The Question on the Bridge

 

After midnight, I lie on my back and close my eyes. I do much of my best work in bed but not when I approach it in the spirit of work. I tell my friends who are serious meditators that my favorite spiritual practice is horizontal mediation, but I don’t say this seriously. No mantras, no breathwork by the numbers, no specified body postures, no fixed agenda. I’ll just let my body get comfy and be open to what flows in my mind and my inner senses. Relaxed attention, or attentive relaxation. That’s all I require of myself. Sometimes it enables me to maintain continuity of consciousness through all the phases of the night. 
     When images come, I may let them rise and fall, content to see what is surfacing from my subconscious or looking in from the limitless universe outside me. If no images come, I’ll be content to drift off into industrial sleep and let my body rest. I may wake up to the fact I am dreaming inside a dream, or not. I may not recall my dreams from the first sleep cycle, though I will check and pay attention to my feelings and sensations when I am missing a story. I can usually detect a dream hangover even when I have lost the dream that caused it. Most often it’s the sense of being jet lagged, or travel worn. I know where that comes from. With or without travel plans, my dreams are often excursions. I get out and about. I visit places on the other side of this world, and in parallel worlds, and in worlds where the dead and the living rub shoulders. The Society for Psychical Research called such outings psychical excursions. A Moroccan dream interpreter calls them exits of the soul.
      For now, though, I’m just lying on my back. My right leg is bent at the knee, giving me the look of the Hanged Man in the Tarot. I straighten it out and give it a good stretch. Shreds and blotches of color float by on my mental screen. There’s a wriggling something pushing in from the edge that could be a giant millipede if I let it, but I wish it to become a lovely many-leaf plant. Geometric patterns form and reform, then textures, weaving and netting, then a parade of faces – some like cartoons or kids’ drawings, many realistic, so many. For a while, it’s like rush hour at a subway station. Everything is changing and racing fast and there are constant popups and inserts. It’s hard to hold onto anything much. I remember William James saying that in ten minutes in the liminal space of hypnagogia, he saw a thousand images. That sounds about right.
      Things are still busy on my mental screen, but there are two notable changes. First, the scene is slowing and stabilizing. Second, I am in it. I’m no longer a voyeur. I’m out and about, on a bridge, with streams of pedestrians moving both ways on either side of me. I smell salt water, engine oil, and fish. The people on the bridge are mostly dark skinned. Many of the women wear hijabs and long form-concealing dresses. A few are in full burkas. A boy on a bicycle is selling round breakfast rolls. I can smell the poppy seeds.
     I am happy when my senses come alive as they are doing now. It means I’m there, in a real place I may or may not be able to name. It means I have bilocated, because while I am walking on the bridge, wishing for one of the poppyseed rolls,  I am perfectly aware that my body is in bed, and I can look in on it. I can wave to myself if I like, though that might confuse the people on the bridge. Or rather, it wouldn’t, because there is no sign that they can see me or are remotely aware of my presence.
   I know exactly where I am now. I am in suspension. I am on the Bosphorus Bridge, a steel suspension bridge that joins the continents of Europe and Asia. Before me and behind me are the two halves of the enormous world-city, Istanbul.  I see boats of all sizes on the water, monstrous container ships from the Black Sea, ferries from the Princes Islands, fishing dhows and floating restaurants.
     I'm not conscious of cars or trucks on the bridge, just the stream of pedestrians walking both ways, of varied ethnicity and dress.
      A woman steps out of the crowd. With a few steps, she is in front of me. She wears a long white silk garment, streaming to her ankles. Her matching hijab covers her face except for her dark shining eyes. In this simple Muslim garb, she is unspeakably elegant, and I know she is very beautiful. There is a faint smell of roses. She looks hard at me and asks, "Are you Turkish - or Romanian?"
     I am so surprised by the question, cadenced by the pause, that I fall out of the dream and am fully back in the body on the bed.
     Fortunately, I have some experience of revisiting dreams.
     I will myself back to the bridge, and wish the woman in white to still be there.
     There is a shimmer where she stood, then she reappears. It’s a little like watching an image emerge from a blur of pixels. But now she seems fully present. I smell roses, and the long dark hair she keeps covered. I told her I am amused by her question. I have friends in both Turkey and Romania. I taught and traveled in both countries and flew back and forth between Istanbul and Bucharest.
      She has brought me a message. She speaks for a Sufi order – she names it - that is interested in my work and would like to meet me. Will I be coming to Turkey soon?
       I would be honored to meet, I tell her.

 

The next day, I receive an invitation from a friend to return to Turkey to lead a workshop. Does my friend know the Sufi order that was mentioned on the bridge? Yes. It is famous for accepting women as equals with men, and for incorporating some shamanic methods for shifting consciousness.
      There are dreams that spill into the world.

Illustration: "Are You Turkish or Romanian?" RM + AI

Looking for Muirthemne

 

First, the dream. Then, the half-dream and the poet speech.

May 7, 2025

dream
Looking for Muirthemne

I'm in a familiar, frustrating dream situation: I have set off from a certain location but now I can't find my way back, because my rambles have taken me into strange territory. Sometimes I find I have forgotten the address and the name of the place where I am staying. Not so this time. Seeking direction, I tell people, "I am going to Muirthemne." They don't understand me. Am I saying "Miercoles", Spanish for Wednesday?

When I return from my dream outing, I recognize the Irish word and my mind goes to Lady Gregory's translation of the old legends of a warrior hero. The book was published in 1902 as Cuchulain of Muirthemne and was in the advance guard of the Irish literary revival. Augusta Gregory described how her friend and protege W.B. Yeats instructed her to take on this task: "I dreamed that I had been writing some article & that W.B.Y. said 'It's not your business to write – Your business is to make an atmosphere'". [1]

Yeats was not faint in his praise for the book he inspired in a dream. He began his Preface to Cuchulain of Muirthemne with these lines: "I think this book is the best that has come out of Ireland in my time. Perhaps I should say that it is the best book that has ever come out of Ireland; for the stories which it tells are a chief part of Ireland’s gift to the imagination of the world - and it tells them perfectly for the first time." 2]

In a Note in the text on the conversation of Cuchulain and Emer he salutes the “poet speech” of early Irish literature that "everywhere brings the odor of the wild woods into our nostrils." He hints that poet speech can lift the veil between the worlds.

