The dragon sits on your shoulder and other messages from the Index Card Oracle

One of my favorite games in my workshops is the Index Card Oracle. I get everyone in the circle to write something - a summary of a dream, an incident from memory, a reflection or a favorite quote - one one side of a 3x5 index card, as legibly as possible. We gather the cards into a deck. I then ask everyone to write down an intention for guidance, expressing this as simply and clearly as possible. ("I would like guidance on....") I then go around the circle, offering the deck. Everyone pulls a card at random. The game requires us to pretend that whatever is written on the card is a direct message from the universe in response to the intention for guidance.

The message may be obscure or ambiguous but, hey, that's how oracles stay in business long-term. As a divination deck, our Coincidence Cards can't be beat. We come up with a one-time deck, exclusively for us, that will never be used in this form again.

Of course, some of the messages are "keepers". My journals are stuffed with index cards whose inscriptions remind me of big dreams and coincidence fugues, of wildly funny incidents and of moments of insight and epiphany when we punched a hole in the surface world and saw into a deeper order of reality.

I've been looking over my collection of Coincidence Cards and I'll share some of the messages here, without attempting to recall the specific meanings that each of them assumed in the context of the intentions. Notes from the dreamworld included:

I’m in a wedding procession. As we walk down the aisle of the church and step up to the altar, I realize we have entered a diner.

Circus elephants circle around linked trunk to tail, lovingly, caringly giving each other a way to follow. Each is a leader as much as a follower.  

I’m in a large room where we each have to fly up to the ceiling every 2 or 3 minutes to breathe, as if the room is under water.

I was traveling from one space to another looking for my dad and my dog who have recently died. In what space would they now be? Are they standing in the galaxy? Are they in my dad’s house? Or in a new landscape by the sea?

 I recognized myself as a spider. The spider spits white webbing around the people. I am told, “It is a unifying force”.

The Moon goddess stands in her majesty above the Sea of Tranquility. She is flanked by her armored Moon soldiers and carried on the back of a giant crab moving gently through the sea.

The dragon sits on your shoulder. His fire breath drives back the dark.

Two men are taking me to my execution by beheading. I fight until my mother appears and tells me it will be okay. I submit myself to the execution and I am happy.

A jaguar leaps out of the forest and into the driver’s seat of a pink Firebird convertible. It morphs into a cartoon version of itself, puts on sunglasses, and drives away, waving as it says, “Hasta la vista”.

Standing near the refrigerator. The door opens, it’s packed, there is movement. Oh my, the turkeys are alive and they want to come out. Some of the messages come from observations on the roads of everyday life: My daughter hands me the feather of a blue heron and tells me I will need it this weekend.

A red passion flower lying in the roadway all alone.

A death’s head skull is floating in mid-air. I look for its origin and find that it is the reflection of a pattern on a woman’s purse.

A salmon pink trumpet-like flower opens before my eyes, bursting with joyful life! 

Some of the cards contain insights harvested from the workshops: 

You do not need to hunt your power. Your power will hunt you. Find a sacred space where your power can find you.

Throw out your net and fish in the River of Dreams.

The child does not need to grow up to be complete.

In playing the Coincidence Card game, we sometimes draw our own card, which is statistically improbable and often very interesting. It suggests, for one thing, that you already have the answer. You don't need to look outside yourself, only to go deeper within. Over the years, I've assembled quite a collection of cards that I wrote myself that spoke back to me in the game. Some of the messages are from dreams: 

A woman is falling to earth from a great height. I spread my falcon wings and swoop down to save her, catching her just before she hits the rocks. We soar straight up into the air before I gently bring her down to a house on a headland overlooking the water. I leave clear instructions for her on living on earth. 

Some are reflections: 

Before lightning strikes, it sends down probes to find its path to earth. In a similar way, we are rehearsed for BIG events by trial events, which may be diversions, dead-ends, first sketches or caricatures of what will come later. Don’t mistake the test drive for the big journey. 

Some are quotes: 

Everything can be taken from a man or woman but one thing, the last of human freedoms: to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. – Viktor Frankl 

On the last day of one of my depth workshops, I wrote on an index card a summary of an essay I had been working on in the early morning. My intention, in consulting the Index Card Oracle that day, was simply for "guidance on the week ahead". I drew a card from the deck. When my turn came to read out my message, I found I had drawn my own card. Here’s what it said: 

In the miasmic conditions of life on this planet, it's easy to forget the mission you came to fulfill. If you are lucky, you'll get a reminder - from a dream or another person with stars in their eyes. 

