Become a Kairomancer and Navigate by Synchronicity

 Synchronicity is when the universe gets personal. Though the word “synchronicity” is a modern invention — Jung made it up because he noticed that people have a hard time talking about coincidence — the phenomenon has been recognized, and highly valued, from the most ancient times. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus maintained that the deepest order in our experienced universe is the effect of “a child playing with game pieces” in another reality. As the game pieces fall, we notice the reverberations, in the play of coincidence.
      When we pay attention, we find that we are given signs by the world around us every day. Like a street sign, a synchronistic event may seem to say Stop or Go, Dead End or Fast Lane.  Beyond these signs, we find ourselves moving in a field of symbolic resonance which not only reflects back our inner themes and preoccupations, but provides confirmation or course correction. A symbol is more than a sign: it brings together what we know with what we do not yet know.
    Through the weaving of synchronicity, we are brought awake and alive to a hidden order of events, to the understory of our world and our lives. You do not need to travel far to encounter powers of the deeper world or hear oracles speak. You are at the center of the multidimensional universe right now. The extraordinary lies in plain sight, in the midst of the ordinary, if only you pay attention. The doors to the Otherworld open from wherever you are, and the traffic moves both ways. 
    I invented the word kairomancer to describe someone who is ready to recognize and act in special moments of synchronicity when time works differently and opportunity strikes. It incorporates the name of Kairos, a Greek god who personifies a kind of time that is altogether different from tedious tick-tock time: that special moment of jump time when more is possible than you imagined before.
    To become a kairomancer, you need to check your attitude as you walk the roads of this world, because your attitude goes ahead of you, generating events around the next corner. You need to develop your personal science of shivers. You want to take dreams more literally and the events of waking life more symbolically. You need to take care of your poetic health, reading what rhymes in a day, or a season. You want to expect the unexpected, to make friends with surprises, and never miss that special moment when the universe gives you an invisible wink or handshake.

My book Sidewalk Oracles offers eighteen kairomancy games you can play any day.

Photo: The Houses Have Eyes. Taken in Sibiu, Romania by Robert Moss 

Walking a Dream

 

Jung said that one of the things he liked to do with a dream was to “circumambulate” it, wander around it, considering it from many angles. He liked to do this while in physical motion, wandering around his house on the lake, through the garden, into the woods.

This is a grand way to get greater perspective on a dream. Walking with a dream for a while, you may find that more of the dream narrative returns to you. You are almost sure to get commentary of some kind from what you notice playing around you, wherever you happen to be going.

You may find that both inner and outer perceptions accomplish what a dreaming people of central Africa say we must do with a dream. Like other cultures that value dreaming, the Yansi of Zaire have special words for dreamwork practice. According to anthropologist Mubuy Mpier, the Yansi share dreams every morning, and the core of their approach to dream exploration is embodied in the term a bumi ndoey, which means to “turn a dream.” The teaching is that we need to turn a dream carefully, as we might lift a great rock, to see what is underneath, on the side that is not initially visible.

It’s not only a matter of letting the world illuminate the dream; it’s a case of letting the dream illumine the world. “We do not always have only to sit with closed eyes, moving around in our heads, to draw closer to an image. We can put it in our pocket and carry it with us throughout days and nights,” as Mary Watkins wrote in Waking Dreams, her passionate appeal for us to let images speak to us and through us. “You not only see different things, you see things differently” when you are seized by poetic imagery, poet and scholar Kathleen Raine observed.

One of the things we want to do when we are walking a dream is to notice when it starts to play out in the world around us. There might be a considerable time gap between the dream and its unfolding in the world, so patience and a decent memory — assisted by your journal! — may be required. When a dream does begin to manifest in external reality, let an alert flash on your inner control panel. In my mind, the default version is: Dream Playing Out Now.

When the dream starts playing out, you have several options. They are not mutually exclusive. If there is no sense of danger and the original dream left you feeling happy and confident, you may be content to let the dream play again and enjoy it with all of your senses. Maybe you’ll find that a sense of “rightness” comes with this: that you have made the right choice, that you are in the right place, that at last you have found the right friend or lover or teacher. If you had a darker sense of the dream — if it involved risk or danger — you will want to be poised to change the script, solve a problem, avoid that accident or that drama at the office.

