Mutual lucid dreaming on the Moon of grass

Boulder, Colorado

I spent the weekend in Boulder, leading an Active Dreaming workshop. On the Thursday evening before the workshop, 111 people (nice number) braved rain and sleet to come to the Boulder Bookstore for my talk on The Secret History of Dreaming. The energy was crackling as we explored the need to reclaim ancient tools of healing and seership such as the construction of webs of dreaming by intentional families to scan the environment and scout out the possible future in order to help whole communities to thrive and survive.

Someone at the bookstore commented on all the Bear energy he felt I had brought into the space. So I was cheered - after driving through a snowstorm to Denver the following afternoon for another bookstore event, at the Tattered Cover - to be welcomed to the downtown area by a huge blue bear saluting his double in the glass facade of the conference center.

The weekend workshop was held on the Naropa campus. I was reminded how, the night before I first traveled to Boulder, twelve years ago, I dreamed I had a delightful dinner conversation with an Asian man I regarded as "a shaman in a business suit". He had a great sense of humor, enjoyed a drink or three, and had the aura of a true magician. We talked about life and death and the larger reality. When I got to Boulder and reported my dream to people at Naropa University, they were convinced that my "shaman in a business suit" was Chögyam Trungpa, the Tibetan Buddhist teacher who founded Naropa, enjoyed alcohol, and once greeted the Governor of Colorado by saying, "Welcome to my kingdom." Chögyam Trungpa had died long before my visit, but it would have been very like him - so one of his former students said - to appear in nonordinary reality to welcome a visiting teacher.

In the Active Dreaming workshop, I was struck by the depth of our shared experiences in dream tracking and group dream travel. A Swiss woman in the group shared a dream in which she is on the deck of a cruise ship at night. The moon grows bigger and bigger until it fills half the sky, to the right of the boat. As she nears the moon, she is amazed and thrilled to see that it is covered with lush green vegetation that reminds her of scenes from her childhood in the French part of Switzerland. She is eager to reenter this dream and so, of course, are we.

We set the intention to travel together and explore this moon of grass. People arrange themselves comfortably in the space, and I drum to fuel the journey. I find it unusually difficult to enter the dreamscape as it was described to us. I can get on the cruise ship easily enough, and feel the rhythms of the waves. But however hard I try, I cannot visualize the moon on the right side of the boat; it continues to hang in the sky on the left. So I try a path I have used before, the path of moonlight on water. Now the moon of my vision is straight ahead, across the ocean, laying a path of light along which I travel into the realm of Luna. There is no sign of the lush green vegetation the dreamer described. Instead, I see locales familiar to me from previous journeys. Something inspires me to go through this lunar scenery. I travel rapidly through a series of doors and passages and come out in a lush green garden on the other side of the moon. The high grass and the flowering trees are full of eyes, the eyes of boys and girls who are living here. I understand that this is a place of Lost Children, who came here when the world was too much (or too little). I think about how to bring them home to the grown-ups in the world who are missing their beautiful moon children. As I turn around, I see that the moon - the moon of grass - is now on my right.

The Swiss dreamer's report of her own journey was extraordinary. In the realm of the moon, she found a tool of vision: an abalone shell filled with water. As she looked in this mirror of water, she saw a second self, looking in an abalone shell - at another, smaller self, looking at a yet smaller version...and so on, all the way down. Then she sensed a larger self, viewing her in a mirror or water...and so on, all the way up. From this lovely and simple vision of nested realities her consciousness expanded and she began to perceive something of the possible shape of the multiverse.

Dream Reentry and Tracking with a Navajo Elder

Later in the workshop, I was privileged to work with a Navajo elder named Abraham who had driven up from Flagstaff because he had heard that I dream in the way of the ancestors, and can teach others how to do that. He wanted to reenter a dream from many years ago. In 1984, he told the smaller group of dream trackers we formed for this exploration, he dreamed he was riding a paint across the desert with his deceased gradfather and a famly friend who had also passed on. They were riding hard towards a great rounded sandstone boulder rising above the dunes. He knew there were important teachings to be received at this place. But the dream was interrupted and he was unable to get back to that place.

When I drummed for the journey, I enjoyed galloping across the desert on a cream horse with a white mane. Rattlesnakes sounded a warning as I neared the great sandstone boulder. I could see no obvious way either to enter the sandstone - using it as a portal - or to move beyond it. I began to feel that perhaps this was sacred territory reserved for the Navajo and that I was not welcome within it. Then I sensed something above me and looked up to find a giant eagle - an eagle as big as a mountain - hovering overhead. Its wings were striped in horizontal bands of bright rainbow colors. I looked down at the ground and saw the same rainbow eagle depicted in a sand painting at my feet. In that moment, I realized I had stepped through the sandstone portal and been received into a Navajo imaginal world. I walked by water, and saw Abraham walking there too, with an animal ally at his heel. I heard the long blessing way chants of his grandfather, and witnessed some indigenous ways of healing.

When we shared journey reports, the deep grooves on Abraham's face opened into a smile of delight as I described the rainbow eagle. He proceeded to tell us how he had found a place of sacred teaching and healing by water, inside the world of the sandstone boulder, and had been followed everywhere by a gila monster - regarded by his people as a great diagnostician - that he would now work with, consciously, as an ally in healing work. He pronounced "gila" the Spanish way, so it sounded like he was speaking of a "healer monster".

Later I was privileged to have Abraham as one of my trackers when I shared a dream from the Saturday night in which, on my way to giving a lecture on Sir William Johnson and the Iroquois in a huge auditorium, I found myself on top of a soaring mountain, inside a security fence, and had to jump down in order to give my presentation. Abraham saw the mountain becoming an eagle, with the area at the crest within the security fence as the head of a bald eagle, and then saw the mountain-sized eagle wrapping itself around me to guide and protect. Thea, another of my trackers, had a very down-to-earth vision of my dream. She advised me to remember "not to make mountains out of molehills" and to remember to "come down to earth" in order to reach all my audiences where they live. I loved both messages, which were nicely balanced and again demonstrated how we always benefit from multiple perspectives on our dream material.

