The pause that refreshes and alluvial dream recall

You wake in bed and think you don't remember any dreams? Wait a moment. Allow for the pause that refreshes. It can reopen the curtain and take you from the stage set of regular life into the deeper theater of dreams.
   It happened again for me this morning. When I opened my eyes, my memory of the night was blank. I lost my dreams, I sighed, because writing my dreams in my journal and then walking with them for a while - seeing how the world illuminates them and how they illuminate the world - is my favorite way to start the day.
   I closed my eyes and lingered in bed. It didn't take more than two minutes before the dreams I thought I had lost came streaming back. There's nothing major going on in the dream travelogue I was able to record, but I had fun writing it down and reflecting on the behavior of my dream self and certain recurring themes that I recognized.
   I am sometimes in awe of my dream self. He has skills I haven't developed, he speaks languages I don't know, he jumps across time and between worlds with utter assurance, while fully conscious that he is operating in several realities simultaneously. Dream Robert last night, was no superhero. He gets lost trying to find the room where he is leading a workshop. His confusion grows as the city around him shifts from New York - specifically, Columbia University - to Paris and back again. One moment, he is asking French gendarmes for directions to "La Grande Salle des Conférences"; the next, he approaches a man in Manhattan for similar help and accepts an invitation to go up to a strange apartment where television interviews in Arabic are about to be recorded.
   Last night's Dream Robert has supernormal powers but does not seem to recognize that he can do something useful with them. Walking down a city street, he starts to levitate. The feeling - I now remember it so vividly - is of being carried up by rapidly rising floodwaters. However, there is no water on the street. Other people on the sidewalk are not affected and appear not to notice that my dream double is floating thirty feet above their heads. He decides that he doesn't want to float away like a balloon so he wills himself to come down slowly - and finds himself squatting on a ledge fifteen feet above a high terrace. It does not occur to him that he can fly and he can't imagine any other way to get down than to risk the jump. He lets himself drop from the ledge. The different physics of his reality allow him to slide gently down, back against the wall, to make a safe and soft landing.
    I am drawn to compare the attitudes and behavior of my dream self with my waking self. Certainly, I can be lost and confused and torn between different places and situations. My dream self doesn't wake up to the fact that he is dreaming, in the sense that he could use his supernormal powers more consciously and effectively; he could fly (for example) to the venue he is trying to locate. My waking self sometimes fails to remember that waking life is also a dream and that reality may be far more malleable than most people allow for.
   Since I know that in dreams we travel into the possible future, scouting challenges and opportunities that lie ahead, I will hold certain elements - Columbia University, that splendid conference building in Paris, the Arabic television interviews - in mind as possible previews, and use them for navigation if they begin to manifest in ordinary reality.

Let me pursue my main theme: the pause that refreshes.

On another recent morning I woke up suddenly at 5:00 a.m. without dream recall. I moved gently around in the bed, possibly resuming sleep postures from the night, no less suddenly, that I had five vivid scenes from the dreams that had previously eluded me..

     I got up to write them down. I found I needed to pay close attention to the scene shifts. Sometimes we are too hasty in turning a series of dream experiences into a linear narrative. Transitions we can't explain may reflect that fact that we have moved from one reality to another. There are many levels of dreaming, and they may correspond to different orders of reality as well as different levels of consciousness.

     I wrote up the five scenes and gave them titles. I noted that they did not play out in a simple linear sequence. There were at least three distinct event tracks, converging and diverging, and that in my dream awareness I was sometimes in three different places at once. 

     Satisfied with my journaling, I went to take a shower. As  I reached for the shampoo, I recalled a further scene -  number 6 - from the dreams that I thought were gone when I first woke that day. In this scene, I decided to wash my hair because it felt gritty when I ran my hand through it under the shower. In the dream, my hair was black and curly, cut fairly short.

     In regular life, my hair has never been black and curly. It has been white for many years and before that it was brown. I seemed to be fully at home, in the dream, in the well-muscled body of the man with black curly hair. I wonder whether Curly has been thinking about dreams of his own in which he is in the body of an older guy with longish white hair. It's possible that I have been in Curly’s body and situation over many years, in what for me are dreams but for him is ordinary reality.

