The First Latvian Moon Landing

THE LATVIANS HAVE SUCCEEDED IN LANDING ON THE MOON!

This was the headline and basic content of one of my dreams on the first night of my residential workshop on shamanic lucid dreaming at a pleasant center on a rocky beach near Roja, on the Bay of Riga, over the Easter weekend. I took it as a wink from my dream producers, indicating that we would succeed in our efforts to bring back the dreaming here.  

     After all, the Moon not only has great attraction for dreamers; it was widely believed by the ancients to be the source of much interesting dream activity. In his treatise On the Face That Appears in the Orb of the Moon, Plutarch - the great biographer, initiate and priest of Apollo, who knew what he was talking about - suggested that the spirits of the Moon visit humans in their dreams, and that the souls of humans travel to the astral realm of the Moon in dreams and transit this realm on the way to birth and again after death.

     Many of the Latvians in my group are passionately engaged in reviving the knowledge and practice of the authentic ancient traditions of their country, dating back to before the invasions began in the 12th century. A folklorist and wonderful singer named Aina gifted us with dainas - traditional folk songs that celebrate oak and sun, stone and sea. The morning after my dream of the Moon landing, I asked her to help open our circle with a song of the oak tree:

I found in a field
a tall oak tree of spirit
his feet go into the earth
his head touches the sky

Oak tree, oak tree
how wide you are
the bee flies for three days
and can't get around you

In the last stanza, this song of oak teaches us to give a little in a strong wind, to avoid being broken.

The big storm boasted
"I'll break the oak."
Oak tree, stand strong
but let the wind shake your branches.

For the first time, I introduced a circle in Latvia to the core techniques of active dreaming: how to open a safe space to share dreams and guide each other towards action to honor our dreams; how to reenter a dream in order to go beyond a fear, dialog with a dream character, penetrate a mystery, or have more fun exploring the multiverse.

    In a moving dream reentry, one of the Latvian women succeeded in going back inside a recurring dream that had previously filled her with shame and dread. In the original dream, she found herself (again and again) approaching the shack where her great-aunt had lived and died in extreme poverty in the harsh times of Soviet rule. She had loved this great-aunt and had always felt bad that the family had not been able to do more for her. In the dream reentry, she entered the shack and had a loving reunion with her great-aunt, who gave her blessings and specific personal information she could immediately use in her life.

    On Sunday, the day of requickening, we moved swiftly through a series of excellent journeys: through the gates of remembered dreams and on to a Dream Library where travelers could gain knowledge on any subject, meet a master teacher and even look at the book of their own lives; and a Magic Market where the discovery of a favorite object from childhood released the spirit horse of vital energy and provided a way to reclaim the energy and imagination of a younger self.

     The fog rolling in from the sea inspired me to offered the sea-mist as the gate for a journey to the Other Side with the dual objective of timely and helpful communication with a departed loved one or ancestor, and of gaining first-hand knowledge of the geography of the afterlife. All of these journeys succeeded beyond my wildest expectations, if not beyond my dreams.
    My own visions, during all these lucid shamanic dream adventures, powered by drumming, became a deepening adventure in dream archaeology, giving me direct access to the world of Baltic mythology and the history and spirits of the land. In a walled garden, I experienced the meaning of ancient Baltic symbols in the forms of shaped flower beds, turning in certain patterns. On a flying horse, I was called east, to a black mountain in Russia, to understand one of the long shadows over Latvia. Through an amber tunnel, I found my way to the current residence of a deceased scholar of Baltic mythology who wants me to make his work known in English.
    In the last workshop session, I helped people to open their hearts and grow a waking vision of the fulfillment of their hearts' desires, a vision so strong that it wants to take root in the world. Then I had them identify three key problems in the way of fulfilling that vision - and journey again, with the drum, for guidance on how to overcome those challenges. This produced very practical guidance, as well as the energy that comes when we carry a vision we can hold not only in the mind but in the inner senses.
     We closed the circle, arms around each other, swaying a little like the great oak in the big wind. As people continued, in high excitement, to share their experiences, I felt that the dream of the Latvian Moon landing was fulfilled.

Article first posted in April 2011

Photo: Sunrise on the Bay of Riga (c) Robert Moss

The need for dream archaeology

Marija Gimbutas, the great Lithuanian scholar of Old Europe and its Goddess traditions, declared with urgent clarity in The Civilization of the Goddess, her chef d'oeuvre:  “We must refocus our collective memory. The necessity of this has never been greater as we discover that the path of ‘progress’ is extinguishing the very conditions for life on earth." 

