Waking Up in the Multiverse

In physics, the hypothesis of Many Interactive Worlds suggests that we live, right now, in one of countless parallel universes that impact each other. Part of the secret logic of our lives may be that our paths constantly interweave with those of numberless parallel selves. The gifts and failings of these alternate selves may influence us, when our paths converge, in ways that we generally fail to recognize. 
     We are connected in a multidimensional drama and this may generate events in both our lives that will appear as “chance” to those who cannot find the trans-temporal pattern. The hidden hand suggested by synchronistic events may be that of another personality within our multidimensional family, reaching to us from what we normally perceive as past or future, or from a parallel or other dimension.
    When you experience déjà vu and feel certain you have been in a certain situation before, you may be close on the heels of a parallel self who got there before you. Serial dreams, in which you find yourself returning to people and places not on your current event track may also be glimpses of a continuous life your parallel self is leading in a parallel world, in which you made different choices. Physicist Brian Greene speculates that we all have "endless doppelgangers" leading parallel lives in parallel universes.
     When you wake up to the fact that serial dreams may be glimpses of continuous lives you are living in other realities, you may be ready for the good stuff: to journey as a lucid dream traveler into a parallel life to dismiss old regrets and claim gifts and knowledge from your selves who made different choices. This can effect a quantum shift in your present life.

Illustration: "Forking Paths" by Robert Moss

Meeting Doppelgangers from a Possible Future

 

Perceiving your own double is a rarer experience than sighting someone else's doppelganger, and easier to accomplish in dreams than in waking states. Jane Roberts, the remarkable psychic medium who channeled the entity Seth, has left us an extraordinary account of spotting a double who seemed to belong to the future, the embodiment of an older self she did not want to become. The episode is reminiscent of dreams that show us what life may be like if we continue along the road we are following.  

As recounted in The Seth Material, Jane and her husband Rob are on vacation in York Beach, Maine in 1963. She is beginning to discover her psychic gifts in contact with Seth; Rob is suffering severe back pains. They decide to go to a lively night spot to try to raise their energy. They are amazed to see an older couple seated in their line of sight who look just like them, but older and sour and embittered.

Rob has a visceral response. He grabs Jane, pulls her on to the dance floor and they do the Twist till the band packs it in. Utterly out of character for Rob. When the music stops the sour old couple have gone. Did Jane and Rob just separate themselves from a probable path to a miserable future?

They ask Seth, who says the embittered couple “were fragments of your selves, thrown-off materializations of your own negative and aggressive feelings.” He talks about how we are constantly generating thought forms that can take on physical life.

He does not say it clearly, but my impression is that Jane and Rob encountered doppelgangers from a possible future, then twisted probabilities when they joined the dance, leaving the sad couple on a path not taken. I am adding it to my casebook documenting how the Many Interactive Worlds hypothesis in physics - which contends that we are constantly splitting into parallel worlds - operates on a human scale.


Illustration by Robert Moss

The "just so" feeling on leaving a dream

Feelings, feelings. I don’t want to discuss a dream experience unless the dreamer will talk about first feelings around it. I notice that quite often my own feelings when I leave a dream are neutral and detached. There is often a sense of “been there, done that” – that I have returned from an experience that in another world that does not have immediate consequences in this one.
    It may be an experience in one of many parallel lives. It may be a case of what the Jungians call compensation; I am engaged in a life unlived in my present reality but going on continuously in a realm of imagination. in Inner Work Robert Johnson reports the memorable case of a reclusive introvert who was leading a robust life with a voluptuous wife in an imagined Italy, where he spoke Italian, made love and had rows, and played with his kids, night after night. While these can be tagged as compensation dreams, we can also allow that they may be glimpses of a continuous life in a parallel reality where the dreamer made different life choices. 

    Then there are the dreams in which you seem to be in someone else’s body and situation. This is not unusual in psychic dreams.
    In a dream experience, I may engage in thrilling adventures, churning with high emotions. If I am calm and detached after coming back, I know I don't need to import these dramas and emotions into my regular life, except perhaps as stories to tell or write. Those dramas belong to another life, one of many I - and maybe you - are living in the multiverse, with varying degrees of consciousness.

     So when I record my feelings on returning from a dream excursion, the words I most often use are "just so," meaning "been there, done that" in a world and a situation that feel quite as real as everyday life, and sometimes more so. I may add the phrase "travel worn" because (for example) when I have led a three-day workshop in my subtle body while my body of meat and bones was dormant in bed for a couple of hours - and then had to fly back across oceans and continents - I can be somewhat jet-lagged. 

Journal drawing: "Bardo Hotel" by Robert Moss

        

The Time of Who Goes There

Have you dreamed you are in a different body, even that of someone of a different gender? Have you noticed that you are a time traveler in dreams? Do you have the sense that you may be leading a parallel life? Do you feel you know far more than you can remember about a deeper reality?
    These themes and more - the liminal state of adolescence, and twilight zones of reality and consciousness - are beautifully explored in a recent Japanese animated movie I discovered when a friend shared a dream that had the visual quality of a film in this genre.
    "I was riding a train to the Moon," she told me. "The train crossed a bridge that was a long, bright crescent. I knew I had to get off at the third stop. You looked different - older but strong and sharper-featured - and I became aware I was dreaming."

