Adventures through the Dream Gates: Meeting Great Turtle

 

This is a story about what you may gain if you stay with a dream after waking and let a fuller story unfold. I rediscovered it while engaged in a favorite pastime: opening an old journal at random and seeing what an experience I recorded years or decades ago may say to me now. Sometimes old mysteries remain unsolved. I often notice recurring themes and situations that help me to become more aware of my attitudes and behavior, providing a necessary witness perspective on my life roads.        
      Sometimes a dream I did not understand at the time has meaning and application for me today because subsequent events have provided a context. I notice again and again that I dreamed events long before they played out – hard evidence, of the only form relevant here, of long-range precognition.  I discover that I missed warnings or advisories that could have smoothed my path and try to learn from my lapses how to get better at discerning and acting on oneiric clues to the possible future.
      Sometimes a dream I recorded looks like a dramatic production, maybe an instalment of a streaming tv series, staged by a personal film crew behind the curtain of the world. Very often - and this is most interesting for me - my dream reports seem to contain memories of events in another reality: a real life world that is running on a different time continuum or in an alternate universe near or far from the ordinary one.
     The report that follows appears to belong to the latter category.The action is played out in another reality, starting with an alternate version of a country where I used to live. When I stay with the dream, something irrupts from the mythic depth, a great power of Earth and of deeper knowing acknowledged by the First Peoples of the land where I now live. The gift of connection with Great Turtle is a blessing in the ordinary world today, as it was eight years ago. 

January 3, 2017

Dream and lucid dream reentry

I save a turtle, Great Turtle saves me

My youngest daughter is driving. We are in London. I tell her to head for Green Park so I can walk the dog there. I wave in the general direction. However, she drives us into a very narrow, twisting street in an area I don’t recognize. It’s very dangerous. Cars and trucks keep rushing at us from around blind corners, in the middle of the road, which has narrowed so only one vehicle can pass at a time. We come to a stop at what is virtually a hairpin bend, and just avoid a collision with a car that shoots out from behind it. My daughter is quite upset. I persuade her to stay in the car while I walk the dog.
    The dog and I are now in a shopping area. Time has changed. It seems that shops in a colonnade at my left hand are just opening. We walk behind two short squat women. One turns into a shop; she may be going to open it. They bid each other goodbye and the second lady walks on with a dog with silky hair that hangs to the ground.
    My dog and I pass them. Unusually, he takes no interest in the long-haired dog. He is after something up ahead. I glimpse it under a lamppost. It looks like a pigeon that has gotten hold of a paper plate. My dog rushes at it, with me hurrying behind. It jumps up onto my left shoulder. I am surprised to see that it is a little turtle. The “paper plate” is its shell.
     I experiment with removing the turtle. It clings to me with determination. Since I have not figured out what to do with it – beyond keeping it away from my dog – this is okay.

My body is stirring in the bed. Grey light is spilling through the bedroom curtains. I am fully lucid. I am in London and in bed in upstate New York. I could leave the dream now, but I want to stay in it. I want to take care of the little turtle that is still clutching my shoulder. My sensations in my dream body are more acute than those of the dormant bdy in bed. 
    I walk with a protective hand over the turtle while I keep my dog on a short leash with my other hand. I look for a safe place to set down the turtle. There is a large garden on the next corner. Behind an ornamental iron fence, I see steps leading down to a pond. There is a sculpture garden and there are statues of animals – including a turtle – there. This seems like a good place to release my little refugee.
    I open the gate and walk down the steps. I tie the dog up while I set down the turtle near the pond. It seems fine now.
    But there is a tremendous stir in the waters. They fountain upwards. With a great roar an immense being rises from the water. Its great head looms over me. I look up at the leathery skin, the lures of the tongue, the ancient, heavy-lidded eyes. I know in this moment I am looking at Great Turtle, A’nonwara, the Teacher of the Deep. In its gaze, I remember the story of the Real People: how the Light Twin descended to the deep realm of Great Turtle, to learn how to wage the eternal battle with the Dark Twin.   
    Great Turtle wants me to descend to his realm. I let myself drop. I am on my back in the water, falling, falling. I have no problem breathing. I go through utter dark to a place of light. There is a world of light own here, in the depths of water. Here Turtle adjusts its form and becomes humanoid (nothing like the Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles, however). Knowledge streams into me, of how life came from another world to the world that was danced into being on Turtle's back.
    Tosa sasa nikon'hren. "Do not let your mind fall." Do not forget the higher world, Earhth-in-the -Sky, that contains the origin and purpose of life on Earth. When humans let their minds fall, they bring down the Dark Times. 