These notes lead me to make a few suggestions about improving dream recall and coming awake to the many levels of dreaming that may be relevant to you:

1. Make time for the pause that refreshes

If you think you have no dream recall, wait a bit. Maybe moving your body into positions it was in during sleep will bring back dreams you thought were gone. Dreams may come back in the shower, or the course of the day. Allowing for a pause before recall is especially important if you have awakened suddenly.

2. Pay attention to scene shifts in your dream reports

Don’t be too quick to turn a series of scenes into a linear narrative, especially when you don’t know how you got from one place to another. You may have stepped from one dream into another, which is to say, you may have changed worlds. In last night's dream (at least as I remember it) my dream self was blurry about scene shifts. More often, he is quite alert to their possible significance. When he is transported from one scene to another in an inexplicable way, he sometimes asks, "How did I get here?"

3. Be ready to ask "Who am I in this dream?"

You can find yourself in the situation and seemingly the body of another person, in your dreams. The reasons are varied. Maybe you have been drawn to share something of another person's experience and perspective, which can expand your humanity. Maybe you have entered the adventures of a parallel self or a counterpart personality in another time or another world. Whatever is going on, it's worth remembering to ask "Who am I in this dream?" and "Whose body am I in?"

4. Reach for the shampoo

Yesterday, as I stepped under the shower and reached for the shampoo, another dream I had lost came back.  I saw again, clearly, the face of a younger man with fine wavy hair cut in a distinctive fashion, fairly short up to the top of his ears, long and luxuriant above, fluttering in the breeze. He was in a fairly good three-piece suit, cut in the style of an earlier era, perhaps Edwardian. He had the style of a poet, but also of a member of the landed gentry. I think I can travel through that mental portrait, if so inclined, and meet him again, perhaps in the Ireland of an earlier time than mine.

Perhaps I can call this kind of thing alluvial dream recall. Alluvial gold comes from sifting through sediment left by rivers and streams. There is pure gold in the dreams that may come when you turn on the water, reach for the shampoo and sift through your hair.

Becoming a dream seer

Our dreams are constantly coaching us for challenges and opportunities that lie ahead of us on the roads of life. It's possible that we rehearse everything that will take place in the future in our dreams, though we forget most of it. 
    Across human evolution, dreaming has been a vital survival mechanism. In the days when we were naked apes without good weapons, our dream radar - our ability to scout across both space and time - often enabled us to avoid becoming breakfast for saber-toothed tigers or leathery raptors. 
    A recent theory posits that dreaming prepares us for challenges by putting us through frequent workouts in threat simulation, helping us to develop the reflexes and responses that will get us through. I suspect our relationship with the future in dreams is much deeper and more important than this. In dreaming, we have access to the matrix in which the events and circumstances that will manifest in our physical lives have their origins. We can not only see future events; we can choose - to varying degrees, and according to our level of consciousness - which among many possible future events will manifest. 
    It's my impression that we are dreaming the future all the time. If you adopt the practice of recording your dreams and comparing the dream data with subsequent events, it won't take long for you to notice some match-ups. The incidents you preview in your dreams may be trivial or terrifying, blah or wonderful. They may be events in your own life, or events in the future history of the world. Our dreams start preparing us for what life will give us months, years, even decades ahead of events. In dreams, we have several kinds of engagement with the future: 

Precognitive Dreams 

Through precognition, we see events and circumstances ahead of time, as they will be played out. A precognitive dream may be literal, or symbolic or both. For example, a dream of a tsunami might turn out to be both a preview of a literal disaster and advance notice of an emotional storm that will hit with the force of a tsunami. We may not understand what we have seen in a precognitive dream until a physical event catches up with that dream. It may also be difficult for us to understand what we have seen because we are looking at things from a certain angle, perhaps the perspective of a different person. But with practice, we can learn to recognize markers that a dream relates to future events, and we can then move to clarify and use the dream information.

