Poetry comes from flooding

 

Stefania Pandolfo’s beautiful but difficult Impasse of the Angels evokes the landscapes – imaginal more than physical – of rural Moroccan villagers for whom dreaming and poetry are vitally important, and always interweaving.
    “Poetry is always the result of flooding”, a younger poet tells her. A real poem bursts from an emotion that is inundating, overwhelming – until it finds creative release.
     The most respected poet in the area, one Sheikh Mohammed, was alien to poetry until he dreamed of a flood. The dream came at a time of personal trauma when he was close to despair. Previously a violent man of action, he had managed to blow off his right hand in a gun accident.
     He dreamed the river was coming down in flood, its front like a mountain, carrying everything it encountered in its path, trees and carrion and debris. Instead of fleeing, he stood there in the dry riverbed, watching and waiting. Then he opened his mouth and swallowed the flood and everything borne along by it.
    Upon waking he recounted the dream to his mother: "The river in flood entered my mouth and I swallowed it." She told him that he had become a poet. He who had never recited a verse or cared for poetry, he who had even ridiculed poets in his previous life, began to ‘speak’, to utter poetical ‘words.” [1]
    I am reminded of the counsel Anais Nin gave to a seventeen-year-old aspiring writer: “Creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.”[2]
    I am reminded of my own big dream of a flood, one of those that dream classifiers might call a watershed dream. I dreamed I was walking a deer I called Bear as I might walk my dog in the park. We came to an open plain with a view to a distant horizon. The earth was reddish and looked bare. I glanced to my right and saw a tremendous wall of water rushing towards where we stood. Instead of fleeing, I prepared myself to catch the wave and ride it. I woke charged with creative energy.
    Of course, I wanted to go back inside the dream, to enter its mysteries and to see what would happen if I managed to ride the great wave. I managed to do this in an operation I call dream reentry, in which we use a dream or personal image that has energy as the portal for a conscious journey, which may be field and focused by shamanic drumming. I did not need drumming to go back inside this dream; it was calling me.
     My animal companion was not mysterious. I have long been closely connected both to the deer and the bear as shamanic allies. I was amused that in the dream I called the deer Baer, but this, for me, simply brought into focus the healing aspects of the connection and was not a [particular focus for the lucid dream journey I was going to make. I wanted to catch the great wave.  
     I lay back in an easy chair, closed my eyes, and willed myself back inside the dream. I found myself in ancient Egypt, in Egyptian garb. I was surveying the Nile at the time of the  inundation, when the great river rose to feed the thirsty earth, bringing the crops. As the waters spilled, I saw papyrus plants in great abundance bursting from the earth, which was now black and loamy. I felt deep in my body that I was being invited to enter a fresh period of abounding creative energy. This proved to be the case. A new book, new poems, new projects poured from me and through me. Life was poetry even when I was writing in prose. Poetry comes from flooding.

 

 References

1. Stefania Pandolfo, Impasse of the Angels: Scenes from a Moroccan Space of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) p.265]

2. Anais Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin. Vol. 4: 1944-1947 (New York: Mariner Books 1972)

 

Jung on the Virtue of Making Dream Pictures

 

In his 1929 lecture "The Aims of Psychotherapy", Jung issued a passionate appeal for art therapy - specifically, for the art of turning dreams into pictures.

First, he notes that it was often a very positive development in a patient's inner life when their dreams featured photos, paintings or films and even more so when the dreamer declared "If only I were a painter I would make a picture of it". When this happened he would encourage his patients to actually draw or paint their dreams and abandon any protestations that they lacked artistic ability. "Many of my more advanced patients, then, began to paint."

He noted that this shifted the dreamer away from a passive attitude to dreams, and to life. "He puts down on paper what he has passively seen, thereby turning it into a deliberate act. He not only talks about it, he is actually doing something about it."

In making a dream picture, the dreamer comes to reflect on a dream in depth and starts to bring vital energy from the dreamworld into embodied life. "The concrete shaping of the image enforces a continuous study of it, in all its parts, so that it can develop its effects to the full. This invests the bare fantasy with an element of reality, which lends it greater weight and greater driving power."

He insists that making art from dreams helps the dreamer to become "creatively independent". The patient no longer depends on the doctor's opinion. "By painting himself he gives shape to himself." He has gone beyond ego to work with his "interior agent" and "the hidden foundation of psychic life".

