The Duke and a Secret Library

I am often excited when my house turns out to have an extra wing, a terrace, or an additional floor, that I did not know about. I am super-excited when I discover that it contains a secret library. I am talking, of course, about my dream house, which is often a composite of houses where I have lived in ordinary reality.

 I can’t say that finding a secret library in my dream house is truly a new discovery, since there are versions that I have been using for decades. Nonetheless when I enter a secret library in a dream, I am frequently surprised that I left it unvisited for quite a while. Sometimes access requires me to roll back a whole wall of books (like the one in my living room photo, complete with library dog); sometimes I pass through a door that is not immediately obvious in the outer room. 

Here’s my report of my visit to a secret library in my dream house last night. If the history part seems a little dry, a theme that is opened here is of compelling interest to me: the possibility that we are living parallel lives in parallel worlds, and that dreams show us how.

November 18, 2020

Dream

Marlborough and a Secret Library

I want everything on Marlborough to complete writing something important I must deliver the next day. I open the door to my secret library, a door I have not opened in a long time. There is an air of hushed expectancy throughout the house. As I walk the passage behind the door and approach the thousands of books on the shelves, I expect to smell dust or – horrors - mold. However, everything seems clean and dry. I find the heavy hardback biographies of Marlborough without difficulty. I have quite a reading assignment ahead of me, but I can do it if I stay up all night. This should not be a problem. I have done it many times before. 

Feelings: intrigued

Reality check: I know this secret library in my dream house. I have gone there in many dreams over decades. The books in this dream library (I have others) are mostly history. I do pull overnight binges of reading and research.

In my physical house I have a 4 volume paperback version of Winston Churchill's biography of his ancestor John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough. Marlborough was Captain-General of the English forces in the wars in the Low Countries in the early 18th century. The huge biography became a bestseller and the earnings kept Churchill afloat in dodgy times. I was impressed, dipping into these volumes, by the vividness of Churchill's historical imagination. He was able to transport himself right inside the living field of another time, putting himself inside a scene in which the outcome among the many possible event tracks in the many worlds was not yet determined. 

Why am I researching Marlborough in my dream? Well, I dipped into Churchill’s biography when I was writing about his historical imagination in The Secret History of Dreaming. I wrote elsewhere, in my historical novel The Interpreter, about the visit of the “Four Indian Kings” to London in 1710, when Marlborough and his wife Sarah – the on-again, of-again favorite of Queen Anne – were at the pinnacle of power. 

I am aware that there are many parallel Roberts, on parallel event tracks, who are also writers but have chosen different themes and genres. Maybe I stepped into the life of Robert the Historical Novelist or Robert the History Professor. Or into a future project I have not yet recognized, let alone decided on, in regular life.

Dreams set us research assignments. Naturally, my dream drove me to reopen my book The Secret History of Dreaming to my chapter titled "Churchill's Time Machines", where I read this:

Imagination and History

In his valedictory lecture at Oxford, Hugh Trevor-Roper observed that “the historian’s function is to discern alternatives, and that, surely, is the function of imagination.” He added: “History is not merely what happened: it is what happened in the context of what might have happened. Therefore it must incorporate, as a necessary element, the alternatives, the might-have-beens.” Churchill had excellent reason to look at history this way, his mind always turning on alternatives, the ghost trails of roads not taken.

 Another English historian, J.H.Plumb, observed that for Churchill history was not a subject; it was “a part of his temperament” that “permeated everything that he touched, and it was the mainspring of his politics and the secret of his immense mastery.”  Isaiah Berlin, studying Churchill in his “finest hour”, concluded that “Churchill’s dominant category, the single, central organizing principle of his moral and intellectual universe, is a historical imagination so strong, so comprehensive, as to encase the whole of the present and the whole of the future in a framework of a rich and multicolored past.” 

Churchill was a time traveler, at least in imagination, and his ability to read the tides of human events and the workings of character across the ages enabled him to see the patterns of the present - through the fog of war and the incredible proliferation of pressure and detail - and to grasp the history of the future.

