What’s Going On in Your Dream House?

When you record your dreams, pay special attention to the dream locations. The settings may be familiar or completely foreign, vivid and sensory or cloudy and indistinct. You may be in a place whose physics appears quite different from ordinary reality. You may be at home with people you don't know in regular life. You might be living in a medieval castle that seems to have been constructed yesterday.
    Again and again, you dream you are in the old place – back in the home you shared with your ex, or the office where you worked at the old job, or at grandma’s house, or in the school yard. Maybe you’ll want to ask yourself: did I leave part of myself behind when I left that old situation? Maybe your dream house is a hybrid, melding elements from places you recognize from the past with novel architecture. The house may seem familiar at the outset, but then proves to have more rooms and more stories than you remember. These may be stories of your life and levels of your psyche or Self.
     It can be fascinating to revisit a dream structure of this kind through conscious dream reentry, and learn more about what is going on. Jung found in his dream of a many-layered house - a dream Freud insisted on misinterpreting - a model for understanding connections between the conscious mind, the personal subconscious and the collective unconscious. In his dream, he started out on a floor that looked like a normal bourgeois home. As he descended through successive floors, he found himself in primal territory, in a dirt-floor basement containing skulls and bones of distant ancestors.
     I find it especially intriguing to go up on the roof of a dream house. Sometimes I find there are levels beyond what I expected. Sometimes, on a roof terrace or garden, I meet a benign figure I recognize as a slightly higher self, a witness self who can give me perspective on my life situation, since he is up above the scrum. I have called this figure the Double on the Balcony.
     I dreamed I was in a house that I used to own, in another reality. It was quite familiar in the dream, but does not correspond closely to any house I have occupied in this world. My dream house was a palace, with sections open to tour groups. It has sweeping marble staircases leading up to what used to be private family apartments and my library. I tried to go up the steps, but they petered out and I realized the library and the private rooms had been long since abandoned and sealed off. I did not give up on my detective work. I took another staircase to a balcony with wonderful views over green forests and meadows. I told ladies I met there, matter-of-factly, "I used to own this house." I know I will come here again. I need to get up that staircase. And I need to understand what life story I am inhabiting in this palace that has seen better days.
    By focusing on a dream location, we have an excellent portal for conscious dreaming, shamanic journeying and astral travel. If you have been to a place in a dream, you can go there again, just as you might return to a place you have visited in ordinary reality. Your dream house may be a place you will visit in the future. I have been guided, in while series of dreams, to houses I did not recognize at the outset but proved to be future homes that I purchased and occupied. We take real estate tours in our dreams.
    The dream house may be a structure that the astral architect in you has constructed for various purposes: as a place for rest and relaxation, as a sanctuary or a study, as a place of rendezvous, as a pleasure palace. Such creations may have their own stability. They may be homes that await you in the afterlife or interlife.    Your dream house may be a place where you are leading a parallel life with people you may or may not know in your physical world. It may be a construction or renovation site, a place waiting for our imagination to raise the walls or put on the finishing touches.
     How about drawing or mapping your dream locales, making floorplans of that dream house? You will be growing your astral geography in ways you will find increasingly rewarding and exciting. You may even find you are claiming some real estate options in this world or the next.

What's that? Your memories of such things are blurry? You can take comfort from Seth, as channeled by Jane Roberts in Dreams and the Projection of Consciousness : "If you have little memory of your dream locations when you are awake, then remember that you have little memory of your waking locations when you are in the dream situation. Both are legitimate and both are realities. When the body lies in bed, it is separated by a vast distance from the dream location in which the dreaming self may dwell.” 

Drawing: "Double on the Balcony" by Robert Moss

Plutarch in the Light of the Moon

For Plutarch (c 50-120 AD), the realm of the Moon assumes huge importance as the residence or way station for some (though by no means all) spirits of the departed, and the base for a variety of daimons (many of them formerly humans) who take a close interest in Earth affairs.

