the Night When the Veil Thins

Back in the day, I used to give a talk on the meaning of Halloween, on the night, at the New York Open Center, when it was still downtown in SoHo. We always had standing room only in the lecture room, which was partly filled by witches, ghouls and vampires dressed for the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade that would unfold just down the street right after. 

I notice, looking through old journals, that on the night of October 30, 1998, prior to taking the train to Manhattan the next day, I asked for some Halloween dreams. This is what came as soon as I closed my eyes:

I watch a beautiful woman in a flowing, gauzy white dress like a wedding dress rise from a coffin and begin to float around a dark, undefined space (like an artists' background, defined by brushstrokes rather than finished shapes). The eyes are dead. All that is there is blind appetite. She is the living dead, a hungry ghost. I avoid her.

As we approach All Hallows' Eve, a shiverish, magical, crazy night in a more than usually crazy year, I am thinking of its many meanings. It is the topsy-turvy, inside-out, upside-down time, when the past lies ahead of you and the future walks behind you, breathing on your neck. It is a night when the doors between the worlds swing open, when the dead walk among the living and the living move among the dead. As my dream of the beauty from the coffin dramatized, it is a night when you want to be able to discern who is who and what is what. 

The last night of October is the start of Samhain (which is pronounced "sow-in"), the great Celtic festival when the dead walk among the living, the fires are extinguished and rekindled, the god and the goddess come together in sacred union, and as the year turns from light to dark, the seeded earth prepares to give birth again. It's a time, when the Celts knew what they were doing, to watch yourself and watch comings and goings from the barrows and mounds that are peopled by ghosts and faeries. It's a time to honor the friendly dead, and the lordly ones of the Sidhe, and to propitiate the restless dead and remember to send them off and to set or re-set very clear boundaries between the living and the hungry ghosts. It's a time to look into the future, if you dare, because linear time is stopped when the hollow hills are opened. 

As Celtic scholar Marie-Louise Sjoestedt wrote, "This night belongs neither to one year or the other and is, as it were, free from temporal restraint. It seems that the whole supernatural force is attracted by the seam thus left at the point where the two years join, and gathers to invade the world of men." 

If you have never learned to dream or see visions or to feel the presence of the spirits who are always about - if you have never traveled beyond the gates of death or looked into the many realms of the Otherworld - this is the time when you'll see beyond the veil all the same, because the Otherworld is going to break down the walls of the little box you call a world, and its residents are coming to call on you. 

It's a time for dressing up, especially if you are going out at night, although there is likely to be much less of that in this time of pandemic. The Celts put on fright masks not to extort candy but to scare away restless spirits before they scared them. Out and about ,they carried torches to light the way, and especially to guide the dead back to where they came from when the party is over. Before Europeans discovered pumpkins in America, they carried lit candles in hollowed-out niches in turnips. 

All of this was so important, and such wild, sexy, shiverish fun that the church had to do something about it. In the eighth century, Pope Gregory III decided to steal the old magic by making November 1 All Saints' Day, or All Hallows Day; so the night of Samhain became All Hallows' Eve, or Halloween for short. A century before, an earlier pope had borrowed the date of the old Roman festival to propitiate the dead - the Festival of the Lemures, or Lemuralia - and renamed that All Saints' Day. But since Roman paganism had been largely suppressed, the church fathers decided to grab the glamour of the Celts, among whom the old ways are forever smoldering, like fire under peat. 

Few people who celebrate or suffer Halloween today seem to know much about its history. For storekeepers and the greetings card business, it's a commercial opportunity. For TV programmers, it's a cue to schedule horror movie marathons. For kids, it's time to dress up as vampires or witches and extort candy from neighbors. My preferred way to spend Halloween is to rest quietly at home, sometimes with candles lit for my dead loved ones, and a basket of apples and hazelnuts beside them, tokens of the old festival that renews the world and cleanses the relations between the living and the dead. 

Text partially adapted from The Dreamer's Book of the Dead by Robert Moss (Destiny Books)

Photo: Greenwich Village Halloween Parade masker by Wendy R. Williams 

How the dead look younger after they die

In most dreams, the deceased appear to be living, and very often the dreamer is unaware that the person he or she encounters is “dead” until after waking. The reason is that the deceased are indeed alive, though no longer in the physical realm.

    The dead may appear as the dreamer remembers them from their last days of physical life, especially in the first dream encounters.

