Adventures through the Dream Gates: Meeting Great Turtle

 

This is a story about what you may gain if you stay with a dream after waking and let a fuller story unfold. I rediscovered it while engaged in a favorite pastime: opening an old journal at random and seeing what an experience I recorded years or decades ago may say to me now. Sometimes old mysteries remain unsolved. I often notice recurring themes and situations that help me to become more aware of my attitudes and behavior, providing a necessary witness perspective on my life roads.        
      Sometimes a dream I did not understand at the time has meaning and application for me today because subsequent events have provided a context. I notice again and again that I dreamed events long before they played out – hard evidence, of the only form relevant here, of long-range precognition.  I discover that I missed warnings or advisories that could have smoothed my path and try to learn from my lapses how to get better at discerning and acting on oneiric clues to the possible future.
      Sometimes a dream I recorded looks like a dramatic production, maybe an instalment of a streaming tv series, staged by a personal film crew behind the curtain of the world. Very often - and this is most interesting for me - my dream reports seem to contain memories of events in another reality: a real life world that is running on a different time continuum or in an alternate universe near or far from the ordinary one.
     The report that follows appears to belong to the latter category.The action is played out in another reality, starting with an alternate version of a country where I used to live. When I stay with the dream, something irrupts from the mythic depth, a great power of Earth and of deeper knowing acknowledged by the First Peoples of the land where I now live. The gift of connection with Great Turtle is a blessing in the ordinary world today, as it was eight years ago. 

January 3, 2017

Dream and lucid dream reentry

I save a turtle, Great Turtle saves me

My youngest daughter is driving. We are in London. I tell her to head for Green Park so I can walk the dog there. I wave in the general direction. However, she drives us into a very narrow, twisting street in an area I don’t recognize. It’s very dangerous. Cars and trucks keep rushing at us from around blind corners, in the middle of the road, which has narrowed so only one vehicle can pass at a time. We come to a stop at what is virtually a hairpin bend, and just avoid a collision with a car that shoots out from behind it. My daughter is quite upset. I persuade her to stay in the car while I walk the dog.
    The dog and I are now in a shopping area. Time has changed. It seems that shops in a colonnade at my left hand are just opening. We walk behind two short squat women. One turns into a shop; she may be going to open it. They bid each other goodbye and the second lady walks on with a dog with silky hair that hangs to the ground.
    My dog and I pass them. Unusually, he takes no interest in the long-haired dog. He is after something up ahead. I glimpse it under a lamppost. It looks like a pigeon that has gotten hold of a paper plate. My dog rushes at it, with me hurrying behind. It jumps up onto my left shoulder. I am surprised to see that it is a little turtle. The “paper plate” is its shell.
     I experiment with removing the turtle. It clings to me with determination. Since I have not figured out what to do with it – beyond keeping it away from my dog – this is okay.

My body is stirring in the bed. Grey light is spilling through the bedroom curtains. I am fully lucid. I am in London and in bed in upstate New York. I could leave the dream now, but I want to stay in it. I want to take care of the little turtle that is still clutching my shoulder. My sensations in my dream body are more acute than those of the dormant bdy in bed. 
    I walk with a protective hand over the turtle while I keep my dog on a short leash with my other hand. I look for a safe place to set down the turtle. There is a large garden on the next corner. Behind an ornamental iron fence, I see steps leading down to a pond. There is a sculpture garden and there are statues of animals – including a turtle – there. This seems like a good place to release my little refugee.
    I open the gate and walk down the steps. I tie the dog up while I set down the turtle near the pond. It seems fine now.
    But there is a tremendous stir in the waters. They fountain upwards. With a great roar an immense being rises from the water. Its great head looms over me. I look up at the leathery skin, the lures of the tongue, the ancient, heavy-lidded eyes. I know in this moment I am looking at Great Turtle, A’nonwara, the Teacher of the Deep. In its gaze, I remember the story of the Real People: how the Light Twin descended to the deep realm of Great Turtle, to learn how to wage the eternal battle with the Dark Twin.   
    Great Turtle wants me to descend to his realm. I let myself drop. I am on my back in the water, falling, falling. I have no problem breathing. I go through utter dark to a place of light. There is a world of light own here, in the depths of water. Here Turtle adjusts its form and becomes humanoid (nothing like the Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles, however). Knowledge streams into me, of how life came from another world to the world that was danced into being on Turtle's back.
    Tosa sasa nikon'hren. "Do not let your mind fall." Do not forget the higher world, Earhth-in-the -Sky, that contains the origin and purpose of life on Earth. When humans let their minds fall, they bring down the Dark Times. 

