The Question on the Bridge

 

After midnight, I lie on my back and close my eyes. I do much of my best work in bed but not when I approach it in the spirit of work. I tell my friends who are serious meditators that my favorite spiritual practice is horizontal mediation, but I don’t say this seriously. No mantras, no breathwork by the numbers, no specified body postures, no fixed agenda. I’ll just let my body get comfy and be open to what flows in my mind and my inner senses. Relaxed attention, or attentive relaxation. That’s all I require of myself. Sometimes it enables me to maintain continuity of consciousness through all the phases of the night. 
     When images come, I may let them rise and fall, content to see what is surfacing from my subconscious or looking in from the limitless universe outside me. If no images come, I’ll be content to drift off into industrial sleep and let my body rest. I may wake up to the fact I am dreaming inside a dream, or not. I may not recall my dreams from the first sleep cycle, though I will check and pay attention to my feelings and sensations when I am missing a story. I can usually detect a dream hangover even when I have lost the dream that caused it. Most often it’s the sense of being jet lagged, or travel worn. I know where that comes from. With or without travel plans, my dreams are often excursions. I get out and about. I visit places on the other side of this world, and in parallel worlds, and in worlds where the dead and the living rub shoulders. The Society for Psychical Research called such outings psychical excursions. A Moroccan dream interpreter calls them exits of the soul.
      For now, though, I’m just lying on my back. My right leg is bent at the knee, giving me the look of the Hanged Man in the Tarot. I straighten it out and give it a good stretch. Shreds and blotches of color float by on my mental screen. There’s a wriggling something pushing in from the edge that could be a giant millipede if I let it, but I wish it to become a lovely many-leaf plant. Geometric patterns form and reform, then textures, weaving and netting, then a parade of faces – some like cartoons or kids’ drawings, many realistic, so many. For a while, it’s like rush hour at a subway station. Everything is changing and racing fast and there are constant popups and inserts. It’s hard to hold onto anything much. I remember William James saying that in ten minutes in the liminal space of hypnagogia, he saw a thousand images. That sounds about right.
      Things are still busy on my mental screen, but there are two notable changes. First, the scene is slowing and stabilizing. Second, I am in it. I’m no longer a voyeur. I’m out and about, on a bridge, with streams of pedestrians moving both ways on either side of me. I smell salt water, engine oil, and fish. The people on the bridge are mostly dark skinned. Many of the women wear hijabs and long form-concealing dresses. A few are in full burkas. A boy on a bicycle is selling round breakfast rolls. I can smell the poppy seeds.
     I am happy when my senses come alive as they are doing now. It means I’m there, in a real place I may or may not be able to name. It means I have bilocated, because while I am walking on the bridge, wishing for one of the poppyseed rolls,  I am perfectly aware that my body is in bed, and I can look in on it. I can wave to myself if I like, though that might confuse the people on the bridge. Or rather, it wouldn’t, because there is no sign that they can see me or are remotely aware of my presence.
   I know exactly where I am now. I am in suspension. I am on the Bosphorus Bridge, a steel suspension bridge that joins the continents of Europe and Asia. Before me and behind me are the two halves of the enormous world-city, Istanbul.  I see boats of all sizes on the water, monstrous container ships from the Black Sea, ferries from the Princes Islands, fishing dhows and floating restaurants.
     I'm not conscious of cars or trucks on the bridge, just the stream of pedestrians walking both ways, of varied ethnicity and dress.
      A woman steps out of the crowd. With a few steps, she is in front of me. She wears a long white silk garment, streaming to her ankles. Her matching hijab covers her face except for her dark shining eyes. In this simple Muslim garb, she is unspeakably elegant, and I know she is very beautiful. There is a faint smell of roses. She looks hard at me and asks, "Are you Turkish - or Romanian?"
     I am so surprised by the question, cadenced by the pause, that I fall out of the dream and am fully back in the body on the bed.
     Fortunately, I have some experience of revisiting dreams.
     I will myself back to the bridge, and wish the woman in white to still be there.
     There is a shimmer where she stood, then she reappears. It’s a little like watching an image emerge from a blur of pixels. But now she seems fully present. I smell roses, and the long dark hair she keeps covered. I told her I am amused by her question. I have friends in both Turkey and Romania. I taught and traveled in both countries and flew back and forth between Istanbul and Bucharest.
      She has brought me a message. She speaks for a Sufi order – she names it - that is interested in my work and would like to meet me. Will I be coming to Turkey soon?
       I would be honored to meet, I tell her.

 

The next day, I receive an invitation from a friend to return to Turkey to lead a workshop. Does my friend know the Sufi order that was mentioned on the bridge? Yes. It is famous for accepting women as equals with men, and for incorporating some shamanic methods for shifting consciousness.
      There are dreams that spill into the world.