    The train to the Moon made me think of Hayao Myazaki's animated films. I went online to refresh my memory and stumbled across a remarkable anime film released in Japan last year as “Your Name”. The original title was “If I Had Known It Was a Dream”, from a line in a famous ninth-century poem that ends “I would not have woken up.” Soon I had it streaming on my screen.
     "Your Name", written and directed by Makoto Shinkai, is a gorgeously-visualized story of body swapping, time travel and parallel worlds. A boy in downtown Tokyo and a girl in a mountain village wake up in each other’s bodies and each other’s lives. 

Spoiler alert  Plot surprises are revealed in the summary that follows.

    In an early scene we see the astonishment of Taki (the Tokyo boy) waking up to realize he’s in the body of a girl named Mitsuha. He’s still feeling her young breasts as her little sister comes to call her to breakfast. The grandmother tells him he’s more “normal” today. Yesterday he was “nuts” and didn’t know how to tie his hair. 

    On the way to school, someone asks if Mitsuha's grandmother had him exorcized because the day before he was acting completely possessed. In class, when a teacher calls “Mitsuha,” the boy in her body is just able to respond; the day before, he did not recognize this name.          The teacher’s blackboard lesson is fascinating. She is explaining the etymology of a Japanese word for "twilight." It literally means "Who goes there?" This is the theme of the whole story, and we will discover in the denouement that twilight is truly magic time.
    Mitsuha, in her own body, participates in a ritual at a Shinto shrine, making sacred sake the old way by masticating rice and spitting into a bowl. After, she screams her frustration at being “stuck in a weird dream, living someone else’s life.” She wishes that in her next life she will be “a handsome boy in central Tokyo.”

     Scene shift to Tokyo: Taki is wakened by his cell phone. But he's not there. Mitsuha is in his body. Now we see the girl experience the shock of discovering that she's changed sex overnight. Mitsuha is horrified when she reaches between the legs of the body she is in. She doesn't know Taki's routine - where he goes to school, where he waits tables after school. She must be dreaming of course, but she's amazed by the realism of this dream and wonders where it will end. She finds Taki's online diary and enters a message.Before sleep, she writes her name on the boy’s palm.

    Next day neither remembers the body-switching, but both boy and girl find they have messages written in markers on their hands. They go over their journals and come to the shocking conclusion that in their dreams they are switching bodies. This seems to be happening randomly a few times a week.

    They come up with a survival strategy. They’ll give each other guidelines, like "Use the right bathroom." They’ll go on posting diary notes on each other’s smartphones. Taki reads this entry in his phone diary: "Today is the day we’ll be able to see the comet". But there is no comet in the sky that day on his timeline. As we will discover, the comet appeared three years earlier. Taki and Mitsuha are not only living in different places; they are living in different times.
   Mitsuha, in her own body and her own time, watches the comet. It splits in the sky, hurling a lethal fragment straight at her village. We understands that the comet kills her and wipes out her village. After this episode, Taki stops waking up in her body. He entries in his smartphone diary fade away.
    Is it possible to bend events in the past, to save the girl from the death she experiences three years earlier? It's a crazy idea, but then it's crazy that boy and girl have been swapping bodies and living parts of each other's lives. If their destinies are that closely intertwined, maybe there's a chance that Taki can reach her across time, warn her about the coming disaster - and save her life and others.
    So the quest begins. Taki does not know the name of Mitsuha's village, but he has sketches he has made from his second life of its beautiful setting. Out in the countryside, a woman in a noodle shop recognizes the location in his pictures.

   Taki goes to the site. The village is gone, replaced by the crater made by the meteor.  All seems lost, but then then there is sake, and archaic technology for relocating spirits and stepping in and out of time. He finds his way to the place of a god, a placee where Mitsuha left “half herself” in safekeeping. The container of a vital part of her spirit is  a jug of kuchikamisake, sacred sake, made with her own spit.
     Taki drinks this. We understand that he is ingesting part of Mitsuha's vital essence. Now we see the unbraiding and re-weaving of time. This is visually compelling, bringing alive an ancient tradition. We come to understand that corded braids represent the threads of time, which can be knotted and unknotted.
      Now Taki is back in Mitsuha’s body on the day that the comet will strike. He struggles to get people to evacuate the village, without much success.

    Meanwhile Mitsuha is on a train to Tokyo in search of him. “If I see you I will know I was in your body.” But his number is unavailable (because they are living three years removed from each other, which she does not yet understand. She finds Taki on a train. He does not recognize her but she gives him her name.

     They are finally able to see each other and meet on the lip of the crater where there is the home of the old god. This begins and ends in the space of twilight. We are reminded of the blackboard early in the film, on which the teacher writes the kanji for Tasogare-doki , twilight time, and explains that it means the time of “'Who Goes There?”. The sense of the expression is that at twilight, t’s still light enough to see someone but too dark to recognize them. For much of the film, the dialect word kataware-doki is used.
    Thanks to Taki's journey across time, the people of Mitsuha's town are saved, though the town itself is destroyed.
    We can't stop without some romance. Mitsuha and Taki continue to seek each other. They finally spot each other on trains in the big city, as they travel on parallel lines. By this time, just as dreams fade, they have forgotten almost everything – including each other’s names – except that something restless in their souls has kept them searching for someone, somewhere.

Makoto Shinkai wrote a "light novel", also titled Your Name, while making his film, and it is well worth reading, though I recommend watching the movie first.

The Midnight Library and the Café Jet-Lag

"Sometimes just to say your own truth out loud is enough to find others like you."

It's a great moment in Matt Haig's great novel The Midnight Library, when Nora, who is sliding between parallel lives, discovers there are others like her. This is what Hugo, the first to reveal himself, tells her. 

