times and from imperial history float upwards to become part of an electronic cloud of information available to the world.
    In a third location, no longer in Europe, young people gather at a third Round Point, bringing offerings of lilacs. The petals rise on a gentle breeze and thousands of butterflies dance above their heads.

Feelings: Strong and centered.

Reality: I visited Roman sites in Nîmes during recent travels in southern France, where I am leading new adventures in May. I am often in London and will be teaching there next spring. I'm not sure of the third locale; it may be Asian.
    You see rond-points of varying sizes everywhere in France. 
     I am fascinated by how much may be going on in this dream. For example, if you are driving in a traffic circle or roundabout in a country where people drive on the right (as in France or the US) you go counter-clockwise. In a country where people drive on the left (like the UK or Australia) you go clockwise.
     In a roundabout, you can reverse direction (in effect, do a U-turn) without departing from the flow of traffic.
     Then there's the practice of circumbulation in religious and spiritual traditions, and Jung's insistence that personal transformation ("individuation") is accomplished by the "circumabulation of the self."
     Viewed from above, a rond-point may resemble a mandala.

Action: Try to get to the central roundabout in every aspect of my work and my researches.

Note: This is an "old" dream that popped up from my journal for March, 2011. It gives me a fine feeling of becoming centered and ready for the roads of this world. So I am posting it to celebrate and share that energy.

New adventures in France: From Friday-Sunday, May 17-19, I am leading "Active Dreaming: The Essential Workshop" in a wonderful space on the Rue du Fauborg Saint Denis in Paris. Details here. From Monday-Wednesday, May 20-22, I am leading a three-day residential version of "Dancing with the Bear: Reclaiming the Arts of Dreamin Healing" at a dream location, the Hameau de l'Etoile near Montpellier. Details here. 

Photos: (top) At a carousel with a blue genie at a rond-point in Nîmes (bottom) a Provencal blue door at the Hameau de l'Etoile.