Illustration: "Are You Turkish or Romanian?" RM + AI

From the Blue Lake of Healing

Bucegi Mountains, Romania

There is a blue lake of healing, on top of a mountain. You must earn the right to go there, by tracking a wounded animal through the woods, following it up steeper and steeper trails even when mountain mist swallows your sight. The animal is connected to you. The places where it is wounded reflect your own condition.
    At the top of the mountain, you are amazed to find a shining blue lake. As you watch, the animal staggers to the lake and falls in. It is gone for so long that you fear it has died. Have you come here for death?
    At last, you see a stir in the waters. The animal surfaces on the far side of the lake. As it takes off, you see it is whole, and healed.
    It is your turn to enter the waters of the healing lake. You may go far deeper than the world you come from. How far you go will depend on your courage and imagination. 

This is a summary of the simple instructions for a group journey that I gave to the intrepid dreamers who gathered in the Bucegi mountains of Romania with me in October, 2013 for my program "Dancing with the Bear: Reclaiming the Arts of Dream Healing". The Blue Lake of Healing is a real place in nonordinary reality. You can read about how I discovered it, and the full instructions for the journey, in my Dreamways of the Iroquois.
    We found once again that our shared adventures in shamanic dreaming and soul healing produce gifts that keep on giving. I asked our dreamers to write summaries of what they experienced and what they learned in the journey to the Blue Lake. Here is a first sampling of their travel reports:

"A wounded deer was completely healed as she entered the blue lake in the mountains. In the middle of the lake there was a crystal and from there healing was being sent for Mother Earth and for all the living creatures on Earth. I was healing people and animals and through healing a part of the light was being sent, so that they themselves became filled with more light."

”The aura of your heart will soften the hearts of those around you. It will transform them into clay that you will mold until it becomes liquid. It must be left ripening in the dark until it becomes light.” 

"Healing comes from the depth ! You can heal yourself there, where you did not think that you could even live! The diamond tunnel with rays of divine light help you heal yourself."

"The mountain goat was hurt in many places and still she had the power to reach the lake. The drums and the fire were calling me, recognizing me as one of their people. I was asked why I needed healing. I said, 'Because I want to make art with colors.' Again, I was asked 'Why?' I said, 'Because in this way i can travel.' I brought colors to my heart and my body." 

"The animal I met was very young and very beautiful. He was bleeding in the neck area. In the deep of the lake I found a rock, removed it and got to the top of a mountain, where I sat in lotus position. I felt myself being charged with energy. I met some dynamic forms, light green in color. I received a gift: a schoolbag with pockets with buckles."

”A giant eagle was my guide. I became one with her and felt her pain As I came out of the water my body was translucent. I was light, I was love. I saw my dear ones - I sent love to them and they sent love to me. Together, we created an immense sphere of light and love and sent it to float above the lake, the country, the planet. Then I transformed into a tree.”

”I follow a big stag, wounded in the chest, in the left. He is limping, but still I cannot reach him. I arrive at the lake, just in time to see him going into water. I run to the lake and I see him getting out on the other side, healed, running towards the forest. I dive into the water, which on the inside looks like an immense lagoon, with light in every corner. There are nymphs and gods at the bottom of the lagoon. My chest hurts, on the left side. I feel the energy healing me. When I get out of the water I notice I have a big scar on the left side of my chest, where my heart was healed.”

"Dancing with the eagle and the bear and the lion. Great festivities in an underwater city. Ceremony around a cauldron. Diving into the cauldron, swimming through a curvaceous tunnel and arriving in the kingdom with all of our loved ones."

"Heart wounded, I realized I came here to die. I let myself fall in the blue lake. Sweet fall, like floating. Beings, translucent tall beings put this golden, shiny, small energy ball inside my heart center and it started spinning. Golden light revived me and i started breathing the blue, good water. Breathing like the first breath in my life. Came back from the journey with a new song in my head: It is a new life, it is a new dawn.

“I was dancing with the shamans around the fire. In the rhythm of the drums I started spinning - faster and faster - until at a certain point I was not touching the ground any more. I was at one with the wind."

"The stag is bleeding from the eyes and his back right leg is injured. When he comes out of the blue lake, he is healed - and he has dropped his antlers. As he moves away, the antlers grow again, larger than before, and golden. 
   "Ravens strip away dead energy & disease from the energy field of the group. Bear dismembers some people, cleanses their hearts. Below the lake is a hospital of animal doctors. We are covered by angels' wings, blazing bright."

"The giant with the head and antlers of a stag was standing on the lake shore, with six of my ancestors flanking him, with staffs in their hands looking at me. He gave me his blessing to enter the lake. Now is your time. I entered the lake cautiously, and found I could breathe normally.
     "I came to a gate near the bottom of the lake. It was like a lens. When I passed through, I was flying within a blue horizon. I realized I could create anything from my heart. The Heart Fairy appeared. We put our chests together and our hearts were united. They were one, with a tremendous power. And then my chest opened, as I was flying and i connected with thousands of hearts. We were linked in a net of love, light and healing. I realized I was golden. I was there for a long time.”

