Towards a History of Dreaming

 

Dreaming is vital to the human story, central to our survival and evolution, to creative endeavors in every field and, quite simply, to getting us through.
     It may be that just as babies rehearse for walking and talking in dreams before they have developed the corresponding physical abilities, humanity rehearses for new phases in its development through dreaming. We are on the edge of grasping what this might mean when we talk about ideas that are “in the air”. We see one facet of it when we learn that artists and science fiction writers have frequently anticipated new technologies by decades or centuries.
     We are learning to talk in English the imaginal realm, a dimension beyond the physical that is the precinct and playground of true imagination, a creative realm that may be the seed-bed of our great discoveries and innovations, and even the origin of events and situations that are manifested in the surface world. Indigenous peoples call it the Dreamtime, or the dream world. We go there when we go dreaming, which may or may not involve going to sleep.
      In modern western societies, we think of dreams as sleep experiences. But for many cultures, dreaming is fundamentally about waking up. In the language of ancient Egypt, the word for “dream” is rswt, which means “awakening”. The implication is that in much of ordinary life, we are in the condition of sleepwalkers, following programs and routines. In dreams, we wake up. This may happen during sleep, or in a twilight state of reverie, or in a vision or meditation or shamanic journey, or through the dreamlike play of coincidence and symbolic “pop-ups” in the midst of everyday life — all of which may be viewed as modes of dreaming and may provide experiences that can be reviewed and honored in the manner of dreams.
     To uncover the real history of dreaming, we need to read scenes from other times with the patience and intuition of a forensic scientist. We need to flag and tag as evidence all sorts of clues and sources that may not previously have been recognized as relevant. We need to situate dreaming activity in its social and cultural context. Above all, we need to be able to imagine ourselves inside the scene, as vividly as basketball great Bill Russell was able to replay games inside his head — and then go beyond the mental replay into a deeper play.
     Dream archaeologist is my name for the kind of investigator who is able to read all the clues from a scene in another time, enter that scene and then bring back new discoveries that will stand up to cross-examination.
     While “archaeology” is often understood to be the science of unearthing and studying antiquities, the root meaning of the word takes us deeper: it is the study of the arche, the first and primal, chief and essential things.
      There are three essential requirements for the dream archaeologist. The first is mastery of a panoply of sources, and the ability to read between the lines and make connections that have gone unnoticed by specialists who were looking for something else.
      Second, the dream archaeologist requires the ability to locate dreaming in its context - physical, social and cultural. For example, to understand the dream practices of the Mayoruna Indians of Amazonia (known as Cat People), we need to know that the typical sleeping arrangement is that you climb into a hammock woven from vines, tied at one end to the center pole of the communal hut, along with all the other hammocks in there. If you go to bed alone, you’ll pull down the center pole and all the other hammocks. You have to agree with at least one other person that you’ll go to bed at the same time. So sleep and dreaming are shared experiences from the moment you decide to go to bed.
     We need to understand the imaginal space, as well as the physical space, within which dreaming experiences take place. Certain cultures instruct or even command dream travelers to journey within a fixed imaginal geography. For example, in his fieldwork among a Nahuat-speaking people in Mexico, anthropologist Timothy Knab was encouraged by his mentors to locate his remembered dream experiences within an Otherworld, or Underworld, known as Talocan. If there’s a lot of water in a certain scene, that means he traveled to a Water World on the east side of Talocan. If there are mostly women that meant he went to the House of Women in the west of Talocan. From outside observer, the anthropologist found his way inside the dreamworld of his hosts.
     Third, the dream archaeologist must develop the ability to enter a different reality and experience it from inside. “One cannot conduct fieldwork in another person’s dream,” says anthropologist Roger Ivar Lohmann. While this may seem to be common sense, it is a view that dream archaeologists are going to test.
    Through the arts of conscious dream travel, active imagination and “mutual visioning”, we can enter other times and gain first-hand knowledge of conditions there that we can proceed to research and verify — and may assist both scholars and practitioners to go beyond what was previously understood. We can reclaim the best of ancient traditions and rituals in authentic, helpful and timely ways.
      As we enter deeper levels of past and future history, we may be able to re-vision the linear sequence of events from the standpoint of metahistory, an understanding that transcends linear time.
     We can enter the life situations of personalities in the past or future who may be related to us in various ways — as ancestors or descendants, as members of our larger spiritual families, as embodied aspects of ourselves or as counterpart selves actually living in other places and times. And we can experiment with direct communication with personalities living in other times, for mutual benefit, in their “now” time as well as the spacious Now of the Dreamtime.

