Mark Twain's terrible memories of the future

Great humor often sparkles on the surface of a dark tide of challenge or tragedy. Mark Twain, still America's most beloved humorist, was stricken by many terrible events in his life and that of his family - the loss of a beloved brother and later his favorite daughter, the loss of all his money late in life, forcing him to start over - yet generally managed to come back laughing, and making the rest of us laugh.

    His ability to laugh his way through did not mean numbing himself to tragedy. Sam Clemens (who adopted the pen name Mark Twain) dreamed the death of his younger brother Henry before it took place, in exact detail, and this haunted him for the rest of his life..

     Sam and Henry were set to embark together on the riverboat Pennsylvania, Sam as apprentice pilot, Henry as a  lowly “mud clerk”, given food and sleeping space in return for helping out at places on the river where there were no proper landing sites. The night before they sailed, Sam dreamed  he saw Henry as a corpse, laid out in a metal casket, dressed in one of his older brother’s suits, with a huge bouquet of white roses on his chest and a single red rose at the center.

     Sam woke grief-stricken, convinced this had actually happened and that Henry was laid out in the next room. He could not collect himself, or convince himself that the dream was not “real” until he had walked around outside. He had walked a whole block, he recalled, “before it suddenly flashed on me that there was nothing real about this – it was only a dream.”

     Family members urged him to dismiss his terrible dream; after all, it was “only a dream”. Though the force of his feelings told him something else, Sam agreed to try to put the dream out of his mind.

     The tragedy began to unfold soon after the two young men boarded the Pennsylvania. The pilot of the Pennsylvania, William Brown, was an autocrat with a violent temper with whom Sam was soon scrapping. During the voyage downriver, Sam got into a full-blown fight with him. The captain sided with Sam, and said they would find a new pilot when they got to New Orleans. But a new pilot could not be found and since Sam and Brown could not coexist on the same boat, Sam was transferred to another vessel, leaving Henry on the Pennsylvania, which started the upriver journey fist. Just before they parted company, Sam and Henry discussed how they would act in the event of a riverboat disaster such as a boiler explosion, which was a common occurrence.

      The Pennsylvania’s boiler exploded in a hell of steam and fire, in the way they had discussed.  Badly burned, Henry survived for a few days, to die in Memphis, where the injured were carried. His handsome face was untouched, and the kindly lady volunteers were so moved by his beauty and innocence that they gave him the best casket, a metal box.

     When Sam entered the “dead-room” of the Memphis Exchange on June 21, 1858, he was horrified to see the enactment of his dream: his dead brother laid out in a metal casket in a borrowed suit. Only one element was missing: the floral bouquet. As Sam watched and mourned, a lady came in with a bouquet of white roses with a single red one at the center and laid it on Henry’s chest.

    Mark Twain kept telling and retelling the circumstances of Henry’s death, in his mind and in his writing, for the rest of his life. He was one of the first to join the Society for Psychical Research after it was founded in London in 1882 in the hope that its investigators could help him understand the workings of dream precognition. He could never escape the thought that – had he only known how to use the information from his dream – he might have been able to prevent Henry’s death.

When I described this episode in a lecture, someone asked, "What's the use of dreaming the future if you can't do anything about it?"       
    My response: any future we can foresee, whether in dreams or though intuition or careful analysis, is a possible future. We may be able to change the odds on the manifestation of a future event, reducing the likelihood that something unwanted will happen, or improving our chances of securing a happy outcome.

     Our ability to dream the future is part of our basic survival kit, part of what kept us alive when we were little more than naked apes without good weapons, trying to fend off leathery raptors or saber-toothed tigers. In our Active Dreaming approach, we use these key methods to work with dreams of the future in order to make better choices and shape the future for the better:

1. Run a reality check on all dream material

Ask, of any and all dream material: Is it remotely possible that something going on in this dream could manifest in the future, literally or symbolically (or both)?

2. Practice dream reentry to clarify and expand the available information

If you can get your head back inside the dream, you may be able to get clarity on the when, where, how and who of a possible future event. If you think of a dream as a place you have been, it's not too hard to understand that because you have been to that place, you might be able to go there again. When you succeed in reentering a dream space, you are not confined to your first memories of the dream on waking, which may have been muddled and fragmentary. You can enter other, related scenes and bring back much more data.

3. Make a practical action plan to use your dream guidance

If you now feel sure that your dream revealed a possible future, you want to  to take definite and appropriate action to head off an undesirable future event, or to bring through possible good fortune. The action plan may range from getting a health checkup to being extra cautious at a certain road intersection, to checking up on your financial planner, to sharing dream information with another person to whom it may relate.

    Some cultures teach rituals for containing or taming an unwanted future. I am intrigued by an apotropaic ritual in traditional Iroquoian society, which consisted of play-acting parts of an evil future, foreseen in a dream, in the hope that the partial fulfillment of the dream in the performance would satisfy whatever was at work in the secret order of events, so that the full evil portended by the dream would no longer have to be play out. I have written about this in Dreamways of the Iroquois. Bizarre though it may sound, I have seen this method work.

