The Art of Memory

 

Dreaming, waking or in between

in any part of the multiverse

in any body, in any life

you are invited to play

a memory game.

Whatever world you are in

the trick is to remember

the other worlds you inhabit

where you are dead and more alive

and the self that is dreaming you

- "The Art of Memory". Poem and photo by Robert Moss

 

Your dreams may be glimpses of continuous lives you are leading somewhere else

What is going on in your dreams doesn't necessarily stop when you wake up or switch to a different screen. The action may play on, like episodes in a television series that continue to run after you turn off the set.
It gets more interesting. In dreams, you may check in to a parallel life you are leading somewhere else.
You may be swimming with seals, or looking for the selkie skin that was hidden from you. You might still be living with your ex, doing the things you would be doing if you had never broken up. You might be marching with those warriors in leather armor under the banner of a Bear Goddess. You might be running that bordello in the French Quarter in old New Orleans. You may be up on a high roof top, looking down on your present life in the perspective of the Double on the Balcony, your eternal witness.
When you exit a scene in a life you are leading somewhere else, you may or may not remember where you were and who you are in that other world. When you do remember, you tag what lingers in your mind as a dream.
When you exit a dream that is also a visit to a parallel life, your parallel self continues on its way. While you go about your day, your other self may dream of you.
Jung struggled for clarity on this, and found it late in life. He came to believe that we lead continuous lives in our dreams. Put another way, your dream may be a glimpse of a continuous life you are living somewhere else, a life that goes on whether or not you are tuned to its channel. This is something you can dream on.
You get up in the middle of the night and go the bathroom. When you return to bed, you find the same dream is playing as you were dreaming before, but the action has moved along. A bathroom break may be the start of your awakening.
Sometimes a dream of this kind reaches to you from another realm like a giant fist, pulling you in and back. It was like that for me one night at Big Sur. I was in a bed overlooking the Pacific Ocean, my window open to catch the sea breeze and the marvelous rhythm of the waves breaking on the rocky shore.
In my dreams, I was far away, in Mongolia in a cruel winter, on the eve of World War II. I was engaged in a secret mission, to spy on a team of SS commandos who were seeking to capture the most powerful shamanic artifact in the Central Asia: the spirit banner of Genghis Khan. I stirred from this dream, thrilled and mystified. I might have made it my plan to reenter the dream to try to understand why I was in Mongolia in the 1930s while my body was on the California coast. But no effort on my part was required - unless I had wanted to resist going back.
Again and again, through the whole night, the drama played on. All my senses were engaged. Now in a dual or multiple state of consciousness, I could hear the Pacific breakers and turn my body on the bed, while fully present in the Mongolian adventure in a body that felt no less real. I could taste the blood from a horse's neck I was required to drink in order to survive that terrible winter, in a wilderness of snow. I could smell the rank fear of horses and men. I have no doubt I was there.

Art: René Magritte, "Faraway Looks" (1927)

Soul in the multiverse: serial dreamers and quantum jumpers

Serial dreams, in which we find ourselves returning, again and again, to a life that is not our waking life offer an invitation to gather first-hand data on the possibility that we are leading parallel lives in alternate realities that may also be parallel worlds.

    Some serial dreams may reflect that fact that one or more of our soul-selves is “out there”, leading its own life in an alternate reality that is separated from that or our dominant personality. But serial dreams of this type open windows into even more spacious possibilities.
    While you are living your present life, on your present timeline, co-walkers are walking beside you, near or far, along their own paths, which branched off when they made different choices or took a different turning. There is the parallel self who stayed with your former lover, the white shadow that still works in the old job. If parallel universes are infinite, as some physicists believe, you have a parallel self who chose pancakes instead of eggs for breakfast, and another that has not opened this book.
     When it comes to studying parallel selves who took a radically different life path, developing different skills and relationships and incurring different karma, it is fascinating to consider what happens when two paths start to converge again. Before you are remotely aware that this is happening, you may feel a certain tilt to the day, and notice that you are drawing events and encounters in an unusual way. People praise you or put you down in ways you can't fathom unless you awaken to how you are loaded now with karma a parallel self incurred in adventures you can't know about unless you are following the dream tracks of your multitudinous self.        
     What if it were possible to reach to some of these alternate selves, and share gifts and life experiences with them in mutually supportive ways? We can attempt that through dream reentry. We can also seek to journey back to a crossroads on our previous life road, and seek to locate and then track the  parallel self that made a different choice from what put us where we are now. We can choose to follow the life of this alternate self from that moment of choice all the way up to the present time, make an inventory of what went wrong or right on that other path and then - most importantly - to harvest lessons and gifts from the alternate life trajectory

