The swan’s cure – a wonderful script for imaginal healing from Aldous Huxley

 

He's a cynical, worldly Englishman and right now his body is broken and screaming with pain. He's fallen from a cliff and he's on his back in a hut on an island in Southeast Asia, racked with fever. He is visited by a beautiful bronze-colored girl in a sarong who talks like she's been educated at Oxford before or after spending a year as assistant to a bodhisattva. She knows things about healing that his culture doesn't know and his mind is absolutely unwilling to accept. But she finds a chink in the closed door of that cynical mind, using memory.
    He is from England. Does he know the city of Wells? Of course he knows Wells, he snaps back at her.  She says she used to go walking there, by the water. There was an extraordinary sense of peace. And when she closes her eyes now she can see it all so clearly, green grass and golden sunlight on the stones of the church across the moat, and she can hear the bells and the jackdaws in the tower. Can he hear them too? Yes, he can hear the birds. 
    In this way, in her soft lilting voice, chanting more than speaking, she leads the patient inside a scene he remembers until he is there as well as on his sickbed. He can see the daisies and dandelions in the grass, the austere geometry of the cathedral tower challenging the tender blue of the sky.
    "And the swans."
     Yes, the swans. Impossibly beautiful, yet entirely real. He sees the curve of the swans' white breasts lifting and parting dark waters.
    "Effortlessly floating."
     The words give him deep satisfaction. As the dreamy voice leads him, he finds himself floating with the swans, on that smooth surface between darkness below and tender blue above, between here and far away, between one world and another. 
     Floating like a white bird on the water, he allows himself to slip into the flow of a great smooth silent river, allowing the sleeping river of life to carry him into a profound peace.
     The patient drifts off, contented, as the voice continues to chant. Above the river, he sees huge white clouds and at her suggestion, he floats up towards them until he is streaming on a river of air, up into the freshness of high mountains. He feels a delicious cool wind on his skin, and falls deeper into sleep, his fever broken.

 

I have paraphrased an extraordinary passage in Aldous Huxley's last novel,Island (first published in 1962) that is a magnificent description of imaginal healing. When Susila, the beautiful young healer, reports to her doctor father on what she did with the patient (the cynical journalist Will Farnaby) she says "he went off more quickly than expected" because she opened his imagination by calling him to a place in England that he knew. She explains that she worked with indirect rather than direct suggestions. "They're always better." She gave him a different body image, one that suggested grace and strength to carry him beyond his present injury, so it became "a miserable thing in revolt against a huge and splendid thing."
     There is a model here for how to grow a vision of healing for someone who is in need of images to make the body well. Start by taking them through the doorway of a life memory. Don't harp on physical symptoms. Give the body - as well as the mind - of the patient living images strong and graceful and fresh enough to shift it beyond its current complaints, as the swan glides on the water or lifts off to claim the sky.
     I teach a similar practice I call dream transfer, in the understanding that we can gift a dream - a healing image, a vision of possibility, even a road map to the afterlife - to someone in need of a dream. 

photo by Romy Needham

Active Dreaming for Soul Recovery

Shamans understand that soul loss is the root of much illness and confusion in our lives. It may be caused by pain or trauma or heartbreak, by wrenching life choices, or by wimping out on our best and bravest dreams. It can reduce us to the condition of the walking dead, passionless and dreary, forever trying to fit in with other people's needs and expectations, lost to our own deeper purpose.

Soul retrieval is a shamanic operation in which the practitioner journeys to bring back lost soul-parts and puts them into the client's body (typically by blowing into one or more of the energy centers, most often the heart or the crown of the head). Soul recovery is a practice in which we help each other to become self-healers and function as our own shamanic practitioners - to gather and integrate our own families of selves and bring wholeness and vital energy into our lives.