As a dream plays out in exterior reality, you may notice that its symbolism is now alive in your world. This can become a whole education on how to refresh and renew our perspectives on what is a dream and what is real. We need to take dreams more literally and waking life symbolically.

A dream may be fairly literal in the sense that it reveals something that is happening or will happen in the future in the ordinary world. Yet when the dream is enacted, we see that there is symbolism in the physical event. So a literalistic dream can point to a symbolic play in the outer world. Let’s consider an example.

A man I will call Yves dreamed that his ring finger was cut off in an accident. There was blood and pain, and he saw the splintered bone, and woke with feelings of dread and fear. When he brought the dream to me, I asked very early, as is my practice, whether it was possible that he could lose a finger in a literal accident, maybe cutting or slicing something. Did his work involve such risks? Well, yes, it did. He worked part-time pruning vines on a hillside in southern France, where he lived. He agreed that he would need to be more watchful about how he handled the secateurs.

We proceeded to discuss the symbolic levels of the dream. Hard to miss the significance of losing the ring finger in terms of a relationship. He was not married, but he had a live-in partner and felt her interest had begun to stray. This brought in the Freudian bit. Did the loss of “tall man” — the middle finger — speak of a decline in sexual performance?

Yves walked with his dream. Within the week, it began to play out when he made a false move while working in the vineyard. He only narrowly managed to avoid cutting off his own finger with the pruning shears. It was the ring finger, as in the dream. The partial fulfillment of his terrible dream led him to confront the symbolic issues. He sat down with his partner. She told him, with the sexual candor for which the French can be notable, that she was dissatisfied with his sexual performance and had already taken another lover. They agreed to separate.

Text adapted from Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library. 

 Photo by RM

If You Don't Have a Dream, Ask for One from the World

One morning when I woke with no dream recall, I stepped out into the street to walk my dog saying, "I would love the world to give me a dream."
     A man walking his own dog across the street called out to me immediately, "Robert, do you have a moment? I'd like to tell you a dream." He was a neighbor I knew slightly. Our previous conversations were usually about our dogs.
    Of course, I hastened across the street. He was very excited. He had just dreamed that he was riding on a train with a bear, sharing a basket of apples. The train divided and he found himself in a different railroad car. He said, "I was glad I still had the basket of food, but sorry that the bear and I parted ways."
   We had a lively discussion about how the dream might reflect choices he would need to make about his job, and the need not to part company with all that the bear meant to him - healing, play, living a natural life - while earning his meal ticket. He was grateful for our dreamplay, and told me later that it helped him to push for - and arrange - the right job transfer.
    I was grateful that the world had literally given me a dream when I needed one.
    The incident was also an example of the workings of one of the favorite oracles of the ancients. They believed that voices from the deeper reality are heard in a kledon - sounds or speech coming out of silence or the undifferentiated hubbub of everyday life. In my book Sidewalk Oracles I explain how to listen for a kledon as daily practice.
   Whatever your relationship with your night life, when you step out into the day make it your intention to be alert and alive to the dreamlike symbolism of what is going on around you.
   If you have a theme for guidance, carry that with you. Get a statement clear in your mind, "I would like guidance on...." [you fill in the blank].Then be willing to receive the first unusual or unlikely thing that enters your field of perception as a message from the world, a dream delivered on the street.