    Over time, it is quite common for the departed to alter their appearance, to shrug off signs of age and bodily ailments, and to present themselves as healthy and attractive. People who died in later years frequently reappear looking around 30 years old. In the west of Ireland and in Scotland, it is widely believed among country folk that the departed grow upwards or downwards in their apparent age until they look 30 years old. Lady Gregory wrote about this memorably in her Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland.    After my mother's death, she revised her appearance a number of times until she appeared to me as a lovely young woman on a beach, seemingly about 29 years old.
    A woman in one of my workshops wanted to know why her father continued to look aged, bent and ill in her dreams. I suggested that she should ask him directly. She made it her intention to reenter the most recent of her dreams of her dead father, and found herself with him right away. His appearance began to shimmer. She saw him transforming into a handsome young man dressed for a night out. She asked him why it had taken him so long to change. "You were the one who needed time," he told her, hugging her tight. "I didn't think you would recognize me if I changed faster than you could handle."

    The departed may change their appearance and personal style even more radically, as they evolve in understanding and come to realize that they are now living in energy bodies that are quite malleable.   

    Jung dreamed of the two central women in his life, his wife and his “junior wife” and life companion Toni Wolff, after their deaths. Toni appeared looking much taller and younger than she had been when she died, and exceedingly beautiful, wearing a lovely multi-colored dress in which the wonderful blue of the kingfisher was the dominant hue.
    After Emma’s death, Jung saw her in a vivid dream in which she appeared in her prime, “perhaps about thirty” but with a depth of wisdom beyond youth or age. Jung concluded that his wife’s dream persona was “a portrait she had made or commissioned” for him. “It contained the beginning of our relationship, the events of fifty-three years of marriage, and the end of her life also. Face to face with such wholeness one remains speechless.”

In one of my own dream excursions this week, I spent good times in a pleasant village of the dead where everyone looked 30ish apart from the elder of the group, who looked to be a healthy 40 years old, less than half his age when he left his physical body. He has been a dear friend, before and after his death, and I was intrigued to find him presiding over an agreeable consensual afterlife situation for educated, upper crust Brits who delight in games of many kinds, from croquet to riddling and verbal competition. It became clear that some people here are rehearsing for their next transition on the many roads of the interlife.
   

Photo: Jung with Emma (née Rauschenbach)

Dreaming is practice for immortality

Dreaming is practice for immortality, perhaps the best we have available. Why? Because dreaming is traveling. We journey effortlessly beyond body and brain, into realms beyond the fields we know in ordinary life. We travel to territories in which the dead are at home. In this way we gain first-hand knowledge of the roads and conditions of the afterlife.
    In dreams, we also receive visitations from the dead. They come for all the reasons we may contact each other in ordinary life, and then some. They come for healing and forgiveness. They come for an update on family affairs. They come with warnings and information. Sometimes they need help and information from us, because they are lost of confused.
    Tremendous numbers of people who are living in the afterworld are seeking to communicate with the living. In one of my workshops, I led forty active dreamers on a group shamanic journey, powered by drumming and focused by clear intention, to visit communications centers on the Other Side where the dead gather to try to contact the living. We found them using technologies both ancient and hyper-modern, according to earthly notions.
     I found some of the dead gathered in an old fashioned seance room, trying to call the living into their space, as Spiritists or mediums seek to call up the dead. In another space, the dead were trying to text and phone and make video calls to the living. I was especially intrigued by a special courier service. The dream messengers, called Zephyrs, are slim and elegant, almost diaphanous, in uniforms that recalled winged Mercury, but capable of putting on any costume that might help them to get into the minds and memories of the people to whom they are tasked with bringing dream messages.
    We may become open to contact with the dead in many ways: through the sense of a presence, through physical anomalies, through goosebumps, with the help of a go-between like a reputable psychic or shamanic practitioner. But the easiest way to communicate with the dead is in our dreams.
     We may be catapulted into afterlife situations by a near-death experience, or brave the gates of death in a shamanic journey or a ritual of deep initiation (which always requires death and rebirth). Yet, again, the easiest way to become familiar with the Other Side and develop a personal geography of the afterlife is through dreams and then by developing the practices of Active Dreaming.
    An old Lakota saying has it that "the path of the soul after death is the same as the path of the soul in dreams." This is exact. In quoting this, I have often added the thought "except that after death, you don't come back." But that is not entirely correct. Some who have died do return to the body. I did this as a child, and so have millions of experiencers of what is now called the NDE. And the dead who have left their physical bodies behind for good return to us in subtle bodies.
    We need to know a little about what happens when we die, and before we are born, in order to live well. Death is an incredible teacher. Looking at our life choices in the clear knowledge that our story did not begin in this body and doesn't end with it can help us to develop a courage and clarity in approaching life choices that may otherwise be lacking.
    These things are too important for us to leave to hand-me-down religious dogmas, or avoid through denial. Maps from recent travelers to the Other Side are good. If you are contemplating a trip abroad, it's good to hear the opinions of others who have stayed in that hotel, or taken that cruise. But the afterlife is infinitely malleable, ever-changing, even within the battlements of the collective belief systems, so  we'll want to find out how things are for ourselves. The most reliable ways to do that are through contact with the dead, and through personal travel in the realms where the dead are at home. Both are most easily and safely accomplished through dreaming.
    You may say, why be in a hurry? We'll find out about the afterlife when we are dead, yes?
     Well, certainly. But I stand with Montaigne on these matters. Puisque nous ne savons pas ou la mort nous attend, attendons-la partout. "Since we do not know where Death is waiting for us, we must be ready to meet Death everywhere."