I returned from this adventure feeling blessed.

I ran a reality check on the contents of my dream. I know Green Park and often walked there when I lived in London. I am certain I will never walk my little dog there. I have been in London with my daughter and we could make a future trip but it is most unlikely she would be driving. I don't think the dream anticipates a literal future situation, but rather an alternate reality which becoems the stage for a deeper - indeed a mythic - drama. 
    I live on what Native Americans call Turtle Island. I have great respect for the snapping turtle (the kind in the dream) and its cousin the sea turtle. They can’t retreat into their shells. Their underbellies are not armored apart from a tiny shield piece called a plastron. I have studied the cosmology of the Iroquois (the Onkwehonwe, or “Real People”) in which Great Turtle not only offers its back as a home for Sky Woman but becomes a form of the Great Teacher of the Deep. I have swum with sea turtles. 

I immediately made a drawing of Great Turtle. His fierce appearance reflects my original nervousness as this huge creature exploded from the water. His intentions, however, were wholly benign.

When I went back through my journal, tracking all my turlte sightings in both worlds over several decades, I rediscovered a poem I wrote to honor Great Turtle in 2012, five years before our unexpected encounter in Green Park:

A'nonwara (Turtle Dreaming) 

I am the turtle that does not hide.
I wear the armor of a knight, not a skulker.
My vulnerable belly says, Get me if you can;
I stick my neck out.

You call me slow, but on water
I am faster than you, and fast on land.
Deep down, I am the teacher you need
to show you how to fight the Dark One.

I am the broad back you live on.
Ignore me for too long,
go on harming my other children
and I will shake you off my back.

Journal drawing: "Great Turtle Rises" by Robert Moss

Location, location, location

The Realtors' motto is also an imperative for dream explorers. I try to bring back every possible detail of a dream location, especialy when it is unknown to me in ordinary reality. Sometimes I can match it to a physical location that I may visit in the future. Sometimes the dream place exists in its own reality, and what happens there stays there - except in my journal and dream sharing.

In a dream last night, I cheked into a hotel in Germany.I was traveling with my two sons, sons I don't have in ordinary life. They wanted to explore the old city we cound see from the hotel, bt I did not want to drve at night and I told them we wouldhave dinner in the hotel.

I return from the dream remembering, in exact detail, the layout of the public spaces in the hotel, though its namehas escaped me. Lying on my back, head sightly raised agisnt the pillows, I make it my game owalk slowly through the hotel again. I return to the airy greenhouse-likes space where I sat my boys down to study enormous menus under a leaded glass ceiling. The young fair-haired lady at the next table is still looking over work papers.

I pad again through the lushly carpeted lobby where a fire is burning in the hearth. I nod to the very correct grey-suited lady standing guard at the reception desk. I again inspect the formal restaurant with its cherrywood paneling and bright lights - the chefs want you to see their creations - that I thought too stuffy for my boys. The diners are elegantly dressed, the waiters of course wear black tie. A prosperous family is sharing roast goose.

I duck my head into the brew pub with all its pipes and barrels and so many beers on tap. I want tofind a dining area with a view over the water to the old city, the view I amired when we arrived here. It seems none of the restaurants and bars on this level overlook the lake.

I think we are near Munich.

My search inside the dream locale naturally orients my search online. I seek "Munich hotels with a view". I dwell for a while with pleasant images of the Kleinhesseloher See, a lake in the public park known as English Gardens in the heart of Munich. The view from my dream hotel was a little more scruffy. I found something strongly resembling it at the website of The Flushing Meadows, a trendy, upscale contemporary hotel an hour's drive from Munich. Could I go there in the future? Always possible. But not with my sons.

I take a closer look at these boys I know only in the dream. Each has the dark brown hair and the oval face I had at their ages, 8 and 10. They could be Younger Roberts. However, they have different names (that I don't need to share here) and it seems clear to me that they have their own identities. I'll look forward to spending more time with them, in what may be an alternate life.