"I met the bear. He was weak, wounded and tired. At the blue lake he dived below and then he came out all shining. His fur, once grey and without light, was now shining in the moonlight. After my healing I was given a white and silver dress that looked like the fur of the bear waiting for me on the shore. I climbed onto his back and we went into the forest where a shaman woman taught me a dance and an incantation for cleansing: "I release to the fire, water, earth and wind what does not belong to me and is a burden for me.'" 

Vindecarea exista in fiecare dintre noi. Crede. "Healing exists inside each and every one of us. Believe.”

For an expanded version of this report please see my new book Growing Big Dreams.

Do you need a vampire chastity belt? (and other dreams of the undead)

Vampires are probably more popular today than at any other time in history. And they continue to get more glamorous and sexy, thanks to TV series like "True Blood" and the BBC's "Being Human", and of course the Twilight series of novels and movies. We are a long way from Nosferatu, and old horrors like the blood-sucking ghoul of south-eastern Europe the Greeks call the vrykolakas.
     So it's not surprising that vampires feature in plenty of dreams, and not only the dreams of teen girls - especially when we remember that Stephanie Meyer's inspiration for Twilight came from a dream. As she recalls, the dream was so juicy she had to stay in and write it all out, though she was supposed to go somewhere with her kids, and later used her dream report as a first draft for a chapter in the first of her vampire books.

     I am reflecting on a report from a mature woman who dreamed she was back in school, where the teacher was reading a love story in which she was a leading character. In the story, she falls in love with a vampire. She kisses him, then runs away, then kisses him again, and takes off again. The teacher stops reading the story in the middle. The kids in the class moan, "Oh no, we want to hear the rest!"

     I commented that if this were my dream, the fact that I am back in school would suggest that I am being offered a life lesson, something I need to know now. I'd think back to the times when I was seduced by someone - or a series of someones - who turned out to be energy vampires. Rather than seeking to know the end of this kind of love story, I would want to avoid repeating it.

     Energy vampires are for real, and the transaction involved is far from glamorous. We can all think of people who tend to drain our batteries. Sometimes it's so obvious you can sense them trying to suck you dry, slurping away, as if with a straw.

     What do you do to stave off the energy vampires in life? Another woman dreamer I know came up with a fabulous solution. In her dream, she was being kissed on the neck by a vampire. She found this very seductive and sensual. But her dream protectors didn't let it go too far. They conjured up a "vampire chastity belt" that fitted her neck perfectly, frustrating the vampire's efforts to suck her blood. I think there might be quite a market for vampire chastity belts if some savvy entrepreneur wants to produce them!

    I have traveled in Transylvania and stood in the shadow of the statue of Vlad Tepes, "the Impaler", better known as Dracula, in his birth city of Sigisoara. I must tell you that the vampire isn't really a Romanian phenomenon; Bram Stoker located his Dracula story in Transylvania, where he had never been, because it was so remote he could get away with saying anything about it.        
    Due diligence, though: the werewolf is a bona fide Romanian production. Check out the wolf-headed dragons of the ancient Dacians, who terrified the Romans by going into battle as wolf-men.

Painting of vampire by Edvard Munch, who actually titled it "Love and Pain" (1883).

Photo: RM in the shadow of Vlad Tepes, the original Dracula, in his birthplace, Sigisoara.

How do you look in the dreams of your parallel self?

I slip in and out of the lives of parallel selves, and others, in dreams and in reverie. I am open to the idea that they are leading continuous lives, on parallel event tracks, and that from their points of view, I am a character that exists in their dreams, when they remember dreams.
    It requires little imagination for me to picture a worldly-wise Robert with a much fatter bank account and a different view of reality sitting down to Sunday brunch and talking about a dream in the following way: “I had the strangest dream last night. I was in Dracula country, in the mountains of Transylvania, or some such place. I was persuaded to hire some evil-looking road cowboy to drive me up a crazy one-lane road to see some natural feature the locals call their Sphinx. They said he boasted that he had killed a fox on that road and cut off the head as a trophy. The next moment, he had driven us halfway off a cliff.”