For much more on this subject, please read my books The Dreamer's Book of the Dead and Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and Life Beyond Death.

Photo: Doors open and shut at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. By RM.

The dead are alive in our dreams

There I go again. I am with someone who was very close to me, many years ago. We are holding a dinner party together, and I am proud of the elegant dining set I purchased. The table can seat twenty people quite comfortably, and cheerful guests are taking their seats.
    I want to tell the group how I came to buy this table. I ask if anyone knows the story.
    Patricia Garfield, a famous dream author, raises her hand, turning from her place at the table.
    I am going to tell my story anyway. It involves a visit to a "cheap" Sotheby's auction in London, not one of the grand auctions. My purchase of this table marked a turning point in my life. I now believe that without the table - and its promise of engagement with large, convivial groups in a social setting - my life would have taken a different course, and I would not have remained close to the woman who is responsible for tonight's party.
    When I step outside the house for a moment, into bright sunlight, I realize that in the reality where my body is asleep in bed, the woman I am with is dead. She died many years ago.
    So I am in a dream.
    I look back at the house. It is a row house in London, like houses I lived in long ago. The scene is entirely real, and solid - the portly taxi pulling up near the steps, the couple with a baby in a perambulator, the sounds from the house.
    Is the Robert in bed in upstate New York dreaming me, or am I dreaming him?
    I am in a place where someone who died in one world is alive in another.
    This feels less like an afterlife situation than like a parallel reality, an alternate world, where she is alive and I made radically different life choices.

I woke from this dream excursion feeling calm and reflective, saddened by memories of the loss of a wonderful woman who died tragically young, cheered by the idea that she may be enjoying a happy life in another reality, and maybe in many alternate realities.
    It's a common, perhaps even universal experience to find that the dead are alive in our dreams.
    Often an encounter with the dead, in a dream, becomes a prompt to dream lucidity. As we begin to realize that someone we are with has died (in our default reality), an inner voice may say, I am dreaming. 
    The presence of Patricia Garfield*, the dream author, may have been a prompt to the Robert at that dinner table to say to himself, I am dreaming.   
    There are things of huge importance afoot.
     Encounters with the dead, especially in dreams, have been a primary source of human knowledge of the afterlife throughout the whole odyssey of our kind on the planet. More than this, we may come to understand that in dreams and visions, we are at home in the realities where those who died in this world are at home. We don't need to puzzle over what happens in the afterlife once we realize that we are already in it.
     As I write this, I am back in a world that I know is real through the evidence of my

senses. My left instep hurts a bit, the legacy of excessive hill walking in recent travels. I hear the Bluetooth-ed mailman talking to unseen persons as he walks the street.I sense my fierce bad kitten trying to sneak into my study to turn it into a toy room.
     Yet my senses were no less alive when I was welcoming guests at the enormous dining table. I could smell the aromas of cooking from the kitchen, and of the flower arrangements on the table. I could feel sun on my face when I stepped outside.
    I muse over the many ways in which the Robert who is at home in that scene is different from my present self. He is highly social, very willing to entertain twenty or more people in his own home. By contrast, the Robert who is writing now is fiercely private at home and avoids social scenes, except in the context of his chosen work. (I often sit down to dinner with twenty people when I am leading residential retreats.)
      Yes, the dinner scene where someone dead was alive is a dream. And it is entirely real. Like life. Here and there, now and then.
      The experience of parallel worlds and alternate realities is probably the most important feature of my dreaming, and has been as far back as I can remember.


*Patricia Garfield's book Creative Dreaming marked a watershed in our understanding and discussion of what goes on in dreaming. Before I met her, and before I started leading public classes around 1990, I dreamed that there was tremendous excitement in the small city where I was living because Patricia Garfield had moved to town and was teaching people about the importance of dreams. When I shared the dream with a friend, she shot me between the eyes by saying "YOU are the famous author who moved to this town and you are the one who should lead dream classes." (We did not yet use the "if it were my dream" protocol!) The next day, I received a call from a local arts center asking if I would lead some classes. They had creative writing classes in mind but were thrilled when I proposed dream classes - because of my dream of Patricia Garfield and my conversation about it. I enjoyed telling Patricia this story when I met her for the first time, 20 years ago. It is in my new book, The Boy Who Died and Came Back.

I have written at length about dream encounters with the dead, and dream travels in worlds where the dead are alive, in several of my books, especially Conscious Dreaming, Dreamgates and The Dreamer's Book of the Dead. 

Photos of tombstone at Vyšehrad  (c) Robert Moss