"We are sliders. We have a root life in which we lying somewhere, unconscious, suspended between life and death, and then we arrive in a place...A library, a video store, an art gallery, a casino, a restaurant..." 

And this place becomes the portal to a parallel world where you find yourself in the body and situation of your parallel self as they are in this same moment. You'll be challenged to catch up with their divergent biography, with a lover you never knew, a job you never held, songs you never learned, muscles you didn't know you had. 

The many worlds interpretation of reality, as it has evolved, makes sliding acceptable to theoretical physics. The architecture for transit - the library, the video store - is easier for human minds than theorems about quantum waves. 

Matt Haig's protagonist, Nora Seed, is exploring this territory while lying between life and death after overdosing. Her surroundings resemble an immense library, in the care of a lady who looks like her beloved librarian from elementary school. All the books in the midnight library are bound in green; to open any one is to enter a different parallel; life in which Nora made different choices.

We come to understand that the challenge for her is to find a life in which she wants to stay in a body in the physical world. She must white out volumes of her vast Book of Regrets. She can't take forever to do this. At a certain point the library of this limb will crumble and dematerialize.

The librarian tells Nora, "Every time one decision is taken over another, the outcomes differ. An irresistible variation occurs, which in turn leads to further variations...You have as many lives as you have possibilities. There are lives where you made different choices. And those choices lead to different outcomes. If you had done just one thing differently, you would have a different life story."

We are then informed that "Doing one thing differently is often the same as doing everything differently. Actions can't be reversed within a lifetime, however much we try...But you are no longer within a lifetime. You have popped outside." 

The books in the library are near or far according to how near or far the alternate life is from the current one (in time as well as space since greater divergence seems related to earlier separation).

Nora learns to think of the life in which her body is lying in a coma as her "root" life, with all the others spreading and diverging like branches of a gigantic tree. I think of Sylvia Plath picture of  existence as a fig tree where you see the juicy fruit of other possible lives but can't get to them and must watch them rot. Here you can get to them but may leave them to rot. 

 So here is the friendly librarian's challenge: Which life would you like to try on?" 

 Choose to stay in another life and it will be as if it was always there. Your memory of the life you were living before - and of the midnight library- will fade and disappear. The book of that life will not be returned to shelves. 

 Nora starts by following her regret over not marrying a boyfriend named Dan and living his dream of running a country pub. The author teases us with his name for the Oxfordshire village where the pub is located: Littleworth. Nora lands in her slightly different body without knowing anything about the scene - she doesn't know where the loo is, or the name of the whiskery regular. A question not answered is: what happens to the Nora who was living at the Three Horseshoes pub while the "original" Nora is in her body and life?

Things don't work out at the pub, or with the boyfriend, now a surly dipsomaniac husband. Try again, and again. Each time there's the small problem of trying to catch up with all the things your parallel; self was doing before you slid into her body. Nora flunks a speech she is supposed to give, as an Olympic star, to a thousand people, because she can't remember the story of this alternate self.

When you check out another life, through a book from the midnight library, you start at the same exact time  00:00. In this other life you made other choices in the past. That is past history of which you may remember little or much or nothing in the body you are now in. You cannot touch that past. You can make choices in the present and future of the alternate life that will become your definitive life, unless disappointment throws you out of it. 

Among the infinity of parallel lives you may choose from, according to library rules, there is a category that is forbidden: lives in which you are already dead. We are told there are no books for such lives because the library is about possibilities and the dead don't have any.

This seems to me to be a wrongful restriction. The dead have choices, like the living, and plenty of possible futures. In exploring my own parallel lives I have entered worlds where I died years ago. Some I find quite enjoyable, even beautiful. For relaxation I sometimes go the penthouse of a Robert who died before me. I enjoy swimming in his rooftop pool, and foraging in his vast library, and watching dreams that play all around me, as if I have slipped into a virtual reality pod, when I stretch out on his bed.

 Nora's dialogues with the slider Hugo, who seems addicted to quantum jumping for its own sake, are marvelous and an effortless introduction to the Many Worlds hypothesis in physics which suggests that there are an infinite number of divergent parallel universes. "Every moment of your life you enter a new universe. With every decision you make." 

Sliders might be popping in and out of parallel worlds all the time. People around them generally don’t notice even when they say, "My mind went blank" or "I am not myself today."

Hugo says, with admirable clarity, that "the human brain can't handle the complexity of an open quantum wave function so it organizes or translates this complexity into something it understands." Like librarian in a library. When Hugo goes sliding, his departure lounge is not a library, but a video store. Other sliders use different launch pads There is always a guide who resembles someone who was helpful in life.  

You don't need to be half-dead to explore this field for yourself, though we all exist somewhere between life and death. I use a very special library, and a cosmic video store, and an art gallery or museum often as portals for lucid dream adventures in parallel worlds and others. I open such spaces to adventurous dream travelers as departure lounges for group journeys powered by shamanic drumming. and play guide for groups that want first-hand experience of these things.

 I have made Matt Haig's novel recommended treading for the advanced dreamers who are engaged with me in exploring and mapping the multiverse. His sliders' varying choice of portals makes me reflect that, beyond a library and a video store, I could make more use of restaurants. I often dine well in my dreams and return with the taste in my mouth. I think I will see whether the Café Jet-Lag in Paris, where I would often stop for coffee or vin rouge after overnight flights, is a friendly transit lounge for interdimensional travel. The name matches my condition when I return from world-jumping. 

