The Question on the Bridge

 

After midnight, I lie on my back and close my eyes. I do much of my best work in bed but not when I approach it in the spirit of work. I tell my friends who are serious meditators that my favorite spiritual practice is horizontal mediation, but I don’t say this seriously. No mantras, no breathwork by the numbers, no specified body postures, no fixed agenda. I’ll just let my body get comfy and be open to what flows in my mind and my inner senses. Relaxed attention, or attentive relaxation. That’s all I require of myself. Sometimes it enables me to maintain continuity of consciousness through all the phases of the night. 
     When images come, I may let them rise and fall, content to see what is surfacing from my subconscious or looking in from the limitless universe outside me. If no images come, I’ll be content to drift off into industrial sleep and let my body rest. I may wake up to the fact I am dreaming inside a dream, or not. I may not recall my dreams from the first sleep cycle, though I will check and pay attention to my feelings and sensations when I am missing a story. I can usually detect a dream hangover even when I have lost the dream that caused it. Most often it’s the sense of being jet lagged, or travel worn. I know where that comes from. With or without travel plans, my dreams are often excursions. I get out and about. I visit places on the other side of this world, and in parallel worlds, and in worlds where the dead and the living rub shoulders. The Society for Psychical Research called such outings psychical excursions. A Moroccan dream interpreter calls them exits of the soul.
      For now, though, I’m just lying on my back. My right leg is bent at the knee, giving me the look of the Hanged Man in the Tarot. I straighten it out and give it a good stretch. Shreds and blotches of color float by on my mental screen. There’s a wriggling something pushing in from the edge that could be a giant millipede if I let it, but I wish it to become a lovely many-leaf plant. Geometric patterns form and reform, then textures, weaving and netting, then a parade of faces – some like cartoons or kids’ drawings, many realistic, so many. For a while, it’s like rush hour at a subway station. Everything is changing and racing fast and there are constant popups and inserts. It’s hard to hold onto anything much. I remember William James saying that in ten minutes in the liminal space of hypnagogia, he saw a thousand images. That sounds about right.
      Things are still busy on my mental screen, but there are two notable changes. First, the scene is slowing and stabilizing. Second, I am in it. I’m no longer a voyeur. I’m out and about, on a bridge, with streams of pedestrians moving both ways on either side of me. I smell salt water, engine oil, and fish. The people on the bridge are mostly dark skinned. Many of the women wear hijabs and long form-concealing dresses. A few are in full burkas. A boy on a bicycle is selling round breakfast rolls. I can smell the poppy seeds.
     I am happy when my senses come alive as they are doing now. It means I’m there, in a real place I may or may not be able to name. It means I have bilocated, because while I am walking on the bridge, wishing for one of the poppyseed rolls,  I am perfectly aware that my body is in bed, and I can look in on it. I can wave to myself if I like, though that might confuse the people on the bridge. Or rather, it wouldn’t, because there is no sign that they can see me or are remotely aware of my presence.
   I know exactly where I am now. I am in suspension. I am on the Bosphorus Bridge, a steel suspension bridge that joins the continents of Europe and Asia. Before me and behind me are the two halves of the enormous world-city, Istanbul.  I see boats of all sizes on the water, monstrous container ships from the Black Sea, ferries from the Princes Islands, fishing dhows and floating restaurants.
     I'm not conscious of cars or trucks on the bridge, just the stream of pedestrians walking both ways, of varied ethnicity and dress.
      A woman steps out of the crowd. With a few steps, she is in front of me. She wears a long white silk garment, streaming to her ankles. Her matching hijab covers her face except for her dark shining eyes. In this simple Muslim garb, she is unspeakably elegant, and I know she is very beautiful. There is a faint smell of roses. She looks hard at me and asks, "Are you Turkish - or Romanian?"
     I am so surprised by the question, cadenced by the pause, that I fall out of the dream and am fully back in the body on the bed.
     Fortunately, I have some experience of revisiting dreams.
     I will myself back to the bridge, and wish the woman in white to still be there.
     There is a shimmer where she stood, then she reappears. It’s a little like watching an image emerge from a blur of pixels. But now she seems fully present. I smell roses, and the long dark hair she keeps covered. I told her I am amused by her question. I have friends in both Turkey and Romania. I taught and traveled in both countries and flew back and forth between Istanbul and Bucharest.
      She has brought me a message. She speaks for a Sufi order – she names it - that is interested in my work and would like to meet me. Will I be coming to Turkey soon?
       I would be honored to meet, I tell her.

 

The next day, I receive an invitation from a friend to return to Turkey to lead a workshop. Does my friend know the Sufi order that was mentioned on the bridge? Yes. It is famous for accepting women as equals with men, and for incorporating some shamanic methods for shifting consciousness.
      There are dreams that spill into the world.