- My journal entry for April 21, 2009

Architects of the Imaginal Realm

                                                                   

"You are a space architect,"one of my students told me. "You create tents of vision and bring us inside for shared adventures."

     I like the idea that I am an architect of imaginal space. I dream of scholar cities and pleasure domes, of temples and libraries in a real world that is constantly and delightfully under construction. I invite others to accompany me to the Moon Café, and the House of Time, to the Silver Airport and the Cosmic Video Store. I give them route maps and floor plans. I tell them how to deal with gatekeepers, what to offer and what to leave behind.
     I help invited visitors to frame their intentions: to meet a guide or an ancestral soul, to find a find a new song or look (if they dare) in their Book of Life, to design a home on the Other Side, to embrace a lover in an apple orchard at the edge of Faerie. I don’t lead them around like a tour guide. I open space, then turn them loose to make fresh discoveries on their own.
    The travelers add to the locations they visit. Their very presence makes the ground more solid, the structures more durable and more complex. They are composed of subtle stuff, but may endure longer than buildings of steel and concrete.
     The taste and imagination of visitors add flourishes and sometimes whole floors. In these ideoplastic environments, every visitor is a builder and decorator. A bronze mirror replaces a daguerreotype; a cello is heard in a music room that wasn't there before; a wall of books in the Magic Library rolls back to reveal a druid wood; golden carp gleam in the pool of the Garden of Memory.
    I created a huge tent, the kind used for family reunions and elegant outdoor weddings, and told my invited guests that they could come here to encounter and reclaim multiple aspects of self and soul. I showed group after group the way to this House of Gifts, and to make sure they did not get lost, I assigned the sheepdog of shamanic drumming to sort out their brainwaves. These visits produced marvels. Then I noticed that what I had raised as a tent had grown in wondrous ways. From one side, it looked like a fairytale castle; from another, like a Victorian mansion with many wings and countless rooms to open one by one.
     The act of observation, we are informed by quantum physics, makes things, even worlds. Looking brings definite events into manifestation out of a soup of possibilities, Heisenberg's "world of tendencies." Frequent explorers of the Imaginal Realm are quite familiar with the observer effect. I am constantly astonished, though rarely surprised, by how the travelers who follow my maps change what they look at. There is now a pink woman with an elephant's head at the ticket counter of the Cinema of Lost Dreams, and there is a three-headed oracle on the dark side of the Moon.

The Woman Who No Longer Remembers Her Dreams

What a pleasure it is to read a very human and deliciously entertaining novel that dramatizes how the arts of dreaming can be used to help get us through the troubles of everyday life, from a water leak in an apartment to a family tragedy or the need to get corporate types out of their left brains and the bars on a country retreat. Florence Lautrédou succeeds brilliantly in giving us an effortless seminar in Active Dreaming - especially the core techniques of dream reentry and tracking - in her new book La femme qui ne se souvenait plus de ses rêves, published in Paris by the prestigious house of Odile Jacob. 

Florence is well-equipped to play dream guide; she is not only a psychoanalyst, coach and previously successful novelist but was a highly gifted participant in the French version of my training for teachers of Active Dreaming at the Hameau de l'Etoile near Montpellier in southern France. She has  traveled with me through the portal of a remembered dream with the aid of shamanic drumming and focused intention. 

 

Florence had me near the beginning of her new book, when her narrator, Anna, says that "My dream fled from me at the end of the night, as it did every morning. Or am I the one who disappears when the night is done?"

The story of Anna, psychoanalyst and single mother, unfolds under the shadow of a literal tragedy: the death of the well known analyst and author Anne Dufourmontelle, who drowned trying to rescue two boys from a sudden storm at sea in 2017. The theme of being overwhelmed by water courses through Anna's days and night - in a rare dream in which she in on a sinking barge, in the leak that has sprung on her floor and forces her out of her apartment.

Her dreams start to return with a visitation by a deceased neighbor, a curmudgeonly eccentric, also an analyst,  who kept no records apart from a hundred boxes of soiled Kleenex. She tells Anna in the dream, "I am you". 

Anna's fitness coach Fabien claims never to dream. His Rx for any existential problem is always:  More sport. "Enfile les baskets" Getting her trainers on in a rush causes Anna to sprain her ankle.

A day comes when Fabien finally has a dream and has to tell it. "It's too strong to keep inside." He tells Anna that in the dream he is with his daughter. They meet two swans who lean their heads on their shoulders then take them flying to a vast and beautiful beach. The swans disappear and now Fabien is with his ex and his daughter, embracing. 

Fascinated, Anna recalls the swans of mythology, of how Aengus can only claim  Caer Inbormeith, the girl from his dreams by taking the form of the swan she has become. She reflects on how Fabien's happy dream came at the end of a happy day when, unusually, he talked and walked with his daughter in the woods. Not a compensation dream, then. Not to be stuffed in some clinical category. The dream could be seen instead as the product of carburants, of the right fuel.  Anna derives the lesson that "You have to get into your life to nourish your dreams of the night."

Anna's dreams start to come back, and deepen. She dreams of a chasm. She is hanging from a cliff by her fingernails. A Finnish woman in green satin appears and takes a cello from its case. Anna is sure she is going to fall to her death but the cellist throws her a rope and three men rise from the abyss to lift her to safety.  