Dream reentry frequently opens the road to soul recovery, because our dreams show us where our missing parts may have gone, and invite us to reach in and bring them back. When we dream again and again of the "old place" (maybe a childhood home, maybe a space we shared with a former partner) we may be learning that a part of ourselves - a part scared away by trauma, or a part that resisted a choice we made - is "stuck" in that place, or went missing at the time we lived there.

By going back inside the dream of the "old place" in a lucid shamanic journey, we may be able to locate that lost aspect of our own identity and energy and find the way to bring it back into our hearts and our lives. Typically, soul recovery of this kind will require reassurance and negotiation. Our younger self may need to be reassured that she is not going to be hurt in the way she was hurt before. She may need to be convinced that we will include things in our lives that she will enjoy and will engage her passions.

In the practice of soul recovery, we support each other without necessarily playing shamanic practitioner for each other – since the heart of this practice is to assist everyone who is able to become a self-healer. The core technique is dream reentry and tracking. This is a method of interactive shamanic lucid dreaming explained in depth in my books, especially Dreaming the Soul Back Home. As applied for soul recovery, we place the focus on locating and reclaiming lost aspects of soul energy that may have surfaced in a dream or a life memory.

The tracker may be required to play an activist role - for example, by helping the dreamer to move beyond a fear, by running interference if there are negative entities in the field, by bringing in the tracker's own animal guardians, or by negotiating directly with some of the dreamer's younger or "other" selves. Before undertaking the soul recovery journey, dreamer and tracker should try to reach a clear agreement on how far the tracker should go (or not go) in assisting the healing.

What do we do for a person who has suffered soul loss and does not have a dream? This is of course a common condition. The Onkwehonwe, or Iroquois, say that if we have lost our dreams, we have lost our souls - at least, the part of our soul-self that is the dreamer and remembers the deeper life. Several Active Dreaming techniques can help the dream-deprived to open a gateway to soul recovery – and reclaim part of themselves that is the beautiful dreamer. 

We can encourage them to call up the last dream that they remember. It may be a dream or nightmare from early childhood. I have been privileged to help facilitate profound soul recovery healing by getting an adult bereft of their dreams to revisit a dream from thirty years ago, or longer. We can help a dreamless, soul-damaged person to revisit a life memory in the same way that they might reenter a dream.

We can perform dream transfer in the service of soul recovery for someone who has lost their dreams. We journey for them and grow a dream for them that they can be helped to enter and can provide an authentic portal for self-healing. Active dreamers know we can bring a dream to someone in need of a dream.

Art: "Many Selves" by Robert Moss

Hungarian Swallow

Nandor, an elderly Hungarian man, wept uncontrollably when he attempted to describe the recent loss of his son, who had died a few weeks earlier of leukemia, aged only 25. Nandor had had no contact with his son – in dreams or otherwise – since his death. Despite his terrible grief, Nandor clung to the materialist perspective that had guided him as a scientist in his native country under communism, distrusting anything that could not be experienced and tested with the physical senses. He said he never remembered dreams.

He had come reluctantly to my workshop at his wife’s insistence, expecting nothing, or less than nothing. His sadness filled me with compassion.

I stood near him during a drumming session and found his son. I found something more: a pleasant room overlooking the Danube in Budapest, a space where Nandor might be able to have direct contact with his boy. After the drumming, I sat with Nandor. He told me he had seen nothing during the drumming. I told him, “I have a dream for you” and asked his permission to share it. “Yes, yes,” he said quickly. I gave him this dream: 

I see you meeting your son in a salon overlooking the river in Budapest. You are drinking something warm – is it tea? – in glasses with silver surrounds. Your son is bookish and deeply interested in the history of Hungary, its epics and literature. He is telling you he has made exciting discoveries now that he can have direct contact with authors and heroes from the past. He has discovered something from medieval times, maybe the eleventh century. The word “Magyar” and the history of the Magyars come up again and again. You can come to this room to talk to your son any time. There is a small bird in the landscape that is connected to you and can be your dream ally. It has black and white plumage, like a magpie, but the tail is a different shape. I got the word “Zoltan” in connection with this. 