I am told that since my last visit the Café Jet-Lag has closed. This is not a serious obstacle to making a return visit. If in my root life the café is no longer there, I am pretty sure I can find it in a parallel continuum, maybe even one in which the old farmer's market is still in business nearby at Les Halles. 

Art: "Dream Library" by Robert Moss

The Paths All Taken

Instead of thinking about paths not taken in this life, we might reflect on the possibility that, in our greater self, we have experienced all possible paths, and can tap into that, embracing the gifts and lessons of many possible lives.

This was the working conclusion of a group of frequent fliers I led in an experiment in tracking an alternate self. I asked each member of the group to start by traveling back along the road of their earlier life and finding a crossroads where they had made a significant decision but might have chosen differently. This crossroads would become the point of departure for a longer journey, powered by shamanic drumming. I gave the following instructions for the larger journey:
-

When the journey begins, you will find yourself approaching that crossroads you remember from your earlier life. This time, you will take a different road. You will follow your alternate self along that alternate life path, all the way to the present moment in time.

-

We used live shamanic drumming to fuel and focus the journey.

One traveler pursued an alternate event track on which, instead of marrying and having kids early, she pursued career and higher education, becoming a U.N. interpreter and eventually founding her own successful business. She saw herself giving speeches in no fewer than five languages. She had some romance and excitement on this trail, but found herself - at her present age - living alone and feeling lonely, amid the trappings of success and affluence that surrounded her. She told us this experience left her glad she made the choice that she made, and also glad she could now feel she had not missed out on that alternate life as the international career woman. "Now I really feel I've lived both lives."

Asked whether she could bring gifts of her alternate self into her present life, she said she'd get on with working with some French language tapes, with the aim of making herself fully bilingual, as her parallel self had succeeded in doing decades earlier. She felt that her language skills might grow faster now that there was some conscious convergence with that other self, the globe-trotting linguist.
-

Another traveler who had never married or become a mother found herself going back to a crossroads she reached in her teens, when - in the life she remembered - she decided not to go back to the boyfriend who was waiting for her in California after spending the holidays with her family on the East Coast.

Following her alternate self who did go back to the boyfriend, she found herself participating, very vividly, in a life that included going to grad school with him, getting married and having kids, running a psychology practice, and then finally breaking up after her husband developed a "roving eye." She reported, with calm certainty, "I've done that now, and I don't need to carry on having any regrets." She thought she would try to bring some of her parallel self's gifts in research and writing into a new phase of her present creative life.

=

A woman who made a commitment to service in ministry and chose not to marry, returned to a time when she might have responded to the invitation of a colleague to pursue a romantic relationship. On the alternate life path she chose to track, she made a different choice, pursued the relationship and entered into a loving marriage. She gave birth to a girl and later to a boy. She developed a professional career in counseling on a university campus. She experienced wrenching grief when her husband died leaving her widowed in her mid-forties. She had a sense of the loving care of this man that reached from the other side to her on both life paths. 

This traveler returned with a deep sense of peace and satisfaction. The alternate life and the one she now inhabited both required courage to navigate challenges. She spoke about a sense of both lives being lived well, and of both offering service and love to others. "Both paths are of great value," she said. "Knowing that, I feel deep peace and satisfaction."

-

Not all the experiences that were reported brought calm and closure. Bravely, one of our travelers returned to the night when she had gone out on a motorbike and suffered a terrible accident that put her in hospital for a long time and left her scarred. What if she had not gone out that night? She found that, on the alternate track that avoided the accident, her marriage still collapsed, and this released her from some of her second-guessing. 

She also met another self, a double who had made the same choice to go out on the bike but had never gotten herself together after the accident. "I call her the Sad One. She's the one who carries her disability through life as her permanent excuse for not trying and not really living. I thought I'd parted company with her but she's still around and I want to send her away."

-

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

-

Alternate reality tracking of the kind I have reported here may become alternate reality therapy - worthy of the acronym ART - if we can rise to greater consciousness of who is stepping where in our life gardens of forking paths.

Illustration: "Forking Paths" (c) Robert Moss

A Dreamer's Notes: Meeting Doubles on the Many Roads of Time

I am leading another workshop, in the dream, and people are wildly excited by the new experiments I have constructed, for which I am using my own life - or rather, my own lives - as a demonstration model. I am 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. To show how this works, I have chosen doubles from my present life continuum, alternate Roberts who made different choices and have traveled since on separate timelines that split off when those choices were made. I want to show that all times are accessible through our Active Dreaming techniques.

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. When my consciosuness enters the situation of an alternate Robert, for example, I choose to behave with kindness and compassion in an unhappy episode involving a former partner. I repeat the exercise with other parallel selves who made different life choices, large and small.

I allow the group to watch my moves, which look to them as if I am stepping in and out of sliding and revolving  doors. We proceed to develop a simple new model of doubling and travel between parallel universes. We prepare for a group journey in which they can experiment with jumping into the situation of their own alternate selves.

Feelings: I returned from this dream excursion excited, almost elated. 

Reality check: I lead workshops in my dreams several times a week. The main theme here has featured in many of my dreams. 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. 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?."

Journal diving: I like to do bibliomancy with my own journals. This report popped up today and I am posting it unedited. It is dated August 22, 2011, and has the same title as this article: "Meeting Doubles on the Many Roads of Time". I made the illustration today. I intend to conduct further group experiments similar to what I was leading in the workshop. 