Back to Mark Twain, and his terrible dream of Henry laid out in a casket, with the bouquet of roses on his chest. Could the methods described above have enabled Sam Clemens to help his brother to escape the "dead room" in Memphis? Of course, we cannot know. But I feel quite certain that Mark Twain would have been willing to give the Active Dreaming methods summarized above a better-than-college try, had he known about them. 
    Had he not allowed his family to talk him into dismissing his dream as "only a dream", careful analysis might have drawn him to think about possible scenarios for death along the river, of which the most likely for someone working on a riverboat, in those days, was a boiler explosion of the kind that caused Henry's death.

    Through dream reentry, Mark Twain might have been able to establish how the death scene came about, and might then have been able to take action by counseling his brother not to travel, separated from him, on the return voyage upriver with the rage-filled pilot.

     Mark Twain paid close attention to dreams and coincidence throughout his life and was keenly interested in improving his practice. In my Secret History of Dreaming, I describe how he returned, in his later fiction, to his regrets that he had not gone ahead and staged a kind of dream theater at home to help his beloved daughter Suzy lift the oppression of dreams in which she was being pursued and eaten by bears, dreams that may have portended her tragic death from illness but could also have been the key to healing had they been fully heard and acted upon.

For more on Mark Twain's dreams and his study of coincidence and what he called "mental telegraphy," please read the chapter titled "Mark Twain's Rhyming Life" in my Secret History of Dreaming, published by New World Library.

Image: Steamboat explosion (in this case the SS Sultana) on the Mississippi River, from Harper's Weekly (1865)

The first things to know about children's dreams

The first thing to understand about working with children’s dreams is that adults need to listen up. And that means making a space, a space where you’re not interrupted where you’re not distracted by the phone or other obligations.  For a sufficient time it might just be five or ten minutes to hear the kid’s dream and to be attentive to them and to provide a protected space for them to talk.  That is the first thing: listen. And in listening remember that the child is the expert on the dream, not you.  Children actually know more about dreaming then most adults because they’re closer to the source of dreaming.

     The second thing to know about helping kids with their dreams is if they’ve got scary stuff from the night help them to move it out right away.  Help them to move that energy.  If it’s something yucky in the dream take them outside and get them to spit on the ground, or get them to make an image of what scared them and tear it up.  Sometimes what is going on in the night that scares kids is not really a dream but a disturbance in the psychic atmosphere, you know the family problems might be spilling over into the emotional atmosphere of the child’s bedroom and sometimes they’re picking that up, and they’re responding to rather formless things that don’t have the shape and content of dreams but constitute an unpleasant energy that needs to be moved out right away.

     When kids have scary dreams that have content and stories, they’re being chased by a monster or something like that, the first thing they need from you is support and the assurance they have an ally.  The first ally they’re going to hope to find is you.  You are their ally.  They’re facing something scary; be their ally. A practical way which you can help to prepare them to face most scary things in the night is to give them something that can be an additional ally.  With young children a stuffed toy representing a fierce but friendly animal for them; it’s a terrific ally.  I’ve seen situations change in a household when the kid is encouraged to make the teddy bear, or the tiger, or the dog toy, the ally, the protector during the night.

      These are the first things, to listen and to give them a way to move the scary energy along and another thing you want to do with children’s dreams: you want to give them a creative way of celebrating the dreams or celebrate their accomplishments in playing with their dreams, which is to help them to draw from the dream or tell the story, or turn it into theater.

      Children are naturals for dream theater.  They absolutely love play acting the role of adults who appear in their dreams, all the actions of monsters.  I did a dream theater with a whole group of children or various ages and there was a dinosaur and a T-rex in the dream and they had such fun playacting the T-rex and the dinosaur and the T-rex eggs, and the terrified mom who didn’t understand that T-rex could be your very best friend.  Absolutely hilarious, you’ve got energy going; you’ve got creativity coming alive.

     For the longer haul, as early as they’re telling dreams if you’re an adult who’s a caregiver or a family member, or a schoolteacher or whatever, you can encourage the child to start keeping what will become a journal of their dreams, a book of their dreams, their special place to keep their drawings and their accounts.  You might need to help them to write when they are very young, but which they can write in themselves later on.  And if you encourage them to keep a journal: that is going to be such a treasure box in that child’s life and in the life of the whole family, and you’ll go back to that with delight later on.  They will have encouraged habits of storytelling and creativity.

When a kid is afraid of the dark, YOU can be the flashlight

This guest blog by dream teacher Jane Carleton is a lovely reminder that the first thing kids need from us when they talk about what goes on in the night is for someone to LISTEN UP - and then, if necessary, to help make a decisive move to deal with the scary stuff.

Guest blog by Jane Carleton

I was once at a friend’s house and met a young girl, about seven years old, visiting with her family from far away. I asked her about her dreams, and she shyly shared that she had a reeeeeeally scary dream that week.
     “Really scary." Oh? Tell me more! “I was home and the wall in my bedroom was full of eyes looking at me!” Oh, how scary! Was it day or night? “Night.” Oh! Scary! “Yes.” What would you like to see happen with those eyes if you could do anything? “I want them to close!” Oooof. Me, too. What could make that happen? “I’d shine a big light at them.” Great idea! What kind of light? “A big flashlight!” Perfect! Would you like to do something about those eyes right now? “OK.”
      All right…see that wall…let’s imagine that wall is the wall in your bedroom. “OK.” And now…I’m here with you, so you’re safe…can you image that wall is full of those eyes, just like in your dream? “Ooooo Yes!” OK, we need a flashlight, right? How about if I be the flashlight, and you shine me on all of those eyes and make them not only close, but also disappear? “Yeah. OK!!!”     
      We did a little dream theater right on the spot. This beautiful little girl, empowered and happy, shone her imaginary flashlight all over the wall, guiding me as the flashlight to shine right where she felt the light was needed. It was just right and the dream was no longer scary. No interpretations, no lessons, just a moment of dreaming together.     
       Meanwhile, the adults were deep in conversation and didn’t realize the beauty of the moment. My new friend skipped off to another room and I rejoined the conversation.                     About twenty minutes later, she came up to me with a big sheet of drawing paper…she wanted to share more dreams with me, and had drawn sketches of about a half dozen dreams…and was brimming with excitement at telling me about her dreams.
      A gate had opened simply because she found someone who was genuinely interested in her amazing inner life. We can do this for others, children and adults alike, and if we open to dreaming with adults, the child within will come out to play.

