Personal Myths and Collective Dreams

Joseph Campbell maintained that “A dream is a personal experience of that deep dark ground that is the support of our conscious lives, and a myth is society’s dream. The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth.” I have long found this to be profoundly true.  In the ancient mind, there was rarely any doubt. In Homer's time, as in Cleopatra's or the Buddha's, dreams were nightly fields of interaction between gods, humans and others. Though we may be short on shared mythology in modern society, our dreams still bring us into mythic life. 

I found this excerpt in an old  journal, typed on a strip of paper I had used as a bookmark. The title of the dream was in upper case.as reproduced here:

The Big dream

IMAGES OF THE PRIMORDIAL GODS

I went through the lineage of the gods, backwards and forwards, from the anthropomorphic versions back to raw and primal images without clearly defined borders. I saw the Great Goddess. I saw Zeus streaming on the face of the waters, like an immense living island whose skin barely broke the surface. His colors were light olive and silver.
    His “hair” streamed in a deltoid pattern that could almost be mistaken for a beard, but was more reminiscent of a verdant triangle of public hair. Trying to describe his form (inside the dream) I evoked sea turtles and cuttlefish and (waking) the wings of a vast manta ray. But none of these similes contained the shape, which was too vast and too fluid to be comprehended in a single visioning.

I was excited that this dream found me again. It took me back to the era before humans had made much progress in domesticating the wild primal nature of the forces at play around them – of the elements, of land and sea, of Earth and Sky. I wrote my story "The Way to Tethys" in Mysterious Realities from another vision of this kind.
    I was curious that in the dream I call the oceanic deity Zeus rather than Poseidon, then recalled that their precincts and identities were probably not clearly demarcated in the archaic mind. Zeus is a generic term for a god as well as the name of the Big God enthroned in the Olympian pantheon (and one of the Big Three beside his brothers Poseidon and Hades). Nobody can decide whether the magnificent Artemision Bronze in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens is Zeus or Poseidon and whether what is missing from his raised fist is a trident or a thunderbolt.

The Greeks dreamed of the Egyptians who dreamed, it may be, of Atlantis. "Great stories are like dreams," Normandi Ellis takes up the big theme in Imagining the World into Existence: An Ancient Egyptian Manual of Consciousness. "The images that appear on the tomb walls and in the context of the Egyptians' sacred books are dreams...If we view the entire study of ancient consciousness and its impact on our lives as if it were a dream language, it becomes easier to peel back its layers and open to its possibilities." 

Illustration: "Eyebrows of Zeus" by Robert Moss

How was your dreamimg?

 

When we study the vocabulary of dreaming, cross-culturally, we come alive to ways of seeing and experiencing the larger reality that I believe were shared by all our ancestors. For example, for the Makiritare, a dreaming people of Venezuela, a dream is literally a “journey of the soul” (adekato). In ancient Assyria, a dream is a “zephyr” slipping through the crack between the door and the lintel to breathe in your ear, like a puff of wind. In ancient Egypt, a dream is an “awakening” (rswt); for me, that is the best of all definitions.

In good Old English, a dream is "merriment" and "revelry" of the kind you might encounter from downing too many goblets in a mead-hall. But by Chaucer's time, the same word, with a different, Northern derivation, can also imply an encounter with the dead. As in Northern Europe (German Traum, Dutch droom etc) the word "dream" we have inherited is linked to the Old Germanic Draugr, which means a visitation from the dead.

The old Iroquoian word katera'swas means "I dream" but implies much more that we commonly mean when when say that phrase in English. Katera'swas means I dream as a habit, as a daily part of my way of being in the world. The expression also carries the connotation that I am lucky in a proactive way - that I bring myself luck because I am able to manifest good fortune and prosperity through my dream. The related term watera'swo not only means "dream"; it can also be translated as "I bring myself good luck." One of those early Jesuit missionaries,  Father Jean de Quens noted on a visit to the Onondaga, that "people are told they will have bad luck if they disregard their dreams." If you want to get lucky, in this conception, you had better learn to dream.

My understanding of what is possible through dreaming was deepened immensely when I dreamed of an ancient shaman, also the Mother of the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk people, who used the term ondinnonk, which took some decoding. I discovered – after studying Mohawk and some Huron – that the term means “the secret wish of the soul, especially as revealed in dreams”. This, I learned, was the key to an ancient practice of dreaming for soul healing, in which a community task is to gather round the dreamer and try to help her understand what the soul wants, as revealed in dreams – and then to help her take action to satisfy the soul (rather than the ego) and keep it in the body where it belongs.

