At the Gate of Story

 The gatekeepers cannot see where the tide of pilgrims begins. Its source lies far to the north, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, the olive groves and forests of cork, even beyond the stern keep of the man of iron dreams on a high wind-raked plateau. The travelers are so many that their feet have emptied the strait, making a land bridge between the continents. Such was the report of one who reached the Gate of Story.

---Yawning on their cushioned seats by a wall bleached to the color of smilodon bones, the gatekeepers do not rule on the veracity of this account. Like the knight of La Mancha, they know that facts can be the enemy of truth. Judging the truth of a story by whether it stirs or disturbs the hearer, they turn the man who parted the seas away. Too many others have tried to pawn this story before; it has been drained of surprise.
---"Altagracia!" croaks a man whose flesh has fallen away so his linen suit hangs off him like a flag of defeat. Some of the crowd cross themselves or finger amulets against the evil eye. An imam directs a boy to offer the parched traveler a waterskin. "Altagracia!" the man cries again, water frothing from his cracked lips.
---No one has spoken that name at this gate before. The gatekeepers motion for the man who has used it to be advanced to the front of the line. Camel drivers open a way for him with their switches, without regard for the age or gender of those they are beating back.
---"You have three minutes," says the chief keeper of the Gate of Story. He flourishes a pocket watch and spins it, on its chain, from his long pointing finger.
---"She is Altagracia," the story man begins.


She is very pale, with lustrous black hair and black eyes. Her traveling clothes are the color of sand in shadow. She wears a veil under her hat. She has pushed it back, but it can be drawn over her face to keep off blowing sand and flies. She has a good deal of luggage, including a hatbox, handled with ease by her giant black servant, Fidel, who has been assigned by her father, The Professor, to keep her safe. Fidel can speak only in little mewling sounds, which the cats of the city understand. His tongue was cut out, perhaps at his own volition, to guarantee that he will live up to his name, which means "faithful", when it comes to keeping secrets, since he is also illiterate.
---Each time the story of Altagracia is told, it expands, and the world with it. Last time I spoke of her she did not have dogs, but now she has a pair of them, resembling greyhounds, that she calls her sight hounds. I said that Fidel is illiterate and mute, but as I speak his shadow is slipping ahead of him through the city gate in the form of a black cat. It is running into the Sultan's library, where it stands on its hind legs to remove a precious copy of the seventh volume of Pliny Maior's Natural History from a cabinet that others always find locked. He wll go to the harem and delight his hearers all night long with the exact descriptions of dogheaded men, Triballes who kill with a look, and lions with the tails of scorpions. He will be rewarded with dishes of sherbert and leg-humping until the chief eunuch will order his tongue, or another particle, to be excised. The feline Fidel is not so easily bested. By naming - both in lapidary Latin and in the Berberous Arabic of the court- all the creatures of Pliny's hearsay, he has brought them to life. The eunuch's scimitar is no match for a manticore.
-
It became harder and harder to hear the teller of this tale, because as each word was uttered, the scene and the action around the gate became more profuse. The crowd parted and reformed as animals out of legend galloped and bulled their way through. The shadow of immense wings cooled the hot sand. A ship in full sail appeared on a canal that surely was not there before. A man with his head under a black cloth took pictures on glass of a couple of newlyweds boarding a train whose engine puffed perfect blue smoke rings. A cat that was also smoking, with the aid of an amber cigarette holder, shuffled a Marseilles deck and purred, "Pick a card, any card at all."
---The head gatekeeper, invoking the Most High, ordered the man who knew Altagracia to pass through the Gate of Story, and threatened to do terrible things to his mother unless he passed through without delay.
---"The Gate is closed for today," he announced to the host of story pilgrims. They groaned and wept and raged. Many of them, desperate to be heard, tried to shout their stories over each other, producing a weird cacophony that made the keepers press their hands over their ears. Blue-eyed janissaries appeared on the battlements of the gatehouse and fired warning shots into the air.
---In the sudden silence, a voice said in a placeless accent, "You will hear me."
---The voice belonged to a short, spare man with a clipped goatee, who held an umbrella over his head.
---"We will hear no more Namers today," the head keeper spoke in a voice of thunder.
---"I am neither a Namer nor an un-Namer. I am the sculptor of the Immortal Sentence."
---These words, also, had never been heard at the Gate of Story. The keepers were bound by a rule laid down in the remotest of pasts to give the speaker a hearing.