The new art and science of dream archaeology provides powerful tools for refocusing collective memory, exactly as the great Lithuanian scholar of the Goddess proposed.  I invented the term "dream archaeology".  It is the study of first and essential (arche) things with the aid of dreamwork and techniques of shamanic lucid dreaming. It is a discipline that enables us to access the living past, to enter into direct communication with the keepers of ancestral wisdom and heal the collective and cultural soul loss that is a feature of our age. 

The practice of dream archaeology involves reclaiming authentic knowledge of ancestral traditions, including those that may have been buried or suppressed in the course of history, through a combination of careful research and shamanic journeying across time and between dimensions. The dream archaeologist combines the skills of the shaman, the scholar and the detective. 

We let dreams set us assignments. Secrets of the past, of which the waking mind may know nothing or very little, come to us in dreams because we are ready for them, and because the ancestors speak to us in dreams. As dream archaeologists, we learn to work with such dreams, both through focused research and by learning the technique of dream reentry, which means making a shamanic journey through the doorway of a remembered dream to harvest more information, to deepen communication with the ancestors, and to travel beyond the maps. 

When we are already engaged in a line of research, we draw on the skills of shamanic lucid dreaming, as well as spontaneous gifts of the night, to find what cannot be located in ordinary ways, but can often be confirmed by subsequent dream-directed research. We are open to the phenomenon that Yeats, with poetic insight, called the “mingling of minds”. This means that when we give our best efforts and passion to our chosen work or study, we draw the support of intelligences beyond the everyday world, including those of past masters in the same field. 

After her death, Marija Gimbutas appeared to her friend and biographer Joan Marler in a powerful dream. Marija said fiercely, “You must remember us.” Joan understood that the great Lithuanian scholar of the Goddess was speaking from the realm of the ancestors, “a place of collective memory and wisdom”. She describes this encounter in an essay in From the Realm of the Ancestors, a magnificent Festchrift in honor of Marija that she edited. 

I have been privileged to lead six workshops in shamanic dreaming and dream archaeology in Lithuania. Each visit has been a grand adventure and a deepening encounter with the ancestors of the land. On my first visit to Marija’s native country, in the summer of 2004, 40 Lithuanians joined me at Nida to reclaim the arts of dreaming. With the aid of shamanic drumming, we made a group journey together through the gateway of an ancient oak, with the aim of establishing direct and authentic communication with the ancestors of the land. 

I found myself in direct contact with a priestess of Žemyna, the Earth Goddess. The priestess belonged to an earlier time, but seemed to speak from a place of amber light outside time. She instructed me in methods of healing and visioning involving the use of amber, and gave me symbols and words in old Lithuanian – a language previously unknown to me – that others in the workshop helped me translate. I am glad to report that I am returning to Lithuania in May this year to lead new adventures in dream archaeology and shamanic dreaming in Vilnius and Kaunas. 

Wherever I go now, I find myself traveling in two worlds. From behind the curtains of ordinary perception, the ancestors are calling. I am reminded again and again that one of the gifts of dreaming is that it opens authentic connections to the ancestors, offering us the chance to heal the wounds of the past and to perform cultural soul retrieval.

For much more on dream archaeology in the Baltic, and elsewhere, see my book The Boy Who Died Came Back

Photo: Žemaitiu alka, sanctuary of the old gods in Samogitia

 

 