Illustration: "Many Doors, Many Timelines" by Robert Moss

In My Forgotten Library

It happens every few months. I pull aside a screen, or open a curtain, or reach into an obscure corner of a room, and open the door to a library wing of my house that is not so much secret as forgotten. This library is immense, with bookcases that rise to the ceiling, suffused with light that seems natural, though I see no windows. The nearest bookshelves at my left hand are filled with European history. I recall that last time I was here, I dipped into some books about John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough.

In the early hours this morning, I step into the library room again. It is as I remember it. However, the room from which I enter is different. With its deep green wallpaper, I think it belongs to my next residence, which we are currently renovating, rather than my present house. Lucid inside the dream, it strikes me that I have not gone to the far end of the library wing and should explore what is there. I am surprised to find several people working at a large table.

When one of them turns, I see he is my favorite dead professor. I had many encounters with him over the years since his death, often in a very special research institution. I am skeptical about whether he is really here now, in this time and place. He laughs and peels off a mask. As the goatee and bald pate and glinting spectacles are removed, I see that my helper has been wearing a familiar face. I’m not sure, but I suspect he is the young historian inside my own psyche. A large, comfy lady at the table seems quite solid. In her shapeless print dress, she’s not putting on any façade. Her name is Maureen, and she is available for research assignments. The third figure, male, is not introduced.

“What are you working on?”

“Parallel lives.”

Of course. A perennial theme. When I met my dead professor at a research institute twenty years ago, he showed me this was his main work. Not simply Parallel Lives as Plutarch wrote them, coupling biographies of prominent Greeks and Romans, but a branch of Metahistory: the study of how the dramas or people living in different times and places can turn on each other, shifting each other’s lives. Back them, my dead professor was studying the interaction between the lives of Lenin and an ancient tyrant. Dionysius of Syracuse. I wonder who will most reward my study now? Maybe Maureen can tell me.

- Unedited journal report, June 8, 2022

 

 

White Shadows

 

White Shadows

When you walk usually you don't see

the white shadow walking beside you
who may stray behind a hedgerow
or veer away into a dark wood
or a tall city full of thrusting agendas
different from your own, or into a love bower
you left behind, or never made.

Your co-walker may swap places
with another white shadow, and another.
This is a parallel self who made other choices,
who stayed with your former lover,
or still works in the old job, or never crossed the sea,
or chose pancakes instead of waffles for breakfast.

Though the veil between you is thinner
than shrink-wrap, you rarely see through it
except in your dreams, where you enter the life
of an alternate self who has trouble remembering

the alternate self you inhabit this side of the dreamlands.

Yet when your paths converge with a parallel self
you feel something, obscurely, a tilt to the day,
and may notice you are drawing events and encounters

in a different way. People praise you or put you down
in ways you can't fathom unless you awaken to how
you are loaded now with karma of your white shadow

incurred in adventures you can't know about

until you follow the tracks of your multitudinous self.

- from Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories by Robert Moss. Published by Excelsior Editions. 

Photo by RM: "My Double Walks Before Me"

On the Just-so-ness of certain dreams

Reflections on my travel report from my last cycle of dreams overnight.

February 27, 2022

dream

Moving back to Chatham

Talking with a group that includes a woman with a trade paperback about Iroquois festivals and a huge, overweight Onondaga elder with a protruding belly who declares himself to be a great admirer of mine. He recalls coming to a talk I gave many years ago, in Chatham. They reminisce about a storm that once tore the roof off a longhouse during a Midwinter festival. I tell him I'd like to walk with him in Johnson country. We agree to meet in Johnstown in the summer and maybe stay overnight at a motel. I bid him farewell for now in Mohawk, glad to be making an Iroquois friend.  Tekateweiarikht'ha. "I take off now beating my wings."

 It's 12:45 pm and I'm running late for a house warming. We are moving back to Chatham. There are droves of people here that I don't know. I walk around sticking out my hand and announcing, “I'm Robert, your host.” This produces every kind of reaction. One woman says she needs five minutes of my time but gets tongue tied when I say she can have two. An old man, also named Robert, starts weeping when I ask if he knows what our name means. I tell him, “Bright in fame” and I playact performing in the floodlights. Young males who think they are hip don't seem to understand or care who I am. A flirty younger woman bops my shoulder with something to get my attention. I try to say something to people in languages corresponding to their names. “Guido.” “Molto piacere”. A sharp, hawk-nosed Israeli says his name is Avalal (?) Nehamot. I have to explain to people that we used to live just outside the village of Chatham, on a lot of land. 

Feelings: tired after all that socializing. Just so.

Reality check 

I bought a farm in the township of Chatham in 1986 because of a white oak and a red-tailed hawk. During the four years I lived on the farm I was called in dreams by ancestors of the land, into the world of Sir William Johnson, the Irish-born colonial Superintendent of Indians, and the Mohawk Iroquois clanmother and woman of power who tried to influence him. My first Iroquois friend in contemporary time was Onondaga and he came to our home in Chatham. 

Later an Onondaga elder asked me to share dreams in which I was called to fly on the wings of a hawk and to receive instruction in an archaic form of the Mohawk language. He told me matter-of-factly, "You made some visits and you received some visitations." Out of these experiences I wrote a cycle of historical novels and a book titled Dreamways of the Iroquois and embarked on my path as a dream teacher. 

I have no plans to move back to the Chatham area but I am planning a house move. It’s possible that I will be drawn back to the world of Johnson and the First Peoples he knew well.