When I first told this story, it took longer than one thousand and one nights to reach the end. Every day since then, I have shortened the story by a sentence. Now that it fills less than a page, I reduce it by one word in each telling. In this instance reducing is the opposite of reduction. With each word I remove, I approach closer to the quintessence of the tale, which is also the key to the making and unmaking of worlds. The consummation of my art will be to deliver the Immortal Sentence, which will replace the knowledge of the world and become the theme of all branches of a new literature and science. Some have thought that the Immortal Sentence will consist only of four letters. This cannot be known until all the words that veil it have been stripped away.


"Cease speaking!" the head gatekeeper commanded. His composure had been shaken. There was whiteness around his mouth. "You may enter."
---The man with the umbrella strode with long decisive steps - unusually fast for a person of small stature, but then he worked his whole legs, from the hips - through the Gate of Story. The immensely high cedar doors began to swing shut. The gatekeepers had gathered their cushions and magic carpets. But the head keeper turned back when a new voice addressed him by his secret name, the name he shared only with Khidr, the guide of those who have no earthly guide.
---It was a woman’s voice. When he faced her, he was pleased to see that she was veiled, though her features could be seen through the gauzy stuff. Her clothes were of English cut, he thought, made by the finest seamstress. Yet something about her made him think of the forbidden vineyards of Shiraz.
---"Come up on the rooftop," she invited him. "We will share a cup of wine."
---"Are you a djinn?" he demanded, now fearful.
---"I am the Sustainer. Every day, I must repeat the one story that keeps the world turning. Every syllable must be flawless, because this is the code on which the world depends."
---"Then why have we never seen you at this gate before?"
---"Do you suppose I have only one form?"
---"Whatever form you take, if you are repeating a story that has been told before, we will know it, and you will have failed the test."
---"You understand very little, and after hearing the story you will know even less. The nature of the story that sustains the world is that it is never different and never the same. By repeating it perfectly, each teller creates a new story and renews the world."
---"This defies both God and reason."
---"Then listen."
---Somehow the head keeper found he was seated beside her on the roof of the watchtower, with the sweet taste of the forbidden wine on his lips.
---The veiled woman speaks:
-
The gatekeepers cannot see where the tide of pilgrims begins. Its source lies far to the north, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, the olive groves and forests of cork, even beyond the stern keep of the man of iron dreams on a high wind-raked plateau. The travelers are so many that their feet have emptied the strait, making a land bridge between the continents. Such was the report of one who reached the Gate of Story.

Illustration: "The Gate of Story" by Robert Moss

Adapted from Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories by Robert Moss. Published by Excelsior Editions.

Slipping through the Hourglass

One of my favorite novels is The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, so elegant and profoundly moving. I reread it every few years. Here the Prince of Salina, having suffered a stroke, is in an armchair on the balcony of a grand hotel in Palermo, is dying:

"For a dozen years or so he had been feeling as if the vital fluid, the faculty of existing, life itself in fact and perhaps even the will to go on living, were ebbing out of him slowly but steadily, as grains of sand cluster and then line up one by one, unhurried, unceasing, before the narrow neck of an hour-glass...With the slightest effort of attention he used to notice at all other times' too, the rustling of the grains of sand as they slid lightly away, the instants of time escaping from his mind and leaving him for ever. But this sensation was not, at first, linked to any physical discomfort. On the contrary this imperceptible loss of vitality was itself the proof, the condition so to say, of a sense of living...Those tiny grains of sand were not lost; they were vanishing, but accumulating elsewhere...like the tiny particles of watery vapor exhaled from a narrow pond, mounting then into the sky to great clouds, light and free." (trans. Archibald Colquhoun)

 The scholarly, aristocratic author, eleventh Prince of Lampedusa and twelfth Duke of Palma. wrote from self-knowledge and family history. He died of cancer before this, his first novel, found a publisher; Feltrinelli published it the year after his death and it has been in publication in many languages ever since.

During my last reading, seized visually and kinesthetically by Lampedusa's image, I was inspired to make a drawing of a gentleman slipping through an hourglass. 

Drawing "Through the Hourglass" by Robert Moss

Dream movies

 

Do you sometimes feel that your dreams are movies? I am sure we have personal film studios that produce some of our dreams, to educate or arouse, to shock or entertain. They deliver night movies in every genre. Sometimes we stay in the audience, sometimes we the stars or at least the supporting actors. If we grow our lucidity about all of this, we may be able to step into the role of director and screenwriter.

As one of my dream movies comes to an end. I may ask to look at the credits. I found that one of my dreams was the work of Hanuman Productions. I have identified other studios and actually toured some of them in conscious dream journeys.

I’m chuckling over the hint that was given to me last night that one of my dreams was produced as an entertainment. It was an exciting thriller in which I was seeking evidence that a high official was working for the Russians. By my side, as I watched him, was an interesting sidearm - not a gun, not a camera, but a TV remote. This clued me in to the fact that my recent binging on a streaming thriller series (Homeland) featuring double agents and Russian spies may have prompted my inner producers to order up a similar script from my dream writers.

