Riding Inside the Tiger

 

I teach and learn by sharing stories and - especially when it comes to dreaming - I don't want to hear from educators and experts who don't share their personal experiences. In this respect Namkhai Norbu does not disappoint. Especially in his book on Dzogchen, The Crystal and the Way of Light (even more than in his book on dream yoga) he shares memorable dream experiences.
     The simplest and most endearing comes from very early in his life. When he was quite small, he dreamed many times that he was riding inside the belly of a roaring beast he thought must be a tiger. In those days no motor car had ever been seen in his remote part of Tibet. When he encountered automobiles years later, he realized what his dreams had prepared him for. I am so charmed by this tale that I have turned it into a drawing. 

When the dreamer is ready, the teacher will appear 

Namkhai’s account of his dream education suggests a modification in a well-known maxim. It’s not just that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. It’s also: when the dreamer is ready, the teacher will appear.
     Aged sixteen, as a student teacher in China, Namkhai dreamed he met a very old man he knew to be a master. The master lived in a white Chinese-style cement house; the name Padmasambhava was written in Tibetan over the dor. The master chanted a mantra of Padmasambhava. Then he instructed Namkhai to go round the house to a great rock and look for the entrance to a cave. Inside the cave, he would find eight natural mandalas. The dreamer’s father appeared and chanted the Prajnaparamita sutra. Namkhai joined in chanting the sutra and they walked round the inside of the cave together. He could see the edges of the mandalas but not their full form before he woke up.
     A year later, back in Tibet, Namkhai heard a visitor talk to his father about an extraordinary old man who was living in a village of white Chinese-style houses in the region. He felt strongly this was the old man from his dream. Reminding his father of the dream, he asked if they could visit the old man in the white house. They set off on horseback and rode for four days. They came to a vialge of white concrete Chinese-style houses and knew the master’s house because mantra of Padmasambhava was over the door. The old man was Chamchun Dorje, a Dzogchen master; he became Namkhai’s primary teacher.[1]     

When you wake with a dream in your hand 

“What if you slept,” Coleridge wrote, famously, “And what if in your sleep you dreamed and what if in your dream you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower
and what if when you awoke you had that flower in your hand, ah, what then?”
     Coleridge’s question was answered for Namkhai in his early dream education. He learned that a certain kind of dream can spill over into the world. He woke with something he had dreamed in his hand.
     One of his uncles was renowned as a tertön, a "treasure revealer" of hidden texts that sometimes appeared as tiny scrolls in unusual places, apparently transmitted across generations by ancient masters. While staying with his uncle in a remote area, Namkhai dreamed he was visited by a dakini.
     She gave him a small scroll of paper containing a sacred text. She said this was very important and that on waking he should give it to his uncle. In the dream he knew he was dreaming. He gripped the scroll tightly in one fist and wrapped the other around it. It was not permitted to disturb his uncle until after his morning rituals, so he drifted off still with his fists clamped together.
     Waking at dawn, he opened his hand and found there really was a tiny scroll within it. He was too excited to wait. He woke up his uncle and presented the scroll. His uncle took it and said matter-of-factly, “Thank you, I expecting this” as if there had been a routine delivery at the door. [2]  

When you are called to travel to a deceased master 

When he was living and teaching in Italy, Namkhai’s guru, Chamchun Dorje, called him in a dream to return to Tibet. He traveled to his master in the dream. His guru told him that it was time for him to take up Todgal, a higher level of Dzogchen practice.  For this, he needed to go to another teacher, Jigmed Linba. 

I thought this was a very strange thing to say because I knew, of course, that Jigmed Linba was a great Dzogchen master of the eighteenth century who had been dead for many years. I thought perhaps I had misunderstood what my master had said so I asked him to explain, but he just said, “Jigmed Linba is up on the mountain behind the house. Go and see him right away.” [3] 

Disbelieving, Namkhai scaled a sheer cliff, noticing that the whole text of a tantra was incised on it, with the title of the text on a standing stone at the top, He found a cave where a beautiful boy with long flowing hair, dressed in a filmy blue garment, was seated. Could this really be the deceased Dzogchen master?  He clambered up on top of the rock and said to the boy, “I was told to come to you.” The boy motioned for him to sit, then took out a little scroll and began reading a Dzogchen text on the Four Lights of Todhgal.
     Look through the Tibetan Buddhist biographies in Serinity Young’s Dreaming in the Lotus and you will find that, again and again, gurus dream with their disciples and the masters appear in dreams to convey essential teachings.[4] This theme is well crystallized by Lama Choedak Yuthok: 

Some people actually gain enlightenment during dreams. Some practitioners while in the middle of dreams which they recognized as dreams, invited great lineage masters of past ages. They came and gave teachings, and some of these practitioners became enlightened as a result. There are a lot of whispered teachings like this. They are known as ‘near lineage’ teachings. Some practitioners who received these could write, teach and transmit the teachings with amazing eloquence. They did not have to bother about studying any texts. One master received three months’ worth of teachings in the course of a single three-hour dream.