On the Just-so-ness of certain dreams 

My most frequent journal comment on my feelings after a dream is "just so", meaning "been there, done that". Returning from dreams, I very often feel as if I am coming back from a trip. Sometimes the kind that takes you across oceans, sometimes the kind that takes you just across the street. Such dreams don’t feel symbolic except in the sense that all of life is symbolic. They invite careful inspection rather than analysis. The questions I ask are Who, What, Where, When, How?

In my last dream overnight – the one that left me tired after much socializing – I attended my own housewarming. I was moving back to an area where I used to live, not to the same house, which stood on a great deal of land, but to a house of a similar vintage on a modest lot. I knew none of the people at the party and went around sticking out my hand and introducing myself as their host, which produced every kind of response from gushing enthusiasm to cool indifference.

I am planning a house move but not to this area. I could meet some of the dream characters in the future so there may be some precog elements. However, I doubt that the dream primarily concerns a possible future. It feels more like a dream of an alternate reality where one of my parallel selves made different choices. The content also makes me think about my possible need to go back to an old field to retrieve something from an earlier time in this life. That theme  is supported by my encounter with an Onondaga elder and my interest in returning to Johnson country in an earlier scene in the same dream cycle. 

A Jungian observer might say that my very social housewarming dream could be “compensation” for my isolation in these pandemic times, when I rarely leave the house and see very few people. Since dreams can have many layers, I am willing to look at content from multiple perspectives. I am ready to ask: where am I at home or not at home? What’s going on in the house of my body or my soul? What part of me is the big-bellied Onondaga elder, the tongue-tied woman, the hip teenager or the flirt? However, my primary feeling remains, been there, done that.

Illustration: "Hawk calls" by Robert Moss

The Midnight Library and the Café Jet-Lag

 

"Sometimes just to say your own truth out loud is enough to find others like you."

It's a great moment in Matt Haig's great novel The Midnight Library, when Nora, who is sliding between parallel lives, discovers there are others like her. This is what Hugo, the first to reveal himself, tells her.

"We are sliders. We have a root life in which we lying somewhere, unconscious, suspended between life and death, and then we arrive in a place...A library, a video store, an art gallery, a casino, a restaurant..."

And this place becomes the portal to a parallel world where you find yourself in the body and situation of your parallel self as they are in this same moment. You'll be challenged to catch up with their divergent biography, with a lover you never knew, a job you never had, songs you never learned, muscles you didn't know you had.

The many worlds interpretation of reality, as it has evolved, makes sliding acceptable to theoretical physics. The architecture for transit - the library, the video store - is easier for human minds than theorems about quantum waves.

You don't need to be half-dead to explore this field for yourself, though we all exist somewhere between life and death. I use a very special library, and a cosmic video store, and an art gallery or museum often as portals for lucid dream adventures in parallel worlds and others and play guide for groups that want first-hand experience of these things..

Matt Haig's slider remind me that perhaps I haven't made sufficient use of restaurants, though I often dine well in my dreams and return with the taste in my mouth. I think I will see whether the Café Jet-Lag in Paris, where I would often stop for coffee or vin rouge after overnight flights, is a friendly transit lounge for interdimensional travel. The name matches my condition when I return from world-jumping.

Dreaming Parallel Worlds

I've long been fascinated by dream experiences of parallel lives. These can take many forms. We find ourselves in the situation of a person living in a different time. We seem to be enjoying - or not enjoying - a continuous life in another reality. We slip into the perspective and apparently the bodies of other people (including even members of other species) who may be living in our present world, but are not ourselves.

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

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

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

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

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

     Second only to dreaming, imaginative fiction is our best mentor on these matters. In Matt Haig’s brilliant recent novel The Midnight Library a young woman whose body is near extinction after an overdose is allowed to experience some of the parallel lives she is living in worlds where she made different choices, and determine whether she can make a firm commitment to any of them.

 In Borges' 1941 novella "The Garden of Forking Paths" a sinologist discovers a manuscript by a Chinese writer where the same tale is recounted in several ways, often contradictory. Time is conceived here as a "garden of forking paths", where things happen in parallel in infinitely branching ways. Borges conveys how all possible outcomes of a given event may take place simultaneously, each one opening a new array of possibilities.

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

     All the questions raised here apply to our collective world as well as our personal one. Just beside us, perhaps, is a parallel world - or a thousand of them - in which there is no pandemic and there was no insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6^th. And parallel worlds where there is still a Soviet Union or where (as in the Philip K. Dick novel The Man in the High Castle) the Axis won World War II and a Japanese commandant rules California. In another parallel world, we have evolved to the level of a Type III Kardashev civilization, with colonies established all over our home galaxy and the technology to tap the energy of a billion stars.

    Before Earth's ecosphere ceases to support life, Michio Kaku conjectures, we may have learned how to transport ourselves to a parallel world in the multiverse. Or maybe (as some scientists believe the Big Bang came about) everything will end and begin again through the collision of parallel "branes". Forking paths, dividing - and sometimes converging. To know more, let's go dream on it.

Illustration: "Alternate Lives" (c) Robert Moss

Where’s the rest of me?

 

Where’s the rest of me?