A man who came to one of my early Active Dreaming workshops told the group, "I'm here because I've been missing the movies." He may have been saying more than we knew at that time.

Drawing: "Hanuman Productions" by Robert Moss

Visits with an Ancient Philosopher-Shaman

 "I was visited last night in my sleep by one whom I presently recognized as the famous Adept and Mystic of the first century of our era, Apollonius of Tyana, called the 'Pagan Christ'.

"He was clad in a grey linen robe with a hood, like that of a monk, and had a smooth, beardless face, and seemed to be between forty and fifty years of age. He made himself known to me by asking if I had heard of his lion. He commenced by speaking of Metempsychosis."

This is the start of a dream report that Anna Kingsford entered in her journal in Paris on May 11, 1880. [1]Her visitor proceeded to give her a tutorial on reincarnation and the conditions under which humans might be reborn as animals. Apollonius explained, "There are two streams or currents, an upward and a downward one, by which souls are continually passing and repassing as on a ladder. The carnivorous animals are souls undergoing penance by being imprisoned for a time in such forms on account of their misdeeds." As a leading Victorian "platform lady" on behalf of  Vegetarianism, Anna was clearly pleased by the harsh description of carnivores.  

There is a tradition that the lion of Apollonius was the reincarnation of an Egyptian pharaoh named Amasis and that the lion wept when his past identity was recognized. Occultist Éliphas Lévi also saw Apollonius as a beardless man robed in a grey garment when he evoked him, although in this case the linen was a shroud. 

Those ancient philosopher-shamans know how to get around. Let me recall the story of Apollonius' visit to the Cave of Trophonius. Plutarch (who knew what he was talking about; his brother was a priest of Trophonius) describes a Mystery initiation at the Cave of Trophonius in ancient Boeotia in which the candidate, after lowering himself through a hole in the ground into total darkness, experienced a stunning shift in consciousness that released his soul from his body and set him sailing among the stars. Freed from the body, his soul expands and flows like a sail, among the “islands” of stars in the ocean of ether — each one presided over by a god except for the moon, which is inhabited by “Epichthonian daimons.”

He stays in the underworld two nights and a day. He receives much information from an invisible spirit about the afterworld and the beings who inhabit it. He is instructed on the relationship between higher and lower self — on how gross appetites pull people down, and how those few who listen carefully to their eudaimon (“good daimon”) may become daimons themselves, playing the role of guardian angels to others. [2]

The kathodos, or underworld descent, to the Cave of Trophonius was a true initiation ritual, requiring a literal experience of death and rebirth. Preparation normally involved sacrifice, purification and discipline. But the Trickster is always at play when authentic shamans appear, and at the Cave of Trophonius a shaman-philosopher flouted the rules.. Philostratus preserves the story of a visit to the sanctuary by Apollonius of Tyana, who told the priests, “I wish to descend into the cave in the interests of philosophy.” The priests refused to let him in, telling the people they would not allow a “wizard” to enter the sanctuary.

Apollonius went despite the priests. Under cover of dark, he and his companions pulled down part of the security wall. He went down the shaft in his regular clothes — his “philosopher’s mantle” instead of the prescribed shroud. He vanished for seven days, then reappeared miles away, at Aulis, with a book in which he had recorded the daimon’s responses to his questions. This book distilled the teaching of the “golden chain” of the Pythagorean shaman-philosophers. [3]

1. Anna Bonus Kingsford, Dreams and Dream-Stories (London: John M. Watkins, 1908) "The Metempsychosis" dream XVI. 

2. Plutarch's accounts of the Cave of Trophonius initiation are in two essays, "On the Demon of Socrates" and "On the Spirits Who Live in the Face of the Moon". Translations appear in Plutarch, Moralia (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Pres, 1994, 1995), vols 7 and 12 (respectively). For full discussion of the Trophonius initiation see my book Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and Life Beyond Death (Novato CA: New World Library, 2020) pp.143-146.
3. Philostratus, The Life of Apollonius of Tyana ( trans. F.C. Conybeare (Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press and William Heinemann, 1969) vol 2, pp.381-383

Illustration: Original drawing by Robert Moss with digital color effects. 

Dream readers and Raven shamans

 

I always scratch my head when I see dream researchers reporting that reading is a rare activity in dreams, or that if you start to read in a dream the text will blur and you won't be able to bring anything away. Perhaps these conclusions are based on the fact that the typical survey group is college kids, who may be less enthusiastic about reading than other sections of the population. Anyway, for as long as I can recall I have read at least as much in dreams as in ordinary reality and this have given me extraordinary leads for my own research, mystery words that prove to be keys to previously unsuspected cultural treasuries, and paragraphs - sometimes pages - of fresh material for my books.