I seem to be much younger in the German hotel than I am writing these lines. I may be in a different body altogether.

Wrestling a dream report from the Undertoad

Just for fun, here's a note from my journal on what it took to bring home a report from a dream excursion in the early hours today:

To bed after 3 am still fizzing with excitement over all my discoveries in a late night reading binge. I am in bed less than two hours before I shoot up to the surface from a dream I nearly lose because sleep still grips me like a powerful undertow, trying to pull me back down. I also need to go to the bathroom.
    Torn between the call to the bathroom, the tug of sleep, and the fading brilliance of the dream, I choose the dream. I will myself to peck out the details of my dream excursion on my phone, fighting with sleep, eyelids closing after every few words, making endless typos, hauling myself back. In that other world

I am wearing a white terrycloth robe with a dark blue bird, wings spread in flight, over the pocket. It’s just a bathrobe but people think I am a wizard in professional garb.

When I’ve captured the essential scenes, I flop back against the pillows. The bathroom can wait. And it does, until I surface with another dream after another hour, eager to get that down too and see if my earlier efforts were worthwhile. They were. My journal report runs to three typed pages and contains many leads and research and creative assignments. I am energized and delighted, with further first-hand confirmation that in dreams, we can travel without leaving home.
     I reflect on my relationship with the undertow of sleep. I want to call it the Undertoad, a word John Irving gave us in The World According to Garp. Let me be clear that I am not opposed to sleep. I have simply never needed or wanted to conk out and sleep like the dead for six or seven or eight hours at a go as some recommend. All of my life I have been a biophasic or polyphasic sleeper, resting and dreaming in two or more periods within the diurnal cycle,avoiding set routines as far as I can manage. In these lockdown times, when I don't have to get to an airport to catch a plane or start an in-person workshop on time, I am more than ever master of my own cycle. I don't recommend that anyone should try to follow my cycles unless you receive a strong direct calling and your metabolism can sustain it.
     When I have to sleep it may be because my body demands some industrial rest and I listen to my body more often than not. On some occasions I have to lie down  because something or someone in another reality is calling me. Robert, we need you now. When I heed this summons I may find myself back in a continuous life drama that has been unfolding over years in an alternate reality. Sometimes I find myself on assignment, called to help someone who is in trouble on either side of physical death. Often I am called to lead workshops (this was going on again this morning), to play teacher and healer, or commune with colleagues in the scholar city of Anamnesis or in the astral realm of Luna. Again and again, I find the ancestors calling, calling. Ancestors of my bloodlines,and of the lands where I have lived or traveled  and of spiritual lineages connected to mine.

     How much I can bring back from these excursions sometimes depends on how willing I am to wrestle with sleep or routine signals from the soft animal of the body. My ability to satisfy the wishes of the body, and of sleep, and dream, is greatest when I can trip lightly trough the twilight space between awake and sleep, and sleep and awake, and greatest of all when I can sustain continuity of consciousness through all the transitions. But sometimes the transits are sudden and bumpy, like Jake Sully jolting in and out of his glorious blue body in Avatar, or Ed Harris coming up from The Abyss, or David Bowie’s landing in The Man Who Fell to Earth. It’s all good.

    One more time: please do not attempt try to follow my example-and definitely not,my polyphasic relationship with sleep! - unless you find this natural and irresistible. To riff on a saying of the dream shamans of the Daur Mongols, everyone has their own dream road, everyone has their own sky to fly.

Drawing: "The Man Who Fell to Earth" by Robert Moss

From the Indisciplined Territories

March 16, 2020

In a time of lockdowns, plane cancellations and shuttered restaurants, adventures in dream travel are more welcome than ever. Last night I enjoyed the company of a fascinating group that included a prince of Persia and a French aristo who asked me to make a picture for a countess who will invite me to her villa at Cap St Jean. A very exclusive travel agency handled all the arrangements and sent me an exotically beautiful young assistant

FROM THE INDISCIPLINED TERRITORIES

I slowly take in the unusual patterns of paint and ink on her brown face. Her cheeks are covered with fine ink that may be pictographic script. Some of the symbols look like musical notes. Over her mouth are crossed diagonal bars of red paint. The shape reminds me of heraldry. Though bars over the mouth might suggest an effort to suppress the voice, the opposite effect is at play here. She speaks clearly and strongly, in British Empire English with an island lilt.