In his time travels into the past, Churchill may have gained most from his ability to enter - fully - into the mind and situation of his great ancestor John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, who led the (uneasily) allied armies of the Grand Alliance to victory against the French in the early 18th century. His four-volume biography of Marlborough, written during his “wilderness years” when he was out of office in the 1930s”, is widely regarded his greatest literary work. Churchill announced that his intent was to unravel “the unfathomable mystery which Marlborough’s character represents.”

He learned from Marlborough’s steady resolve in adversity; early in his command Marlborough announced, “The issue in this matter is liberty or death.” He studied with Marlborough how to exercise leadership within an alliance, in a war involving much of the world and therefore offering multiple choices and rival priorities. Marlborough “never ceased to think of the war as a whole”; Churchill also was always looking for the big picture. Churchill noted that Marlborough’s success in command was related to his ability to enter the mind of his adversary: “The mental process of a general should lead him first to put himself faithfully in the position of the enemy, and to credit that enemy with the readiness to do what he himself would most dread….The safe course is to assume that the enemy will do his worst — i.e., what is most unwelcome."

Churchill concluded from Marlborough’s example that contrarians win when they are guided by accurate intuition. Marlborough made many command decisions that baffled or terrified generals with more conventional minds. 

Churchill was able to roam the past without being lost in it. Churchill’s command of history helped him to see the broad lines of a situation; he was able to swim through details without drowning in them.

 Churchill’s works of history were participatory. He wrote about events in which he or ancestors with whom he felt close affinity had taken part, and about causes he had espoused. There is no pretense of standing at the margins of the action as an impartial scholar. He said that his method was borrowed from Defoe’s Memoirs of a Cavalier, in which the author “hangs the chronicle” of great evens “upon the thread of the personal experiences of an individual.” 

"Imagination and History": text adapted from The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

 

 

The Strand of Imagination

I love playing architect of the imaginal realm. This means helping to design or co-create real places in the realm of true imagination where people can go - in lucid dreaming, shamanic journeys and imaginal exercises - to have adventures in discovery and healing. As a book lover, I especially like traveling and guiding people to various versions of a Secret Library or Magic Bookstore where they may have access to any kind of information or inspiration,and meet master teachers. I invite them to call up the memory of a place like a bookshop or museum where they were excited by the discovery of new ideas and images, and then use that memory as the portal for a visit to a space that will soon expand and deepen into something far beyond memory. Here is my account of what happened when I suggested to a circle of forty literate dreamers at a weekend workshop in Manhattan that we might travel together, fueled and focused by my shamanic drumming, to the iconic Strand bookstore and let it become our doorway to the Imaginal Realm where poets, shamans and mystics have always wanted to go.

THE STRAND OF IMAGINATION

We agree to meet at the Strand, the venerable, vast and lively bookstore at the corner of Broadway and East 12^th Street in Manhattan. The area used to be called Book Row, but of all the bookshops that flourished here around the time the Strand opened its doors in 1927, this is the sole survivor. It has remained a family business, ownership descending through the progeny of Ben Bass, the founder. In the time when the Strand boasted that it contained eight miles of books, a wag stated that the eight miles of New York worth preserving were inside its walls. The bookstore has grown since; it now boasts no less than 18 miles of books.