Illustration: "Are You Turkish or Romanian?" RM + AI

So You Want a Dream Interpreter

 

If you want someone to interpret your dream, make sure they can tell it to you before you tell them.
       A Turkish friend recalls that her grandmother used to take her dreams to a Şeyh (shaykh) of the Halveti Ussaki Sufi order for interpretation. On one occasion, the Şeyh greeted her by telling her the essential content of her dream before she had told him the dream. She was shocked, but also convinced that the Sufi master was the right interpreter, if he could find a dream before she gave it to him.
       This kind of thing is not unusual in cultures where the practice of dreaming is still strong. That the best dream interpreter is one who can tell you your dream before you tell it to him is a sound principle, when you think about it, because it suggests that such a person has great intuitive abilities, and maybe very useful connections on the other side of ordinary reality, and perhaps the ability to dive into the dream world - or at least your own energy field - at will. I have written about the practices of a West African tribe who believe you can only trust interpreters if they can tell you your dream before you tell them. 
      I have also suggested that Nebuchadnezzar was operating by the same principle when he challenged all the dream interpreters to tell him a dream he claimed to have forgotten. [1] In a society that valued dreams highly and had advanced dream practices, I'll bet the king had not really forgotten his dream, but rather wanted to put the supposed dream experts through their paces. Daniel, famously, was able to access the king's dream and tell it to him because he had powerful assistance; he called on his God.
    Let's be clear. This is not a pitch for dream interpretation. We want to help each other to claim the power of our own dreams. We do that by offering commentary by saying "if it were my dream", recognizing our own projections and encouraging the dreamer to accept or reject feedback according to their own instincts. When we are able to enter another person's dreamspace - as shamanic dreamers learn to do, with permission - we can say, "in my dream of your dream," again leaving final decisions about the dream to the dreamer.
     If you are going to look for a dream interpreter nonetheless, look for someone who can find your dream before you tell them what's in it - or travel into your dreamspace, at your invitation, to bring back the full content and meaning of your experience,or call on a guide who knows. 

1.See my book The Secret History of Dreaming

 

Place of the Lion

The Dream

I am driving in a large open car along a once-grand avenue near the water in a city on the Black Sea. To our left are splendid buildings from the Belle Epoque that once housed department stores, hotels, restaurants. Everything has fallen into disrepair; signs are missing letters or hanging loose; some buildings look abandoned. Business is still being done though it doesn't correspond to the old signage.
     The person giving me this private tour explains that old magic is still alive in this fallen city. In particular, the ancient art of bonding with an animal familiar is practiced even in the best families, though proscribed by the church and frowned on by the state. Behind the columns of that now-shabby emporium, for example, is an establishment known to its clientele as Lion Inspiriting. Here the most awkward and tongue-tied can be learn to speak in a commanding voice, and the timid and cowardly can be infused with courage.
     I want to see how this works. Quick as thought, I am guided through a marble hall, up stairs to a half-lit parlor where I am invited to recline on a divan. I am aware that there is a stuffed lion in the room, so shabby and dusty I am sure it is an old taxidermy specimen rather than merely a prop or a toy. A black and white film starts to play. Grainy, silent. Nothing much happening for a long time except close ups of waving patterns in high glass. I am amazed at the detail. I can see every blade of glass. I realize the scene is not only on a screen. It is all around me. And it is not only black and white; There is some green and blue, and a glow of colors I can't normally see.
     Am I inside the night vision of a lion?
     The stuffed lion is no longer where I saw him before.

Feelings when I leave the dream: Excitement and delight.

Reality check: The city reminds me of Constanța, the Romanian city on the Black Sea where I led a fourt-day workshop years ago. The signs on the buildings are in the Roman alphabet, but I'm not certain they are in Romanian.

There is a villa in Constanța called the House of Lions. I don't recall seeing it when I was in the city and don't know whether it is the marbled building in my dream.

I love lions and have made a shamanic practice of connecting people with Lion spirit to claim their voice and find their courage. My original title for my book Active Dreaming was The Place of the Lion and there is a lion door knocker on the cover.

The werewolf is well-known in Romania (and is far more common than the vampire) but I have not heard of werelions here. However, I did once meet a werelynx in the Carpathian mountains. 

I find shifts between color and black and white (going either way) very significant in dreams.

I enjoy the slightly creepy Gypsy-Steampunk quality of the room where things go black-and-white. Of course Romania is famous for Romany. And in the middle of the night I was reading some hilarious chapters in Robertson Davies' novel The Rebel Angels about Gypsy magic in the heart of bourgeois Toronto.

What do I want to know?

Where does this story want to go next?

Bumper sticker

When the lion speaks everyone listens.

 Revisting the dream

When I look again to see how the story could develop, I imagine the narrator - now distinct from myself - discovering he is in the body of the taxidermy lion, which is now animated but shedding hair and bits of hide as it moves around awkwardly. To his horror, he finds that something else has taken the human body he left on the divan. It raises up and leave the premises. He is trying to track it but in this form people will flee from him or try to capture or kill him.

Dialogue with a dream character 

The Alteri

I ask the proprietess of the shapeshifting salon called Lion Inspiriting, Who are you?

She tells me, “We are Alteri”.

Does this mean alters, as in other personalities? 

Surely the lion isn’t native to these parts. She laughs at me for forgetting my history. The lions of the Hatti and of Ishtar, of Egypt and Africa. The cave lions of long ago. Her people are not captives of time or borders.

[Unedited entry form my joirnal for May 10, 2021]

Photo: House of Lions in Constanța.

On Dream Reentry: A Brief Introduction

Think of it this way: In your night dream, you went to a place, which may resemble a site in ordinary reality or may be somewhere quite extraordinary where the physics are utterly different. Either way, because you were in a certain place, you may be able to find your way back there, just as you could return to that café or bookshop or house party you once visited in your regular life. 