Jane E. Carleton, MA, GG specializes in dreams as an international consultant, educator, and workshop leader. With two graduate degrees in Dreams and Consciousness Studies, she is an adjunct professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Jane teaches a variety of contemporary and cross-cultural experiential, transformative dreaming techniques, including Robert Moss’s Active Dreaming. 

Fox tales

When I announced a playshop titled "What The Fox Knows", devoted to appreciating the Trickster element in life, I was ready for that archetype to come into play, more abundantly than ever. I was not disappointed.
    Two days before I traveled to Mosswood Hollow, in the wild woods east of Seattle, to launch the workshop last weekend, I walked a hilly path at the Esalen Institute to open the afternoon session of a retreat I was leading there. I paused to watch a black cat crossing my path. Being a contrarian, I regard a black cat on my road as a positive sign. But this was not any black cat. It had a remarkable red bushy tail, the very semblance of a fox's brush. I felt, with delicious shivers, that a hybrid creature had slipped between the worlds to signal that the Fox was already in play.
    I recalled how, years earlier, leading a similar retreat at Esalen, I had spoken to the group about why Fox - even more than Coyote, or Raven, or Spider or Squirrel - is, for me, the quintessential form of the Trickster. The group seemed to be laughing harder than my humor could explain. "Look behind you!" someone shouted. I turned, and saw only coastal cypress and the Pacific Ocean beyond the cliff. I resumed my talk and someone yelled, "Look! He's back!" I turned again, and could not see what they were talking about. They had to explain to me that whenever I spoke of Fox, a fox stuck its head up, looking through the window at the group while my back was turned. The fox hid itself every time I turned to see. This happened three times. There's Fox for you.

My Fox workshop was especially devoted to exploring how the Trickster can be our friend when we are willing to shift and improvise, but is our devil when we insist on sticking to plans and perpetuating old habits. Part of our study was how any setback in life can prove to be an opportunity if we are prepared to look for the door that may be opening when another door slams shut or refuses to open.
    A tall and beautiful redhead named Fiona joined us for the Fox workshop, bounding through the back door with sparkling confidence. Of Irish stock, now living in the Seattle area, she had decided to come only the day before, right after hearing about the workshop from a neighbor.   

      She did well in the journeying, to her surprise. A recurring theme for her became: interrupted life paths and parallel lives. Asked to seek the gift in a setback, she found the memory of  how she resented a friend who had caused her to miss a trip to Amsterdam she thought would be wonderful twenty-five years before, when she was 21. In her journey in the workshop, powered by shamanic drumming, she saw what that missed trip would have generated. “It was as vivid as a movie. If I had taken that trip, I would have met a Canadian man. I saw the two children we would have had together. And the fire that would have destroyed our sweet country home, and the deaths of the three people I would have loved most in the world. As the only one to escape, I would have lived with survivor guilt, clinging to a rotting shack and hard memories until I died. Wow, what a gift my friend messed up my trip all those years ago as my life has been such a blessing!"  
      On Saturday afternoon, she discovered she had lost the keys to her car and asked help in searching for them. Most people joined in, searching all the places she had been on the property, reaching behind sofa cushions, scouring the floor of the yurt and the paths. Four people went through her purse after she had searched it several times. In the evening, someone used their AAA card to call a professional to open her car. The assumption was that she had locked her keys in her car, which the owner of the AAA card confessed to having done four times herself. The Triple A man arrived after dark and popped the lock. The redhead’s keys were not in the car.
    She stayed at Mosswood overnight, thankful that at least she had put some things in her car on the outside chance she decided to stay overnight. She had a second car key at home, but did not know where to find that since she had recently moved.
    In the morning, another member of the workshop said that she had received a strong message, "Maybe you can't find the key until you know what you are supposed to unlock." This struck a chord with the Fiona who had made some breakthroughs in her thinking about relationships over the weekend, and especially in a conversation that had just happened moments ago at the breakfast table. Paul, our wonderful host at Mosswood Hollow, came to Fiona and said, “Let me check your purse again. Maybe you have a secret pocket.” Fiona and Paul looked again and found the car key that wasn't there before.
    Little doubt the Fox was in play, hiding something to effect certain changes. One thing Fiona noticed, during the time Fox hid her key, was that she had the active support of a whole community when she needed it, though (as she observed) it was typically outside her comfort level to ask and receive help.  It warmed her heart when she looked out of the bathroom window over the frosty landscape in the early morning and saw one of our workshops participants searching her car again.  “Oddly,” Fiona said afterwards, “I felt very calm throughout, with the  feeling that everything was happening just the way it should.” 