 

References 

1. Namkhai Norbu Crystal and the Way of Light: Sutra, Tantra and Dzogchen ed. John Shank (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987) pp.9-10.
2. ibid pp. 51-52.
3. ibid p.102.
4. Serinity Young , Dreaming in the Lotus: Buddhist Dream Narrative, Imagery, & Practice (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1999).
5. Lama Choedak Yuthok ed. Pauline Westwood, Lamdre: Dawn of Enlightenment. (Gorum Publications, 1997).

 

Illustration: “Riding Inside the Tiger” by Robert Moss

 

 

How dreams get us through

 

During an interview I did for Wisconsin Public Radio, the callers produced a harvest of personal examples of how dreams help us to get through life.

A songwriter described how he has woken in the middle of the night with new songs playing in his mind. Sometimes they are complete, with words and music. Sometimes he has to work on them for a bit. He is in a long tradition of songwriters and composers who have plucked new pieces from their dreams. I was reminded on John Lennon's statement that "the best songs are the ones that come to you in the middle of the night and you have to get up and write them down so you can go back to sleep." 

As we discussed diagnostic dreams, the host recalled the case of a man who dreamed a rat was gnawing on his throat. Shaken by the dream, he sought medical assistance, and went from one physician to another until his throat cancer was detected and treatment began that he credited with saving his life. 

David, an IT professional, recounted a situation in which his office was preparing to install a new system. The day before, his supervisor told him to go home and get some sleep. He took a nap and saw himself in a workaday situation. He saw and recognized the code he would be applying. Suddenly the screen in his dream went fuzzy and a voice said firmly, "NO. It should be like this." The code changed. When he went into the office the next day, he checked and found that the code they were working with was wrong. He made the necessary changes, as had been done in the dream. "Good thing you caught that," his supervisor told him. At this point, David explained that he had dreamed the correction. "Never heard of anything like that," the supervisor shook his head. "Maybe I should have my analysts do a lot more sleeping." 

A woman caller spoke of a recurring dream theme whose full significance became clear to her only at the end of a long relationship. She dreamed again and again that her partner was missing. She couldn't find him or couldn't get through to him on the phone. Sometimes she felt he was hiding from her. By the time of the break-up, she had been compelled to recognize a long pattern of deception, and that in fundamental ways, her partner had been "missing" for much of the time they had been together. 

We discussed what is going on when a dream theme repeats over and over. I suggested that it's either because we need to get the message or because we need to take action on that message. We may have a notion what a recurring dream is about, but can't bring ourselves to do what is necessary - which would be very understandable if we dream our partner is missing. Like a helpful (and well-informed) friend who is looking out for us, the dream theme will come again and again until we do something about it.

At the end of the show, the host asked me to share a "big" dream of my own. How to pick one, out of so many? Yet I knew at once which dream I would tell, because earlier in the program - when asked to explain how dreaming can help to move us beyond hatred and war - I had quoted a phrase in the Mohawk Indian language. The phrase is tohsa sasa nikon'hren. It literally means, "Do not let your mind fall". 

We fall into Dark Times, in the traditional Mohawk cosmology, when we forget the higher world - the Earth-in-the-Sky - from which we come. Our ability to heal our enmities and grow as a life form depend on not-forgetting a higher source of wisdom and a higher order of reality. Dreaming is the main link between our ordinary minds and that higher spiritual plane, a way of not letting our minds fall. 

So I told a watershed dream from my ligfe in the 1980s, in which I entered a space where a circle of people who lived very close to the earth were singing and drumming. I hestitated at the entrance of their longhouse, fearing I was intruding. But they welcomed me into a place they had waiting for me. At a certain point, I lay by the firepit, at the center of the circle. 

One by one, the dream people came to me. They took red-hot coals from the fire and placed them over my ears and my eyes, and on my tongue, and over my heart. They sang in their own language, which I could now understand: "We do this to open your ears, that you may hear clearly. We do this to open your eyes, that you may see clearly. We do this to open your mouth, so you will speak only truth. And we do this -" placing the coal over the heart "-so that henceforth you will speak and act only from the heart." 

I did no analysis with that dream. Vitally energized, I jumped in my car and drove to a lake in a state park east of my home. I promised to the lake and the trees and the red-tailed hawk that came knifing through the clouds, "Henceforth I will speak and act only from the heart." 

On the darkest days, a dream like this can be a hearthfire and a homing beacon. Charging us with the power of a deeper drama, inciting us not to let our minds fall - these may be the biggest ways that dreaming helps us through.

Journal drawing" "We do this to open your heart" by Robert Moss

 