Early Warning Dreams 

Dreams may contain early warnings of a possible future development we may not want - a crisis at work, the bust-up of a relationship, a health problem, a car accident. We may not want to focus on any of these unpleasant possibilities. But if we are willing to study what an early warning dream is telling us, we will often find that it is giving us vital information that can help us avoid a possible future problem if we take appropriate action. Sometimes we dream the future for the benefit of another person, even a great cause. What will then happen depends whether we can find an effective way to get the dream information to the person who can best act upon it. 

Early Opportunity Dreams 

Early opportunity dreams may also require action if we are going to manifest a future we'll enjoy. You dream you are in your ideal home, or doing the work that nourishes your soul and your bank account, or you are with your soulmate, who is someone you have not yet met in the regular world. These dreams may be inspiring and encouraging, but you won't want to leave them floating away from your physical life like helium balloons that have lost their strings. You'll want to figure out what practical action you can take to move decisively in the direction of that happy dream. 

Choosing Alternate Event Tracks 

Any future we can see (in dreams or through wakeful intuition) is a possible future. We can influence the odds on the manifestation of a specific future event. While it may seem impossible for an individual to change certain future events perceived in dreams - like a natural disaster or death at an advanced age - it may still be possible to work with the dream information in a useful way: for example, to alert friends not to go on vacation in the place where the dreamed hurricane will hit, or to help someone whose death is near, and the family, to meet that situation with grace and closure. 

As dreamers, we discover and inhabit the true nature of time, as it has always been known to dream travelers and is now confirmed by modern science. Linear time, as measured by clocks, and experienced in plodding sequences of one thing following another, always heading in the same direction, is an illusion of limited human awareness, at best (as Einstein said) a convenience. In dreaming, as in heightened states of consciousness, we step into a more spacious time, and we can move forwards or backwards at varying speeds. We not only travel to past and future; we travel between alternate timelines. 
   With growing awareness, we can develop greater and greater ability to choose the event track - maybe one of infinite alternative possible event tracks - that will be followed through a certain life passage, or even the larger history of our world. 
   This may be a case of the observer effect operating on a human scale. It is well understood that at quantum levels, deep within subatomic space, the act of observation causes plucks a specific phenomenon out of a bubbling cauldron of possibilities. It may be that, in the cauldron of our dreaming: through the act of observation, we select a certain event track that will begin to be manifested in the physical world. By a fresh act of observation, or re-visioning, we can then proceed to alter that event track, or switch to an entirely different one. 

Text adapted from The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams,Coincidence and Imagination by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library

Photo: Hawk Eye by Steve Jurvetson

What's going on in your dream house?

When you record your dreams, pay special attention to the dream locations. The settings may be familiar or completely foreign, vivid and sensory or cloudy and indistinct. You may be in a place whose physics appears quite different from ordinary reality. You may be at home with people you don't know in regular life. You might be living in a medieval castle that seems to have been constructed yesterday. Again and again, you dream you are in the old place – back in the home you shared with your ex, or the office where you worked at the old job, or at grandma’s house, or in the school yard. Maybe you’ll want to ask yourself: did I leave part of myself behind when I left that old situation? Maybe your dream house is a hybrid, melding elements from places you recognize from the past with novel architecture. The house may seem familiar at the outset, but then proves to have more rooms and more stories than you remember. These may be stories of your life and levels of your psyche or Self. It can be fascinating to revisit a dream structure of this kind through conscious dream reentry, and learn more about what is going on. Jung found in his dream of a many-layered house - a dream Freud insisted on misinterpreting - a model for understanding connections between the conscious mind, the personal subconscious and the collective unconscious. In his dream, he started out on a floor that looked like a normal bourgeois home. As he descended through successive floors, he found himself in primal territory, in a dirt-floor basement containing skulls and bones of distant ancestors. I find it especially intriguing to go up on the roof of a dream house. Sometimes I find there are levels beyond what I expected. Sometimes, on a roof terrace or garden, I meet a benign figure I recognize as a slightly higher self, a witness self who can give me perspective on my life situation, since he is up above the scrum. I have called this figure the Double on the Balcony. Last night I dreamed I was in a house that I used to own, in another reality. It was quite familiar in the dream, but does not correspond closely to any house I have occupied in this world. My dream house was a palace, with sections open to tour groups. It has sweeping marble staircases leading up to what used to be private family apartments and my library. I tried to go up the steps, but they petered out and I realized the the library and the private rooms had been long since abandoned and sealed off. I did not give up on my detective work. I took another staircase to a balcony with wonderful views over green forests and meadows. I told ladies I met there, matter-of-factly, "I used to own this house." I know I will come here again. I need to get up that staircase. And I need to understand what life story I am inhabiting in this palace that has seen better days. By focusing on a dream location, we have an excellent portal for conscious dreaming, shamanic journeying and astral travel. If you have been to a place in a dream, you can go there again, just as you might return to a place you have visited in ordinary reality. Your dream house may be a place you will visit in the future. I have been guided, in while series of dreams, to houses I did not recognize at the outset but proved to be future homes that I purchased and occupied. We take real estate tours in our dreams. The dream house may be a structure that the astral architect in you has constructed for various purposes: as a place for rest and relaxation, as a sanctuary or a study, as a place of rendezvous, as a pleasure palace. Such creations may have their own stability. They may be homes that await you in the afterlife or interlife. Your dream house may be a place where you are leading a parallel life with people you may or may not know in your physical world. It may be a construction or renovation site, a place waiting for our imagination to raise the walls or put on the finishing touches.