So I lay down again, letting my body relax towards the half-dream state, and sang in my mind a poem that came to me long ago in a dream. I knew it to be a wing song when it came, a song that lifts you and gives you the power of flight beyond the body and beyond the world, and may entertain friendly spirits as well. When I first woke with the song, I phoned two musical friends to ask them to record the notes so they were not lost. My friends were out so I sang into their voicemail. I managed to retain the tune, and to record several verses, although one is enough for flight.

On my back in bed this morning, with early light seeping through the drapes, I sang We are sleeping till we're dreaming We are dreaming for awakening We're awakening for our homecoming into the La-and I had vivid sensations of lifting effortlessly from my body in the bed. I felt great wings extend outward and upward from my shoulders. I revelled in the power of ascent. I felt like a sea bird, perhaps a swan. I sported with the winds. I enjoyed the skirl of landscapes and waterscapes far below, and then islands in mist, and long blue ragged hills and at last a broad green plain with tiny tufts of wool that must be grazing sheep and a dolmen arch worthy of a bard or a tribal king or one of the shining ones.

References

1. Judith Hill. Lady Gregory: An Irish Life. Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2005.p.150

2. W. B. Yeats, Preface to Cuchulain of Muirthemne: The History of the Men of the Red Branch of Ulster, arranged and put into English by Lady Gregory. London: John Murray, 1902.

3. Cuchulain of Muirthemne p.23. 

Illustration at Top: "Looking for Muirthemne" RM + AI

You know when he tells you it's a redingote

 

I am often asked, of scenes that develop in lucid dreams and visions, "How do I know I'm not making it up?" Well of course I am in favor of making things up, of engaging in reality creation with the aid of imagination, that great faculty of soul. Nonetheless, I recognize that the skeptic in the cognitive brain needs to be appeased. Sometimes a bit of information unfamiliar to the dreamer that can later be verified serves that purpose, providing a sense of objectivity.

Early yesterday morning, in a half-dream state between sleep and awake, I found myself observing a fascinating series of events. I saw what at first looked like a giant golf ball rolling over sea mist towards the shore, where I stood on a sandy beach with dense jungle behind me.  As the ball got nearer, I saw it was a very small moon, with people singing as they rode it towards a reunion in the jungle. Intensely curious, I ran through the jungle, trying to get to the place where the moon riders would come down.

I came up behind a strapping man with a curling red beard, with a cane topped by a crystal ball, a top hat, and what I labeled in my journal a "frock coat". I knew he was a magus and that the meeting he was headed for was of huge importance. Soon he and his servant - who had a blue parrot on his shoulder - were whizzing over the undergrowth on their own magical transportation. I managed to get close enough to the magus to start picking up his thoughts. I stayed lucid and entirely resent to this adventure - while also aware of my body in bed - until the cats pulled me out by demanding breakfast yowls and thumps. 

Very early today, lying on my back in bed, I decided to reenter the scene, and seek the identity of the man in the frock coat, and see whether I could look in on the meeting with moon riders. I learned many things, including his name. At the point where I might have asked, "Am I making this up?" the word "redingote" came to me, in a clipped accent. Redingote? I wasn’t certain till I looked it up.

 

A redingote and a frock coat are both long coats worn by men in the nineteenth century, but differ in style, cut, and purpose. The word "redingote" derives from the English "riding coat." Fitted at the waist with a long, flared skirt, it could be double-breasted or single-breasted. It was worn for both riding or formal occasions. The frock coat, the mainstay of Victorian men's formal wear, usually double breasted and worn with a vest, was shorter (knee-length) also fitted but less waited and flared.

So, he wants me to know he is wearing a redingote, like a frock coat but not the same. Exquisite detail to which I do not normally have access soothes the skeptic in me, though it does not silence him. He hisses, “You must have read that word in Thackeray when you were a student”. Perhaps. But it was long gone from memory if so, and I am pretty sure that the voice that gave it to me was not speaking from the bargain basement of my personal subconscious. After identifying and speaking with some of them, I am certain that the people in that moon-assisted gathering are not part of me at all except in the sense of the old Latin tag attributed to Terence: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto, "I am a human being, nothing human is alien to me"

On Spiritual Enthronement, or Fusion with an Aspect of the Higher Self

 

Plotinus said that our most important tutelary spirit is the self on a level above the one we are on. I have found this to be true. I think of this self as my double on the balcony, because in half-dream states I have encountered him on a high roof terrace, a vantage point from which it is possible to find patterns in the confusion of life below and approach life choices with detachment and even a sense of divine comedy.
      I meet this life teacher in interior dialogues, above all, once again, in the half-dream state that researchers call hypnagogia but is more elegantly described as dorveille in Old French, dormiveglia in curent Italian. I feel that at a tremendous turning point in my life, our minds and energies merged.
      Let me try to make a general obseravtion before I turn this discussion over to the record of a conversation I made many years ago. . 
     As we go through a process of spiritual evolution, we may grow to the point where we can fuse our current personality with a higher self and now progress to a relationship with a self on yet a higher level, and so on up the scale. Through successive transformations, we may reach a level where we are able to survey — on a continuing or even constant basis — our relations with many aspects of our multidimensional self, including personalities living in other places and times, without losing our ability to navigate in our present bodies.

    “Take heart. I am with you always. I know you better than you know yourself.” This was the opening of communication with an inner teacher that I recorded on the night before Halloween in 1993.
     "Now we are one but may still talk as two.”
     This was the essence of communication from the same inner voice, as I received it on March 13, 1995. Over many months, I had come to know and trust that inner speaker. He had given me a wealth of information I was able to test and verify, and apply in ordinary reality. That night, I had stretched out on my bed after applying myself to several hours of reading and reflection on our relations with inner teachers. What was coming through now was direct knowledge.
     “Your mind on my purpose.”
      That was familiar language, the way this inner voice encouraged me to give my full attention to what was coming through. The best communication of this kind, I had learned, comes in a state of relaxed attention, or attentive relaxation. I don’t think of this as channeling, because I am fully conscious throughout, able to ask questions and to engage in a full dialogue when that seems appropriate. On that night, a self that was no stranger gave me some very clear information:

    "When fusion takes place between a focus personality and the Higher Self - that is to say, the control personality on the plane directly above the focus personality -the result is a step forward in personal evolution that will revise the scales of the contacts. The Higher Self now becomes an entity on a higher level than before.