Plutarch knew what he was talking about. He was not only a marvelous historian and philosopher, but a Mystery initiate, who spent his last thirty years as a priest at Delphi, communing with the gods and traveling between the worlds. He traveled in Egypt and wrote a treatise on Isis and Osiris that has a continuing influence on our understanding of ancient Egyptian religion.

He knew the importance of dreams. He wrote in his essay "Amatorius" that “Since [the soul’s] arrival in the world, it is by means of dreams that it joyfully greets and gazes upon that which is most beautiful and most divine.”

In hies essay "On the Divine Vengeance" Plutarch describes a journey to a locale in the sphere of Luna where three daimons sitting together in the shape of a triangle are mixing dreams in a cosmic krater (or mixing-bowl). Different streams flow into it, one “whiter than sea foam” another “the violet of the rainbow”. The lighter and whiter the dream that is mixed up, the more true it will be. “This is the source from which dreams derive.”

The source of this account is an ancient NDE. A dissolute man of Soli who is told by an oracle that he will do much better when he dies. Soon after he falls from a height and is believed to be dead until he revives at his burial place three days later
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Plutarch explains how after death spirits that are able to rise beyond the lower astral plane may enjoy a pleasurable afterlife in the realm of the Moon. They may live on there for a great length of Earth time, or graduate to existence on a higher plane, leaving their astral bodies behind. Or they may become Moon-based daimons, closely engaged with human affairs, playing far-from-infallible guides to people in the physical world.

In a most remarkable tract titled" Concerning the Face that Appears in the Orb of the Moon" Plutarch gives a comprehensive account of the role of the Moon in relation to the soul history of humans. The Moon is here described as the portal through which spirits travel on their way to birth on Earth, and to which they ascend, if they pass certain tests, after physical death. Some of these spirits of the departed may be promoted to the status of daimons, with permission to interact with the living.

"Not forever do the spirits tarry upon the moon; they descend to take charge of oracles; they attend and participate in the highest of mystic rituals; they act as warders against misdeeds and chastisers of them, and they flash forth as saviors manifest in war and on the sea." [1]

These spirits of the Moon, far from omniscient or infallible, are on probation.If they act unfairly, giving in to wrath or envy, they are cast out and again confined in human bodies on earth.

Plutarch shakes up our mythic geography when he tells us that Earth is the realm of Demeter, the Moon of Persephone, and everything between Earth and Moon is the realm of Hades. Entry by the departed into the realm of Luna requires the ability to travel beyond the temptations, fears and distractions of the lower astral (Hades) and go through a clean-up, effected by “scrubbers” (maybe resembling scarab beetles).

In summary, this ancient shaman-philosopher confirms that It is in the realm of Luna that spirits take on and take off the astral body before birth and after death. And that the Moon, as an astral realm, is the base for a large population of daimons (many formerly human) who have a close engagement with human affairs.

[1] Plutarch, De facie quae in orbe lunae apparet [“Concerning the Face which appears in the Orb of the Moon”] in Moralia XII trans Harold Cherniss and William Helmbold

Image: Detail of the Moon from Donato Creti, "Astronomical Observations" (1711) in the Vatican Museum

Visiting Yeats in the Magic Cottage

I have enjoyed a lifelong relationship with William Butler Yeats. I have always loved his poetry and have been able – since elementary school – to recite long passages from memory. I have had dreams and visions of Yeats and his circle for as long as I can remember. He was not only a marvelous poet; he was a Western magus, one of the leading figures in the Order of the Golden Dawn.