What's that? Your memories of such things are blurry? You can take comfort from Seth, as channeled by Jane Roberts: "If you have little memory of your dream locations when you are awake, then remember that you have little memory of your waking locations when you are in the dream situation. Both are legitimate and both are realities. When the body lies in bed, it is separated by a vast distance from the dream location in which the dreaming self may dwell.” [Seth: Dreams and the Projection of Consciousness by Jane Roberts]

Art: "House of Light", drawing from Robert Moss journal.

Commencement at Alma Mater

from last night's dreams:

I am walking across a campus with a host of people arriving for a big ceremony, something like commencement. I feel wonderful, young and fit and strong. 

    I am a young professor, no older than my early 30s. I am a celebrity, and the college kids are so excited by my presence. They look at me as if I am Indiana Jones. I am wearing well-cut “donnish” clothes – tweed jacket, slacks, shirt and tie. I consider the impact it will have if I turn up later for a lecture I am scheduled to give in a trench coat and broad-brimmed black fedora, which are also part of my wardrobe.

    There is special seating reserved for me in a vast auditorium.

    However, I first go to see a wise woman – wise beyond her apparent years, since she looks to be in her mid-thirties, a little older than my dream self. I present a card. It looks like a tarot card. It is brilliantly colored. The central figure wears a costume patterned in sky-blue and orange lozenges, with a big floppy Renaissance hat. He could be the Fool or the Magician, but I want to call him the Troubadour. The card glows in my hand, casting rays of light.

    When she sees the card, the wise woman reveals a whole set of cards. I am charged with excitement. This is the real deal. These images hold real codes of life and manifestation. I will consult them when I teach courses at the university, where I have been given a special, highly prized, appointment.

Feelings: Delight. I wanted to stay in this dream, and did so, despite the morning light spilling through the windows.

Bernart de Ventadorn

Reality check: The dream felt entirely physical. The body was definitely mine, but not the one I am living in right now. I was a very young professor (of ancient history) long ago at the Australian National University. This is a different college. The buildings are older, and the campus is larger.
    I work with tarot and have taught courses in "Tarot for Dreamers".
    I was introduced to Troubadour songs that spoke to me deeply when I was teaching in southern France earlier this month. One was from Bernart de Ventadorn, the meaning of whose surname ("Adorns the Wind") is already a poem. Another was from Guilhem de Peitieu, Count of Poitou ((1071-1127), who has been called The First Troubadour:

Farai un vers de dreyt nien....

qu'enans fo trobatz en durmen

sobre chevau.

I made this song from pure nothing...

It came to me when I was sleeping

on a horse.

    I cannot immediately identify the wise woman.
    I have seen myself teaching in a pleasant college in the afterlife in dreams and visions over many years.

What do I want to know?

-          Is this an alternate reality?

-          Is it a glimpse of a life I might inhabit after death, in an Alma Mater – School of Mother Soul – where I have seen myself teaching in dreams and visions over decades in this current life?

-          Does it reflect energy and presence I can claim right now?