Opening an old journal at random, as I often do., I found an entry from 1996 that put me on the trail of an ancient Hellenic shaman who was reputed to be able to take flight from his own mouth in the form of a raven. Here is my journal entry, edited only for length:

January 28, 1996

Dream Archaeology: Keys from Mantis

I am greatly excited because I have discovered several relief carvings from Mantis, an Egyptian site. Their images were separated in an exhibition or catalog. When brought together, they hold the key to an ancient mystery. Some are fragmentary.
    I go through dictionaries and reference books, working out the connections. I look up meanings for the words Diva (or Deva), Divina and Drostic (“to do with defense of lost causes”). One of the reference books contains verses and a heroic genealogy derived from the Arimaspea.

Waking, I recognize the last reference. The Arimaspea is a lost epic poem attributed to Aristeas of Proconnesus. It describes a people of the north, the Arimaspi, who live in mountains that may be the Carpathians and battled with griffins for access to gold. We know the work through fragments preserved by Herodotus, who says that Aristeas journeyed to fierce northern peoples, “possessed by Apollo”.

 Aristeas was a Greek shaman, living on an island near modern Istanbul, who projected a second body from his mouth in the form of a raven, and was credited with the power of bilocation. I own a book about him by an English classical scholar.

Aristeas was said to have dropped down dead in a fuller’s shop in Proconnesus, on the Sea of Marmara. At the same time, he was seen alive and well at Cyzicus, four hours away by boat, on the mainland. When the news reaches his town, his body – already prepared for burial – is found to have disappeared. 

 In book IV of  the Histories, Herodotus reported of "the birthplace of Aristeas, the poet who sung of these things", 

I will now relate a tale which I heard concerning him both at Proconnesus and at Cyzicus. Aristeas, they said, who belonged to one of the noblest families in the island, had entered one day into a fuller's shop, when he suddenly dropped down dead. Hereupon the fuller shut up his shop, and went to tell Aristeas' kindred what had happened. The report of the death had just spread through the town, when a certain Cyzicenian, lately arrived from Artaca, contradicted the rumor, affirming that he had met Aristeas on his road to Cyzicus, and had spoken with him. This man, therefore, strenuously denied the rumor; the relations, however, proceeded to the fuller's shop with all things necessary for the funeral, intending to carry the body away. But on the shop being opened, no Aristeas was found, either dead or alive. Seven years afterwards he reappeared, they told me, in Proconnesus, and wrote the poem called by the Greeks The Arimaspeia, after which he disappeared a second time. This is the tale current in the two cities above-mentioned. [trans. George Rawlinson]

Two centuries after his death, Aristeas appeared in Metapontum in southern Italy. He commanded that a statue of himself be set up and a new altar dedicated to Apollo, declaring that since his death he had been travelling with Apollo in the form of a sacred raven.

Other details from the dream remain obscure or mysterious. Mantis is a familiar word. In Greek, a mantis is "one who divines, a seer, prophet,"(from mainesthai "be inspired," related to menos "passion, spirit"). But does this correspond to a site in Egypt? Seventeen years after I journaled my report, I have not found confirmation of the meaning of "drostic" (not drastic) that was given in the dream. 

Illustration: "From the Mouth of Aristeas" by Robert Moss

Scarab Makes a World

 

April 13, 2023

Vision in liminal space before sleep

"What Is Reality?"

I like to do horizontal meditation flat on my back in bed in the liminal space between sleep and awake. Last night, following an interesting conversation with a philosopher and meditation teacher, I put the question he had put to me, "What is reality?"

The response was immediate - and highly visual. I saw a scarab beetle emerging from a ball of dung and spreading its wings, flying up into the sky. Light on its shell and wings flashed gold. I heard its Egyptian name, Khepri, which has to do with emergence and creation. I saw that the ball of dung was in fact the primal mound, rising from the waters of Nun. Reality is what happens when we rise from the sh-t and make a world.

Drawing: "Scarab Makes a World" by Robert Moss

The Fifty-Ninth Swan

I seem to be much with Swan People of late, drifting and winging between dream and myth. Yesterday I flew and swam, as swan and man, along a wild shore to high stony cliffs where a great swan's nest had been laid. I am going through my journals and books, gathering reports, turning some into drawings and drafts for a possible new book. I found a few paragraphs I published in a story titled "The Fifty-Ninth Swan" in Mysterious Realities. It evokes the sadness and the longing of the poet Yeats after his repeated rejection by Maud Gonne.