Iceland is dreamland

Iceland is a country where dream fires burn among the ice, along with the geysers and volcanoes. Most Icelanders believe in dreams and follow their guidance to a degree that is remarkable among modern Western societies.  A Gallup survey of 1,200 Icelanders in 2003 revealed that 72 percent found meaning in their dreams; many reported dreaming the future and sharing dreams regularly within their families. More than half the respondents said they had experienced lucid dreaming. Over 70 percent believed that dream precognition is real, and over 40 per cent reported personal experiences of precognitive dreams.
    The Icelandic language distinguishes vital categories of significant dreams, such as dreams of the future (berdreymi) and dream visions (draumspa). We can track Iceland’s dreaming traditions back through the Eddas and the sagas. In a classic study, Dreams in Old Norse Literature, G.D.Kelchner found 530 dream references in old Icelandic literature. In the V öluspa, even the gods go to wise women for help with their dreams.     In a scholarly article in the journal History and Anthropology,  Adrienne Heijnen provides fascinating insights into the respect that Icelander accord to dream visitations from the deceased, especially when it comes to naming babies that are on the way. It is widely believed among Icelanders that the deceased visit the living in dreams aðvitja nafns, “to seek a namesake”.   
     Ten percent of Icelanders surveyed by the Social Science Research Institute of the University of Iceland reported that they had received dream visitations from deceased persons who expressed the desire to pass on their names to children who had not yet been born. No less than 75 percent of the group believed that this is possible.  Heijnen explains that it is believed that “through the naming of newborn children with the help of dreams, substance can flow from the dead to the living, who are often, but not necessarily, genetically related.”   
     Heijnen reports the case of a woman named Sigrun, who was killed by an avalanche while hiking with her boyfriend. After her death, Sigrun visited her friend Helga in dreams. The dreams became more frequent and more pressing when Helga was pregnant with her oldest daughter. “Sigrun came to me,” Helga began, whenever she recounted one of these dreams; she had no doubt that her deceased friend had visited her.  She told her dreams to her mother, who became convinced that Sigrun wanted to give her name to the coming child. Helga agreed the baby would be named Sigrun.  After the christening, Helga dreamed of her deceased friend as a joyously singing head and took this as confirmation she had done right.   
    The typical dream visitor who comes seeking a namesake is a deceased member of the immediate family. But Icelanders also report similar visitation from drowned sailors, deceased friends, neighbors who died in accidents and "hidden beings" called Huldufólk or alfar, said to live in rocks and hills, who may want to give their names to the newborn. And a boy was named Gabriel because the archangel Gabriel appeared to his mother.   
    It is widely believed that when parents refuse a request from the spirits to give their name to a child, they expose the child to danger. a A woman who died young from asthma, supposedly because she was not given the name an alf woman had told her pregnant mother in a dream, because the priest refused to accept it.    Clearly, there is more here than we generally understand when we talk about picking a name for a baby. Heijnen notes that in Iceland "a name is supposed to carry certain characteristics, or qualities or affects. Namesakes are sometimes though to share aspects of their personality.”   
    First names are singularly important in Iceland. You see that when you open a phone book; the entries are arranged by first names. (Last names identify Icelanders as the child of a parent, usually the father, by adding "son" or "daughter" to his or her first name.) The general preference is to give a newborn child the first name of one of the grandparents, but a dream visitation will override this, as in the case of Sigrun. They say, “One may not let a deceased person down.”  As  one Icelandic woman dreamer puts it, "You may not have listened to a person when they were alive, but when they have died, you had better listen up."   
     Icelanders understand, as a matter of common experience, that dreams can be transpersonal, social and objective phenomena, not simply productions of the personal subconscious. This understanding is built into the Icelandic language. When you tell a dream in Icelandic, you might begin by saying, “It dreamed me a dream” [Mig dreymdi draum] As Heijnen puts it, “Dreaming in Iceland is not considered to be a withdrawal within the self, but a way of disclosing and relating with ‘the world.’”

Reference: Adrienne Heijnen, “Relating through Dreams: Names, Genes and Shared Substance”  History and Anthropology, Vol 21, No.3, September 2010, pp. 307-319

For more on Icelandic dreaming, please see "Dreaming a Wife - and the Fish" in The Secret History of Dreaming, pp. 128-131.

A Sufi master transfers an evil destiny from this world to a dream world

Writer and scholar Musharraf Ali Farooqi, whose works include a wonderfully spirited translation of The Adventures of Amir Hamza, alerted me to a most interesting story he discovered in an Arabic manuscript. The story involves a 12th century Persian Sufi master, Abdul Qadir Gilani, and how he is said to have saved the life of a merchant by transferring his evil destiny from this world into a dream world.
    The manuscript is a book of parables; the key passage is quoted from another book titled Behjatul Asrar or Behjatul Israr, attributed to Abdul Qadir Gilani himself.

     Musharraf Farooqi has generously shared his translation:

A merchant named Abul Muzaffar visited his friend Sheikh Hammad and informed him that he was departing to Syria with a merchant caravan, and asked for the Sheikh's prayers for his safe return. The Sheikh told him to postpone his plans for it would have dire consequences. He told him that robbers would rob and kill him.

     As the merchant was returning from the Sheikh with an uneasy mind, he crossed paths with Abdul Qadir Gilani who asked him the reason for his distraught looks. When Abul Muzaffar told him about Sheikh Hammad's prediction, Gilani told him not to worry and to depart for the journey with an easy mind. He assured him that no harm would come to him.

     The merchant followed his advice, departed for Syria as he had planned and returned after turning a good profit.
     During his return journey he misplaced his purse of gold coins when he reached Aleppo and went to sleep with a troubled mind. He dreamed that robbers had attacked the caravan and looted all his possessions and killed him.
     He awoke from the nightmare in terror and found himself safe and also remembered where he had kept the purse. When he returned to Baghdad he wondered whether he should first call on Sheikh Hammad or Abdul Qadir Gilani. Abul Muzaffar met the former in the bazaar.
     The sheikh told him that he should convey his gratitude to Gilani because God had transferred his destined fate, about which he had been warned by Sheikh Hammad, from the world of wakefulness into the world of dreams by Gilani's praying seventy times for him.