The Practice of Dream Archaeology

Marija Gimbutas declared with urgent clarity in The Civilization of the Goddess:  “We must refocus our collective memory. The necessity of this has never been greater as we discover that the path of ‘progress’ is extinguishing the very conditions for life on earth."
    The emerging discipline of dream archaeology provides powerful tools for refocusing collective memory, exactly as the great Lithuanian scholar of the Goddess proposed. Dreams guide us to the necessary past, to the history we need to know and use. Dreams may also trigger and direct specific lines of research. Dreaming, we have direct access to the realm of the ancestors. Sometimes they reach to us, in dreams, as an ancient priest of Nippur appeared to the Assyriologist Herman Hilprecht when he was puzzling over the meaning of two fragments of agate or as an ancient atetshents (“dreamer”) of the Mohawk people called me to work that required me to study her language and reconstruct the shamanic dream practices of her tradition. We can choose to reach to the ancestors through dream incubation and by developing the skills of shamanic dreaming.
    The practice of dream archaeology involves reclaiming authentic knowledge of ancestral traditions, including those that may have been buried or suppressed in the course of history, through a combination of careful research, active dreamwork and shamanic journeying across time and between dimensions. The dream archaeologist combines the skills of the shaman, the scholar and the detective.
    We let dreams set us assignments. Secrets of the past, of which the waking mind may know nothing or very little, come to us in dreams because we are ready for them, and because the ancestors speak to us. As dream archaeologists, we work with such dreams through focused investigation, tracking that strange word, looking again at the fragments of that figurine.
    We also carry our exploration into the dream space, by learning to go back inside a dream, wide awake and conscious, as an archaeological team may penetrate to previously hidden levels of a site, or the inner caves where the great revelations are to be found. I call this technique dream reentry. It is practiced wide awake and conscious, and may be a joint venture by a whole group of active dreamers. We use shamanic drumming to fuel and focus our expeditions, using a dream image as a doorway to harvest more information, open direct dialogue with the ancestors, and go to the deeper levels of reality where the meaning of things can be found.
    We travel to ancient sites and dream with the land, opening communication with the ancestors. In The Boy Who Died and Came Back I describe what happened when we made group shamanic journeys at Kernave, an ancient capital of Lithuania, and I found myself in contact with a legendary shaman-priest, a veritable Merlin of the Baltic.
    We are open to the phenomenon that Yeats, with poetic insight, called the “mingling of minds”. This means that when we give our best efforts and passion to our chosen work or study, we draw the support of intelligences beyond the everyday world, including those of past masters in the same field. After her death, Marija Gimbutas appeared to her friend and biographer Joan Marler in a powerful dream. Marija said fiercely, “You must remember us.” Joan understood that the great Lithuanian scholar of the Goddess was speaking from the realm of the ancestors, “a place of collective memory and wisdom”.

Image: This mysterious figure, dubbed the  "Idol of Pomos" was found in a Cypriot village and dates from the Chalcolithic period. It is an inviting subject for dream archaeology.

Ravens release the dead

Prague

Two ravens, up in the branches of the Soul Tree. One black and one white. They want me to go down to a place in the Lower World where cleansing and healing is needed. I will travel this time under their wings.
    We go down through the roots of the tree, down and down, to an immense field of the dead. Countless bodies are lying here, many of them thrown on top of each other in mountainous piles. What is to be done with all these bodies of people slaughtered and abandoned, over all the centuries of war and invasion here in the Bloodlands?
    The ravens know. I hover with the great pair, black and white, over the field. At their command, under their directions, thousand of black ravens flock to the field. They tear at the corpses, stripping meat and sinew from the bones. They gorge until all the corpses have been stripped to the bones, which gleam white and clean in the sourceless twilight of this realm.
    Now something rises like steam from the bones. A great vaporous cloud, light gray, becoming lighter and more diaphanous as it rises. It is collective spirit that is rising, released from the unhappy dead. I am seeing something that Alfons Mucha tried to paint, in "Apotheosis of the Slavs", the final painting in his magnificent and harrowing series of giant canvases, the Slav Epic: a kind of resurrection of Slavic spirit.
    I am awed, and seized by sudden hope for the collective healing that may be possible here in the broken heartlands of Europe.
    I feel an urgent need to commune with the Goddess of these lands. She has shown herself to me in many forms. Here and now, she reveals herself in a primal form. The vast slopes of her body look like bread dough - like a loaf of bread, big as a mountain, that is shaped but not yet baked.
    What is the breakage of human tides to her? Blood and bone, blood and bone. All the bodies, buried, burned or unburied, have made her more fertile. She lives, she rises, she will give ripe harvests.
    I resolve to go out into the country, when my workshop is over, and make an offering to the Goddess of this land. What can a man offer the Earth Goddess? Only the return of her gifts. Bread and beer and honey.

- My experience while leading a group journey into ancestral realms in my Shamanic Dreaming workshop in Prague this weekend.


Detail from Alfons Mucha, "After the Battle of Grunwald" currently on exhibit at the National Gallery in Prague. Photo by RM.

Frankfurt journal: Singing in the Medicine Bear, and schnitzel heaven

Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany

Weine nicht, mein Kind,
Weine nicht, mein Kind,
Der Bär will für dich tanzen
Der Bär will für dich tanzen

