What the Dickens is Happening in Dreams?

"Dickens' Dream" by Robert William Buss (1875)

Cigar in hand, Charles Dickens is sitting comfortably in his writing chair, eyes closed. Through the tobacco smoke, pictures of characters and scenes from his books appear in every direction. Some – like the picture of Little Nell on her deathbed from The Old Curiosity Shop – are in vivid color. Others are only black-and-white sketches. We don’t know whether the painter, Robert William Buss, left his watercolor unfinished or made it this way by design, to show stories rising into full color and form from the author’s imagination - or asserting themselves as characters demanding a place in his books.  Buss made the painting after Dickens’ death and called it “Dickens’ dream”. [1]

     Dreams feature throughout Dickens’ work, across the whole gamut from dreams caused by fever or dyspepsia to the famous visitation dream in A Christmas Carol where Scooge tries to dismiss Marley’s ghost ass “a bad bit of beef” or “a blot of mustard”. We know that Dickens paid close attention to his own dreams and made a study of the contemporary literature on dreams, from research suggesting that dreams are the result of physiology to accounts of dreams as divine guidance or supernatural phenomena.[2]
     Dickens’ fullest account of his personal opinions about dreams was expressed in a letter he wrote, as editor of the magazine Household Words, to one of his contributors on February 2,1851. The contributor, Dr Thomas Stone, had submitted an article of “Dreams” that Dickens did not much like; he wrote eleven pages – some 1500 words, an astonishingly copious response from an editor - to Dr Stone explaining how the essay on dreams should be expanded and reframed. [3]
    Dickens starts by informing the author of the article on dreams that “I have read something on the subject and have long observed it with the greatest attention and interest”.  He then shares the disappointing news that when he has been frustrated in developing a plot, his dreams have not helped him. Instead of providing a solution to a creative problem, they have rather reflected it.

If I have been perplexed during the day in bringing out the incidents of a story as I wish, I find that I dream at night, never by any chance of the story itself, but perhaps of trying to shut a door that will fly open, or to screw something tight that will be loose, or to drive a horse upon some very important journey, who unaccountably becomes a dog and can't be urged along, or to find my way out of a series of chambers that appears to have no end.  [4]

       Dickens expounds amusingly on the “sameness” of certain dreams, for example, of appearing in your “nightdress” in public (as an eminent Victorian, he does not speak of appearing naked in public).

How many dreams are common to us all, from the queen to the costermonger! We all fall off that Tower, we all skim above the ground at a great pace and can't keep on it… we all take unheard of trouble to go to a Theatre and never get in, or to go to a Feast which can't be eaten or drunk, or to read letters, placards or books, that no study will render legible, or to break some thralldom or other, from which we can't escape, we all confound the living with the dead, and all frequently have a knowledge or suspicion that we are doing it…we all go to public places in our night dresses and are horribly disconcerted lest the company should observe it. [5]

    Dickens’ epistolary essay plunges to greater depths as he talks about the importance of paying attention to recurring dreams. He writes openly about his many dreams of Mary Hogarth, his wife’s sister, after her premature death aged seventeen. Dickens modeled many female characters in his novels on Mary, even including similar death scenes. Mary died in his arms in the family’s London house on May 7, 1837, after a visit to the theater. The doctors thought the cause of death was a heart attack. There was no prior warning.       
      Dickens was devastated. He declared “I have lost the dearest friend I ever had." [6]  Perhaps for the only time in his life, he found himslef unable to meet deadlines; he postponed instalments of  Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist that he owed his publishers and public. He held on to mementoes of Mary - a dress, a locket, a ring. He told Mary's mother months at the end of that year  that  "I have never had her ring off my finger by day or by night"[7] In 1869, as he neared his own death, he could still say,  “She is so much in my thoughts at all times, especially when I am successful, and have greatly prospered in anything, that the recollection of her is an essential part of my being, and is as inseparable from my existence as the beating of my heart is. [8]
     With all this depth of emotion, it would be surprising if Mary had not figured in his dreams. Dickens reported that "for a year, I dreamed of her, every night - sometimes as living, sometimes as dead, never in any terrible or shocking aspect. As she had been my wife's sister, and had died suddenly in our house, I forebore to allude to these dreams - kept them wholly to myself." [9]
    We may wonder whether his discretion was motivated by an element of erotic fantasy playing through the dream encounters, though in his thoroughly researched book Dickens and Women Michael Slater contends that Dickens' relations with Mary were entirely proper before she died in his arms. [10]
    A year after Mary's death, Dickens recalled, "I lay down to sleep, in an Inn on a wild Yorkshire Moor, covered with snow. As I looked out of the window on the bleak winter prospect before I undressed, I wondered within myself whether the subject would follow me here. It did." [11]

