A Dreamer's Notes: Currency of Psychical Excursions

 

He is wearing what look like tennis whites from an earlier era. He is brisk, upper-crust, charming - and ready to show his credential immediately. He hands me a 500 euro bill with the words "psychical excursions" written across it in a neat hand. 

I recognize the phrase. It was a term employed by the early researchers for the Society for Psychical Research to describe journeys beyond the body in which the traveler appeared to others as a "phantasm of the living". 

The tennis player's mode of introduction suggests that though the language may sound antiquated, this line of inquiry is valid today, and valuable. He did not allow me to return the banknote. I fold it and put it in my pocket. 

After returning from my dream excursion, I reopen Phantasms of the Living, the first major published work from the S.P.R. I find myself at once in the thick of accounts of "psychical excursions", in which the traveler is dreaming and is perceived by others in their own dreams - and sometimes with their physical eyes. 

One report involves a man who was on the steamship Limerick on a rough Atlantic crossing. Worried about him, his wife spontaneously projected herself from her bedroom to embrace him as he lay on his lower birth in his stateroom thousands of miles away. For him, this was a delightful dream - as it was for his wife, when she shared matching details after the trip. 

For one Mr. Tate, a librarian from Cleveland who occupied the upper berth in the cabin, it was a scandalous flouting of the rules. "You're a pretty fellow," he chastised the dreamer in the lower bunk in the morning, "inviting a woman to our room like that." Awake during the night, Mr. Tate had witnessed the visitation with open eyes. 

Next I went looking for tennis players in the early S.P.R. I seemed to recall that the Australian-born psychic investigator Richard Hodgson (famous for his sleuthing after Madame Blavatsky at one point Secretary of the Society) was a champion tennis player. I soon confirmed that he loved a hard game of hardball and died of a heart attack in an especially violent game at Boston’s Union Boat Club.

This is an unedited report from my journal dated January 6, 2023. I drew the illustration on March 10, 2023. I make a daily practice of making at least one sketch from my dreams, old and new. 

 

Place of the Lion

 

I found the Place of the Lion in a dream. I invite you to make it yours. 

You are at a zoo on a Sunday afternoon. People are wandering about, snacking and chatting as they inspect the animals and birds. As you approach the big cat enclosures, you are uneasy because you know that big cats don't belong in confinement.

When you come to the lion pen, you are disgusted because people are mocking the great beast, pulling faces - until someone screams that the gate is open and the lion could get them. Now all the people are running away.

Instead of fleeing, you step through the open gate, into the place of the lion. The great beast runs towards you and leaps up...and his great paws are on your shoulders...and he licks your face like a friendly dog. He wills you to turn around and look at the scene in the zoo in order to understand what is really going on here.

When you look back, you see that it is the humans that are living in cages. In the comfort of their suburban houses and malls and supermarkets they have failed to notice that they have walled themselves in places of confinement. When you look beyond the lion, you see there are no walls, only an open horizon of wild freedom and possibility. The lion says to you, in his gravely lion voice, "You see, my dear, humans are the only animals that choose to live in cages."

Text adapted from Active Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library

Drawings by Robert Moss

Top: "Lion at the Heart"

Bottom: "Place of the Lion"

Illustration by RM

 

Unfinished Portrait of the Higher Self & Other Dream Drawings

 

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

Here are three recent productions:

January 17, 2023

Dream

Hermetic Fridge

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

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

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

Feelings: excited, intrigued

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

January 18, 2023

Dream

The Ambassadors Get Me to Ride a Kangaroo

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

Feelings: amused

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

January 20, 2023

Dream

She Finger-Knits Herself Under a Red Blanket

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

Feelings. Entertained

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

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

[Date of drawing: January 26, 2023]

Banyan Family

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

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

[Date of drawing: January 28, 2023]

Unfinished Portrait of the Higher Self

Journal report dated May 2, 1999

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

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

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

[Date of drawing: January 24, 2023]

Bees Fly Me to the Epopteia

Journal report dated January 25, 1992

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

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

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

A Dreamer's Notes: The Cover Girl is Out of the Book

There are books that won't stay quietly on a shelf or a table unless you put them inside a birdcage. My book Conscious Dreaming once flew off a shelf in the Boulder Book Store in Colorado and struck a visiting shamanic teacher at the third eye. He bought it, read it, and invited me to his city to lead a workshop. 