    In the year I lived in Manhattan, my arms were often sore from toting big shopping bags of twice-sold tales from the Strand up to my modest apartment in Yorkville. On flying visits to the city since, I have often failed to ration my book-buying at the Strand sufficiently to pass the weight inspection for suitcases at airports. Besides the expected and unexpected treasures in all the cases of old books, the Strand is the place to get a new book at half price. The velocity at which review copies pour into the store makes it hard to believe that many of those reviewers even opened their copies before generating a little extra income.
    The Strand has long been, for me, one of those magic bookshops where the shelf elves produce exactly the right book to guide or redirect a creative intent. When I was writing a chapter of a novella in which W.B.Yeats is at home in his rooms in the Woburn Buildings, off Tavistock Square, circa 1900, my youngest daughter - who did not know about my project - visited the rare book room at the Strand and brought me back a rare prize, a memoir of Yeats by John Masefield in which the English poet evokes beautifully the experience of visiting the Irish poet in that London apartment.
    The Strand has a place in my imaginal geography, as well as my physical rambles. I go there in night dreams, and in wide-awake shamanic journeys to places in the imaginal realm, a world of true imagination beyond the physical (but not the inner) senses where we can access wise teachers and extraordinary places of healing, initiation and higher learning.
     When I was writing about Harriet Tubman, who used her dreams and visions to guide escaping slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad before the American Civil War, I found myself roaming the Strand in the middle of the night in my astral body, in that wondrously fluid state of consciousness that sleep researchers call hypnagogia and I prefer to call the twilight zone. Down in the basement, I met Harriet Tubman, wearing a hat pulled down over her forehead and a shapeless coat. She showed me that her skills as a tracker and guide owed a great deal to the shamanic ways of the Ashante, her father's people, and especially to the leopard, the favorite animal spirit of West African shamans and shapeshifters. I used the insights I gained in the basement of the Strand that night in my chapter on Tubman in The Secret History of Dreaming.
    I shared this "old" dream with the participants in a shamanic dreaming workshop I led at the New York Open Center back in 2012. There was great excitement when I suggested that all of us could use the Strand as a portal for an adventure in the imaginal realm, with the aim of contacting master teachers or practitioners in whatever fields most interested us. Most people in the workshop knew the Strand.
    I explained that we could use our memories of the physical bookstore in order to enter a space beyond it. We might find that by opening any book, we could enter the world it contained. We might discover that a bookshop in Manhattan could become the gateway to a Secret Library, where all knowledge is accessible.
    When I was sure that everyone had been seized by the intention to explore, and the workshop participants had placed their bodies in comfortable positions for journeying, I used my gee-whiz technology - a single-headed frame drum - to provide fuel and focus for our group adventure. I always journey for myself while drumming for the group; I immediately found myself at the corner of Broadway and 12^th. After a cursory look at the sale items in the stalls on the sidewalk, I headed into the store. I noticed a memorial display for Maurice Sendak, and paused to check the prices of recycled review copies of a few novels I had recently purchased: Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Prisoner of Heaven, Alan Furst's Mission to Paris, Joseph Kanon's Istanbul Passage.

    I took the stairs to the basement and found Graham Greene waiting for me there. I have talked to that grand English novelist and entertainer (or the part of myself that relishes him) before, and he has given me excellent advice on the practice of writing, advice I have not always followed. Greene was a consummate professional, able to sit down and crank out his 750 words a day however many drinks he had shared with a Soviet agent, a whisky priest, or a bevy of filles de joie the night before. I wondered if he would nudge me towards trying my hand again at a tale of intrigue; in a former life, back in the 1980s, I published a series of popular spy novels. Ah, something more interesting. Greene offered me some tips on writing a memoir. I set my intention re-read his own autobiographical works, especially A Sort of Life and Ways of Escape.
    Behind Greene, among the stacks, I saw a dark-haired young fellow in a trenchcoat. Who was that? It gave me a shiver to realize I was looking at a much younger version of myself, the 1980s thriller writer, seen now very much as he appeared on the dust jacket of a couple of my early novels. I did not engage with him directly.
    I went to the right, down book-lined passages, and met other figures, including a magical child with a treasure chest full of stories for children that I might yet write. As I continued drumming, I found myself in a passage where books rose to the ceiling. The passage turned and turned in a spiral until - poof - I came out in a space where the first thing I saw was a spray of black feathers, and the black embroidered hem of a long woman's dress.
    I found myself in the presence of a gloriously over-the-top lady of a certain age, still desirable and very sure of her place in a social and literary world she had made for herself. She was dressed all in black, with a black feather boa and a magnificent dress with plunging decolletage. She gave me her pen name and allowed me a glimpse of her life. Her admirers include American tycoons and European counts; she allows only a very select few to share her intimate favors. There are those in high places who rely on her as a psychic medium; it is her special pleasure to connect people with their past lives. Out of this life, she has written a wildly successful series of romps that blend the metaphysical with the bodice-ripper and the policier.
    I was astonished, though not altogether surprised, to realize that I knew this lady writer. At the end of the 1980s, when I had abandoned the commercial path, I found myself held up for a long time at a customs inspection. While I submitted to questions and inspections, I noticed a flamboyant woman in furs breezing past complaint officials at a parallel checkpoint; they whisked her Louis Vuitton bags through, uninspected. The lady in furs turned to me and blew me a kiss. She called to me, "Maybe we'll meet again."
    That was, of course, a dream. When I thought about it at the time, I chuckled, realizing that I had caught a glimpse of my inner Happy Hooker, the part of me that had been willing to put out my work for a price. Here she was again, in a black feather boa. Why?
   Write in my voice, said my Happy Hooker. Write in my name, if you like. You can still write about the things that matter to you, while you give people even more fun.

