How you know you're not in Kansas any more

"Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore. We must be over the rainbow."

- Dorothy, in the movie version of The Wizard of Oz

I am thinking about the moments, in the midst of a dream adventure, when we wake up to the fact that we are not in ordinary reality.
    You look in a bathroom mirror and you see a very different face.
    You are with people and suddenly remember that in the regular world they are dead.
     Fish start flying through the air.
     A horse jumps out of a painting on the wall and thunders across the room.
     Such moments are prompts to dream lucidity. You say to yourself, I'm dreaming. Sometimes this startles you into leaving the scene and dropping back into your body in the bed. With practice, you may learn to use these awakenings, inside the dream state, to carry on with the adventure, now fully aware that you have the power to navigate, making conscious choices - and powers you don't have when you are in physical reality.
    The prompt may not only help you to become a lucid dreamer; it may awaken you to the fact that you are in a different world. In one of the great Celtic voyage tales (immrama), known as the Voyage of Maeldun, the travelers in their skin boat awaken to the fact that they are no longer on the Irish Sea when they reach an island where the ants are as big as horses. A radical change in the apparent scale of things is a well-recognized indicator that we have gone beyond the bounds of the familiar everyday world.
    I found the following experience thrilling and instructive:

I am bouncing along in a yellow cab in a part of New York City I don't know well. It's run down. The road is potholed. Some of the stores are shuttered, some of the buildings look abandoned. The street seems very wide because there is little traffic.
     The driver is tearing along, much too fast, veering all over the road. I ask him to slow down. He either does not hear me, or has decided to ignore me. I lean forward to speak to him through the gap in the security screen. I notice for the first time that the taxi driver is a dead man. He is yoked to the steering column by a rope tied round his neck like a noose.
     I realize that I am not in any regular city. I must be dreaming. So now I am lucid, yes?
     Yes and no. As this thought rises, the driver slams on the brakes and the taxi stops so violently that I am bounced off the broken springs in the back seat towards the ceiling. I grab the door handle. As I move to get out, the kind of voice you hear in recordings in New York City cabs says, very distinctly,
    "This is not a dream. You are in the afterlife."
    This opens out into a grand adventure in which I entered several different afterlife locales, none of them especially elevated, and learned a good deal about lifestyle choices and dramas on the Other Side.
     At a certain point, I became concerned that I had gone so far and deep that I was uncertain how to get back. Since I was lucid, I was aware that I could simply will myself to go back to my body. Yet I was troubled by the thought that if I tried a quick exit - Back to the body! - I might leave some vital part of myself behind in the Underworld I had discovered.
    I could use a little help, I signaled.
    This inner cry produced an immediate response. An elegant figure, dressed in black and red as if for a costume ball, appeared, with a yellow car that was not a yellow cab, something more like a Mini Cooper. With a dashing gesture, he invited me to hop in and drove me back at amazing speed, up through many levels of the realm I had been in.
    What do I have to say about this? Thank you - for the experience, and the roadside assistance.

Art: "Fish Woman on the Paris Bridge" by Robert Moss. From a dream.

Maxims of the Hidden Poet

 You have a poet hidden inside you. In dreams, your poet makes worlds. Your poet is not hiding from you, but you may have been hiding from him or her. Let your inner poet walk with you in your world, and your world will change. You will smell colors. You will hear voices in stones. You will find a universe in a flower. You will meet a goddess at a traffic light.

Here is some of what I hear when I attend to my hidden poet.

 

Maxims of the Hidden Poet

Did you really say that your dreams have nothing to do with reality? Your real problems begin when your reality has nothing to do with dreams.                               

Dreaming, you can travel without leaving home.

You can meet your loved ones at any distance, including beyond the apparent barrier of death.

Dreaming, you are a time traveler. You visit past, future and parallel times

Your consciousness is never confined to your body and brain, except by your failures of courage and imagination.

Instead of trying to interpret dreams according to everyday assumptions, use dreams to interpret the confused messages of everyday life.

Coming events cast a shadow before them. You have felt this some mornings as you emerge from a dream you may or may not remember. The shadow of a mass event can fall like a mountain over many. Most days the shadow is softer and more intimate. As you rub sleep from your eyes, the shadow that falls over you may be cast by your roving dream self, returning to your time with a sun at its back that has not yet risen in your world.