Then he goes right to the top, or perhaps over the top. 'It is impossible for me to describe the extent to which this discovery changes the patient's standpoint and values, and how it shifts the center of gravity to his personality. It is as though the earth had suddenly discovered that the sun was the center of the planetary orbits and of its own earthy orbit as well." [1]

Painting Philemon

"Since I did not understand this dream-image, I painted it"

In 1914 Jung dreamed of a figure he called Philemon. He came to play an extraordinary role in Jung's imaginal life. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he recalled:

"There was a blue sky, like the sea, covered by flat brown clods of earth. It looked as if the clods were breaking apart and the blue water of the sea was becoming visible between them. The water was the blue sky. Suddenly there appeared from the right a winged being sailing across the sky. I saw that it was an old man with the horns of a bull. He held a bunch of four keys, one of which he clutched as if he were about to open a lock. He had the wings of a kingfisher with its characteristic colors.

"Since I did not understand this dream-image, I painted it to impress it upon my memory."

The tremendous - indeed Otherworldly - significance of the dream encounter was confirmed for Jung when, a few days later, he came upon the body of a dead kingfisher, a bird rarely seen around Lake Zurich.

He said in his memoir that “Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. For I observed clearly that it was he who spoke, not I.

"He said I treated thoughts as if I generated them myself, but in his view thoughts were like animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air, and added, “If you should see people in a room, you would not think that you had made those people, or that you were responsible for them.” It was he who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche. Through him the distinction was clarified between myself and the object of my thought. He confronted me in an objective manner, and I understood that there is something in me which can say things that I do not know and do not intend, things which may even be directed against me.”

Jung's first portraits of Philemon - at least, the first that have survived - are a pencil drawing and a study for a lost picture that once hung in the room of Jung's wife Emma. They are reproduced in the lavishly illustrated book The Art of C.G.Jung, recently published by the Foundation of the Works of C.G.Jung. Their great interest is that they show the bull horns and a vigor of flight that are missing from Jung's later painting of Philemon in The Red Book.

1, C.G.Jung, "The Aims of Psychotherapy" in Collected Works volume 16 trans R.F.C.Hull (Princeton: Bollingen Series, 1985) 47-49

"Lady of Many Colors'. Dream drawing by Robert Moss.

Into Manannan's Realm

I sing of a voyage, and a voyager, sails furled in the dusk, yet ready to spread before a favoring wind.

   The black goose sails before, into the fire below the sunset rim of the world. The way leads to the sunken lands, and to the earth beneath the sea that land-bound men will never touch.

Watch how the waters turn and swirl, opening a tunnel between the elements. Let yourself flow through the passage.

You are entering the realm of Manannan mac Lir, most unknowable of the Old Ones, one who escapes definite and conventional forms. Your kinsman. You are at home here. You breathe where others drown. Sea-born, sea-girt, salt blood in your veins, coral sprouts from your marrow. You surge with the horses of the sea, into a rare kingdom

Away, away come away my love

To fields of coral and pearl

Away, away come to me my love

To she who one was your girl

                                               

I heard the siren song, though I had long since turned my back on the sea and lived in a tamed country, in a gentle valley.

   She found me there, as surely as a kelpie finds a lone fisherman in a curragh on a lonely night with the whisky in him, or the fire of the stars.

   Something out of memory. But whose?

   The memory of the cell? A current in the blood? Something held in the mirror of dreams without bodily substance, yet alive in the silvered deep of the glass, in suspension between the middle world and the worlds that escape form?

Do all such visitations come from the past, from those beneath the earth or sea? Or do they come from the same time, but a parallel realm of being? Why not from the future?

Questions, questions, while her lilting song echoes in my inner ear.

Away, away, come away my love.

                                                        ~

Put this down. Etch it on stone, mark it for memory:

There is one time, one art that encompasses all. Look through the hole in the stone. The Holy Man knows. See through his single eye the oneness of things. All created things, all that is past, or present, or to come, will and can be seen in this glass without a lens.


Note of Origins

These words came streaming through me on a night when I was writing some reflections on how more is available in dreaming than is understood by the daily trivial mind. I wrote these lines: 

Dreams are the doorway between the worlds. In modern Western society, we have a diminished understanding of the word “dream”, reflected in the common expression, “it’s only a dream”. Let us push deeper, beneath the surface clutter of day residue and “inferior thinking” and the smorgasbord of broken memories, to what Sri Aurobindo calls “the sleep of experiences".