    Hmm. I'll need to think about that.
    When I sounded the recall with the drum, our intrepid dream travelers brought back a marvelous set of personal reports, featuring encounters with dead poets and master chefs, with a children's writer and a Neoplatonist philosopher. Wonderful what one can find, in the Strand of imagination.

Art:“Upstairs at the Strand Bookstore” acrylic painting by @jontwingley

Bear in the Secret Library

I have a secret library in my house. It contains several rooms filled with rare and precious books, many of them beautifully bound, arranged on bookcases that rise to the ceiling.

     It's hard to believe, but I often forget the very existence of this amazing cache. Often I remember it only when I am thinking of moving. Then I am in a lather to make sure that I don't leave any of the most important books behind. This task is not straightforward, because now I must find the concealed entrance to the secret library. Things have to be moved to free the wall without a door that will swing open if I can remember how to work the hidden catch.

     I remember a night when it took me a while to move what needed to be moved and open the false wall. Then I was able to go down a broad, rather grand staircase. I was surprised and delighted to see something unexpected on the bottom step: a very large bearskin. As I descended to it, the bearskin rose up and became a huge brown bear. I was so happy to be with Bear. I hugged him and danced around with him.

    Then I noticed that the whole first room of the library was full of animals. At first they looked like taxidermy specimens, stiff and stuffed. In front of the fireplace, noses in the air, were two great dogs who once lived with me; I loved them fiercely. Elsewhere in the room, I saw a red fox, a wolf, a mountain lion, a stag, a moose. As I moved around the room, they all came alive and I found myself at a joyous reunion with a council of animal guardians.

    Libraries can hold more than books. In your dreams, as in mine, you may find yourself in possession of a secret library. Try to remember it tonight, and see what you may want to transfer from your dream life into your waking world: knowledge that has always belonged to you, on another level;a book you have not yet written but can now bring through; a renewed connection with your animal spirits.

Photo by RM.

The Strand of Imagination

We agree to meet at the Strand, the venerable, vast and lively bookstore at the corner of Broadway and East 12^th Street in Manhattan. The area used to be called Book Row, but of all the bookshops that flourished here around the time the Strand opened its doors in 1927, this is the sole survivor. It has remained a family business, ownership descending through the progeny of Ben Bass, the founder. In the time when the Strand boasted that it contained eight miles of books, a wag stated that the eight miles of New York worth preserving were inside its walls. The bookstore has grown since; it now boasts no less than 18 miles of books.