      Yeats began to appear in my dreams at night as well as my daydreams and willed journeys in consciousness. In these dreams, I sometimes seemed to be living in his era – sometimes I seemed to meet Yeats in another reality altogether.
      Many years later, I dreamed I received a message from him inviting me to visit him at home. I was not sure where ‘home’ for Yeats might now be, but it did not appear to be in Ireland. In a subsequent vision, in that promising state of fluid awareness that sometimes develops in the hypnagogic zone between waking and sleep (or vice versa), I found myself floating above my body, up through the ceiling, and then through some kind of mesh that looked like an intricately woven fabric or netting.
     I was drawn up as if a traction beam had been turned on. I was under no compulsion, but I let myself rise on the intention of the one who was calling me. I had no doubt who that was. His lines were running through my head:

I shall arise and go there, and go to Innisfree…

Oh, yes, the early poem that has been quoted so often that Yeats himself got bored and irritated by it, vastly preferring the maturity and complexities of his later work. But its rhythms helped me travel, helped me swim through the subtle air. You don’t reject a wing song that works (and indeed, Yeats wrote many).

      I passed through many landscapes, perhaps whole worlds. They were separated by dividing partitions that were sometimes like cloud-banks, sometimes like membranes that stretched to let me through, and sometimes like woven fabric or netting. I came at last to what appeared to be a pleasant country cottage on a winding path. The flower beds were bright with color. It seemed to me that, as I glanced around, the colors at the edge of my peripheral vision would change. Behind the cottage was a gentle river, and on the banks of the river, spires and towers that might have been those of Oxford. I began to drift along the path beside the river and saw another town beyond the first, this one quite certainly Italian; the architecture was that of the Quattrocento Florence or the Urbino that Yeats had loved and sometimes threatened to make his sanctuary from the critics and civil unrest in Ireland.

      I was thrilled that scenes the poet’s words had often conjured in my mind in lesser, drifting states of reverie were now so vividly and palpably available to explore. I hurried toward a palazzo worthy of a Medici that looked as if it has been constructed that day.

      But again there was that tug of another’s intention, and I allowed it to pull me back to the cottage. Did the cottage really have a thatched roof before, or was that detail changed while I was looking elsewhere?

     Through the door, long a hall, and there was Yeats, sitting at a broad table covered with books and papers. Through the leaded glass window at his left hand I saw the cities along the river; they changed from one to another at the blink of an eye. I was excited to see that Yeats was continuing to study and to write. I wondered whether it hampered or helped his craft that his new work would not be published on earth. He was patient with me, letting me gradually awaken to the understanding that, from his new perspective, the most important from of publication might be to inspire others, to operate as one of those ‘teachers of the thirteenth cone’ he wrote about in A Vision.

      He showed me a large blue crystal lying on his desk. He was most insistent that I should use this blue stone for creative inspiration and to open and focus the third eye of vision. This blue crystal was a place in which to see, and a connection between the two of us.           
      He gave me some personal guidance and an update on certain psychic crosscurrents involving individuals and group that had been caught up in psychic battles in the past, in the time of the great rift within the Order of the Golden Dawn and in the darker times of the struggle between British magicians and the Nazi occultists. I asked Yeats where exactly we were.

      He told me very precisely: “We are on the fourth level of the astral plane”. It seemed this was a neighborhood essentially reserved for people of creative genius, for writers and artists and musicians.

      I felt immensely privileged to have been given this tour of Yeats’s environment. It was not clear to me whether he lived in the cottage alone; I was not shown the private rooms. I did feel quite certain that this Yeats was embarked on a vast new project, though its exact nature was not yet made clear to me.

Text adapted from The Dreamer's Book of the Dead by Robert Moss. Published by Destiny Books.