Dreams can be the revenge of the imagination. In ordinary life your imagination may be bound to old stories and crushed by your efforts to fulfill schedules and fit in with other people’s expectations. You may have lost the power to visualize anything beyond the surface world and to find the extraordinary in the ordinary. You may have so lost contact with your great imagineer, your inner child, that you reject the magic of making things up.

Dreams can blow a hole in the hard carapace of your self-limiting assumptions through which the moreness of life comes shining through. That opening can be the portal to realms of true imagination where creators, shamans, and mystics have always wanted to go.

Everything is waiting for you to wake up. You thought you were dreaming in your sleep, but while your body slept your soul was awake. Right now, as you go about your day, your soul is dozing. Wake up and dream.

 ~

In the world you now inhabit, you need to chop wood, carry water, as dreamers do in their daily practice. Write in your journal every day. Wait like a trout fisherman in those waters between sleep and awake for the fish to arise. Light beacon fires by letting others know, at any distance, that you have dreams to share. Make a safe space to share your dreams with a friend or a circle. Help each other discern what your dreams reveal about the secret wishes of the soul, how they may show you ways to survive in the dark times and bring treasures back from darkness, and what action your dreams require of you. Let the beacon fires spread and lift up the dark.

You can heal your body and your life by dreaming a better story. Why not dream a better world? How about now?

Text adapted from Growing Big Dreams: Manifesting Your Heart’s Desires through Twelve Secrets of the Imagination by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Photo: Writing desk in Yeats' tower, Thoor Ballylee, County Galway by RM

Jung wrestles with the prince of the Casbah

I accustomed myself to living always on two planes simultaneously, one conscious, which attempted to understand and could not, and one unconscious, which wanted to express something and could not formulate it any better than by a dream.

The voice is that of Jung, reflecting late in life on his early travels (in 1920) in North Africa, where he was fascinated to find himself among people whose language he did not know, whose culture was initially utterly foreign to him, and who had a very different relationship to their bodies and their emotions (he thought) than Northern Europeans.
     He felt that beyond surface differences he was dealing with a different collective spirit, a spirit of the land itself. He told himself that his feelings were more than a tourist's projections, that there was something out there, a spiritus loci that he needed to explain to himself and eventually to others. He had deeply emotional reactions to everyday scenes: to the buzz of Arab conversation in the casbah in Algiers, to a haughty, magnificent rider on a black mule hung with silver, to Arab men walking hand-in-hand at an oasis in the Sahara, to the sudden riot of color and noise of a market setting up in the early morning.
    He feared that he was falling "under the spell of the primitive", that he had been "psychically infected", a condition he saw reflected in his body when he succumbed to a form of infectious enteritis.
    He began to fear that his rational mind and identity might be overwhelmed by what "primitive" peoples called ghosts and spirits. He had read Inside Australia, a 1912 book about Aboriginal beliefs and customs by anthropologists Baldwin Spencer and Francis Gillen. His imagination was seized by the reported Aboriginal belief that the ancestral spirits of the land lie in wait for newcomers, and can reincarnate themselves through their progeny. Jung returned this idea again and again. In his essay "Mind and Earth", he wrote that "Certain Australian Aboriginals assert that one cannot conquer foreign soil, because in it there dwell strange ancestor spirits who reincarnate themselves in the new-born. There is a great psychological truth in this."
    In North Africa, Jung wrestled with the sense that there was something wild and primal and "barbaric" that could take possession of him now, not in a future generation. He was moving towards a theory of the "objective reality of the psyche", about how just as each of us has a world within, the world outside us is full of spirit, for good or otherwise. But more immediately, he was groping for a way to stay in balance, to master and integrate archetypal forces that threatened to overwhelm him.
    In Tunis in 1920, it was a dream that was his mentor and his proving-ground, as was so often the case in his life. Jung dreamed he was in an Arab city with a casbah whose walls formed a perfect square, with a gate on each side, and a moat around (an unlikely element in a North African city). He stood before a wooden bridge leading to a dark, arched portal.             Eager to explore, he stepped onto the bridge. At the mid-point, he was challenged by "a handsome, dark Arab of aristocratic, almost royal bearing". This prince of the casbah attacked him. They fought and fell through the railing of the bridge together. The dark prince tried to force Jung's head under water to drown him, but Jung resisted. "No, I thought, this is going too far." He succeeded in pushing his assailant's head under water. "I did so although I felt great admiration for him. I had no intention of killing him. I wanted only to make him unconscious and incapable of fighting."