photo credit: Bear on BART

Dreaming by the Book

I am often asked where do you start if you are new to my books. The linear answer is: with Conscious Dreaming (my first and still my foundation book introducing my marriage of shamanism and dreamwork) and/or The Three "Only" Things (easily accessible, with lots of games I developed later, including the Lightning Dreamwork process and fun ways of navigating by synchronicity).
    The history professor in me says: start with The Secret History of Dreaming. The healer in me who loves to see the light of returning soul in the eyes says: go for Dreaming the Soul Back Home. The part of me who walks close to Death, and to dead poets, nominates The Dreamer's Book of the Dead. The dream teacher who wants to see circles of active dreamers growing everywhere, now, says: Active Dreaming. 
    The poet in me says: start with Here, Everything is Dreaming, filled with poems and stories that stream straight from the dreaming. The novelist in me says: go read the three novels in my Cycle of the Iroquois, Fire Along the Sky, The Firekeeper, and The Interpreter. These flow from my dreams and "far memories" and are a window into the shamanic dreaming practices of Native Americans as well as the life dreams of pioneers on America's first frontier. 
    The frequent flyer in me says, if you are already feel at home in the multiverse, and want more travel itineraries, go for Dreamgates. The fellow whose life was turned upside down, and is still turning, after an ancient Mohawk/Huron woman shaman called him in dreams and visions, says, go for Dreamways of the Iroquois. The man who succeeded in staying alive in this world by reading and acting on dreams of the possible future picks Dreaming True.  
     If you like audio, you can go for my Sounds True series Dream Gates: A Journey into Active Dreaming. (This is not a book on tape, and please don't confuse it with Dreamgates the book, which was written later and has different content). If you like video, play with my video series The Way of the Dreamer (Psyche Productions) in which I not only talk but demonstrate the core techniques of Active Dreaming with the help of a lively circle of dreamers. This is now available for digital download. My recording of shamanic drumming for dream travelers, Wings for the Journey, is available for audio download.
     I can't pick a favorite, and yet I must admit I have special fondness for The Boy Who Died and Came Back, a memoir of my adventures in the multiverse since I literally died and came back as a child in my native Australia. 
     And I am excited by the publication of my latest book, Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life.  This is all about dreaming wide awake, full of wonderful games - like playing Sidewalk Tarot - and the 12 Rules for Becoming a Kairomancer. 

Black dog gives me a sign

Prague

I was in high spirits, swinging my black dog stick, as I walked down the cobbled winding street for the first session in the four-day series of adventures in Active Dreaming I am leading at Maitrea in Prague. My spirits rose higher when I saw there was a friendly black dog out for his evening walk right in front of me. I am in favor of personal omens, and for many years the appearance of a friendly black dog has been a happy omen for me. On Týnská ulička, the black dog squatted in front of me and proceeded to pump out a prodigious quantity of poop on the sidewalk,right at my feet. Hmm, did this mean my evening was going to be crappy? I decided to cleave to the traditional belief that shit, as a dream symbol, is auspicious, boding abundance and fortune. In the Greco-Roman world, the belief was related the fact that excrement goes into underworld, from which we get gold and silver. A name for the Lord of the Underworld is Pluto, meaning the Wealthy (not the Disney dog, though there is another canine connection) from which we derive the word "plutocrat." My choice of symbolic frames of reference worked out well. I opened the evening workshop with my fresh story. Czechs have a great, often very earthy, sense of humor, and the sixty people packed into our space loved my dog story. "That touched my poetic intestine," one of them laughed, using a wonderful Czech tongue-in-cheek expression. We received an abundance of gifts as we proceeded to play my Coincidence Card Game, turning a simple deck of index cards into an impromptu oracle that delivered amazingly specific and arousing responses to the questions we posed on life issues. The black dog dump gave me a great way to ensure that we all had our sense of humor in good working order at the start of play. The general title of my series in Prague is "On Wings of Dreams". The black dog episode, and the funny story it gave us, will make it likely that we bring all our discoveries and heady adventures in flying between the worlds back down to solid ground by the close of play.

We spent some time in the class that followed this sidewalk oracle discussing how you come to recognize personal omens, and how - if they are to be practical, rather than "mere" superstitions - you are going to want to watch closely what follows after one of them turns up on the roads of life. I provide guidance on this in my book Sidewalk Oracles, from which I excerpt the following:

Game Rules for Recognizing Personal Omens

1. Start by checking on superstitions you may have inherited or picked up from others. For example,that walking under a ladder or having a black cat walk in front of you is bad luck, or that having a bird poop on your head or your car might mean money is coming. Have any of these supposed omens worked for you the way they are supposed to? If so, keep them on your personal list of practical omens. If not, scratch them.

2. Check recurring images or incidents that catch your attention.

3. Keep track of what happens after sightings of this kind. Does a certain kind of incident follow? Does the day turn out well or badly? Does the repeated number or similar sighting seem only to be saying, “Listen up, pay attention”?

4. Make a short list of your personal omens, the ones that seem to work, and pay attention to what follows your next sightings of them.

Playing Sidewalk Tarot: "He Can't Kill Both of Us, Can He?"