That, for me, was the right message, for the week ahead and for any week.

Now my ability to get on airplanes and lead on-site workshops has been shut down by the pandemic, I find it very satisfying – and sometimes shocking – to draw a card from the huge deck of cards I have collected in past gatherings. This brings back delicious memories and sometimes gives me starter dough for new writing and a spur to fresh projects. And messages for any day and every night.

 

For a full description of how to play the Coincidence Card Game, and variant versions including one for creative writing and storymaking, please see my book Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Every

Borrowed lines

Writers enjoy the thrill of petty larceny. Though I don’t recommend grand theft, I encourage people at the start of my creative writing programs to borrow lines, images and plot ideas from each other. At the beginning of one of my 5-day adventures in "Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming" at Mosswood Hollow, we accomplished this through a card game.
    I had everybody write a summary of a dream or a story or just a few good lines on one side of an index card. Then we took turns to pull cards from the deck and make up more of a story or script from whatever was dealt to us, pretending that the card we drew contained our own material. We also agreed that whatever was read in front of the group would be common property.
     This provided great starter dough! Here is a cycle of seven little verses I wrote that morning, riffing on seven of the cards that were shared.

Borrowed Lines

1
Turn Off

Turning, turning. They kept her turning
till she didn’t know which way to turn.
So she turned harder, the other way
and became cyclone. She carried their houses
and banks, their laptops and diamond rings
and every sure thing in the swirl of her rage
until she turned all of them off.

2

Cat People

What you most hate is what you will become
unless you agree that
what you most fear is what you must do.

3

Worker bees

On the porch, a few of us are fanning ourselves.
Most are torpid in sunlight, in a heat stupor.
Until one of us rouses and flies up counter-clockwise

and we rise to follow, filling the air with our hum.

4

Breakfast Time

I love the spring bunny in a shaft of sunlight
on the dew-glistening grass, sweet and soft.
I drop from the sky in vertical descent,
talons exquisitely precise. Breakfast time.

5

All Roads

To tell you I love you is to love myself.
I must breathe this from my gut
and sing it with lungs and belly
until all roads lead to my heart, and you.

6

Key to the Attic

May you never forget the key to granma’s attic
in the place between sleep and awake
where you found another world when you were nine
that calls you now, all these decades gone.

7

The Right Line

Take the U Train
not the Them Train
never the Should Train
not the Might-Have-Been Train
pass by the Wannabe Train
skip the Must Train
Take the U Train, you.

The card game mentioned above is a literary variant of my Coincidence Card Game, whose rules are fully explained in Sidewalk Oracles. I am leading "Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming" this year at magical Mosswood Hollow from May 21-26 and at a beautiful country hotel near Česká Skalice in the Czech Republic from September 12-16.

