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

The Dervish House

I read the last lines of The Dervish House and said, “Wonderful!” out loud. I want to read the book again to savor all that is in it and to understand more fully some of the intricate description of nanotechnology, hedge fund operations, the history of Sufi lodges, the legend of the Mellified Man, the geography of Istanbul.
    Ian McDonald is astonishingly deep and diverse in his knowledge. He writes about everything with exact and fine detail and vocabulary and – amazingly! – this is never wearisome, though it makes the book a slow (but always fascinating) read. I never doubted that his six main characters, sharing apartments in a converted dervish house on the Asian side of Istanbul, are Turks (if we include the elderly Greek “experimental economist”, Georghios Ferentinou, as we must).
    There are no concessions to the non-Turkish reader. Every Turkish word is given with the Turkish spelling and necessary diacritical marks. The sole concession is with jinn, rendered djinn, no doubt at the publisher’s insistence. Even Shams of Tabriz becomes Çams with the cedilla under the C.
     Just when you think the author can’t possibly trump himself, we read this on the penultimate page, where the focus is on Necmet, who has been turned into a shayk who sees djinn and talks to Hizir (the guide of those who have no earthly guide, called Khidr in Arabic) by a nano-pharmaceutical exploded in a terrorist suicide on a tram:

The army doctor...told him a story about the Mevlana, the great saint whose order built this tekke. The Mevlana has a friend, Shams of Tabriz, a spiritual friend, the other half of his soul, one spirit in two bodies. Together they explored the depths of God in ceaseless conversation. The dervishes grew jealous of the one-in-twoness and quietly killed Shams of Tabriz. When the Mevlana was unable to find his friend, the only possible conclusion was that they had merged and Shams was now part of him.

Why should I seek?
I am the same as he.
His essence speaks through me.
I have been looking for myself.

Ottoman dreaming and synchronicity magnets

A friend in Turkey reports a dream from last night in which we are both inspecting a book written in Ottoman Turkish, in the old Arabic script. She is surprised that I can read this text with ease.
     I am glad to confess that in waking life I could not read Ottoman Turkish without an interpreter! Yet I am put in mind of dreams of my own, over decades, in which I discover and am helped to decipher previously unknown or undervalued texts in Ottoman Turkish, Farsi, Egyptian and other languages.
     And I am reminded that help in such studies sometimes becomes available in interesting ways. I find that when I am giving focused attention to a certain line of study, or a creative project, coincidence comes to support me, sometimes through the agency of that benign spirit Arthur Koestler called the Library Angel, a shelf elf who makes books and documents turn up (or disappear) in highly unlikely ways. This works through the internet too.

      Two summers ago, in 2010, I was trying to document a story about shared dreaming and war magic from the time of Suleiman the Magnificent. The story involves a “dream master” who supposedly had twelve people enter lucid dreaming together on a huge round bed to provide energy for an astral operation in which he entered the mind of a European prince and altered the fortunes of a battle.

      I first came upon this intriguing account in The Understanding of Dreams, an old anthology of cross-cultural dream narratives, edited by Raymond de Becker, an elusive and somewhat murky character. He gave his source as an earlier book by one N. de Helva titled La Science impériale des songes, published in Paris in 1935. After much hunting, I was unable to locate a copy of this book anywhere, or even identify the publisher. When I compared the de Becker version with the historical records of the campaigns and household of Suleiman, I became more and more suspicious that someone had constructed a tall tale. But I realized that my investigation would not be complete until I had probed documentary sources available only in Ottoman Turkish.

     I said out loud, around midnight, "I need a Turk."
     The next instant, an email arrived in my inbox from a Turkish doctor, wanting to know about a retreat I was leading that fall. She had attended a conference where I had spoken 18 months earlier; we had had no contact since. I now seized the opportunity to ask her whether she could check out the story of the Ottoman “dream master” for me. Within hours, she started sending me documents and original translations from Turkish sources that not only confirmed my suspicions about de Becker’s cavalier use of materials but vastly expanded my understanding of the practice of dreaming and imagination in the Ottoman empire.
     Even if the story of Suleiman and the dream master was a tall tale, there is no doubt that dreaming was of great interest to the Ottomans, who traced the origin of their dynasty to a dream of Osman, the founder. Now I am going to Istanbul, perhaps I will find myself on the trail of a literary thriller. What if the "Registre des songes à la Cour ottomane", cited by the mysterious and untraceable "N.Helva" as his source, really exists?

      

People ask why some of us seem to have more frequent and more exciting experiences of synchronicity than others. I think there are periods when any of us can become a synchronicity magnet, attracting events and encounters in rich profusion according to the energy and intentions that travel with us.

      We observe synchronicity at work in the world more often when we are open to seeing it, and ready to play with the signs and symbolic pop-ups of everyday life.
       But there is more to it than just our willingness to pay attention. Like calls to like, and the call is stronger when our passions or curiosity are most actively engaged in a life passage or a course of study or exploration. Yeats spoke, with poetic clarity, about the “mingling of minds” that can take place when we are giving our best to a certain line of study; he noted that we draw the support of like minds, including intelligences from beyond our ken and beyond our world, who share our interests.

       Oh yes, the Turkish doctor traveled to the United States that fall for my retreat.

I recount the story of Suleiman and the Dream Master in The Three “Only” Things. Though I now believe the story is not historical, one may say of it, with the Italians, “If it’s not true, it’s well found”.

Graphic: Jean-Baptiste van Mour, Grand Vizier in audience in Topkapi palace

Turkish delight

I've been enjoying a new riff of Turkish synchronicity this week.

First, I received the image of the cover of the new Turkish edition of my book THE THREE "ONLY" THINGS.

Second, within a minute of that, I received an invitation (from a different person, someone I have never met) to lead a workshop at a beach resort town on the Turkish coast next year.

Third, within 30 minutes, a friend posted a comment at my Dream Gates blog in which she mentioned that she will be in Turkey next summer and has been dreaming that a tiger will be her guide in this trip. At the exact moment I read her post, I was cutting the picture of a tiger from a greeting card I had received to use as a bookmark.

Sometimes it's hard to avoid noticing that there are things that WANT to happen, and forces at play (in the play of coincidence) that help us to get that message.

I wrote a previous piece about an amazing (even by my standards) case of synchronicity or "mental texting" involving Turkey at my Dream Gates blog. On that occasion, exhausted by long investigation of an incident of alleged dream sending in the time of Suleiman the Magnificent, I said out loud, around midnight, "I need a Turk!" (to help me with documents in Turkish in the archives of the Topkapi Palace). Two minutes later, I received an email from a doctor in Turkey (unconnected with the latest riff of coincidence) who readily volunteered, when asked, to help with my research.