     Why would you want to do such a thing? There are plenty of excellent reasons. Maybe you’ve been running away from your dreams and leaving them broken and unfinished because there’s something in your dream world that scares you. If you can find the courage to go back inside one of those nightmares, wide awake and conscious, and face what frightened you, it’s more than likely you’ll find power and healing waiting for you on the other side of the terror. The fiercest dragons guard the richest treasures, said Rilke, with a poet’s clarity.
     You may want to go back inside a dream because you were having a great time that was interrupted by the alarm clock or the kids tickling your toes. You may want to go back in to have more of a conversation with someone who appeared to you in a dream - your departed grandmother, maybe, or a wise old man you suspect is a guide - or to read a letter you left unread. You may want to see what’s on the top floor of that mysterious house, or down in the root cellar. You may have a mystery to solve. You may want to clarify whether that plane crash could take place in the future, as either a literal and symbolic event, and what you need to do with that information (once you have it clear) in order to avoid or contain an unwanted development.
     You may simply want to know more about a dream. The best way to understand a dream is to recover more of the experience of the dream. Dreams are experiences, not texts, and a dream experience, fully remembered, is its own interpretation.          
      Through dream reentry, one of the core techniques of Active Dreaming, my original synthesis of dreamwork and shamanism, you can pursue any of these agendas, or simply enjoy the fun and adventure of using a personal dream image as a portal to the multiverse. The best time to attempt dream reentry may be when the dream is fresh and you are still closely connected to it - lazing in bed after waking, or slipping back into bed after a bathroom stop. But if the dream has energy for you, you may be able to go back inside it long afterwards.
      For ancient and indigenous shamans, the chief cause of many of our complaints - fatigue, low energy, excessive vulnerability to illness and allergies - is soul loss. The understanding is that in any human life, we may lose part of our vital energy and identity through pain or grief, shame or abuse or wrenching life choices. The cure is to try to find that missing piece and bring it back and put it where it belongs. 
       Our dreams offer us roads to soul recovery. You dream of being back in the old place. This may be your childhood home, or the place you shared with your ex. Such dreams may be telling you that you left a part of yourself at that place, at a certain time in your life. They may be issuing an invitation for you to reach back into that time and place and reclaim something that belongs to you — that beautiful younger person whose dreams were interrupted but can now be lived by you, if you are together.

You prepare to reenter a dream as follows:

1. Pick a dream that has some real energy for you. It doesn’t matter whether it is a dream from last night or from 20 years ago, as long as it has juice. It doesn’t matter whether it is a tiny fragment or a complex narrative. It makes no difference whether you choose to work with a night dream, a vision or waking image. What’s important is that the dream you choose to revisit should have some juice — whether it is exciting, seductive, or challenging.

2. Begin to relax. Follow the flow of your breathing. If you are holding tension in any part of your body, tense and relax the muscle groups associated with that part of your body until you feel yourself becoming loose and comfy in your body.

3. Focus on a specific scene from your dream. Let it become vivid on your mental screen. See if you can let all your senses become engaged, so you can touch it, smell it, hear it, taste it.

4. Clarify your intention. Come up with clear and simple answers to these two questions:

What do you want to know?

What do you intend to do, once you are back inside the dream? 

You may need one thing more: something to energize your adventure in conscious dreaming and to help you shut out distracting thoughts. Shamanic drumming — a steady beat on a simple frame drum, typically in the range of three to four beats per second (but sometimes faster) - is a marvelous tool for helping to shift consciousness and travel into the dreamspace. The steady beats serve to override mental clutter and focus energy and intention on the journey. The rhythms of the drum correspond to brain wave frequencies in the theta band, associated with the hypnagogic zone and its dreamlike imagery. If you want a physiological explanation of why shamanic drumming is such a powerful tool for shifting awareness, you could say that the “sonic driving” of the drum herds our brain waves into the theta band, opening us to its characteristic flow of imagery. I have made my own recording of shamanic drumming specifically for the dream reentry adventure. 

When you reenter a dream, you can invite one or more friends to go with you, to support you as you face your dream challenges on their own ground, and to gather information for your benefit. When two or more people are able to enter the same space in nonordinary reality and bring back mutually confirming information from that space, they have produced hard evidence of the objective reality of other realms. Through this process, we can bring through immensely valuable guidance and healing for each other. 

 

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

Illustration: "Stepping through the Magic Clock" by RM with Night Cafe

Adventures through the Dream Gates: Meeting Great Turtle

 

This is a story about what you may gain if you stay with a dream after waking and let a fuller story unfold. I rediscovered it while engaged in a favorite pastime: opening an old journal at random and seeing what an experience I recorded years or decades ago may say to me now. Sometimes old mysteries remain unsolved. I often notice recurring themes and situations that help me to become more aware of my attitudes and behavior, providing a necessary witness perspective on my life roads.        
      Sometimes a dream I did not understand at the time has meaning and application for me today because subsequent events have provided a context. I notice again and again that I dreamed events long before they played out – hard evidence, of the only form relevant here, of long-range precognition.  I discover that I missed warnings or advisories that could have smoothed my path and try to learn from my lapses how to get better at discerning and acting on oneiric clues to the possible future.
      Sometimes a dream I recorded looks like a dramatic production, maybe an instalment of a streaming tv series, staged by a personal film crew behind the curtain of the world. Very often - and this is most interesting for me - my dream reports seem to contain memories of events in another reality: a real life world that is running on a different time continuum or in an alternate universe near or far from the ordinary one.
     The report that follows appears to belong to the latter category.The action is played out in another reality, starting with an alternate version of a country where I used to live. When I stay with the dream, something irrupts from the mythic depth, a great power of Earth and of deeper knowing acknowledged by the First Peoples of the land where I now live. The gift of connection with Great Turtle is a blessing in the ordinary world today, as it was eight years ago. 