He is walking in the Seven Woods, at Coole Park. He comes to the lake, and sees that the swans have left sky and water and settled in a green meadow. Across the distance, they look like tufts of sheep’s wool. He can get near to them, perhaps, by crossing a field of cows. As he hoists myself over the stile, a red bull appears and challenges him, head down, steaming and potent, warning him away from his harem. Then the bull gets his scent and turns from him, shaking his rump, as if to say, You are no competition.
     He knows already what the count will reveal. There are fifty-nine swans on the grass, as there were fifty-nine on the water yesterday. He could not identify the solitary swan until now. He watched a mated couple drive the lone swan away with sounds like muffled bugles. He sees the solitary swan struggle through the wet grass. Clumsily, working pinions, he tries to lift off the ground. Perhaps his feathers are wet. It seems so hard for him to get airborne. Finally he wings his way above the lake towards the fairy hills, graceless and unloved.
    The poet flies with him, sharing his pain. Swans are not meant to live alone. They mate for life. I know the mate I would have if she would have me. In the stories I have gathered from the peasantry, and from old books, gods and heroes alike may turn into swans, or be forced to take their shapes under a curse. The love god Aengus, no less, must shapeshift into a swan to find and win the lady he desires, when she flies at Samhain in the company of swans, in their form, to be recognized by the golden chain round her neck.
    He wills myself, climbing higher, into the clouds, to find her spirit in a place of brightness. He couples with her in midair. He falls on her as Zeus comes to Leda. He will make this more than fantasy by carrying the lovely spirit he makes his above the clouds down to the body she has given to a red brute of a man, so she make wake from his spell and leave his cattle field and come to the poet in the green meadow.

Text adapted from Mysterious Realities; Adventures of a Dream Traveler in the Imaginal Realm by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library. 

Art: "Swan and Shadow" from the Swan People cycle of drawings by Robert Moss

Put Yourself in a Place where a Greater Power Can Find You.

 

To engage with greater powers, including your creative spirit, or genius, you need to put yourself in a place where you can easily be found. Border territory is good for this, like the borderland between sleep and awake, or the edginess of entering a new field or making a life transition, or the liminal space that opens up when you walk the roads of this world with senses aquiver, aware that everything is alive and speaking to you.. As Australian Aborigines say, the Big stories are hunting the right people to tell them. I offer you a poem I wrote in this spirit:

 

Hunting Power

 

You say you are hunting your power

But your power is hunting you.

I’ll go up to the mountain, you say.

I’ll fast and live on seaweed

I’ll hang myself on a meat-hook

Under the hot sun. I’ll give up sex

And wine and my sense of humor.

What are you thinking of?

For you to go hunting your power

Is as smart as the mouse hunting the cat.

 

Go out in the garden any night

Step one inch outside the tame land

And you are near what you seek.

Open the window of your soul

Any night and your guide may come in.

The issue is whether you’ll run away

When you see what it is. To make sure

You succeed, tether yourself like a goat

At the edge of the tiger wood that breathes

Right beside your bed. He’ll come.

 

- from Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories by Robert Moss. Published by Excelsior Editions.

 

Déjà vu in the Bardo of Dream Travel

A vignette from my pre-pandemic travel journals:

March 12, 2018 

The Woman in the Zulu Hat

I look behind me and there she is again, the mountainous woman in the Zulu hat, coming along the ramp behind me. I step on board the plane and the flight attendant takes my coat, exactly as he did before.

"Sorry to bother you again," says the man who needs me to stand up so he can sit in the window seat. He fires up his computer and starts watching the same old movie he was watching before.

The man who is going to sit behind me fumbles with stuff in the overhead compartment and I brace myself in case he lets something fall on my shoulder as he did before. But he catches it this time, pats my shoulder and says, "Good thing I knew what was going to happen."

"We've met before," the man across the aisle says to the woman next to him. She says, "In your dreams."

These incidents unfolded during my trip home from Atlanta last night. The first plane broke. They found us another plane, unbroken but otherwise identical, where we took the same seats we had before. People were blurry, taking off after midnight, 2 1/2 hours late. It was hard not to feel we were in a Twilight Zone episode in which things go on repeating until you wake up to the fact that you are dreaming, or dead, or both.

The Taste of a Dream: Coffee with Centaurs

 

Wake up and smell the coffee? Dream on! The coffee was so good in that mysterious museum in the desert. I can still taste it. The full report fell out of my journal from a year ago.

March 9, 2021

dream

Coffee at the Museum

I am at a remarkable private museum, an elegant structure of stone and glass, standing in the desert. The name "Abba T.Izawi" stays with me; it may be on a sign by the entrance. Every piece here is extraordinary, reflecting exquisite and unusual taste.