     After this struggle, the scene changed and the adversary reappeared as as a companion. They stood together in a vaulted octagonal room in the center of the citadel. Everything was white, simple and beautiful. On the floor below him, Jung discovered an open book with black letters written in splendid calligraphy on milky-white parchment. He was reminded of the Uigurian script of western Turkestan, familiar to him from the Manichean fragments of Turfan  "I did not know the contents, but nevertheless I had the feeling that this was 'my book', that I had written it."
     He told the young prince that now he had overcome him, he must read the book. The prince resisted, but Jung overcame him again, this time with kindness and patience.
     Recalling this turning-point dream in his later years, as he dictated the materials for Memories, Dreams, Reflection, Jung analyzed it in terms that today sound almost stereotypically "Jungian" and yet go beyond. The shape of the casbah or citadel is a perfect mandala, within which the dreamer is journeying to the center of the self. The adversary on the bridge is a "shadow", but in a larger sense that is often understood when that term is used. The Arab prince is "not the personal shadow, rather an ethnic one associated not with my persona but with the totality of my personality, that is, with the self. As master of the casbah, he must be regarded as a kind of shadow of the self."
    In his own view, Jung's struggle with the dark prince - like Jacob's struggle with the dark angel - was more than a battle with a denied or suppressed aspect of his ordinary personality. It was a contest in which consciousness, awakened to the power and allure of a previously unrecognized archetype, is challenged to fight in order to befriend.
     

Art: Henry Ossawa Tanner, "Gate of the Casbah" (1914)

Conscious Dreaming in the Real World

I used to avoid the term “lucid dreaming” because it was often associated with approaches that promised to teach people to “control” and “manipulate” their dreams. The discussion has matured greatly since then, though if you cruise the web you’ll find plenty of hucksters promising to teach you how to be a master of the universe or have guilt-free sex with anyone through lucid dreaming.

    I chose the title Conscious Dreaming for my first book on all of this. In my mind, being conscious means more than being lucid. It means being aware that at every turning, in every state of reality and consciousness, you can exercise choice. At the very least, you can choose your attitude, and that can change everything. You want to be prepared, always, to test the limits of possibility.

    In my experience, it is less important to be aware that we are dreaming than to be capable of exercising choice, pursuing goals and considering consequences, whatever state of reality and consciousness we may be in.
    The ability to embark on dream journeys at will, travel to certain locations, contact transpersonal beings and exercise wakeful powers of goal-setting and decision-making in the dream state  is what is prized by traditional dreaming peoples. In other words, they rank volitional dreaming above lucid dreaming, to employ a helpful distinction suggested by anthropologists Roger Ivar Lohmann and Shayne Dahl in a recent essay.[1]
      As a lucid dreamer, you may experiment with creating environments in nonordinary reality where you can live out your wildest fantasies or engage in training or meditation. I am greatly in favor of practicing reality creation on the imaginal plane. However, you don’t want to fall into the delusion that everything you experience in dreaming is merely a figment of your own imagination, or that everyone you encounter is a projection or aspect of yourself.
     You will come to understand that dreaming – lucid or otherwise – is a portal to other realms of reality in the multidimensional universe. They may have their own physics, whether similar or wildly different from the physics of everyday experience on Earth.  These realms include the territories where the dead are alive.
     This is common knowledge in ancestral and indigenous traditions, which understand that the dream world is a real world and may actually be more real than much of ordinary life, where we are sometimes in the condition of sleepwalkers. In dreaming cultures, it is recognized that the most important events in our lives may take place in dreams.              
     Anthropologist Irving Hallowell wrote of the Ojibwa, “When we think autobiographically we only include events that happened to us when awake; the Ojubwa include remembered events that hat have occurred in dreams. And, far from being of subordinate importance, such experiences are for them often of more vital importance than the events of daily waking life. Why is this so? Because it is in dreams that the individual comes into direct communication with the atiso’kanak, the powerful ‘persons’ of the other-than-human class.”[2]

     Shamans say that in dreams that matter (waking or sleeping) one of two things is happening. Either you are journeying beyond your body, released from the limits of space-time and the physical senses; or you receive a visitation from a being — god, spirit, or fellow dreamer — who does not suffer from these limitations. In the language of the Makiritare, a dreaming people of Venezuela, the word for dream, adekato, means literally a “flight of the soul.”[3]
     Among the Semang-Negrito peoples of the Malay peninsula, "walking into a dream" means entering an altered state of consciousness and a separate reality.  What is experienced in dreams is at least as real as what goes on in the day. One of the souls of the dreamer travels in other worlds. [4]