    What my parallel Robert might recall as an odd dream was a quite literal, physical event for me. On a dream archaeology expedition in Romania in October 2012, I set off with local friends to see the Sphinx of Bucegi, a celebrated natural rock formation regarded as a major energy spot, near a cave associated with an ancient shaman-god of the Dacians and the mystical White Wolf said to watch over this land.   
     We walked through the woods from the pleasant pensiune we had booked for my workshop, facing the  Caraiman monastery, whose construction was inspired by a priest who dreamed of a church that needed to be built around a fir tree at this site. We intended to ride up the mountain to the Sphinx by cable car, but a road cowboy with a four-wheel drive persuaded us to hire him. This proved to be the wildest ride of my life, up a steep, narrow road with hairpin bends and no railings at the edge of dizzying cliffs. The road was often partly blocked by construction or landslides, and we frequently encountered cars and trucks rushing down in the middle of the road as if bent on a head-on collision.   
     The road cowboy drove as if possessed, but I assumed this was local custom and he knew what he was doing. I could not follow his conversation with my Romanian friends, but I was struck by his hand-waving animation as he recounted a story at a point where the road was only dirt and craters and lumps of rock. Soon after, the driver made a wild swerve to the right to get around a protruding boulder, taking us to the edge of the cliff — and then partway over. We were now stuck in the dirt, hanging over the cliff, as the driver gunned the car back and forth, succeeding only in getting us deeper into the dirt, while the Jeep leaned, little by little, further over the cliff.    “Time to get out of the car,” I said quietly.   
     We left the driver with the vehicle, phoning for help, and walked for twenty minutes down the winding road to a cabină— a rustic inn and restaurant — to recover with Ursus beer and spicy sausages. On the walk, my friends told me that just before he nearly took all of us over the cliff, the driver had been boasting about how he had killed a fox on that section of mountain road and then decapitated the fox to mount its head on a wall as a trophy.   
     It seemed we had traveled that day with a man under a fox’s curse. Through it all, I felt oddly detached, and never in real danger, as if we had been under the protection of an unseen hand. Perhaps it was the man who had taken the fox’s head who was under the real danger on that high and stony road.   
    My parallel Robert, remembering this as a dream, might discuss it as a set of symbols, seeking a Freudian or a Jungian interpretation. He might shrug off the dream as simply "bizarre", or attribute it to something he ate. He might give some thought to foxes and fox hunters, and the possibility that he might travel to Romania and should consider his transportation options carefully. If he has read Jung, he may study the fox-cursed driver as the Shadow, and the Romanian girls as anima figures, and the Sphinx of the mountains as a form of the Self that is hard to attain.
    Wherever his mind turns, my parallel self is likely to miss the fact that what is a dream for him was a physical experience for me. But wait - who am I to judge? Some mornings, when I return from his life, I talk as if he is my creation. When I share dream reports in French, I say, "J'ai fait un rêve", "I made a dream", which implies that I made him.  I don't know whether his French is better than mine (I hope so!), but I can hear him talking as if he made me.

I suggest the following thought experiment: Imagine you are in the situation of a parallel self who is trying to make sense of events in your day as scenes from a dream.

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: In the Bucegi Mountains of Romania, 2012

Dream archaeology among the Dacians

From my Romanian journal

Sarmizegetusa Regia, ancient capital of the Dacians

There are deer in the forest. I track them behind closed eyelids. I count three, mostly hidden by evergreens, oaks and lindens. No, not deer. Men, armed for battle, setting an ambush on the steep wooded slopes above the valley where a little river gurgles along its rocky bed.
    I see their quarry. A Roman column, marching deep into the mountains to attack Samizegetusa, the capital of the Dacians. The sun glints on helmets, on shields, on body armor.
   Breaking from shelter, the Dacians are no longer deer, or men. They are wolves. A standard bearer holds up their war banner. It has the head of a wolf, and the body of a dragon. The wind sighs through the wolf's open mouth. Then it howls. All the Dacians are howling now. Some wear wolf pelts. They have prepared for this, raising their battle frenzy, willing themselves to become werewolves under sun or moon.
    They fall on the Romans, hacking through metal and flesh with their terrible sica, a big hand sickle. The Romans buckle and yield. The legionaries are terrified of these mountain savages, their killing tools and their killing frenzy. The wolf howls drown the Roman horns, as the centurions try to get their men into defensive positions. But there is no rout. Many Romans are down, but barked orders bring the survivors into tortoise formation. The legionaries, under their shields, present one great armored back, impervious to the wild men. Spears come through the chinks in the common armor. In the next moment, the Dacians are assailed on their flank by cavalry, Roman auxiliaries recruited in neighboring provinces. This is not a good day for the Dacians, though it began well.

I saw this scene, vividly, while lying in bed in the early morning before driving with friends from a lodge in the Orastie mountains to the ancient Dacian capital of Sarmizegetusa.
    I came to the sacred city of the Dacians with other images, and memories. I had dreamed two nights before of a bracelet of wires wrapped like electric cable that could be used for communication as well as decoration. Before my morning vision of battle, I dreamed of a mysterious archaeological find, of something that looked like a simple boat, or canoe, hollowed from bone or wood, that seemed to be a vehicle for transporting souls after death. I carried the memory of a tremendous group journey during my last visit to Romania, a year ago, when we opened a portal to an ancient Temple of Light associated with the mysterious shaman-god of the Dacians, Zalmoxis. I had distant recollections of Mircea Eliade's short book titled Zalmoxis, the Vanishing God.
     Yet I came to Sarmizegetusa without expectations. Sometimes the stones speak, sometimes they are silent.
      My first glimpse of the sacred precinct, through the trees, was of the remains of the oldest, limestone temple. 

