The Ganesh Splash

Just for fun, from an old journal:

A woman reported a dream in which she watches three elephants bowing to me with deep reverence. Then they rise up and splash me copiously with water sprayed from their trunks. She has the feeling that this is to make sure I don't get puffed up over the honor they have given me. In her dream, I welcome this with laughter and joy.

I chuckled when I read this account, and also felt that little tingle that comes when life rhymes. About the same time she sending me her dream, I was spraying members of a workshop circle in Connecticut with salted water, my favorite psychic cleansing agent. Having given them their shower, I proceeded to splash myself with water from the same vessel.

There was another rhyme. That same morning, I shared or reported three unlikely and mildly embarrassing screw-ups in front of the group, of the kind that made it entertainingly clear that the leader was far from infallible.     

I felt confirmation, when I read the dream report, that I had received a trunk call from Ganesh aka Ganesha, the elephant-headed form of the Gatekeeper beloved and honored in India. From now on, I think I'll add the term "Ganesh Splash" to my personal lexicon of the modes of meaningful coincidence. 

Ganesh Splash: An unlikely and mild embarrassment that prevents you from taking yourself too seriously (or allowing yourself to be guru-ized by others), produced with love and laughter.

 

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 

Symbol migration and dream telepathy

I am rarely surprised when I hear accounts of telepathy between people who are closely connected. We sense each other's feelings (telepathy literally means "feeling at a distance'); we feel a tug in the head an know someone is calling us; we pick up sounds and smells and images relating to the other person's activities. When living across an ocean from me, one of my daughters always knew when I was cooking my fiery version of Hungarian goulash, which she detested. "Ugh, I know you were cooking that yukky stuff again." I would know when she was thinking about me, across all the miles,  because I would smell a little girl cologne she had bought in a general store.
      Dream telepathy is very interesting because it extends beyond picking up elements of what is going on in another person's mind or life. We may actually find that we are meeting each other in a dream space and sharing adventures. This happens spontaneously. It can also be done by setting a dream date, with a rendezvous place.
     I once agreed with a group of active dreamers who were on a residential retreat with me that we would seek to meet at the Jean Talon market in Montreal overnight. We agreed to meet at a cheese counter. Only one person in that group, a French Canadian, knew the market. He was later able to confirm details of our travel reports. It seemed we had not only shared some good times; we had been to a version of the market very close to the physical one. I found that all my senses were engaged, I came back with the taste of a perfect brie and a pungent roquefort on my palate.
     When dream telepathy extends to full-fledged interaction between two or more people, we may want t call it shared or mutual dreaming.
      A variant on this theme I find fascinating is what I have decided to call symbol migration. A symbol that is alive in your mind can exert powerful magnetism. It may help to generate effects in the world around you which you may notice in the play of synchronicity. It may also exert a reach that brings it into the minds of other people, whether or not this is any part of your intention An image you are thinking about and visualizing in your waking reality may enter the mind of someone connected to you in a dream.
     Jung gave us a wonderful example of symbol magnetism in his tale of repeating fish. I want to share a personal experience of symbol migration that also has significant fishy content.
      I often read deep in the night, when some of my best research is done and my best

discoveries are made. Over a weekend at a mountain lodge where we were doing deep shamanic work with the spirits of the land, my middle-of-the-night reading included a book by one of the great ethnographers of Northeast, Frank G. Speck, titled Midwinter Rites of the Cayuga Longhouse, based on his fieldwork among the Six Nations in the 1930s.

   I was struck by the following elements in his account: 

1. Fever Mask. Speck includes a photo of a "Fever Mask" for catching and controlling a fever spirit, and writes about how Indians can handle red-hot coals in an altered state.

2. Dreams of Angry Fish. He discusses dreams regarded as "persecution by animals". According to his native informants, animals that have suffered from humans and want redress may haunt those who killed or tormented them in dreams. Speck listened to a number of disturbing dream reports involving fish. These were taken very seriously. A dreamer afflicted by unpleasant dreams of fish was thought to required cleansing and ritual propitiation of the fish spirits. Speck reported that among the Cayuga at that time, if you had a troubling dream about fish, the first thing people should do for you is to splash water on you to reassure the fish that you will honor their element.