She can't talk about this to the first person she sees, a client she's been encouraging to talk dreams but says frankly he's not interested in other people's dreams and is still sympathetic to the notion that there is no time for dreams in the battle of life. She can't tell her supervisor.

A month after her dream of the chasm she hears inner voices that tell her You are not alone and You are building. On a night walk in Paris she sees the woman with a cello who threw her a lifeline. She asks, "Have I begin to live my dreams?"

When I arrived at page 97 I found that I had become a character in the novel.

Anna is trying to explain to her fitness coach how it is possible for two or more people to enter the same dream space. She proceeds to give a description of the dream reentry and tracking techniques taught and practiced by... Robert Moss.

"It is possible to enter the dreams of others. Shamans do it. Robert Moss, a dream specialist, practices this with groups. It's called a reentry...

"You gather in a room. The one who wants to go back inside a dream tells it to the others so they can go too. Each person chooses an image that inspires them, a point of departure. The lights are dimmed, the drum rolls, and off we go!"

The novel shows us how this can be used to heal group dynamics as well as individual lives. A corporate client hires Anna to facilitate a weekend retreat (on "Confidence") at a chateau in the Vexin. I know many chateaus and country estates in France that now host retreats, and Florence's depiction of the ambience is flawless. 

Out of the office, among the trees, the suits from Paris party late and drink deep and arrive for their morning session haggard and hungover. All Anna remembers from her dreams is that she received a short email with the brief message: Pas grave, c'est le CC qui compte. "Don't worry, it's the CC that counts". 

She gets the message on her way to the meeting. CC means cut the crap. When characters in this novel get to the point, they start firing off bursts of Franglais or outright American English, which by my observation is true to life among French professionals today. The log jam is broken. They are out of the boxes of their left brains and their formal agendas.

Creative solutions come flooding, and a more generous approach to staff and the community. The boss brigs solutions he has dreamed to the office. The group arrange to meet again, on the Breton coast and in the woods, to practice Active Dreaming together. We see lives mended, wounds healed, inner compasses restored. "You have taught me to serve my dreams," Olivier, the boss, tells Anna. When his team gather for their second retreat, Olivier says, "What we need is to know what we truly want."

"Together?" 

"Exactly. Fais-nous rêver. Make us dream."

Note on translation: All translations from La femme qui ne se souvenait plus de ses rêves are by Robert Moss. Florence's novel is not yet available in English, but I hope that it will be soon.

Swan photo by Romy Needham

 

The Dream Web

 A document from a a possible future describing a the practices of a commonwealth of dreamers.

In place of a constitution, Dreamland has a charter that the founders titled 

RULES FOR HERDING CATS

            One of the rules reads as follows:

When a decision is required on a matter of community importance, the people must come together in the Big House and make a web.

In the first years of Dreamland, when the community was small, there was only one Big House, built of very simple materials around a great tree that rose through the roof like a ladder into the sky. Now Dreamland has many Big Houses, but the making of a dreaming web is essentially the same. Standing in a great circle at nightfall as they sing songs of Earth, the weavers raise the Mother’s energy into the vital centers and share it hand to hand, giving and receiving. When the energy is flowing strong between them, they each project ropelike energy cords to a common center and began to weave and shape the web. The cords flash with many colors, but as they interweave they glow sparkling white. When the chief weavers are satisfied that the web is strong enough to serve the group intention, the dreamers lie down in a cartwheel on the floor.

Lying together in the dark, with their web of dreaming glowing above and around them, the dreamers sing their group intention, over and over. As they sing, the web grows. It will grow until it has brought within it everything the dreamers need to see and know. As the energy filaments stretch, they may encompass the whole planet. All times are accessible. Years or centuries may slip by, like blown leaves, in the group perception. While the group visions together within the web, individual Dreamers move along its strands, agile as human spiders, and drop down on scenes they choose to see close-up.

At daybreak, the Dreamers share their perceptions, and the necessary decision becomes clear. They say there is no need to count heads when hearts are joined and connected to the heart of the Mother.

Text adapted from "Dreamland: Documents from a Possible Future" in Active Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Spider web photo from Wikipedia

 