The theme of parallel lives, as in Fiona's glimpse of the alternate event track that would have started in Amsterdam, became a main preoccupation for our group.
    Becky asked for a dream to explore her parallel lives.
    At the Sunday breakfast table, she regaled us with a marvelous story. In her dream, she is met by "Mr Foxy", dressed like John Travolta. He tells he she must dance with him as the price of seeing what she wants to see. She is swept into a round of dirty dancing followed by tango.
    Then she is offered a choice of veils of different colors. Each veil will take her into a different reality. She chooses purple and is horrified to find herself facing the teeth of a barracuda the size of a shark in an underwater world. She next chooses white and finds herself in a desert watching pilgrims advancing towards a church or mosque. She does not belong here. She chooses gold and is greeted at a carriage by a slick character she distrusts before she checks his rear and sees a fox's tail protruding from under the flaps of his tuxedo coat. She is carried into scenes of a lush life.
     We had enormous fun offering feedback over breakfast. But a dream with this much life demands to be performed. So in the course of the day, we turned it into theater. Becky applauded, beaming, as the woman she had chosen to play her dream double was ground into dirty dancing by the foxiest man in the group. When it came time to check out Mr Slick, a prankster in the circle leaped up and pushed a large stuffed toy - a fox, of course - under the back of the player's sweater so the tail hung down.
     The bumper sticker was obvious, and irresistible. In appraising a man, Check Out His Tail.

Fox-tailed cat photo (c) Robert Moss

Demolishing Stalin's ghost through dream theater

Prague

"I'm in Letná Park," she begins, accepting my invitation to step into the center of the circle and tell her story where everyone can see her.     "They have cut down the trees. Our precious lindens are just stumps. I feel the blood of the trees." She is crying now, weeping over the rape of the land.
     "There is worse. They have put up the Stalin Monument again. Its black shadow falls over the Old Town. The curse of Stalin is falling over my country again."
     Everyone in the room feels the shadow of this dream. It carries collective memories of Soviet oppression in this country in an earlier era, laced with fears about what Putin's regime in Russia is planning today. The Stalin Monument on Letna hill, overlooking the Vltava River and the Old Town of Prague, was the largest group statue in Europe. It depicted Stalin leading two lines of faithful Socialists, Czech and Russian, into a bright Marxist-Leninist future. Czechs, who have often fought tyranny with humor, called it "The Line for Meat." Even beyond its monumental ugliness and hubris, there was strangeness about this construction. The sculptor, Otakar Svec, killed himself the night before the monument was unveiled in 1955, just a year before Khrushchev denounced Stalin. The Communist government in Prague waited until 1962 to blow it up, which required massive quantities of explosive. The gargantuan plinth remained, and was topped by a giant metronome that uncomfortable evoked the hammer and sickle for mant. There has been ongoing debate since the "velvet revolution" about what to do with the site, which is widely called "Stalin" to this day."
    Zora, the dreamer, was born in Stalin's era. Many of the families of the dreamers gathered in our pleasant space at Maitrea, just behind Old Town Square in Prague, suffered imprisonment under Soviet rule.
    So: here we are with the first dream shared on the first full day of my workshop in Prague, and the chill of a horrible past history and the edginess of the current situation along Russia's borders weighs heavy on all of the 52 people in our space. We need to move the energy. We need to make the land green again, and exorcize the overweight ghost of Stalin.
    "Let's turn this dream into theater," I propose. Zora was eager to see how this would work.
    No problem recruiting players to become the sad, broken trees in the park and the hill itself. In an instant, our space is transformed. We see and hear the pain of the butchered trees.
    A good-natured Czech chemist agrees to play the Stalin Monument, and adopted the correct position, one foot forward, eyes fixed on that bright Socialist future. His posture breaks the unease in the room. Wild laughter and clapping begin.
    Zora spreads her arms wide, becoming the eagle of her dream, circling the room on straight wings.
   "You are in command here," I call to her. "Your dream is alive around you. You can do anything you like to make a better story. You can restore the trees. You can recruit an army of helpers to plant seedlings. You can demolish the Stalin Monument so thoroughly that its ghost will never be seen again."
    With amazing speed and energy, under Zora's lead, our players bring the trees back to life. They dance with Stalin, pulling the figure out of its rigid Line for Meat stance. "Let's turn Stalin's statue into a fertility goddess!" a wit proposes. The chemist's efforts to shapeshift his sturdy male body accordingly draw gales of laughter.
    The mood is bright. We may not have changed the world, but we have brought 52 bright spirits to brighter life. The gifts of spontaneous dream theater, generated by personal and authentic experiences, are unending. It is my favorite element in all the workshops I lead. It is a potent source of healing and soul recovery, not only for individuals but for the families and communities we bring together.
    


Photo: Stalin Monument, aka "The Line for Meat", that stood on Letná hill from 1955 to 1962. 

Dreaming a Vision of the Heart in Romania

On May 10th, the first World Day of Active Dreaming, dream ambassadors in many places all over the map led programs to help people in many walks of life claim the guidance and healing and creative energy of dreams. I will run some of their reports and photographs in this blog, starting with a wonderful narrative from Ana Maria Stefanescu, a dream teacher based in Bucharest who is one of the moving spirits behind our World Day, on how she and a circle of Romanian dreamers spend the weekend of May 10-11.