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


Dream journal drawing by Robert Moss

 

An Ottoman Voice in My Committee of Sleep

 

Once again in a dream I am playing scholar and scribe, working with a team to collate, translate and edit several versions of an Ottoman Turkish text that may be derived from Old Anatolian. A female philologist is working on this. We compare several words for dream in Turkish – rüya, hayal, düş – and older terms from the Turkic language group and the different states and qualities each implies.  

I smile, on waking, at this new evidence that specialists in my Committee of Sleep, monitoring my research into different dreaming cultures and dreaming minds, are trying to nudge me in their preferred directions.
    These are a few of the subjects my dreams have prompted me to research over the past year.

The biography of Yeshe Sogyel
The city of Ugarit and the Library of Ashurbanipal
Irish and Scots folklore of the Cailleach
The life and music of Nina Simone
The cult of Cybele
telestike or statue-animation in late antiquity
The life of Pemalingpa and other tertöns or “treasure revealers”
Aerial tollhouses on Eastern Orthodox road maps to the afterlife
The genre in Chinese poetry known as Youxian or “Wandering as an Immortal”
The burial rites of the Toraja of south Sulawesi
Dion Fortune’s approach to “intermediate beings”
shamanic dream practices of the Passamaquoddy

Almost every night brings another research assignment delivered in a dream. Sometimes it is just a postcard or a mysterious word (“Phthonios”), sometimes an immense cinematic drama, maybe playing on several screens.
     Thankfully, I sometimes find that the dream is a prompt to recover work I have already done – including essays and draft chapters – that I had forgotten. This may be, in part, the case with my Ottoman prompt. Under the Ottoman empire dreams were valued highly, and even a Sultan kept a dream journal. When I try to marshal what I have learned about Ottoman dreams, I think of the brilliant Turkish scholar Asli Niyazioğlu, who has made a most rewarding study of the role of dreams in Ottoman biographies. I posted an article based on one of her books here.
     Accepting that the Turkish lady in my dreams was pushing me to go further I found a scholarly essay by Asli on the influence of dream interpreters of the Halveti (Khalvati) Sufi order over Ottoman sultans. In the late sixteenth century, the Sultan himself had his dreams recorded and sent to the Halveti şeyh for interpretation. The Sultan’s senior architect, successor to the famous Sinan, took up his profession because of a dream interpreted by the sheikh in this way. [1]
     Asli explains in this interview how in Ottomoan biographical dictionaries, dreams are often presented as keys to career decisions. She explains that a common Ottoman term for dream was "mirror"; dreams were seen as mirrors in which divine intention was reflected. 

 

 1. Asli Niyazioğlu, “Dreams, Ottoman Biography, Writing and the Halveti Sunbuli Sheikhs of Sixteenth-Century Istanbul" in  Ralph von Elger and Yavuz Kose (eds) Many Ways of Speaking about the Self: Middle Eastern Ego-Documents in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish (14th-20th Century) Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2010, pp. 171-184.

Art (Top) Ottoman woman enjoying coffee,early 18th century, unknown artist. In Pera Palace Museum, Istanbul. (Bottom) Miniatutre of Ashab-i Kehf (Sleepers of Ephesus) in Topkapi Palace museum, Istanbul.

 

 

 

Meeting a Merlin of the Baltic

I saw him again last night, in the twilight between awake and sleep. He first appeared as a giant dark eagle atop a conical hill, able to see across vast distances. He showed himself again as hybrid, eagle-man, and then as able to project the form of an iron wolf. Lyzdeika. I have not forgotten you. 
     Shall we recall our meeting at your birthplace in May, 2013? Here is my report of my quest for a Baltic shaman-priest:

The Shaman from the Eagle’s Nest

 On my second visit to Lithuania, I was taken to the old city of Kernave and shown a conical hill that was the reputed birthplace of a shaman-priest named Lizdeika. According to tradition, he was found, as a baby, in an eagle’s nest on that hill.  Lizdeika lived closed to wolves, and was reputed to be able to shapeshift into their form. He plays a central role in the unfolding of the most famous dream in Baltic history.
    Camped with an army near the present site of Vilnius, Grand Duke Gediminas dreamed of an iron wolf that howled. He consulted Lizdeika - by now the krivu krivaitis, or high priest of the old religion — on the meaning of the dream. Lizdeika told the grand duke he should build a fortified city on the hill where he had been sleeping. The city of Vilnius was founded because of this dream, and in front of the cathedral is a statue of Gediminas’ iron wolf.