Someone told me this week that that she dreamed the cover of Dreamgates, my book for frequent flyers. I was inspired to look up my report of an experience in the drifty hypnopompic zone between sleep and awake, when that book showed signs of life in an interesting way. Cover girls are one thing, but we don't expect book covers to start kicking up their heels.

January 4, 2020

Hypnopompic state

The Girl from My Book

Lying in bed after waking I become aware there is something like a television monitor above the right side of my head. It is superposed on the ceiling rather than in the ceiling. The colors are poster paint bright. There is a young fair haired girl in a white dress and a white horse under a huge leafy tree

They are familiar. Can this be the girl who is sleeping on a branch of a giant tree while a white horse grazes on the cover of my book Dreamgates? I recall now that in a dream before waking I was reading pages from Dreamgates aloud to a girl who needed help in transitioning between different energy bodies

The girl on the screen above me looks at me and says, "When I wake up here, I fall asleep there."

She shows me things beyond the picture on the cover of my book, which has become a living landscape. There is a primal beast the size of an elephant that makes me a little nervous until she demonstrates that it obeys her like a trained dog. Like the girl in my dream she wants to discuss subtle bodies and what happens when we travel beyond the astral plane. Perhaps she is the girl from the dream as well as the girl from the book tree. We'll be talking some more, when she falls asleep there and wakes up here.

I tracked down the drawing I made from this vision. The girl on the screen deserved some special recognition. Cover girls are one thing, but we don't expect book covers to start kicking up their heels.

Playing Dream Detective and Dreaming Movies Ahead of Time

I greatly enjoy turning my dreams into drawings that I enliven with oil pastels, gel crayons or watercolors. Sometimes, however, I am content with a pencil drawing, especially when, playing dream detective, I call in my inner sketch artist. Here's an example from my journal from exactly one year ago:

January 31, 2021

Dream

The Actor with Thick Eyebrows

Sometimes playing dream detective requires me to try my hand as a sketch artist as I seek to identify a character in the story. Last night's dream inverted a familiar dream trope. You have dreamed of being with a film star, right? Afterwards (on the assumption that you are unlikely to meet this person in regular life) you may think about what aspect of you, or perhaps another person, you have tagged with the characteristics or role you associate with that actor.

In this dream, things worked the other way round. I thought I was dealing with a powerful British official. Then I realized that he was an actor playing that role in an actual movie production. I thought I recognized the actor from movies and TV series I had seen in the past. On waking, I couldn't recall his name. His most notable feature is his thick dark eyebrows. He may be 45 in the dream, good-looking in a craggy way, dark haired, fairly athletic under his custom suit.

I posted my sketch on Facebook like a WANTED notice. Scores of attempted identifications poured in. The suggested actors nearest in looks to The Man with Thick Eyebrows were Colin Farrell and Clive Owen. Not there yet, though.

Funny how this game is the opposite of what we usually play with a dream of a movie star or other celebrity. Usually we retain the name of the star and then have to figure out how the character or roles of that well-known figure might relate to us or someone in our ambit. In other words, we assume that our dream editor has stamped a well-known name or mask on a less-recognized person or personality aspect so we have something to hold from the dream.

Here it's the other way round: go find the star whose name is withheld. I have not quite caught his likeness here. I think he is British and may have appeared in political thrillers and cop stories. I haven't come up with a name yet though it's interesting what happens when you ask Auntie Google to pull up mug shots of Male Actors with Thick Eyebrows.

Going to Movie Previews in Dreams

A year later, I still haven't found a satisfactory match for my drawing. However, now I am watching more movies on the small screen under the combined effects of the pandemic and a bitter Northern winter, maybe his face will appear. In the past, I made a collection of movie previews I attended in my dreams. The fact that we can dream the content of a film we haven't yet seen or thought about is for me entertaining confirmation that we may dream the future all the time. Here is one of my favorite examples, from 1996:

I dream that a silly little dog decked out in fake antlers runs out onto a road and is killed. He is magically revived by a bizarre character who does not conform to human norms.