I paused from writing these notes, because I felt a deep shift in the atmosphere, blowing like the wind off an unseen sea. I felt the power of a deeper source, moving with me and through me as wind and waves. I adjusted my inner senses and let braver words come, both fresh and ancient.

Photo: Bow Fiddle Rock near Portknockie on the north-eastern coast of Scotland. The natural quarttzite arch is thought to resemble the tip of a fiddle bow. 

Unfinished Portrait of the Higher Self & Other Dream Drawings

 

My favorite activity first thing in the morning is to make a drawing from a dream. This delights the small boy and the artist in me, who are pretty much the same. I don't worry about technical execution, and use whatever I pull from my boxes of colored pencils and markers and oil or gel crayons and Neocolors.

Here are three recent productions:

January 17, 2023

Dream

Hermetic Fridge

My mind is still working on Neoplatonist texts I was studying late. I open the fridge and see a screen filling the upper half. It displays texts that appear in Greek and English translation and various symbols. I am able to read quite a lot. Then the screen flickers and living scenes appear. A woman in a flowing garment dances with a radiant being that descends in a shaft of light. I picture myself entering a similar column of light and ascending within it.

On a shelf in the fridge door is a slim rectangular case, like a laptop. This belongs to observers who are monitoring the transmissions.

I walk outside on our street, rehearsing exercises and meditations I have derived from my studies. When I take up the texts again, there is a satisfactory click: I have found a portal that was used by an ancient lineage of theurgists to enter another universe. A Speaker confirms my discovery and shows me how that universe looks from the outside.

Feelings: excited, intrigued

Reality check: I have been reading books by and about the Neoplatonists late into the nights. The fridge and the street in the dream are our new fridge and the scene right outside our building. I'm happy to think that ancient knowledge is right here where I live.

January 18, 2023

Dream

The Ambassadors Get Me to Ride a Kangaroo

I'm at a reception hosted by a Spanish grandee, Muy caballero. Many ambassadors are present. Drinks and canapes are flowing freely. My host tells me his guests would like to see me ride a kangaroo. Is this a joke? No, they actually have one. With great misgivings, I get on the animal's back (riding bareback) and we are flying. If this started as a joke, it is becoming something else.

Feelings: amused

Reality: I am an expat Australian. Aussies really don't ride kangaroos but long ago I knew an Aboriginal spirit man whose animal ally was a kangaroo - Big Red - that gave him the power of fast walking. In movement, kangaroos are in the air 80 percent of the time.

January 20, 2023

Dream

She Finger-Knits Herself Under a Red Blanket

People have gathered because the blonde is putting on quite a show. She is finger knitting a chunky red blanket while sitting inside it. She goes on - and up - until the blanket all but covers her head. Excitement rises because she is being timed. In a minute or so she'll be stopped. Will she finish in time? She adds to the tension by slowing her hands. Now I can barely see her skin and hair below the red strands. A few last loops and pulls and she's Done!

Feelings. Entertained

Reality: I know nothing about knitting. I don't think I know the blonde. Her style is of an earlier generation. I think of the Mad Men era. What's going on feels like a contest or publicity stunt. The last thing I read before bed was a line about an intuitive seeing a woman entirely covered in red

Sometimes I combine this exercise with bibiomancy by opening an old journal at random and seeing what pops us. Here are three drawings I made recently from "old" dreams I recorded more than twenty years ago that still convey terrific energy.

[Date of drawing: January 26, 2023]

Banyan Family

I found this in a much longer inner communication I recorded on May 22, 1999:

"You recall your almost erotic interest in the banyan of Lahaina, that replants itself. The banyan is an excellent model for the relationship between different life experiences – for your personal soul family. "

[Date of drawing: January 28, 2023]

Unfinished Portrait of the Higher Self

Journal report dated May 2, 1999

I am leading a group up a mountain along a spiral path. We pass a statue of a recumbent lion. What might be a saddle on his back is a giant carnelian glowing with deep red fire.