-          All of the above?

Action: I will study the Troubadour song I was given. I will reflect on the significance of the combination of blue and orange. I may try to reenter the dream, talk to the wise woman, review the rest of the deck of cards, and find out what I am teaching at this nonordinary university.

Bumper stickers: 

1. Live in blue and orange.

2. Indiana Jones is a professor!

Serial dreams and parallel lives

Serial dreams, in which we find ourselves returning, again and again, to a life that is not our waking life offer an invitation to gather first-hand data on the possibility that we are leading parallel lives in alternate realities that may also be parallel worlds.

    Some serial dreams may reflect that fact that one or more of our soul-selves is “out there”, leading its own life in an alternate reality that is separated from that or our dominant personality. But serial dreams of this type open windows into even more spacious possibilities.
    While you are living your present life, on your present timeline, co-walkers are walking beside you, near or far, along their own paths, which branched off when they made different choices or took a different turning. There is the parallel self who stayed with your former lover, the white shadow that still works in the old job. If parallel universes are infinite, as some physicists believe, you have a parallel self who chose pancakes instead of eggs for breakfast, and another that has not opened this book.
     When it comes to studying parallel selves who took a radically different life path, developing different skills and relationships and incurring different karma, it is fascinating to consider what happens when two paths start to converge again. Before you are remotely aware that this is happening, you may feel a certain tilt to the day, and notice that you are drawing events and encounters in an unusual 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 a parallel self incurred in adventures you can't know about unless you are following the dream tracks of your multitudinous self.

     What if it were possible to reach to some of these alternate selves, and share gifts and life experiences with them in mutually supportive ways? We can attempt that through dream reentry. We can also seek to journey back to a crossroads on our previous life road, and seek to locate and then track the  parallel self that made a different choice from what put us where we are now. We can choose to follow the life of this alternate self from that moment of choice all the way up to the present time, make an inventory of what went wrong or right on that other path and then - most importantly - to harvest lessons and gifts from the alternate life trajectory.

Adapted from Dreaming the Soul Back Home by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Art: René Magritte, "La reproduction interdite". The book on the mantel is Edgar Allan Poe's classic tale of the double, here given the French title Les aventures d'Arthur Gordon Pymt. The picure is in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam

Luck of the Irish when events got fuzzy round the edges

Grand Rapids, Michigan

A physicist friend of mine likes to talk about a Stutter Effect in life, when it seems that events pause and repeat and hesitate and dawdle and seem less than fully determined. This kind of Stutter Effect sometimes brings us awake to the fact that physical events are fuzzy around the edges, stammering on the edge of going off on another track, in a parallel reality where things happen differently.
    My travel to Grand Rapids on Friday was a stuttering sequence. At my home airport, and later on the plane, public announcements were hesitant, often stopping in mid-sentence, then repeated. Content of announcements would change radically without explanation. Flight 4734 is departing for...for Cleveland at 9:05....Flight....4734 is departing...departing for Newark...Newark at 9:05.
    Though the airport seemed deserted from the outside, inside is a mob scene, especially at the security check, where only one channel is open as compared with the normal three, or four. After snaking all the way up the line, I ask the TSA lady who checks my drivers license whether they are understaffed because of the sequester. "It's a strange day," she says. "People keep disappearing. I don't know why we don't have enough staff. You could ask a supervisor."
     My main priority now, of course, is to get to my departure gate before my plane takes off. I take off my shoes and put them on the conveyor bet to go through the X-ray machine. I take my laptop out of my carry-on bag, put it in a bin, and set these on the conveyor belt too. My shoes go through, but then the action is paused. The same TSA lady asks me to wait with my carry-ons. "We are changing crews and you don't want to lose track of where your stuff is." I point out that my shoes are already on the other side. She is indifferent to this. I am left waiting, shoeless, for more than five minutes, standing with my bags. I am thinking about the dreamlike symbolism. Shoes, in my dreams, often speak of the soul. Bags sometimes speak of what is left behind or needs to be left behind. Hmmm. My shoes are on the other side, while I am left behind with my bags. Which reality am I in?
    I finally get the signal to push my bags towards the machine. I go through the body scan and now I must hurry to get to the departure gate by boarding time. In the lounge, there are more of those stuttering, mutual contradictory announcements. When my first flight to Cleveland takes off,  we are already 40 minutes late. Not promising, since the schedules layover time before my second flight to Grand Rapids is just 46 minutes.
    On board the plane, there are more interrupted, stammering, contradictory announcements. It feels like nothing in our itinerary is fixed in time or space. I am reminded of Yoda: The future is always in motion. So is now.
     There's a memory of Ireland in the speech of our flight attendant, Bernadette. When she brings me some Bloody Mary mix, we compare accents and I speak to her, philosophically, about my rather slight chances of making my connection if we are landing at Cleveland airport 6 minutes before it is due to take off. She brightens. "This plane could be going on to Grand Rapids! Sometimes we do." Really? Then why do I have a second boarding pass? I pull it out. No luck. I'm booked on a second plane, and a second puddle-jumper company, for my connection. "I'll talk to the pilot," says Bernadette. "I'll let you know if your connection at Cleveland is also delayed."
     No word comes. Now we are descending. Bernadette announces that our plane will turn around at Cleveland and go to Buffalo. No wait. The plane will go to...to...Charlotte.  Not to Grand Rapids? I feel that reality stutter. Suppose I could just shift to an alternate event track where this plane could take me to my destination instead of leaving me stranded at Cleveland airport for who knows how many hours?
    Probably not a good plan. Jump one event track and you might have to face all manner of fallout.
    We are on the ground. Before the door opens, Bernadette makes sure I am poised to get out first. Other passengers are obliging.
    "May the luck of the Irish be with you," says Bernadette.
    We have arrived at gate 14. The gate for my next flight is 17, right next door. Someone from the airline is waiting to walk me up the ramp and show me just where it is. At gate 17, another airline official beckons me on? It seems they have held the plane for me. The flight attendant steers me to a different seat than the one on my boarding pass. As I buckle my seat belt, I see it is departure time, to the minute. My checked bag won't make it, of course. But wait. We sit on the tarmac for six minutes. Then I see yet another airline person running towards our plane with my suitcase, unmistakable because of its huge light blue leather name tag.
    When we take off, I realize I know the soft-faced man with a goatee and long sideburns who is seated in the row in front of me. I know the sequence of places he will discuss with the man next to him - Lake Havassu, San Diego, Asheville, Kalamazoo. I have been in the seat before, no doubt in a dream. The strong sense of deja vu tells me that things are going fine. Reality, for now, is settling down into a more definite sequence. But I'll keep in mind that events are not only fuzzy but can get crazy round the edges. 
    The sign on Cherry Street in downtown Grand Rapids says "AMERICAN REALITY - OPEN DURING CONSTRUCTION." Oh, wait, maybe that's American "Realty", a real estate office. But a point was made. The server who brings my lunch at the Green Well is wearing a tee-shirt that says, "The Bird Made Me Do It." When I ask, "What bird is that?" I am told, "You can make it any bird you want it to be." 
    The best coffee I have in town the next day is in a place whose OPEN sign is upside down. I have to get out of the hotel pool when an elephantine Midwest family does cannonballs and empties all of the water.
     When I sit down in my room to write, fire alarms go off above my ear and in every room. In the hotel bar after dinner that night, a bat starts dive bombing the customers while a staffer tries to drive it away with a cushion.
    Reality, open during construction.

Dream explorers in the multiverse

Since Einstein, physics has become a science of uncertainty, improvisation and wonder. It reveals that behind the seemingly solid surface of things is an incredible dance of energy, or pure consciousness. It shows us that time and space, as we experience them on the way to the office or to pick up the kids from school, are not conditions for any other kind of life in the universe, merely human conveniences (although they often seem more like inconveniences).

Today, the agreed “laws” of physics tell us the following:

·         Time travel into the future is possible.

·         Time travel into the past may be possible. (Einstein, in his time and in my dreamtime, maintains that it is not a physical possibility for a human body – but allows, in the dream version, that it could be accomplished in other ways.)