Musharraf Farooqi asked: "I wonder what you make of it and if you have read any references about such a transference of destiny from the world of wakefulness into the world of dreams."

My response: I am familiar with apotropaic procedures for averting an unwanted future event, especially one foreseen in dreams, and have actually used some of these myself. While I enjoy the way the author here speaks of sending an evil event from the physical world into a world of dreams, in today's language (as recognized in mainstream physics) we might speak of shifting an event into another parallel universe.

    In this story, what might have happened is revealed in a dream. The attack and murder seem to be taking place, in the dream, at the same time they would have unfolded in physical life, except for Abdul Qadir Gilani's intervention. I have seen dreams of this kind myself.

     However, the process that is most familiar to me is that we foresee an unwanted event in dreams and then take action to avert it. Some cultures have rituals for this. A traditional Iroquois practice was to play-act part of the content of an evil dream in the hope that this partial dramatic enactment would fulfill the dream, while containing its consequences, so it would not have to manifest completely. As described in my Dreamways of the Iroquois such play acting could be very fierce; thus a war chief who had dreamed he was taken by enemies and fire-tortured to death had himself burned with red-hot knives and hatchets.

      I have seen gentler, improvisational versions of such rituals of containment work. So we see that while the Syria-bound merchant's life was supposedly saved by the devout prayers of a saint, there are things that ordinary dreamers can do for themselves to shift a "destiny" from one event track to another.

The feat attributed to the Sufi master becomes more explicable, if no less extraordinary, when we consider current theories in physics of Many Interactive Worlds. Leading edge physicists suggest that we are living right now, in one of numberless parallel universes. They are forever splitting. However, they can also converge and influence each other. If this is how it is, then it is not so hard to imagine that an unwanted event could be deported to a parallel reality. The merchant survived, in what he thought was the real world. He died in world he may have continued to see in his dreams. We are not told what he discovered to be fundamental reality when he died and was able to see that the life just ended was also a dream. 

Illustration: Traditional portrait of Abdul Qadir Gilani, born in Persia in 1078, buried in Baghdad in 1166. Artist unknown.

Yellowstone dreams

 

I was not a fan of the young Kevin Costner, but he is very good as John Dutton, the patriarch of a Montana livestock empire in the series "Yellowstone".  Happily I have found it gripping enough for me to get to season 3, and its treatment of dreams, which is mature and intelligent. We are invited to discern when we can deal with nightmares through interior work and when dreams are showing us a possible future that requires action in physical life. 

In the first episode of season 3, John Dutton talks about nightmares with his grandson Tate. 

“I’m in that room,” says Tate. “The floor just disappears, and I fall and keep falling. I scream, but no sound comes out. No one hears me, so no one comes to help me.” It seems he is reliving the trauma when he was kidnapped by a white militia working for his family’s enemies.

John Dutton offers these insights:

“You know what dreams are? It’s your memories and your imagination all mixed together, into this soup of what’s real and what’s made-up. But the thing about this soup is, you can change the ingredients, Tate. You can put in whatever you want to. Any memory, any fantasy. You can be a baseball star who opens Christmas presents all day long. So when you close your eyes later, decide what you’re going to dream. That’ll be the dream.” 

Now this is an admirable approach with some kinds of dreams, but we are about to learn that it may not work with dreams that portend the future. John starts to recount a scary dream of his own. He says he dreams there is a family in need on the side of the road. When he pulls over to help them, they no longer want his assistance. They want something else. He won’t say more. We are left to infer that there is something terrible in his dream he won’t share with the little boy.

In the season finale, the dream plays out in the daylight world. John stops to help a mother and child broken down by the side of the road. As he changes a tire for them, killers pull up in a van and riddle him with bullets. Sometimes a dream of the future requires action in the physical world, to avert an unwanted scenario or move towards a desirable one.

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

 

 

 

Dream rehearsals

 

Before I led my first public dream workshop, I dreamed the exact number of participants and also that there would be a problem with a man who would try to record the session without asking permission. In the dream, I saw him fiddling with a micro-recorder under a dark jacket while seated next to a grand piano. In the workshop the following evening, a man in a dark jacket sat next to the piano. As soon as he reached for his recorder, I was able to stop him pressing the Play button, because my dream had rehearsed me for this.

On another occasion, when I was scheduled to speak at a college in high summer, I dreamed that the air conditioning system in the lecture room was so loud that people could not hear me; we were posed with the choice of broiling in the summer heat or having an inaudible speaker. My action was to drive to the college and check the A/C. As in my dream, the fans were incredibly noisy. I was able to save my lecture by having it moved to another auditorium. I include many personal episodes of this type of dream rehearsal in my book Conscious Dreaming,

Still on the theme of "workaday" dream rehearsals: the dream may come long before the event it previews. Thirteen months before leading a three-day residential retreat at a new venue, I dreamed that 67 people had signed up for one of my programs. Much of my long dream report was then devoted to bizarre and surreal scenes. At the time of the dream, I had never heard of the venue where I found - more than a year later - that 67 people were enrolled for my program. That match-up made me scout the full dream report to see what else in it might have been a helpful rehearsal. As the workshop unfolded, I recognized that the dreams participants were sharing closely resembled those "bizarre and surreal scenes" in my dream report, which now served me as a personal counselor, guiding me on how to handle specific individuals carrying specific challenges and imaginal histories.