 On my fifth visit to Lithiuania, several years later, I stood in the rain on Lizdeika’s green hill and asked for the blessing of the ancestors, in the midst of a circle of Baltic dreamers who were eager to reclaim the old ways. Kernave means Wet Place, setting a perennial weather forecast in a country whose name means Rain Country. We had managed to perform a traditional Baltic fire ceremony that morning, despite the unremitting rain, and I had been impressed by how greedily the fire spirits swallowed offerings of Lithuanian beer, the heavy, dark beer that is like liquid bread. Now I was drumming for our circle, to open direct communication with the spirits of this land. My personal hope was to make contact with Lizdeika. I believed I had dreamed of him, before this trip, as a Baltic Merlin whose story needed to be told.
     As soon as I tapped the drum, the landscape opened, to my inner eye, as if a zipper has been pulled from the zenith to the muddy path at my feet. I saw a windswept figure above me, at the top of the hill. He was a man wearing a feathered robe, or a bird the size of a man. I sensed his fierce determination. I understood that I was required to earn the right of entry into his realm. I must start, now, by disclosing my shamanic connections, by showing him that I was his peer. This was not so hard.
     I found I had at my left shoulder a kinsman in his own feathered cloak. It was raven black. I recognized the druid from fourteen centuries ago who had often been my companion, in my time and in his own. On my right side was a wolf pack. It seemed to have traveled here with me. I had been privileged, in this country of the wolf, to have enlisted the protection and guidance of the wolf family before, because of my connection with the ancient Mohawk Mother of the Wolf Clan. This soon proved to be extremely important.
     We were given a private tour of the archaeological museum of Kernave later that day. Kernave is an active site, with ongoing excavations. The museum director, who participated in my workshop, responded cordially to my request that she should tell us about unsolved mysteries that we might be able to investigate as dream archaeologists. 
     We heard a singularly creepy ghost story involving a mutilated corpse. On the night local archaeologists excavated a grave at the edge of the ancient burial ground, strange things happened. They had dug up the remains of a woman who had been decapitated. Her head had been buried face down in the earth. Her hands and feet had also been cut off and transposed. The archaeologists speculated that she was a witch who had been dug up and mutilated in this way to prevent her from going around bothering the living. There was a second theory; that her body had been hacked up this way to turn her into a cemetery guardian, a protector of bodies and souls and grave goods. That night one of the archaeologists heard rushing winds outside her tent on site. She went out to see the energy form of a giant stallion reared up on its hind legs. All the animals around went wild, dogs howling, birds screaming. All the archaeologists rushed out. What was going on that night? What had they released? They covered up the body in its original site.
     After lunch, I suggested to our group that we might use objects we had seen in the museum, as well as any impressions we had picked up around Lizdeika’s hill, as portals for a journey to encounter the spirits of the land and recover essential history. One of our explorers chose as her portal the skull of a princess that had impressed all of us. The princess had been buried wearing a diadem with symbols of a mother giving birth and the Tree of Life. In her journey, our dream archaeologist traveled through one of the eye holes of the skull and then looked out, through the priestess’ eyes, into scenes of her life and her world. Another brave explorer used the skeleton of a horse that had been buried alive at the center of a circle of human graves; it was buried standing, its neck and legs were broken. Another of our trackers chose to investigate the mystery of the missing swords; only one sword (and this just the hilt and pommel) was in the museum. I gently discouraged tracking the phantom of the mutilated corpse.
    My own intention for this expedition was to go back to the scene at Lizdeika’s hill when I saw the landscape opening as if it had been unzipped. After I began the drumming, however, I was distracted by the tale of the mutilated body and our discussion of the missing swords. I traveled rapidly through many scenes of violence from the past. I saw a duke hurrying down wooden stairs and ladders to fight or flee under sudden attack. I saw raganas, wood witches, as ancient masters of psychic warfare, creating Baltic versions of the golem to menace and terrify enemies. It seemed that they had used bodies like the one in the cemetery, rather than clay, in this cause. Some may even have worked with Kabbalists in times when the survival of the Lithuanian Jews was imperiled.
     I saw warriors and/or their weapons — swords and spears — and/or figures of wood or amber representing them planted vertically in the earth with the idea that in need they would spring from the ground, fully armed, to fight invaders.
      Now I was back at the place of Lizdeika. He stared at me from pale blue eyes. The human features around the eyes kept changing, and I became aware that he has occupied many bodies. Then the shape around the constant pale blue eyes became the head of a wolf. He really is a wolf as well as a man.
    He began running like a wolf, pelting across the landscape. I ran after him, adopting a similar wolf form. Then he rose from the ground and became a dark eagle. I became a bird and flew after him. There were several more animal transformations. Then he became a grass snake and slipped through a crevice among the rocks. I became a snake and slid through after him.
     We were now in a different space, a kind of sanctuary between the worlds. I felt the presence of one greater than him, a female presence. It came to me that as a wolf, he is subject to the Alpha in his pack, who is the She Wolf, the Mother of the Clan. They have relations in other forms, on other planes. He is linked to Menulas, the Moon God; she to Saule, the Sun Goddess. They seemed to enjoy my own encounter with Moon Man and Sun Woman in Paris.      It came to me that Lizdeika’s main obligations were not as counselor to dukes or high priest of the recognized pagan line, but to these hidden powers. What happened to the Lizdeika of history, who advised Gediminas? He had wanted his body to be left for the bird, up on a tree on the hill where he was found as a baby. But it was necessary to dispose of his body faster, because enemies — and maybe witches — were coming who would desecrate it or (worse) use it for sorcery. So he was burned and the ashes were dropped in the river. However, his vital soul was preserved inside a soul catcher, an amber whose natural shape resembled that as a man. It is from this container that he was able to enter and use successive human (and animal) bodies.
     I met a Merlin of the Baltic, neither good nor bad, just so, and — like the Merlin of my Celtic ancestors — never confined to one time, ever shape-shifting, through the stories he weaves and the stories that are woven around him.