There is a tower at the top of a mountain. Through open doors we see an artist working on a painting, apparently a self portrait. Above and around it is a second, much larger portrait. It is nested inside a still larger picture, suggested rather than executed. And so on, and so up. Looking up I see that the tower has no roof and the walls seem to go up into the sky. Picture within picture, self within higher self. I doubt that the artist's work can ever be done but his passionate engagement is fueling a life of creative exploration charged with that carnelian fire.

One more, from a night vision I recorded more than thirty years ago:

[Date of drawing: January 24, 2023]

Bees Fly Me to the Epopteia

Journal report dated January 25, 1992

“Had” to lie down at 9:30 p.m. Immediately, I had the sense of being drawn up out of my body, of my whole second body lifting up. I saw a glow around my second body. I felt strong vibrations and heard a humming sound. I realized that a swarm of bees had massed around me, especially around my arms and shoulders, lifting me, helping me to fly.

I flew inside the swarm of bees, over an ocean, towards a temple on a rocky height. Greek words were streaming through my mind. Kyriacos. Epopteia.

Later, I grabbed relevant books from my shelves. Kyriacos means Lord or Ruler. The epopteia is the “full vision” or “full revelation" of the highest stage of the Mysteries, when the initiate is brought face-to-face with the deity. Of course I found many pages about bees as the companions of the Goddess and recalled that "honey bee" (melissa) is an ancient title of the priestess.

A Dreamer's Notes: Library Night with Borges

What’s missing from Edwin Williamson’s long biography of Jorge Luis Borges (Borges: A Life) are the dreams. There’s mention of an early and recurring nightmare, in which Borges does not know where he is or who he is, a dream that may have anticipated his blindness but extends to his existential condition. There are a couple of references to nightmares in his later years – of being terrified by a dream that oppressed him in a book-lined basement in a professor’s house in East Lansing, so he had to be moved to a hotel; of a terrible dream in which he is crucified and glimpses a she-wolf as his oppressor. But nothing, really, about the dreams that may have inspired and fueled the poems and stories.

Did Borges really dream only on paper? If so, this might account for his uncertainty about whether there is an afterlife, something that weighed on him into his final days. His father – who went blind long before him – sometimes spoke of his longing for death in the sense of being totally “extinguished”. Borges, bitterly and recurringly rejected by women and disappointed in love, and tied to the clumsy body of a failing, eventually sightless animal, also yearned for this, and often thought of suicide. Feeling close to his own death, three years after the death of his boyhood friend from Geneva, Maurice Abramowicz, Borges wrote 

I cannot tell whether you are still someone
I cannot tell whether you can hear me [“Elegy”]

Yet the next year in a Greek taverna in Geneva, when a certain song was playing, Borges experienced an epiphany. The song declared that while the music played, you could enjoy the love of Helen of Troy; while the music played, Ulysses could go home to Ithaca. In this moment, Borges knew that Maurice was alive and present, and raised his glass in a toast to his friend. “Tonight I can weep like a man,” he wrote that same night, “ because I know there is not a single thing on this earth which is mortal and which does not project its shadow. Tonight you have told me without words, Abramowicz, that we should enter death as we might enter a fiesta.” [“Abramowicz” in Los Conjurados]

Borges was now released to imagine – in a burst of visionary optimism after all the black despair – a world created by dreamers. In his prose poem “Someone Shall Dream” (“Alguien sonara”) the future “shall dream dreams more vivid than our waking life today. It shall dream that we can work miracles, and that we won’t carry them out because it will be more real to imagine them. It shall dream worlds so intense that the voice of a single bird could kill us.” 

A Library Date with Borges

I have dreamed of Borges, and these dreams are very much the dreams of a writer and bookman, as you might expect. During a visit to Barcelona, I picked up copies of a couple of Spanish-language editions of books by Borges and his friend Adolfo Bioy Casares and leafed through them on a sunny hotel terrace during siesta time. That night, Borges called me, as he had promised in a previous dream, to his ideal library. In that well-upholstered space, he appeared in his prime, no longer blind, beautifully dressed. He gave me a personal seminar on the art of the short story, drawing on his own experience of writing three drafts of a story. “Each,” he remarked, “had merits and demerits.

The story was "The Secret Miracle", that dark jewel in which a Jewish playwright who has been sentenced to death by a Nazi official in occupied Prague is granted his wish for a year to complete an unfinished play. The world around him is frozen as he spends a year of mental time on this work. When he finds the last word the bullets are released from the barrels of the firing squad. The story contains two remarkable dreams within its own oneiric logic.