Rounding the edge of the hollow ground, I sat on a bench and let myself slip across the centuries into scenes of  another time. I was surprised to find myself briefly joining the perspective of a Roman officer named Marius, who had served the emperor Trajan since his time in Spain. This Marius had been tasked by the emperor to report, after the fall of Sarmizegetusa, on the religious practices of the Dacians and on how they managed to maintain speedy communications in such a broken country of foresta nd mountains.
     This was interesting, but not what I had come for. A small group of tourists disappeared. My Romanian friends and I had the site to ourselves, and tolerant custodians allowed me to drum by a wonderful tree, turned golden in the early fall. I instantly saw a she-wolf. I found myself in the presence of an ancient woman of power, a priestess and leader of the wolf people, and a man in a bear skin leading corresponding rituals for the people of the bear. It seemed that three animals were of special importance to the Dacians - the wolf, the bear and eagle - and that they had a clan system in which each clan had special powers and functions. The bear clan had special responsibilities for medicine, and carried the aegis of Zalmoxis. The wolf clan produced fierce warriors, yet its leader, the alpha, was female.
     But where was the Temple of Light, and those fountains of healing colors?
     The clue that we may not have missed it completely was in a strange photograph taken by my friend Ana Maria Stefanescu. That fountain is no ordinary trick of refracted sunlight.

Two days later, at the National History Museum in Bucharest, I paused at the statue on the steps, of Trajan gripping the Dacian she-wolf. 

Inside, I tracked my dreams and impressions among reliefs reproduced from the infamous column of Trajan in Rome, a giant monument devoted to the emperor's conquest of the Dacians. I found Romans apparently raising a "tortoise" with their shields. 

Other reliefs depict Roman auxiliary cavalry drawn from many provinces of the empire. There are even two scenes of Moorish cavalry fighting for the Romans against the Dacians, who were contending with an empire encompassing much of the known world. I was drawn to one of the few reliefs depicting a woman. It shows a Dacian "priestess" being yielded to Trajan. She is tentatively identified as the sister of the Dacian king, Decebalus, who was  driven to suicide by the Romans.

In the treasury at the museum, I found gold bracelets like the one in my dream. Can they really have played some role in communication?

A little checking confirmed that Trajan served as legate in Spain, in the Roman province of Hispania Narbonnensis. Could I really have picked up a mental trace of a literate Roman officer who had served him there and continued as a confidant and adviser?
    Plenty of leads for further dream archaeology. Meanwhile, I learned at the museum that fresh excavation at Sarmizegetusa has been authorized, so there may be new finds to be considered, surviving the Roman efforts to destroy all traces of a great and - to moderns - quite mysterious ancient civilization.

Photo of RM with fountain of light by Ana Maria Stefanescu. All other photos (c) Robert Moss
   

The bridge becomes a fire, the fire becomes a bridge

From my Romanian Journal

Plaiul Foii, Bucegi Mountains, Romania


Wednesday, October 1

BEARS, WITH OR WITHOUT DOGS

Our charming host at the villa in a fold of the wild Bucegi mountains where I am leading a four day adventure in Active Dreaming greets me with a thimble of palinka. He guides me upstairs and says, "Choose any room you want." I put my bag down in a spacious room with a terrace overlooking the mountains. "I wouldn't choose this side of the house if you like it quiet," he cautions.
     Really? In the last twenty miles of the drive on a bumpy dirt road we passed only a few cars and an equal number of horse-drawn carts.   
    "It's the dogs," my host explains. "Sometimes they bark all night because the bears come close on this side of the house."   
    "What about the other side?"   
    "There are bears, but no dogs."   
    I decide I'll settle for the side with bears but no dogs to bark at them. Later I go to meet the bear-sized dogs that are our border guards.

Thursday, October 2

LIFE RHYMES, ARCHANGELS TOO

1. When I first taught in the Bucegi mountains, I found myself here on the day of the Archangels Michael and Gabriel, who are celebrated together in these parts. I attended part of an Orthodox service in their honor at the church of the Caraiman monastery (founded because of a dream) opposite the villa where we gathered that time.

2. Yesterday, before leaving Bucharest, I visited the church of the Archangels Michael and Gabriel in Mircea Eliade's old neighborhood, on Strada Mantuleasa. The church was closed or open (depending on your point of view) because of a funeral.

3. The last two people to arrive for my current workshop, at a new site in the same mountains, were friends named Michael and Gabriel.

~

The first dream title shared when I opened the workshop was:

The ancestors are here and they tell me, "We come to warm our hands at the fire in you."

How could it start better than this?

Friday, October 3

I watch a cat drink from the running stream in front of the house. Strange, wild and beautiful.

Stranger still is the change in the bridge. Yesterday it had gates and railings. Today these have gone. I am told  they will be used on the fires. This may be evidence of the shift to a parallel universe. It is certainly confirmation that I am living in a synchronicity poem.

ANGELS IN SOAP BUBBLES

"I am back in the playground where I played hopscotch and hide-and-seek when I was a little girl. I see soap bubbles coming down. Each one contains a little angel with a message for me, about healing and forgiveness. When the angels speak, I know how to resolve a conflict with a friend, and how to reclaim my health."