From Bear Man to Sun Falcon: healing through group shamanic dreaming

Niskayuna, New York

I am the beneficiary of an extraordinary group experience of healing and initiation achieved through a shamanic journey through the portal of a personal dream. The dream was shared last night by a member of one of my circles of active dreamers.
    The night before our gathering, the dreamer found herself in a cave with intriguing paintings on the walls: of fire, sun and moon, stars. All these images seemed alive. A being rose from the depths of the cave. She could not tell whether he was human or animal. He was entirely covered in fur. He looked more like a bear than anything else. He said, "Are you ready?" She replied, without hesitation, "I am". She knew that he was talking about a portal that had opened behind him. She saw a waterfall, and a vivid green landscape, and a unicorn. The bear man stepped aside, inviting her to go through.
   But she woke before going through the portal. She was excited, but also disappointed that the adventure remained unfinished.
   "Wouldn't you like to go back inside the dream and carry on the adventure now?" I asked, after she told us the dream.
    She was eager to do this. She was familiar with our process of making shamanic journeys, with the aid of drumming, through the gateway of a personal dream. The idea is simple: if you have been some place in a dream, you can go there again, just as you can return to a place you have visited in ordinary life.
    "When you are back inside the dream," I said, "what are you going to do?"
    She told us she wanted to talk to the caveman, inspect the paintings on the cave walls, go out through the waterfall, find the unicorn - and let the rest unfold.
     "Do we have your permission to come with you?"
     "Absolutely."
     We were now almost ready for a group adventure through a dream portal that excited and intrigued all of us in the circle. We made time for people to ask a few questions - traveler's questions, not analytic ones. "Could you see the sky above the waterfall from inside the cave?" "Was the cave man wearing his own fur, or something he had put on?" The answer to that one was unclear. We agreed that this was one of many things for our trackers to check out, an idea that brought plenty of chuckles from the women in the circle.
     We closed the curtains against the gloaming and stretched out - all except me, since I was the drummer.
    With the first tap of the drum, we were there, all together, inside the cave. I saw a whole soul history in the cave paintings, and saw others checking them out. Some of the symbols, especially a lake of fire, were familiar to me from images on the walls of Egyptian temple tombs.
     I monitored the dreamer's fresh encounter with the bear man. I noticed that he could appear as more or less bear, or more or less human, at his choosing, and that whatever he was wearing (or not wearing was his own). He was potent and well-equipped, but the space he opened was about more than sex.
    "You are in the cave of your heart," he told the dreamer. "This portal is open only to those who follow the heart."
   I watched her plunge straight into the waterfall. I followed suit. I enjoyed the shock of the water beating down on my head, pummeling my body. I felt deep cleansing, and staying in the falls far longer that I had expected - maybe an hour of ordinary time - in the few minutes my physical body was drumming for the group.
   Then I was out above the falls, grabbing salmon out of the river, feasting on the fish and offering them to my family of bears.
   When I remembered to check on the dreamer, I saw she was safely off, on the back of the white unicorn, surely headed for a fresh personal adventure and initiation.
    I thought about my own need for bodily healing. I had had a rough few days, with flu-like symptoms and other irritations, whose source was not yet clear. I saw a huge, bat-like thing flapping across the sky to my left. Was this a form of my affliction, or its source? I asked for help to deal with it.
    A giant falcon appeared, flying straight from the sun. The red-tailed hawk is a special friend of mine, but I will call his cousin here a falcon, because of what evolved. Sun-bright, the falcon pursued the dark thing across the sky, seized it with his talons, grappled with it in mid-air and forced it down and down and down to a hole in the earth. When I looked in the hole, I saw a ravening maw, edged by countless irregular snapping teeth, as long as knives.
    The sun falcon was fiercely intent on ending whatever story the black thing embodied. He forced it down into the toothed hole, which snapped shut over it. I found myself exultant, rising to my feet as I drummed. Now I felt the wings of the falcon against the sides of my face, of my head. He held me and shared his power and his knowing. I knew who was with me. Horus, divine warrior, eternal opponent of darkness and dark forces, healer and protector.
    I stayed in full Egyptian mode for the next phases of the journeyer. I experienced a series of kheperu - becomings or transforming - familiar to me from long-ago journeys and far memory of ancient lives. I meet the lion, pass through its skin, and claim the fullness of its power and roam with my pride.
    I am aware of my duty to the group. Many of us now seem to be in a sacred wood where gatekeepers native to this land where we are living and drumming stand guard. The guardians are friendly.
    I return from the cave of the heart, and my Egypt of the heart, and sound the recall.
    After we take times to record our experiences, the travel reports are rich. One tracker is suprised that she found herself among falcons and lions. I reassure her that she was in the realm of shared experience.
    The original cave dreamer told us, with awe, that the unicorn flew her to a place of encounter with an ancient medicine teacher. Her discoveries continued in dreams of the night. She told me this morning:    
   "I went back into that cave and met the bear man again. You were there and we were looking at the pictures on the wall. It was a story of an ancient civilization and the bear man said that in the future dreamers, healers and teachers were needed to build a community of one heart."
     Dreamers, healers and teachers are needed to build a community of one heart. Yes indeed. Some of us are working on that, night and day, day and night.

"Horus Resolution" (c) Robert Moss. June 11, 2014. 

Ravens release the dead

Prague

Two ravens, up in the branches of the Soul Tree. One black and one white. They want me to go down to a place in the Lower World where cleansing and healing is needed. I will travel this time under their wings.
    We go down through the roots of the tree, down and down, to an immense field of the dead. Countless bodies are lying here, many of them thrown on top of each other in mountainous piles. What is to be done with all these bodies of people slaughtered and abandoned, over all the centuries of war and invasion here in the Bloodlands?
    The ravens know. I hover with the great pair, black and white, over the field. At their command, under their directions, thousand of black ravens flock to the field. They tear at the corpses, stripping meat and sinew from the bones. They gorge until all the corpses have been stripped to the bones, which gleam white and clean in the sourceless twilight of this realm.
    Now something rises like steam from the bones. A great vaporous cloud, light gray, becoming lighter and more diaphanous as it rises. It is collective spirit that is rising, released from the unhappy dead. I am seeing something that Alfons Mucha tried to paint, in "Apotheosis of the Slavs", the final painting in his magnificent and harrowing series of giant canvases, the Slav Epic: a kind of resurrection of Slavic spirit.
    I am awed, and seized by sudden hope for the collective healing that may be possible here in the broken heartlands of Europe.
    I feel an urgent need to commune with the Goddess of these lands. She has shown herself to me in many forms. Here and now, she reveals herself in a primal form. The vast slopes of her body look like bread dough - like a loaf of bread, big as a mountain, that is shaped but not yet baked.
    What is the breakage of human tides to her? Blood and bone, blood and bone. All the bodies, buried, burned or unburied, have made her more fertile. She lives, she rises, she will give ripe harvests.
    I resolve to go out into the country, when my workshop is over, and make an offering to the Goddess of this land. What can a man offer the Earth Goddess? Only the return of her gifts. Bread and beer and honey.

- My experience while leading a group journey into ancestral realms in my Shamanic Dreaming workshop in Prague this weekend.


Detail from Alfons Mucha, "After the Battle of Grunwald" currently on exhibit at the National Gallery in Prague. Photo by RM.