Nandor became quite excited as he listened. He told me that he had taken his son on a journey to Budapest to visit places and people that had been important in his earlier life, and that they both had a keen interest in the early history of Hungary. He announced with a broad grin that they would have been drinking “wine” rather than tea in those glasses chased with silver.

He readily agreed to try to enter the room I had described in a subsequent drumming journey, and returned with tears streaming down his cheeks. He told me he had had a vivid encounter with his son who had quoted lines from a “lost” epic of the eleventh century. In the dreamspace, he found and identified the bird I had described. It was a kind of swallow that is found in the Hungarian countryside. Its name sounds like “Zoltan”, though the word is slightly different.

“I know now there is life after death,” Nandor told me at the end of the workshop. “This changes everything.” When he gave me his card on leaving, I saw that the name of his company includes the word “Magyar.”

We can grow a dream for someone who needs a dream. It may become a passage to another world and reunion with a departed loved one. 

Text adapted from The Dreamer's Book of the Dead by Robert Moss. Published by Destiny Books. 

 

 

Place of the Lion

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drawings by Robert Moss

Top: "Lion at the Heart"

Bottom: "Place of the Lion"

Illustration by RM

 

The Future of Imaginal Healing

As we grow the skills of Active Dreaming and become a dreaming society again, imagery for healing will become central to our medicine. Advances in hard scientific research, especially in the fast-expanding field of psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) have helped to provide the mandate, because they supply overwhelming evidence that the body believes in images, and that our thoughts and feelings can make us sick or make us well.

     It’s interesting to note that research in the PNI field was guided by dreaming long before it was given the clunky name. The first person to isolate and identify a neurotransmitter was Otto Loewi, and he saw how to perform the necessary experiment in a dream. He got out of bed, cut open a frog, and applied vagal juice to its heart as he had done in the dream; the relaxant in the vagal stuff was identified as the neurotransmitter acetylcholine.

     According to molecular biologist Candace Pert, there is a “psychosomatic communications network” that operates not only in the brain, but in all parts of the body. Our conscious or unconscious thoughts and feelings are constantly affecting our health by sending directives to a pharmaceuticals factory inside the body. In her passionate memoir, Molecules of Emotion, the late great Candace Pert describes how she was guided by dreams and synchronicity in her own scientific odyssey.

     The key thing to know, as we seek resources for self-healing, is that the body believes in images and responds to images as if they are physical events. This means we have the ability to shape the condition and behavior of our bodies, for good or ill, according to the images we entertain and the thoughts and feelings that we allow to claim our attention.

     Physician Larry Dossey, a leader in mind-body medicine since the 1980s, observes that “The body responds to mental input as if it were physically real. Images create bodily changes, just as if the experience were really happening. "  Brain scans show that when we imagine an event, our thoughts “light up” the same areas of the brain that are triggered during the actual event.

     We are often unaware of our shifting thoughts and feelings. We may be wholly unaware of memories and images, held in the body, that bring us down. The decision to bring unrecognized thoughts and feelings into consciousness is an essential step towards self-healing. Starting from here, we can develop the practice of investing the energy of our attention in images that make us well.

     We can make it our choice, for example, to increase blood flow to a certain part body part, giving it the strength to flush out toxins and the nutrients required to heal. Norman Cousins got over a broken elbow and back on the tennis court in record time because he spent twenty minutes a day focusing on his intention to increase blood flow through the injured joint, after his doctor explained that elbow injuries often healed slowly because of poor blood supply.

     When imagery is used as a clinical tool, it involves the deliberate focusing of attention on specific images to bring about desired changes. A 2007 study conducted for Blue Shield of California grabbed the attention of the health insurance industry by proving that imagery not only works but cuts costs. Insurance giant Blue Shield of California decided to test the effect of a guided imagery on 905 Health plan members scheduled for surgery were prepared by a simple guided imagery tape, designed to allay fears about the procedure and promote recovery. Most patients were able to receive the imagery, regardless of bias or upbringing, and for most it seemed to relieve anxiety and was held responsible for a notable reduction in the time required for recovery - and a saving of over $2,000 per patient due to reduced time in hospital.