Dreaming a Vision of the Heart
by Ana Maria Stefanescu

The first World Day of Active Dreaming. Such a wonderful experience, for which I am profoundly grateful. After two days of adventure, together with my colleague Cristina and a group of amazingly courageous dreamers, deep within the worlds of dreams and heart, i am slightly tired but really happy: what an amazing thing, reconnecting through dreaming to the true mission of the heart !
    We started on Saturday with a journey to the space between lives, to remember what was our intention before we were born into this life and to see what our guide of the family of souls we belong to has to say about that.
    We practiced the lightning dreamwork process and found out about the power of giving and receiving useful and intuitive feedback. We ventured into dream spaces, re-entering as explorers and guides and trackers and helpers.
    Then, the dreamers turned their dreams into theater. These were the peak moments, full of magic: witnessing transforming fear into love, lack of trust into hope and faith, The theater of Active Dreaming is real magic.
     In the evening we played synchronicity games - s o much fun, each and every time we play - and embarked on a group shamanic journey to find a pulsating, radiant heart on top of the mountain: a heart that wanted to share the light with other hearts.
     Then homeplay, to incubate a dream over night...
      On Sunday morning the dreams wanted to be expressed through drawing and colors. Then we listened to the body and followed its energy map by drawing the totem pole of the chakras, understanding that if we are to fulfill our mission in this world, then we want to know our resources and our allies but also the places in the body that could use some healing. We met spiritual teachers and animals and beings that we know we can rely on. And that's good to know. The lion was there and the bear was there and the dolphin, and many more.
    Then dream theater again - one that opened our hearts even more and made us see and feel the power and love of Mother Earth - and the power of love.
     As we are on a mission of the Heart, we traveled to a certain Magic Market you can read about in Robert's book Dreaming the Soul Back Home and then farther "back" in time to meet and bring home our child selves. We made promises that we are to honor.
     Feeling whole now we sat in the center of the circle to declare and take responsibility for or mission. We promised "to honor our dreams and the powers that speak to us in dreams".
     Last but not least, we grew a community vision of the future - a future where we live a reality of the heart, where Earth is healed and happy and people remember the language of the trees.
     Again, gratitude ! Gratitude for the wonderful group of dreamers and dream teachers, gratitude for all the gifts received through dreaming...and gratitude and love to you, dear Robert.

with Ana Maria Stefanescu (r) and Cristina Craciun in the Carpathian mountains

Theater of soul recovery

Berkeley, California

Dream theater has long been one of my favorite things in the playshops I lead. We turn dream stories into performance very quickly, encouraging the dreamer to be director, scriptwriter and star. I will help her to pick members of the workshop to play all the key roles in the dream, human, animal and other. She can interact with her dream characters and ask them to tell her what they can say from the roles they are playing. Sometimes a dream is really asking to be dreamed onward, to continue an adventure, move beyond a fear, claim a power or resolve a mystery. In dream theater, it is remarkable how quickly we can facilitate this process. This is the pinnacle of improv, is profoundly energizing and bonding for a whole group, and often both wildly funny and deeply healing.
    I was awed by how fast and deep we were able to go, through spontaneous dream theater, on the first morning of the workshop I am currently leading in Berkeley, California. A woman narrated a dream in which she was shocked to see that her ex-husband was pregnant. She became distracted by the busy-ness of life, work, schedules, cleaning routines. Then in a moment of revelation she realized, inside the dream, that he ex was pregnant because he had stolen her egg,. Tremendous emotions were surging as she narrated the dream.   I suggested that she might want to cast people to play the key roles, starting with her ex and the egg, and the moment of revelation.
     As the drama unfolded, completely alive in the room, I proposed that she also cast people to play sources of inner guidance for both herself and her ex. Watched her confront her ex, reclaim something precious that she felt had been taken from her, and then come together with him, inside the embrace of the guides available to them both, for the well-being of the family. She told us she would be able to take this emotional healing and carry it through life, and the depth of the shared experience left us in no doubt this would happen.
     A second dream narrative also called for immediate performance. In her dream, another woman met a young girl, maybe four years old, she recognized as a very young version of herself who had gone missing at that age through bad things in the family. She tried to approach the child, but the girl would not engage with her, curling up in a corner and sucking her thumb. We quickly cast all the key elements in the dream, including the strange house and the rising flood waters in the landscape. The player who embodied the lost child brilliantly presented the challenge of reclaiming a part of our vital soul that may have gone missing in early life: we have to convince her that we are safe and we are fun. 
    The player in the role of the lost child refused to accept the assurances from the adult dreamer that she would be protected and would enjoy life with her grown-up self. It took intervention of a shamanic kind to clear this. I approached the child and asked her whether she would trust the Bear or the Tiger. "Tiger," she said without hesitation. So I entered the second theater. Tigers are beautiful and fierce and young children usually love them. The lost child came home to the adult, riding the tiger. They embraced, and were joined, We were all delighted by the fine visual synchronicity that the woman portraying the lost child was wearing a beautiful scarf featuring huge, brightly colored butterflies. The butterfly is a near-universal symbol for soul; in Greek the same word (psyche) means "soul" and "butterfly".
    The third dream shared on Saturday morning also invited immediate dream theater. In his dream, a man was scared by a huge standing bear that stood in his way. The bear had a chain attached to one of its legs. He avoided the bear, got distracted by a party scene, and then encountered two more bears. He lay down, trying to make himself small and invisible. The bears lay down on either side of him and went to sleep, leaving him unable to move or relax until eventually he left the dream, feeling that something vitally important had been left unresolved. In the dream theater, he was able to separate from the distractions of the party scene, and eventually to free the bear from the leg iron. In the conversation with the dream characters that ensued, the bear told the dreamer, "I am your own power" and the chain was especially eloquent. "I enabled you to contain that power until you were ready to claim it."
     It is extraordinary how this kind of performance can bring all the elements of a dream - far beyond the initial dream report - richly alive in a space and at the same time offer a path to closure and healing, all within minutes. The play-acting can become a true theater of soul recovery, as a spirited and intentional family emerges to support the recovery of vital energy that went missing in cruel passages of life, and to bring in more of the bright spirit of a larger Self. The child in us loves all this performance and creativity, and the child selves we may have lost are drawn to us because we are fun.