I study a wooden high relief sculpture that rises from the floor to the skylight several stories up. It's hard for me at first to understand what is in front of me. Are those two apes with long bodies hanging their heads down from trees? Then I get it.

I am looking at two centaurs dipping their heads like horses to drink from a river. Their human heads are primal and look from another perspective like horses' muzzles. The human torsos are shaped like the horses' heads and long necks. So these are centaurs, but not like the ones I have seen in classical art. Horse and man are interfused, not separated at the waist.

I am leading a workshop in a spacious room in the museum. There are just three men in a group of 30, but they are cast in leading roles in performance and are helpful in healing work.

Now it is early morning. I don't expect that the coffee in a pot on a beautiful wooden cart will be hot. It's not only hot but amazingly good. I pour some more and find only hot water is left. But that tastes good too.

I am in no hurry to get out of bed and smell the coffee. I can still taste the coffee from my dream. My usual French roast is no match.

Feelings: Top of the world!

Reality: I am teaching at least one workshop every night in my dreams. We usually have far more women than men, as in ordinary reality in the United States (in Europe men are bolder about sharing their inner lives in mixed groups).. I don't know this museum, which seems to be in the Middle East. I like coffee in the morning but don't drink much.

I am often eating or drinking in my dreams and the taste can be wonderfully intense and often lingers on my palate as I wake. The meals are often simple. One of my favorites was a sandwich of thinly sliced Italian roast beef on ciabatta, with mesclun and dijon mustard. The dream drove me to get the ingredients on waking and make the sandwich for lunch. It remains one of my favorites.

In a recent dream, I was at an upscale pub where the bartender let me sample several locally brewed beers. I came back with the hoppy, slightly grapefruit-y taste of an IPA on my palate.

In one of the most romantic dreams of my life, which felt like a visit to a life in another time, I kissed a beautiful woman at the Gare du Nord in Paris under the shadow of the coming war. We had been eating raspberries and I woke with the taste of the juice in my mouth. When I looked in the bathroom mirror, I expected to see it still dribbling down my chin.

The ancients thought that dreams in which senses beyond sight and hearing come richly alive have special importance. They remind us, for one thing, that in dreams we don't just get around as disembodied thought forms. We travel in a subtle body of varying density, with a sensorium capable of experiencing pleasure and pain quite as intensely - sometimes even more so - than the physical body. In Indian philosophy, they speak of the kama body, the body of desire, that travels in dreams and survives physical death,

In other dreams, I have eaten books - typically parchment or papyrus scrolls - and returned with the sense that I have absorbed hidden knowledge. The ancients recognized this kind of dream too. What have you been eating or drinking in your dreams?

Research: Back to my dream of coffee at the museum. I enjoy doing the research assignments that dreams give me. Often these require me to play word detective. "Abba" means "father" in Aramaic and is the name by which Jesus addresses God in the Book of Mark. I could not find any relevant "Izawi" in a quick search, but "Sidawi" is an Arabic name associated with Sidon.

I remember the centaurs in the Lycian sarcophagus from Sidon that I viewed in the archaeological museum in Istanbul some years ago. The centaurs in my dream were more original and almost alive, pulsing through the grain of the wood.

Journal drawing by RM: "Coffee with Centaurs"

Playing Dream Detective and Dreaming Movies Ahead of Time

I greatly enjoy turning my dreams into drawings that I enliven with oil pastels, gel crayons or watercolors. Sometimes, however, I am content with a pencil drawing, especially when, playing dream detective, I call in my inner sketch artist. Here's an example from my journal from exactly one year ago:

January 31, 2021

Dream

The Actor with Thick Eyebrows

Sometimes playing dream detective requires me to try my hand as a sketch artist as I seek to identify a character in the story. Last night's dream inverted a familiar dream trope. You have dreamed of being with a film star, right? Afterwards (on the assumption that you are unlikely to meet this person in regular life) you may think about what aspect of you, or perhaps another person, you have tagged with the characteristics or role you associate with that actor.

In this dream, things worked the other way round. I thought I was dealing with a powerful British official. Then I realized that he was an actor playing that role in an actual movie production. I thought I recognized the actor from movies and TV series I had seen in the past. On waking, I couldn't recall his name. His most notable feature is his thick dark eyebrows. He may be 45 in the dream, good-looking in a craggy way, dark haired, fairly athletic under his custom suit.

I posted my sketch on Facebook like a WANTED notice. Scores of attempted identifications poured in. The suggested actors nearest in looks to The Man with Thick Eyebrows were Colin Farrell and Clive Owen. Not there yet, though.