I had no strong feelings about the dream. It felt like watching a movie. I entered the report in my journal and rushed to the airport to catch an early flight. I missed my connection and ended up on a different plane with a completely different itinerary. I was carrying a copy of my book Conscious Dreaming, then newly published, and the woman author seated beside me asked to see it. With our pleasant conversation on hold, I looked up at the screen where the in-flight movie was playing. I watched a silly little dog decked out in fake antlers for a Christmas pageant run out on a road. He was killed but magically revived by a bizarre character, the archangel Michael portrayed by John Travolta in the movie of the same name.

If it is possible to dream about something as trivial as the in-flight movie on the wrong plane ahead of time, then surely it is possible to dream of bigger things. I'll stay on the lookout for the Man with Thick Eyebrows.

Back to the Future, Forward to the Past

After I published this little article I posted a link on the Robert Moss Books Facebook page. I immediately got fresh suggestions about the identity of the mystery actor. . Two readers suggested Matthew McFadeyan, a name not mentioned before. He wasn't on my radar because I don't think I had ever watched the early seasons of the popular BBC series MI5 where he plays a leading role. I had not even heard of the current HBO series Succession - where he again plays a major role - until I checked the internet overnight.

I fired up Britbox and started watching episode 1 of Season 1 of MI5. Within minutes I was sure - through the tingle test as well as facial recognition - that the actor in my dream was Matthew McFadeyan.

This tiny episode presents an example of a paradoxical relationship between dreaming and time. A dream leads me one year later to a TV series that was launched 20 years ago. The first episodes are punchy and highly relevant today. However it may be that the main point of the episode is to give a simple demonstration- trivial and thus safe - of how time loops work.

Lost in Dreams

Not all my dreams are mythic adventures or exotic destination travel. I sometimes find myself in frustrating repetitive situations where my dream self is very far from a master of the universe. The other morning I came back travel worn and disappointed from a dream in which I was lost and confused and looking for help in all the wrong places.

Things started out well with a big book event in California in my honor. Then for some reason I got on a bus without checking where it was going and found myself in a remote location, hiring a sketchy character off the street to drive me back to my point of departure. I realized things were off when he led me down a scruffy path among trash bins where a weird black-and-white rabbit seemed to be snacking on the bloody remains of his twin, His car turned out to be a filthy rustbucket. At that point my dream self had the minimal good sense to pull out but was still far from where he wanted to go.

I recorded all the details. I will think about the rabbits and I will pay attention if any elements start to play out in ordinary reality, because dreams can show us the future quite literally and I have been known to do book events in California.

What weighed upon me after this dream was the reprise of a familiar, recurring dream situation I will call Lost and Clueless. The details change from dream to dream but the situation repeats every so often. When it does I make myself stay with the dream and ask: where in waking life am I Lost and Clueless in the sense that I am failing to use common sense, to adopt rational solutions and to seek help in appropriate quarters?

I think my dream producers gave me another B movie because they wanted to me to receive a message and do something about it. I would have liked to slam the door on my Lost in California dream. But I don't ever let myself dismiss an uncomfortable dream, let alone shrug "It's only a dream" because I know that every dream tells me more than I already know.

So I wrote my report as an email I sent to myself, my favorite way of first documenting a dream. Then I confronted the uncomfortable question: Where in waking life am I Lost and Clueless right now?

The answer came to me at once. For many weeks I had put off doing my part to complete a family Help Book. It is both a locator for documents and services and a set of directions any of us could use to get help in an emergency, the kind of guide that tells you who to call if the pipes freeze or the internet is down. The utility of this Help Book was made very clear in physical reality on the night of my Lost in California dream; we discovered that our internet was down for several hours.

Dreams require action. I postponed other plans and sat down at my desk and did my bit to complete the Help Book. This took less time than I had feared. With that job done, I felt grateful for the dream, no longer frustrated by it. No need now to hire a sketchy character with an odd bunny off the street. Though the link between the content of my dream and the waking situation might seem obscure to an outsider, I felt the inner logic and accepted the push.

We can be lost in dreams, as in waking life, in other ways that provide another kind of course correction. There is Lost and Clueless. There is also Lost and Found. The navigational law of serendipity is that we may need to get lost in order to find ourselves. The word "serendipity" is derived from Serendib, the magical kingdom in the story of Sindbad the sailor. Everyone wants to find the kingdom but it is not on any map. Sindbad finds it only after he falls off the charts, is shipwrecked, loses his shipmates and washes up on an unknown shore. To find a place you do not know you must go by a way you do not know. You can get lost in a dream, as in life, and find yourself in a place of wonder and delight. I'm looking forward to the next dream like that.