What a pity we don't greet each other in the morning in the style of another indigenous dreaming people, the Wayuu of the Guajira peninsula in Colombia. They don't say "Good morning" or "Hi" or "How's it going?". They say  jamaya pü’lapüin? which means "how was your dreaming?" or "what did you dream?"

Lapu is both their word for a dream and the name of a deity. 

Michel Perrin, a French ethnographer who lived with the Wayuu and describes their shamans "dream practitioners" - a better term for real shamans than many I have seen - reported a caution from this dreaming people. "“When you no longer dream, that is a sign or consequence of grave illness. You are almost dead because when your dreams vanish so do all traces of the soul.”

Illustration: Assyrian Lamassu in Red by Robert Moss

Dreaming in Greeneland

When I first traveled to Paris as a foreign correspondent, early in the 1970s, the office secretary made a reservation for me at the St James Albany, which turned out to be twin hotels - very handsome Right Bank townhouses - separated by a quiet courtyard with a fountain and flagstones and flowerbeds and shade trees. It struck me that the courtyard between the twin hotels was a liminal space, ideal for intrigue and trespass of various kinds – for games involving lovers, or spies, even players from different worlds. 

     I later discovered, to my great delight, that Graham Greene had similar feelings and had made this location a part of Greeneland, the fictive world of his novels. He used the courtyard of the St James Albany as the setting for a hilarious scene in Travels with My Aunt in which two women, meeting by chance, discuss the lovers with whom they tryst in secret in each of the twin hotels - and then discover that their lovers are the same man when M. Dambreuse arrives with his wife and children.

     Graham Greene led many lives, but first and last he was a writer, with a professional writer’s discipline. Through his many intrigues, both personal and political, he managed to sit down almost every day from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. – on a veranda in Tahiti or a cottage in Brighton – and knock out his quota of 500 words, and he did this for seventy years, producing a steady stream of popular novels and essays.
     A crucial part of Greene’s practice was to write down his dreams. He started keeping a dream journal when he was sixteen. He often reported his dreams in letters to lovers and friends. Over the last twenty-five years of his life, he recorded his dreams with great faithfulness – though in fiendishly difficult handwriting – in notebooks that are now in an archive in Texas. His last literary project was to edit a selection of his dreams for a posthumous collection he titled A World of My Own.

     The interweaving of Greene’s dream life with his other lives makes a fascinating study, for which the primary source materials are unusually extensive.  We see how a man who chose to live on the dangerous edges of the world was able to create – richly and repeatedly – from the borderlands of dreaming. We can track many different modes in which a writer can create from dreams, from receiving the initial idea for a story, to solving a problem during sleep, to bridging a narrative gap, to dreaming deep into a character’s life.

     As a young boy, he had psychic dreams, often involving death by water, a prospect that terrified him. On the night the Titanic sank, when he was just seven, he dreamed of a shipwreck, with a man in oilskins bent double beside a companionway under the blow of a great wave. 

     He was miserable at school – nothing unusual in the lives of creative and sensitive individuals – and ran away when he was sixteen. This was highly embarrassing for the family, since Graham’s father was headmaster. They decided to send him to London to be psychoanalyzed, which was still a novel idea in 1920, especially for a teenage boy. The analyst selected, Kenneth Richmond, had no formal training; he was a writer with spiritualist leanings who followed an eclectic approach.
     While Greene was boarding with him in Lancaster Gate, Richmond instructed him to write down his dreams. In mid-morning sessions, Greene was expected to tell a dream and then give his associations to the key images while the analyst merely listened. When Greene did not recall a dream, he made something up. The whole experience – which he later described as the happiest six months of his life  – laid the foundation for Greene’s literary career by training him to write from dreams and invent stories. 

      Kenneth Richmond’s beautiful wife Zoe – about whom Greene had mildly erotic dreams – thought Graham was clairvoyant, “a natural medium”. While in Lancaster Gate, Greene dreamed of a ship going down in the Irish Sea. That same night, just after midnight, the Rowan sank in the Irish Sea. 

      In some of his precognitive or clairvoyant dreams, he found himself in the situation of one of the victims. Aged twenty-one, he dreamed of another shipboard disaster in which he was being ordered to jump overboard from an upper deck. He later read the news of a terrible wreck in a storm off the Yorkshire coast in which the captain ordered his men to jump into the violent sea, and all but two were drowned. Greene speculated that “on an occasion like this there must be terrific mental waves of terror, and my mind seems to be particularly attuned to the terror of drowning wave.”