    "This progression has taken humans from the conditions of the group soul — comparable to animals or even insects — to higher individuation. It can take the species as a whole to a new plane. Indeed, from this point of view, you are attending the emergence of a new species.Your physical equipment imposes limitations on both consciousness and memory. The three-tiered brain joins you to the crocodile and the horse as well as the emerging human. New structures in the brain are being evolved. Rising on the planes brings a process of physiological change — in the metabolism, in the composition and replacement of cells, and, naturally, in the chemistry and electrical engineering of the brain.
     "Now we are one but may still talk as two. Beyond us, a higher, clearer, purer intelligence is seeking to manifest and contact you as you rise on the planes."

       This came from an inner voice of the kind we come to know and trust. As I recorded hundreds of pages of communications from this source over the years, I reassured myself that if I was going crazy, I was in good company. Socrates knew such a voice, and Plutarch wrote an essay about it. The truest guide is no stranger. As Rumi put it: “The one who knows everything is with you now, closer than your jugular vein.”

Text adapted from "The Double on the Balcony", chapter 31 of The Boy Who Died and CameBack: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Journal drawing: "Path to the Higher Self" by Robert Moss

 

 

The Twilight Road to Mythic Worlds

When I look through old journals, I am amazed, though no longer surprised, by all the adventures and conversations I have recorded from the twilight state betwen sleep and awake, or between awake and sleep. Many of these were quite spontaneous, unplanned by me, although they were lucid episodes in which, once inside the action, I had the power to choose and navigate and to experiment with changing plots and sometimes worlds.

I have been familiar with this state for as long as I can recall, since early childhood. In many ways, it is my home base. Yet this whole area of inner experience is still largely neglected or undervalued by sleep and dream experts. I have decided to start posting more of my reports and to add quick illustrations if there are none already in my journals. Here's a short narrative from six years ago:

January 2, 2019

Lucid dream in hypnagogic zone

Unraveling the Knot

As soon as I lie down, an inner voice says, Pay attention.

A book is placed in front of me. It looks like a journal bound in brown leather. The text and pattern of the cover, however, are like tree bark. The clasp has the form of a Celtic knot. To open it I must unwind a string, flawlessly, in a certain pattern. A false move will seal the book.

Very carefully I experiment. I am making a double spiral, then a triskele, then a fourfold shape that might resemble a four leaf clover. 

The book opens into a wildly beautiful scene with a castle above a gorge. I run toward the castle, wearing skins. I am armed with a bow and a sword. A great water bird rises. Surly swamp creatures seek to oppose my path. I bat them away with my sword which blazes light. I see a waterfall in the gorge and understand that this, not the castle, is my primary objective. 

I become a falcon, swooping down into the gorge. I see a red stag above. I know this place though I am coming to it a new way. There are giants above the fall, observing. For an instant I am with them. I know these great ones as ancient allies. For now my assignment is below.

I fly through the hard spray. I am cleansed and restored to a human form. I see again the mouth of the cave of the ancients. I remember the stone that opened a portal of blue light when I braved up to a nightmare of hissing black snakes - and then accepted a call to join in an ancient battle with a dark tyrant sorcerer. I will be here again.

Illustration: "With Falcon Into the Gorge" by Robert Moss

Confessions of a polyphasic sleeper

I confess that I am a biphasic and often a polyphasic sleeper. I have never really tried to sleep for six or more hours at a stretch, the widely recommended mode in our predominantly monophasic sleeping culture. Typically, I sleep (or at least lie dormant) for two distinct periods of 3-4 hours and two hours in a 24-hour cycle, sometimes adding a short lie-down of 30-60 minutes. The shorter sleep phase may be an afternoon or evening nap before a long overnight period of reading and study, to be followed by 3-4 hours in bed starting around dawn.

Now I am at home much of the time, with a tolerant family and only a few external deadlines, I sleep, wake and dream almost whenever I feel like it and the hours are completely unpredictable. I do not suffer insomnia because I don't try to sleep unless I feel like it. Since my school days, I have almost never needed an alarm clock or a wake-up call. Traveling between time zones did not bother me in the pre-pandemic era when I did that every week. In any time zone, I am nearly always awake between 3:00 and 4:00 a.m., one of my favorite hours. I am told this is the time, actuarially, when more people die and more are born than in any other hour in the cycle of 24.

    When resting in bed, I spend as much time as possible in a half-sleep or half-wake state, in the hypnagogic zone (approaching sleep) or the hypnopompic zone (after sleep). This liminal state of consciousness is immensely fertile. It presents spontaneous images that can be the portals for lucid dream adventures. It opens psychic perception and is a place of encounter with inner guides. It is a state in which we hatch new ideas and creative connections. My approach to sleep and dreaming may seem exotic to many in a society that is suffering serious dream deprivation and in general does not reward its members for recalling and sharing dreams. However my habits would be recognized and approved by most of our ancestors, cross-culturally.

    For hundreds of thousands of years, humans thought that what the pushers of sleep meds promise – an uninterrupted night of seven or eight hours’ sleep – was an unnatural and undesirable thing. Experiments by a team led by Dr Thomas Wehr at the National Institutes of Mental Health in Bethesda have supplied compelling evidence of how our technology has ripped us from our natural cycle. Deprived of artificial lighting for several weeks, the typical subject evolved the following pattern: lying awake in bed for an hour or two, then four hours sleep, then 2-3 hours of “non-anxious wakefulness” followed by a second sleep before waking for the day's activities.

     One of the most exciting findings in Wehr’s study involved the endocrinology of the night watch. The interval between first sleep and second sleep is characterized by elevated levels of prolactin, a pituitary hormone best-known for helping hens to brood contentedly above their eggs for long periods. Wehr concluded that the night watch can produce benign states of altered consciousness not unlike meditation. [1} Wehr and his team put their subjects on the Paleolithic plan, without alternatives to electrical light such as candles or fire or oil lamps. The Paleolithic two-sleeps cycle wasn’t only a stone age phenomenon; it was characteristic of how people spent their nights until gas lighting and then electricity became widespread. A seventeenth century Scottish legal deposition describes a weaver as “haveing gotten his first sleip and awaiking furth thairof.”