    In the year I lived in Manhattan, my arms were often sore from toting big shopping bags of twice-sold tales from the Strand up to my modest apartment in Yorkville. On flying visits to the city since, I have often failed to ration my book-buying at the Strand sufficiently to pass the weight inspection for suitcases at airports. Besides the expected and unexpected treasures in all the cases of old books, the Strand is the place to get a new book at half price. The velocity at which review copies pour into the store makes it hard to believe that many of those reviewers even opened their copies before generating a little extra income.
    The Strand has long been, for me, one of those magic bookshops where the shelf elves produce exactly the right book to guide or redirect a creative intent. When I was writing a chapter of a novella in which W.B.Yeats is at home in his rooms in the Woburn Buildings, off Tavistock Square, circa 1900, my youngest daughter - who did not know about my project - visited the rare book room at the Strand and brought me back a rare prize, a memoir of Yeats by John Masefield in which the English poet evokes beautifully the experience of visiting the Irish poet in that London apartment.
    The Strand has a place in my imaginal geography, as well as my physical rambles. I go there in night dreams, and in wide-awake shamanic journeys to places in the imaginal realm, a world of true imagination beyond the physical (but not the inner) senses where we can access wise teachers and extraordinary places of healing, initiation and higher learning.
     When I was writing about Harriet Tubman, who used her dreams and visions to guide escaping slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad before the American Civil War, I found myself roaming the Strand in the middle of the night in my astral body, in that wondrously fluid state of consciousness that sleep researchers call hypnagogia and I prefer to call the twilight zone. Down in the basement, I met Harriet Tubman, wearing a hat pulled down over her forehead and a shapeless coat. She showed me that her skills as a tracker and guide owed a great deal to the shamanic ways of the Ashante, her father's people, and especially to the leopard, the favorite animal spirit of West African shamans and shapeshifters. I used the insights I gained in the basement of the Strand that night in my chapter on Tubman in The Secret History of Dreaming.
    I shared this "old" dream with the participants in a shamanic dreaming workshop I led at the New York Open Center last weekend. There was great excitement when I suggested that all of us could use the Strand as a portal for an adventure in the imaginal realm, with the aim of contacting master teachers or practitioners in whatever fields most interested us. Most people in the workshop knew the Strand.
    I explained that we could use our memories of the physical bookstore in order to enter a space beyond it. We might find that by opening any book, we could enter the world it contained. We might discover that a bookshop in Manhattan could become the gateway to a Secret Library, where all knowledge is accessible.
    When I was sure that everyone had been seized by the intention to explore, and the workshop participants had placed their bodies in comfortable positions for journeying, I used my gee-whiz technology - a single-headed frame drum - to provide fuel and focus for our group adventure. I always journey for myself while drumming for the group; I immediately found myself at the corner of Broadway and 12^th. After a cursory look at the sale items in the stalls on the sidewalk, I headed into the store. I noticed a memorial display for Maurice Sendak, and paused to check the prices of recycled review copies of a few novels I had recently purchased: Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Prisoner of Heaven, Alan Furst's Mission to Paris, Joseph Kanon's Istanbul Passage.

    I took the stairs to the basement and found Graham Greene waiting for me there. I have talked to that grand English novelist and entertainer (or the part of myself that relishes him) before, and he has given me excellent advice on the practice of writing, advice I have not always followed. Greene was a consummate professional, able to sit down and crank out his 750 words a day however many drinks he had shared with a Soviet agent, a whisky priest, or a bevy of filles de joie the night before. I wondered if he would nudge me towards trying my hand again at a tale of intrigue; in a former life, back in the 1980s, I published a series of popular spy novels. Ah, something more interesting. Greene offered me some tips on writing a memoir. I shall re-read his own autobiographical works, especially A Sort of Life and Ways of Escape.
    Behind Greene, among the stacks, I saw a dark-haired young fellow in a trenchcoat. Who was that? It gave me a shiver to realize I was looking at a much younger version of myself, the 1980s thriller writer, seen now very much as he appeared on the dust jacket of a couple of my early novels. I did not engage with him directly.
    I went to the right, down book-lined passages, and met other figures, including a magical child with a treasure chest full of stories for children that I might yet write. As I continued drumming, I found myself in a passage where books rose to the ceiling. The passage turned and turned in a spiral until - poof - I came out in a space where the first thing I saw was a spray of black feathers, and the black embroidered hem of a long woman's dress.
    I found myself in the presence of a gloriously over-the-top lady of a certain age, still desirable and very sure of her place in a social and literary world she had made for herself. She was dressed all in black, with a black feather boa and a magnificent dress with plunging decolletage. She gave me her pen name and allowed me a glimpse of her life. Her admirers include American tycoons and European counts; she allows only a very select few to share her intimate favors. There are those in high places who rely on her as a psychic medium; it is her special pleasure to connect people with their past lives. Out of this life, she has written a wildly successful series of romps that blend the metaphysical with the bodice-ripper and the policier.
    I was astonished, though not altogether surprised, to realize that I knew this lady writer. At the end of the 1980s, when I had abandoned the commercial path, I found myself held up for a long time at a customs inspection. While I submitted to questions and inspections, I noticed a flamboyant woman in furs breezing past complaint officials at a parallel checkpoint; they whisked her Louis Vuitton bags through, uninspected. The lady in furs turned to me and blew me a kiss. She called to me, "Maybe we'll meet again."
    That was, of course, a dream. When I thought about it at the time, I chuckled, realizing that I had caught a glimpse of my inner Happy Hooker, the part of me that had been willing to put out my work for a price. Here she was again, in a black feather boa. Why?
   Write in my voice, said my Happy Hooker. Write in my name, if you like. You can still write about the things that matter to you, while you give people even more fun.