Art: Remedios Varo, "Sympathy" (aka "The Madness of the Cat"), 1955

Sharing Bear Medicine through a coincidence game

One night I found myself deep inside an ancient warrior cult of the Bear Goddess. As soon as I lay down and closed my eyes, in the early hours of the morning, a portal opened. It appeared as an ancient stone gateway immensely tall in proportion to its width. Through the dream gate, I saw warriors armed with axes, spears and swords were marching to battle. They wore leather armor of a type I thought might be Romano-Celtic. Above them fluttered the banner of a Bear Goddess; the standard bearer wore the full pelt of a bear.
    My curiosity became intense. I zoomed in on the scene, then my consciousness joined one of the bear warriors. I felt the heat of the bear skin over my body, and the heat of the coming battle. The body I had joined was compact and heavily muscled. But I did not want to be present for the hacking and killing that was about to begin.
     I seemed to jump across time, into a different season, when the leaves were gone from the beeches and oaks. Still in leather armor, I stumbled alone through the wilderness. I was tired of battles, weary of slaughter. I was ready to die. I abandoned my weapons, and stripped off the bear skin that had been stained by the blood of battles and the grime of life. I lay down among the roots of an oak. But I was not alone. A bear cub, walking on two legs, took me by the hand and led me to a place of healing. The doctor here was a huge mother bear. She opened my chest and took out my heart. She rinsed the organ carefully and replaced it in a soft green bed of moss and herbs. Grateful and amazed, I looked around the space I was now in. The hut was full of natural remedies and charms, herbs and spices, dried lavender and other flowers. Dried lavender was laid around my neck, like a necklace.
     I emerged from this lucid dream adventure feeling blessed and healed. I also recognized that, not for the first time, I had been taken into ancestral territory and challenged to make some choices.
      There were gifts here to be shared with others, and very soon the world gave me a remarkable opportunity to do this. I led a workshop in Santa Fe the next weekend, at a center not far from Bear Canyon, where I found a white quartzite stone in the natural shape of a bear’s head; I gave this to a man who had been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. One of the people who came to that workshop was a most reluctant participant I will call Bella. She, too, had been diagnosed with a serious illness and felt that her life, at this time, was a “train wreck”; she had recently lost both her job and her marriage. She did not remember dreams, was skeptical about shamanism, and was basically there only because friends had dragged her to my workshop. She sat with her arms folded tight over her chest, resisting all efforts to turn her into an active participant. I wondered whether she would make it through the morning.
      But Bella was still with us after lunch, when I had decided to introduce a new game. I set an intention for my own dreams the night before: “I would like a new game to play in this workshop.” In my dream, I saw my group swapping story cards, regular 3”x5” index cards on which each participant had been invited to write something with story value; this might be part of a dream, or a life memory, or something experienced in a journey with the drum, or the product of pure imagination. The cards were made into a deck and shuffled. Then people drew from the deck at random, read out what was written on their cards – and then pretended that this was part of their own story. They were now required to make something up to dramatize that story, or expand it.
      I followed my dream directions exactly. When the cards had all been written and distributed, I span my drumstick to pick the first person to play. It pointed to Bella. I groaned inwardly, thinking, That’s the end of this game. Bella turned over her card with evident reluctance and read out what was written on it. This was the text:

I am a warrior in leather armor in an ancient army that marches under the banner of the Bear Goddess. Tired of battles, I go into the wilderness to die. But a bear cub takes me by the hand and leads me to a place of healing.

Bella coughed. She got to her feet, but then her legs folded and she lay full-length on the floor, making the sounds of dry retching. She crawled a few feet, then croaked her own lines. “I have been fighting in the army of the Earth Mother. I have been fighting for clean water and clean air. But I have lost my battles and I can’t fight any more. I have come here, into the desert, to die. But bear cub won’t let me leave. She brings me to a healing shack, where my organs are regenerated. I don’t have the disease anymore. Now the Mother Bear places dried lavender across my throat, and I smell its sweetness.”
     She had most of us in tears. She had taken the story on the card — the card I had written, of course — and made it her own. She had moved the action from the Northern forest to the desert of the Southwest, where she lived. She had defined the field of battle as the environmental cause she had been fighting bravely, but without success. She had shifted the symptoms to the area sof her body affected by her own disease.
     When she returned to her place in the circle, the woman seated next to her opened her journal and took out a sprig of dried lavender. “You mentioned dried lavender, so I would like you to have this.” Bella let her neighbor place it across her neck. I must note that although dried lavender was in my original dream, I had not mentioned it on the card I wrote. Two secret handshakes from the universe.
     At the end of the day, Bella stood before the group to thank us, and the Bear. “I am going to let my body believe. I am not going to die the way the doctors said. However I die, I will die standing up. And I will fight the good fight in the ways that Earth Mother teaches me.”

Adapted from my book The Boy Who Died and Came Back. Published by New World Library. This was the first time I introduced a version of my Coincidence Card Game, which we now play in several versions in my playshops all over the world map. We experiment with a digital version, with exciting results, in my new online course for The Shift Network last night. Please see my book Sidewalk Oracles for guidance on playing the game with friends, and developing a solitaire version.

Drawing: "Dancing with the Bear" by RM

Lions in the tree tops: when someone else's dream is a gift for your life

I am in the woods. They are lovely, dark and deep, as in the poem. I am thrilled by the movement of many wild animals among the trees. I look up, and see big cats in the tree tops. Can they be lions?
    I have no sense of fear. I want to watch, and explore.
    However, my friend doesn’t want to stay here. She keeps talking about chores and social engagements, all the little things she needs to deal with at home and at work. She tells me she’s taking off and I let her go.
    Paths diverge in the woods. I sense that any of these paths will lead to new adventures. I’m not sure which one to follow. The lions are moving fast in the tree tops now. I trust them to show me the way. One of them makes a fantastic leap, pursuing a deer that I glimpse further along the trail. A second lion lopes ahead along a second path.
    I get it. It’s not either/or. More than one path is open to me in life, and I can follow both at the same time, if I let the lions in me show the way.
     

