Nights among the dead

 

I am often among the dead in my dreams. They are always alive. Sometimes I remember that they died on an event track we shared, other times I don't. Sometimes they come calling. My father has come many times since his death with helpful advisories for me and the family. Sometimes my dream travels take me to new environments on the Other Side were the dead are enjoying new lives. They show me around and I learn first-hand in this way about lifestyle and real estate options available after death.
    Contact with the deceased, especially in dreams, isn’t weird or unusual or even truly supernatural. It comes about for three reasons: the dead are still with us, or they come visiting, or we travel to the realms where they are now living. The number one reason why people who are not accustomed to sharing dreams decide to tell one is that they have dreamed of a close friend or family member who died but is very much alive in the dream.
    The immense body of data on near-death experiences (NDEs) is scientific evidence of the survival of consciousness after the physical body has closed down. When you become a conscious dream traveler, you confirm through your own experience that awareness is not confined to the body and brain, and therefore is able to survive death. You are ready to learn that healing and forgiveness are always available across the apparent barrier of death, and to develop your personal geography of the afterlife.
    One of the most interesting things I have learned is that the living may be called upon to play guides and counselors for the dead. “The Silent Lovers”, which I included in my book Mysterious Realities, is a just-so story – shocking to me as it unfolded – about how I was called to play advocate for a dead man, otherwise a stranger, going through his life review on the Other Side. Yeats was right when he said, with poetic clarity, that the living have the ability to assist the imaginations of the dead.  

Art: "Houses of Death" by Robert Moss

The Greatest Spell

The Poetic Edda contains the narrative of a young man, Svipdag, who raises his mother from her burial mound to help him on an impossible quest to find the beloved of his soul, his "fated bride". Groa was and is a völva, or seeress. Before she died, with her knowledge of things to come, she told him to call her back when he needed help.

Groa weaves nine spells of protection over him, to preserve him from flood and fire and to change the hearts of enemies so they cannot reach for their swords. The great spell is probably the ninth. If Svipdag finds himself in a "war of words", his own will not fail him.

Wit nor words be wanting you

At behest of the heart

- Grógaldr (The Spell of Groa) in Lee Hollander (trans) The Poetic Edda

The story of Svipdag and Groa has many counterparts in Norse tradition. In the Völuspá, the greatest of the poems in the Poetic Edda, a seeress summoned from the Underworld by the high god Odin tells the story of the creation of the world and its coming destruction and rebirth.

In tale in the Flateyjarbók, a poet is made by dreaming on the burial mound of a dead poet.

Dream Poetry from the Mound

An Icelandic shepherd lay down to sleep on the burial mound of a poet, hoping for inspiration to compose a poem in the style of the bard he admired, though he had no skill with words. While the sheep browsed and dozed, the dead poet appeared to the shepherd in a dream. “I will give you a rare verse. If you learn the verse by heart and can recite it without flaw when you wake, you will become a great poet.”

- Flateyjarbók I: 174 quoted in H. Ellis Davidson, Myths and Symbols in Pagan Europe.

The Norse stories have counterparts in other traditions. A story from Ireland weaves together the theme of calling on wise ancestors and the power of poetic speech.

Raising a Bard to Lift the Fog of Forgetfulness

There is a legend that the great Irish epic, the Táin Bó Cúailnge, or Cattle Raid of Cooley, was brought back from the fogs of forgetfulness when the foremost poets of Ireland gathered at night on the burial mound of Fergus, the ancient druid of dreams and battles. They called on Fergus to awaken. They praised him with drink and gallant words, and above all with fresh poetry.

When one of them delivered a fine enough poem, a deeper mist rose from the tomb, and from the mist came Fergus with his shining hair, to sing again the lost epic of gods and heroes and warrior queens. And the poets caught the words and carried them to the written page.

Illustration: "Old Birch at the Sogneford" by Thomas Fearnley (1839)