-   Part of the secret logic of our lives may be that our paths constantly interweave with those of numberless parallel selves, sometimes converging or even merging, sometimes diverging ever farther. The gifts and failings of these alternate selves - with all the baggage train of their separate lives - may influence us, when our paths converge, in ways that we generally fail to recognize. Yet a sudden afflux of insight or forward-moving energy may be connected with joining up with an alternate and lively self, just as a sour mood of defeat or a series of otherwise inexplicable setbacks may relate to the shadow of a different parallel self, a Sad One or a Dark One.

Adapted from Dreaming the Soul Back Home by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

How do you look in the dreams of your parallel self?

I slip in and out of the lives of parallel selves, and others, in dreams and in reverie. I am open to the idea that they are leading continuous lives, on parallel event tracks, and that from their points of view, I am a character that exists in their dreams, when they remember dreams.
    It requires little imagination for me to picture a worldly-wise Robert with a much fatter bank account and a different view of reality sitting down to Sunday brunch and talking about a dream in the following way: “I had the strangest dream last night. I was in Dracula country, in the mountains of Transylvania, or some such place. I was persuaded to hire some evil-looking road cowboy to drive me up a crazy one-lane road to see some natural feature the locals call their Sphinx. They said he boasted that he had killed a fox on that road and cut off the head as a trophy. The next moment, he had driven us halfway off a cliff.”

    What my parallel Robert might recall as an odd dream was a quite literal, physical event for me. On a dream archaeology expedition in Romania in October 2012, I set off with local friends to see the Sphinx of Bucegi, a celebrated natural rock formation regarded as a major energy spot, near a cave associated with an ancient shaman-god of the Dacians and the mystical White Wolf said to watch over this land.   
     We walked through the woods from the pleasant pensiune we had booked for my workshop, facing the  Caraiman monastery, whose construction was inspired by a priest who dreamed of a church that needed to be built around a fir tree at this site. We intended to ride up the mountain to the Sphinx by cable car, but a road cowboy with a four-wheel drive persuaded us to hire him. This proved to be the wildest ride of my life, up a steep, narrow road with hairpin bends and no railings at the edge of dizzying cliffs. The road was often partly blocked by construction or landslides, and we frequently encountered cars and trucks rushing down in the middle of the road as if bent on a head-on collision.   
     The road cowboy drove as if possessed, but I assumed this was local custom and he knew what he was doing. I could not follow his conversation with my Romanian friends, but I was struck by his hand-waving animation as he recounted a story at a point where the road was only dirt and craters and lumps of rock. Soon after, the driver made a wild swerve to the right to get around a protruding boulder, taking us to the edge of the cliff — and then partway over. We were now stuck in the dirt, hanging over the cliff, as the driver gunned the car back and forth, succeeding only in getting us deeper into the dirt, while the Jeep leaned, little by little, further over the cliff.    “Time to get out of the car,” I said quietly.   
     We left the driver with the vehicle, phoning for help, and walked for twenty minutes down the winding road to a cabină— a rustic inn and restaurant — to recover with Ursus beer and spicy sausages. On the walk, my friends told me that just before he nearly took all of us over the cliff, the driver had been boasting about how he had killed a fox on that section of mountain road and then decapitated the fox to mount its head on a wall as a trophy.   
     It seemed we had traveled that day with a man under a fox’s curse. Through it all, I felt oddly detached, and never in real danger, as if we had been under the protection of an unseen hand. Perhaps it was the man who had taken the fox’s head who was under the real danger on that high and stony road.   
    My parallel Robert, remembering this as a dream, might discuss it as a set of symbols, seeking a Freudian or a Jungian interpretation. He might shrug off the dream as simply "bizarre", or attribute it to something he ate. He might give some thought to foxes and fox hunters, and the possibility that he might travel to Romania and should consider his transportation options carefully. If he has read Jung, he may study the fox-cursed driver as the Shadow, and the Romanian girls as anima figures, and the Sphinx of the mountains as a form of the Self that is hard to attain.
    Wherever his mind turns, my parallel self is likely to miss the fact that what is a dream for him was a physical experience for me. But wait - who am I to judge? Some mornings, when I return from his life, I talk as if he is my creation. When I share dream reports in French, I say, "J'ai fait un rêve", "I made a dream", which implies that I made him.  I don't know whether his French is better than mine (I hope so!), but I can hear him talking as if he made me.