    Hmm. I'll need to think about that.
    When I sounded the recall with the drum, our intrepid dream travelers brought back a marvelous set of personal reports, featuring encounters with dead poets and master chefs, with a children's writer and a Neoplatonist philosopher, with Chekhov and with Virginia Woolf. Wonderful what one can find, in the Strand of imagination.

Meeting my boy authors in the Dead Poets' Library

One of the places I love to go for creative inspiration is a Secret Library. The books are alive; open any one and you are magically transported into the realm for which it is a record and a key. Some of the books fly around on their own when not leashed to a long table or placed inside the fine mesh of bird cages of exquisite design.
     This is a place of dead poets who are very much alive. I have had many encounters with W.B.Yeats in the Secret Library. I was reckless enough to describe some of these in detail in my Dreamers' Book of the Dead on the principle well stated by Mark Twain (who is also no stranger to these premises) that "I don't want to hear about the Moon from someone who hasn't been there."
     The doors to the Secret Library open in dream, and through memory, and are oiled by the practice of going there and bringing back gifts and doing something creative with those gifts. I wrote the last phrase a little nervously, because I am aware I have yet to fulfill assignments given to me by the fiercest of the mentors I have ever encountered in my Secret Library.

I go up the stones steps and through the glass doors on a fine spring day when the fruit trees are in flower and the street is full of cheerful bicyclists in bright colors. I nod to the Librarian. I notice an unusual stir of activity in the lobby and the main reading room. These spaces are crowded with people, some familiar. I see Yeats in the distance, and Tolkien and C.S. Lewis with their pipes and pots of beer, and RLS romantically attired in Scottish dress. I see Jung, with a flash of kingfisher blue in the field around his three-piece woolen suit; and the bard with the silver brooch; and Borges in the corner, with a jeweler’s glass.
    I would love to consult with all of them. I'm not going to waste a second questioning whether they are real figures or figments of my imagination, as long as they can give me some good stuff, maybe the makings of a new book.
    But three boys block my way, clamoring for my attention. I would guess their ages as six, nine and twelve. They are very familiar. I have seen them in family photo albums, and in dreams.
    "What do you want?"
    "We've been telling you," says the six-year-old.
    "We've told you again and again, in dream after dream," says the twelve-year-old.
    "And you wouldn't listen," says nine-year-old Robert. Did I really have that many freckles when I was nine?

 "I’m listening now," I tell them. "What do you want?"

“I want a train,” says Six.

“I want toy soldiers,” says Nine

“I want girls, but not the yucky kind, and Nazis to fight,” says Twelve.

“I want a Bear,” says Six.

“I want a Lion,” says Nine.

“I want an Eagle,” says Twelve.

“I want my father,” says Six.

“I want my sister,” says Nine.

“I want the Mage of the Purple Mountain,” says Twelve.

They tell me, as a chorus: “You should listen to us much more than you do. We are the ones who can help you write the best book you have ever written, the one that everyone will want to read."
     I'm listening now.