She tells me she is from The Indisciplined Territories. Is she joking? Oh no. "They call us the Indisciplined Territories because no one dares to take us on." Her enunciation is precise. Indisciplined, not merely Undisciplined. She describes a small group of islands and atolls defined as dependencies of a recognized group with a double name I don’t quite get; it sounds like Bones-and-Something....

I emerge from this encounter excited and intrigued. As usual, my dream sets me research assignments, tracking names of places and people and of the strange conveyance, like a miniature carousel on wheels, that took us through a forest.  It was called a "coneebo", possibly written as conibo. I may look into indigenous traditions of face paint and tattoos. 

I will not waste a moment on analysis. A dream like this is, first and last,an adventure in another world. Some elements may spill over into my physical reality but I am satisfied with the adventure in its own right. I will draw on its creative energy with pencil and colors and keyboard. Maybe I can draw and paint the relief map I was showing people in the dream. Perhaps it will reveal the location of The Indisciplined Territories.

I wonder whether I have made the picture the countess wants. If so, can I expect an invitation to Cap St. Jean Ferrat? I am unlikely to get there by plane in the near future, but dream flight is always available and I do have a very special travel agent to call.

Follow-up: dream directed research

I was soon reminded that the Conibo are an Amazonian people and rapid research online produced many photos of elaborate face painting, for which women are the artists. Catalog copy for an exhibition at the Museum of Natural History in New York titled "Body Art:Marks of Identity" included this:

"The intricate rectilinear and curvilinear designs that cover the faces, clothing, houses, ceramics and other objects of the [Shipibo-Conibo] cultures on the Ucayali River of the upper Amazon in Peru derive from the origin of the world, when everything in the universe was covered with such lines in a continuous unified design. The original patterns were lost, or obscured, due to misdeeds of failed proto-humans, but they are still present everywhere if one can see them. Male shamans can reclaim the patterns through hallucinogenic visions and relay them to artists who bring them back into the world through the decorations they create on objects. The women artists are aided in realizing the intricate patterns by placing the colorfully veined leaf of the iponquene plant over their eyelids before they start — the plant is named after a complexly patterned armor-headed catfish. These harmonious designs are associated with human cultivation and prosperity. In rituals, shamans can sing the tunes of songs from this labyrinth of lines."

I have not yet found an image of the barred pattern over the mouth and chin displayed by the exotic travel assistant in my dream.

Journal drawing by Robert Moss

"You can go back to your dream now," she said

Esalen Institute, Big Sur, California

In the middle of the night, I stirred awake, then let myself relax into the drifty, liminal state between sleep and awake. Soon I was traveling in a lucid dream, roaming night landscapes.
   I set purpose and direction by repeating to myself, I am in a place of healing and creation.

   I floated, more than walked, to a set of massive stone steps going down to a sandy beach, where waves broke gently against the shore. At the base of the steps, I felt I needed to turn left. I found that there were people here. Some were gathered in front of a vendor's stall, set up in a niche between the pillars of the carriageway above us.  
   Curious objects were on the vendor's table: tall, cylindrical pottery vases.They were brown in color with a design that resembled the weave of basketry, perhaps two or three feet high. I wondered if they were urns for ashes of the dead, or vessels for votive offerings. I looked again at the structure around and above the stall. I realized it was the remains of a Roman aqueduct.
   "Robert." I heard my voice, spoken in a flutelike woman's voice.
   I turned to try to find the speaker. She appeared to me first in drifting robes, like a woman of the desert. I had a glimpse of her in modern, smart casual clothes, cashmere sweater and skirt. She slipped away, looking over her shoulder to make sure I followed.
    In the peak scene, she was holding me and bouncing me like a baby, at the head of a happy conga line of dancers. I felt nourished and joyful.
    She told me, "You can go back to your dream now."
    I found this shocking, and thrilling.
    I thought I was in a lucid dream. She seemed to be telling me I had moved beyond dream states into a separate reality.