January 3, 2017

Dream and lucid dream reentry

I save a turtle, Great Turtle saves me

My youngest daughter is driving. We are in London. I tell her to head for Green Park so I can walk the dog there. I wave in the general direction. However, she drives us into a very narrow, twisting street in an area I don’t recognize. It’s very dangerous. Cars and trucks keep rushing at us from around blind corners, in the middle of the road, which has narrowed so only one vehicle can pass at a time. We come to a stop at what is virtually a hairpin bend, and just avoid a collision with a car that shoots out from behind it. My daughter is quite upset. I persuade her to stay in the car while I walk the dog.
    The dog and I are now in a shopping area. Time has changed. It seems that shops in a colonnade at my left hand are just opening. We walk behind two short squat women. One turns into a shop; she may be going to open it. They bid each other goodbye and the second lady walks on with a dog with silky hair that hangs to the ground.
    My dog and I pass them. Unusually, he takes no interest in the long-haired dog. He is after something up ahead. I glimpse it under a lamppost. It looks like a pigeon that has gotten hold of a paper plate. My dog rushes at it, with me hurrying behind. It jumps up onto my left shoulder. I am surprised to see that it is a little turtle. The “paper plate” is its shell.
     I experiment with removing the turtle. It clings to me with determination. Since I have not figured out what to do with it – beyond keeping it away from my dog – this is okay.

My body is stirring in the bed. Grey light is spilling through the bedroom curtains. I am fully lucid. I am in London and in bed in upstate New York. I could leave the dream now, but I want to stay in it. I want to take care of the little turtle that is still clutching my shoulder. My sensations in my dream body are more acute than those of the dormant bdy in bed. 
    I walk with a protective hand over the turtle while I keep my dog on a short leash with my other hand. I look for a safe place to set down the turtle. There is a large garden on the next corner. Behind an ornamental iron fence, I see steps leading down to a pond. There is a sculpture garden and there are statues of animals – including a turtle – there. This seems like a good place to release my little refugee.
    I open the gate and walk down the steps. I tie the dog up while I set down the turtle near the pond. It seems fine now.
    But there is a tremendous stir in the waters. They fountain upwards. With a great roar an immense being rises from the water. Its great head looms over me. I look up at the leathery skin, the lures of the tongue, the ancient, heavy-lidded eyes. I know in this moment I am looking at Great Turtle, A’nonwara, the Teacher of the Deep. In its gaze, I remember the story of the Real People: how the Light Twin descended to the deep realm of Great Turtle, to learn how to wage the eternal battle with the Dark Twin.   
    Great Turtle wants me to descend to his realm. I let myself drop. I am on my back in the water, falling, falling. I have no problem breathing. I go through utter dark to a place of light. There is a world of light own here, in the depths of water. Here Turtle adjusts its form and becomes humanoid (nothing like the Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles, however). Knowledge streams into me, of how life came from another world to the world that was danced into being on Turtle's back.
    Tosa sasa nikon'hren. "Do not let your mind fall." Do not forget the higher world, Earhth-in-the -Sky, that contains the origin and purpose of life on Earth. When humans let their minds fall, they bring down the Dark Times. 

I returned from this adventure feeling blessed.

I ran a reality check on the contents of my dream. I know Green Park and often walked there when I lived in London. I am certain I will never walk my little dog there. I have been in London with my daughter and we could make a future trip but it is most unlikely she would be driving. I don't think the dream anticipates a literal future situation, but rather an alternate reality which becoems the stage for a deeper - indeed a mythic - drama. 
    I live on what Native Americans call Turtle Island. I have great respect for the snapping turtle (the kind in the dream) and its cousin the sea turtle. They can’t retreat into their shells. Their underbellies are not armored apart from a tiny shield piece called a plastron. I have studied the cosmology of the Iroquois (the Onkwehonwe, or “Real People”) in which Great Turtle not only offers its back as a home for Sky Woman but becomes a form of the Great Teacher of the Deep. I have swum with sea turtles. 

I immediately made a drawing of Great Turtle. His fierce appearance reflects my original nervousness as this huge creature exploded from the water. His intentions, however, were wholly benign.

When I went back through my journal, tracking all my turlte sightings in both worlds over several decades, I rediscovered a poem I wrote to honor Great Turtle in 2012, five years before our unexpected encounter in Green Park:

A'nonwara (Turtle Dreaming) 

I am the turtle that does not hide.
I wear the armor of a knight, not a skulker.
My vulnerable belly says, Get me if you can;
I stick my neck out.

You call me slow, but on water
I am faster than you, and fast on land.
Deep down, I am the teacher you need
to show you how to fight the Dark One.