Mary’s appearance on a Yorkshire moor made Dickens decide to break his silence. He reported the dream to his wife Catherine. After this his dreams of Mary ceased for many years, which led him to suggest that “secrecy” may foster recurring dreams.
     He dreamed of Mary again years later, in a rented palazzo in Genoa in Italy. She appeared mantled in blue like Raphael’s Madonna He tried to discount the dream visitation as the effect of external circumstances. “It was All Souls' Night, and people were going about with Bells, calling on the Inhabitants to pray for the dead. -Which I have no doubt I had some sense of, in my sleep; and so flew back to the Dead.”  [12]
     Dickens reported that in the dream he spoke to “Spirit”, asking, “What is true religion?” He was told that “Roman Catholicism is best for you.” This must have been intensely displeasing for Dickens, who throughout his life was a virulent anti-Catholic. Some scholars have suggested that the dream may have prompted Dickens to look more closely at the role of religion in the lives of the ordinary Italians he chronicled in his later book Pictures from Italy, from the peasant who delighted in making the sound of the rooster Peter heard crow to the dancing and feasting at festivals.[13]
    Dickens professed to be skeptical about the utility of dream incubation on any theme. However, he allowed that we often find we have solved something in our sleep, with or without dream recall. He ascribed this to “the result of a sudden vigorous effect of the refreshed intellect, in waking”.  
   At the end of his letter to Dr Stone, we are finally given the clue to the central role of dreams in his immense literary productivity. He writes that “on waking, the head is usually full of words”. We can picture him now, rising from reverie in the writing chair in the picture, to fill page after page with his long, looping , remarkably legible script.

Dickens letter to Stone,1851

References

1. Leon Litvack,“Dickens's Dream and the Conception of Character” The Dickensian, no. 103 (2007) pp. 5-36

2. For a brief survey of what Dickens read about dreams see  Jonathan C. Glance,  “Revelation,  Nonsense  or  Dyspepsia,”  Mercer  University,  2001, http://faculty.mercer.edu/glance_jc/files/academic_work/victorian_dream_theories.htm. On contemporary efforts to explain dreams by physiology, see Doris  Kaufmann,  “Dreams  and  Self-Consciousness,”  in  Lorraine Daston (ed) Biographies  of  Scientific  Objects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)

3. Full text of Dickens' Letter to Dr Thomas Stone, 2 February 1851 in Madeline House, Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson et. al (eds) Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) vol. 6, pp. 278-279. [Hereafter "Pilgrim"]
4. ibid

5. ibid

6. Pilgrim vol. 1 p. 263

7. Pilgrim vol. 1 p.323.

8.  John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens. ed. J. W. T. Ley. (London: Palmer, 1928) p.841 

9. Letter to Stone, 1851

10.  Michael Slater, Dickens and Women (London: J.M. Dent , 1986)

11. Letter to Stone, 1851

12. For a vivid description of Dicken's palatial life in 1844 in and around Genoa , where he dreamed of Mary Hogarth as a Madonna, see chapter 5, "Work in Genoa: Palazzo Peschiere" in volume 4 of John Forster's Life of Charles Dickens. Easily found online

13. David Parker, "Dickens and the Death of Mary Hogarth” Dickens Quarterly vol.13, no.2 (June 1996) pp. 67-75

 

In the garden of Ottoman dreams

In the collective imagination of Islam, paradise is a garden. In the Ottoman world, gardens are places where friends come together, where wonderful parties unfold, where joy and romance are easy, where the seeker finds the spiritual master, where the living and the worthy dead rub shoulders. The maturation of a person in spiritual and life terms is likened again and again to the opening of a bud. The bud becomes a flower. Sometimes this sets a whole garden astir with blossoming, delighting the senses with color, perfume and the susurrus of silken petals.
    A book may be a garden of ever-living plants. Ottoman biographical dictionaries are often called gardens: The Garden of Roses, the Garden of Peonies, even the Garden of Truths. The last is the title of a biographical dictionary by the poet and provincial kadi (judge) Nev’zade ‘Ata’i (d. 1637). He studied a thousand lives, of people from the generation before his, and planted these in formal rows in the garden of his book. He took only subjects who had died and gone into the earth. The fact that his subjects were dead did not mean that they could not speak. He reports face-to-face encounters with the dead, in a garden, or at a gravesite, or at the threshold of a home.  
    We can enter his world, and the gardens of Ottoman dreaming, through the pages of Dreams and Lives in Ottoman Istanbul by Aslı Niyazioğlu, a history professor at Koç University in Istanbul. We learn that for Ottoman officials, dreams were especially prized as a way of gaining counsel on career decisions; there is a practical edge to how they compared dream reports. In a society that valued dreams, a dream report might be a way to promote a case or a cause.    

    Versed in current scholarship on dream sharing in other early modern societies, from Mughal India, Safavid Iran, Habsburg Spain, Ming China, Aslı Niyazioğlu makes an important contribution to the history of dream sharing and how identities are constructed in different societies. We can almost hear the dreams being swapped at garden parties, by Sufis in the dervish houses, by students in the religious schools, in private homes. 

    Ottoman biographers often included dreams in their narratives. “They referred to dreams as mirrors that reflected the divine world that was hidden from ordinary eyes.”  In times of opportunity, as in times of unease, students and officials looked for role models  as they sought tools to survive and thrive.
    The full title of 'Ata'i's compendium is Garden of Truths in the Completion of the Peonies. Why peonies? I thought of those thick, ruffled blooms, ability to come back spring after spring for a century or more, and traditional associations with abundance, prosperity, fullness.

    What did the Ottomans want to know about the people they read about? What made, in their minds, an interesting or worthwhile life? Niyazioğlu correctly insists that we must abandon contemporary expectations to enter a different era and mindset. Ottoman biographies are full of dreams and encounters with the dead. On one level, 'Ata'i's collection is a set of resume lives, chronicles of career steps and appointments,  "Yet, it is also a book where the dreamers woke up to another sight of their world, a fearsome and restless world where social networks and career paths are turned upside down.” 