Drawing: "Lost in California" (c) Robert Moss

Dreaming the Cosmogram

Lucid dreaming from the hypnagogic zone

On the Cosmogram

Something is skimming the surface of wetlands. I can't see it clearly among the rushes. I am told it is a Nightskimmer. The marshes extend as far as the horizon. I wonder whether these are the waters between the worlds of the living and the dead in the Kongo cosmograms.

I see one of them now, drawn with motion signs to show progression from life through death to rebirth. The cycle moves from birth to death as the sun moves from sunrise to sunset. When the sun goes down in the world of the living, it rises in the white clay world of the dead. To die in one world is to be born in the other. To die in the world of the living is to “go upside down”.

Then there is the other arm of the cross within the circle. It is actually a vertical pole. It takes you up or down, between the two worlds. The way is open to the initiate and the sorcerer and the sacred king. In their different ways they stand feet planted in the cosmogram, connected to its points, choosing among its ways, drawing the flash of spirit from above and below.

Feelings: high excitement

Reality check: I am not versed in Kongo tradition or practice. However, I was intrigued by the pictures and commentaries of Kongo ground drawings (Brazilian: pintos riscados) of the cosmos in recent rereading of Robert Farris Thompson's wonderful book Flash of the Spirit.

The traditional cosmograms are usually highly abstract, often basically just a circle cross. In my lucid dream space, one came alive and I saw the parallel life and movement of the two worlds and how an initiate could himself become the vertical axis between them. I gave my figures bird crowns like Yoruba kings. My solar barque sailing both sides of the world-ocean recalls Egypt. In the African diaspora, the traditions stream together.

Since I have made drawing and coloring from dreams a daily practice, my imagery in the HG state is often very painterly, suggesting how to transfer something from the dreaming to a physical surface. I don't have the technical proficiency to bring through more than a small part of what my inner artist is showing me, but I'll go on doing what I can!

The drawing below came from another distinctly African passage in my recent dreaming in the liminal space between sleep and awake.

Bird on the Iron: Staff of Osanyin (Osain)

The bird of mind, the spirit head, floats above six iron spikes. This is the staff of Osanyin, wounded healer, lord of leaves, crippled orisha of medicine and initiation of the Yoruba. I own a staff just like this, in Afro-Brazilian style, that I acquired in Salvador da Bahia several decades ago. The bird, lean and graceful, hovers above the crossroads of the tricky god Eshu and the sharpened iron of the hard god Ogun. The spikes may also be a psychic stockade and the healer's apothecary tree. Look carefully and you may see the serpent energy raised.

Drawings (c) Robert Moss

Punch a Hole in the World: Listening to Children's Dreams

Young children know how to go to Magic Kingdoms without paying for tickets, because they are at home in the imagination and live close to their dreams. When she was very young, my daughter Sophie had adventures in a special place called Teddy Bear Land, where she met a special friend. I loved hearing about these travels, and encouraged her to make drawings and spin further stories from them.

One day Sophie sat down beside me and asked with great earnestness, "Daddy, would you like to know how I get to Teddy Bear Land?"

 "I'd love to."

 "Sometimes I take the Sun Gate. Sometimes I take the Moon Gate. Sometimes I take the Tree Gate. Sometimes I take the Rainbow Bridge. And sometimes I just punch a hole in the world."

I've never heard anyone say it better. To live the larger life. we need to punch a hole in the world. This is what dreaming - sleeping or waking or hyper-awake - is really all about. On our roads to adulthood, we sometimes forget how to do it, just as older children in the Chronicles of Narnia cease to be able to see Aslan as they approach adolescence and become more and more burdened by the reality definitions of the grown-ups around them.

When we listen, truly listen, to very young children, we start to remember that the distance between us and the Magic Kingdoms is no wider than the edge of a sleep mask. True listening requires us to pay attention; to attend, in its root meaning in the Latin, is to stretch ourselves, which requires us to expand our vocabulary of understanding. We owe nothing less to the young children in our lives. When we do this, we discover that they can be our very best teachers on how to dream and what dreaming can be.

Here's what we need to know about listening to children's dreams and supporting their imaginations:

1. Listen up! When a child wants to tell a dream, make room for that. Make some daily space for dream sharing. Listen to the stories and cherish them for their own sake.