Add German to the list of languages in which my groups have now sung the Bear into the circle as healer and protector. My dream translator, Peggy Moeller, magicked up this version with all of 5 seconds notice, and the rhythms worked perfectly for the words I originally borrowed and translated from the Mohawk Indians. For the Mohawk, this song is both a lullaby used to comfort young children in the night, and a shaman song used to call Okwari, the Bear, as healer and protector.
     To sing for the Medicine Bear as Great Mother in Germany felt like an act of ancestral healing and even cultural soul recovery, on more than one level. Here, as throughout much of Europe, the bear was revered in early times as the master of animals. Warriors invoked its strength and courage. The evidence of the paleolithic caves suggests that early Europeans believed that the bear was a form assumed by deities, by the more-than-human. The early church was fiercely hostile to bears, as well as the bear cult. St Augustine, who probably never saw a bear, pronounced Ursus diabolus est, "The Bear is the Devil". The church leaders became convinced that in Germanic lands like Saxony, the heathens would never be converted so long as bears survived, and they persuaded the emperor Charlemagne to order two crusades against the bear. These were deliberate acts of attempted genocide, or xenocide. In the late 8th century, soldiers and armed men were sent out in all directions with orders to hunt down and kill any any every bear they could locate. Thousands of bears were slaughtered. The facts of this appalling history are laid out in clear scholarly fashion in a recent book: The Bear: History of a Fallen King by French cultural historian Michel Pastoureau,
     Singing for the Bear seemed like an act of reverence and restitution. But there was more. As we sang, and then as I drummed, I had a most powerful vision of Great Mother Bear, dancing with us, and dancing for Germany. She was seizing the dirty and bedraggled bearskins of male warriors and men of violence who had been possessed by the killing frenzy of the Bear, but not its power to heal and protect. I saw her cleansing the spirits of dead berserkers (literally "bear-shirts") and stripping away the hateful though-forms and energetic legacies of racism and hatred. And I felt how deeply this country is in need of shamanic tools for ancestral healing, and gratitude for the ability an outsider sometimes has to see the shape of such needs and to help bring through the healing, because he or she stands outside the historic tragedy and multi-generational guilt and angst of the people among whom he is traveling.

How do you feed and honor the Bear? Well, food is always a good idea. After the first day of my workshop - where we went fast and deep while having loads of fun - I took a cable car downtown with native guides recruited that day  for dinner at the wonderful non-touristy Klosterhof, a restaurant popular with locals. The establishment is dedicated to this version of the Benedictine message: "Ora et labora, said Benedict, pray and work. But who works hard should also eat and drink well and plentifully!" No table available, just seats at the bar, but when I suggested to Jenny, our charming server, that she could work magic, she agreed with enthusiasm. No sooner had I been given a tall glass of the house brew than she announced that she had the perfect table for us. 

In schnitzel heaven at the Klosterhof

    I asked the table magician's advice on house specials, and she sang an aria of praise for a unique offering with a name designed to scare off all but the boldest of wordslingers: Schlägler Chorherrenschnitzel. A generous pork schnitzel, fried in butter, topped with bacon, slices of apples and mountain cranberries, melted cheese, and finally a fried egg. Really?
     I trembled a little at the prospect of a mountain of food with all these contrasting layers of flavor, but my inner Bear did not hesitate for a second. We'll have it. "Let me hear you say its name correctly," Jenny put me through a shamanic test. She was very kind to my atrocious accent. A mountainous plate duly arrived, and I found that, as promised, the many flavors and textures blended amazingly well. My inner Bear was fully prepared to clean the plate, but I told him that we would need to go hiking in the mountains to work off all this rich food if we did that, and he finally let me shove the plate away, uncleaned. A digestif? Of course. I chose the Klosterhofgold, a liqueur prepared with aromatic infusions of Angelica and Meisterwurz ( "Master Root"). This potion was invented by bibulous monks who insisted that it would blend the powers of heaven and earth in the body. It did wonders for the sniffles I had developed by sloshing around in wet snow after repeated redeye hopping between different time and temperature zones since I left Hawaii a week ago.
     The Bear in me was pleased, though he still wanted to finish everything on that plate.

Top photo: With Peggy Moeller, my dream translator, at my Friday evening lecture for the Frankfurter Ring.

Snapshots from a Dream of Tallinn

Tallinn, Estonia

I walked past Fat Margaret, the massive medieval tower that guards the north gate of the Old City, and down Pikk Street. Just before 9 AM, it was nearly deserted; while the word "Suletud" on the doors of shops and restaurants and museum simply means "Closed" in Estonian, I was able to enjoy blissful solititude, in the more familiar sense, instead of tourist crowds .

    I walked up to the pink palace that houses Estonia's parliament, then down Toompea Street to a great unhewn block of stone that has been turned into a monument. On August 20, 1991, the day of an attempted coup in Moscow, the Supreme Council of Estonia declared independence. This was one of the rocks that nonviolent independence fighters hauled to block the roads to the citadel against Soviet tanks that (for once) never came.
    At the foot of the hill, I turned west to visit Freedom Square, where a man-made monument greeted me. It is a Victory Tower constructed entirely of glass, honoring Estonia's earlier struggle for independence in 1918-1920, when Estonians, supported by a British fleet and international volunteers, had to fight on two fronts - against the Red Army and against the German Iron Guard, in league with the Baltic German Landswehr. The glass tower, surmounted by the Cross of Liberty, Estonia's military medal, resembles an ice sculpture, suggesting both the difficulty of building a free society, and its fragility in a country whose geographic misfortune is to be situated in the "Bloodlands" between Germany and Russia.
    I walked up the Hill of the Hartu Gates, above the glass tower. A group of Russians were rough-housing with a Samoyed. I heard angelic singing behind me, as I stood under an ancient linden, and turned to find a troop of school girls chorusing a folk song.