    The purpose of biography – according to Taskoprizade [d.1561], author of the Arabic biographical dictionary Crimson Peonies, a model for ‘Ata’i, it is “to learn from those conditions [of individuals of the past], to seek advice from them and to form the habit of experience through acquaintance with the vicissitudes of time.” 

     In Ottoman lives, dreams are shown to be guidance on practical decisions and career moves. It is also recognized that dreams can open the eye of truth, what Ibn 'Arabi called the eye of the heart. The bureaucrat Latifi [d.1582] recounted a memorable case of how the voice of conscience may be heard in dreams. The case involved a judge who gave up his career after he dreamed that on the Day of Judgment water mills crushed the heads of corrupt judges; the mills were powered by the blood of their victims.

    In this period Sufi sheikhs used dreams in the training of their disciples, especially in the Halveti and Bayrami orders. The Halveti leader Sinan Efendi wanted disciples to tell all their dreams to their sheiks. 

    Dreams selected by Ottoman biographers are typically clear and direct. These were held to be characteristics of a true dream. 

    Asli sees Ottoman dreams as “bridges between different realms…between the living and the dead, the past and the future, the human and the divine". This is a world where dreams change lives, the dead appear in broad daylight, and biographers invited their readers into gardens of remembrance where the departed will bloom again like peonies in the spring.

    Interaction between the living and the dead is constant in Ottoman biographies. The dead may appear at your door, or in a dream or both; it’s not always clear which reality you are in at the moment of encounter. In one of ‘Ata’i’s stories, an Ottoman sailor in North Africa is woken from a nap by a servant who tells him that his beloved friend, a sea captain reported dead three years earlier, is at the door. They embrace, they pass a couple of delightful hours together, then the friend leaves and the sailor is overcome by sleep. When he wakes, he hastens to tell his friends about the visit. He is amazed when they insist that the captain is indeed dead. No reason is given for the visit except the natural desire of good friends to spend time together.

    Rumi appears to welcome and bless a sheikh who travels to Konya, the poet-mystic’s domain. He appears at a sema and draws a skeptical sheikh into the turning dance, making him a convert. “I could not stay still”. 

     A dead lover appears to his grieving boyfriend and leaves a physical token.

    ‘Ata’i visits the tomb of a sheikh, who appears to him and gives him a pen and assures him he can function both as a kadi (provincial judge) and as a leading poet. When ‘Ata’i is blocked composing a mesnevi, his deceased father, the poet Nev’i Efendi appears and addresses him as “O young bud of the garden of my heart.” Telling him “I built a fountain of pure milk in this house.Strive so that it continues to flow. Do not bring it to a halt.” 

     In 'Ata'i's time, one preacher condemned visits to grave sites from the minbar of Ayasofya, while another praised them from the Blue Mosque just opposite. For 'Ata’i the wise dead are “guardians of the world”. Their bodies are beneath the earth, but their spirits open like wonderful ever-growing flowers.  

    Let’s notice these were scary times. The paranoid Sultan roamed the streets of Istanbul at night with his guards, sniffing for any tell-tale trace of tobacco; if he catches anyone smoking he will have him killed. Anyone caught walking without a light was also subject to immediate execution.
    The author of the Garden of Truths steadies himself in dangerous times with the knowledge that he has allies and bonds beyond death. He presents himself as custodian and gardener for wise men accessible to him in dreams. As a gardener, he removes weeds, prunes, fertilizes, displays unique plants. Asli  Niyazioğlu has rendered a tremendous service to the history of dreaming - which must also be a history of the role of dreams in social interaction - in this careful and fascinating study of Ottoman dreams and biographies. 

From Ottoman Istanbul: A Sufi cure for a dream drought

According to his biographers, when Ibrahim Tennuri wanted to become a disciple of the Bayrami sheikh Akşemseddîn (d. 1459), the sheikh asked him about his dreams. As he could not remember any, he was placed in a retreat for forty days. The retreat worked: he had a hundred dreams and remembered each with great precision.

The subject of this review article is Dreams and Lives in Ottoman Istanbul: A Seventeenth-Century Biographer's Perspective  by Asli Niyazioğlu. Published by Routledge for the Birmingham Byzantine and Ottoman Studies Series, 2016. 

Art: anonymous painted illustration of the garden of Sa'dabad at Kağıthane, Istanbul, ca. 1720.

Dreaming with the Departed: First Responder

Drumming for a group to call up dreams of the departed, I found my mind going back to the produce section of a supermarket where I met Fireman Tom six months after he had come to a one-day shamanic workshop with me. He came to that class because he was hungry for contact with his departed wife. He had spent two years visiting psychic mediums and others and had received lots of messages but that wasn’t good enough. He needed direct contact. He was a one-woman guy who had married his high school sweetheart. No, he had not dreamed of her and rarely remembered dreams. I assured him that when we had set a clear intention and opened the right kind of portal, he would ride to his deceased wife on the shamanic drumming I would provide.