     His youthful psychic ability to dream his way into someone else’s situation resembled his mature ability as a novelist to dream his way into his characters’ lives. He later observed that “sometimes identification with a character goes so far that one may dream his dream and not one’s own.” 

     Greene’s dreams were central to his writing. He said that two of his novels, It’s a Battlefield and The Honorary Consul, both started with dreams. He dreamed the plots and characters of entire short stories. When he was writing A Burnt-Out Case – which drew heavily on his diary of a trip to the Congo – Greene came to a point in the plot where he was stuck. Then the author dreamed as his character, Querry, and found he could insert his dream “without change” in the novel, “where it bridged a gap in the narrative which for days I had been unable to cross.” 

     Greene made it a habit to solve writing problems in his sleep, noting that it is not necessary to remember the content of a dream in order to receive a dream-inspired solution. “When an obstacle seems insurmountable, I read the day’s work before sleep…When I wake the obstacle has nearly always been removed: the solution is there and obvious – perhaps it came in a dream which I have forgotten.” 

      He harvested personal dreams and assigned them to characters in his novels. In a  dream reflecting his lifelong preoccupation with religion, he gave a lecture on the theme that God evolves, as well as man, and that behind their apparent duality, God and Satan are one. He later transferred this theory to a passage in The Honorary Consul where his character explains that God has a “night-side” as well as a “day-side”; the night-side will wither away (“like your communist state, Eduardo”) as God and man both evolve. 

   Graham Greene was a man of mystery who had much to hide, in his private life and in his engagement with the worlds of power and espionage. For him the great mystery, at the end, concerned what follows death. He thought – and dreamed – about this all his life. He was greatly affected by a series of dream encounters with his father after his death. 

   Greene had a disturbing dream that he might be extinguished after death through lack of belief. “I had been aware of people I had loved who called me to join them. But I had chosen, by my lack of belief, extinction. A great black cone like a candle extinguisher was to be dropped over my head.” 

     But he did not go out like that. He left sure of continuing life, ready for new travels, regretting only separation from the last woman to share his life, Yvonne Cloetta.

    A week before his death, knowing it was at hand, he said to Yvonne in the hospital at Vevey: “It may be an interesting experience; at last I shall know what lies on the other side of the fence.” 

Towards the end, he made this note in Yvonne’s “red book” of their conversations: “Perhaps in Paradise we are given the power to help the living. I picture Paradise as a place of activity. Sometimes I pray not for the dead friends but to dead friends, asking their help.” 

Yvonne recalls that “He worked every morning, as he always did, right up to the end, on his book of dreams.” Evidently he came to believe that through dreams (as one of his characters said in a different connection) “there was something in the warring crooked uncertain world he could trust beside himself.”

Adapted from The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

I dreamed I woke up

I dreamed I woke up.
In this waking life my thoughts
are agate points and deep lagoons
that make ancient cities and heroes
and bust dakinis out of lunch boxes.

Everything is alive when I am awake.
I remember to swim in air
and fly in water, and ride moon-tigers
to the Moon Café, and the light in my head
is the light of the blue-white star.

I went back to sleep in a world
of fewer voices and more noise. Out here
in mossy woods, sleep life is pleasant.
It's good to watch a cedar shake her frills,
good to be surprised by lime on watermelon.

There are days I don't want to wake up.
Then there are days of pain and lost delight,
city days caught in time and trivial stories
when I forget that I am asleep
and can change the game if I awaken.

I cannot say whether the person writing this
is asleep in the world, or awake in the dream.

- from Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories by Robert Moss. Published by Excelsior Editions

photo by RM

Atlantis-haunted: Tolkien and the Bent World

A recurring dream of the drowning of Atlantis was the secret engine of some of J.R.R. Tolkien's greatest work. As he described this work in a letter:

This legend or myth or dim memory of some ancient history has always troubled me. In sleep I had the dreadful dream of the ineluctable Wave, either coming out of the quiet sea, or coming in towering over the green inlands. It still occurs occasionally, though now exorcized by writing about it. It always ends by surrender, and I awake gasping out of deep water. I used to draw it or write bad poems about it.

Tolkien came to suspect that the dream of the downfall of Atlantis may have been ancestral memory, passed down through the generations, especially after his son Michael shared similar dreams with him before they had ever discussed the dreams of the father. Tolkien spoke of his "Atlantis-haunting."

     In many unfinished drafts and sketches, as well as in his most famous works, Tolkien attempted to describe the fate of Atlantis before and after the fall. He gave it many names, settling on Númenor for the civilization at its height, and Atalantê - directly evoking "Atlantis" - for the drowned world. In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien transfers his dream to Faramir, dreaming of the fall of Númenor . The short fourth book of The Silmarillion, titled Akallabêth (The Downfallen in Adunaic , one of Tolkien's invented languages) we are given Elendil's account of the destruction of Númenor.