Text adapted from The Boy Who Died and Came Back by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library. 

Photo: At the hill of Lizdeika, Kernave, May 2013. 

 

Dreaming with the People of Amber

The first time I visited the Baltic, I dreamed of an ancient priestess who showed me the spiritual uses of amber. She brought me inside a chamber like the inside of an egg-shaped amber, glowing with golden light, and showed me how to use a smaller version of this amber as a place to see. She gave me words in Old Lithuanian that Lithuanians in my workshop at Nida, on the spit of land in the Baltic Sea called Nieringa, were able to translate with some difficulty.

On my second visit to Lithuania, I dreamed again of the People of Amber. Here is the report I wrote in my journal at the tme:

October 6. 2009. 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. 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 getting 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 tractor 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."

I titled this dream "The Mud People and the Amber People". 

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 lands where I was traveling.
    I was staying at the country place of a "good witch" in the Suvalkija distrct in Lithuania. After attending my workshop in Vilnius, she invited me here 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 evening before my dream. 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".

My dreams of the People of Amber offer light in more than one landscape. I have invited groups near and far to enter that amber space of sanctuary and healing.One of those groiups met with me in a forest of dark green pines and silver birches at Kurzeme on the Bay of Riga in neighboring Latvia . Fueld by shamanic drumming, we journeyed tigether therough the dark woods of histiry and personal struggle into the amber light.In Riga, I found the egg-shaped amber in the photo. It fitted my palm, and my dream.

I recount furher adventures in Lithuania, including an encounter with a Merlin of the Baltic and dream archaeology at a working site in Kernave, in The Boy Who Died and Came Back. 

Arnold Toynbee, Time Traveler

 

The great English historian and philosopher of history Arnold Toynee,who gave us a theory of the rise of civilzations, sometimes found hiself visiting the distant periods he studied as an eye witness. In section XIII of volume X of A Study of History, he departs from his familiar narrative style. He called this section “The Inspirations of Historians”. He titled  part E “The Quest for a Meaning Behind the Facts of History”. He opened with this statement:

A tenuous long-distance commerce exclusively on the intellectual plane is an historian's normal relation to the objects of his study; yet there are moments in his mental life -- moments as memorable as they are rare -- in which temporal and spatial barriers fall and psychic distance is annihilated; and in such moments of inspiration the historian finds himself transformed in a flash from a remote spectator into an immediate participant, as the dry bones take flesh and quicken into life.

Mulling over dry research – a précis of one of the lost books of Livy’s History – Toynbee was hurled into the blood and thunder of  war between Rome and confederate Italian states. By his own acount, he was “transported, in a flash, across the gulf of time and space from Oxford in A.D. 1911 to Teanum in 80 B.C., to find himself in a back yard on a dark night witnessing a personal tragedy that was more bitter than the defeat of any public cause." He witnessd the fate of Mutilus, a proscribed confederate leader denied sanctuary at his home by how own wife, who killed himself with his own sword.
    Toynbee's experiences of mental transport across time quickened as he traveled to ancient sites. He enteed the perspective of Philip of Macedon checking his battle lines. He was among a roatring criwd at Ephesus. He fell into “the deep trough of Time” after climbing to a ruined citadel in Laconia.
    In London, soon after the Great War, walking by Victoria Station, he was gripped by a sense of the universal movement of time streaming through him and around him. He felt himself "in communion, not just with this or that episode in history, but with all that had been, and was, and was to come." He felt history flowing through him in a mighty current, with his own life rolling like a wave within this vast tide. With this torrent inside him, he could still note the granular details of the station wall - the Edwardian red bricks and white stone facings. He wondered why what he felt was tremendous illumination had opened for him in this pedestrian seting.
     Perhaps, in addition to visiting the past, Toynbee was tapping into the future. A year or so after his experience near the station, on January 8, 1920, Victiria replaced Charing Cross as the main London station for contnental services. The service to Paris via Dover and Calais started the same day. 

