Astral projection and bilocation in the early Renaissance church

In the mid-15th century, the monks of San Francesco, in Borgo San Sepolcro in Tuscany, allotted 510 ducats - a fantastic sum at that time - for a double-sided altarpiece. The lead artist was Stefano de Giovanni, known as "Sassetta", already recognized as the master of the Siena school. The altarpiece was constructed over the grave of of the Blessed Ranieri Rasini, and a series of panels on the predella depicted scenes from his life.

    The Blessed Ranieri (just short of sainthood) was a Franciscan friar who died in Umbria in 1304. His reputation clearly long survived his death. He was revered locally as a miracle maker with the ability to project an energy double that could work wonders while his body was engaged somewhere else. Thus he ranks as an all-but-patron-saint of dream travel and astral projection.

    Anyone interested in the history of dream travel would do well to look very closely at two surviving paintings of the Blessed Ranieri, by the great Sassetta. The one above is titled "The Blessed Ranieri Freeing the Poor from Jail", and it is in the Louvre. It shows Ranieri whizzing around like a rocket man.

The second painting shows Ranieri appearing to a cardinal in a dream; this panel is now in the Staatliche Museen in Berlin. It depicts Ranieri floating in mid-air above the sleeping body of a well-fed cardinal, pointing to a flask containing a healing balm.

     It was a good thing for those who saw the Blessed Ranieri (d. 1304) flying about in this way that they were living in a Catholic country where bilocation and astral projection were welcomed, at least when practiced by the religiously correct. In the Puritan theocracy of colonial Massachusetts, a couple of centuries later, a snitch who claimed to have seen you flying around in your dream body could get you hauled into a Salem witch trial.

I'll be interested in further information on the flying holy man in Sassetta's paintings. His aerial visit to the rotund cardinal is mentioned in Sassetta: The Borgo San Sepolcro Altarpiece, edited by Machtelt Israels, but it seems that the identity of the cardinal is a matter for speculation.
    A pleasant legend survives in a later account (1622) by a printer named Giovanni Antonio Castiglione, according to which the monks had emissaries sent to a certain cardinal to request balm to preserve the Blessed Ranieri's body after he died "in the odor of sanctity." The flying Ranieri got to the cardinal first, offering a deal: balm for his body in return for healing for the cardinal. So, in the painting, he has gone in ahead of the emissaries waiting outside the cardinal's bedchamber. Ranieri was the subject of a religious play that was popular in Tuscany.

Art:

"The Blessed Ranieri Frees the Poor from a Prison in Florence" (c.1440) by Sassetta, in the Musée du Louvre, Paris

"The Blessed Ranieri of Borgo San Sepolcro Appearing to a Cardinal in a Dream" (1444) in the Staatliche Museen, Berlin.

Atlantis-haunted: Tolkien and the Bent World

A recurring dream of the drowning of Atlantis was the secret engine of some of J.R.R. Tolkien's greatest work. As he described this work in a letter:

This legend or myth or dim memory of some ancient history has always troubled me. In sleep I had the dreadful dream of the ineluctable Wave, either coming out of the quiet sea, or coming in towering over the green inlands. It still occurs occasionally, though now exorcized by writing about it. It always ends by surrender, and I awake gasping out of deep water. I used to draw it or write bad poems about it.

Tolkien came to suspect that the dream of the downfall of Atlantis may have been ancestral memory, passed down through the generations, especially after his son Michael shared similar dreams with him before they had ever discussed the dreams of the father. Tolkien spoke of his "Atlantis-haunting."

     In many unfinished drafts and sketches, as well as in his most famous works, Tolkien attempted to describe the fate of Atlantis before and after the fall. He gave it many names, settling on Númenor for the civilization at its height, and Atalantê - directly evoking "Atlantis" - for the drowned world. In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien transfers his dream to Faramir, dreaming of the fall of Númenor . The short fourth book of The Silmarillion, titled Akallabêth (The Downfallen in Adunaic , one of Tolkien's invented languages) we are given Elendil's account of the destruction of Númenor.