He came back from that journey beaming. He met a guide he thought was Gabriel but didn’t want to get too grand so they agreed Tom would call him “Gabe”. He escorted Tom to a pleasant green field where tables had been set up to welcome and process new arrivals. Tom recognized Mary working at one of the tables. She did not look up when he first approached her. When he got her attention she still seemed distracted by the papers in front of her.

“Don’t you love me anymore?”

“Of course I do. But I’ve got a lot of work to do here – work I love – and you have lots of years ahead of you down their Tom. Please go back and enjoy them”

When Tom shared his journey report in my workshop, he concluded, with a shy grin, “So I guess it would be okay to ask that girl from the church out now.”

The “girl” was sixty-five. They had both felt some chemistry but Tom thought he would be disloyal to his wife if he went with another woman – until he met Mary on the Other Side. He really was a one-woman man.

When I met him in the supermarket thirty years ago, Tom was tanned and fit, not only looking fifty pounds lighter but fifteen years younger,

I asked, “What happened to you?”.

“I just came back from my honeymoon in Jamaica. I married that girl from the church.”

Warm memories from that exchange, in front of the oranges and tangerines, washed through me as I listened in class to the sounds of bubbling spring water. I had asked everyone to allow a story or image to come from the well of dreams and memory, Was it only a wonderful memory that was coming to me now, or was there more of the story to be reveled?

I knew in that moment that Tom had died since I last saw him. His honeymoon was thirty years ago and he was in his late sixties at the time. How was he getting on now?

Immediately, I found myself looking in on another scene. Its vividness scared away any doubt that this was absolutely real.

I saw Tom in an old brick firehouse, in his blue fireman’s uniform. The siren had just sounded, and he sprang into action. He wrapped his legs round the pole and slid down to the ground floor where the engines were waiting. He looked as he had done as a young man, hearty and strong, maybe thirty years old. Tom was a first responder again.

I saw him rush to the scene of an accident. A man’s body lay on the road. Above it, half-formed of smoke-like substance, was a second body, leaving him from the abdomen. His consciousness was in the second body but blurry. He had no idea what had happened. There was a real risk that as he settled into his dense etheric body, he would confuse it with his physical body and fail to understand his situation. Those who have died suddenly, without preparation for conditions after death, often get lost or confused in this way.

Tom acted decisively, as first responder for a victim of sudden death. I observed him comforting and steadying the spirit of the man who had been killed on the road. I knew he would soon lead him to the guides who would escort him on the next stage stage of his journey to his new life. I wondered whether Tom would still call one of them Gabe.

Drawing: "First Responder" by Robert Moss

Ghost Writers: The Rhyming Case of the Thirteen Lost Cantos

Classic mystery writer Dorothy L. Sayers maintained that her best work was not any of her novels but her translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. When she died in 1957 the last thirteen cantos of her translation of the Commedia – the final verses of the Paradiso – remained unfinished. They were completed by her friend Barbara Reynolds in a remarkable feat of ghost-writing described by Reynolds in her 2006 biography, Dante: The Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man.

There is an extraordinary literary echo here, involving another kind of ghost. When Dante died, the same thirteen cantos were missing from his text of the Paradiso. 

Dante succumbed suddenly to malaria in 1321. He had been elated, not long before, to complete the Commedia during a burst of writing in Ravenna, on the Adriatic. Now his survivors could not find the final thirteen cantos.

In his Vita di Dante, Boccaccio relates how Dante’s children and “disciples” searched for the lost cantos for months, only to give up in despair, “enraged” that God would take Dante from the world before sharing the entirety of his work. Two of his children, Jacopo and Piero, decided they would attempt to complete the work themselves. Luckily, a miracle occurred to “check [this] foolish presumption.”

Exactly eight months after his death, Dante appeared in a dream to Jacopo. He showed himself with a shining face, in shining white garments. Jacopo asked him if he was alive. Dante replied, “Yes, but with the true life, not this life of ours [in the world]”. Jacopo asked about the lost cantos. Dante took him to a room where he used to sleep. He touched one of the walls and said, “Here is what you have been looking for.”  

Jacopo woke up and enlisted a friend to help search the house where his father had lived. They inspected the wall Dante had indicated. They searched behind a rug hanging in front of "a little window in the wall" and found the missing cantos “all moldy with the damp of the wall, and close to rotting if they had stayed there much longer.”

Illustration for the Paradiso by Giovanni di Paolo, 1450

Wakeful Ecstasies of Swedenborg

 

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) was the son of a Lutheran bishop attached to the Swedish court. Living at the dawn of modern science, he mastered all the sciences of his day. He was driven by a passion for knowledge. He became fluent in nine languages. He made his own telescope and produces designs for a submarine and an airplane. He published a whole library of scientific treatises on subjects ranging from algebra to fossils, from hematology to the brain. In the words of one of his biographers, “he exhausted all the known sciences after founding several of them.”

Then he brought his towering intellect and his experiential approach to the study of the unseen. He was called to the new work by his dreams. In his fifties, he began keeping a dream journal in which he was wholly frank about erotic dreams as well as spiritual adventures. In twilight states, between sleep and waking, he found himself being drawn into experience of a deeper reality. Surfacing from sleep, he found himself entering “wakeful ecstasies.” 

I lay awake, but as if in a vision; I could open my eyes and be awake if I wanted to, but yet I was in the spirit — there was an inward and sensible joy through my whole body. 