Bear cub fountain on The Circle in Berkeley (c) Robert Moss

At the heart of the mosaic of the mended self

Morro das Pedras, Santa Catarina Island, Brazil

She set this intention for the night: "Help me to find and bring together all the parts of myself."
    All night long, it seemed she dreamed and re-dreamed the same scene.
    She is looking at a set of beautiful large tiles, covering a spacious area. One of them had been broken into many parts, of differing sizes and shapes. But it has been reassembled. You can see the cracks where the tile was broken. The earth shows through the cracks. Strangely, the effect is to make the mended tile very beautiful.
    Asked to describe the colors and patterns of the mended tile, she recalls that the colors were red and blue, white and yellow. One of the larger shards, pointing in to the center, was a long triangle. There was perhaps a pattern, reminiscent of the Mediterranean, but she can't visualize it clearly now.
    I suggest, in the midst of our circle of dreamers, that perhaps she'll be able to find the pattern if she chooses players to represent the different colors and shapes in the mended tile.
    She is delighted by this suggestion. She picks red and yellow people, white and blue, pieces of every size and shape. And a smiling, maternal woman to play the big triangle pointing to the center. She wants the actors to spread out on the floor and find how they fit together. We mustn't forget the earth that is showing through the cracks and providing a foundation. The dreamer chooses earth people.
    She claps her hands in delight as the living mosaic forms at the center of our space.
    The woman who is the triangle looks as if she is giving birth.
    We invite the dreamer to step into the center of the living mosaic of herself and see how everything looks and feels from there.
    She can see the whole pattern now. "I was borken and now I am whole. Amd what was broken and is now whole is more beautiful than the tiles that were never cracked."

I am constantly awed by the power of active dreaming to show us where the missing parts of ourselves can be found, and to help us bring them together, and by the power of spontaneous dream theater to bring all of this through, into embodied life, in joy and compassion and celebration.

Wanda Burch on Healing Soldier's Heart

Wanda Burch is one of those who is working to heal our wounded warriors. For the past three years, she had been leading healing retreats for women veterans of America's wars, using the core techniques of Active Dreaming. She reports notable success in using the dream reentry technique to guide veterans back through the dark forests of recurring nightmares to a place of healing and resolution.
     In today's conversation on my radio show, Wanda gives moving examples of using both dream reentry and dream theater - my favorite element in all of my workshops - to help heal our soldiers' broken hearts. There is a template here for others to follow. Wanda is an adept of our Active Dreaming techniques, and in some cases was present at their creation. I have shared dreams with her for a quarter century, and she describes the development of our dreaming friendship in her book She Who Dreams, an inspiring personal account of her healing and recovery from breast cancer with the help of Active Dreaming. She has completed my three-year training for teachers of Active Dreaming.
    In today's radio show, Wanda also discusses her research into the dreams of soldiers during the American Civil War, and explains why in that era what is now diagnosed as PTSD was described as "soldier's heart". She is writing a book on this subject, and I believe this will be a significant contribution to making the Secret History of Dreaming less secret. In our conversation, Wanda recalls how she was drawn to her Civil War there after discovering a letter from a Georgia soldier named Henry Graves in which he not only describes a vivid astral dream adventure but insists on the vital importance of dreams and imagination in getting soldiers through the traumas of war.
     The key section of Henry Graves' letter, written to an aunt from Petersburg, Virginia, on August 7, 1862, reads as follows:

"Standing with a spade in my hand on top of a big bank of red clay or with a mattock in a deep broad ditch, I would, in order to pass off time, imagine myself at home with my coat off, sitting out in the east end of the piazza at home, enjoying the cool breeze that almost always is blowing fresh through there, with a basket of peaches at my side and all the homefolk around. This is the way I employ myself when I get into an unpleasant place, and, by this means, the time passes much more swiftly and pleasantly.
    "I don’t know what poor mortals and especially soldier mortals would do if they were not blessed with the gift of imagination and the pictures of hope. There are, besides these two angels of mercy, others fully as welcome and kind, which now and then visit the poor soldier.