      Guided imagery CDs, like the one used in the California study, are now widely available. Hospitals are giving CDs to patients to help them marshal inner forces to attack cancer cells or to establish and visit a healing place in the imagination. In future imaginal healing, our society will go further. We can do much better than offering prefabricated imagery. We can learn to help each other to develop our personal factories of healing imagery, which are working nightly in our dreams. And we can learn to grow healing dreams for each other.

Community-based imaginal healing may include the following:

1. Pre-need dream clinics

In our clinics and healthcare centers, and other community centers, people will meet to share dreams by an agreed protocol and will help each other to recognize and act on what dreams are giving us, which can range from diagnosis of a developing problem in the body (before symptoms present or are named) to an invitation to soul recovery.

2. Imagery harvesting

Dreams are a factory of images. Anything that comes to us in dream, including the scary or unwanted things, is ripe and ready for work in the cause of growth and healing. I have found that almost any dream can be a source of healing, if we are willing to go back inside it or carry the story onward to a desired outcome. In my dream of healing medicine, the understanding of basic treatments will be expanded to include sessions to help patients harvest positive imagery for self-healing from dreams and also from positive life memories.

3. Vision transfer training

We can grow a dream - a healing image, a script for recovery, a vision of larger life possibility - for someone in need of a dream. I teach vision transfer as a core technique of Active Dreaming. In my dream of healing medicine, nurses, therapists and community guides will be trained in vision transfer techniques for producing fresh, customized images for healing that can be gifted to someone in need of the right imagery. An image that I often use, for myself and others, to promote regeneration of the body's tissue and vitality, is that of a nurse stump or nurse log. The old tree has been cut down, or fallen, but from its apparent death new life is burgeoning; a new tree may rise, tall and strong, from the old Or I might use the image of a giant redwood that has been cored  by fire but is still putting out fresh growth, high above.

4. Story healing

We’ll come to grasp that finding meaning in any life passage may be at the heart of healing, and our healers – declared or undeclared – will help people to move beyond personal history into a bigger story that contains the juice and sense of purpose to get them through.

In all of this, we will be guided by Mark Twain’s insight that “The power which a man’s imagination has over his body to heal it or make it sick is a force which none of us is born without. The first man had it; the last one will possess it.”

For more on the vision of the coming dreaming society, please see my book Active Dreaming: Journeying beyond Self-Limitation to a Life of Wild Freedom.

Image: Nurse stump, symbol of regeneration and rebirth. Photo by RM.