Part of me is weeping against an ash tree beside a field of hay
Part of me checked out of this body at age three
Part of me never left London
Part of me is on an island of no-pain where I never have to grow up
Part of me never stopped fighting battles that cannot be won
Part of never stopped winning battles that should not be fought
Part of me never left that marriage, or that early love
Part of me wears a lion robe lined with the night sky
Part of me remembers this as a fading dream
Part of me does not know he has more than one body
Part of me is teaching school in a dusty town in New South Wales
Part of me is painting with Kupka in a French garden
Part of me is an African witchdoctor dancing with spirits all night
Part of me is fighting the Magical Battle of Britain
Part of me is entertaining in a villa in the astral realm of Luna
Part of me is in the Cinema of Lost Dreams, lost in the movies
Part of me fights to leave my body whenever I suffer heartbreak
Part of me abandoned me when I gave up on a life dream
Part of me hanged himself from the World Tree but did not die
Part of me is swimming with manta rays in the South Pacific
Part of me is interrogating the ghosts of Egyptian sorcerers
Part of me keeps score by money and part of me flees from it
Part of me is the tiger and part of me is the sheep
Part of me stands at the center of all these selves
and reminds them of our family motto: Reviresco. I grow back
Part of me is weeping against an ash tree beside a field of hay

Art: "Alternate Lives" by Robert Moss

Mysterious Realities: An Interview about Many Worlds, parallel lives, kairomancy and dream travel

What is dream travel? How do we become dream travelers?

In ancient and indigenous understanding, dreaming is traveling. In big dreams, we make visits and receive visitations. We travel across time and space, and to places where the dead are alive, and to alternate realities. Once we connect with our dreams and wake up to what is going on, we can begin to develop the practice of lucid dream travel.
    An ideal departure lounge is the half-dream state of what sleep researchers call hypnagogia. In the middle of the night, or the early morning, you find yourself drifting between sleep and awake. If you can train yourself to maintain a state of relaxed attention in this in-between state, you will notice that you may be receiving a whole menu of possibilities for lucid dream travel.

    This twilight state is a good place to become aware of your ability to travel beyond the body. I often find myself lifting out of the body quite effortlessly in this state, without bumps and grinds. Sometimes, when tired, I simply rest half in, half out, of my physical form. Sometimes I float up to the ceiling. Quite often I go flying, like a bird, over my sleeping city and to places far away.
    We are talking now about one of the royal roads to lucid dreaming. The other is the practice I call dream reentry. You recall a dream that has some energy for you and you choose to go back into that space and dream the dream onward. You may want to reenter a dream to clarify what was going on, or talk to your deceased grandmother, to explore a parallel world or scout out a possible future. You may need to reenter a dream because there are terrors to be overcome, or a mystery to be explored, or simply because you were having fun and adventure and would like to have more.

Your story “Dreamtakers” paints a terrifying picture of what it means to lose our dreams. What can we do to recover?

In contemporary society, dream drought is a widespread affliction, almost a pandemic. This is deadly serious, because night dreams are an essential corrective to the delusions of the day. They hold up a mirror to our everyday actions and attitudes and put us in touch with deeper sources of knowing than the everyday mind. If you lose your dreams, you may lose our inner compass. If our dreams are long gone, it may be because we have lost the part of us that is the dreamer.
    Traditional Iroquois say bluntly that if we have lost our dreams, it is because we have lost a vital part of our soul. This may have happened early in life through what shamans call soul loss, when our magical child went away because the world seemed to cold and cruel. Helping the dream-bereft to recover their dreams may amount to bringing lost souls back to the lives and bodies where they belong. In my story “Dreamtakers”, I describe a shamanic journey to help return dream souls to people who have lost them. This is something I teach and practice.
     There are several ways we can seek to break a dream drought any night we want to give this a try. We can set a juicy intention for the night and be ready to record whatever is with us whenever we wake up. We can resolve to be kind to fragments. The wispiest trace of a dream can be exciting to play with, and as you play with it you may find you are pulling back more of the previously forgotten dream. 

    If you don’t remember a dream when you first wake up, laze in bed for a few minutes and see if something comes back. Wiggle around in the bed. Sometimes returning to the body posture we were in earlier in the night helps to bring back what we were dreaming when our bodies were arranged that way.

     If you still don’t have a dream, write something down anyway: whatever is in your awareness,
including feelings and physical sensations. You are catching the residue of a dream even if the dream itself is gone. As you do this, you are saying to the source of your dreams, “I’m listening. Talk to me.”
     You may find that, though your dreams have flown, you have a sense of clarity and direction that is the legacy of the night. We solve problems in our sleep even when we don’t remember the problem-solving process that went on in our dreaming minds.
      And remember that you don’t need to go to sleep in order to dream. The incidents of everyday life will speak to us like dream symbols if we are willing to pay attention. Keep a lookout for the first unusual or striking thing that enters your field of perception in the course of the day and ask whether there could be a message there. When we make it our game to pay attention to coincidence and symbolic pop-ups in everyday life, we oil the dream gates so they let more through from the night.

Many of your adventures turn on amazing coincidences and chance encounters. You invented the word “kairomancer” to describe someone who is poised to recognize and act in special moments of synchronicity. That sounds very intriguing. How do we become kairomancers?