I am the broad back you live on.
Ignore me for too long,
go on harming my other children
and I will shake you off my back.

Journal drawing: "Great Turtle Rises" by Robert Moss

The Romance of Dreaming

 

On Valentine Day, romance your dreams. The romance of dreaming is played out beyond your present life and your present world. Through dreaming, as the Irish poet-painter AE (George Russell) promised, "Your own will find you". Someone you loved and lost five thousand years ago may call you to remember that romance, and look for its fulfillment in new bodies that have ancient eyes.

    Yes, I am a romantic about these things. But I am also a practical romantic. I know that we can dream the way to manifest the kind of love that transcends time, and also that dreaming will show us how to do what we love and let the world support us. However, this requires us to develop the practice of active dreaming, which involves not only growing our dream recall and keeping our journals, but learning to clarify the content of dreams and above all taking action to bring energy and guidance from the dream worlds into the physical world.
    One of my favorite teaching stories about this comes from India. It is sometimes called "The Sketcher of Pictures". It goes like this:

 

The princess (and all women may be princesses, or queens) is dreaming. She dreams of the perfect lover, who satisfies her in every way. The dream streams like silk. It smells like jasmine and honeysuckle.
   She opens her eyes and howls with pain and loss, because although her surroundings are opulent she knows no one like the man of her dreams.
   Her father sees that she is very sad and asks what is wrong. When she tells him it has something to do with a dream, the king summons his wise men to listen to the dream and tell her what it means. They gather in a council chamber, ready to give their interpretations.
    As the princess recounts her dream, a wild man rushes into the room, his hair a white storm about his shoulders. He is a rishi who lives in the woods and cares nothing for the rules of the court. He grabs a piece of paper, makes a quick sketch, and hands it to the girl.
    When she looks at the picture, the princess is stunned. The rishi has captured the very essence of her dream lover.
     Abandoning the conclave of dream interpreters, she runs after the wold man from the woods. When she catches up to him, she begs him to tell her the identity or her dream lover. "Who is he? Where can I find him?" Clearly the rishi knows the man of her dreams.
     Good teachers don't give you everything all at once. The rishi says only, "The map is in your dream." Then he takes off into the woods.
     The princess thinks about it. What does it mean, that a dream contains a map? When she thinks about it some more, she realizes that she was not with her lover among the clouds. She was in a bed in a room in a house in a city in a certain landscape. Though she recognizes none of these places, she has vivid memories of them and feels she would know them again.
     So she sets out on the quest. In an Indian village, they may take hours to tell this part. There will be tigers, of course, and bandits, and deserts and snakes and all manner of perils. There will probably be elephants.
     But let's catch up with the princess at the moment when her quest is almost over, because there on the horizon, after long travels and many ordeals, she sees the city from her dreams. And now she is rushing through those streets the house from her dream, and up the stairs to the bedroom from her dream, where she finds her lover rising from his dream of her.

 

It sounds like a fairy story, but there are no fairies in it, or any of the gods, demons and others from the rich forests of Hindu mythology. There are only humans, and what humans can do when they learn to make maps from their dreams and have the will and stamina to follow their maps.
    Through the perfume of romance, we receive a lesson in practical romanticism. Do the work in dreamwork. Recognize that dreams require action. Learn - why has it taken you so long? - that a dream is a place. Because you have been there, you can go there again. This can bring you, in this physical world, to place of your dream lover. More often, it will bring you to places in a more spacious universe where you can rejoin the beloved company of your soul, those who love you across time and space, even when you make each other crazy.
   Give a hug to someone you love on Valentine Day. Bring flowers or chocolates if you must. But don't let the day pass without sharing dreams.

Illustration: "The Sketcher of Pictures" by Robert Moss

 

Poetry comes from flooding

 

Stefania Pandolfo’s beautiful but difficult Impasse of the Angels evokes the landscapes – imaginal more than physical – of rural Moroccan villagers for whom dreaming and poetry are vitally important, and always interweaving.
    “Poetry is always the result of flooding”, a younger poet tells her. A real poem bursts from an emotion that is inundating, overwhelming – until it finds creative release.
     The most respected poet in the area, one Sheikh Mohammed, was alien to poetry until he dreamed of a flood. The dream came at a time of personal trauma when he was close to despair. Previously a violent man of action, he had managed to blow off his right hand in a gun accident.
     He dreamed the river was coming down in flood, its front like a mountain, carrying everything it encountered in its path, trees and carrion and debris. Instead of fleeing, he stood there in the dry riverbed, watching and waiting. Then he opened his mouth and swallowed the flood and everything borne along by it.
    Upon waking he recounted the dream to his mother: "The river in flood entered my mouth and I swallowed it." She told him that he had become a poet. He who had never recited a verse or cared for poetry, he who had even ridiculed poets in his previous life, began to ‘speak’, to utter poetical ‘words.” [1]
    I am reminded of the counsel Anais Nin gave to a seventeen-year-old aspiring writer: “Creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.”[2]
    I am reminded of my own big dream of a flood, one of those that dream classifiers might call a watershed dream. I dreamed I was walking a deer I called Bear as I might walk my dog in the park. We came to an open plain with a view to a distant horizon. The earth was reddish and looked bare. I glanced to my right and saw a tremendous wall of water rushing towards where we stood. Instead of fleeing, I prepared myself to catch the wave and ride it. I woke charged with creative energy.
    Of course, I wanted to go back inside the dream, to enter its mysteries and to see what would happen if I managed to ride the great wave. I managed to do this in an operation I call dream reentry, in which we use a dream or personal image that has energy as the portal for a conscious journey, which may be field and focused by shamanic drumming. I did not need drumming to go back inside this dream; it was calling me.
     My animal companion was not mysterious. I have long been closely connected both to the deer and the bear as shamanic allies. I was amused that in the dream I called the deer Baer, but this, for me, simply brought into focus the healing aspects of the connection and was not a [particular focus for the lucid dream journey I was going to make. I wanted to catch the great wave.  
     I lay back in an easy chair, closed my eyes, and willed myself back inside the dream. I found myself in ancient Egypt, in Egyptian garb. I was surveying the Nile at the time of the  inundation, when the great river rose to feed the thirsty earth, bringing the crops. As the waters spilled, I saw papyrus plants in great abundance bursting from the earth, which was now black and loamy. I felt deep in my body that I was being invited to enter a fresh period of abounding creative energy. This proved to be the case. A new book, new poems, new projects poured from me and through me. Life was poetry even when I was writing in prose. Poetry comes from flooding.