“My first draft had the most passion,” Borges told me. “The third was the most technically accomplished. It is essential not to lose the passion in the developing craft.”

Illustration: "Library Date" by RM with AI assistance

Poets of consciousness

Poets, it’s said, are shamans of words. True shamans are poets of consciousness. Journeying into a deeper reality with the aid of sung and spoken poetry, they bring back energy and healing through poetic acts, shapeshifting physical systems. When we dream, we tap directly into the same creative source from which poets and shamans derive their gifts. When we create from our dreams, and enter dreamlike flow, we become poets and artists. When we act to bring the energy and imagery of dreams into physical reality, we become poets of consciousness and infuse our world with magic.

In Birth of a Poet, William Everson raised a clamorous appeal for poets to reawaken to their shamanic calling: "O Poets! Shamans of the word! When will you recover the trance-like rhythms, the subliminal imagery, the haunting sense of possession, the powerful inflection and enunciation to effect the vision? Shamanize! Shamanize!" Across the centuries, many of our greatest poets have recognized their kinship with the shaman’s way of shifting awareness and shapeshifting reality. As his name in a spiritual order, Goethe chose the name of a legendary shaman of antiquity, Abaris, who came flying out of the Northern mists on an arrow from Apollo’s bow.

Our earliest poets were shamans. Today as in the earliest times, true shamans are poets of consciousness who know the power of song and story to teach and to heal. They understand that through the play of words, sung or spoken, the magic of the Real World comes dancing into the surface world. The right words open pathways between the worlds. The poetry of consciousness delights the spirits. It draws the gods and goddesses who wish to live through us closer. Shamans use poetry, sung or spoken, to achieve ends that go deeper than our consensual world. They create poetic songs of power to invoke spiritual help; to journey into nonordinary reality; to open and maintain a space between the worlds where interaction between humans and multidimensional beings can take place and to bring energy and healing through to the body and the physical world.

The South American paye takes flight with the help of "wing songs". These flight songs help him to borrow the wings of the kumalak bird [a kind of kite] that is a main ally of shamans. Among the Temiar-Senoi of the Malaysian rainforest, the great gift of a dream is the norng, or dream song, literally a "pathway" that can get you through the jungle or carry the soul to where it needs to go on either side of death.

Among the Inuit, the strongest shamans are also the most gifted poets. One of the reasons their spirit helpers flock around them is that they are charmed and exhilarated by the angakok’s poetic improvisations. Inuit shamans have a language of their own, which is often impenetrable to other Eskimos. It is a language that is never still. It bubbles and eddies, opening a whirlpool way to the deep bosom of the Sea-goddess, or a cavernous passage into the hidden fires of Earth.

My favorite Inuit shaman-word is the one for "dream". It looks like this: kubsaitigisak. It is pronounced "koov-sigh-teegee-shakk", with a little click at the back of the throat when you come to the final consonant. It means "what makes me dive in headfirst." Savor that for a moment, and all that flows with it. A dream, in Eskimo shaman-speech, is something that makes you dive in headfirst. Doesn’t this wondrously evoke the kinesthetic energy of dreaming, the sense of plunging into a deeper world? Doesn’t it also invite us to take the plunge, in the dream of life, and burst through the glass ceilings and paper barriers constructed by the daily trivial self?

Shamans know further uses for dream songs. They call the soul back home, into the bodies of those who have lost vital energy through pain or trauma or heartbreak. And from their journeys, they bring back poetic imagery that can help to shapeshift the body’s energy template in the direction of health.

Mainstream Western physicians agree that the body believes in images and responds to them as if they are physical events. By bringing the right images through from the dreaming, the poets of consciousness explain dis-ease in ways that help the patient get well, and interact with the body and its immune system on multiple levels without invasive surgery.

As dreamers, we tap into the same deep wells as poets and shamans and we climb ladders between the worlds. Poetry sometimes comes dancing out of dreams, in full-formed verses. When we turn our dreams into poems, we free our creative spirit, and our spirits come dancing.

Text adapted from Dreamways of the Iroquois by Robert Moss. Published by Destiny Books. 

Photo by RM

Writers dreaming, dreamers writing

 

Writing and dreaming are closely related as daily practice. Writers who keep journals and record their dreams are giving themselves a warm-up, flexing the creative muscles that will work on the larger project. Writers who may not record their dreams with any regularity nonetheless rise from sleep with their heads full of words – as Dickens related in a letter to a certain Dr Stone – that are pressing to come out.