2. Invite good dreams Pick the right bedtime reading or better still, tell stories. Help your child to weave a web of good dream intentions for the night - for example, by asking "What would you most like to do tonight?" Encourage children to sleep with a favorite stuffed animal (whether teddy bear or T-Rex) and make this a dream guardian.

3. Provide immediate help with the scary stuff If your child was scared by something in the night, recognize you are the ally the child needs right now. Do something right away to move out that negative energy. Get a frightened child to spit it out (literally) or draw a picture of what scared her and tear it up as violently as possible.

4. Ask good questions. When the child has told her story, ask good questions. Ask about feelings, about the color of the sky, and about exactly what T-Rex was doing. See if there's something about the future. Say what you would think about this if this were your dream. Always come up with something fun or helpful to do with this story. Open up the crayon box, call grandma, etc.

5. Help the child to keep a dream journal. Get this started as early as possible. With a very young child, you can help with the words while they do the pictures. When your child reaches the point where she closes the journal and says, "This is my secret book and you can't read it any more" do not peek. Give her privacy, and let her choose when she'll let you look in that magic book.

6. Provide tools for creative expression. Encourage the child to bring dreams come alive through art, dance, theater and games, and to draw or paint dreams. Gather friends and family for dream-inspired games and performance. Puppets and stuffed animals can be great for acting out dreams. This can also be dress-up time. It's such a release for kids to portray mom or dad or other grown-ups in their lives - be ready to be shocked!

7. Help construct effective action plans Dreams can show us things that require further action - for example, to avoid an unhappy future event that was previewed in the dream, or to put something right in a family situation. A child will probably need adult help with such things, starting with your help. may require adult help, starting with yours. This will eventually require you to learn more about dreaming and dreamwork (hint: you can start with my books).

 8. Let your own inner child out to play As you listen to children's dreams, let the wonderful child dreamer inside you come out and join in the play.

9. Keep it fun! When you get the hang of this, you'll find it's about the best home entertainment you can enjoy.

Notice two things that are not on this list, but would be at the very top of a list of what NOT to do with your children's dreams:
1. NEVER say to a child "It's only a dream". Children know that dreams are for real and that scary stuff that comes out in dreams needs to be resolved, not dismissed.
2. DON'T INTERPRET a child's dreams.You are not the expert here; the child is.

Text adapted from Active Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Art: Book Tree by a 10-year-old Romanian boy

Drawing from dreams

My daily practice is not only to write down whatever dream memories I bring from the night, but to draw them. My journal drawings are rough and ready and as I make them my inner art critic is sent to another room. As I continue the practice, I find that successive drawings make storyboards for narratives unfolding over many nights, in more than one world. Some of the drawings make me vividly aware of just how far and wide the Traveler - the part of me that goes wandering while my physical body is dormant - may go in his overnight rambles. Some of the drawings make it clear that some dream experiences are like quantum chess games in which pieces are moving simultaneously in parallel, potentially interactive states.

February 14, 2019

Leading in a Bear Blanket

I am leading a workshop for a large group near a rocky shore. I am carrying many shamanic accoutrements and power objects but I lay them all down in favor of a long-handled rattle and a blanket I drape over my shoulders. The blanket looks like a Pendleton with many animal designs. However I tell the group it is a Bear blanket. Bear has made it clear who will be in charge of our healing journeys. There is happy excitement as I lay out the stages of a full day of working with the medicine of the animal spirits under the aegis of the Bear.

- I rose in excellent spirits feeling that everything that had taken place was entirely real and could play out in the future at a location I can't yet identify but will recognize

February 16, 2019

Man in Motley at the Diner

"You'll have to talk to Ramón," says the strange young man in a parti-colored suit. He comes down a ladder to speak with me after I return to the retro diner in search of a carry on bag I think I left there. He makes a gnomic remark about "the first parrot in the race." Where is Ramón? "Ramón will be here in three hours. He speaks Spanish, Belgian and Hebrew."