    If you have been primed to think that what goes on in dreams is all about your  own thoughts and projections, you may be shocked into awareness that the dream world is a real world when you find yourself in a lucid dream in which other players are clearly beyond your control. 
    For Jung, the dawning came in his encounters with the mentor he called Philemon, who appeared to him as an old man with kingfisher blue wings and convinced the psychologist, as Jung put it, of the objective reality of figures who appear in inner experiences. "it was he who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche." [5]
    I once dreamed that I was rattling along at high speed in a yellow New York City cab. I became lucid when I noticed that the taxi driver was a dead man yoked to the steering wheel by a rope around his neck. I yelled for the cab to stop. When it did, I heard the kind of recorded voice you get in New York cabs. It said, "This is not a dream. You are in the afterlife."
    I proceeded to have adventures in a number of strange Underworld locales and bardo states. Getting out of here was not straightforward. I had to ask for help. It came in the elegant shape of a being I had met many times before, who is recognized in certain traditions as a form of the sacred Gatekeeper. I was lucid throughout this odyssey, and volitional in the sense that I remained fully conscious of my power to choose my course. But the other players and the environment itself had their own reality and solidity.
     A bigger experience in a state of dream lucidity brought me to my first encounter with the spiritual teacher I have called Island Woman in my books. This episode began in the hypnopompic zone, when I stirred from sleep in the middle of the night. Among the stream of images rising on my inner screen, I chose a double spiral of the kind I had seen on a guardian stone at the entrance to Newgrange, the megalithic temple-tomb in Ireland.
     Instantly, I found myself floating above my body - a reminder that in dreaming (lucid or not) we often travel beyond the body and brain. I enjoyed the very sensory experience of flight. I lifted over trees and rooftops, soaring and swooping like a bird. I felt some pain when my wingfeathers rubbed the dried needles of an old spruce tree.

     Then I felt the tug of someone else's intention. I chose to follow the call. It brought me on a long flight over pristine woodlands - modern highways and developments were gone - to a cabin somewhere near Montreal where a wise and ancient woman spoke to me over a wampum belt. I did not understand her language until a series of later experiences - and some helpful synchronicity - led me to my first friends among the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois. They had me repeat words I had recorded phonetically. Eventually we determined that my interlocutor was speaking to me in an archaic form of the Mohawk language, "the way we may have spoken it three hundred years ago."
     I was required to study Mohawk to understand the teachings of an arendiwanen, or "woman of power", who had called me in a lucid dream into a real world beyond linear space and time. This transformed my life. [6]
    
References

1. Roger Ivar Lohmann and Shayne A.P. Dahl, "Cultural Contingency and the Varieties of Lucid Dreaming" in Ryan Hurd and Kelly Bulkeley (eds) Lucid Dreaming: New Perspectives on Consciousness in Sleep (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2014) vol 2., 24-25.
2. A. Irving Hallowell, "Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior and World View" in Stanley Diamond (ed) Culture and History: Essays in Honor of Paul Radin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 207-44.
3. Marc de Civrieux, "Medatia: A Makiritare Shaman's Tale" in David M. Guss (ed) The Language of the Birds (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1985) 74.
4. Diana Riboli, "Dreamed Violence and Shamanic Transformation in Indigenous Nepal and Malaysia" in Lucid Dreaming: New Perspectives, vol, 2, 75.
5. C.G.Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Vintage, 1973) 183.
6. For the full story, see Robert Moss, Dreamways of the Iroquois (Rochester VT: Destiny Books, 2004) and The Boy Who Died and Came Back (Novato CA: New World Library, 2014).

Photo by RM
Drawing: "Island Woman" by Robert Moss

Yoga of Consciousness in the Place between Sleep and Awake

"You know that place between sleep and awake, the place where you can still remember dreaming? That's where I'll always love you. That's where I'll be waiting."