Sharing Bear Medicine through a coincidence game

One night I found myself deep inside an ancient warrior cult of the Bear Goddess. As soon as I lay down and closed my eyes, in the early hours of the morning, a portal opened. It appeared as an ancient stone gateway immensely tall in proportion to its width. Through the dream gate, I saw warriors armed with axes, spears and swords were marching to battle. They wore leather armor of a type I thought might be Romano-Celtic. Above them fluttered the banner of a Bear Goddess; the standard bearer wore the full pelt of a bear.
    My curiosity became intense. I zoomed in on the scene, then my consciousness joined one of the bear warriors. I felt the heat of the bear skin over my body, and the heat of the coming battle. The body I had joined was compact and heavily muscled. But I did not want to be present for the hacking and killing that was about to begin.
     I seemed to jump across time, into a different season, when the leaves were gone from the beeches and oaks. Still in leather armor, I stumbled alone through the wilderness. I was tired of battles, weary of slaughter. I was ready to die. I abandoned my weapons, and stripped off the bear skin that had been stained by the blood of battles and the grime of life. I lay down among the roots of an oak. But I was not alone. A bear cub, walking on two legs, took me by the hand and led me to a place of healing. The doctor here was a huge mother bear. She opened my chest and took out my heart. She rinsed the organ carefully and replaced it in a soft green bed of moss and herbs. Grateful and amazed, I looked around the space I was now in. The hut was full of natural remedies and charms, herbs and spices, dried lavender and other flowers. Dried lavender was laid around my neck, like a necklace.
     I emerged from this lucid dream adventure feeling blessed and healed. I also recognized that, not for the first time, I had been taken into ancestral territory and challenged to make some choices.
      There were gifts here to be shared with others, and very soon the world gave me a remarkable opportunity to do this. I led a workshop in Santa Fe the next weekend, at a center not far from Bear Canyon, where I found a white quartzite stone in the natural shape of a bear’s head; I gave this to a man who had been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. One of the people who came to that workshop was a most reluctant participant I will call Bella. She, too, had been diagnosed with a serious illness and felt that her life, at this time, was a “train wreck”; she had recently lost both her job and her marriage. She did not remember dreams, was skeptical about shamanism, and was basically there only because friends had dragged her to my workshop. She sat with her arms folded tight over her chest, resisting all efforts to turn her into an active participant. I wondered whether she would make it through the morning.
      But Bella was still with us after lunch, when I had decided to introduce a new game. I set an intention for my own dreams the night before: “I would like a new game to play in this workshop.” In my dream, I saw my group swapping story cards, regular 3”x5” index cards on which each participant had been invited to write something with story value; this might be part of a dream, or a life memory, or something experienced in a journey with the drum, or the product of pure imagination. The cards were made into a deck and shuffled. Then people drew from the deck at random, read out what was written on their cards – and then pretended that this was part of their own story. They were now required to make something up to dramatize that story, or expand it.
      I followed my dream directions exactly. When the cards had all been written and distributed, I span my drumstick to pick the first person to play. It pointed to Bella. I groaned inwardly, thinking, That’s the end of this game. Bella turned over her card with evident reluctance and read out what was written on it. This was the text:

I am a warrior in leather armor in an ancient army that marches under the banner of the Bear Goddess. Tired of battles, I go into the wilderness to die. But a bear cub takes me by the hand and leads me to a place of healing.

Bella coughed. She got to her feet, but then her legs folded and she lay full-length on the floor, making the sounds of dry retching. She crawled a few feet, then croaked her own lines. “I have been fighting in the army of the Earth Mother. I have been fighting for clean water and clean air. But I have lost my battles and I can’t fight any more. I have come here, into the desert, to die. But bear cub won’t let me leave. She brings me to a healing shack, where my organs are regenerated. I don’t have the disease anymore. Now the Mother Bear places dried lavender across my throat, and I smell its sweetness.”
     She had most of us in tears. She had taken the story on the card — the card I had written, of course — and made it her own. She had moved the action from the Northern forest to the desert of the Southwest, where she lived. She had defined the field of battle as the environmental cause she had been fighting bravely, but without success. She had shifted the symptoms to the area sof her body affected by her own disease.
     When she returned to her place in the circle, the woman seated next to her opened her journal and took out a sprig of dried lavender. “You mentioned dried lavender, so I would like you to have this.” Bella let her neighbor place it across her neck. I must note that although dried lavender was in my original dream, I had not mentioned it on the card I wrote. Two secret handshakes from the universe.
     At the end of the day, Bella stood before the group to thank us, and the Bear. “I am going to let my body believe. I am not going to die the way the doctors said. However I die, I will die standing up. And I will fight the good fight in the ways that Earth Mother teaches me.”

Adapted from my book The Boy Who Died and Came Back. Published by New World Library. This was the first time I introduced a version of my Coincidence Card Game, which we now play in several versions in my playshops all over the world map. We experiment with a digital version, with exciting results, in my new online course for The Shift Network last night. Please see my book Sidewalk Oracles for guidance on playing the game with friends, and developing a solitaire version.