A writer’s dream may help to “break up the great fountains of the deep” (a phrase Mark Twain used repeatedly) releasing the power of long-buried memories, or bringing through ideas that have been growing in the preconscious or the deeper unconscious for years or decade. That is how Aslan came to C.S. Lewis, giving him the key to Narnia.

As Lewis recalled

The Lion all began with a picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. The picture had been in my head since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself: ‘Let’s try to make a story about it.’

At first I had little idea how the story would go. But then suddenly Aslan came bounding into it. I think I had been having a good many dreams about lions about that time. Apart from that, I don't know where the Lion came from or why he came. But once he was there He pulled the whole story together, and soon he pulled the six other Narnian stories in after him. 

Yeats was inspired by a dream to write his play Cathleen ni Houlihan. As he wrote in 1908:

One night I had a dream almost as distinct as a vision of a cottage where there was well-being and firelight and talk of a marriage, and into the midst of that cottage, there came an old woman in a long cloak. She was Ireland herself, that Cathleen ni Houlihan for whom so many stories have been told and for whose sake so many have gone to their death. I thought if I could write this out as a little play I could make others see my dream as I had seen it.

In dreams and flow states that writers come into contact with inner helpers. Robert Louis Stevenson communed with his “Brownies” in states of reverie, and gave them the credit for doing better than half his literary work. Yeats spoke of the “mingling of minds” that can bring assistance, in a creative venture, from intelligences that seem to belong to other times or other dimensions .

Milton described the source of his inspiration as

....my celestial patroness, who deigns
Her nightly visitation unimplored,
And dictates to me slumbering, or inspires
Easy my unpremeditated prose [Paradise Lost IX. 21-4]

Milton spoke of “being milked” after his nights of inspiration, as – totally blind by the time he composed his most famous work – he dictated to a scribe.

When they are truly “on”, many writers experience the sense that they have entered a creative partnership with a larger power, a power the ancients used to call the genius or the eudaimon (the good demon). Some writers develop the ability to enter a certain kind of imaginal space – call it the Dream Library – where such encounters are easy; we do this regularly in my own creative writing retreats.

 

Inviting in your genius

The Romans never described a person as a genius. They might say, "Apollonius has a genius" - i.e., a special relationship with a tutelary spirit. The word genius is related to gignere, which means to engender or "beget". It implies reproductive energy, the power of inseminating new life. The Romans called the marriage bed genialis lectus. As observed by Jungian analyst and classicist Marie-Louise von Franz, "this referred not only to sexual potency but also to the qualities that today we would call psychic vitality, temperament, resourcefulness and a lively imagination."
    In a well-bred Roman household, a statuette representing the personal genius of the father of the family usually stood near the hearth in the kitchen. It might be the figure of a young man, holding a horn of plenty or a phallus or a snake. The woman of the house was believe to have her own guardian spirit, or "Juno", who embodied the power of giving birth. In the Roman conception, each of us is born with a personal relationship with a spiritual patron, or genius, who is the source of creative energy.
    James Russell Lowell was close to this perception when he wrote: "Talent is that which is in a man's power; genius is that in whose power a man is."
    To live and work creatively, we need to make room for this energy. The Romans were on to something. To bring something new into the world is to give birth. We see this in the pregnancy dreams that are not about physical childbirth, but about something new that is borning inside us. We can feel it in our bodies in a period of creative gestation.
    When one of my books is ready to be born, I feel pregnant. I mean that in a quite literal sense. My appetites change. I develop odd cravings at strange hours. I forget to eat or sleep for days at a time, then walk out of a dinner party to crash or feed my face with something I wouldn't normally touch. I develop morning sickness. When my new baby is ready to come out, I can't stop the contractions, even though sometimes, like a woman I once heard screaming in a maternity ward, I want to yell, "This has to stop!" There is no dope, no epidural, no C-section available to dull the experience or shortcut the labor; whatever is in me has to come out the old-fashioned way. There is an equivalent to birthing in water: the blessed gift of going into a state of flow, in which I relax into the rhythms of what is fighting its way into the world.
     As Erich Neumann remarked, "Every human being is by nature creative. Yet one of the gravest and most menacing problems in our Western civilization arises from the fact that this civilization cuts man off from his natural creativity."
    To choose and act creatively, we must be able to put our commonplace selves, with their reliance on structures and schedules,on one side, and make room for the source energy of the begetter. Creative inspiration, as all artists and discoverers know, comes through spontaneous combustion between the waking mind and other levels of consciousness. "I know now," wrote Yeats, "that revelation is from the self, but from that age-old memoried self, that shares the elaborate shell of the mollusc and the child in the womb, that teaches the birds to make their nest; and that genius is a crisis that joins the buried self for certain moments to our daily trivial mind."
     You cannot program a creative breakthrough, but you can clear a space where it may come about. Dreamwork is a wonderful aid to the creative process, because the source of dream images and the source of creative inspiration are not separate. When you resolve to catch your dreams, you are telling your creative source, "I am available. I'm listening."
     When you record your dreams, you are developing the art of storytelling. You will discover your gifts as a writer, and if you are already a writer,you will find you have done your "warm-up" exercises almost effortlessly and are ready to go he distance. Best of all, through dreamwork you are constantly learning to approach challenges from new angles, in a spirit of play. The Romans believed that a person's genius rejoices in good living, in laughter, in healthy sex, in having fun. Forget to play, and you are not working with your genius, for whom play is the only thing in mortal affairs worth taking seriously.