In the city of Delft, on the night of April 6, 1744, Swedenborg experienced the vision that transformed his life and work. Retiring early, he wrestled with an entity he described as the Tempter. After his struggles, he heard a noise under his bed, which he interpreted as the departure of this dark being.

He started shivering uncontrollably.  He was at last able to snatch a few hours’ sleep. Then: 

I trembled violently from head to foot and there was a great sound as of many storms colliding, which shook me and threw me on my face. In the moment I was thrown down I was fully awake and saw how I was thrown down. 

Terrified by this wholly vivid experience of being propelled outside his physical body, Swedenborg prayed for help. As he held up his folded hands — the hands of his subtle body — “a hand came which clasped mine hard.” He found himself in the presence of a radiant being he took to be Christ. 

I saw him face-to-face….He spoke to me and asked if I had a certificate of health. I answered, “Lord thou knowest that better than I.” He said, “Well, then act.” 

Afterward, Swedenborg found himself traveling far and deep into nonordinary reality in a state that was “neither sleep nor wakefulness.” He conversed and interacted with beings in the spirit would “the same as with my familiars here on earth, and this almost continuously.” He conversed with dead people “of all classes,” including many people he had known during their physical lives. They gave him information he was able to verify and put to use. 

These encounters gave him a firsthand understanding of the conditions of the afterlife. Previously, his religious faith had convinced him that the spirit survives physical death. Now he could begin to study how it survives.

He gained important insights from encounters with departed people he had known before their deaths. He discovered that dead people are frequently confused about their situation because they cannot distinguish between the physical body and the subtle body. During the funeral of Christopher Polhem, one of his former teachers, Polhem “came through” to Swedenborg, “asking why he was buried when he was still alive.” The dead man was puzzled by the fact that, while the priest sermonized about the resurrection of the dead at the Last Judgment, “he was still alive” and “sensible of being in a body.”

 Swedenborg’s observation of the condition of other spirits in the afterlife led him to formulate the important observation that “when a man dies, his soul does not divest itself of its peculiarities.” He observed the condition of the executed nobleman Eric Brahe and reported that two days after his death “he began to return to his former state of life, which was to love worldly things, and after three days he became just as he was previously in the world.”

The departed follow the path of their desire and understanding. In his soul journeys, Swedenborg tracked them into many regions in the Otherworld. He encountered an angelic guide who told him that the “other members of his society” were appalled by the “crass ignorance” of the real conditions of the afterlife that prevailed among Westerners even after they took up residence in the spirit world.       
Swedenborg’s mentor told him that “angels” of his rank are instructed to gather newly arrived spirits, find out their ideas about heavenly joy — and give them what they desire. “You know that everyone that has desired heaven…is introduced after death into those particular joys which he had imagined.”

For example, there is a heaven for big talkers and another for big eaters. There is a paradise for those who believe the promise that they will rule with Christ forever; they see themselves enthroned as kings and princes. If you think of heaven as a beautiful garden, you get to smell the roses. But in all cases, according to Swedenborg’s mentor, you will be bored to distraction within two days. 

Now that you are ready to move beyond your expectations, the guide assigned to you can begin to instruct you on further possibilities. By one means or another, you will learn that happiness requires “doing something that us useful to ourselves and others.” Swedenborg’s angel explains that heaven is not a fixed environment or program of events, but a state that corresponds to — or is actually created by — the spiritual condition of its inhabitants.

The local clergy were not enthusiastic about Swedenborg’s road maps, or the fact that his example might encourage others to go exploring for themselves. Inflamed by Swedenborg’s observation that few priests (“that order of which very few are saved”) seemed to prosper on the other side, a Swedish minister plotted to have him judged insane and committed to a lunatic asylum.

Swedenborg’s geography of the afterlife was the gift of experience, which invites us to go beyond his maps, just as he went beyond the maps of previous explorers. His basic travel techniques will be recognized by active dreamers. They include: 

Deep relaxation: He would close his eyes, focus his attention on a single theme or target, and slow his breath. He first practiced this approach, especially breath control, in childhood during morning and evening prayers. He spoke of the “passive potency” of his meditation practice. The heart of it was to “withdraw the mind from terms and ideas that are broken, limited, and material.”

Experiment in the twilight zone: The half-dream state on the cusp between sleep and waking was Swedenborg’s favorite launchpad. He described this state as “the sweetest of all, for heaven then operates into [the] rational mind in the utmost tranquility.” He worked with both spontaneous and familiar photisms. For example, he writes of an “affirming flame” that would appear on his inner screen at the start of a journey or in the midst of a writing binge, reassuring him that conditions were favorable and that he was on the right track. 

Soul journeying: Swedenborg developed a fluid ability to shift consciousness and travel beyond the physical plane. “When I am alone my soul as it were out of the body and in the other world; in all respects I am in a visible manner there as I am here.” 

Night and day, he lived and worked as an active dreamer. His banker friend Robsahm observed that Swedenborg “worked without much regard to the distinction of day and night. Swedenborg himself noted, “When I am sleepy, I got to bed.” He kept a fire going at all times, drank large quantities of coffee with a huge amount of sugar. His dress at home was a robe in summer, a reindeer coat in winter.