How could I be poised to relate a dream rehearsal to an event thirteen months later? Because I follow the discipline of keeping a detailed journal, giving a title to each entry. How could I find a report from more than a year before? Because I also live by synchronicity, in this case using a specific and fun version of bibliomancy (divination by opening a book at random) that for now I'll call journal-mancy (since imerologiomancy seems a bit too much). I opened an old journal at random on the morning of that three-day retreat, and out fluttered a closely-typed three-page report that began "There are 67 people enrolled for my workshop."

When people who remember dreams tell me they can't recall dreaming a future event, I say: Look again. Ask of any and every dream, and especially the workaday ones, Is it remotely possible that this will play out in the future? If the answer is, Yes, then consider whether the dream is more than precognitive; it could be a rehearsal that will help you to prepare for coming events and shape then for the better.

Illustration by Robert Moss

Walking a Dream

Jung said that one of the things he liked to do with a dream was to “circumambulate” it, wander around it, considering it from many angles. He liked to do this while in physical motion, wandering around his house on the lake, through the garden, into the woods.

This is a grand way to get greater perspective on a dream. Walking with a dream for a while, you may find that more of the dream narrative returns to you. You are almost sure to get commentary of some kind from what you notice playing around you, wherever you happen to be going.

You may find that both inner and outer perceptions accomplish what a dreaming people of central Africa say we must do with a dream. Like other cultures that value dreaming, the Yansi of Zaire have special words for dreamwork practice. According to anthropologist Mubuy Mpier, the Yansi share dreams every morning, and the core of their approach to dream exploration is embodied in the term a bumi ndoey, which means to “turn a dream.” The teaching is that we need to turn a dream carefully, as we might lift a great rock, to see what is underneath, on the side that is not initially visible.

It’s not only a matter of letting the world illuminate the dream; it’s a case of letting the dream illumine the world. “We do not always have only to sit with closed eyes, moving around in our heads, to draw closer to an image. We can put it in our pocket and carry it with us throughout days and nights,” as Mary Watkins wrote in her passionate appeal in Waking Dreams for us to let images speak to us and through us. “You not only see different things, you see things differently” when you are seized by poetic imagery, poet and scholar Kathleen Raine observed.

One of the things we want to do when we are walking a dream is to notice when it starts to play out in the world around us. There might be a considerable time gap between the dream and its unfolding in the world, so patience and a decent memory — assisted by your journal! — may be required. When a dream does begin to manifest in external reality, let an alert flash on your inner control panel. In my mind, the default version is: Dream Playing Out Now.

When the dream starts playing out, you have several options. They are not mutually exclusive. If there is no sense of danger and the original dream left you feeling happy and confident, you may be content to let the dream play again and enjoy it with all of your senses. Maybe you’ll find that a sense of “rightness” comes with this: that you have made the right choice, that you are in the right place, that at last you have found the right friend or lover or teacher. If you had a darker sense of the dream — if it involved risk or danger — you will want to be poised to change the script, solve a problem, avoid that accident or that drama at the office.

As a dream plays out in exterior reality, you may notice that its symbolism is now alive in your world. This can become a whole education on how to refresh and renew our perspectives on what is a dream and what is real. We need to take dreams more literally and waking life symbolically.

A dream may be fairly literal in the sense that it reveals something that is happening or will happen in the future in the ordinary world. Yet when the dream is enacted, we see that there is symbolism in the physical event. So a literalistic dream can point to a symbolic play in the outer world. Let’s consider an example.

A man I will call Yves dreamed that his ring finger was cut off in an accident. There was blood and pain, and he saw the splintered bone, and woke with feelings of dread and fear. When he brought the dream to me, I asked very early, as is my practice, whether it was possible that he could lose a finger in a literal accident, maybe cutting or slicing something. Did his work involve such risks? Well, yes, it did. He worked part-time pruning vines on a hillside in southern France, where he lived. He agreed that he would need to be more watchful about how he handled the secateurs.

We proceeded to discuss the symbolic levels of the dream. Hard to miss the significance of losing the ring finger in terms of a relationship. He was not married, but he had a live-in partner and felt her interest had begun to stray. This brought in the Freudian bit. Did the loss of “tall man” — the middle finger — speak of a decline in sexual performance?

Yves walked with his dream. Within the week, it began to play out when he made a false move while working in the vineyard. He only narrowly managed to avoid cutting off his own finger with the pruning shears. It was the ring finger, as in the dream. The partial fulfillment of his terrible dream led him to confront the symbolic issues. He sat down with his partner. She told him, with the sexual candor for which the French can be notable, that she was dissatisfied with his sexual performance and had already taken another lover. They agreed to separate.

Big Feet. Detail from painting by Brazilian street artist Pedrito, RM private collection. 