This is a dream that I heard in an intimate circle of dreamers last night. I am telling it as my own dream because that is what it has become. Let me explain.
    We were playing one of the coincidence games I have invented. In this version, members of a group are invited to write a brief summary of a dream on one side of a small index card. The cards are collected and shuffled and they become an oracle deck. Before the game begins, the players are invited to set an intention by stating a theme on which they would like guidance. They take turns to pull a card from the deck. It is suggested that whatever is written on the card you pull will be a direct response from the index card oracle to your life question.
    My theme last night was simple and practical: "I would like guidance on the next six weeks." Over these winter weeks, I will be at home for the longest period in more than a decade. I want to be sure I take full advantage of this break from my almost incessant travel.
    The card I received gave a glimpse of the scene in the woods, the choice of paths, the friend who wanted to go back to everyday routines. At my request, the dreamer told the fuller version. As soon as she identified the big cats in the tree tops as lions, I found myself quivering with excitement and entirely there, in my inner senses. I could smell the forest, and the hot breath of the lions,
     The first message I received came loud and clear, in the behavior of the dreamer's friend. I must part company with the part of myself that encourages me to get caught up in small assignments and minor distractions.
     I need to put myself, in the weeks ahead, in a place of wild freedom.
     I want to accept that I can follow more than one path, in my new creative work.
     I have always felt close to lions, and I put a lion on the cover of two of my books, Active Dreaming and the new one, Sidewalk Oracles.

     What is the lion, to me? It is courage, the power to speak my truth and be heart by others, wild and primal energy for life. My lion self follows the path of heart, the only path worth following.

We may find that there is a message for us in another person’s dream because, quite simply, we are human and we are all connected. This is part of the beauty of learning to share dreams in the right way. We recognize something of ourselves in another person’s dream because, while every dream is unique and requires close attention to specific details, dreams also reflect universal situations and living symbols that speak to all. 

For the rules of playing the Coincidence Card Game with dream reports, see my book The Three "Only" Things. For further ways to play the game, and on building a personal index card oracle, see Sidewalk Oracles.

Drawing: Sun Lion by RM

When the bear eats cherries from the Tree of Life

Quand l'ours cueille et goûte avec plaisir les cerises à l'arbre de vie, avec délice, comme un enfant.

I chuckled and smacked my lips as I read these words, written in sky-blue ink on an index card. I attempted a translation:

"When the bear gathers and tastes with pleasure the cherries from the Tree of Life, with delight, like a child."

We were playing my coincidence card game, during my last workshop in southern France, in  a big, sunny room in a restored farm house in the Ardèche. In its simplest form, used as an impromptu oracle, the game works like this.

- Everyone in the group is asked to write something on one side of an index card. You write whatever comes to you: a memory, something you observed in the world around you, a summary of a dream, a thought that is in your mind.

- The cards are collected and turned into a deck. We are getting ready to play a card game. We have made a one-time deck that will now become a divination tool.

- Next, the players are asked to formulate a theme for guidance. To get this clear and simple, they are encouraged to fill in the blank in the following sentence: "I would like guidance on -----"

- Now the deck is shuffled and each player is invited to draw a card at random.

- When the players read what is written on their cards, they are invited to receive this as a response from the oracle to their questions. The message might be vague or ambiguous; that is how oracles stay in business long-term. If a player can't fathom the message, others might make some suggestions ("if it were my card").

When we play this game in my groups, I am often content to set a modest theme, like guidance on the week ahead, or on the workshop I am currently leading. My intention that day was simply, "I would like guidance on my next travels."
     I smiled again, remembering the taste of the early-ripe cherries I had been plucking from a tree in front of the farm house before breakfast.
    "I was watching you," laughed Emmanuelle, who identified herself as the author of the card I had drawn. "I saw the bear and the child in you."
     Lovely encouragement for the travels before me. I promised to feed and play with the bear and the child in me. 

For more on the coincidence card game, and other synchronicity games, please see The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence and Imagination (New World Library)