Drawing: "Dancing with the Bear" by RM

Lions in the tree tops: when someone else's dream is a gift for your life

I am in the woods. They are lovely, dark and deep, as in the poem. I am thrilled by the movement of many wild animals among the trees. I look up, and see big cats in the tree tops. Can they be lions?
    I have no sense of fear. I want to watch, and explore.
    However, my friend doesn’t want to stay here. She keeps talking about chores and social engagements, all the little things she needs to deal with at home and at work. She tells me she’s taking off and I let her go.
    Paths diverge in the woods. I sense that any of these paths will lead to new adventures. I’m not sure which one to follow. The lions are moving fast in the tree tops now. I trust them to show me the way. One of them makes a fantastic leap, pursuing a deer that I glimpse further along the trail. A second lion lopes ahead along a second path.
    I get it. It’s not either/or. More than one path is open to me in life, and I can follow both at the same time, if I let the lions in me show the way.
     

This is a dream that I heard in an intimate circle of dreamers last night. I am telling it as my own dream because that is what it has become. Let me explain.
    We were playing one of the coincidence games I have invented. In this version, members of a group are invited to write a brief summary of a dream on one side of a small index card. The cards are collected and shuffled and they become an oracle deck. Before the game begins, the players are invited to set an intention by stating a theme on which they would like guidance. They take turns to pull a card from the deck. It is suggested that whatever is written on the card you pull will be a direct response from the index card oracle to your life question.
    My theme last night was simple and practical: "I would like guidance on the next six weeks." Over these winter weeks, I will be at home for the longest period in more than a decade. I want to be sure I take full advantage of this break from my almost incessant travel.
    The card I received gave a glimpse of the scene in the woods, the choice of paths, the friend who wanted to go back to everyday routines. At my request, the dreamer told the fuller version. As soon as she identified the big cats in the tree tops as lions, I found myself quivering with excitement and entirely there, in my inner senses. I could smell the forest, and the hot breath of the lions,
     The first message I received came loud and clear, in the behavior of the dreamer's friend. I must part company with the part of myself that encourages me to get caught up in small assignments and minor distractions.
     I need to put myself, in the weeks ahead, in a place of wild freedom.
     I want to accept that I can follow more than one path, in my new creative work.
     I have always felt close to lions, and I put a lion on the cover of two of my books, Active Dreaming and the new one, Sidewalk Oracles.

     What is the lion, to me? It is courage, the power to speak my truth and be heart by others, wild and primal energy for life. My lion self follows the path of heart, the only path worth following.

We may find that there is a message for us in another person’s dream because, quite simply, we are human and we are all connected. This is part of the beauty of learning to share dreams in the right way. We recognize something of ourselves in another person’s dream because, while every dream is unique and requires close attention to specific details, dreams also reflect universal situations and living symbols that speak to all. 

For the rules of playing the Coincidence Card Game with dream reports, see my book The Three "Only" Things. For further ways to play the game, and on building a personal index card oracle, see Sidewalk Oracles.

Drawing: Sun Lion by RM

Eldorado Kite

The great bird lifts from my hand

drawn to the sun

on Your breath.

I tug on the string,

trying to drag it down,

forgetting what You taught me:

the falcon longs for the wrist of the King.

This strange wind is too strong for me.

I am rising with the bird

above all that is fenced in,

urgent to cut the cord.

My tame self panics.

It wants to hide among limits and shadows

where air does not move like this,

in animate waves of intent.

Something falls like a worn-out coat

and Your breath blows me as a sail

across oceans of sky

to my home in Your heart

where falcon and falconer are one.