Winging It from a Land of Seers

We have personal styles of dreaming, and content - like the content of any day - will reflect our interests and desires. Because I love reading and research, I do a lot of it in my dreams, as in regular life. I'm posting this "old" report as an example, and also because I've been playing around with illustrations.

December 2, 2021

Dream

Winging It from Molossian Country

I am boning up on Molossian divination from a bulky typescript that contains fragments of an epic, trying to get a clear picture before I go to a dinner where this information will be greatly valued. There were many oracles in ancient Epirus, including the sacred oak at Dodona. I am intrigued by an account of how crucial messages traveled rapidly to and from the East, as far as Asia Minor. Seers could accomplish this mind to mind. I suspect that oracles also used carrier pigeons.

Dreaming inside the dream, I fly like a bird, over wild, windy country, East towards Attica. When I land I find a silver tetradrachm with the owl of Athena. I bite into it, testing the purity of the metal.

Feelings: Enjoyment. Certainty that this is a real experience. Been there, done that.

Reality check: My dream activity here is very similar to my ordinary days, in the combination of literary research and shamanic lucid dreaming that I call dream archaeology. The document I am reading resembles academic papers on divination at Dodona and other sites in Molossia/Epirus I studied when preparing a new class on Greek oracles.

I read in dreams very much as I do in ordinary life. My attention wobbled a bit with the dream typescript not because the text broke up (as some dream researchers say happens with reading material in dreams) but because of the difficulty of digesting a lot of academic writing at high speed.

Journal drawing by RM with digital effects

Dog as God and Psychopomp in Dream Archaeology

 

A small example from my journals of one mode of dream archaeology: following clues from a dream to an ancient culture and turning up evidence or documentation for something that was previously unknown or  incompletely known. It may also be an example of dream precognition:  

May 8, 2022

Dream  

Power of the Dog in Dream Archaeology 

I'm excited by essays and materials I find in what at first seems to be a big white-bound bound volume. They include maps and charts and line drawings on an archaeology theme: The Dog. I reflect on related sources I have available to go further on this theme in my own research and writing, including Barry Lopez's fine work Of Wolves and Men.

Later I am out in the woods with a man who lives close to wolves. He leads the way off the main path to the right. He says the wolves are out, moving clockwise. It seems to be his plan to meet them face to face. I notice he hasn't brought his rifle. I'm willing to trust that he knows what he's doing and that if we meet the wolves face to face it will be a sociable encounter.

 

Where Dog=God and Psychopomp

After recording my, I opened my email and found my daily pdf from an academic website, a paper on canine burials at Saqqara during the Graeco-Roman period.. [*] It describes the mass burial and mummification of dogs in ancient Egypt, 1,350 at this site alone, tens of thousands at Abydos.

The authors suggest that the primary reason for canine burial here was to provide an organic embodiment of Anubis in his role as psychopomp, guiding souls between this world and the afterlife. The dog buried beside or near humans becomes "an amuletic animal mummy... considered to be either an adequate replacement for, or a valuable complement to the Anubis amulet to ensure the continuing and unbroken assistance of Anubis for the deceased."

The article contains maps and charts and line drawings including one of a 2nd century funerary stele from Terenouthis (Kom Abu Bellou), where the deceased is seen in the company of a dog and a falcon, aspects of Anubis and Horus.

So my dream of the archaeology of the dog seems to be a minor example of precognition or clairvoyance. The incoming email enabled me to fulfill part of my dream research assignment right away. I would probably not have made time to read that scholarly article without the dream; I had a few other reading assignments. 

It is interesting to reflect on where the wolves are circling. Their presence off-stage in that part of my the dream leads me to reflect on the evolution of the human-canine connection, In the Egyptian context, it may be relevant that Anubis and his two jackal-headed brothers, Wepwawet and Duamutef, are especially associated with wild canids. 

In one of my big dreams of Egypt twenty years earlier, my two beloved black dogs (both deceased) came out of a hollow tree, dripping with what looked like amniotic fluid and might have been resin or honey. They guided me through the pylon gate of an Egyptian temple that was both ancient and newly constructed. A beautiful cupbearer gave me wine infused with blue lotus. In an inner chamber I received profound revelations about soul and self that are indelible. Recalling my guides, the two black dogs, I think of how in some funerary stelae from Egypt, like one in the picture above, twin canids share the role of psychopomp. 