    For me, the simplest and earliest of Tolkien's many versions of this theme is the most stirring and provocative, hinting at a workable geography of a deeper reality that may be directly relevant to our condition today. This is a two-page sketch for "The Fall of Numenor", published by Tolkien's son Christopher at the start of The Lost World and Other Writings, volume 5 in The History of Middle-Earth. In the story outline Tolkien describes how, when the gods decided to punish the Numenorians/Atlanteans for their crimes, they "globed the earth".

The Gods therefore sundered Valinor from the earth, and an awful rift appeared down which the water poured and the armament of Atalantê was drowned. They globed the whole earth so that however far a man sailed he could never again reach the West, but came back to his starting-point.

This was the creation of what Tolkien came to call the World Made Round. Before the bending of the world, a traveler could sail West in a straight line towards the realm of the gods (though few humans were welcome to go all the way). Now, in our "bended" (or bent) world if we travel West and keep on going for long enough, we merely come back to where we started.

     On a higher level of reality, however, above the clouds of our consensual hallucinations, the Line of the Gods still runs straight. Unless you are an elf, or at least an elf-friend, however, you have little chance of finding the straight path. Tolkien's dream of Atlantis not only spurred him to become a world-maker, a master shaman of the imagination; it made him a world-rememberer, offering a vision of the sources of our human condition and a possible path (through travel in dream and in time) of transcending our bent condition. Makes you think twice about the possible merits of being a flat-earther.

Of related interest: A Robert Moss vision of Atlantis

Graphic: "The Fall of Numenor" by Darrell Sweet

Banishing Desert Demons, then Over the Arch of the Bridge

I was up in the middle of the night, initially feeling quite unwell and oppressed as I tried to keep up with the troubling news from Egypt, visiting many international news sites to get some global perspective.

When I returned to bed in the early hours, as soon as I closed my eyes I had the vivid impression of mountain walls rising high into the sky, in a desert landscape. There was the strong sense of a firestorm coming, as if the air is filled with a combustible gas that a single spark will ignite. Above the mountains, I saw demonic figures rear and whirl, not fully substantial yet, but taking form.

I don’t often see demons. My guess is these desert demons are ifrit, the worst of the djinns in the demonology of the Arab world. Their substance, as I recall, is fire. I have no desire to help them materialize in the noosphere now, and bring in the burning times. So I banish this image, washing my inner screen with light.

My thought returned to Egypt, and I wondered whether I had been give a glimpse of forces at work in the reality that is hidden from ordinary perception.

Sleep took me, and I dreamed:

Over the Arch of the Bridge to Happy Adventures

I am with a group of very fit younger people. They are wearing dark blue crew neck sweaters and matching pants and watch caps. They may be Special Forces, though I don’t see weapons.

I follow them up the rise of a great arch above a very long bridge. The shape of the arch is reminiscent of Sydney Harbor Bridge. As I go higher, I find that the material of the arch is flimsier and flimsier. There are gaps through which it would be easy to fall. Sometimes there is just a loose flapping panel, inside the outer rim, between one section and the next. I can’t keep up with the young people. At the same time, my dream body is operating much better than my physical one.

At the high point of the arch, I realize I must be dreaming, but don’t want to test this by letting myself fall to the water far below. I notice that there now seems to be no bridge surface below; the arch would therefore be the only way of crossing without taking a different route or mode of transportation altogether.

I get across safely. I am now involved in a whirl of conference and workshop activity in a city among mountains and connect quickly with wonderful new friends.

I wake much restored, physically, emotionally, mentally.

My dream of crossing the bridge reminds me a bit of a dream at the start of the financial crisis of 2008 in which I am in a high performance car and find myself plummeting down a near-vertical descent with no chance of stopping or turning back. Eventually the slope levels out and becomes a floating bridge. My car slows to a stop just before crashing through the plate glass windows of an upscale retail center. I took that dream as guidance to sit back and let the money crisis work its way through. The Arch dream also comes out okay, but here definite action and forward movement are required.