    For me, the simplest and earliest of Tolkien's many versions of this theme is the most stirring and provocative, hinting at a workable geography of a deeper reality that may be directly relevant to our condition today. This is a two-page sketch for "The Fall of Numenor", published by Tolkien's son Christopher at the start of The Lost World and Other Writings, volume 5 in The History of Middle-Earth. In the story outline Tolkien describes how, when the gods decided to punish the Numenorians/Atlanteans for their crimes, they "globed the earth".

The Gods therefore sundered Valinor from the earth, and an awful rift appeared down which the water poured and the armament of Atalantê was drowned. They globed the whole earth so that however far a man sailed he could never again reach the West, but came back to his starting-point.

This was the creation of what Tolkien came to call the World Made Round. Before the bending of the world, a traveler could sail West in a straight line towards the realm of the gods (though few humans were welcome to go all the way). Now, in our "bended" (or bent) world if we travel West and keep on going for long enough, we merely come back to where we started.

     On a higher level of reality, however, above the clouds of our consensual hallucinations, the Line of the Gods still runs straight. Unless you are an elf, or at least an elf-friend, however, you have little chance of finding the straight path. Tolkien's dream of Atlantis not only spurred him to become a world-maker, a master shaman of the imagination; it made him a world-rememberer, offering a vision of the sources of our human condition and a possible path (through travel in dream and in time) of transcending our bent condition. Makes you think twice about the possible merits of being a flat-earther.

Of related interest: A Robert Moss vision of Atlantis

Graphic: "The Fall of Numenor" by Darrell Sweet

Austin definitions of dreaming

I spent a marvelous evening in Austin years ago, when I gave a talk at Book People, a fine independent bookstore. To warm things up, I asked my audience if anyone would care to define the word “dream”. I expected that someone would say that a dream is something that happens during sleep. I was poised to use a response of this kind as a launch-point to discuss the deeper and wider spectrum of dreaming. 

    Instead, the Austin crowd offered definitions that took us right into the limitless adventure of dreaming. These were the first four definitions of "dream" that were volunteered

1. A dream is a beginning.
2. A dream is an adventure.
3. A dream is a message from spirit.
4. A dream is a mission.

     A challenging question was posed later by a man who told us that his mother warned him not to go too deep into dreaming because "you can get lost there". She told him this had happened to her, and he saw what this could mean as she succumbed to Alzheimer’s-type symptoms over the years before her death. We discussed how older people sometimes withdraw their awareness into another state of reality, and how we can meet them there – before and after physical death – and have helpful communication. He said he intended to try to reach his mother in her parallel reality now. I hope he succeeded. I know it can be done.

Two ways of re-making the future

I am teaching two ways of re-making the future. One involves working with what looks like a ball of string. The second way involves scooping, molding and sculpting a heap of soft material, like dough or squishy clay.

I have announced that a prize will be given for the best student in each category. The bigger prize will go to the one who sculpts from the formless mass of pliable "dough".

The students are eager to try this assignment. As they take turns to separate strings from the ball, I notice that the strings look a bit like long strips of celluloid, as were used to record and project films. A vigorous, stocky man throws himself into molding and sculpting the heap of soft matter. He's building an amazing structure and he's the clear favorite to win the prize I have announced.

Feelings: Actively curious and intrigued.

Reality: I teach people to play with the idea that we can switch from one probable event track, running into the future, to another. This can be visualized as selecting one string of events from a ball of possibilities. I also like the idea that we can "rewind" a certain sequence - in life as in dreams - back to a certain point of decision, and then go forward with a different scenario.

I also love the image of sculpting a life project out of a soft mass of unformed material. The prize is no doubt bigger here because there is more creating to be done. I think of how, in the imaginal realm, we can build cities and palaces of subtle and ideoplastic substance. It could be contended that it is from creation on this plane that physical structures and situations are manifested.

Tunnel of Light by Eve Fouquet

The True Causeway

In my dream, a wise old man tells me I must remember the importance of "the true causeway". Still dreaming, determined not to forget his counsel, I work the phrase into a poem that contains this jingly couplet:

By the true causeway of imagination
You'll come to your destination.

As I woke from the dream, I thought of Napoleon, and pictured him with and without his marshal’s hat.

I woke, as I often do, with the sense that I had had a quite real encounter - the sense I record in my journal as "just-so."