 

 References

1. Stefania Pandolfo, Impasse of the Angels: Scenes from a Moroccan Space of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) p.265]

2. Anais Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin. Vol. 4: 1944-1947 (New York: Mariner Books 1972)

 

The Doorstopper Method for Keeping Your Dream Gate Open

 

Here's one of the games I invented for retrieving lost dreams.
   Picture a door to your dream world.
   As you left, you stepped through this door, back into your body in the bed.
   Some of your dreams are fluttering around you. Perhaps you have some of them in your pocket or what you think of as a safe container. I picture a glass jar like the ones I used to catch fireflies on summer nights. Or you think you have alreday recirded them in your journal, or captured them with your cell pnone camera.
    But a strange thing happens. As soon as you step through the door, back into an ordinary space, your dreams take flight. They won’t stay in your pockets. The container won’t hold them. They wing away, like butterflies through that door, which closes so fast you can’t prevent them leaving. Your journal for the night is blank and there is nothijng new in your cameral roll. Now the door is sealed tighter than a bank vault and you can’t find a way to open it.
    Try this: as you return from your dreams, imagine that the door to the dream world stays open for a while, because there is a doorstopper. I picture this stopper as a black dog. He’s alive, of course, though he may remain very still while his role is to keep the door from closing. Gradually he will let the door close. This is what must happen, so your waking life is not so full of dream creatures that you can’t tell where you are any more and end up on the couch of the mad-doctors.
     But you have enough time now to catch some of those escaping dreams. You are permitted to go back through that ever-so-slowly closing door, go in a little ways, and grab what you can.
     When I first played this game, I was surprised to see that a flight of steps began at the threshold. When I climbed the steps, I found myself in a pleasant wooded setting, with dreams gathered on the branches or flitting about.
     I invited them to play with me, and some consented to accompany back to the ordinary side of everything, which gets less ordinary in their company.
     As I stepped back through the door, heading for my body where I had parked it on the bed, I patted the head of the black dog who had managed the portal. He had become bigger and even more noble, shifting from the role of doorstopper to that of Gatekeeper. 

Drawing by Robert Moss with digital colorization

What is Active Dreaming?

Active Dreaming? The phrase is a provocation, designed to shake us free from the assumption that dreaming is a passive activity.  I am grateful for the gift of spontaneous sleep dreams, the ones we don’t ask for and often don’t want. They hold up a magic mirror in which we can see ourselves as we truly are. They serve as a voice of conscience. They preview challenges and opportunities that lie in our future. Sleep dreams show us what is going on inside the body, diagnose developing complaints before medical symptoms present themselves, and show us what the body needs to stay well. We solve problems in our sleep. And, as the First Peoples of my native Australia teach, our personal dreams may be a passport to the Dreamtime, the larger reality in which we can meet the ancestors and our authentic spiritual teachers.

I work with sleep dreams in all these varieties, and many more, and welcome them to work on me. But Active Dreaming is far more than a method for decoding sleep dreams. While the techniques involved are fresh and original, they are also very ancient. They involve ways of seeing and knowing and healing that were known to our early ancestors, kept them alive on a dangerous planet, and enabled them to communicate with each other and with other forms of life in the speaking land around them.

Active Dreaming is a way of being fully of this world while maintaining constant contact with another world, the world-behind-the-world, where the deeper logic and purpose of our lives are to be found.

Active Dreaming is a discipline, as is yoga or archaeology or particle physics. This is to say that there are ascending levels of practice. In any field, the key to mastery is always the same: practice, practice, practice.

CORE PRACTICES OF ACTIVE DREAMING

First, Active Dreaming is a way of talking and walking our dreams, of bringing energy and guidance from the dreamworld into everyday life. 

We learn how to create a safe space where we can share dreams of the night and dreams of life with others, receive helpful feedback, and encourage each other to move towards creative and healing action. We discover that each of us can play guide for others, and that by sharing in the right way we claim our voice, grow our power as storytellers and communicators, build stronger friendships and lay foundations for a new kind of community. Above all, we learn to take action to embody the energy and guidance of our dreams in everyday life.