A Dreamer's Notes: Playing Detective with Old Journals

I have been keeping a journal, off and on, since my teens, and as a dedicated daily practice for nearly 40 years. My first entry every day is usually a dream report, sometimes many of them. I like to go back to old journals, open one at random, and see what pops up. This simple act of bibliomancy produces intriguing results. Sometimes I notice that an incident I dreamed long ago is just starting go play out in ordinary reality.

A favorite example: I was hurrying to get into my car and drive to a retreat center 90 minutes from my home where I was scheduled to teach for the first time. I paused to pull a binder from the shelves housing printouts of my dream reports, intending to see what I would find when I opened it. A loose-leaf report - three legal-sized pages of single-spaced text - flew out of the binder. I had written the report 11 months earlier. I glanced at the first lines:

74 people are registered for my workshop. I am given this information at reception by a bald man with a big beard.

I skimmed the rest of the report. There was weird stuff there, material for dark fantasy and scifi. I had no time to study the details. I folded the report and put it in my pocket.

When I got to the retreat center, I was greeted by a man with a big beard, wearing a hat. I asked him t remove his hat. When he did, I saw he was bald and a match for the man in my dream. "How many people do we have for the workshop?"

"Seventy-four."

This was already interesting, as a clear case of dream precognition. Eleven months ago, when I recorded my dream, I had not yet been invited to this retreat center; indeed, I had never heard of it. The three-day workshop I was bout to lead was not in my calendar. 

In my cabin, I read through all of my dream report carefully, wondering how all the dark drama and special effects might relate to what was unfolding now.

I did not have an assistant for that workshop. Seventy-four people is a rather large group to handle alone, in a huge drafty barn with bats flying - literally - up among the roof beams. Naturally, there were people there who had come hoping to heal deep wounding and get relief from nightmare terrors. As the workshop progressed, I realized that what I had seen in a dream eleven months before had prepared me for things that were going to be shared and sometimes acted out in the group. I had dreamed the dreams of others. And received a p[review not only of a registration number but of various personal situations that would need to be handled with care and sensitivity. Over that long weekend  my dream report was my counselor, whispering in my ear, Be prepared for what's coming next, giving me a context for understanding and sometimes a path resolution.

My Bald Man with a Beard dream is more than an example of how we dream the future. It's a prompt to look at how an "old" dream can provide navigational guidance when a situation it previewed starts to manifest.

Sometimes digging in old journals brings up a dream I could not fathom at the time but may have been illuminated by subsequent discoveries. I may now have a new way to investigate what I left as a cold case when I failed to solve a mystery. One of the characteristic features of my style of dreaming is that I read a great deal and read and receive messages in  many languages. My dreams are full of obscure names and phrases from languages ranging form Mohawk to Japanese to medieval French, from Farsi to Georgian to the Greek of the Neoplatonists. In the pre-Google days I was not able to run down some of the odd names and phrases I recorded from my dreams. It's so much easier now.

There are mysteries in the dream life I have recorded that continue to elude explanation. I suspect that some of these are related to the adventures of my traveling dream doubles. They get out and about in  other realities near or far from the one in which I am writing this piece. I am looking right now at a report I entered in my travel journal in 2019. My handwriting in pencil is almost indecipherable, and slightly smudged. I did not transcribe this short text in my digital data base. I did make a sketch, and that is what made me take another look at these journal pages.

Here is my attempt to reconstruct the text:

4/11/19

Showing Aubrey His Body

In the Cévennes. A little blue Fiat 500 has crashed. A man in a light blue parka is sprawled on the snow. I go through the door of a house where a party is in full swing. I approach a man drinking eggnog, telling him there is something he needs to see. I guide him to the door and show him the body in the snow. He doesn't realize for a moment that he is looking at his own body, dressed in the same light blue parka. I know that his name is Aubrey. I reassure him that someone is coming to get him on the right road. 

My feelings, then and now, are of curiosity rather than high emotion. It seems that my dream self is performing a service, a little psychopomp work to held a soul with the first stage of his bardo: recognizing that you are dead in the sense that you can't use your physical body any ,more.

I have traveled and taught in the general region of the Cévennes but haven't used that term - which may be of Celtic origin - outside the dream. 

I don't think I know any man named Aubrey. Not an Aubrey Beardsley fan. I might go back to the Brief Lives compiled by John Aubrey, the 17th century English biographer and antiquary, and take a look at Ruth Scurr's recent novel about him disguised as his intimate journal. Always happy to find pretext to acquire another book....

"Your dreams say more than anything you can tell me"

 

You greet someone by asking what they dreamed. If you want news of someone you care about at a distance, you ask how they have been dreaming. You see the future in your dreams and you talk to the dead.

This is how it is in the family of Colombian American writer Ingrid Rojas Contreras. Her dead Nono - her grandfather - appeared to her in a dream and showed her a river, a river she needed to know about. He appeared in dreams the same night to her mother, Mami, and two of her aunts, telling them all that he needed to be disinterred. He couldn’t bear to stay longer in the place where he was buried. His daughters did not understand why, but they knew the dream required action.

This is a shared dream, and shared dreams are gospel, because unlike dreams you experience on your own, shared dreams have the validity of being peer-reviewed.

At some danger and expense, the women of the family acted on his wishes. They traveled to Bucaramanga, the town where he was buried, and raised money to have his body exhumed. They found the reason for his discomfort. People had smuggled encargos – demands for Nono’s help - inside his casket, burdening him in the afterlife with their needs and desires. A typical encargo, scrawled on a piece of paper, might read, “You will have no rest until I get a new house.”