The Strand of Imagination

We agree to meet at the Strand, the venerable, vast and lively bookstore at the corner of Broadway and East 12^th Street in Manhattan. The area used to be called Book Row, but of all the bookshops that flourished here around the time the Strand opened its doors in 1927, this is the sole survivor. It has remained a family business, ownership descending through the progeny of Ben Bass, the founder. In the time when the Strand boasted that it contained eight miles of books, a wag stated that the eight miles of New York worth preserving were inside its walls. The bookstore has grown since; it now boasts no less than 18 miles of books.

    In the year I lived in Manhattan, my arms were often sore from toting big shopping bags of twice-sold tales from the Strand up to my modest apartment in Yorkville. On flying visits to the city since, I have often failed to ration my book-buying at the Strand sufficiently to pass the weight inspection for suitcases at airports. Besides the expected and unexpected treasures in all the cases of old books, the Strand is the place to get a new book at half price. The velocity at which review copies pour into the store makes it hard to believe that many of those reviewers even opened their copies before generating a little extra income.
    The Strand has long been, for me, one of those magic bookshops where the shelf elves produce exactly the right book to guide or redirect a creative intent. When I was writing a chapter of a novella in which W.B.Yeats is at home in his rooms in the Woburn Buildings, off Tavistock Square, circa 1900, my youngest daughter - who did not know about my project - visited the rare book room at the Strand and brought me back a rare prize, a memoir of Yeats by John Masefield in which the English poet evokes beautifully the experience of visiting the Irish poet in that London apartment.
    The Strand has a place in my imaginal geography, as well as my physical rambles. I go there in night dreams, and in wide-awake shamanic journeys to places in the imaginal realm, a world of true imagination beyond the physical (but not the inner) senses where we can access wise teachers and extraordinary places of healing, initiation and higher learning.
     When I was writing about Harriet Tubman, who used her dreams and visions to guide escaping slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad before the American Civil War, I found myself roaming the Strand in the middle of the night in my astral body, in that wondrously fluid state of consciousness that sleep researchers call hypnagogia and I prefer to call the twilight zone. Down in the basement, I met Harriet Tubman, wearing a hat pulled down over her forehead and a shapeless coat. She showed me that her skills as a tracker and guide owed a great deal to the shamanic ways of the Ashante, her father's people, and especially to the leopard, the favorite animal spirit of West African shamans and shapeshifters. I used the insights I gained in the basement of the Strand that night in my chapter on Tubman in The Secret History of Dreaming.
    I shared this "old" dream with the participants in a shamanic dreaming workshop I led at the New York Open Center last weekend. There was great excitement when I suggested that all of us could use the Strand as a portal for an adventure in the imaginal realm, with the aim of contacting master teachers or practitioners in whatever fields most interested us. Most people in the workshop knew the Strand.
    I explained that we could use our memories of the physical bookstore in order to enter a space beyond it. We might find that by opening any book, we could enter the world it contained. We might discover that a bookshop in Manhattan could become the gateway to a Secret Library, where all knowledge is accessible.
    When I was sure that everyone had been seized by the intention to explore, and the workshop participants had placed their bodies in comfortable positions for journeying, I used my gee-whiz technology - a single-headed frame drum - to provide fuel and focus for our group adventure. I always journey for myself while drumming for the group; I immediately found myself at the corner of Broadway and 12^th. After a cursory look at the sale items in the stalls on the sidewalk, I headed into the store. I noticed a memorial display for Maurice Sendak, and paused to check the prices of recycled review copies of a few novels I had recently purchased: Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Prisoner of Heaven, Alan Furst's Mission to Paris, Joseph Kanon's Istanbul Passage.

    I took the stairs to the basement and found Graham Greene waiting for me there. I have talked to that grand English novelist and entertainer (or the part of myself that relishes him) before, and he has given me excellent advice on the practice of writing, advice I have not always followed. Greene was a consummate professional, able to sit down and crank out his 750 words a day however many drinks he had shared with a Soviet agent, a whisky priest, or a bevy of filles de joie the night before. I wondered if he would nudge me towards trying my hand again at a tale of intrigue; in a former life, back in the 1980s, I published a series of popular spy novels. Ah, something more interesting. Greene offered me some tips on writing a memoir. I shall re-read his own autobiographical works, especially A Sort of Life and Ways of Escape.
    Behind Greene, among the stacks, I saw a dark-haired young fellow in a trenchcoat. Who was that? It gave me a shiver to realize I was looking at a much younger version of myself, the 1980s thriller writer, seen now very much as he appeared on the dust jacket of a couple of my early novels. I did not engage with him directly.
    I went to the right, down book-lined passages, and met other figures, including a magical child with a treasure chest full of stories for children that I might yet write. As I continued drumming, I found myself in a passage where books rose to the ceiling. The passage turned and turned in a spiral until - poof - I came out in a space where the first thing I saw was a spray of black feathers, and the black embroidered hem of a long woman's dress.
    I found myself in the presence of a gloriously over-the-top lady of a certain age, still desirable and very sure of her place in a social and literary world she had made for herself. She was dressed all in black, with a black feather boa and a magnificent dress with plunging decolletage. She gave me her pen name and allowed me a glimpse of her life. Her admirers include American tycoons and European counts; she allows only a very select few to share her intimate favors. There are those in high places who rely on her as a psychic medium; it is her special pleasure to connect people with their past lives. Out of this life, she has written a wildly successful series of romps that blend the metaphysical with the bodice-ripper and the policier.
    I was astonished, though not altogether surprised, to realize that I knew this lady writer. At the end of the 1980s, when I had abandoned the commercial path, I found myself held up for a long time at a customs inspection. While I submitted to questions and inspections, I noticed a flamboyant woman in furs breezing past complaint officials at a parallel checkpoint; they whisked her Louis Vuitton bags through, uninspected. The lady in furs turned to me and blew me a kiss. She called to me, "Maybe we'll meet again."
    That was, of course, a dream. When I thought about it at the time, I chuckled, realizing that I had caught a glimpse of my inner Happy Hooker, the part of me that had been willing to put out my work for a price. Here she was again, in a black feather boa. Why?
   Write in my voice, said my Happy Hooker. Write in my name, if you like. You can still write about the things that matter to you, while you give people even more fun.