    Sleep historian Roger Ekirch says that “until the modern era, up to an hour or more of quiet wakefulness midway through the night interrupted the rest of most Western Europeans” - and presumably most other people - so that “consolidated sleep, such as we today experience, is unnatural.” [2] This may help to explain the extent to which so many  in our urbanized society are out of nature and out of touch with dreaming.

     “Segmented sleep” was the norm for our ancestors until quite recently, as it remains for some indigenous peoples today. Like Virgil and Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Tiv of central Nigeria speak of “first sleep” and “second sleep”. They wake at any time during the night and will talk to anyone in the hut who is also awake - often about their dreams.[3] Most interesting, the state “twixt sleepe and wake” that the French called dorveille was widely regarded as an excellent time to birth new ideas. In 1769, the artful London tradesman Christopher Pinchbeck advertised a device called a “Nocturhnal Remembrancer”, a parchment tablet inside a box with a slit to guide the writing hand in the dark to enable “philosophers, statesmen, poets, divines and every person of genius, business or reflection” to secure the “flights and thoughts which so frequently occur in the course of a meditating, wakeful night.”

    Biphasic or polyphasic sleep might help us to recover the "perceptual diversity" that anthropologist and economic development specialist Tara Lumpkin observes is woefully lacking in contemporary mainstream Western cultures. "When a culture restrains perceptual diversity, that same culture reduces human adapatibility, which, in turn, leads to human beings living unsustainably...Coming from developed Western cultures, which highly value monophasic consciousness and the scientific method, we may not even be aware of what we are losing. It is altered states of consciousness, which speak through symbols and intuition such as dreaming, imagining and meditating, that often allow us to grasp the whole in a way that the scientific method can never provide."[4]

    Modern culture, through the suppression of natural circadian cycles and a disregard of dreaming, may have fulfilled for many Thomas Middleton's complaint that we have rendered ourselves “disanulled of our first sleep, and cheated of our dreams and fantasies.” [5]
     Perhaps you, too, will find it helpful to wake up to the fact that it's okay to be awake in the middle of the night. While sleep deprivation can be a serious problem, we do better when we stop confusing being awake in the middle of the night with "insomnia" and learn to have fun when the rest of the world is sleeping (and thinks we should be asleep). And then, whenever possible, plunge back into dreaming.


References

1. Nathalie Angier, "Modern Life Suppresses Ancient Body Rhythms", New York Times, March 14, 1995.
2. A. Roger Ekirch, "Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-Industrial Slumber in the British Isles",American Historical Review 106, no. 2 (April 2001) pp. 343-386.
3. Paul Bohannon, "Concepts of Time among the Tiv of Nigeria", Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, no. 9 (Autumn, 1953) p. 253.
4, Tara W. Lumpkin, "Perceptual Diversity: Is Polyphasic Consciousness Necessary for Global Survival?" Anthropology of Consciousness vol.12 nos. 1-2 (2002) pp. 37-70.
5. Thomas Middleton, "The Black Book", in The Works of Thomas Middleton ed. A.H. Bullen (New York: AMS Press, 1964).

Journal drawing: "Swinging Across the River" (c) Robert Moss

Dorveille: sleeping on horseback and the apple-round space

Dorveille. A wonderful term that is sadly obsolescent in Frace, and has no satisfactory equivalent in English, though Coleson Whitehead uses it - with deliberate misspelling as "dorvay" - in his marvelous crime novel Harlem Shuffle. 
     Dorveille, "sleep-wake", is the liminal space between sleep and awake, well-known to active dreamers of any era as the royal road to lucid dream adventures, the site of creative breakthroughs and sudden illumination, and prime time for encounters with daimons, the departed, minor deities and other visitors. It is a term and a state of awareness that had great respect in the Middle Ages. 
    Michel Stanesco, a leading scholar of medieval literature, explains that in the world of the Middle Ages, where the terrestrial and the celestial coexisted, "there were no brusque and decisive dichotomies between the real and the imaginal, the natural and the supernatural, the possible and the impossible. This is why there were no definitive oppositions between dream and reality, between sleep and waking." [1] So the state of dorveille, in which the protagonist, half sleeping, moves in an ambiguous universe, between the mysterious and the familiar, is seen as normal.
    For the chivalric authors of Romance poetry, dorveille might be attained at clip-clop rhythm, sleeping on a horse. En doormen/sobre chevau – “sleeping on a horse” – was how, famously, Guillaune IX of Aquitaine, produced "a poem about nothing." Dozing on horseback was the frequent condition of the knight in the field. Dropping with fatigue on a long journey, maybe after fighting in a field of war, the knight was often led by his horse, sometimes to realms of wonder, to a magic orchard or a floating chateau, and thought himself in Fairyland or Paradise.
     Chrétien de Troyes, Le chevalier de la charrette (the Knight of the Carriage) described Lancelot’s drifty state as his head drooped over his horse's neck at a ford

Lui meismes en oublie
ne set s’il est, ou s’il n’est mie
ne ne li manbre de son non
ne set s’il est armez ou non
ne set ou va, ne set don’t vient

He himself forgets
what he is or is not
he doesn't remember his name
or whether he is armed or not
he doesn't know if he is coming or going

 

If this does not seem like much of an incentive to sleep on horseback, consider the possible delights of dorveille in bed as recounted by the French medieval poet and chronicler Jean Froissart. He wrote in "Le joli buisson de Jonece" of being transported during dorveille into  a marvelous space that was “round as an apple”. His experience began when he went to bed early on a dreary winter evening. He felt himself gently touched by fire. As he drifted towards sleep, thoughts and memories arose and became visions. Then Venus – no less – carried him to that apple-round space. The colors were blue streaked with white but they changed with the winds. He could not tell the size of the space he was in but he was always at the center.