So the family took the remains of Nono’s body, in his white suit, and had them burned. They made their way eventually to the river from Ingrid’s dream and released the ashes to the waters there. “My dream gave us the river.”

Nono was a curandero, a healer and seer, both an illiterate rogue and a person of real gifts he called “secrets,” like the ability to talk to move clouds (and so change the weather) foresee events, or negotiate with the dead.

When Nono was treating an illness, he asked his dreams to guide him to the herbs he needed, and when he roused from sleep, he hiked until the landscape matched his vision, and there he gathered the medicine

His daughter Sojaila, “Mami”, Ingrid’s mother, had similar gifts, though women were not supposed to be curanderos. Her gifts burgeoned after a dreadful incident when she was eight, in which she fell down a well and remained amnesiac for eight months. After that, as well as knowing “secrets”, she had the ability to bilocate: to project a double visible to other people. This often happened when her regular body was in deep sleep or she was tossing in fever. Ingrid saw Mami’s double reading tarot cards at the kitchen table while her body lay in bed. Mami would often go to visit her husband in her second body – which she called her “clone” - when he was working in another country. He would see her doing his housekeeping, sweeping the floor, scrubbing the walls and leaving them wet.

The doubling theme is central to the book. Ingrid, too, suffered amnesia (for eight weeks) after an accident in Chicago in her early twenties, and the gift she found in the wound is a remarkable story in itself.  And she is a dead ringer for her mother, causing endless confusion among Mami’s relatives and former lovers.

Enter the world of The Man Who Could Move Clouds and you will find yourself in a landscape teaming with the wild fauna of magical realism. You may need to shake yourself to remember this isn’t just magical realism: it’s magical reality. You are in a realm full of ghosts. The ghosts may be restless spirits of the dead, or conditions that Western doctors label complexes or disorders, or  energy doubles, or the product of leaving a part of yourself behind when you make a sudden or wrenching life choice. Listen to this:

We have a hand in creating our own ghosts. We think we are done with a place , or a person, and wrest ourselves away. But when leaving happens in a wave of distress, when we leave what we still love, we conjure our own ghost walks into being.

And this:

A circle is a straight line haunted by something living at its middle – a ghost that causes it to bend and bend,

Ingrid Rojas Contreras showed us her astonishing power with words in a novel titled Fruit of the Drunken Tree, which brings vividly alive the struggle of women and girls for survival in the era of constant war between guerillas, paramilitaries, drug dealers and police.  The violence is always there, in the offing, in the memoir, along with heartbreak, deception and the brutality of men towards women. Yet there is a dancing spirit that sashays us through, the fascination of local customs – sleep with a mirror under your pillow in order to remember, watch for the glow in the earth where a guaca (haunted treasure) is buried - and all the everyday magic.

Maladies and misfortunes are caused by “stories that have not healed inside you.” The heart of healing is changing your life story for the better. Mami heals people by mumbling incantations over a bottle of tap water and giving them a story as they drink it. She tells fortunes the same way. "You have to tell a story that will allow the client to experience the truth without your ever having to name it."

In the world of Ingrid's family in three mountain towns in Santander department, we see what it means to live in a family where everyone dreams and therefore everyone is a little bit of a shaman. Ingrid’s Papi dreams of death under a piece of falling machinery on a walkway at the site where he is employed as an engineer. He’s arguing with a worker when this happens. Later, in ordinary life, he starts arguing with a worker on that walkway. He recognizes that the dream is starting to play out and steps back – escaping the death he dreamed when a piece of machinery fell at the exact spot where he was standing.

The boundary between dreaming and waking, like that between the living and the dead, is porous, if frailer than the ratty shower curtain Nono was gripping when he fell and died in the bathroom. Things bleed through. On the night of Nono's death, Nona - his estranged wife - dreams she has passionate sex with him. Bit when he asks her forgiveness, she won't give it. She wakes to find she is covered in mud and there are clods of earth on the bed. She knows this is because she threw their marriage bed away in the woods, leaving it to mud and muck. 

In my family, we study dreams and seek to decode their architecture. 

Waking life was a constant state of confusion "but our dreams were grounding”. 

Mami says, “Your dreams say more than anything you can tell me.”

 

 

The Drowning Boy and His Sister

When I was nine years old, before I left my body in an operating theater and went to another world, I nearly drowned. I had been out fishing with my father and his friends on a boat on a river near Melbourne, Australia. When we docked, I slipped on the gangplank and fell into the water. Nobody could understand that I was in any danger. The water was shallow and I was a good swimmer. Yet all my short life was swirling through my mind, with glimpses of places and people I had not met in ordinary reality. Finally someone reached down and hauled me out. Then I was on my belly, coughing up the brackish water I had swallowed.

Half a world away, in Memphis, Tennessee, a girl my age dreamed that a boy with a round, freckled face, was drowning, though no one understood he was in danger. In her dream, she reached down into the water and helped to pull him out.