    Hmm. I'll need to think about that.
    When I sounded the recall with the drum, our intrepid dream travelers brought back a marvelous set of personal reports, featuring encounters with dead poets and master chefs, with a children's writer and a Neoplatonist philosopher, with Chekhov and with Virginia Woolf. Wonderful what one can find, in the Strand of imagination.

Meeting doubles on the many roads of time

I am having a grand time demonstrating how it is possible to step in and out of the bodies and life situations of doubles on parallel event tracks, and how this can be used for healing and mutual empowerment. For this demonstration, I have chosen doubles from my present lifetime, alternate Roberts who made different choices. All times are accessible.

      I jump into situations that belong both to a parallel past, a parallel present, and a possible future, but the time in each scene is always Now. I can make choices in all these situations. In the place of an alternate Robert, for example, I choose to behave generously, avoiding blame and shame, in an incident involving a former partner after the time when (in ordinary reality) we had separated.

      My demonstration is in the service of teaching others how to do these things, at a workshop that has become a very exciting group experiment.

     I allow the group to watch my moves, which look to them as if I am stepping in and out of sliding doors. We proceed to develop a simple new model of doubling and travel between parallel universes.

Feelings: Excited, almost elated.

Reality: Several much more detailed dream reports from the past week seemed to involve jumps of this kind, into the situation of doubles on alternate event tracks. I found two of these experiences, involving former partners, to be very healing and resolving - beautiful, really - and woke from them energized and happy. I have crafted and led a number of group experiments in visiting doubles in parallel universes, and I am interested in developing a model of understanding that will bring together current speculation in physics (where is is now widely hypothesized that we are living in one of possibly infinite parallel universes) with the experience of dreamers, who go to parallel worlds (by my experience and observation) most nights.

Follow-up: When I got online after this dream, I found an announcement for the English translation of a book by French physicist Jean-Pierre Garnier Malet. He has developed a "theory of doubling" In his Théorie du dédoublement, Garnier Malet suggests that the "doubling" of time and space is a "law of physics" that offers us "temporal openings" - opportunities to step in and out of time and by so doing, change our possible future for the better. These opportunities are enhanced when we become conscious of the existence of our doubles and draw on their superior knowledge. I learned about Garnier-Malet's work when I was teaching in France in November 2010, and picked up French-language copies of a couple of his books.

      In Le double... comment ça marche? Garnier Malet urges us to learn to "drink time", as a thirsty animal drinks from a stream. He explains that this means "drinking information from the past and the future during sleep. Dreams are there to allow us to do this. Haven't you noticed that dreams put us in a different kind of time?." I think I am in favor of drinking time, maybe even ready for a binge.

Wing of Hawk brings me back to basics

Gore Mountain, New York

When we gather round the great fireplace in the meeting lodge on this magic mountain, our assignment for the first group journey is always the same: to re-connect with the animal powers and the spirits of the land. Their presence is palpable even before the drumming begins, a benign wind scented by woodsmoke, pine and spruce.

On Friday night, my assignment for the second journey is to gather tools and resources to deepen our understanding and practice of soul recovery healing. As I drum for the group, there is a great stir of activity in my inner sight and my attention shifts at high velocity between many scenes and sources of guidances.

Then I feel a soft slap on my upper right arm. My eyes remain closed, as I continue to focus on my drumming and pursuing my own visions. The soft slap is repeated. I open my eyes and glance at my neighbor, Carol, who has journeyed with me in this way for nearly 20 years. Is she trying to alert me to something, or has she just lost sense of body space in the grip of her own visions? I see that Carol is motionless, a couple of feet away, absorbed in her own journey.

I close my eyes and once again feel that sensation that something is gently slapping my upper arm. It feels like....a wing. I see it now, and then the whole body of the red-tailed hawk rises before me in a glory of feathers, wings outspread. As it goes up, I feel a stir about my shoulders. Once again, red-tailed hawk is lending me wings. I allow myself to rise up, in a subtle body, while my physical body maintains the drumming and part of my awareness remains focused on the group.

I am carried, at great speed, to a place I know well. I was brought here, to a place in the northern woods, nearly 25 years ago, on the wings of hawk for my first encounter with an ancient Native woman who began my education in her ways of dreaming and healing once I consented to learn her language and change my life. I have called her Island Woman in my books *, because she was brought, as a child captive, from a Huron village on an island in Ontario to become an adopted Mohawk, and eventually Mother of the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk people. When I enter her presence, I am within a blaze of white light. White Wolf is here. To the north, at the source of the light, I see the radiant form of the Peacemaker. Great antlers rise from his head like living candelabra.

Information streams into me, as fast as a burst transmission. I am here to reclaim what I learned in my past studies with Island Woman. Dreams show us the secret wishes of the soul, and in a community that is spiritually alive, people will gather round those who have seen dreams to help them discern the wishes of the soul, as revealed in those dreams - and to take action to honor the soul's wishes. We must move with the soul energy that becomes available through dreams. It is not enough to sit around talking. Soul wants to clap its hands and sing. We want to embody our dreams by singing, by play-acting, by dancing, by every form of spontaneous creative expression.