[*] Mary Hartley, Alanah Buck, Susanne Binder, "Canine Interments in the Teti Cemetery North at Saqqara during the Graeco-Roman period" in Miroslav Bárta, Filip Coppens and Jaromír Krejãí (eds) Abusir and Saqqara in the year 2010/1 (Prague: Czech Institute of Egyptology, Charles University, 2011) 17-29.

Photo: Funerary stela of Kopres. Roman Period, late 2nd century from Terenouthis. University of Michigan Excavations, 1935

 

 

 

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

Dreaming Expands Our Humanity: Report from Paris, 1944

I'm in Paris early in August 1944. People are hungry and torn between hope and despair. Allied armored columns are speeding towards the capital, according to the BBC and the underground newspapers passed hand to hand. The word from Free French General Leclerc is Tenez bon. Nous arrivons. "Hold on. We're coming."

But not all the French are looking forward to the Liberation. I listen to frantic conversations of once-comfortable bourgeois merchants and functionaries who grew fatter by serving the Germans, and ordinary Parisians who obeyed Marshal Pétain's appeal to "collaborate" with the Militärverwaltung in Frankreich, the German Military Administration in France.

I look in on women who were kept as mistresses by German officers. Some have been living in luxury, in swank hotels, with running champagne and silk stockings. I watch them huddled together, talking about survival plans. They are terrified of what will be done to them when their protectors are gone. I watch some of them pleading with Hans or Otto, Don't leave us. Take us with you. 

A Wehrmacht colonel feels sympathy, but there's nothing he can do except to give his mistress his gold cigarette case. He has no idea what will happen to him, when Paris falls, as he knows it must. His comrades will simply dump the women they used and leave them to the mercies of their countrymen. Some will be stripped of their finery and their hair, beaten and shamed and used for rough sex.

~

I woke from this dream feeling oppressed, in a hotel off the Boulevard Saint-Germain during a visit to Paris in December, 2013. To clear my feelings, I trekked out to Montparnasse to visit the Memorial Maréchal Leclerc and the Museé Jean Moulin. I sat in a little theater with a wrap-around screen watching multiple images of Paris in the last days of the Occupation.

I wondered why I had dreamed into the situation of the people I had viewed the previous night, people who had made unpleasant choices and were facing unpleasant consequences, people who would not be among those jostling to cheer the Americans and the Free French as they entered Paris. Maybe one of those women was kept in a room in my hotel, under the Occupation.

It occurred to me, yet again, that one of the functions of dreaming is to expand our humanity. In a hotel bed in Paris, I traveled back across time into life situations of people who were compelled by history to make terrible choices. I was reminded that the typical Parisian during World War II was not a Resistance fighter but someone who was simply trying to survive, to put food on the table, to get through.

I was in Paris in 1970, a year after Marcel Ophüls' tremendous four-hour documentary film  Le chagrin et la pitié ("The Sorrow and the Pity") was released. The film showed how collaboration was normal for most of the French under Vichy, and all the justifications for it beyond acceptance of military defeat. A government committee ruled that the film “destroyed the myths that the people of France still need”. 

More recently, French historian Patrick Buisson has claimed in a book with the provocative title, 1940-1945 Anneés  Erotiques (“1940-45 Erotic Years”) that a remarkable number of French women traded sexual favors with the Germans. He floats the idea - infuriating to many - that for some French women this amounted to a kind of sexual liberation. Photos from Nazi archives, like the one above, were displayed in a big exhibition in Paris showing what look like high times shared by Nazi officers and French girls, generating more rage and disgust.

So perhaps I was dreaming not only into French lives in 1944, but into the continuing challenge, for the heirs of Occupation - in which everyone's family had a story - to come to terms with history. Mulling this, I recognize that those of us who are born and live in countries that have not suffered invasion and occupation in recent generations are truly privileged. It is a challenge to our empathy and imagination to grasp fully the history of other peoples.

I recalled a Latin tag from my school days. Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. It is from Terence (aka Publius Terentius Afer, writing around 170 BCE) and it means, "I am a human being, I consider nothing that is human alien to me."

Dreaming, nothing that is human is truly alien to us.

Egyptian Silver: A New Dream Archaeology Assignment

 

In one scene in a dream last night, I have been given an object to deliver to a skinny, sketchy man I don't trust. I take it out of my bag and unwrap it. The object is flat, rectangular, silver, about the size and shape of a cigar cutter. It seems to be in two parts, with a cover that slides back. I notice at least three columns of Egyptian figures, one holding a staff of power and wearing a high crown. The figures look to be in the elongated Amarna style introduced under Akhenaten.

When I hold it up, the skinny man jumps back, face distorted in a rictus of terror. "Silver" I reassure him. Nope. He acts as if silver will scald him. Or whatever is under the cover. I don’t understand. I put the Egyptian object away carefully in my pocket.