Across the centuries, his words echo as a clarion call to new generations of explorers who refuse to settle their accounts with possibility and just do it: 

I am well aware that many will say that no one can possibly speak with spirits and angels so long as he lives in the body; and many will say that it is all fancy, others that I relate such things in order to gain credence, and others will make other objections. But by all this I am not deterred, for I have seen, I have heard, I have felt.

 

 

Text partly adapted from Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and LifeBeyond Death by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Illustration from Swedenborg Foundation

Dream visits with 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. Then there are the dream encounters in which I am with someone who died on the event track we shared in in this world but seems to be alive in a physical body on an alternate event track, in a parallel world.

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.

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.  My narrative “The Silent Lovers” in 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. I can confirm that Yeats  was absolutely right when he said, with poetic clarity, that the living have the ability to assist the imaginations of the dead.

Illustration: "Alive Among the Dead". Journal drawing by Robert Moss with digital colorization

How Bull became a believer in dreams

The thing most likely to bring people awake to the importance of dreams is a visitation from the deceased. The number one reason why people of every background have chosen to share dreams with me, over the years, is that they have dreamed of a dead relative or friend. They want confirmation that the encounter is real, they would like guidance on what to do about it, or simply need to share something that has moved them at the core.

For men in particular, such dream visitations can be life-changing. Hard heads who previously dismissed dreams and prided themselves on having no connection with the inner life crack open when dad or granddad turns up in a dream. Take the case of Bull.

That was the nickname his buddies had given him. He is a huge man, a linebacker, and a police officer for a big city department, the kind of guy for whom touchy-feely doesn’t come easy. Then came the night when he would have died but for the intervention of a dead man.

As he tells the story, he came home hammered that night and fell into bed alone. His girlfriend was working late. As he slept, his grandfather appeared to him in a dream. He had loved his granddad and they had been very close when Bull was a boy. But this was not a gentle visitation. Bull’s grandfather slapped him and shook him, shouting “Wake up!”

Bull woke with a start and sat up. The bedside clock told him it was 5:00 a.m. He felt wet. He looked down and saw that the whole bed was filled with blood. He had a varicose vein that had popped .He called 911 and the ambulance came right away He lost 5 pints of blood and was in intensive care for two days. They told him that if he had not woken up when he did, he would have died.

Bull says, “I never thought much about my dreams but after this I am a believer.” The dream visitation saved his life and shook his world.

For much more on dreaming with the departed see chapter 7 of Conscious Dreaming and The Dreamer's Book of the Dead.

Cave art: Aurochs at Lascaux

 

How dreaming gets us through

In our current closed-down society, people who did not previously make much room in their lives for dreams are dreaming up a storm. Unused to sharing or working with dreams, they often shout out, “Why am I having this weird dream?” As a lifelong dreamer who devotes much of his time to teaching others how to dream, let me offer a few general observations: 

1.Dreams always tell us more than we already know. Don’t dismiss any dream, or tag it as “weird” or trivial, until you have recorded it and looked carefully at what is going on here.

2. "Weirdness" in dreams may be special effects your dream producers bring in to dramatize something you need to understand or act upon, such as the need for social distancing and self monitoring.

3Dreaming may be traveling; you make visits and you receive visitations. Your social life may be very restricted in ordinary life, but you can be as social as you like in your dreams. You can go to that farmer's market or that travel destination you've been missing. I dreamed I wass in Aruba the other night, lying back under a palupa on the white sand beach with the taste of sea salt and lime daiquiri on my lips. I did not feel downcast when I reurned to my body's housebound condition. I enjoyed the full after effects of a mini vacation and did not have to pay for a plane ticket or wait for bags.

4.You have intuitive radar that comes fully alive in dreams. You see things happening at a distance in time and space. You check out the possible future. You see unwanted events in the possible future you may be able to avoid if you clarify your dream information and take appropriate action. You see desirable future scenarios -your dream home, your dream partner, your dream job – that you may be able to manifest if you follow the road map your dream has given you.

5. In dreams, you can go to a night cinema where the feature films are made especially for you. You are not confined to sitting in the audience. You can step through the screen and become scriptwriter, director an star of your own life movies.

6. You can talk to the dead in your dreams. There is nothing “weird” or unnatural about contact with the deceased, especially in dreams. We meet them because they are still around, or because they come visiting, or because in our dream travels we go to places where they are alive. Sometimes they have guidance for us. Sometimes they need our help because they are stuck or confused, and may have been hurled into the afterlife without preparation or rituals of leave-taking. With so much death around us, this is a very good time to learn, with the deceased, that consciousness survives the death of the body and that life goes on in whatever world.

7. Dreaming, you have access to wiser sources than those available to the daily trivial mind: to the god/goddess you can talk to, to the ancestors, to a Greater Self. Your dreams are a voice of conscience and course correction, showing you how your current actions and attitudes appear to an objective, witness self. Dreams are a way for your true spiritual guides to get past the cynical, reductionist skeptic in your left brain and recall you to your bigger story.

8. Your dreams are a factory of images that can help you stay well or get well.  Your body believes in images. Find the right ones and you program the amazing pharmaceuticals factory inside you to pump out the right drugs, boosting your immune system.

9. You don't need to go to sleep in order to dream. Your most powerful dreaming may unfold in the twilight zone between sleep and awake. You may journey like the ancient shamans, hyper-awake. The scales may drop from your eyes so you see that the world around you is a forest of living symbols looking at you.