I am reminded, also, of the great teaching stories of the origin myths of Island Woman's people, and especially the story of the real Hiawatha. Before he became speaker and champion for the Peacemaker, Hiawatha was a fallen man. He fell so low he dined on the body-parts of fellow-humans. His transformation began when he saw his true face in a mirror - the reflective surface of the water in the pot in which he intended to boil up the organs of a butchered enemy. When he saw the radiance and beauty of his greater Self, he gave up his old habits and committed himself to a path with heart, and eventually became the "man of good mind" who led his people out of the Dark Times.

When Hiawatha overcame his most terrible enemy, the tyrant-sorcerer Tododaho, he did not kill him. He combed the serpents of evil out of his hair. After this spiritual cleansing, he raised up his former adversary to join the men of good minds, the rotiyaner, who are confirmed by the clanmothers as the traditional chiefs of the Haudenosaunee, or People of the Longhouse, among whom the Mohawk guard the Eastern door.

There are tremendous lessons here about soul awakening and soul healing. It was hard for me to hold back the tears as the truth of Island Woman's way streamed through my mind and my inner senses. The most important knowledge, it may be, comes through reclaiming what we already know.

Time to return to the circle. I enjoyed riding a thermal over Lake Champlain, and then the view across the mountains to our lodge. My traveling self rejoined my drumming self. drummed the recall, and our dream travelers all came home to the circle, charged with energy and insight for the extraordinary adventures that unfolded over the weekend.

* My fullest account is in Dreamways of the Iroquois.

Dressed for the hike to the Grotto of the Ancients

Madison, Wisconsin

On going to bed on Friday night, I asked guidance for the workshop on Shamanic Lucid Dreaming I was leading over the weekend. I woke with this dream:

I am wearing a magnificent duster (a long, ankle-length riding coat) that flares at the bottom. It is buttery in texture, and very light golden brown in color.

At a security check, the X-ray scan sets off alarms. The security guys are very respecful as I search the pockets of the duster and finally a concealed pocket in the hem to see what may have set off the concern. I bring out a magnificent amber-colored stone that may actually be a big chunk of amber, the colors ranging from dark to golden and near-white. In the concealed pocket are lots of coins, including at least a dozen heavy gold coins. I lay these things out on the table. Security is satisfiied and lets me take everything with me.

     I re-examine my finds in a private space, surprised that I had completely forgotten that I possessed the gold coins. I now notice that my possessions also contain a fine, narow gold ring set with a ruby. I try it on my fingers experimentally. It perfectly fits the "marriage finger" of my left hand, but I decide not to wear it.

     I now resume leadership of a group I am leading into wild and beautiful country. When not sporting my duster, I am wearing a well-fitted three-piece pinstripe suit, but no tie and with rough hiking boots. This feels like the right garb for my leadership role, asserting authority but still informal (no tie etc).

     We proceed along a dappled trail through woods. I see a most interesting stone on the trail and pick it up. The stone is the size of a brick, with rounded edges. It seems to glow from within. On each side of the stone is the image of an African lion. He looks alive. I am thrilled with excitement, but replace the lion stone on the trail. I know this is a blessing and also protection for the group.

     We walk a long way to a magical grotto, one of the destinations we have agreed on for the journey. As we enter the cavernous space, huge, possibly sculpted figures rise in a semi-circle before us. The colors are wonderful, across a spectrum from cobal through turquoise to acquamarine. There is something vaguely Buddhist about the figures, but I suspect they are much more ancient than the coming of Siddhartha. Are they sculpted, and worn by time and water, or natura formations - or the preserved forms of some very ancient entities?

     We will explore these questions together, in the grotto.

Feelings: Delight, excitement

Reality: My workshop is being hosted by a horsewoman who keeps horses, on a little farm in Wisconsin horse country. I don't wear a duster, but the style (later borrowed by J.Peterman in the U.S.) is quintessentialy Australian. It is at least 35 years since I have worn a 3-piece suit, but I do (in and out of the dream) understand the need to consider self-presentation and the balance between informality and authority that must be worked by a leader and presenter.

     I have a strong connection with the lion, and with amber.

Follow-up: On Saturday, I turned this dream into the map for a group experiment in shamanic lucid dreaming, with wonderful results. Many of us had the experience of dreaming together in another reality, with mutually confirming discoveries. For example, many dreamers (including myself) found that it was necessary to use one or two of the coins to pay the Gatekeeper. Many found a healing pool in the Grotto of the Ancients, and were able to travel within or through the giant figures to powers beyond them.

When the world is your body

In one of my workshops, a woman I'll call Lara shared a dream titled “War”. She was very agitated and upset as she retold it.

I am on patrol with six women dressed in green uniforms. We are all riding motorcycles. The stars seem very close. I don’t want to look at them. I don’t know where we are to begin with, then I realize we are near my home town. Enemy missiles are coming in. Our people are firing missiles to stop them, but their aim is all wrong. I keep yelling to warn them they are missing their targets, but they don’t hear or don’t act. An enemy missile hits the place where I was born and I know it has been obliterated.

Lara connected this dream with a series of “end of the world” dreams, but found this one the scariest. In our early discussion of her dream, she did not tell us that she had been undergoing medical treatment and has been worried about her doctors. This came out only at the end of the process, and we did not ask for details.

After some hesitation, Lara agreed to my suggestion that she should try to go back inside her dream through our Dream Reentry technique. She also agreed to allow all the other dreams in the workshop - a circle of 35 - to make a group journey into her dreamspace, where we would support her and gather further information for her as dream trackers.

I asked her to set a clear intention for Dream Reentry. She stated that her intention was to “heal the dream” by preventing the enemy missiles from getting through. I then started drumming to give the group fuel and focus for the group expedition.

In her Dream Reentry, Lara made interesting discoveries. She found the dream cities full of “pink houses” that she had not seen or remembered before. The stars, once again, were ominously close and she did not want to look at them. She was unable to fulfill her intention to "heal the dream". Something more remained to be done.