 

 

1. Michel Stanesco, Jeux d'errance du chevalier médiéval: Aspects ludiques de la fonction guerrière dans la littérature du Moyen Age flamboyant. Leiden: Brill, 1988. p.149

 

The Door to the Dream Vault

 

Often it feels like the door to a bank vault, that door between night dreams and the daylight world. You've been into a deep place, full of valuable things you'd like to bring back with you. But as you leave the treasure house, a door swings shut behind you. Maybe you try to catch the door before it closes, but it's so heavy and its movement so strong that you frequently find you can't manage that.
    When the door is sealed tight behind you, you may look for a way to reopen it. But the combination is tricky, and there may be a time release, as with the doors to some vaults. that won't open until a certain hour or date unless you can find a supervisor or an override mechanism.
     Many people just shrug and go about the business of the day, leaving the door between the worlds shut. Some people dedicate themselves to keeping it shut, because they don't make room in their lives for dreams or because something once happened on the other side that scared them. But even the most passionate and dedicated dreamers go through periods when the vault door slams shut, morning after morning, leaving the strange feeling that we are missing out on something really important.
     I have recorded many thousands of my own dreams over the years, sometimes a dozen from one night. Because I know just how much goes on in the dream worlds, I get edgy when I find I have lost my night dreams. Yes, I make a practice of living as if everything around me is a set of dream symbols. And I have developed many techniques for entering states of conscious dreaming, including the use of shamanic drumming. But I treasure the gifts of spontaneous night dreams, especially the ones we don't ask for and may or may not want, because they hold up a magic mirror to our lives and show us things with an objectivity we can rarely achieve in ego-centered consciousness. They may also be adventures across time and in other dimensions of reality. 
    Dreaming is social as well as individual. We get out and about and meet others: other dreamers, the deceased, beings other-than-human. Sometimes I feel that behind the door of the bank vault is a lively, well-appointed restaurant, as in the photo from a converted bank in Butte, Montana.
     Let's assume you know all about setting an intention for the night. (My favorite one is "Show me what I need to see.") And that you have trained yourself to be ready to catch and record dreams at whatever hour you stir from them. But now you are finding that, despite your best efforts, that heavy metal door keeps swinging shut behind you, keeping the treasure (and the beauty or terror or both) down in the vault. What to do?
     See if there is a wisp that followed you as the door was closing, or slipped through the tiniest crack before it was sealed airtight. In ancient Mesopotamia, dreams were called "zephyrs" because, like little breezes, they can slip through a chink in the ordinary world. Stand under the shower, or sit with a cup of tea, and see whether the wisp will reveal itself in the rush of the water or the rising steam. If you can grab that wisp, it can take you back behind the sealed door, in its own special way.
     If you can't catch even a wisp, be alert for how the logic of the dreams you missed may now be playing out in the world around you. Find signs and symbols as the day unfolds, and read them as if they were dreams. 
     As general practice, we want to learn how to slow down the closing of that tremendous door, by schooling ourselves to linger in the twilight zone between sleep and waking. Instead of jumping out of bed when you wake, however you wake, see if you can stay for a time between the worlds, in the twilight state that researchers call the hypnopompic or hypnagogic zone. A great place to develop the practice of conscious or lucid dreaming.
    You might try this, when you wake up and find your dreams are missing. Picture yourself standing in the doorway between the worlds. It is open, like the door of the bank vault in the photograph. One one side is your dormant body in the bed. On the other is an adjacent world, a world from which your traveling self is returning. You can look both ways. If you are crafty, you may be able to tiptoe back into the vault and grab something you can bring back to the daylight side. It could be pure gold. Or the deed to a magic kingdom.

Those who attend in the Twilight Zone

 

All these people are gathered. They are like actors who have taken their places on stage and are waiting quietly for the curtain to go up. It comes to me that they are "attending", an interesting word. 
    I have the feeling they are characters who could have parts in a new book. Yet they have their own lives. None of them seems to be aware of me.
    But now a young woman slips through their ranks, to look at me directly. She is red haired, tall and slim, quite lovely. Her clothes are of an earlier time. Her gaze is deep. I cannot read her feelings, but I would like to know her. She moves away to my left, and I sense that she wants me to follow. When I go after her, however, I am interrupted by a mature woman with long black hair and very white skin who thrusts herself between us. I know she is filed with jealous hate for the redhead. 
    There is an old story here, of passion and jealousy. I sense it goes back several centuries, to the British Isles. I won't follow it now. The sunlight streaming into my bedroom round the edge of the drapes is quite bright. I reach for my French blue sleep mask (thank you Air France) and stretch out on my back, enjoying the luxury of drifting back from my twilight zone adventures into the sleep that repairs the body and allows the dream soul to go wandering without an agenda.


Often, as in this episode recorded in an old journal, I find different casts of characters waiting or popping up as I hover on the edge of sleep or linger in the twilight zone of hypnagogia. Sometimes, they appear to be quite literally on stage, or in the wings, waiting for me to show up in order to start or resume a play. More often, they seem to be characters in life dramas that are being played out in other times or in parallel worlds, dramas in which I have a lead role from which I may have been absent while attending to things in waking life.
    When I am writing, I am occasionally thrilled to discover in this way that my characters - who may or may not have been previously known to me - are assembling in this way, ready to claim their parts in my stories, or at least audition for those parts. 
    Those attending. I like this description for the people who appear on the cusp between waking and sleep, or between sleep and waking. To attend can mean to take care of or wait upon someone; in its Latin origin, in the verb attendere, it means "to stretch toward" something. Encounters with those who attend in the twilight zone can certainly help to stretch the mind. 

"Curtain Time". Dream Oracle card by Robert Moss

 

The Apple of Fate

 

On a cool fall night, I lie down on my bed. As soon as I close my eyes, I see a form of the Great Earth Mother, vast and voluptuous. She rises before me, large as a mountain, and opens a fertile valley. I fly through this like a swallow, and come out in a world suffused by sourceless light.. There is a sense of being in a contained space, protected by translucent walls that are spirals of light. 
   There is a feminine presence. She lets me know she is willing to be a guide for me in this realm. She is very tall and slender, dressed in blue. Her name is of the North. Though the light is everywhere, she moves within a fine mist that makes her features hazy.
    She tells me this is a place of purification, of cleansing “down to the bone marrow.” She speaks to me of soul, and where it travels.“Where your desire goes, there you go in soul flight out of the body, and in the soul’s journey after death.”
    She shows me a ball fired high into the air, sailing up above the clouds. She tells me, “This is the Apple of Fate. When it returns to Earth, your present life will be over.” We agree I do not need to know the exact time or circumstances of its return.