- my favorite dream from this morning's dream sharing in my Romanian workshop. Far too good for analysis. We turned it into theater. Wonderful to watch adults playing hopscotch again, and to see those angels coming down, each in the arms of a human soap bubble, and working their magic. Yes, we'll be blowing bubbles as soon as we lay in a supply.

~

We ask to have a fire built for a ritual of cleansing in the evening. The wood used is from the bridge. The bridge becomes a fire, the fire becomes a bridge.

Saturday, October 4

GIFT OF THE RED CAT

Her intention was simply to remember dreams, because they had gone missing. She woke in the middle of the night and said, "Sh-t, I've got nothing." Then she saw that her red cat was on the bed, which wasn't possible in physical reality because the cat was at her home hundreds of miles away. The cat tried to say in human words, "You're dreaming."

Immediately she was transported into a wild jungle full of animal life. Strangely, the animals were contributing their gifts to "bags" projected by the plants. From one of these bags, endowed with the powers of many animals, and of the plant devas, a new human form emerged, full of spirit and understanding.

- I was privileged to hear this dream at the breakfast table this morning. Again, we wasted no time in analysis. We agreed that the dreamer would supply her red cat with suitable treats when she goes home, carry a cat talisman, and accept the cat as an oneiropomp, a guide into dreaming. Then we embodied the energy of the dream - to the delight of the whole circle - in dream theater.

~

At last we have soap bubbles. We give them to the young woman who dreamed that angels came down in bubbles. She leaps gleefully around the room, waving the wand. And it is raining angels.

All photos (c) Robert Moss

Dreaming a Vision of the Heart in Romania

On May 10th, the first World Day of Active Dreaming, dream ambassadors in many places all over the map led programs to help people in many walks of life claim the guidance and healing and creative energy of dreams. I will run some of their reports and photographs in this blog, starting with a wonderful narrative from Ana Maria Stefanescu, a dream teacher based in Bucharest who is one of the moving spirits behind our World Day, on how she and a circle of Romanian dreamers spend the weekend of May 10-11.

Dreaming a Vision of the Heart
by Ana Maria Stefanescu

The first World Day of Active Dreaming. Such a wonderful experience, for which I am profoundly grateful. After two days of adventure, together with my colleague Cristina and a group of amazingly courageous dreamers, deep within the worlds of dreams and heart, i am slightly tired but really happy: what an amazing thing, reconnecting through dreaming to the true mission of the heart !
    We started on Saturday with a journey to the space between lives, to remember what was our intention before we were born into this life and to see what our guide of the family of souls we belong to has to say about that.
    We practiced the lightning dreamwork process and found out about the power of giving and receiving useful and intuitive feedback. We ventured into dream spaces, re-entering as explorers and guides and trackers and helpers.
    Then, the dreamers turned their dreams into theater. These were the peak moments, full of magic: witnessing transforming fear into love, lack of trust into hope and faith, The theater of Active Dreaming is real magic.
     In the evening we played synchronicity games - s o much fun, each and every time we play - and embarked on a group shamanic journey to find a pulsating, radiant heart on top of the mountain: a heart that wanted to share the light with other hearts.
     Then homeplay, to incubate a dream over night...
      On Sunday morning the dreams wanted to be expressed through drawing and colors. Then we listened to the body and followed its energy map by drawing the totem pole of the chakras, understanding that if we are to fulfill our mission in this world, then we want to know our resources and our allies but also the places in the body that could use some healing. We met spiritual teachers and animals and beings that we know we can rely on. And that's good to know. The lion was there and the bear was there and the dolphin, and many more.
    Then dream theater again - one that opened our hearts even more and made us see and feel the power and love of Mother Earth - and the power of love.
     As we are on a mission of the Heart, we traveled to a certain Magic Market you can read about in Robert's book Dreaming the Soul Back Home and then farther "back" in time to meet and bring home our child selves. We made promises that we are to honor.
     Feeling whole now we sat in the center of the circle to declare and take responsibility for or mission. We promised "to honor our dreams and the powers that speak to us in dreams".
     Last but not least, we grew a community vision of the future - a future where we live a reality of the heart, where Earth is healed and happy and people remember the language of the trees.
     Again, gratitude ! Gratitude for the wonderful group of dreamers and dream teachers, gratitude for all the gifts received through dreaming...and gratitude and love to you, dear Robert.

with Ana Maria Stefanescu (r) and Cristina Craciun in the Carpathian mountains

The Journal as Omniverse: Reading Mircea Eliade's journals

I am doing my assignments, Mircea.
   I met Mircea Eliade when I was leading an adventure in Active Dreaming in the Bucegi mountains of Romania last October. He died in 1986, but active dreamers know that the fact that someone no longer has a physical body is not a serious impediment to communication. I wrote about this encounter in a previous article, "Mircea Eliade and the Flow God."
   Inter alia, Eliade urged me to read all of his journals, and pay special attention to what he was recording and using while bringing through his fiction. I'm on it.
 