In tracking for Lara, my first aim was to establish whether her dream related to a literal threat of war or terrorism. It soon became clear to me that it did not. I looked for the women in green that Lara had described and found they were wearing nurses’ hospital scrubs. These nurses are aware of alternative approaches and can help to temper the allopathic approach.

I called on my dream allies to support Lara and I saw the Bear come through and wrapped her in healing energy. It seemed to me that the world of Lara's dream was the world of her body, and that all the war was raging within her body. I saw the menacing stars as cancer cells, threatening to metastasize. The “pink houses” were Lara's cellular system. The missiles being fired off were her doctors’ efforts to come up with the right mix of chemicals to treat her condition. The threat of missing or misfiring reflected the danger that the doctors would get the treatment wrong.

I tried to assist Lara in her intention to “heal the dream”, experimenting with setting up shields. I saw the missile fired at her birthplace deflected so that it landed in the river and was washed out to the sea.

I had the strong feeling that Lara could work with her dream imagery in the direction of healing, that it might even be possible to re-weave the pattern of the stars.

When we shared travel reports at the end of the group journey, I was cautious in telling Lara what I had seen, not wanting to project any negative images or scenarios. "In my dream of your dream," I began, She accepted what I brought quickly and gratefully, telling us immediately that there was a very real danger that what her doctors were doing – or might try to do – would misfire. She resolved to carry the dream warning as an advisory and to look for help from the “warrior nurses”.

Other members of the group reported that in their own journeys, they had seen the Bear embrace Lara and surround her with its healing and protective energy.

This adventure in group dreaming brought into sharp focus the need to determine whether the world of our dreams is the world out there, or our personal world, or the world inside the body, in which dramas and battles are also playing out. Because dreams work and speak on many levels, an individual dream may relate to all three of these worlds, and to a world beyond the ones we know.

For a full explanation of Dream Reentry and tracking, core techniques of Active Dreaming, please read my books Conscious Dreaming and The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence and Imagination.

Night battle via Future Invention Gallery

Awakening to dreams in Portland

Portland, Oregon

Dreaming is not fundamentally about sleep, though I greatly value the sleep dreams that come spontaneously and offer us an objective view of ourselves and our place in the worlds. Dreaming is essentially about waking up to a larger reality and a secret logic of events that are often hidden from the everyday conscious mind. So it seems fitting that my Active Dreaming workshop in Portland this weekend is unfolding in a lovely center called Awakenings. The sun smiled on us all Saturday, which is already a dreamlike event in this rainy city.

I asked the dreamers who joined our circle to introduce themsleves by sharing their intention for the weekend, and the title of a dream or image, which enabled us gto taste the flavor of each other's imaginations right at the start. I noted some of the intention:

"I want to learn how to bring the energy of my dreams into 3D reality."

"I want to make closer links between my dreaming and my writing."

"I'm here to deepen my practice of dreaming."

"I want to use dreaming to integrate my inner child into my adult world."

"I'm here to acquire tools to re-vision education for children, to help them and their families bring back soul and to make them safe with their dreams."

"I'm here to move beyond getting weireded out when my dreams turn into real events in waking life."

"I'm here to find new direction for my painting, and my life."

These generous statements of intention gave us a vivid sense of expanding horisons of possibility. I demonstrated our quick, high-energy dream sharing process - Lightning Dreamwork - with three volunteers who undertook the assignment to tell us a dream as a story, and to hold the attention of the audience. One of the gifts of dream sharing is that, when we do it right, we find our voice and develop our skills as storytellers. An even greater gift, especially for newcomers, is that when we are heard with deep attention and given the right kind of feedback, we receive vital validation of our inner lives and our soul quests.

Stephani told us a dream of being back in her former home, trying to sort out old clothersm when a pirate ship appeared on a body of water at her door that doesn't exist in the regular world.

Jaya's dream took us into deep ancestral territory. She found herself riding in the back of a van by a river. She witnessed a mysterious ritual in which seven people clad in wolfskins performed a sacred dance around the bodies of dead wolves. As they danced, light rose from them, forming a cone shape that then opened out and produced the head of a wolf among the stars. The dreamer urgently wanted to stop the van and see more, but was unable to influence the driver. She woke with a profound sense of longing. She leaped at the suggestion that she might be able to reenter the dream, with the help of shamanic drumming, and get out of the van and ask the wolf people for permission to learn the nature of their ritual and of their connection with the Wolf Star.

In a dream of equal mythic power, a man stepped into a river carrying a sword. In the water, his sword became a chalice. On the far side of the river, he saw a family of bears. He became alarmed when they stared at him fiercely, and he turned away though he felt the object of his quest lay beyond the bears. "I feel the bears are gatekeepers, and that I need to face them and go beyond them." He welcomed the idea that he too, could reenter his dream, wide awake and conscious, and confront the bears and seek to discover what lay beyond them.

So here we had two excellent plans for dream reentry and group dreaming - for an exercise in what could be termed shamanic lucid dreaming. The wolf dreamer and the bear dreamer gave permission for the whole group to travel with them, back into their dreams and to explore beyond the remembered scenes and carry the action forward. In two group journeys powered by shamanic drumming, we shared extraordinarily powerful and moving adventures.


As a lunchbreak assignment, I asked everyone to be alert for anything striking or unusual that entered their field of perception as they roamed the town - to be open to receiving symbolic popups from the world. Waiting for coffee on my way back from lunch, I noticed Stephani, who had dreamed of pirates, standing in front of a corner bar, a block away from our workshop site, talking on her cell phone. The sign above her head, apparently unnoticed until now, read "The Jolly Roger". Life rhymes, and there are dresms that want to come into the surface world, some singing pirate songs.