10.Active dreaming is a path of real magic. In my lexicon, true magic is what happens when we bring gifts from another world into this one. We do this when we remember our dreams and act to embody their energy and guidance in everyday life. And when we wake up to the fact that dreaming is not fundamentally about what happens during sleep. Dreaming is about waking up to a deeper reality and deeper sources of meaning in our lives

To get good at dreaming, as with anything else, requires practice, practice, practice. Three things to do now:

* Keep a journal. Date each entry and give it a title. This is going to become the most important book on dreams you will ever read: your personal encyclopedia of symbols, our data log for “supernormal” phenomena like clairvoyance and precognition, a place where you dialog with your Self and your inner teachers, a workout for the writer and creator in you.

*Learn some of the core techniques of Active Dreaming, my original synthesis of dreamwork and shamanism. These include using the Nine Keys to Your Dreams explained in my book Conscious Dreaming, practicing the Dream Reentry technique, and learning to navigate by synchronicity, which is the dreamer’s way of operating 24/7/ You’ll find a short guide to my relevant books here. You may also want to check out my online video courses for The Shift Network

*Learn my Lightning Dreamwork technique, a fast, fun process by which we can share a dream or a personal story with a friend, give each other helpful feedback (without presuming to tell each other what our dreams or our lives mean) and help each other determine what action we should take to embody guidance and energy from the story.

Get to know your dreams better and you may find that if you still want to call them "weird" you will use the word in older sense. Though few of us remember its origin, weird is derived from Wyrd, which is a way of understanding how things in all the worlds are connected, and turn together. In the Scotland of my paternal ancestors, to be “weirdless” was to be unlucky or unfortunate in life. 

Photo: Under a palupa on Manchebo beach, Aruba, by RM

The state of our soles

In dreams, the state of our footwear often suggests the state of our souls. You can hear the echo of "soul" in "sole". A dream of lost shoes may invite us to think about where on the roads of life we may have lost or misplaced soul. Sometimes you can reach back into that kind of dream in order to look for lost shoes, and that search may take you back to a place in your life where you lost something more important - vital energy and identity - that you can now reclaim.  

    Shoes not only have soles. They have ties, and the state of your laces or straps in a dream may say something about connections - "old ties" or new ones. A woman getting ready to attend a high school reunion in Manhattan dreamed she was urgently seeking shoes that would be comfortable for walking yet smart enough to suit her taste. A salesman in a fancy store persuaded her to purchase a pair of sneakers with laces made of genuine, but flexible, gold. She smiled at the thought that after all the years since graduation, her ties to her classmates were "golden", and that she would be comfortable with them in the big city. 

     A Freudian psychiatrist I know dreamed that her shoes were far too tight; they were torturing her feet and making it nearly impossible for her to walk. When she reflected on this, she realized that her Freudian approach was cramping her ability to do her job. She expanded her studies, embracing Jung and other approaches to the psyche and its healing. Now, in her dreams, her shoes usually fit just right. 

     In some dreams, we find ourselves wearing shoes that would be highly unlikely in regular life, except at a costume party. We seem to be cross-dressing, or wearing the footwear of a different historical period, or dispensing with shoes altogether in a primal landscape. When we inspect the bodies we inhabit in dreams of this kind, we sometimes discover that our dream self slipped into someone else's situation, in a different place or a different era. The state of our shoes in such dreams (and other details) may be a clue to connections within a soul family that includes personalities in different times.  

      That thought has been of great interest to me since I dreamed that I visited my favorite professor at a research institution where he was doing some remarkable work that involved pairs of shoes. The professor is Manning Clark, the famous Australian historian, who was a great friend and mentor to me when I was a student and a precocious lecturer at the Australian National University. Manning died in 1991, but I have had many intriguing encounters with him since.
     In the dream involving shoes, Manning showed me that he is now busily engaged in studying "parallel lives". This meta-historical approach seems to involve tracking how choices made and actions taken by two people living in different times impact each other's fortunes, by a process of causation that you can only grasp if you can step outside linear chronology. One of the pairs Manning had selected for study was Lenin and Dionysius of Syracuse (a tyrant of ancient Greece). Each time the professor finished work on one set of parallel lives, he moved a pair of shoes to a different position on the far side of his desk. This was evidently a kind of tally, but I felt the shoes signified something more. 

    There is an angel of shoes, or more especially sandals, the most common footwear when his name was most commonly invoked. He is Sandalphon, and his name is still important in the pathworking and astral travel protocols of certain Mystery and kabbalistic orders. He wears sandals in the presence of his Maker, and leather footgear in the presence of Shekinah, the Divine Feminine. Some say he was once the prophet Elijah, or Elias. He presides over the astral body and the soul journeys we make in this vehicle. Some believe he watches over the big journeys that precede birth and follow death, which involve putting on and discarding "garments", like soft shoes. 

     In the Terry Gilliam movie "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus", a well-heeled lady is whisked away to a paradise of shoe-lovers, and stilleto heels by top designer Jerome C. Rousseau dance along the seabed. 

     Common expressions involving footwear may provide clues to where your dream is walking. A few that jump to mind:

- Goody two-shoes
- if the shoe fits...