Poems do not require explanations, but I want to tell the story of this one, which is a story of growing a vision for someone in need of a vision.
    I was staying with a generous man who was near death. I had sought various ways to offer help and return his hospitality. I had found a quartzite rock shaped exactly and naturally like the head of a bear and brought it to him as a possible agent of healing.
    But Death was getting ready to take him. He knew that in his body, in his dreams and in the behavior of the ravens that were always around his adobe house in the Southwest.
    I walked the neighborhood, grieving and searching for something to offer that might help him prepare for the Big journey. I saw a hawk overhead, a good sign for me. Coming closer, I saw it was a hawk-shaped kite, so well made you could easily mistake the semblance for the real thing. The kite soared aloft. It had escaped the hand or the pole that had held it.
    What a beautiful metaphor for a soul rising from the body, lifting towards the heavens.
    I wrote the poem for my friend and read it to him at his bedside. He was especially moved by the words about a "strange wind" and air moving differently, and had me read them again. Then, with his failing voice, he read the poem back to me.
    I like to picture him rising, at death, like a falcon that has slipped the leash, to return to the wrist of the Great Falconer above. 

"Eldorado Kite" is in my collection, Here, Everything is Dreaming: Poems and Stories. Published by Excelsior Editions.

The Wind and the Book: Spontaneous Dream Transfer

We can gift a dream to someone in need of a dream. This may be a healing image, a vision of life possibility, or even a road into the afterlife. I have developed a focused technique that I call Dream Transfer or Vision Transfer which is explained in several of my books, including Dreamways of the Iroquois.
    Sometimes a very wonderful dream transfer is accomplished effortlessly, when we find we have the right dream to give to another person, either the right dream about that person, or a dream of power we can invite them to share.
     When I was writing my book Dreaming the Soul Back Home, a European friend, visiting family in the United States, called me and asked how it was coming along. I replied that I had not done much focused writing of book drafts, but that I was relaxed because my whole life experience was feeding this book, and the deadline was still a few weeks away, which seemed like a very long way off to me. As a former journalist - and student - I don't really believe in deadlines until they are so close I have to pull an all-nighter.
     "I don't think you need to worry," my friend said. "I dreamed that you were in a magnificent grove of trees, holding a bunch of typed pages. You decided to take a nap.
     "A magical wind whipped up, carried the pages out of your hands and took them swirling round and round in the air. Finally the wind placed the pages on your belly. You woke up, examined the pages, and exclaimed with joy, 'That's it! My book is done!'"
     I declared that I would make this dream my own, and let it become my creative reality.
     That is exactly what unfolded. When I sat down to work on my new book, the pages flew together. Some flew from my journals, some from this blog, others seemed to come whirling down the chimney or through the skylight.
     I felt that the wind from the dream was with me. I clasped the printouts of my book pages and said, "My book is done!" and hit the Send button to get the digital version winging its way to my editor.
     I am going to call on that dream and that magical wind when my next book deadline is creeping up in the calendar. 

Art by  Irene Alexeeva. inspired by Vladimir Kush

Dream Transfer: Eating the Fruits of My Journals

We can grow a dream for someone in need of a dream - a healing image, a vision of life possibilities, even a map to another world.
    As a last exercise in my workshop in Ann Arbor last weekend, I asked members of our circle to form threesomes and take turns to act as Seeker and Dreambringer. The Seeker would set an assignment by identifying the theme. "I need guidance on retirement." "I need help in bringing my different skills and interests together in rewarding new work." "I need to help a member of my family approach death with courage and grace." The Dreambringers whould journey with the help of shamanic drumming to find the right dream or story to bring to Seeker. The right dream might be a composition, folding elements from the Dreambringer's own life, things perceived during the journey, and creative imagination. I explain how to conduct a dream transfer in practical detail in my book Dreamways of the Iroquois.
    I was blessed on Sunday to have very creative dreamers as my partners for this exercise. I set them the assignment of helping me to generate the creative energy required to bring through new books. I am especially grateful to Tami, who brought me this juicy vision:
   "You are seated in front of a stack of your old journals. As you leaf through them, ripe berries burst from the pages. You are eating the berries with gusto. As you devour the fruits of your journals, you fill with unstoppable creative energy and inspiration."
    I love this image, of taking the fruit without becoming snagged in the brambles. I'll keep it with me as I seek to devour my journals without being consumed by all they contain!