On assignment: There was a lot more going on in my dream report. I'll just note where my initial Egyptian research took me. The Egyptians valued silver even more highly than gold though fewer examples have survived because of the corrosive effects of salt at the burial sites. The wealthy used silver for mirrors and certain amulets, including scarabs.

Nefertem was the deity most often embodied in silver statuettes. He is the god of the blue lotus. He is said to have been the first being to emerge from the blue lotus that grew on the mound that rose from the primal waters. In complementary myths of Memphis, he is placed in a divine family as the child of Ptah and Sekhmet.

He was both a deity of perfumes and healing, a lion-headed creator god and a potential sender of demon punishers and the Seven Arrows of Sekhmet. He was sometimes depicted as a child emerging from the blue lotus or an adult male crowned with the lotus. There is a bust in the Amarna style of the boy pharaoh Tutankhamun as Nefertem emerging from the lotus in the Cairo museum.

Photos: Top Silver scarab of Overseer Wah c 1900 bce; bottom standing statue of Nefertem with blue lotus crown, late period c 600-300 bce. Both in Metropolitan Museum of Art New York City. Photos in public domain.

Dream archaeology at Bandelier

Bandelier National Monument, New Mexico

I was staying outside Santa Fe in an adobe house with extraordinary views across desert and mountains. The phrase Big Sky really applies here - you can watch the weather rolling in from fifty miles away. The night sky is extraordinary, a grainy, pulsing field full of animate energies. Nature feels quite personal here.

    I went out to the Bandelier State Monument, to visit the sites of the ancient and mysterious Anasazi people. I had two of those encounters with spirits of the land of the kind that are the stuff of dream archaeology.
    On the trail to the falls, I felt the mountain lion energy very strongly. Further along the trail, I lay down under ponderosa pines. I immediately sensed a presence. Scanning with my inner senses, I tracked it. Among the trees, a little person took form. He was very dark-skinned and no more than four feet tall. He was willing to give me a name, speaking the five syllables slowly and distinctly, so I could pick them up. I will not publish his name here; traditional peoples are very sensitive about the power of names.
    The name and the nature of the little man were connected with Rabbit. He could run like a jackrabbit. I saw him hunting small animals a long time ago, living very close to the earth. I asked to enter his Dreamtime and slipped inside the world of the animals. He belonged to a time when human and animal consciousness were not as separate as they are today, and when forms were not fixed. He seemed to be able to shapeshift his physical body as well as his energy profile into animal forms. I was attracted by his simplicity. There was even a sense of innocence in the just-so-ness of his relations with the land.
     I encountered a different presence as I stood  in front of the petroglyphs at the “longhouse” site - apartments built into the talus of a volcanic cliff - at the Anasazi village. A Gatekeeper figure emerged. He told me that white people still know next to nothing about what really went on here, but that he would show me certain things, under certain conditions.
    The wall opened to my vision like a window. I looked into the scene of an ancient rainmaking ceremony. The priest held up and vibrated a large stuffed serpent while a helper made the sound of thunder crashing with something resembling a mortar and pestle. I was shown the methods this ancient people used for appealing directly to the animate forces of nature. My tour expanded. I enjoyed looking into the everyday lives of these ancient ones, their foods and cooking methods, their rituals and their delight in theater and music.
     I recalled that the First Peoples of my native Australia talk of the Speaking Land. The spirits of the land are talking, talking. All we need to do expand our awareness, and listen without judgment. I felt privileged to have been invited into a space between the worlds to learn the ways of two ancient peoples of the American Southwest.

- from my dream archaeology casebook (2001).

Jackrabbit photo by Jim Harper

The Way to Seshat's Library

 The gates are unbolted to you by Seshat!

These are words of a spell In the Egyptian Coffin Texts, where Seshat, the goddess of writing and patron of scribes, is featured as a gatekeeper.

As doorkeeper she may take on the function of a judge, deciding who may pass through the door she guards. In the Book of Thoth, Seshat stands with Shai, a personification of Fate. The soul traveler is instructed to say, "May the goddess open for me the road to the House of Life."

My painting was inspired by a shamanic journey to the Library of Seshat. The door was opened, quite literally, by the dream of a friend. She reported in high excitement that she had opened a book in my study - Budge's translation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead - and a doorway swung open, revealing a pathway to "a library even bigger than yours".

We journeyed together through the dream door, with the aid of shamanic drumming. I noticed, monitoring the scene from a witness perspective while at the same time fully engaged in the action, that the path we were walking was the body of an immense golden cobra.