    

As I traveled back to my resting body in the bed, in a physical reality between the Pacific Ocean and the redwood forest, I tried to hold the scenes from my adventure in my mind. Some escaped me, but what remained gave me several interesting leads. I need to search for pottery vases like the ones in my dream. I need to think about whether the location with the Roman aqueduct could be one of the places where I currently travel - like Montpellier in Languedoc - or a place where I will go in the future, or a place in another reality. I will remain open to further contact with the mysterious woman who gave me healing and led me to question, yet again, the nature of dreaming and of reality.

     I will add last night's experience to my long list of examples of how a figure in a lucid dream may alert us to the fact that a dream is rarely "only" a dream and may be a full experience of a world beyond the ordinary senses.
 

Photo: Garden Goddess at Esalen by RM. The woman in my lucid dream did not look like this version of the goddess, but something of the divine mother trails about her.

Paris Backstage and other dream realities

French soldier from Indochina war,
Del Prado

My dream rambles last night have got me thinking about how easily, in dreams, we slip into a separate reality, or a whole series of alternate realities.
    In my recollection, the first scene in the dream unfolds at a large airport, possibly Paris Charles de Gaulle. I recognize women I know in a line at a departure gate, but the line is moving fast and they are gone before I can greet them. I stop at a news stand to buy a French-language newspaper, and notice that instead of giving me change for 5 Euros, they hand me a little ticket that can be used in lieu of cash.
     Now I am out and about in the streets of Paris in the morning light. I am free to explore without any fixed agenda. I come to a pleasant little square lined with bookshops and galleries, and am delighted that the doors are already open, with old books on display in carts on the sidewalk. I glance at a set of landscape paintings hanging from a metal fence. Someone behind me says, "Florida", but the pictures don't look much like Florida to me.
     I walk on, eventually coming to a narrow street. The sign has three words; the middle one is "Coulisse". I wander down a passage in a building on this street. I am drawn to model cars and trains in a window display to my right. Through the shop window on my left, I see whole platoons of model soldiers in French uniforms, from different eras. I am less interested in the Napoleonic figures in their finery than in the Foreign Legionnaires, the World War II figures, and the figures from the wars in Indochina and Algeria. I wonder whether the shop has a model soldier from a regiment from northern France; a character I have been studying fought in this unit.
    Suddenly I am inside the soldier shop, though I have no memory of going through the door. The owner is a strange character. He starts speaking to me in voluble French about a seminar - apparently a military history conference - that is taking place that day. Soon he is recounting his combat experiences in a French unit in Vietnam. I realize that he is talking about the French war in Indochina, and that there is an anomaly. The French left Indochina in 1954, while the owner of the soldier shop looks to be no older than 40.
     He is rather hard to understand, even when he switches to speaking English. Now he is talking about how he lost an eye in the war, and how people looked upon him with revulsion when he came home. He shows me that his left eye is glass, and moves to roll it from its socket to show me how he cleans it. I don't need to see this, and want to leave.
     But somehow, instead, I accept an invitation to a picnic, and in the next instant I am at a gathering under a tent with people of all ages, perhaps an extended family. They are eating thick sandwiches with great lumps of what might be chicken, oozing mayonnaise, that don't appeal to me. These people are all very careful not to expose themselves to direct sunlight. There is an elderly woman there I find creepy; she may be demented. I want to take pictures of her and the man with the glass eye, perhaps in order to identify them later, but this proves to be no easy task. When I think I have got them in focus, they slip into blurry profile, or out of the shot altogether. The little camera I am using spits out passport-sized photos, none of them satisfactory.


I woke from this dream feeling distinctly uneasy. The reality shifts inside the dream - when I slipped through the shop window, then when I was projected into the picnic scene - had taken me to places I really did not want to be.
    My first action was to research the word-clue. The word "Coulisse" is most widely used, in French and among theater people in English, to mean "backstage" or "in the wings". The coulisse, in a theater, may be the space between stage scenery in the wings through which actors come and go. A coulisse may also be a "sliding door."
    Certainly the dream street named Coulisse took me to a backstage version of Paris. Why was I drawn to this separate reality, which feels to me now like a possible realm of the dead? Well, I will be in Paris in May (and will carry my dream report as a travel advisory). And I have dreamed of old wars involving France and the French. Oh yes, I did have a passion for model soldiers and for playing "little wars" with them as a boy, and still have quite a collection, including a box of French Zouaves; and when I was last in Paris I visited a toy soldier shop, not the one in the dream but the famous Drapeaux de France, near the Louvre.