 

Reading and reflecting on this report in my journal, from nearly thirty years ago, I am stirred again by the vision of the Apple of Fate. Now I am considering goddesses known to my Northern ancestors who were especially fond of apples. Idunn is a Nordic goddess who carries apples in a box crafted from ash wood. In the Prose Edda, when the gods start to feel old, they ask her to feed them her apples, which carry the magic of rejuvenation. This is why Idunn's name means Ever Young, or Rejuvenator. The Prose Edda contains the story of Idunn’s abduction and rescue, both the work of Loki) Idunn’s husband Bragi, the skaldic god of poetry, who gave his name to the cup (bragarfull) with which toasts to the mighty Viking dead were raised..
    In a story of the goddess Frigg in the Volsung Saga, an apple from the goddess can produce a new birth as well as fresh juice. When king Renr prays for a child, Frigg's messenger, a crow, drops an apple in his lap, and soon his wife is pregnant. Then there are the Apples of Hel, They are mentioned in an 11th century poem by the skald Thorbrion Brunarson, who saw the apple as food of the dead. 
     I do not find the phrase Apple of Fate in the Icelandic texts, or the excellent works of Hilda Ellis Davidson, the great English scholar of Nordic paganism. But I see that the intriguing Nehelennia is also depicted as carrying a supply of apples. With the breath of her name I feel a wind from the mythic ocean gusting through my study. Nehelennia, whose best-known temples were on the coast of the Netherlands, was a Celtic-Germanic goddess who was a special patron of voyagers, those traveling by sea or across the astral tides, and those making the crossing to the Otherworld and the afterworld. 
    Apple of Fate is a term that could fit the apple in the Garden of Eden, or the apple in the story of Paris' choice between the three goddesses, since in each of those stories a choice involving an apple determined a fate. But those stories don't resonate with me in relation to the blue lady and what she showed me. And anyway, the apple of Eve and the apple of Paris weren't apples as we know them. Apples were unknown west of Kazakhstan until some of the soldiers of Alexander the Great brought them back from his campaigns; even then, these "apples" were only small and tart, like crabapples.
    I wonder where my Apple of Fate is now, flying or falling or bumping along the ground. As the lady in blue suggested, I don't need an exact fix on that, at least, not yet….

Drawing by Robert Moss: Lady of Apples

I made the drawing after a vision in the hypnagogic zone on January 2, 2021. I heard the name "Idunn" quite distinctly. I was wafted into an enchanted apple orchard. I smelled the apple blossom in the golden hair of a lovely young woman who seems sweet and innocent.I let myself drift into a sleep dream in which I drove north, ever north, faster and faster with a young woman who seemed to be both my daughter and my research partner. The wind rushed past us as the beating of great wings. We were excited because we had found the key to a mystery.I drew Idunn by an apple tree with apple blossom in her hair, dressen in apple-green rather than blue and holding her golden apples in a basket rather than an ashwood box because that is the way I saw her this time.  

 

Hawk reminds me we can fly

 

I am drifting around dawn in the liminal state between sleep and awake, where I recommend that you learn to spend more time because it's a natural launchpad for lucid dream adventures. It's a place where creative connections are made easily. It's a place where you are highly psychic and your psyche - come on, let's call it soul - can be quite mobile. 
     I am drifting around dawn. The image of a feather floats up on my inner screen. I see the pattern and I know it is the feather of a red-tailed hawk, a bird that has played an important role in my life.  Suddenly, I realize the feather is attached to a live bird, to a wing that is quivering in mid-air. I look at the wing, at the back of the bird, at the silver-white belly feathers.I look ino the intense yellow eyes that are looking at me and I feel an invitation. To do what? To lift up, to fly with the hawk.
    Now I am floating over the rooftops of the city and over the green park. I have gone through my window without noticing. I am vaguely aware of the body I have left in bed, but my focus is on the adventure ahead. Extraordinary things have happened when I have flown with the hawk before. This already feels so good.  I, am enjoying going with the wind, the pure freedom of flight. The hawk is no longer separate. I think the hawk and I have become a hybrid. Or I have taken the form of a hawk.
     Frequent flyers beyond the body do it in different ways, Some fly Superman style, arms out, straight as a rocket. Some swim through the air or go doggy-style, or pedal. I often find myself winging it like the birds. So maybe I am a hawk now.
      But I am distracted by mechanical noise. I have not lost track of the physical environment. I am in two places and two states of mind at once. I am floating above the city and at the same time I am aware of my body in bed and the physical life of the night city below me. I search for the source of the noise and see a helicopter, probably going to or from a nearby hospital on an emergency call. I tell myself the noise will go away. Let me stay with the hawk in flight and find out where it wants to take me this time.
      The noise of the chopper blades does fade. But now there is a louder, harsher, churning noise, I think of a military aircraft. This is really pulling me out of my lovely aerial experience. As soon as my attention shifts, I drop back in my dormant body in the bedroom with a soft thud.
      This is a small anecdote, nothing important going on, but little incidents like this remind us that in dreams and dreamlike states, we can fly. This is a talent to be grown and to be mastered. It has been valued in most cultures as far back as we can track even if many in modern society have forgotten.

In Praise of Astral Travel over Astral Projection

 

A wise practitioner of natural magic I knew long ago made a distinction between astral travel and astral projection and recommended the first over the second. "You can be anywhere you think you are, in the mind, without needing to separate from the body".

I appreciate the simple wisdom here, following my remarkable experiences overnight. Awake around 3 am, I lay on my back and let my awareness wander in the fertile liminal space of hypnagogia. My impressions became strongly sensory, above all visual. As I moved beyond familiar locales, space seemed to open up immensely. Without specific intention, I found myself following a winding road lined with scrub and then with modest Asian market stalls. Movement was effortless, with a rocking motion that made me feel I was in a rickshaw.

I came to a magic market and the first of a series of deeply moving encounters with departed friends and relatives, rich in new information. They showed me their current residences and activities. 

I was treated to an etheric healing session by a beautiful and severe therapist I met for the first but perhaps not the last time. I was introduced to a new counselor, whose rigorous questioning led me to define a new project with clarity and forward-moving energy that was lacking until now.

I am quite sure that these were transpersonal encounters.