February 16, 2019

The Mystery of Niss

The young woman at hotel reception tells me she has been reading or viewing something called "Niss". "Eliot Niss," I say brightly, not realizing that his last name was Ness. The receptionist ignores this and goes into an enraptured trance. Her fingers are frozen on the computer keyboard. She is no longer pulling up my reservation though i am in a hurry. She is THERE, in the world of Niss. I catch a glimpse of what is going on inside the bubble of her fantasy - a kind of Shangri-la within icy mountain ramparts. I reach over the counter and gently touch her shoulder, trying to bring her back.

I leave this dream scene wanting to know: Who or What Is Niss? Auntie Google gives me acronyms that don't feel relevant and Nissan ads; Urban Dictionary gives me wildly discordant slang references. Calling Special Agent Ness; we need a dream detective to work on this mystery word.

February 19, 2019
To the Riding of the Soul

The lattice doors of my salon open and I am on a green path of pressed grass winding deep into the woods. I am following deer, running like a stag and feel the antlers on my head. I delight in all the animal life. Fox wants to show me something but I stay on the green path. Beyond the woods I look up at a shining city. I feel my elders and old comrades are there. However I pause to talk to a graybeard leaning on a staff near a slightly tumbledown stone house. I ask him, "What is this place?". He replies, "The riding of the soul."

- from a lucid dream that unfolded spontaneously in the hypnagogic state overnight.

Feelings: excited and regenerated by that depth of green. Intrigued by the unexpected phrase. The term "riding" in British Commonwealth usage, means an administrative district and is derived from a Norse word meaning a third.

February 20, 2019

Oberon Deals Me the Storm Card

In the liminal space between awake and sleep I follow the path I took the previous night to the Riding of Soul. The old man in the broad brimmed hat is waiting for me. His name is Oberon. Really? I try to change this; surely I can't be dealing with the King of the Fairies. The struggle of my inner skeptic is met with cool indifference. "I have told you my name. Use it or not."

He shows me that I have a choice between three paths. I see vivid scenes of where they lead. All outcomes have strong attractions. In the long run, it becomes clear to me, I can follow all three paths and manifest what each offers. However for manifestation in the near future it is necessary to set a clear and simple objective and hold to that.

Oberon takes out what looks like a set of tarot cards. Really? My skeptic is restive again. Oberon wants me to see that, whatever my life choices, there is a ruling factor that I must acknowledge. I can work with this archetype in many ways but I can't evade its presence. I reconcile myself to the delivery of one of the major arcana. Here it comes. Wait. This is not a card from any tarot deck I have seen or imagined.

The image is of a thunderhead or thunderbird shooting lightning bolts. Thor's hammer flies through the maelstrom. The name on the card is Storm. A detailed reading follows, exploring how my life will unfold according to which aspect of myself I allow to take the lead when the power of Storm is strong with me, in me and around me.

Feelings: Excited, potent
Reality: Since boyhood I have always felt close to lightning and thunder and the mythic beings associated with those elemental powers.

March 5

Tracking the Dream Traveler

Once again, I am tracking the Traveler - the Robert who wanders far and wide while my body is dormant in the bed. I roused myself to write a list of names and clues from his rambles overnight:

- a long-haired white chihuahua cuddling close to me in a crowded taxi
- a landscape of gently rolling hills where landmarks had been given Celtic names. I observed that the Celtic words were imports the original spirits of the land may not appreciate.
- a thrift edition of a novel "by the author of Ben-Hur". I put this with other thrift classics and children's books in a pile of Free Books on a curb, making the sign.
- an Indian restaurant with a pleasant beer garden.The sign read "Jaipur" and this was also the name of the house beer
- a clothing store named Lane in a high Victorian building that looked like a former factory. A woman told me I would not be interested because they sold "Boys' Academy stuff".

March 6
Superposed

While we seek to make linear narratives out of our dreams it is possible that many of them are organized by superposition. In quantum mechanics this means that "whenever the system is definitely in one state we can consider it as being partly in each of two or more states" (Paul Dirac). This may explain how in the dream I just left I was both (a) dressed in safari shirt and cream chinos and (b) looking for the same clothes on a bed while (a) I had the room to myself but (b) there were other people coming and going, leaving signs of much activity - a burning candle, a weird collection of Icelandic elves and trolls, both humorous and sorcerous, on a wide windowsill. The parallel states converged when a young man - one of a gay couple that had been using the room without intruding on me - showed me a strange cabinet carved with runes and magic sigils. Definitely some magic afoot.

All images (C) copyright Robert Moss.