Second, Active Dreaming is a method of shamanic lucid dreaming.  

It starts with simple everyday practice and extends to profound group experiences of time travel, soul recovery and the exploration of multidimensional reality. It is founded on the understanding that we don’t need to go to sleep in order to dream. The easiest way to become a conscious or lucid dreamer is to start out lucid and stay that way. As a method of conscious dream navigation, Active Dreaming is not to be confused with approaches that purport to “control” or manipulate dreams; it is utterly misguided to seek to put the control freak in the ego in charge of something immeasurably wiser and deeper than itself.

Third, Active Dreaming is a way of conscious living. 

This requires us to reclaim our inner child, and the child’s gift of spontaneity, play and imagination. It requires us to claim the power of naming and define our life project. It invites us to discover and follow the natural path of our energies. It calls us to remember and tell and live our bigger story in such a way that it can be heard and received by others. It is about navigating by synchronicity and receiving the chance events and symbolic pop-ups on our daily roads as clues to a deeper order. Beyond this, it is about grasping that the energy we carry and the attitudes we choose have magnetic effect on the world around us, drawing or repelling encounters and circumstances.

To live consciously is to accept the challenge to create, which is to move beyond scripts and bring something new into the world.

This approach is not only for individuals and friends and families, but for communities and for our deeper attunement to the cause of the Earth.  Active dreamers become Speakers for the Earth, and rise to full awareness of the truth of the indigenous wisdom that we must be mindful of the consequences of our actions down to the seventh generation beyond ourselves. Active dream groups can offer a model of intentional community, and can foster a new mode of leadership that empowers each member to claim her voice and play guide to others as they learn to speak and embody their own truth.

Dream art: "Conference of the Birds" by RM

See my book Active Dreaming for the fullest explanation of the basic techniques, includingh guidance on creating and growing dream sharing circles. 

Shamanic Lucid Dreaming

 

I have reservations about the term "lucid dreaming" because it has been associated with notions of "controlling" or "manipulating" dreams. Through dreaming, we have access to a source that is infinitely wiser and deeper than the everyday ego, and we want to be available to that source. I am in favor of learning to choose where we go and what we do in dreams, as in waking life, but that requires discernment, not the fantasy of control. 

Another problem I have with the term "lucid dreaming" is that it is most often associated with techniques for waking yourself up to the fact that you are dreaming while you are asleep. This is a valuable skill, especialy when it enables you to choose how a story is gong to devleop and the role you will play, exercise your cretaive imagination, dialogue with dream characters and gather and retain detailed information you can bring back. However, the easiest way to become a lucid or conscious dreamer is to start out lucid and stay that way: in other words, to enter conscious dreaming from a waking or semi-wakeful state.  

I titled my first book on all of this Conscious Dreaming. My preferred name for what I teach and practice is Active Dreaming. As the phrase suggests, we can be active in embarking on conscious adventures in dreaming, and we want to be active in bringing the energy and insight of our dreams into waking life.  

Since I am often asked whether Active Dreaming is a mode of lucid dreaming, I am going to borrow a phrase employed by one of my friends in the lucid dreaming fraternity who refers to my "shamanic lucid dream adventures." I am using the adjective "shamanic" here to describe a method for shifting consciousness to enter nonordinary reality for purposes that include the care and recovery of soul.  

How do you become a shamanic lucid dreamer? You start out conscious and you stay that way. To accomplish this, you only need three things: a clear intention, an image that can serve as a portal, and a means of focusing the mind and fueling the journey. All these things can become available naturally, in the twilight zone of consciousness that researchers call hypnagogia. You are between sleep and waking. Images rise and fall in your mindnd any one of those images can become the gateway for a conscious dream adventure.  

I somertimes find that I am able to maintain continuity of consciones through all the phases that evolve from this liminal stage. I will add that I find the twilight state between sleep and awake in the morning tat sleep reserachers call the hypno[pompic zone particularly propitious for conscious edream adventures and lucid enciunters with inner guides and transpetrsonal visitors. 

An equally simple and natural way to become a shamanic lucid dreamer is to use a remembered dream as the portal for a journey. In your night dream, you went to a place, which may resemble a site in ordinary reality or may be a locale in a separate reality where the physics are utterly different. Either way, because you were in a certain place, you may be able to find your way back there, just as you could return to a house you once visited in regular life. 

 Why would you want to do this? Maybe you've been running away from something in your dream world that scares you - from the Bear, or the Tiger, or an unknown intruder or pursuer. If you can find the courage to go back inside one of those nightmares and face what frightened you on its own ground, you may find power and healing waiting for you on the other side of the terror.  

You may want to go back inside a dream because you were with your dream lover in a tropical paradise but were interrupted by the alarm clock. You may want to talk to someone who appeared to you in a dream. You may need to clarify whether that auto accident could take place in the future, as either a literal and symbolic event, and what you need to do with that information (once you have it clear) in order to avoid an unwanted development. You may simply want to know more about a dream. The best way to understand a dream is to recover more of the experience of the dream. A dream experience, fully remembered, is its own interpretation. 

 Through the technique of dream reentry, you can pursue any of these agendas, or simply enjoy the fun and adventure of using a personal dream image as a portal to the multiverse.  