-

Reflecting on the wise man's phrase, I played with the double entendre in the word “causeway”. A cause makes a way; a way may require a cause., or provide one. Digging into etymology, I learned that "causeway" derives from the Old English “causey way”, meaning a thoroughfare that has been “heeled” or “trampled” down. A causeway is typically a road raised above surrounding water or wetlands. The longest in the world is the Ponchartrain “bridge” in Louisiana. Singapore and Malaysia are joined by a causeway. Churchill had five causeways built - the Churchill barriers - linking the Orkney islands around Scapa Flow as defense against the German navy in WW2. Dykes in Holland are sometimes also causeways. It's quite possible a causeway featured in Napoleon's campaigns - and in his exile?

-

I think of the “isthmus of imagination” described by the medieval Sufi master Ibn 'Arabi. For Ibn 'Arabi, imagination is the isthmus (barzakh) between the ordinary world and the world of eternity, between body and spirit, and between being and nothingness. To walk this causeway requires discipline, practice and discernment. On the way of true imagination, higher beings become visible and intelligible. Imagination has the power “to embody that which is not properly a body.” Now, that's a true causeway.

The Mud People and the People of Amber

Suvalkija district, Lithuania

I am out in the woods, in the rural part of western Lithuania where I am staying. I come to some wide, shallow steps, just packed earth with wood at the edges. I notice two snakeskins, tied in knots that resemble figures of 8, then a larger one, tied in a slightly more complex knot, on a higher step, and know these were left as signs and also that the snakes were not venomous.
    Now I see vivid, brightly colored scenes of ancient battles - of Teutonic Knights who invaded these lands, and Lithuanian Grand Dukes with their knights and men at arms, struggling against great odds to force them back.I This living history unfolds into times where local people took to the forests and the mud to carry on their resistance against invaders. I see people who lived with wolves and bears and tried to call on their energies in the fight. I see huge mystery beasts in the woods that look like elephants and wonder whether these are the shades of extinct prehistoric creatures, or entities created by the country''s defenders in an effort to equalize a conflict through psychic means of attack.
    I wander deeper into the woods. I am conscious that sticky mud is everywhere, and geeting deeper, just as I found it roaming fields and ancient hill forts the previous day. I come to the house of a ragana - a witch - on one of the sloppy forest trails. It is just a hut among the roots of a crooked tree. I see the face of the witch before she scuttles away into hiding. She has painted the upper part of her face, from the hairline to the cheekbones, chalk-white so it looks like part of a death's head, or perhaps a venomous spider. While she avoids me, nasty slithering things rise from the mud.
    I'm willing to fight her allies, if need be, and am glad to see that an enormous Bear is with me, as a bodyguard. Yet I'm thinking that the witch is merely defending herself; I have wandered into her territory, and she has reason to fear intruders. Instead of starting a fight, I call down Light, and a bright shaft of amber light immediately descends.
    I am happily surprised to find that it serves as a traction beam. It pulls me straight up into the air, far above the mud and the dark woods. I find myself inside what seems to be an egg-shaped amber, with female presences who remind me of ancient priestesses of this land I have met in previous dreams and journeys. The leader tells me, "You must understand that there are the Mud People and the Amber People, and here you belong to the People of Amber. Your duty - and that of those you train here - is to build bridges and wooden pathways so people can get across the mud safely. You must avoid allowing yourself to be sucked down into the mud. You must remember to call on the power of Light Amber to heal and to guide, and on the power of Dark Amber to remove the darkness."

As I surfaced from this mostly lucid dream, the moon shone bright in my face for a moment, like a spotlight. Then a cloud blew above the apple trees and mountain ash outside my window, and I lay back in the gentle dark, savoring my latest encounter with the "understory" of the Baltic country where I was traveling.
    I stayed on Monday night at the country place of a "good witch" in the Suvalkija distrct in Lithuania. She invited me - after attending my workshop - to learn practices of healing and divination handed down in her family from mother to daughter and never written down (until I took notes, with her permission). She had burned amber in a ritual the night before. In the morning, after hearing the dream, she continued my instruction. She demonstrated how to move light amber over the body in a spiraling motion to heal. Then she showed me how she uses a dark amber (also called "vampire amber" here when used in this way) in a different pattern to extract disease and "strangers" in the body.
     Over a breakfast of dark, nutty "grandmother's bread", homemade cheese and butter and coffee chewy with grounds, we talked about the significant of "Mud People" in the literal history of Lithuania, whose name means "Rain Country". Lithuania has no real natural borders. Its main defense against invaders and occupiers, across the centuries, has been the mud. When the cities fell to enemies, people "went into the mud".

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