Funny how this game is the opposite of what we usually play with a dream of a movie star or other celebrity. Usually we retain the name of the star and then have to figure out how the character or roles of that well-known figure might relate to us or someone in our ambit. In other words, we assume that our dream editor has stamped a well-known name or mask on a less-recognized person or personality aspect so we have something to hold from the dream.

Here it's the other way round: go find the star whose name is withheld. I have not quite caught his likeness here. I think he is British and may have appeared in political thrillers and cop stories. I haven't come up with a name yet though it's interesting what happens when you ask Auntie Google to pull up mug shots of Male Actors with Thick Eyebrows.

Going to Movie Previews in Dreams

A year later, I still haven't found a satisfactory match for my drawing. However, now I am watching more movies on the small screen under the combined effects of the pandemic and a bitter Northern winter, maybe his face will appear. In the past, I made a collection of movie previews I attended in my dreams. The fact that we can dream the content of a film we haven't yet seen or thought about is for me entertaining confirmation that we may dream the future all the time. Here is one of my favorite examples, from 1996:

I dream that a silly little dog decked out in fake antlers runs out onto a road and is killed. He is magically revived by a bizarre character who does not conform to human norms.

I had no strong feelings about the dream. It felt like watching a movie. I entered the report in my journal and rushed to the airport to catch an early flight. I missed my connection and ended up on a different plane with a completely different itinerary. I was carrying a copy of my book Conscious Dreaming, then newly published, and the woman author seated beside me asked to see it. With our pleasant conversation on hold, I looked up at the screen where the in-flight movie was playing. I watched a silly little dog decked out in fake antlers for a Christmas pageant run out on a road. He was killed but magically revived by a bizarre character, the archangel Michael portrayed by John Travolta in the movie of the same name.

If it is possible to dream about something as trivial as the in-flight movie on the wrong plane ahead of time, then surely it is possible to dream of bigger things. I'll stay on the lookout for the Man with Thick Eyebrows.

Back to the Future, Forward to the Past

After I published this little article I posted a link on the Robert Moss Books Facebook page. I immediately got fresh suggestions about the identity of the mystery actor. . Two readers suggested Matthew McFadeyan, a name not mentioned before. He wasn't on my radar because I don't think I had ever watched the early seasons of the popular BBC series MI5 where he plays a leading role. I had not even heard of the current HBO series Succession - where he again plays a major role - until I checked the internet overnight.

I fired up Britbox and started watching episode 1 of Season 1 of MI5. Within minutes I was sure - through the tingle test as well as facial recognition - that the actor in my dream was Matthew McFadeyan.

This tiny episode presents an example of a paradoxical relationship between dreaming and time. A dream leads me one year later to a TV series that was launched 20 years ago. The first episodes are punchy and highly relevant today. However it may be that the main point of the episode is to give a simple demonstration- trivial and thus safe - of how time loops work.

Trickster as Guide: In Praise of Marty

 

The other night, drifting in that liminal state between sleep and awake, I heard a car horn, honking several times. I was quite irritated. Who thought it was okay to beep for someone in a neighboring house in the middle of the night? Then I recollected that sounds from the street rarely reach my bedroom at the back of the house. And then realized that the sounds were coming from inside, not outside, my head.

I closed my eyes again and a vivid scene immediately appeared. The centerpiece was a blue Cadillac convertible, with the fins of a previous era but in shiny new condition. At the wheel was a fellow sporting a loud plaid suit and a felt hat, and brandishing a fat cigar.

I knew him, of course. I have met him in dreams and dreamlike states over quarter of a century. I know him as Marty, pronounced in a distinctive New York way, as Morty. I suppose it could be spelled that way but I have always recorded it as Marty and he has never corrected me, so that's how it will stay.

"Put on a good suit," Marty instructed me. He was inviting me out for a night on the town. The blurred shapes behind him resolved into the facades of restaurants and bars and nightclubs, with a Cajun flavor.

Well, why not? I found my way to a wardrobe - not my regular one. When I opened it I saw that the clothes on the hangers were more than sets of jackets and pants. They were whole body suits. If I stepped into one, I would alter my physique accordingly. Nice kind of dress-up for an outing on the astral plane. I chose a body with strong broad shoulders and a trim waist, an idealized version of my younger, fitter self.. It came encased in a midnight blue double-breasted suit. Yes, this would do nicely.

What followed was simply a fun night out in a body that works better than my current one, fun for its own sake. This is one of Marty's specialities. Let me go back to the start of our relationship.

Marty first visited me when I set an intention for dreaming. The fancy name for this is dream incubation and in some traditions it is approached with great reverence, with ritual and purifications and offerings to deities and priests. I generally find it sufficient to just frame a clear intention and repeat it in my mind as I approach the night.