I suggest the following thought experiment: Imagine you are in the situation of a parallel self who is trying to make sense of events in your day as scenes from a dream.

Text adapted from The Boy Who Died and Came Back: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Photo: In the Bucegi Mountains of Romania, 2012

Your dream may be a glimpse of a continuous life you are leading elsewhere

What is going on in your dreams doesn't necessarily stop when you wake up or switch to a different screen. The action may play on, like episodes in a television series that continue to run after you turn off the set.

It gets more interesting. In dreams, you may check in to a parallel life you are leading somewhere else.

You may be swimming with seals, or looking for the selkie skin that was hidden from you. You might still be living with your ex, doing the things you would be doing if you had never broken up. You might be marching with those warriors in leather armor under the banner of a Bear Goddess. You might be running that bordello in the French Quarter in old New Orleans. You may be up on a high roof top, looking down on your present life in the perspective of the Double on the Balcony, your eternal witness.

When you exit a scene in a life you are leading somewhere else, you may or may not remember where you were and who you are in that other world. When you do remember, you tag what lingers in your mind as a dream.

When you exit a dream that is also a visit to a parallel life, your parallel self continues on its way. While you go about your day, your other self may dream of you.

Jung struggled for clarity on this, and found it late in life. He came to believe that we lead continuous lives in our dreams. Put another way, your dream may be a glimpse of a continuous life you are living somewhere else, a life that goes on whether or not you are tuned to its channel. This is something you can dream on.

You get up in the middle of the night and go the bathroom. When you return to bed, you find the same dream is playing as you were dreaming before, but the action has moved along. A bathroom break may be the start of your awakening.

Sometimes a dream of this kind reaches to you from another realm like a giant fist, pulling you in and back. It was like that for me one night at Big Sur. I was in a bed overlooking the Pacific Ocean, my window open to catch the sea breeze and the marvelous rhythm of the waves breaking on the rocky shore.

In my dreams, I was far away, in Mongolia in a cruel winter, on the eve of World War II. I was engaged in a secret mission, to spy on a team of SS commandos who were seeking to capture the most powerful shamanic artifact in the Central Asia: the spirit banner of Genghis Khan. I stirred from this dream, thrilled and mystified. I might have made it my plan to reenter the dream to try to understand why I was in Mongolia in the 1930s while my body was on the California coast. But no effort on my part was required - unless I had wanted to resist going back.

Again and again, through the whole night, the drama played on. All my senses were engaged. Now in a dual or multiple state of consciousness, I could hear the Pacific breakers and turn my body on the bed, while fully present in the Mongolian adventure in a body that felt no less real. I could taste the blood from a horse's neck I was required to drink in order to survive that terrible winter, in a wilderness of snow. I could smell the rank fear of horses and men. I have no doubt I was there.

Art: René Magritte, "Faraway Looks" (1927)

In the dream fitting room, clues to parallel lives

It's happened again. There I was last night, strolling down Jermyn Street in London in a very smart double-breasted gray suit. I haven't worn clothes like these in decades. I haven't put on a tie since my daughter's wedding years ago, and my idea of dress-up is chinos with black sneakers. Yet in the dream, I am my present age, leading the life I might have lived if I had never moved to upstate New York, never started dreaming in the Mohawk language, never become a dream teacher - and remained a bestselling novelist.
    The other Robert's life ain't shabby. He has grown as a writer, specializing in literate spy novels set in the darkest years of the mid-20th century, somewhat akin to Alan Furst. He is a time traveler with a special agenda, using active imagination, along with good research, to enter the lives of people in the era of Hitler and Stalin.
    I have no wish to swap lives with him, but I'm glad to see he is thriving in his own way. If ever I feel a twinge of regret for a path not taken, I can console myself with the knowledge that in another reality the path was taken. 
    I've long been fascinated by dream experiences of parallel lives. These can take many forms. We find ourselves in the situation of a person living in a different time. We seem to be enjoying - or not enjoying - a continuous life in another reality. We slip into the perspective and apparently the bodies of other people (including even members of other species) who may be living in our present world, but are not ourselves.