The best time to attempt dream reentry may be when the dream is fresh and you are still closely connected to it, lingering in bed after waking. But if the dream has energy for you, you can go back inside any time, even decades after the original dream.  

Shamanic drumming - a steady beat on a simple frame drum, typically in the range of three to four beats per second, but sometimes faster - will help you to shift consciousness and travel into the dreamspace. The steady beat helps to override mental clutter and focus energy and intention on the journey. The rhythms of the drum correspond to brain wave frequencies in the theta band, associated with the hypnagogic zone and its dreamlike imagery. If you want a physiological explanation of why shamanic drumming is such a powerful tool for shifting awareness, you could say that the "sonic driving" of the drum herds our brain waves into the theta band, opening us to its characteristic flow of imagery. I have made my own recording of shamanivc drumming specifivcally for shamanic lucid dreamers.  

The drumming will also help you to synchronize and focus shared adventures in dream travel. You can invite one of more partners to journey with you through the portal you have chosen and act as companions and trackers who can support you and bring you extra information. In my workshops, we frequently have 30 or more active dreamers traveling together on group adventures of this kind. Often we keep group logs, and you can read samplings from these in my book Dreamgates and in the epilogue to Dreamways of the Iroquois, where I describe how I led a group of frequent flyers on a group journey to meet the shaman-priests of the Kogi, on their sacred mountain, at the invitation of a Kogi elder. Through such experiments, we assemble truly scientific data on the reality of the dreamworlds, and what is possible within them.  

Shamanic lucid dreaming is an adventure in navigating the deeper reality that we can share with a partner, with a group, or a whole community. A caution: the side-effects may include transformation.

Journal drawing by Robert Moss: "How It Will Begin"

Location, location, location - and other keys to dream reentry

 

The realtor's familiar slogan applies to the technique of dream re-entry as well as the property game. The easiest way for you to back inside a dream is to hold your focus on the dream location. Your initial memories may be fuzzy, but a single landmark - even a single shape or color - may be sufficient to enable you to shift your consciousness into a vivid and complex scene.

Be open to possibility! The geography of the dream world is not that of the Times atlas or the Mobil guides. In dreams you may find yourself in familiar locales, including places from your past – Grandpa’s place, or your childhood home – that may or may not have changed. You may also visit unfamiliar but realistic locations, often clues that your dream contains precognitive or other “psychic” material. You may find yourself in scenes from a different historical epoch (past or future), in a different galaxy, in otherworldly locales, or in free-flowing situations where nothing conforms to the supposed laws of the physical world. One of the purposes of dream reentry is to establish where in the worlds you are. The typical dreamer, after waking, has no more idea where he spent the night than an amnesiac drunk.

The best time to try to reenter a dream is often immediately after you have come out of it. By snuggling down in bed and rehearsing the postures of sleep, you may be able to slide back into the dream in a gentle and natural way. But your work schedule may not allow you leisure to do this. And if your dream contains deeply disturbing material, you may need to wait until you are ready to deal with it. You may also feel you need the support of a partner or a drumming session.

But here is a simple technique for dream reentry you can use in the privacy of your bedroom or easy chair:

1. Find your question. What is your main question about the dream you wish to explore? Try to formulate that question as clearly and successfully as possible. Write it down. This will help to establish your focus. During your exploration, you will use this question like a flashlight or a miner’s lamp. It might be quite specific, or as general as, “What is this dream telling me?”

2. Focus on your target. Summon back as many details of your dream location as you can. This is the scene you are going to reenter. Maybe you have multisensory impressions of it. How does the air feel? What can you hear? Are there any distinctive smells?

3. Ask yourself who or what inside the dream can best answer your question. When you reenter the dream, you may be able to communicate directly with one of your dream figures.

4. Relax. Get into a comfortable position, sitting or lying down. Take some deep breaths. Breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth. As you exhale, try to release any pain or tension you are holding in your body and wish it outside your space. You may find it helps to count yourself down – from twenty to one – as you let your consciousness slide toward your selected locale. Or you may wish to put on meditation music or a drumming tape.

5. Move into your dream locale. Look around carefully to identify exactly where you are. You may notice many details you forgot or overlooked before. Do you know this place? Do you feel you are inside a scene from another time, or another order of reality?

6. Let the action unfold. Don’t interfere with the spontaneous flow of images. You have full power to choose how you will interact with your dream characters and respond to any challenges that are presented to you. Your dream reentry may take you beyond the point at which the original dream ended; if the first dream was unresolved or aborted, this is part of your design. Your new dream may also introduce characters and events that were not in the original dream. This is fine; your underlying purpose is not to reproduce the earlier version, but to move closer to the source from which dream images flow.

7. Dialogue with dream characters. You may find a dream character who can answer all your questions. Your selection is not confined to humans. Dreams are full of “persons other than human” (to borrow an Ojibwa phrase). There is no such thing as an inanimate object in dreams.

8. Expect the unexpected. Because the dream source is wiser than the ego, it may be telling you something more important than the question you decided to ask.

9. Map your journey. Pay attention to how you return from the dreamscape, as well as the paths you took through it.

Text adapted from Conscious Dreaming: A Spiritual Path for Everyday Life by Robert Moss. Published by Three Rivers Press.