-          

                  - Tinker Bell to Peter Pan in the movie "Hook"

I have been following these fairy directions for a very long time. If you can train yourself to maintain a state of relaxed attention in this in-between state, you will notice that you may be receiving a whole menu of possibilities for lucid dream adventures. Images, faces, landscapes rise and fall. When you learn to hold one of them in focus, it may become the portal for a conscious journey.
    The Parade of Faces is a frequent phenomenon in this state. You may feel you are among a crowd of people, with faces and figures rushing by. Sometimes one may turn to look at you, which can be an interesting opportunity to enter a shared experience with another dream traveler you may or may not know in ordinary reality.
    Sometimes the images rising and falling before you look like a child's sketches, or cartoons.
    A frequent sighting for me, in this in-between state, is of what initially looks like the weave of a carpet or the mesh of a net. I have come to recognize this as a kind of border between states of reality and consciousness. With intention, I can part the strands and find myself in another order or reality.
    The liminal state of hypnagogia, which I often call the Twilight Zone, is a good place to become aware of your ability to travel beyond the body. I often find myself lifting out of the body quite effortlessly in this state, without bumps and grinds. Sometimes, when tired, I simply rest half in, half out, of my physical form. Sometimes I float up to the ceiling. Quite often I go flying, like a bird, over my sleeping city and to places far away.
    As Tinker Bell counseled, the Place Between Sleep and Awake is, above all, a wonderful place to rendezvous with other beings and other intelligences. It is a state in which we often become away of the psychic activity around us.
    Often, I find different casts of characters waiting or popping up as I hover on the edge of sleep or linger in the twilight zone of hypnagogia. Sometimes, they appear to be quite literally on stage, or in the wings, waiting for me to show up in order to start or resume a play. More often, they seem to be characters in life dramas that are being played out in other times or in parallel worlds, dramas in which I have a lead role from which I may have been absent while attending to things in my default reality.
     I frequently have inner dialogues in the Place Between Sleep and Awake, with sources of knowledge I have come to trust. This is a time when I can often receive streams of counsel and information from inner guides. In Dreamgates, I record some of my conversations with the intelligence I decided to call "G2". He carried the vocabulary and knowledge of a great Western Mystery order. I felt he was a transpersonal figure, though in no way alien to me. Many others have come to me in this liminal state. The most important of these inner guides is certainly no stranger; he is a self who observes and operates on a level of reality above the one I inhabit while living on this Earth in a physical body.
    In the history of creative breakthroughs in every field, including science and technology, the hypnagogic state has been of vital importance. In this liminal zone it is easy to make creative connections, which often involves linking things that seem to the routine mind to be unconnected. Many inventions and discoveries attributed to dreams by over-hasty writers - like Kekule's discovery of the benzene ring - are actually gifts brought through from hypnagogia, to such an extent that I call this zone of consciousness "the solution state" in The Secret History of Dreaming.

        It is surprising that so little has been written about the nature and manifold possibilities of this liminal state in the literature of sleep and dreams. Greek Cypriot author Andreas Mavromatis wrote the only book I know entirely devoted to this liminal state of consciousness, marrying scientific data to rich accounts of creative and visionary accomplishments in this zone. In Hypnagogia: The Unique State of Consciousness Between Wakefulness and Sleep, originally published in 1987, Mavromatis writes that

“Hypnagogia…facilitates the emergence into consciousness of material that might otherwise remain unconscious. It might, thus, also constitute the platform onto which is periodically raised the substratum of continuous but not always conscious mental activities taking place throughout life. As such, it opens great vistas of psychological exploration. Its introspective study may furnish the individual not only with the benefits of an integrated personality but also with the means of discovering new or little known modes of experiencing which will undoubtedly enrich him/her as a psychological entity.”  

    The Place Between Sleep and Wake can be the very best place to go on with a dream or go back inside one. You may want to practice dream reentry to clarify information from a dream, or get to its full meaning, or continue a conversation with a dream character. You may need to reenter a dream because there are terrors to be overcome, or a mystery to be explored, or simply because you were having fun and adventure and would like to have more. Or because Tinker Bell is waiting for you.
    The Place between Sleep and Awake is the best place to develop the continuity of consciousness prized by advanced practitioners of the yoga of sleep and dreams. I am talking about growing your ability to maintain awareness and witness perspective as you move back and forth between sleep, half-sleep, dream, lucid dreaming, what Sri Aurobindo called “the sleep of experiences” and the dream of everyday life.


Art: "The Victory" by René Magritte (1939)

The Art of Memory

Dreaming, waking or in between
in any part of the multiverse
in any body, in any life
you are invited to play
a memory game.

Whatever world you are in
the trick is to remember
the other worlds you inhabit
where you are dead and more alive
and the self that is dreaming you.

- Robert  Moss,  “The Art of Memory”

Photo of trees at the Palais-Royal (c) Robert Moss