Adapted from Conscious Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by Three Rivers Press

Image: Winged genius from mural in a Roman villa at Boscoreale, near Pompeii, late 1st century, now in the Louvre.

Acts of Creation

 

To be creative is to bring something new, and valuable, into our lives and our world. You don’t have to be an Einstein or a Shakespeare to be creative. You need to play the best game you can, in whatever field is calling you, and come up with some new moves, and play so hard you don’t think of your game as just work (and may never want to retire from it).

What makes a world-class creative remains mysterious. But new research in neuroscience is telling us interesting things about how the association centers of the brain work when new ideas are coming through, confirming that one characteristic of creative people is that they make connections between things that other people don’t see as connected. Nancy Andreasen, a pioneer of brain imaging at the University of Iowa, found that in episodes of high creativity, multiple association cortices of the brain are communicating back and forth with each other - not to process sensory input, but in free conversation. Wild and novel connections are made, and from these – through the brain’s character as a self-organizing system – new creation emerges.

 Educational psychologists who try to rate creativity levels speak of a “fourth-grade slump”, when adult assumptions and formal training start to block kids’ natural ability to make things up. This suggests another key to creative living; we want to stay in touch or get in touch with the spontaneous creativity of our inner child, our master imagineer. 

Something important that creative people have in common is that they develop creative habits. For choreographer Twyla Tharp, these include “subtraction” – making a conscious effort to minimize distractions and make sufficient time and space available for a new project. For creativity researcher Keith Sawyer (a psychology professor at Washington University in St Louis) good creative habits include “working smart”, creating a daily rhythm that sets the right balance between hard work and “idle time” when the best ideas often jump out.
    For Columbia business professor William Duggan, creativity in business hinges on “opportunistic innovation”, the readiness to watch for unexpected opportunities and change your plans in order to cash in on them when they turn up.

A high tolerance for ambiguity is a characteristic of highly creative people. This increases our ability to think outside the box, make connections others can't see, and escape from either/or choices..We grow our tolerance for ambiguity when we share dreams in the right way and receive feedback from multiple perspectives - and find that every viewpoint has something to offer. Active dreamers are capable of checking all the boxes when given multiple choices.

Great creators in all fields are dreamers, not only in sleep but in twilihght states of reverie where connections that escape the ordinary rational mind come easily and contact with higher intelligence is often made. Robert Louis Stevenson said he received his stories in a state of “reverie” in which benign visitors he called “brownies” helped him to compose.
      Wolfgang Pauli, one of the pioneers of quantum physics, said that dreams were his “secret laboratory.” Scientist Otto Loewi dreamed the experiment that enabled him to prove that nerve impulses are chemically transmitted, a discovery that won him the Nobel Prize. Einstein, Niels Bohr, Kekulé, – and Newton in his own day, and Hypatia in hers – were all dreamers. They drew inspiration from sleep dreams and developed the ability to slip into twilight states of consciousness

Other habits of creative people: 

- They find personal ways of getting “into the zone”.