- well-heeled
- given the boot
- pulled himself up by his own bootstraps
- to know someone, you must walk in his shoes (or moccasins)
- if you were in my shoes...

- those are big shoes to fill

- get your skates on

- put on your dancing shoes

So - what's in your shoe closet, in your dreams?

For more on dreams that show the state of our soul - and can provide portals for soul recovery healing - please see my book Dreaming the Soul Back Home.

Dreaming with Robin Williams

Sarah Sera Sera is a wildly creative and entertaining dream teacher, performance artist and storyteller in the Portland,Oregon area. Her flair for comedy is such that it is not surprising that she attracted a dream mentor and playmate with the face and personality of Robin  Williams. When I gave an advanced group the assignment of selecting nine dreams that had made a mark in their lives and weaving a story from them, Sarah selected nine of her dreams of Robin Williams. She then produced a wonderfully funny script that I hope will be performed on stage. You can read the full narrative if you follow the link at the end of this delightful guest blog I asked Sarah to write, with Robin, to introduce their oneiric relations. She just messaged me that Robin says “Feel free to give her writing assignments as you find entertaining. But she is unlikely to follow the rules.”

Guest blog by Sara Sera Sera

I turned on my computer and started an email to Robert Moss. It’s 5:30 AM. OMG, why am I up and writing to Robert Moss at 5:30 AM?

In my mind's eye, the archetype expressed most recently and accurately by the late, great, Robin Williams appears in midair to my right.

“You okay, kid?” Robin asks.

I’m glad he’s wearing a festive long winter hat. I smile. He’s in a four poster bed in midair in my apartment. Don’t worry, it’s not creepy. He’s also wearing an old time white nightshirt.

I sink under my weighted blanket. “My chest hurts, my friend. It feels like I’ve been stabbed repeatedly.”

Robin lifts a candle. He is using the base of a candle holder I remember from my father’s family cabin when I was little. “Nice touch,” I think.

Robin shines the candle light on my bed to look at me. He yawns largely. I can see something is very awry about his hat, but the light isn’t bright enough for me to make out what’s off.

“What were you dreaming?” He asks.

I pick up my cell phone. I look at the notes to see what I’ve written.

“In my dream, I dance where comedy meets with tragedy. I see the storyline glimmering upon the surface of waters, and when I see the specific fragment I would like to know, I stretch out my hand and lift the glimmering gold line. The line wraps around my arm and I gather the song from inside the fragment and become that song.”

Robin blinks at me. He twists his face in a strange expression, slightly dazed.

“I’m going to need a lot of coffee for that one,” he says. “Is it time to get up? I guess I’m up now.”

I don’t move, it’s still not even 6am yet.

“OK. I request paid assistants from the universe,” I reply.

“What do you think I am?” Robin asks. “You think the universe sends me to just anybody?”

“Yes,” I say. “And now that I’ve begun to channel you, you once again get to bring new life to people in new ways. So, yes, I do think anyone can invoke you. But… I get to be your favorite story teller for the next little bit of our journey.” I wink at him.

Robin must have got bored with my monologue, he is looking at a room service menu. I don’t know where he gets these ideas, I don’t have room service here. Oh wait – that’s genius. I’ll put in a request to the universe. The universe loves me. “Excellent idea, my friend! Ahem… Universe? I want room service options, here, on site.”

Robin looks at me over his reading glasses. “You could easily make your own coffee and flavor it with good intentions”.

Robin chuckles. Now he’s reading a newspaper. I’m glad he keeps the old school traditions alive. Its so nostalgic to read a paper.

“Alright. What are you planning to work on before you make coffee?” Robin asks.

“I haven’t committed to getting up yet.” But now I’m thinking about coffee and that may be the best course of action. Robin is a wise guide after all.

“Alexa,” I say, and stop short. I just heard a dolphin squeak when I said Alexa. Oh that’s right, I have a bad cold. Perhaps that’s the explanation for why my chest feels like I’ve been repeatedly stabbed.

I try again, pressing on thru the inhuman squeaking that should be my voice. “Alexa, play Xanadu Soundtrack.”

Robin groans and falls back on his bed holding a pillow tightly over his head.

Olivia begins to sing, “Come take my hand, you should know me, I’ve always been in your mind… You know I will be kind, I’ll be guiding you.”

“How does this replace your other submission, ‘9 dreams and Robin Williams’?” Robin asks.

Olivia continues singing over Robin as if she doesn’t know he is speaking. “Building your dream, has to start now, there’s no other road to take.”

“Simple. I’ll post that essay on “I Am Always Dreaming”. This is submission becomes a teaser. It’s long enough to intrigue the fans of your school in Anamnesis and the department of “Comedy from Tragedy”, but it’s not so long that people pare inspired to send ‘TL;DNR’ comments to Robert. I’m polite that way.” I pause as I feel a wave of déjà vu, and realize it’s actually déjà reve. “I think I’ve dreamt this conversation before.”

“You have to believe we are magic…” Olivia is on a roll and unstopable! I start to sing along, but quickly stop when I realize the voice of the dolphins isn’t fond of singing in English.

But Olivia didn’t stop. When I recover from my coughing fit, I hear her sing, “I’ll bring all your dreams alive, for you.”

Read the original “9 dreams and Robin Williams” over at https://iamalwaysdreaming.com/blog/f/9-dreams-and-robin-williams.