Drawing: "Yeats in the Magic Cottage" (c) Robert Moss

Yeats practices symbol sending in Sligo

I have returned to my studies of W.B.Yeats, the poet, magus and maker of mythologies.
    I was intrigued to notice that as a youth in Sligo, Yeats had early practice in what was then called "thought transference" in games he played with his mother's brother George Pollexfen. Uncle George, who often appeared crabby and distant to others, was a visionary and a spirit-seer. Man and boy would walk by the water, one on the shore and another on the bluff, beaming "symbols" to each other and then checking the results. WBY noted in his Autobiographies that when two people shared a symbol, a dream “would divide itself between them, each half being the complement of the other.”
    George Pollexfen later joined WBY in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and they engaged in astral journeying or "mutual visioning" together intended to build a Celtic Castle of the Heroes on the inner planes. For several years, Yeats followed a plan to establish an order of Celtic magicians at a wildly romantic site, the ruined castle on Lough Key, the "Lake of Cé", a legendary druid devoted to the god Nuada.
     I describe a personal experience of "tuning in" to a mutual visioning session between Yeats and his friend Florence Farr in The Boy Who Died and Came Back. Mary Greer gives a vivid account of magical work of this kind by Yeats and his intimate circle in her excellent book Women of the Golden Dawn.

Recent additions to the Yeats shelves in my personal library include some pretty important stuff: Virginia Moore's very hard-to-find The Unicorn: William Butler Yeats' Search for Reality (1954), written with the help of George Yeats and with full access to WBY's magical diaries, otherwise kept secret from the world until very recently; the new scholarly edition of the 1925 version of A Vision (very different from the better-known and just slightly less strange 1937 version); and Becoming George: The Life of Mrs W.B.Yeats, Ann Saddlemyer's extraordinary 800-page biography of of the girl who started out as WBY's desperate substitute for the Gonne women (mother and daughter) and then became his personal medium and spiritist goad. All three are indispensable for understanding WBY.
   

The very latest new Yeats books on my reading table are Talking to the Gods by Susan Johnston Graf, an intriguing study of the role of  Golden Dawn  practices in the lives and writing of WBY and three other writers (Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood and Dion Fortune) and a beautiful subscriber-funded edition of Yeats' early story collection The Secret Rose, bound together with a novel of WBY's early life by Irish writer Orna Ross. I am proud to be listed among the subscribers who helped to bring this to publication.
     In any line of research, the question arises: how far can you go without  becoming entangled in a jungle of material indefinitely? The Yeats material continues to sprout, Jumanji-like. The literary scholarship devoted to WBY is probably exceeded (in English) only by that given the Bible and Shakespeare. There are now industrious literary detectives analyzing which pages were dog-eared in books from WBY's library, and tracking the metallurgy and samurai traditions associated with "Sato's ancient blade", a 500-year-old sword presented to Yeats by a Japanese admirer which became a recurring symbol in his work, including the important and disturbing late poem "A Dialogue of Self and Soul".
     I gain, always, by returning to the poetry, which I read in the much-used early Macmillan edition of the Collected Poems that I received when I was awarded the Ellis Prize for Verse at my high school graduation. I find that Yeats' poems grow, not diminish, in power, with growing knowledge of how they came to be. Though I have long held that a poem must be its own explanation, I also know the truth of WBY's declaration: "A poet writes always out of his personal life, in his finest work out of its tragedy, whatever it be, remorse, lost love, or mere loneliness; he never speaks directly as to someone at the breakfast table, there is always a phantasmagoria." So it seems right to inspect the personal life as the seed bed and the mythico-magical studies and practice as feed for the flowering phantasmagoria.

There is knowing through books, and then there are other ways of knowing. When I was working on the book that was published as The Dreamer's Book of the Dead, WBY turned up in my inner sight and declaimed, "What better guide to the Other Side than a poet?" I have written quite openly about how "my" Yeats proceeded to grow my understanding of transitions after death, including what happens to discarded subtle bodies in the astral realm of Luna, and how those who have died visit survivors in the phase he called "Dreaming Back" in an effort to get their life stories straight.
     Yeats took me, in a lucid dream journey, to a magical environment on "the fourth level of the astral plane"; you can read about that here. In a series of dreams and visions, he also introduced me to special places in Ireland, especially Sligo, that were part of his magical geography. Some of these I have yet to visit, and this is high on my list for future travel.

Image: The ruined castle on an island in Lough Key, where Yeats hoped to base a Celtic magical order, the Castle of the Heroes.