3. Whirlwind Mask. In the book Speck discusses the Iroquois belief that disease as well as mayhem are carried by Whirlwind Mask, and has photos of a mask representing the Whirlwind spirit that only a powerful shaman can wear. I was stirred by the idea that the greatest healer in this tradition may be one who can take on and contain the forces of chaos and disease and transmute them within their own being.

The next morning, I was excited to discover that key elements from my reading appeared to have slipped into dreams of our group through symbol migration.  

The first people to share dreams with me at the breakfast table reported the following: 

1. Fever dreams. "I dreamed of a a man whose skin was on fire." (Later a second dreamer reported, "I dreamed my husband had a fever")

2. Dream of angry fish. "I dreamed that the fish were mad at me. They stripped me to the bones, like a filleted fish. Them men wrapped me in skins and took me out into the water to grow me a new body."

3. Dream of Whirlwind Mask. "I dreamed I should make a mask of the Whirlwind and then put it into the fire to contain that power." This dreamer, an artist, had already constructed an amazing whirlwind mask, using birch bark fallen from trees in the woods around us.

We are porous to the thoughts and feelings of those connected with us. Within a loving and supportive community, this offers seeds for growth and healing and deepening understanding. It may also remind us to check our boundaries and may sure we are not open to the migration of unwanted images or preoccupations. In my groups we always take care to set up effective psychic screens and shields, not least by invoking the Gatekeeper, that entity that opens and closes our roads between the worlds.

Art: René Magritte, Les merveilles de la nature (The Wonders of Nature), 1953.

Dream telepathy and writing assignments

I'm chuckling over a fresh example of long-range telepathy at work between a dreaming and a waking mind. Not the first, in my experience, that involves the writing process.
   I kept vampire hours tonight, mining old journals for material for new writing. I paused from time to time to look at ideas and exercises for creative writing that I have sketched out over the years, both for my personal use and as plans for one of my favorite workshops, "Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming."
    Just as I was thinking of continuing my dreaming in bed, I received an email message from my friend Ana Maria Stefanescu n Romania, who hosted a marvelous workshop for me in the Bucegi mountains last month. She reported that - while I was reading and making notes - she dreamed that I gave her a series of ideas and exercises for a creative writing workshop she is planning to lead in Romania in December. She commented that she woke up very excited, but still tired. Certain that she would be able to remember what she had learned, she allowed herself to drift back to sleep, then woke again to find that most of the content was gone.
     She requested me to show up in her dreams again and repeat the instructions!
     I recalled that on a previous occasion, someone who dreamed they received tuition from me was not only able to recall the whole session in exact detail, but to help me fill a page in a book I was writing. Back in the period when I was working on my book Dreaming True, I received a message from a woman in California who had attended one of my programs. She wanted to thank me for the lecture I had given overnight, in her dream, in which (she said) I had summarized part of my argument very cogently in five points that I wrote on a whiteboard.
     Unknown to her, except for her dream, I had reached a stage in my book draft when I wanted to sum up part of my thesis in five points, but had only formulated the first to my satisfaction. I shot back a message to the California dreamer asking if she could retrieve her lecture notes and send them to me.  
     Right away, she sent me the five points Dream Robert had made in his lecture. They filled in, exactly, the missing bits in my book draft.  And I put them in the book with almost no editing!
     My response to my friend who lost the details of what Dream Robert was telling her about crafting a creative writing workshop? "Maybe you can go back inside your dream and get Dream Robert to give you those ideas and exercises again!"
     Ana Maria said she will try this. It took her only an hour or so to came back to me that she now recalls that Dream Robert's first exercise was to encourage writers to go to the place from which their truest words come. This was further good telepathy, and dream tracking, since (unknown to Ana Maria) I have led an exercise along these lines. I wrote a poem of my own ("A Place to Write From") on this very theme, on where I find my truest and most passionate words:

Write from the place that is raw
from the night when you lost your skin.

The poem is in my collection, Here, Everything Is Dreaming that will be published in April 2013.
     I couldn't help joking that this fine flow of telepathy may have been aided by the fact that my friend is in Romania, while I was keeping vampire hours!       