Trying to record in the night museum

I am delighted by the detailed reports dream travelers have brought back from a journey to a museum where they can find secrets from other lives and other times.

As they share their adventures, I am taking more care than usual to make notes in my travel journal. Although I am using a new ballpoint pen, the flow of ink is erratic. I shake it to try to improve the flow, then try writing letters again where previous efforts have left only indentations on the paper. When I press down hard, the results are worse than before. I try writing lightly, letting the tip of the pen just skim the paper. This works better.

I write and rewrite the title of the third journey report, stated clearly by a woman in the group as

LOUVRE MUSEUM

FAKE DOUBLE

By this, she appears to be saying that she went to an alternate Louvre museum, in the imaginal realm. She found that inside, it had double walls. She could step through any wall and find, an arm's length behind it, a second wall, behind which the real treasures were to be found.

She had a particular interest in a mystery of the American Civil War, involving "two lost names". She found the names. I duly recorded the first: "Orlando Orlando or William Orlando." I wrote down the second name also, but can't recall it write[*] now - since I woke to realize that I was doing all this recording inside my dream, not in a literal journal.

The dream content was quite typical of workshops I lead where a frequent and popular group exercise is to travel to a space like a library or museum where it is easy to find portals to other times, or speakers from those times. The literal-ness of the dream (in the context or how I spend my days) makes me feel that my dream self either (a) went ahead of me, across time, to lead a program I'll lead in ordinary reality in the future or (b) taught a workshop inside the Dreamtime, which would not be a novelty.

The trope of trying to record something inside a dream will be familiar to many dreamers. Sometimes we are quite convinced we have journaled everything - until we wake, to find the relevant page in the bedside notebook blank. Still, the physical-seeming effort of having to write over and over to get ink on the page did succeed in imprinting a few memories that remained in my waking brain.

* I'll leave the slip, on the principle that we want to notice what's showing through our slips. Clearly, a message for me is WRITE NOW.

Meeting doubles on the many roads of time

I am having a grand time demonstrating how it is possible to step in and out of the bodies and life situations of doubles on parallel event tracks, and how this can be used for healing and mutual empowerment. For this demonstration, I have chosen doubles from my present lifetime, alternate Roberts who made different choices. All times are accessible.

      I jump into situations that belong both to a parallel past, a parallel present, and a possible future, but the time in each scene is always Now. I can make choices in all these situations. In the place of an alternate Robert, for example, I choose to behave generously, avoiding blame and shame, in an incident involving a former partner after the time when (in ordinary reality) we had separated.

      My demonstration is in the service of teaching others how to do these things, at a workshop that has become a very exciting group experiment.

     I allow the group to watch my moves, which look to them as if I am stepping in and out of sliding doors. We proceed to develop a simple new model of doubling and travel between parallel universes.

Feelings: Excited, almost elated.

Reality: Several much more detailed dream reports from the past week seemed to involve jumps of this kind, into the situation of doubles on alternate event tracks. I found two of these experiences, involving former partners, to be very healing and resolving - beautiful, really - and woke from them energized and happy. I have crafted and led a number of group experiments in visiting doubles in parallel universes, and I am interested in developing a model of understanding that will bring together current speculation in physics (where is is now widely hypothesized that we are living in one of possibly infinite parallel universes) with the experience of dreamers, who go to parallel worlds (by my experience and observation) most nights.

Follow-up: When I got online after this dream, I found an announcement for the English translation of a book by French physicist Jean-Pierre Garnier Malet. He has developed a "theory of doubling" In his Théorie du dédoublement, Garnier Malet suggests that the "doubling" of time and space is a "law of physics" that offers us "temporal openings" - opportunities to step in and out of time and by so doing, change our possible future for the better. These opportunities are enhanced when we become conscious of the existence of our doubles and draw on their superior knowledge. I learned about Garnier-Malet's work when I was teaching in France in November 2010, and picked up French-language copies of a couple of his books.

      In Le double... comment ça marche? Garnier Malet urges us to learn to "drink time", as a thirsty animal drinks from a stream. He explains that this means "drinking information from the past and the future during sleep. Dreams are there to allow us to do this. Haven't you noticed that dreams put us in a different kind of time?." I think I am in favor of drinking time, maybe even ready for a binge.