I am especially interested in whether others are dreaming into the current world crisis. "As within, so without"; it is sometimes difficult to sift what in a dream is about our personal world and what relates to the world out there. The same dream may involve both.

Tolkien's wager with Time

In one of his letters, J.R.R. Tolkien reports that he once made a bet with C.S. Lewis that led to a grand (but unfulfilled) literary project and what became a lifelong inquiry into the nature of time. The two great scholars and fantasy writers "tossed" to decide which of them would write a fantasy epic centered on adventures in space, and which would write a parallel epic devoted to adventures in time. Lewis got the assignment in space, and proceeded to produce the magnificent Space Trilogy of adult fantasy novels. Tolkien got the assignment in time, which he would certainly have chosen for himself, since he was always fascinated by the possibility of time travel and of slipping into the Other Time of Faerie, which he ruminates on in his important essay Of Fairy-Tales.

     Tolkien never produced his Time Trilogy. He did write some unfinished stories that center on time travel, the first of which is titled "The Lost Road." The finished works may be lacking, but it is fascinating to track where Tolkien's mind and imagination - and dreambody - traveled on this assignment. He became convinced that dreams and the practice of dreaming are the key to time travel. He was entirely correct in this. He found an exemplar in J.W.Dunne, the soldier-engineer-dreamer whose groundbreaking book An Experiment with Time remains hugely exciting, as a study of time travel through dreams that is grounded in first-hand experience.

    This note is merely to announce that I am currently tracking Tolkien's adventures in past time and Other Time. I'll post longer reports when I'm ready. Assuming that I have his blessing, since he has turned up in several of my lucid dreams, along with C.S.Lewis, with advice that I did not always follow right away...

The Shores of Faerie. Drawing by J.R.R.Tolkien (1915)

A library full of seeds

Around the turning of the year, I make time to look over old journals. This is part of the ongoing process of composing a life story. It also helps me to keep track of my dream double, and how far and wide he has traveled beyond the milder adventures of my waking self.

Just now I turned up the following dream report from May 2003:

A LIBRARY FULL OF SEEDS

In my library, I am surprised and delighted to see that a shelf has been partly filled with white-covered booklets, in stacks facing outward. These booklets resemble large packets of seeds. The covers are somewhat spackled by time and weather. I have the impression that they have been brought out of old trunks and boxes, including boxes bequeathed to me by a scholar of an earlier generation in my family.

The first brochure I examine is on dreams, and contains the text of an ancient dream - possibly the dream of Scipio (recorded by Cicero) that was central to the medieval study of dreams. As I look over the stacks, I see that the brochures have been organized alphabetically and cover a tremendous range of information. Some titles are the names of countries.

I am excited by the prospect of using these materials. I glance at the larger bookcase on my left, and notice that quite a range of books I had not noticed before (or were not there before) are now on the shelves, including a volume from the chunky Cambridge Medieval History series.

-

I find this a cozy and comforting dream in this winter season, when I am at home for a few weeks, reading wide and deep, and letting the seeds of ideas and stories germinate inside me.

The underwater archive of lost dreams

British-born sculptor Jason deCaires Taylor creates cities and societies under the sea. His art is compelling, though you may need a scuba outfit to see all of it.

I am especially stirred by his installation titled El Collectionista de los Sueños Perdidos (literally, "The Collector of Lost Dreams")

In the words of the artist: "The Archive of Lost Dreams depicts an underwater archive, maintained by a male registrar. The archive is a collection of hundreds of messages in bottles brought together by the natural forces of the ocean. The registrar is collating the individual bottles and categorising the contents according to the nature of each message - fear, hope, loss, or belonging.

"Various communities from a broad spectrum of ethnic, religious and cultural backgrounds have been invited to provide the messages, which, it is hoped, will document current values and aspirations for future generations to discover."

Taylor's installation matches the sense we dreamers often have, surfacing from the deeps of the night, of having left treasures and messages behind, and may inspire us to go diving again, beneath the shallows of ordinary consciousness, in quest of them

For more on Jason deCaires Taylor and his underwater sculptures, visit his websiteionista de los Sueños Perdidos