Synchronicity is when the universe gets personal. Though the word “synchronicity” is a modern invention — Jung made it up because he noticed that people have a hard time talking about coincidence — the phenomenon has been recognized, and highly valued, from the most ancient times. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus maintained that the deepest order in our experienced universe is the effect of “a child playing with game pieces” in another reality. As the game pieces fall, we notice the reverberations, in the play of coincidence.
      When we pay attention, we find that we are given signs by the world around us every day. Like a street sign, a synchronistic event may seem to say Stop or Go, Dead End or Fast Lane.  Beyond these signs, we find ourselves moving in a field of symbolic resonance which not only reflects back our inner themes and preoccupations, but provides confirmation or course correction. A symbol is more than a sign: it brings together what we know with what we do not yet know.
    Through the weaving of synchronicity, we are brought awake and alive to a hidden order of events, to the understory of our world and our lives. You do not need to travel far to encounter powers of the deeper world or hear oracles speak. You are at the center of the multidimensional universe right now. The extraordinary lies in plain sight, in the midst of the ordinary, if only you pay attention. The doors to the Otherworld open from wherever you are, and the traffic moves both ways. 
    I invented the word kairomancer to describe someone who is ready to recognize and act in special moments of synchronicity when time works differently and opportunity strikes. It incorporates the name of Kairos, a Greek god who personifies a kind of time that is altogether different from tedious tick-tock time: that special moment of jump time when more is possible than you imagined before.
    To become a kairomancer, you need to check your attitude as you walk the roads of this world, because your attitude goes ahead of you, generating events around the next corner. You need to develop your personal science of shivers. You want to take dreams more literally and the events of waking life more symbolically. You need to take care of your poetic health, reading what rhymes in a day, or a season. You want to expect the unexpected, to make friends with surprises, and never miss that special moment when the universe gives you an invisible wink or handshake.

Many of your stories involve awakening to the possibility that we are living parallel lives in parallel worlds. Tell us how we can explore this for ourselves.

In physics, the hypothesis of Many Interactive Worlds suggests that we live, right now, in one of countless parallel universes that impact each other. Part of the secret logic of our lives may be that our paths constantly interweave with those of numberless parallel selves. The gifts and failings of these alternate selves may influence us, when our paths converge, in ways that we generally fail to recognize.  

    We are connected in a multidimensional drama and this may generate events in both our lives that will appear as “chance” to those who cannot find the trans-temporal pattern. The hidden hand suggested by synchronistic events may be that of another personality within our multidimensional family, reaching to us from what we normally perceive as past or future, or from a parallel or other dimension.

    When you experience déjà vu and feel certain you have been in a certain situation before, you may be close on the heels of a parallel self who got there before you. Serial dreams, in which you find yourself returning to people and places not on your current event track may also be glimpses of a continuous life your parallel self is leading in a parallel world, in which you made different choices. Physicist Brian Greene speculates that we all have "endless doppelgangers" leading parallel lives in parallel universes.
    When you wake up to the fact that serial dreams may be glimpses of continuous lives you are living in other realities, you may be ready for the good stuff: to journey as a lucid dream traveler into a parallel life to dismiss old regrets and claim gifts and knowledge from your selves who made different choices. This can effect a quantum shift in your present life.

Your stories are full of encounters with the dead, in visitations and especially in visits to places where they are living on the Other Side. Is contact with the deceased really as natural and easy as you suggest?

I am often among the dead in my dreams. They are always alive. Sometimes I remember that they died on an event track we shared, other times I don't. Sometimes they come calling. My father has come many times since his death with helpful advisories for me and the family. Sometimes my dream travels take me to new environments on the Other Side were the dead are enjoying new lives. They show me around and I learn first-hand in this way about lifestyle and real estate options available after death.
     Contact with the deceased, especially in dreams, isn’t weird or unusual or even truly supernatural. It comes about for three reasons: the dead are still with us, or they come visiting, or we travel to the realms where they are now living. The number one reason why people who are not accustomed to sharing dreams decide to tell one is that they have dreamed of a close friend or family member who died but is very much alive in the dream.
    The immense body of data on near-death experiences (NDEs) is scientific evidence of the survival of consciousness after the physical body has closed down. When you become a conscious dream traveler, you confirm through your own experience that awareness is not confined to the body and brain, and therefore is able to survive death. You are ready to learn that healing and forgiveness are always available across the apparent barrier of death, and to develop your personal geography of the afterlife
    One of the most interesting things I have learned is that the living may be called upon to play guides and counselors for the dead. “The Silent Lovers” is a just-so story – shocking to me as it unfolded – about how I was called to play advocate for a dead man, otherwise a stranger, going through his life review on the Other Side. Yeats was right when he said, with poetic clarity, that the living have the ability to assist the imaginations of the dead.  

What is the Imaginal Realm?

There is a world between time and eternity with structures created by thought that outlast anything on Earth. This is the Imaginal Realm. You may enter it through the gate of dreams, or the gate of death, or on nights when you drop your body like a bathrobe. Here you will find schools and palaces, places of adventure, healing and initiation.

    The Imaginal Realm is a fundamental ground of knowledge and experience. In this realm human imagination meets intelligences from higher realities, and they co-construct places of healing, instruction and initiation. Here ideas and powers beyond the grasp of the ordinary human mind – call them archetypes, tutelary spirits, gods or daimons – take on guises humans can begin to perceive and understand.

   The great medieval Sufi philosopher Suhrawardi insisted both on the objective reality of the Imaginal Realm and that the way to grasp it is the way of experience: “pilgrims of the spirit succeed in contemplating this world and they find there every object of their desire.”  To know the realm of true imagination, you must go there yourself.  Happily for you – once you wake up to what is going on – the doors may open to you any night in dreams, or in the fertile place between sleep and awake, or in a special moment of synchronicity when the universe gets personal and you know, through your shivers, that greater powers are in play.

Mysterious Realities: A Dream Traveler's Tales from the Imaginal Realm by Robert Moss is published by New World Library.

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