     "Night dreams, for instance, are as a general thing much more vivid than day dreams. The sweetest dream I have had for many a day past I had the other night, sleeping on the top of a fence with a rail, not remarkably flat or broad, for my couch and my gun barrel for my pillow (an iron pillow can hardly be called a “downy” one, do you think?).  My dream, of course, had a “goddess,” a sweet little, hazel-eyed girl who lives away down in Georgia and for whom I feel a “very tender feeling” was by my side, my arm was around her waist and her head on my shoulder, and her soft cheek laid most lovingly against mine (the idea of a soft girl cheek laid against my rough, sun burnt, bearded jaw!) and tender words of love were coming from hearts full of love, when alas! alas! The cracking of a stick near by, by an approaching foot, caused me to spring from the embrace of my darling to grasp the cold steel of my gun barrel and from the gentle accents of love to cry out the rough challenge, “Who goes there?” and, instead of the warm breath of the little girl which I had felt on my cheek but a moment before, I wiped from my face the cold night dew and with half a groan I turned me to my rail again."

You can listen to my conversation with Wanda Burch live today at 12:00 pm Eastern (9:00 am Pacific) at healthylife.net, or download from my archive.

Dream theater for soul recovery

Gore Mountain, New York

"I asked my dreams for guidance on soul recovery," Kerri told us. "I woke at 3 AM, and my first thought was, Where are my dreams? Then a big dream came flowing back, and I realized that it exactly responded to my intention. I needed more sleep, but the dream stayed with me, intact, until morning."

She thought the dream would make a good script for theatrical production. I seized on this suggestion, before she gave us the story. We had been inside our meeting lodge all morning, voyaging together in some powerful group journeys. Now we needed to get outside, in the spring sunlight, and move. When soul or the spirits speak through dreams, according to the Native traditions of these mountains, then we must move with their energy and bring that alive in our bodies. We never want to bore the spirits, especially our own.

Dream theater with fresh material may be my favorite part of my depth programs. It brings out the performer, the improviser, the comic - and the child inside us who isn't afraid to make things up. It can run the whole gamut of emotions, from wild bawdy laughter to deep pathos. It always delivers raw vitality.

So we gathered outside on the grass, in a clearing in the forest of silver birch and spruce, to hear the dream that Kerri said provided guidance on how to bring soul parts home.

"I am approached by a tall Scotsman in a kilt. He speaks in a beautiful deep voice that could carry across mountains, but with gentle patience, as if he is teaching a child.

"He holds out a key ring with three keys. He says, 'To regain the soul, you must be able to open the locks.'

"While I am holding the keys, wondering how to use the, the Scotsman says. "And to please the soul, you must have music.' He waves his hand, and this cool jazz guy appears, playing a saxophone.

"The Scotsman makes another flourish. 'And of course, you must have food to nourish the soul.' I see a kitchen with an open door, with delectable aromas wafting out.

"Now the Scotsman gestures towards a couple who are walking past some long shelves, like the shelves in a department store or a supermarket. On the shelves are glass pyramids with squared-off tops. The woman in the couple is a teacher. She turns to me and says, 'To recover soul, you also need glass.'"

Much in the dream was deliciously mysterious. It excited us. I had Kerri cast members of our gathering to play every role in the dream, including the keys and the key ring. She picked me to play the Scotsman. Another woman in the group donated a beautiful fern-green scarf to serve as my kilt.

While I followed the dream script, other players brought the dream elements wonderfully alive. The three keys - played by three women in the group - wanted to open centers in the dreamer's heart, and in her head, and in her gut, and then became the soul parts returning through these openings. A improvisational musician in the group was in his element as the cool jazz man. An Italian-American woman threw open a delectable Mangia, Mangia kind of kitchen to produce soul food.

Up on the deck of our meeting lodge, the people selected to play the glass pyramids with squared-off tops staged a silent hieratic drama. We came to understand that they were in the role of chambers or transporters for soul parts. I was vividly reminded of shamanic soul retrieval operations in which we may use a quartz crystal for such purposes.

All of this was fast becoming a vibrant, effortless education in shamanic soul recovery techniques. I did not want to stop. Still playing the Scots instructor, I asked Kerri, who played her own part in the first production, to now cast another member of our group to take the lead role, and go through the whole process. We repeated this with several players, and each time our understanding of the nature of soul recovery healing deepened. It was beautiful to watch the dance of the three keys around the dreamer, within the ring, becoming the deep embrace of soul reunion, again and again.

Undefinitis and its remedies

It's hard to match a three-headed smoking dragon for drama, but our mountain dreamers came close last weekend with the enactment of a dream of a reality TV show volunteered by Donna S, one of our Connecticut dreamers. On Donna's dream screen, the lively host of the show is helping contestants to check whether what they think they want out of life is what they really want. With lacerating clarity, the show holds up a magic mirror in which people can see their desires and jealousies for what they are. The first contestant longs for the hair, the legs and the shoes of a cool, sexy blonde. The second contestant wants the fame of a star athlete beloved of the media. The third guest on the show aches for something undefined.

--

Our dreamer chose Sara to play the host of the show, and Sara - a blonde, larger-than-life Italian American who has been bruised on her life road and come back laughing and full of soul - proved herself to be a natural TV diva. I slithered into into the role of "Dr Bob", a mix between Sara's shill and her ever-available resident talk therapist. We howled as the first contestant, after an elaborate makeover, struggled with whether or not to stay in her new blonde persona. Canned applause boomed when the second contestant decided the price of fame was something she wasn't willing to pay, as a swimmer in the group mimicked the actions of swimming breaststroke from New London to Bermuda.