- They are risk-takers. They are willing to make mistakes, and learn from them. They look at mistakes as experiments rather than failures.

 - Creative people are “prepared for good luck”; they view coincidences as homing beacons and turn accidents into inventions.

- They make room for creation – time and private space.

- They are visual thinkers.

- They find a creative friend. This is a person who provides helpful feedback and supports their experiments.

- They persevere. 

Creativity is not just the preserve of a lucky – or tormented – few. It’s a power we can all claim. 

And here is what, for me, is the most important key to creativity. When we take on a creative project - and its element of risk - and step out of whatever box we have been in, we draw supporting powers, especially the power that the ancients called the genius or the daimon. Most people understand this intuitively, even though we may fumble for an agreed language to describe it.

When we are passionately engaged in a creative venture, we draw support from other minds and other beings, seen and unseen. According to the direction of our will and desire, and the depth of our work, those minds may include masters from other times, and a greater Self. We draw greater support the greater the challenges involved in our venture. Great spirits love great challenges.

Yeats wrote about what it required to engage the daimon with quivering passion in his essay Per Amica Silentia Lunae. The title means “The Friendly Silence of the Moon”. He borrowed it from Virgil's description of the Greeks approaching Troy by stealth. Under the poet's moon, Yeats explains how we  can develop a co-creative relationships with minds operating in other times and on other planes of reality. 

Yeats believed, as I do, that whether we are aware of it or not, all our life choices are witnessed by a larger self he called the daimon. The daimon lends or withholds its immense energy from our lives according to whether we choose the big agenda or the little one. The daimon is bored by our everyday vacillations and compromises and detests us when we choose against the grand passion and the Life Work, the soul's purpose.

The daimon loves us best, Yeats said, when we choose to attempt “the hardest thing among those not impossible.”

Art: "The Red Tree" by Robert Moss

 

 

Seth and the Dream Department of Literary Production

I love first-hand stories of how writers are inspired and spurred to action by dreams. In an old journal, I found notes I made while reading Susan M. Watkins' account of the classes she took with Jane Roberts and Seth in the early 1970s. She reported that a dream pushed her to jettison her doubts about turning her journals into a book. She dreamed she saw a print shop growing out of her backyard garage, “literally growing, like a time-lapse garden film – out of the garage walls and floor”. She knew this print shop contained everything she needed to produce her book and get it circulating to an audience.
    She proceeded to put together and publish her book, Conversations with Seth, a treasury for those of us who are drawn to the Seth material and its wonderfully clear description of multidimensional reality and the multidimensional self and the vital importance of dreaming in all of this.

    Susan compared the mobilizing effect of this dream to the kind of experience described by Jane Roberts in Adventures in Consciousness, when a surge of creative energy is given to us by the psyche at exactly the right moment.
    As a writer myself, I assign such episodes (devoutly to be wished) to the Dream Department of Literary Production.

My rediscovery of the Watkins story made me open her book again, at random. I found precious thoughts from Seth on two very important themes: how absence of dream recall may be caused by fear of the inner self, and how the dream world s not only a real world but may be the source of events in the physical world.

    In a session of Jane Roberts class in June 1973 Seth had this to say to a participant who wanted to know why, if dreams are important, she could not remember hers:

    “You are still afraid of the inner self. You still do not trust your dreams, and you are afraid of them. You do not want to remember them. When you give yourselves the suggestion that you will remember your dreams…you do not mean it. You are afraid or what you might meet, and you are still afraid of one particular dream, and you know the one to which I am referring.

     “You can change the ending of the dream by understanding the nature of reality: that you form it….You must believe in the power and energy and strength and glory of your being, and know that problems are challenges for you to solve…Then face them joyfully [with] your entire self….

    “Stop cowering! Do not cower before your own belief that the inner self is frightening, or that you are a bad person, or that while you are good, there are bad things hidden down there. Tell yourself, and convince yourself, that since you area part of All That Is, you are in your own way, now, a unique expression of All That Is, and there is nothing in All That Is to be afraid of and there  is nothing in you to be afraid of.”

     Later in that session Seth comes to his favorite theme:

    “How real is a dream? What makes you think that there is any difference between what you think of as a dream and what you think of as reality? You assume that a dream is less real; yet through what you think of as your dreaming life, you make your physical life…You choose in the dream state the probable realities that you will then make physical.”