Dream Archaeology: Power of the Dog and Third Eye Wine

Two small examples of one mode of dream archaeology: following clues from a dream to an ancient culture and turning up evidence or documentation for something that was previously unknown or  incompletely known. First, an incident from this morning that may also be an example of dream precognition: 

May 8, 2022

Dream and Follow-Up

Power of the Dog in Dream Archaeology

I'm excited by essays and materials I find in what at first seems to be a big white-bound bound volume. They include maps and charts and line drawings on an archaeology theme: The Dog. I reflect on related sources I have available to go further on this theme in my own research and writing, including Barry Lopez's fine work "Of Wolves and Men".

Later I am out in the woods with a man who knows them well. He leads the way off the main path to the right. He says the wolves are out, moving clockwise. It seems to be his plan to meet them face to face. I notice he hasn't brought his rifle. I'm willing to trust that he knows what he's doing and that if we meet the wolves face to face it will be a sociable encounter.

WHERE DOG=GOD AND SOUL GUIDE

After recording these and several other scenes, I opened my email and found my daily pdf from an academic website, a paper on canine burials at Saqqara during the Graeco-Roman period by a team from Macquarie University in a collection published by the Czech Institute of Egyptology. [*] It describes the mass burial and mummification of dogs in ancient Egypt, 1,350 at this site alone, tens of thousands at Abydos.

The authors suggest that the primary reason for canine burial here was to provide an organic embodiment of Anubis in his role as psychopomp, guiding souls between this world and the afterlife. The dog buried beside or near humans becomes "an amuletic animal mummy... considered to be either an adequate replacement for, or a valuable complement to the Anubis amulet to ensure the continuing and unbroken assistance of Anubis for the deceased."

The article contains maps and charts and line drawings including the one shown here, of a 2nd century funerary stele from Terenouthis (Kom Abu Bellou), where the deceased is seen in the company of a dog and a falcon, aspects of Anubis and Horus.

So my dream of the archaeology of the dog seems to be a minor example of precognition or clairvoyance. The incoming email enabled me to fulfill part of my dream research assignment right away. I would probably not have made time to read that scholarly article without the dream; I have just a few other reading assignments. We'll see where the wolves are circling later on.

Here is a raw journal report from twenty years ago:

May 15, 2002

Dream

Egypt-Rome: Third Eye Wine

I am with a group traveling through ancient sites. We explore an Egyptian temple. Our female guide hurries the group past a chamber that intrigues me; it contains lovely blue-glazed pottery and a beautiful statue of a winged ba-soul. I tell the group, “This room is a chapel of the Ba.” The guide receives this with respect and acknowledgment. She tells us we will come out into one of the most beautiful vistas on earth.
    I expect to come out onto the Giza plateau. Instead, the scene above ground looks a lot like the Vatican City, outside St Peter’s. I swivel my head to the left, to look back at the huge temple we have just left. In the crowded street, there is some confusion as drivers and other tour guides push their vehicles through the throng. 
    I leave the group to stroll among vendors’ stalls and coffee shops. Three men in the market invite me to join them in a glass of wine. They may be Egyptian. They teach me to say “chess” in their language.
    I enter a dream within the dream. I learn that Egypt’s initiates used a “third eye wine” called Sem or Sekhem-Re. The wine was infused with blue water lilies. This helped to open the strong eye of vision, and to keep it open. 
    I am now able to look through an esoteric text titled “Initiates’ Vocabulary”. It explains key terms for soulcraft in ancient Egypt. There are terms here that are so far unknown to modern scholars.
    There is an obelisk in one of the scenes, perhaps in Rome.

Once again, dreams set us research assignments. Excited by the dream, I searched online and hit the books and discovered that in ancient Egypt, Sekhem-Ra was the name of a fine vintage wine. It took me many years until, researching a new course involving dreaming in ancient Egypt, I came upon reports from field archaeologists that confirmed what I learned in my dream, adding fascinating details of how the Egyptians classified wines and dedicated them to the fortunate dead - and may have infused some wines with blue water lilies.  The stele of Ipuy, a craftsman of Deir el-Medina near Luxor describes how he meets Hathor in a dream. This is apparently the first time a non-royal in ancient Egypt left a record of a dream encounter with a deity. The stele includes the picture of a wine jar capped by blue water lilies and a bunch of lettuce.

On the Egypt-Rome theme: I continue to research the fascinating syncretism between Egyptian and Graeco-Roman religion and practice, from the cult of Isis as described by Apuleius to the creation of hybrid deities like Serapis and Hermanubis. 

[*] Mary Hartley, Alanah Buck, Susanne Binder, "Canine Interments in the Teti Cemetery North at Saqqara during the Graeco-Roman period" in Miroslav Bárta, Filip Coppens and Jaromír Krejãí (eds) Abusir and Saqqara in the year 2010/1 (Prague: Czech Institute of Egyptology, Charles University, 2011) 17-29.