  I arrived at the Museum of Occupations at opening time. This was at the top of my "must-see" list because I felt a strong need to understand the long nightmare of the 20th century from which the Estonians emerged, singing. I saw old suitcases piled everywhere, a mute tribute to all the Estonians forced to flee their homes or their country. A sinister inner gateway loomed in front of the exhibits. It looks like a cross between a tank and a border checkpoint, embellished on one side by the red star and on the other by the swastika, emblems of the twin evils that invaded and oppressed Estonia in World War II.

     Beside this iron gate, the museum's statement of intent included these words:

The loss of memory and gaps in memory are dangerous for a people.

Yes. And it takes remarkable bravery to own the memories of a history in which so many were not only brutalized or murdered, but compelled to fight in the uniforms of foreign armies commanded by psychopathic despots. The exhibits are understated: a collection of every-shifting identity cards, an NKVD trroper's body armor, a bottle of homemade vodka, a photo of Forest Brethren - who took to the woods to resist the Soviets - smoking cigarettes under a tree. The testimonials of survivors, speaking in documentaries running on monitors above the display cases, are more graphic. A woman speaks of the "smell of burned meat" after the Soviets arrived to "liberate" her district.

     I leave the Museum of Occupations with all the material in English I can find and walk up to Town Hall Square to drink a local beer - A. Le Coq - at a sidewalk table in the sun. Suddenly a large group at two long tables behind me burst into song, quite beautiful song. When I thank them, they tell me they are Swedes, a choir arrived for a singing competition at the Concert Hall. At my request, they proceed to sing a "summer hymn". And I wish that all international conflicts could be resolved in a singing contest. 
    My walk brings me back to Fat Margaret, once a prison. Now the thick-walled stone tower houses a maritime museum. I wander inside and contemplate images of Neolithic Estonians in skin boats, of fish-factory ships, of the salvage from warships sunk in the Baltic. There's a copper deep-sea diving suit from the 1920s, worthy of Jules Verne. It's hard to image anyone in that kind of armor surfacing again from the deep; the commentary notes it was never used. Just above the right shoulder of the deep-sea suicide suit is the first painting in special exhibition of seascapes by an Estonian artist, Rein Mägar. It's dated 2011, and shows a wild spray of blue and white. The title? Unistus. "Dream." Perfect. Another nudge to keep on doing what I have come here to do.

    Leaving Fat Margaret, I look at the interesting building across the street, which pays distant homage to the Tudors. Now a children's library, this building at 73 Pikk was formerly the Tallinn headquarters of the Soviet KGB. A nice progression. At the Museum of Occupations, I watched the former deputy head of the KGB in Tallinn, Vladimir Pool, recalling on camera his experiences when he was trying to monitor the growth of the Singing Revolution in 1988, three years before the popular movement in the Baltic countries helped trigger the collapse of the Sovet Union. The KGB boss had his agents phoning in estimated numbers of Estonians arriving for a songfest that had been shaped as a cry for freedom from Soviet rule. Pool was astounded as his agents reported ever-growing numbers of people. He lost contact with one of his agents. The man called in. "Fifty thousand now," he reported. (The number was to get much larger). Then the agent added, "Soviet power has just gone down the toilet."
    In the evening, I walk along Soo Street, northwest of the Old City, to a studio in an old wooden building where I open the first session of my Active Dreaming workshop. People are excited; some have read Conscious Dreaming in its Estonian edition.
    As we go round the circle, making our introductions, I feel that a grand communal adventure is beginning.
    A young Estonian man tells us, "I am here because I feel an ache in my belly when I have to come back to the body from my dreams."
    An older woman says, "I am here because your book gave words for how I have dreamed all my life."
    A computer programmer says, "I'm here because my dreams have returned after years of amnesia but I'm clueless."
    A beautiful woman announces, "In my dream, I saw Russians driving around crazily on a monster, aggressive lawnmower in front of my dream home and I want them off my grass."

Photos of Tallinn (1) Great Coastal Gate (2) Prison doors in Museum of Occupations (3) Steps in Old City (c) Robert Moss