Few writers can have valued their journals as much, or made as copious use of them, as Mircea Eliade. He also devoured the journals of other writers, preferring those that were written in the least calculated way, essentially for the writer himself rather than for whatever he thought posterity might make of him, the journals containing the details of experiences in time – a street scene, a dream, a snatch of conversation, a thought on the wing.
    Much of Eliade’s published work streams straight from his journal pages, not only his autobiographical fiction but his works on philosophy, religion and shamanism as well. He fills page after page with quotes and excerpts and commentaries on his voluminous reading.
     I especially enjoy his journals from the first decade after World War II, a period when he was an exile from his native Romania, now under Communist rule, trying to find his way in the world. His pages are studded with dreams.

     We feel the weight of history and the sadness of the exile in a recurring dream that oppressed him. He finds himself in a familiar landscape, a lake district. He cannot remember how he came here. “I repossessed my entire life as a ‘past’ that had become present again.” This brings no happiness. He is overcome by grief for the loss of “a plenitude no longer known”..
    His spirits are lifted by a delightful, happy dream. He is among young children in a moonlit meadow when a cluster of stars start to fall. The stars fall around them like golden apples. They start eating them, though they are very hot. Eliade runs about, juggling a hot star in his hand, calling to the children, “Quick! Seize your opportunity! These falling stars bring us good luck!”
     Eliade finds, as I do frequently, that dreams set us reading assignments. He describes a dream that pushed him into an orgy of reading. In Paris, at the end of August, 1947, he dreams he has again become a complete “Balzacian”. “Toward morning I dreamed that I’d become a Balzac enthusiast again, and I was in the bookstore on the rue Bonaparte.” He starts reading and re-reading everything by Balzac he can lay hands on. Soon he is planning to write a book on Balzac. He recalls that he first read Le Père Goriot when he was ten, then became a “Balzacian” when he re-read it as a teen.
    A couple of days after his dream, he declares in his journal, “I believe that in the past two days I’ve read Balzac for more than thirty-two hours, driven by a fever that reminds me of my adolescence. I can’t do anything else. I can’t read any other book.” He visits Balzac’s house in Passy, looks at the river Seine from the garden, and at the trapdoor through which the writer fled into a tunnel under that garden when creditors came hunting him. The palace opposite that Balzac hoped to buy is now occupied by the Turkish legation. From Balzac's Les secrets de la princesse de Cadignan, he transcribes this: the writer d’Arthez kisses the hand of the princess, from the wrist to the nails, “avec une si délicate volupté, que la princesse inclina sa tête en augurant très bien de la littérature.” (he kissed her “with such a delicate voluptuousness that the princess bowed her head, auguring very well for literature.” 

    Eliade's journals become an omniverse. He records his decision to record anything and everything that catches his attention in one notebook, The Journal.
    He thought in 1947 that the book that would express his essential self would be a journal written in a nonlinear way. 

“I think sometimes about writing a book that will express me entirely. I’d withdraw for several weeks into an isolated place – an island, a cabin on a mountaintop (the ideal spot would be Tierra del Fuego!), without any books or manuscripts. With nature presenting no interest, I’d write a kind of journal, but without order or any kind.”     

He writes that for him a journal is not a confessional, and not primarily a means of knowing himself (though he thought that as an adolescent). It is a way to record “in the flux of the hours, certain images, situations and thoughts…by ‘freezing’ them, fragments of concrete time.” His journals record his steps in time and his efforts to step out of time, his recurring life theme.

     When he was laboring on his seminal work Shamanism in a little room in Paris in 1949, laid prostrate by heat in summer, holding a bottle of hot water in his lap to thaw his hands in winter, Eliade wrote in his journal, "It would please me if this book would be read by a few poets, dramatists, literary critics and painters. Perhaps some of them would profit more from the reading of it than would certain orientalists and historians of religion."
      We heard you, Mircea.

~

Quotations are from Mircea Eliade, Journal I, 1945-1955 trans Mac Linscott Ricketts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. 

Francis Ford Coppola, struck by Romanian lightning

Here is a great statement about starting anew:

"The film would have to be about many things - time, memory, second chances, the illusion of the new man, European history, love and using the one we love, language - and I knew that the only sensible way to deal with this dilemma was to become young again, to forget everything I knew and to try to have the mind of a student. To reinvent myself by forgetting I even had any film career at all and instead to dream about having one." 

The voice is that of filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola. He is talking about what was required for him to turn Mircea Eliade's novella Youth Without Youth into a 2007 film with the same title. I am intrigued by how closely Coppola identified with Eliade's semi-autobiographical protagonist. In Youth Without Youth, Dominic Matei is a scholar in his later 60s who is ready to kill himself because he thinks he will never complete his life work, a book on the origin of language. He leaves the provincial town where he lives and teaches Latin and Italian for the capital, Bucharest, with a blue envelope filled with strychnine. Before he can take the poison, he is struck by lightning. The effect is a medical miracle. As he recovers, he has the body of a vigorous young man and is even able to grow a a full set of new teeth. His mental acuity is greatly increased; he absorbs books in a flash.
    When he came on this story, Coppola had not made a film in a decade and was about the same age as Dominic Matei. He took Eliade's story, which fills less than 140 pages but is intricate and complex and brought it to the screen with remarkable fidelity. Themes central to Eliade's life and imagination are limned with great care.
    There is the yearning to escape from linear time. There is the fascination with a second self, depicted as a double, neither dark nor light. 