-

Then we came to the Undefined. The player cast as the woman of undefined wants entered her role so completely that our infallible TV host forgot she was there and gave her place to someone who wasn't in the script. As Dr Bob, the resident guru, I was obliged to intervene. I pronounced that the woman of undefined identity and longing was a poster girl for a malady that has reached epidemic proportions in our culture. I named this foggy beast. "The medical name for the malady is undefinitis. It is a very serious complaint, because the human is an animal that must define itself or be defined by others. Letting others define who you are and what you can do puts a fatal crimp in life."

-
The issue raised in our dream theatre was one for all of us to address. After further games and group journeys, in the cause of curing undefinitis, I asked everyone in our circle to write a clear, simple answer to the following question: How will I live my life? Here's a sampling of the responses:

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- I will live my life with the wonderment of a child

- I will live as a knight who chooses the hard way, for honor and duty

- I will live in the Now

- I will live my deepest passions

- I will live authentically

- I will live on the Earth in bare feet

- I will live to serve with a joyful heart

- I will live as if every day is the start of a new life

- I will live as if today is a good day to die

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My own contribution: "I will live as a chooser, who chose the conditions of this life and chooses to remember the life contract he entered before he came here."

-

We need to watch for the symptoms of undefinitis, in ourselves and others. We need to be able to state who we are and what we think we are doing (though this is always going to evolve). We want to play with the idea that - however confining or harsh our circumstances may appear to be - we always have choice. Every day, we choose the story we are going to live, even when we forget we are doing this.

A Russian dragon on Magic Mountain

I spent the weekend up on a mountain in the Adirondacks leading one of my favorite retreats. Our shamanic gatherings on Gore Mountain - held twice yearly - are reserved for active dreamers who have worked with me in depth and are committed to becoming dream ambassadors, soul healers, speakers for the Earth and full citizens of the multiverse. This is where we push the envelope and often test-fly new techniques in a wonderful natural setting where the Deer energy is strong and dragons are sometimes seen.

The heart of this mountain is red garnet, and so it isn't hard for us to raise dragon fire in our circles. This time we found we were entertaining a dragon who had traveled far to appear on our mountain. He came in a dream of Louisa, a brilliant Russian-American scientist who was born in St. Petersburg. By the fire late on Saturday night, she told some of us a dream in which she had a close-up encounter with Zmey Gorynynch. "Zmey" is Russian for "dragon", and "Gorynych" means "Son of the Mountain". Zmey Gorynych is an enduring figure in Russian folklore who survived all Soviet attempts to extirpate "reactionary" beliefs and superstitions. He lives deep in the realms of the nechist, dark and unclean and tricksterish forces you must approach with great care if you are foolish or brave enough to approach them at all. He has three heads, and is a great drinker and smoker.

As the fire crackled and sputtered, we listened to Louisa's dream adventure. "I am in a small boat, paddling upstream on a river through a magic forest. I am in quest of something. The way is hard, and the shadows of the woods are scary, but I am determined to find what I am seeking. I come to a waterfall and somehow find the strength to row my boat up the falls. On the mountain above, I come to the burrow of Zmey Gorynych.

"Two of the dragon's head are sleeping. The third is smoking. Zmey Gorynych is a terrible chain smoker. He blows smoke in my face and asks what I want. I start asking him questions about things I want to know. He interrupts me with a great puff of smoke and hisses, 'You bother me with this nonsense? You should ask something that matters - like, What is the purpose of my life?'

"I know that this isn't really a question I should put to a three-headed dragon whose breath stinks. But I ask him anyway. 'What is the purpose of my life?' He responds by spitting on me. As his spittle lands on my forearms, the skin crackles and turns into scales.

"I want to get out of here now, but the darkness is falling. Zmey Gorynych takes me under his wing. His heads take turns sleeping, watching and smoking, so there is absolutely no chance of slipping away. I spend the night in the armpit of the dragon."

She woke laughing. The dream adventure was such a grand romp that I suggested we might try to bring the whole group inside it. Louisa willingly agreed to let her dream be used as the script for dream theatre, the pinnacle of improv, and often wildly funny, energizing and healing. The next morning, she cast some of the men in our circle to play the dragon, and a hyper-fit woman who abhors smoking to play the cigarette they are swapping between the heads. Other actors portrayed the contrary current on the river, the pressure of the falls, the boat and the strange walking trees in the magic forest. In our rehearsal, Louisa watched another dream actor play herself. When she stepped into her own role, the performance had deepened to the point where it took little imagination to believe that Zmey Gorynych was in the space, speaking and puffing and snoring and belching through the orifices of three otherwise most civilized men - an architect, a physician and a civil servant - who heaved and thrashed at one end of a long sofa, which a humorous financial planner from Connecticut, playing the body of the beast, lolled and drooped over the other.

Invited to improvise and take the dialogue with the dragon further, Louisa astounded all of us by asking what is certainly the last question I would want to put to a dragon of this type: "What do you eat?" This brought the house down. Aching with laughter, we skipped what is often the final phase of dream theatre: the interview with the players, when the dreamer gets to hear from everyone in the cast, speaking from the role they played. Some things are too good to discuss, let alone analyze. Belly-laughs are healing, and what we never want to forget in working with dreams is that the most important thing is to seek every opportunity to bring vital energy from the dreamspace into embodied life. Спасибо большое ( Spasibo bolshoe). Thanks a lot, Zmey Gorynych!