Through all of this, I was fully aware of my body in the bed, able to hear my cats and the city sounds outside the building without being distracted from my astral adventures. In other words, I was fully lucid in two worlds. You can travel beyond the body without leaving the body unattended and transitions don’t have to involve bumps and grinds and rolling about.  Like my friend the mage, I recommend bilocation over pursuing out of-body experiences for their own sake.

I also recommend journaling your adventures in astral travel as soon as your full attention has returned to the body. I often do this by tapping out an email to myself on my phone. I enjoy the thought that I am sending myself a message from the dreamworld. This morning, however, I wanted to record the most important statement in my travel report by hand, with a fountain pen. There is magic in hand writing, as those who work with old grimoires understand. 

However you write your report, another key rule for me is: do it before coffee. Yes, I know this is cruel, but it is part of the price for becoming a real dream magician. 

The Golden Times between Sleep and Awake

 

Iamblichus (c.250-325 CE), the famous philosopher and theurgist descended from the priest-kings of Emesa (in modern Syria) was very clear that the liminal space between sleep and awake is prime time for contact with spiritual guides, such as gods: 

"Either when sleep departs, just as we are awakening, it is possible to hear a sudden voice guiding us about things to be done, or the voices are heard between waking and going to sleep, or even when wholly awake. And sometimes an intangible and incorporeal spirit encircles those lying down, so that there is no visual perception of it, but some other awareness and self-consciousness. When entering, it makes a whooshing sound, and diffuses itself in all directions without any contact, and it does wondrous works by way of freeing both soul and body from their sufferings. 

"At other times, however, when a light shines brightly and peacefully, not only is the sight of the eye possessed, but closed up after previously being quite open. And the other senses are awake and consciously aware of how the gods shine forth in the light, and with a clear understanding they both hear what they say and know what they do."[1]

Iamblichus wrote his book under the pseudonym of an Egyptian priest, Abrammon, maintaining that “the gods are pleased when invoked according to the custom of the Egyptians”. [2] Though he wrote and taught in Greek, he is distinctly less Hellenic that other Neoplatonists. He kept his Semitic name, which is derived from the Syriac or Aramaic ya-mliku, meaning “El is King”. He was descended from the priest-kings of Emesa, some of whom bore his name. Iamblichus I sent troops to support Octavian in the Roman civil war. [3] Iamblichus the theurgist professes great reverence for Egyptian and Chaldean tradition, as opposed to the faddism of the "flight" Hellenes. 

Theurgy means "divine working" and for Iamblichus it was a matter of ritual activity and practice in shifting consciousness, not abstract speculation. The aim was to “rediscover life-giving water hidden in our desert”, to return the soul to knowledge of its greater identity and purpose and lift the individual to the level of a greater self.  This extended to “taking the shapes of the gods” while human, in the body."

 Iamblichus taught that theurgy did not act through the intellect but through one’s entire character “to allow the soul to exchange one life for another, to exchange the mortal life for the life of a god”. [4] In Theurgy and the Soul, Gregory Shaw observes that Iamblichus was  “the first leader of a Platonic school to function simultaneously as hierophant of a sacred cult”.[5] We do not have texts describing the specific ritual practices of that cult, though we know it involved sound and light and telestiké, statue magic, which involved calling the energy of a god or daimon into an image to ensoul it. 

Good to know that this celebrated ancient magician-philosopher also recognized that nightly or morning magic awaits us in that liminal space of “god-sent dreams” between sleep and awake.

References 

1. Iamblichus, De mysteriis trans. Emma C. Clarke John M. Dillon and Jackson P. Hershbell (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003) III.2

2. Marsilio Ficino came up with the title On the Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians [De mysteriis for short in most references]. Since it was framed as an epistle from an Egyptian priest in response to criticisms from Porphyry, another leading Neoplatonist, its real title would be: “The Reply of the Master Abammon to the Letter of Porphyry”. 

3. John Dillon, “Iamblichus of Chalcis” In Wolfgang Haase (ed.), Philosophie, Wissenschaften, Technik, (New York: De Gruyter, 1987) pp. 863-5

4. Gregory Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus (Kettering OH: Angelico Press/Sophia Perennis, 2014) p.6

5. ibid., pp. 76-7

Photo: The Emesa Helmet. A Roman cavalry helmet with iron face guard covered by a sheet of silver, from the 1st century; found at Homs (ancient Edesa) in 1936.

 

Tendrels of Dreaming: Shamanic Dreamers and Tibetan Buddhists

 

There is a fascinating ambivalence about dreams and dreaming in Buddhist tradition. On the one hand, Buddhism begins with a conception dream of the Buddha’s mother, Queen Maya, in which a numinous white elephant enters her body and is then born through her. On the other hand, ordinary dreams are often dismissed as the product of confusion and the work of the “three poisons” of desire, hatred and fear.

The dreamworld is a realm of illusion – but so is everything in the experience of a human who has not attained spiritual liberation. The great Tibetan lama Milarepa counsels his disciples that dreams are of no importance – and then instructs them to pay close attention to their dreams and tell them to him in the morning; his favorite pupil, Gambopa, brings a powerful prophetic dream that previews the spread of Buddhism in Tibet.

In Tibet, the Buddhist ambivalence about dreams is accompanied by a dynamic process of conflict and engagement over many centuries with indigenous shamans known as “heroes” and “invokers”. Dreaming is a basic mode of shamanic operations, a means of travel by which shamans interact with the powers of the deeper world and guide souls of the living and the dead. As mediators for the community, shamans meet and negotiate with the conscious, spiritual aspects of all life, including the Earth itself. By contrast, the first Buddhist rulers of Tibet planted twelve pagodas at strategic points on the body of the land, to “nail” and hold in subjugation the Earth Mother they characterized as a “demoness”.

In an excellent and very readable scholarly study, Angela Sumegi explores the creative tension between Tibetan Buddhism and shamanic dreaming. In Dreamworlds of Shamanism and Tibetan Buddhism, Sumegi demonstrates how, while retaining its philosophy of transcendence, Buddhism in Tibet has adopted many of the characteristic techniques of shamanic dreamers, healers and diviners. She explains that she was drawn to this theme by records of the highly shamanic visionary experiences of the Fifth Dalai Lama who once, during a serious illness, invoked a fierce deity who projected a scorpion inside his body that proceeded to devour his organs until he seemed to burst into flame; his illness then passed.