"The double. He always answers the questions I'm ready to ask him. Like a true guardian angel."

There is Eliade's love of his native Romania, shadowed by the horror of its history in the mid-twentieth century and the horrible choices many Romanians (including the young Eliade) were driven to make. There is the dream of a car that augurs a troubling event in the future. There are perennial issues of love and betrayal.
    There are such small questions as these: What is the price for being given a second life? What happens if you jump from one body to another, through metempsychosis? Is the dreamworld more real than the physical world?
    After another lightning strike, a young Swiss woman named Veronica starts speaking fluent Sanskrit. She seems to be hosting the spirit of a certain Rupini, a seventh-century female ascetic from Central India. A Sanskrit scholar called from Rome to examine her offers the Rupini personality this explanation of how she comes to find herself in a different time and a different world from the one she remembers:

[This world] is not, properly speaking, a dream...but it participates in the illusory nature of dreaming because it is a matter of the future, therefore of time; now, time is par excellence unreal.

    "I'd be interested to know what my chances are now," says Dominic Matei as his lightning-gifted powers reveal their full strength.
    "What kind of chances?" asks the professor who is monitoring him at a secure facility.
    "My chances for continuing the life I recently began, without the risk of reintegrating it into my previous biography." 

     Read Eliade's Portugal Journal from 1941-1945, the only unedited and largely unexpurgated of his many published journals, and you will understand his deep desire, reflected in the words of his character, to escape a "previous biography."
     Eliade died in 1986, two years before the first American edition of Youth Without Youth. The translator was the tireless Mac Linscott Ricketts, whose dedication has brought many of Eliade's books to anglophone readers, including his long novel The Forbidden Forest (where a dream car is a major plot element) and most recently the Portugal Journal (in an edition from one of my own publishers, SUNY Press).
   Coppola's film of "Youth Without Youth" received mixed reviews. But I think Mircea Eliade would be pleased by what Coppola made, and by Tim Roth's brilliant performance as his alter ego and his double. Above all, Eliade would surely applaud Coppola's courage in choosing to reinvent himself in this cause: to set aside his previous career and accomplishments and dream something new into being.

Flitcraft again?

Watching the film version of "Youth Without Youth" again last night, I spotted a possible allusion to the Flitcraft Shift I recently discussed here. When Matei and his lover escape to Malta, she asks what kind of bird she is watching from the terrace. "A Maltese falcon." Of course. This exchange is in the movie, but not in the book.

Quotations are from Mircea Eliade, Youth Without Youth translated by Mac Linscott Ricketts with a Foreword by Francis Ford Coppola. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.



Top photo: Mircea Eliade as an aging professor, in the snow.

Through the blue door, into the house of the ancestors

A guest blog by Romanian dream teacher and life coach Ana Maria Stefanescu.

I am in a old traditional Romanian house. The walls are painted deep, deep blue. I step through the small door, and I am warmed by the smell of childhood, the smell of summers spent with family in the country. This is wonderful. I realize that I am in a village in Ardeal, in Transylvania, perhaps the village where my mother was born. An old woman, wearing white and black traditional clothes of the region, is just waking up from sleep as I enter the room. She seems older than Time itself - or better said, there is a feeling of her being outside Time. She starts speaking ardeleneste - the sweet accent that my heart loves. She uses regional expressions I thought i had long forgotten. She is giving me food recipes, suggestions for delicious regional dishes. As her voice rises and falls, the words stream into a rhyming chant. The sounds are so alive. Their energy stirs me.

I woke from this dream feeling blessed. I felt immense gratitude. Over the years, I had had dreams connected to different traditions. This one connected me directly, and deeply, with the ancestors of my native land. I wanted to put on the ia, the traditional Romanian blouse - the one that inspired Matisse and is well depicted in his painting "The Dream".
     There was an amazingly beautiful follow up to this dream, inspired by fellow dreamers

in our Romanian Dreaming Circle: some weeks later, all of us dressed in ii - the traditional blouses we organized a Sezatoare, a circle of women gathered to share stories, to sing, to dance, to plait hair, to knit. Gatherings of this kind used to be common in the villages. Our circle shared hours of joy and laughter and dreams..     The gifts of the dreamworld are many. For me, reconnecting with the authentic, ancient Romanian tradition is one of the most cherished gifts.. I believe the techniques of Active Dreaming help to establish similar connections for dreamers all over the planet, making the link to what is authentic and true and right to bring through now, into our world.