I will be leading my five-day creative writing adventure, "Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming" at magical Mosswood Hollow, near Duvall, Washington, from May 6-10, 1013.      

Proof that dreaming is more than hot air

A Russian friend living in New York has just provided proof positive that dreaming is more than hot air. She received an email from her mother, who lives in St Petersburg, recounting a dream.

"My mother writes that in the dream she is flying in a hot air balloon over St. Petersburg and showing the University to a friend of mine who is visiting the city. "My mother spent half a century at the University, studying and then teaching and doing research, and is quite attached to the place, so her part in the dream is natural. What seized me was this: one of my friends from graduate school is going to St. Petersburg this winter and recently discussed his plans with me. My mother has no clue about these preparations and has never met the guy - except in her dream."

This looks like a clear case of dream telepathy, wonderfully animated by the dream producers. What makes the mother's telepathic hit all the more interesting is that a trip by a foreigner to St Petersburg in the dead of winter is an eccentric move, because of the weather.

Dream telepathy, with bears

I spent Saturday at Stillpoint, a wonderful small retreat center in the woods near Saratoga Springs, New York. It's been my habit, over many years, to lead a playshop here at this time of year titled "Dreaming at Midwinter", in which we honor the ancient traditions of the First Peoples of this area, who were the Kanienkehaka, or Mohawk Indians. We opened the circle by offering tobacco to the spirits of the land and by singing (in English) a traditional Mohawk song for calling in the Bear, as guardian and healer.

The Bear was very much with us in the initial sharing. One woman spoke of a close-up encounter with a large mother bear and her cubs during a hike in the woods. Others spoke of how bears had appeared in their dreams. I thought of how many times Bear has played the role of protector and medicine animal in my own life and practice since I first came to North America.

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It felt right to lead the group on a shamanic journey, into the realm of Great Mother Bear. In a standing meditation, I had everybody find their connection with a special tree, a tree that knew them. I suggested that during the drumming, we would all travel down through the roots of the tree, down into a Cave of Earth where we would encounter Mother Bear and receive healing and life direction. This journey prospered. Every member of our circle returned with thrilling narratives and great gifts.
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The woman who had previously met a bear on the trail reported that Mother Bear received her into a loving embrace and later combed her hair, with gentle care, with her great claws. After this, she felt energized, able to move forward with clear direction on a new phase in her professional and creative work. I was struck by how closely her experience of Bear combing her hair matches a Mohawk tradition of cleansing and freeing the mind. In the real Hiawatha story, when Hiawatha (as agent of the Peacemaker) at last overcomes the tyrant-sorcerer Tododaho, instead of killing his adversary he cleanses and heals him by combing the snakes of evil intention from his hair, and then raises him up to join the council of the "men of good minds".

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Among the journeyers who met Mother Bear was a wonderful man whose father had been born and raised in Kaunas, Lithuania. He was amazed and delighted when I told him that next March I will be leading a workshop in Kaunas, a fine old city that stands at the junction of two rivers. He recalled that his father used to invoke the name of Perkunas, the fierce Baltic god of thunder, in an ancient curse - "May Perkunas blast you!" I told him about the remarkable work of the Lithuanian artist Arvydas Kazdailis, who has been bringing the mythic past and the tragic history of the Baltic alive. In one of Kazailis' etchings for a beautiful edition of The Chronicles of Prussia he depicts Perkunas as a cosmic bear, with lots of action going on within his giant form.
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When I drove home, I found an email message from my friend in Lithuania who is coordinating my workshop in Kaunas. "I dreamed you were wearing dark blue," she reported. "You grew huge, like a storm god or a Tibetan wrathful deity. Your features changed, and I realized you had turned into a giant bear, a dark blue bear. You were surrounded by people dancing in the woods." I checked the time difference and noted that she dreamed this while - unknown to her, outside the dream - I was leading our group journey into the Cave of the Bear, dressed in dark blue. Not bad for dream telepathy across the big pond.

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The graphic is an etching of Perkunas by Arvydas Kazdailis in his edition of Prusijos zemes kronika ("The Chronicles of Prussia").