    The parallel life experiences that intrigue me most are those in which we seem to find ourselves traveling - in an alternate reality - along paths we abandoned in this lifetime, because of choices we made. Contemporary science speculates about the existence of (possibly infinite) parallel universes. In our dreams, we have the ability to gain experiential knowledge of this fascinating field.

    In dreams like the one of the fancy suit, I quite frequently find myself living in a city or a country where I used to live, doing the things I might well be doing had I stayed in a former line of work and a certain life situation. In these dreams, I am my current age, but my life has followed a different track from the one I have taken in my waking reality. There is a "just-so" feeling about these dreams. I return from them thinking, "Well, that's how things might be if I had made a different choice." Sometimes I'm quite relieved that I made the choices I did; sometimes I feel a little tristesse for something or someone left on the "ghost trail" I've seen in my dream ; but most often my feelings are entirely non-judgmental.

    This theme is nicely explored in a novel titled The Post-Birthday World, by Lionel Shriver. Through alternating chapters, we follow alternate event tracks in the life of the heroine, depending on whether she did or did not kiss a man other than her partner on the night of his birthday. That night, her world split. We follow her double life, through those alternating chapters, and the dual narrative is beautifully wrought. At the end of the twin tellings, it's hard to make a value judgment between the alternate life paths. You can't really say that one is better or worse than the other; they are simply different.

    Through a chance encounter that was the product of a missed airline connection, I once met a woman who told me she was living a double life of this kind every night (or every day, depending on your perspective). Every night, she went home to her husband at their comfortable house on an island off the North Carolina coast. They might go to their favorite restaurant, or to the mall or the country club. In the morning, they went off on their separate ways to work. The shocker was this. The man she went to every night in her dreams was a different husband, in a different house in a different island. "Whenever I close my eyes," as she told it, "I'm in a different world. It's the same as this world, but everything is different."
     Under the Many Worlds hypothesis now widely entertained by physicists, it's possible that every choice we make results in the creation of two or more new universes.

     In Parallel Universes theoretical physicist Michio Kaku suggests that another universe may be floating just a millimeter away on a "brane" (membrane) parallel to our own. He explains that we can't see inside it because it exists in hyperspace, beyond the four dimensions of our everyday reality. But in fact, we can and do go there - in dreaming and in the imagination.

    Synchronistic encounters and moments of déjà vu can help to awaken us to the reality of parallel worlds, as explained in my book Sidewalk Oracles. Imaginative fiction helps open our minds to what is possible. In Borges' 1941 novella "The Garden of Forking Paths" a sinologist discovers a manuscript by a Chinese writer where the same tale is recounted in several ways, often contradictory. Time is conceived here as a "garden of forking paths", where things happen in parallel in infinitely branching ways. Borges conveys how all possible outcomes of a given event may take place simultaneously, each one opening a new array of possibilities.

    It's fascinating to speculate on what may happen if parallel selves, and their parallel worlds, bump up against each other. Could we combine the gifts of different life experiences, or would we compete with each other? One approach to this theme is a creaky old Roger Moore movie titled "The Man Who Haunted Himself", hilarious to watch now because of its silly, jingly circa-1970 musical score. An arrogant, power-mad, womanizing s.o.b. finds enlightenment, and becomes softer and kinder to the point where his family, his office and his girlfriend can't figure him out. When his other self - the s.o.b. in the Savile Row pinstripes - turns up, everyone accepts him as the true Roger Moore character, and Mr. Softer and Kinder is shut out of his home and his office.

    Leading-edge physicists recently renamed the Many Worlds hypothesis. They now talk of Many Interactive Worlds, exerting mutual influence that usually escapes human perception. As I walk the streets that parallel Robert is walking, is it possible that our lives begin to converge? Is he dreaming more? Am I more drawn to the period and the themes that fascinate him, and to his genre?

    I take a sideways look at that smartly dressed fellow in London, through the window my dream opened. He's decided to buy a new dress shirt, and is stepping into Turnbull & Asser, no less, with this intention. Price tags are immaterial to him. I'll leave him to it, as I pack old jeans and polo shirts for my trip today, to places in Europe he also visits, on his own track. However, I pop Night Soldiers, a  beautifully written spy novel by Alan Furst, set in eastern Europe in 1934, into my carry-on bag.