·         There is no firm separation between subject and object in the universe. The observer and the “outside world” that he thinks he is observing are enmeshed together. Indeed, at subatomic levels, it is the act of observation that plucks events from a soup of possibilities.

·         Humans have an innate ability to communicate and influence people and objects across a distance.

·         The mind is non-local. Consciousness acts outside the brain and outside space time.

·         Any event that occurs in the universe is immediately available anywhere as information.

·         Our experience of reality, like our experience of linear time, is a mental construct. Change the construct, and we change our world.

The new physics shows us a universe that baffles common sense, a universe that operates along utterly different lines from one in which the commuter train leaves at 6:05 (if we’re lucky). Yet the findings of leading-edge physics have brought us scientific confirmation of the worldview of shamans, mystics and dreamers, who have always known that there is a place beyond surface reality where all things are connected, a place beyond time where all times are accessible, and that consciousness generates worlds.

    How do we bring all of this together with our lived experience, our human needs, and our hopes for world peace and a gentle upward evolution of our species?

     By becoming active dreamers, able to follow dream clues along the spiraling paths of the multiverse, and to step in and out of alternate realities at will.
      We have the material. Dreaming, we swim in the quantum soup of possibilities, where the act of looking brings things into being. Dreaming, we discover the existence of alternate realities and parallel worlds – including dimensions that escape human conceptions of form – and can actively explore them. Dreaming, we confirm that consciousness is never confined to the body, and that we can reach people and objects at a distance. Dreaming, we are time jumpers, able to visit (and possibly influence) both past and future. Dreaming, we can experience the six (or seven) “hidden” dimensions of physical reality, separated from our everyday sensory perception at the time of the Big Bang, that are posited by string theory.

     As active dreamers, we can achieve experiential understanding of the multidimensional universe that science is modeling.

     As researchers inside Multidimensional Reality, we can contribute in important ways to what will be – if we are lucky – the foremost contribution of the twenty-first century to science and evolution: the emergence of a true science of consciousness
    Active dreamers who keep full and detailed records of their experiences can contribute mightily to the emergence and understanding of new paradigms in science. Here are some of the things we can contribute:

·         Case studies of interactive dreaming that will provide mutually confirming evidence that consciousness is never confined to the brain.

·         Documented and witnessed reports of dream precognition, telepathy and other psi phenomena that will establish that these are entirely natural events, and that our everyday experience is not the only engagement with time and space that is possible.

·         Serial dreams in which we return to locales where we seem to be leading a continuous life as our present selves, but with some different elements in the scene. For example: we may be married to a different person, living in a different town, following a different line of work. Serial dreams of this type may provide strong experiential evidence for the “parallel universes” hypothesis.

·         Serial dreams in which we enter the situation or perspective of people living in other times or dimensions who are clearly not our familiar selves. These experiences may be suggestive of our connectedness, in our multidimensional identity, with a vast family of consciousness in many time periods and frequency domains.

  

Strange sky and a plot against the government

I

What is going on in the sky? Great thunderheads move like wings, then like giant fists, and between them there are swirls of orange light. I am awed, not afraid, walking this road in high, stony country. One of my companions says we need to look very carefully, through gaps in the clouds, beyond the swirls, for a distant point in the sky. What is happening in the clouds, and major events that are coming in our world, originate from there.

II

Next, in broad sunlight, I am in a stadium packed with excited people. Some of these people know me and welcome me, making room for me to sit with them. I am wearing a light, broad-brimmed summer hat with a chin strap, very Aussie. I am glad to be with these people, even though we are packed in tight. They may want me to make a speech.

III

Now it's night, and I am at an airfield where a secret operation is being prepared. There is a big dark military helicopter on the tarmac, propellers turning. There are lots of tough men - 250 of them - in civilian clothes. I know they are soldiers, even though they are not in uniform or carrying automatic weapons, though a few have sidearms visible on their belts. I see a man I know going to talk to someone on the chopper.
    I call out his name, and he turns to me, a sandy-haired man in a light blue windbreaker with a slight Southern accent. I ask him what's going on, and he tells me this airfield is a "staging area" from which the soldiers will be sent on for their mission. He says "the states have a different viewpoint from the government." It suddenly hits me that the secret operation under way here may not be against a foreign enemy, but against the U.S. government, and it may need to be stopped.