I really needed guidance from a wiser source that night. I was in the midst of writing the book that was published as Conscious Dreaming, the book that introduced the original blend of dreamwork and shamanic journeying that I call Active Dreaming. I had an enthusiastic publisher, but my editor had pointed out that "dream books don't sell many copies". I wanted to reach as many people as possible, not for fame and money, but to help break the dream drought that had become so pervasive in modern culture.

So I set this intention: Show me how to bring the gifts of dreaming to many more people.

In the dream that followed, I found myself under the big top in a circus. The bleachers were packed. In the center of the ring, a man in a loud plaid suit, with a pork pie hat, a mustache and a huge cigar, was doing acrobatics. He turned cartwheels then somehow managed to bounce from the ground up to the very top of the tent. As he repeated these unlikely maneuvers, I became fully aware that I was dreaming. I remembered that I had asked for guidance.

I stared, incredulous, at the clownish acrobat performing impossible feats. I knew, in that instant, that his name was Marty, pronounced the New York way. Was he supposed to be my guide?

Marty vaulted into the bleachers, grabbed an attractive blonde, and started cuddling and smooching. As I watched this new performance, shocked. he blew out a great cloud of smoke. He gave me a wink and said, round the edge of his stogie, "It's about entertainment, kid. It's about entertainment."

I came back from the dream laughing. I recognized I had received exactly the guidance I needed. Keep people turning the pages. Give them stories they can live in for a while. Never forget that a story may be the shortest route between a human being and the truth. And that the deepest truths may "in laughing guise be dress'd".

So I'm always grateful when Marty shows up. His hat style changes, and he's not always in a suit that might be most appropriate for a racetrack tout. He sometimes appears in a top hat and a tuxedo, even full tails. Still there is always something a little louche about his appearance. Last year he turned up riding a bike around a circus ring. His attire was Edwardian-formal until you looked below the waist.

Marty confirmed my long-standing opinion that there is a Cosmic Costume Department for inner guides. They present themselves in the forms appropriate to our levels of perception and understanding, and the messages they intend to convey. 

It's about entertainment, kid.

Drawings (c) Robert Moss

Dreaming the Cosmogram

Lucid dreaming from the hypnagogic zone

On the Cosmogram

Something is skimming the surface of wetlands. I can't see it clearly among the rushes. I am told it is a Nightskimmer. The marshes extend as far as the horizon. I wonder whether these are the waters between the worlds of the living and the dead in the Kongo cosmograms.

I see one of them now, drawn with motion signs to show progression from life through death to rebirth. The cycle moves from birth to death as the sun moves from sunrise to sunset. When the sun goes down in the world of the living, it rises in the white clay world of the dead. To die in one world is to be born in the other. To die in the world of the living is to “go upside down”.

Then there is the other arm of the cross within the circle. It is actually a vertical pole. It takes you up or down, between the two worlds. The way is open to the initiate and the sorcerer and the sacred king. In their different ways they stand feet planted in the cosmogram, connected to its points, choosing among its ways, drawing the flash of spirit from above and below.

Feelings: high excitement

Reality check: I am not versed in Kongo tradition or practice. However, I was intrigued by the pictures and commentaries of Kongo ground drawings (Brazilian: pintos riscados) of the cosmos in recent rereading of Robert Farris Thompson's wonderful book Flash of the Spirit.

The traditional cosmograms are usually highly abstract, often basically just a circle cross. In my lucid dream space, one came alive and I saw the parallel life and movement of the two worlds and how an initiate could himself become the vertical axis between them. I gave my figures bird crowns like Yoruba kings. My solar barque sailing both sides of the world-ocean recalls Egypt. In the African diaspora, the traditions stream together.

Since I have made drawing and coloring from dreams a daily practice, my imagery in the HG state is often very painterly, suggesting how to transfer something from the dreaming to a physical surface. I don't have the technical proficiency to bring through more than a small part of what my inner artist is showing me, but I'll go on doing what I can!

The drawing below came from another distinctly African passage in my recent dreaming in the liminal space between sleep and awake.

Bird on the Iron: Staff of Osanyin (Osain)

The bird of mind, the spirit head, floats above six iron spikes. This is the staff of Osanyin, wounded healer, lord of leaves, crippled orisha of medicine and initiation of the Yoruba. I own a staff just like this, in Afro-Brazilian style, that I acquired in Salvador da Bahia several decades ago. The bird, lean and graceful, hovers above the crossroads of the tricky god Eshu and the sharpened iron of the hard god Ogun. The spikes may also be a psychic stockade and the healer's apothecary tree. Look carefully and you may see the serpent energy raised.

Drawings (c) Robert Moss