In many nights during my lonely boyhood, this girl was the sister I longed for. We went riding through the sky together, leaping from cloudbank to cloudbank to get to fresh worlds of adventure. Usually my horse was gleaming black, with a star on his forehead, while hers was white. Sometimes, we would meet in a garden of fruit trees and rambling roses, where a bear guarded the gate to color worlds, as vivid and fascinating and scary as the Color Books of Fairies. We could count on Bear to keep us safe. He tied a red cord round our middles so we could not get lost, and would tug when it was time to come back.

It took more than three decades after my near-death in the river before I met the girl from Memphis. Because of my dreams of ancestors of the land, I was now on my quest for Sir William Johnson and the world he made in the Mohawk Valley. I drove from the farm where I was living to Johnson Hall, his last home in the Valley, and met Wanda Burch, who had been curator of this historic site for many years. I did not know her right away as my dream sister, but I felt completely at home with her. She was generous in opening her vast trove of personal knowledge of the records of Johnson, and in escorting me to other places connected with him and the Mohawk Indians he came to know so well. 

We soon discovered we were both dreamers. We traveled into the same dreamscapes, as we came to believe we had done as children. Wanda revealed an ability to dream into other aspects of my life that would have been disturbing had we not almost immediately developed a relationship of deep trust and agreed to adopt each other as brother and sister. 

One morning, Wanda shared a dream report in which she saw me exploring a strange triangular castle on the borders of England and Scotland. While she was dreaming, I was studying photos and descriptions of Caerlaverock castle, the ancestral home of the Maxwell clan (of which the Scots Mosses are a sub-clan). This stronghold on the Western Borders, near Dumfriesshire, was built in the shape of a triangle for both ease of defense (it takes fewer soldiers to guard three walls than four) and for magical purposes (the triangle is a favorite ritual portal for evocation, or bringing things through from a hidden dimension).

Sometimes Wanda seemed to be dreaming my material. She would call and say, “I have another of your dreams.” Sure enough, her report would look and feel exactly like one of my own dreams, stamped with personal markers like picking up a phrase from another language, discovering a secret room or a rare book, or cloak-and-dagger adventures in far-flung places.

The great and daily gift in this ever-deepening friendship was our ability to give each other mutual support and validation and to grow our practice of dreaming together. We realized early on that dreams require action..
     

Over lunch soon after the pull of dreams and the play of synchronicity had led me to sell the farm and move to a house on a hill in the city of Troy, I told Wanda that I had dreamed that a famous author of dream books had moved to my town and was leading dream classes and everyone was very excited. Wanda and I had not yet learned to offer comments by saying “if it were my dream”. She fired her interpretation of my dream right at me. “Robert, you are the famous author who has moved to Troy. Why not give some dream workshops?”

This had me poised for action, but I did nothing until the next day when, in the way of synchronicity, I got a call from a local arts center. Would I be willing to give some classes? Sure. They were expecting me to offer writing classes, but readily readjusted their expectations when I said I wanted to lead dream workshops. Prior to the first of my evening dream classes, I dreamed we had 41 people signed up, and that there was a problem with a man seated near a piano who was trying to record the class without asking permission. I was perplexed by the number 41, since we had agreed to limit the class to 35 – until I got to the center and learned that we had 35 registered and 6 on a waiting list. I was now alert for possible appearance of a man with a tape recorder near the baby grand piano in the gallery we were using. I spotted him as soon as he started fiddling with the machine he was trying to conceal under his raincoat, and laid down the law.
    

Wanda and I practiced dream archaeology together, culling the holographic memories of the land at sites in the Mohawk Valley and further afield where the events of Johnson’s life, and those of the settlers and natives he knew, had unfolded. We also found ourselves developing “far memory” of other lives where we felt we had been connected.

We learned how to companion people who are moving through the gates of death. We learned how to grow dreams for people who are in need of a dream, and wrap the energy of vision around them so that it can bring body and mind towards healing.

I don’t recall exactly when Wanda told me her dream, from when she was nine, of rescuing the drowning boy. I remember her talking of it to me again, when we visited a Mohawk community in Ontario because a Mohawk grandmother had asked me to help her people remember how to dream in the old way. At the lunch table, I found myself sitting opposite young women whose surnames were Johnson and Brant, and may well have been lineal descendants of the 18^th century people who called me into their world and brought Wanda and me together.

“Your own will come to you,” asserted the Irish visionary writer George Russell, beset known by his pen name Æ. My soul friendship with Wanda, in its inception and its ever-renewing gifts, has taught me that this is simple truth. In his beautiful little book The Candle of Vision, Æ gave a personal example. When he first attempted to write verse, he immediately met a new friend, a dreaming boy “whose voice was soon to be the most beautiful voice in Irish literature” This was William Butler Yeats. “The concurrence of our personalities seemed mysterious and controlled by some law of spiritual gravitation.”

In his later life, Æ found a soul companion in the Australian writer P.L.Travers, the author of Mary Poppins and also a deep student of the Western Mysteries and a world-class mythographer. Æ wrote to her, “I feel I belong to a spiritual clan whose members are scattered all over the world and these are my kinsmen.” Yes. And our spiritual kin can reach to us across oceans, and across centuries, even into the drowning pool.

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

Photo by RM

For Wanda's odyssey of healing through dreamwork, please see her beautiful book She Who Dreams