I woke from this dream today rather detached, though as I thought about what was going on I became quite troubled about the idea that there could be a plot against the U.S. government involving people with military resources and political power at state level. I don't think I was my present self in the scene at the airport. I seemed to be much younger, maybe working undercover to expose and stop a conspiracy.

However, I was probably my present self - or a close counterpart - in the scene at the stadium, because yesterday I took delivery of the Aussie-style summer hat I was wearing there. That becomes a time marker. If events in this dream could manifest in the future, literally or symbolically, it would be at a time when I might be wearing that hat, as in summer.

My intention, before I went to bed in the early hours today, was the same as the night before: to explore the nature of "far memory", as in memories of other or parallel life experiences. I think I may have succeeded in entering the experience of a parallel self in the airport scene. I very much hope that the plot he seemed to be monitoring is not one that will be hatched in the United States in ordinary reality.

I notice an interesting transition between my dreams from yesterday and those of today, flowing from the common intention of exploring memories of other and parallel lives. Yesterday I seemed to be in the body and situation of an American teen helping President Obama to dry the dishes after a simple private lunch. Today I seemed to be in the body and situation of a young adult American male trying to head off a militarist conspiracy against the government. Maybe my teen alter ego grew up a few years overnight...

Taking on the power of a woman shaman

As a mere man, I am always delighted when something happens to bring me closer to the Divine Feminine and to put me in touch with my own feminine side. I just had an experience of both those things that leaves me feeling charged with joyous energy and profoundly grateful.

I am leading a large workshop group in which we are performing shamanic rituals for healing. A woman friend is with me; this woman is like a sister to me and has assisted me in other workshops over many years. We agreed that she will be the demonstration model for a shamanic healing ritual which we will allow to be photographed and possibly filmed. She lies on the floor and gets her body in a comfortable position on a blanket.

    I am dancing around in a long swirling garment, gathering power and power objects for the ritual. I pick up and contemplate several objects I may use, including some large crystals. I am looking for a bear fetish, but find that the crystal I select is actually carved into the image of the Buddha. It's quite beautiful, with shades of lavender, but I decide not to use this.
    Still dancing, I find another crystal, shaped like a soft L, ornamented with little jewels and fine strands of gold, glowing with rainbow lights. It's soft and feminine, yet it packs a lot of power, and I can hold it like a laser gun to fire energy exactly where it is needed. This is the tool I will use.
   With this in my hand, I dance back towards my assistant. My long garment flutters around me, and so do the strands of a veil that is hanging over my face. I realize that these are traditional garments of a woman shaman, and I become conscious that I have summoned and am now channeling immense energy of the Divine Feminine. My assistant stirs as I approach. I lay objects beside her and over her, reassuring her that it's me and all is going according to plan, even better than we planned. She mumbles agreement, seemingly quite sleepy, and shifts her body so most of it is now off the blanket, while her head remains in its original position.
    Energy surges, finding its way to where it is needed. The glow of nurturing energy expands, filling the whole space. Some people in the background start chanting Goddess names. Indeed, we feel the Goddess is with us.

I'll be curious to see what the friend who is my demonstration model in this dream remembers from the night. I dreamed this in early sleep, before midnight, so she may not yet have been in the dreamlands.
    In the meantime, plenty of others have been keeping me posted on the peregrinations of my dream doubles. In the past 24 hours, I have received reports on a Robert with a black dog who joined one dreamer for a picnic on a hill; and a Robert with a bear who introduced another dreamer to three other animals; and a Robert who magicked up a big tax refund for a third dreamer. A Robert who is savvy with tax and finances is definitely a parallel self in a parallel reality far from my ordinary circumstances! I wouldn't mind an occasional meet-up with him.

Follow-up

I shared my dream report with the woman who was assisting me in the healing ritual in the dream. She told me she seemed to spend most of her time, in dreams last night, participating in a healing ritual that involved singing a childhood ballad that is full of deeper meanings. She also informed me that she has some large crystals from a family place in the South and expects to bring back more when she visits the property in the spring. I have invited her to assist me in a depth workshop later this year.

Drawing by R.M.