One of the everyday oracles the Greeks valued most highly was the kledon. A kledon is sound or speech coming out of silence or undifferentiated noise. On a gritty city street, I received a kledon that gave me exact guidance on how to handle a conflictive situation.
     My kledon that day was inspired by my little dog Oskar.
     Oskar is a miniature Schnauzer who weighs about twenty pounds. Walking my little dog towards the park, I was debating with myself whether I could manage to take on two big new projects. Each would demand a great amount of time, energy and focus. Worse, it was possible that they could prove to be mutually competing.
      I had this theme on my mind when a stranger got out of his truck. As he approached me, he pointed his chin at my dog and said, "He can't kill us both at the same time, can he?"
     I felt that behind the joke, a joker of a larger kind was in play.
     I had been asking myself:  Can I handle two new projects at the same time? The kledon I received was “He can't kill us both at the same time, can he?” It did not cause brain damage to figure out the connection. I had been told I could not tackle more than one project at a time.
     I would have to “kill” one of the new projects. I made an instant choice, but now had to find a way to break the news to the project manager I was about to disappoint.
     When I made the call, he was not happy at all. The conversation was strained until I told him my dog story. When I repeated the line, “He can't kill both of us at the same time,” the manager roared with laughter. He shouted, "I get it!"
      I thanked him, and gave a nod to the joker I sensed behind the joke on the street that day.

      This is an example of one of the ways I play the game I call Sidewalk Tarot. I started using the phrase after I noticed that things keep literally popping up, like tarot cards, on the streets and sidewalks of the small city where I live. Anything that enters your field of perception, through any of your senses, within your chosen time frame may count as a card in play, even as one of the greater trumps.

Adapted from SidewalkOracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Love beyond death on another plane

I have been away from this blog for three weeks, engaged in teaching and travel in three European countries: the Czech Republic, France and Spain. I carried a travel journal, as always, and let it fill with things glimpsed along the road and with the adventures shared in the workshops and trainings. But I needed a break from writing for publication, even in the evanescent form of a blog. I had finished proofing the pages of my new book, Sidewalk Oracles, just before getting on my first flight to Europe in May, and had been pumping out all kinds of new texts in connection with the launch of my new course for The Shift Network, "Dreaming Wide Awake."
    Yesterday, on my last morning in Prague, I took a stroll along the Vltava river and saw the following slogan: Nejlepší program když nemás program. It can be translated as "The best program is to have no program" or perhaps, "The best schedule is to have no schedule." This seemed like a little nudge of confirmation from the world about taking some time off from writing to lie fallow and see what wants to come through.
     I received a different kind of nudge on my first flight on my long journey home later that day. My rowmate was a reader, with a used copy of a collection of short stories by John Sayles she had picked up at Shakespeare & Son in Prague. We were soon talking about Czech writers, especially Milan Kundera. She volunteered that she had attended the well-known Iowa writers' workshop "decades ago." Yes, she had kept on writing. "I have finished several novels, but they are all in the garage."
    I said I admired anyone who completed a book, especially without the benign pressure of an editor or agent who is waiting and wanting to receive it.
    "I do have an agent," she told me. "He's only been enthusiastic about one of my novels. I heard from him just before I came on this trip. He wants me to do a lot of work on that book, so I decided to let it go."
    Intrigued, I asked her if she would like to share something about the novel. "I guess you could call it a ghost story," she said, with a little hesitation.
    "You mean ghosts as in shapes floating in midair, and making funny bumps in the night? Or do you mean a story of an encounter between the dead and the living?"
     She meant the latter. She explained that her novel centered on a love that survives death. Grounded in her intimate knowledge of a locale in the East Bay area near San Francisco, the story recounts the love between an unlikely couple - a lifeguard and a female minister - that survives her premature death.
    I told her that people are hungry for good writing on this theme. I mentioned my work with dreams of the deceased, and reported that the number #1 reason why people have told me their dreams, over the years, is that they have had an encounter with someone who has died and need confirmation that this kind of experience is for real - and guidance on where to go with it. I mentioned that on Friday I am giving a lecture at Unity Church in Madison, Wisconsin, on "Dreaming with the Deceased".
    By the time we landed in Frankfurt, my flight companion was eager to get back to that novel about a love that survives death, and get it on the road to publication. Guidance from this synchronistic encounter worked both ways. I have had it in mind for a long time to try to turn my personal encounters with Death and with situations on the Other Side into something that can be published as a novel. 
    So synchronicity on another plane played literary adviser for both of us.


Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Sychronicity in Everyday Life will be published by New World Library in October. It contains a chapter with fresh stories of chance encounters during airline travel.