I interviewed Angela Sumegi on my “Way of the Dreamer” radio show in 2010, when her book came out. There was a little magic in play that day. I rose on the morning of the interview with two fragments from the hypnopompic zone, the intermediate state between sleep and full waking. In a vivid dream scene, I watched Central Asian riders gallop across a great plain where everything was verdant green. Above them, thunderheads came rolling across the sky. When I looked at the lightning, I suddenly saw it as the riders did – as a fiery god, resplendent in red garments, hurling thunderbolts as he rode the sky on a great charger.

When the scene receded, a word came into my mind with quiet insistence: Kalachakra.

I thought these scraps from my dreamlife might be a rehearsal for my interview. Prior to recording the radio show, I took Angela’s book along to a conference at a medical center, where I was kept waiting for much longer than expected. This gave me a chance to re-read sections of her book, including a discussion of the concept of tendrel to which I’ll turn in a moment. The person who cleared the logjam at the doctors’ office was a very efficient and pleasant Jamaican. His origin interested me, because I had noticed that Angela Sumegi was born in Jamaica, though she migrated to Canada many years ago and now taught at Carleton University in Ottawa. I had not met anyone from Jamaica for many years. Now, in the space of a few minutes, I was going from one Jamaican to another.

This seemed like a meaningful coincidence. It also felt auspicious, in relation to the interview, since the first Jamaican had played such a helpful role. Might this be an example of the workings of what Tibetan Buddhists call tendrel?

I put the question to Angela Sumegi on the air. She reminded me that the word tendrel is a contraction of a longer phrase referring to the Buddhist doctrine of “dependent origination”, according to which all phenomena arise “dependent on causes and conditions”. It is also used to mean “sign” or “omen”. So the word applies both to the practice of reading signs in coincidence, natural phenomena, divination kits and dreams - and to a deep philosophy of hidden causes. Tibetan paintings show the twelvefold manifestation of the principle of dependent origination around the Wheel of Life: old age and death arise from birth, etc., etc. As Sumegi explains in her book: “The principle that all phenomena arise interconnectedly and interdependently applies without exception to every existent, linking them throughout time and space; what appears to be a random or chance occurrence can be analyzed in terms of its connections.”

We agreed that my Jamaican sequence might be an example of tendrel at work in the divinatory sense of an omen that felt promising. It also hinted at hidden patterns of causation and connection.

We were already deep into the practice of dreaming. In dreaming cultures, dreams are not isolated from “signs” in the way of Western dream analysis. You read signs in dreams; you also look for dreamlike symbols in the midst of everyday life.

I told Angela the fragments from my dreams and asked her what the Tibetan mind would make of these. She went to the right place (from my point of view) immediately, by telling me that Tibetans would want to know my feelings around the dreams. I am firmly convinced that the first thing we need to know about a dream is how the dreamer felt about it, on first waking. My feelings around the dream scene of the horseman on the verdant plain were of excitement and driving energy, which Angela proceeded to confirm in commenting on the positive energy she felt in the horses and the lush green of the landscape.

What about that word, Kalachakra?

“It’s the great Wheel of Time,” Angela explained, “and the most complex and profound of the approaches to Tantra. It is also the name of a ritual His Holiness the Dalai Lama conducts frequently.”

As we discussed the Kalachakra ceremony, we noticed that it features dreaming. Monks hand out sheaves of kusha grass – long blades to place under the mattress, shorter ones to tuck under the pillow. Grass to dream on, and to invoke only good dream experiences.

Angela suggested that the way the word “Kalachakra” had come to me might be an example of what Tibetan Buddhists call a dream of “permission”: an invitation to proceed to a deeper connection with a practice or a deity.

By now, I was enjoying our conversation hugely. I knew already the depth of Angela’s research, including the years she has spent in India studying with Tibetan religious communities and learning the languages. She now confirmed her credentials in the way that dreamers instantly recognize, by sharing a night vision from her childhood in Jamaica in which a huge figure with three eyes and fearsome weapons entered her space. She was able to identify this entity many years later, as she embarked on Tibetan studies and first saw images of the deity known as Mahakala (the “Great Black One”).

Picture: 12th century Tibetan Mahakala in Rubin Museum of Art

The Traveler

 

Sometimes, lying in the drifty state near sleep, I sense that as I grow drowsy, a second self, back to back with me on the bed, is stirring awake, ready to prowl. I call him the Traveler.

I can only keep up with him by becoming him. When I come home from our travels, I am not quite myself and no longer him. When we part company, I am left to pore over scraps of memory like the things I find in my pockets and on my phone after a regular plane trip: a boarding pass, a bus ticket, a foreign banknote, a scribbled love note, random photos of far-away cities and beaches and train stations.

I track the Traveler by recording his exploits – the ones I manage to catch – in my journal. In one report he seems to be very like my present self, just two days ahead of me, on my present probable event track. Sometimes he is much further ahead, or on a different – mildly or radically – event track, or he is in another body in another time or another world.

When I am the Traveler the journey often begins at a certain threshold, a gap between the worlds, in a twilight of the mind. I may find myself floating upwards. I roll over and as I do so I feel something pulling loose from my physical body. Lights flash at the top of my head and I find myself being drawn up into a cone of light, like a pyramid with an opening at the top. 

There are days when, flat on my back under a tree, I fall upwards into the bowl of the sky, like Rumi. There are nights when I feel I am about to blast off like a rocket, or be blown from the mouth of a cannon, through circles of red within black. Or I find myself stripping off, shedding the body like a snake skin, dropping it like an old overcoat. When the travels begin, I often find myself looking at a geometric pattern. It may be a glowing energy grid. It may resemble the weave of a carpet, or the strands of a net.

This has been going on for as long as I can remember. You might say I got a jump start by being thrown out of my body and into other worlds at an early age. At age 3 and again at age 9 I was pronounced clinically dead in hospitals during crises of illness. Today we talk about near-death experiences but I still think of this as dying and coming back, which is what Australian doctors told my parents I had done. During one of these experiences, during a few minutes under a surgeon’s knife, I seemed to live a whole lifetime with a different people in another world. So I have always understood that there are worlds beyond the physical world that are no less real – and possibly more real – and that we can travel there by shifting consciousness.

Art: "Traveler" by Robert Moss