I returned from this adventure feeling blessed.

I ran a reality check on the contents of my dream. I know Green Park and often walked there when I lived in London. I am certain I will never walk my little dog there. I have been in London with my daughter and we could make a future trip but it is most unlikely she would be driving. I don't think the dream anticipates a literal future situation, but rather an alternate reality which becoems the stage for a deeper - indeed a mythic - drama. 
    I live on what Native Americans call Turtle Island. I have great respect for the snapping turtle (the kind in the dream) and its cousin the sea turtle. They can’t retreat into their shells. Their underbellies are not armored apart from a tiny shield piece called a plastron. I have studied the cosmology of the Iroquois (the Onkwehonwe, or “Real People”) in which Great Turtle not only offers its back as a home for Sky Woman but becomes a form of the Great Teacher of the Deep. I have swum with sea turtles. 

I immediately made a drawing of Great Turtle. His fierce appearance reflects my original nervousness as this huge creature exploded from the water. His intentions, however, were wholly benign.

When I went back through my journal, tracking all my turlte sightings in both worlds over several decades, I rediscovered a poem I wrote to honor Great Turtle in 2012, five years before our unexpected encounter in Green Park:

A'nonwara (Turtle Dreaming) 

I am the turtle that does not hide.
I wear the armor of a knight, not a skulker.
My vulnerable belly says, Get me if you can;
I stick my neck out.

You call me slow, but on water
I am faster than you, and fast on land.
Deep down, I am the teacher you need
to show you how to fight the Dark One.

I am the broad back you live on.
Ignore me for too long,
go on harming my other children
and I will shake you off my back.

Journal drawing: "Great Turtle Rises" by Robert Moss

Feeding Tiger, Meeting Puma

The wheeling of the stars is not infinite
And the tiger is one of the forms that returns.
- Jorge Luis Borges

In the early days of my public teaching, many people said they came to my workshops because they had dreamed of tigers. One woman dreamed again and again that she was searching in a forest for a white tiger. A man arrived at the arts center where I was then teaching and froze in the doorway, staring at the artifact I had placed at the center of our space. It was the carved head of a tiger, open-jawed, set atop a wooden staff hung with bone rattles. An artist in Colorado had started carving the head shortly before he met me, guided by a dream. After he met me, he dreamed he should set the head on a rattle-staff and give it to me. The man in the doorway at the arts center exclaimed, “I know I’m in the right place! This is my dream.”
     “For more than a year,” he explained, “I was hunted by a tiger in my dreams. I kept running away, and usually woke myself up, still terrified, trying to convince myself this was only a dream. Then the tiger was on me, snarling and snapping, and I could not get out of the dream. He drove me down a dark forest trail. I saw things there that scared me, huge snakes hanging from the trees, savage eyes in the shadows, but nothing was as scary as the tiger. He kept on me, tearing my clothes and flesh.  I was bleeding when he forced me to the edge of clearing in the jungle, where he licked my wounds. I saw he had brought me to a place where jet fighter pilots were being trained. They had been waiting for me for a long time. I went through the training and got my wings, all before breakfast back at home. I felt really good, and empowered to do stuff to help and protect other people. That’s why I came to you.”
     I loved this dream resolution. I know, as young children know, that the tiger is power that can indeed help and protect. In soul recovery work, the tiger – as well as the bear – has often been my ally in persuading lost boys and lost girls to return to an adult self from whom they separated because of pain or abuse or trauma in early life. Those child selves often trust the tiger more than the adult, to keep them safe and to make life crazy fun.
     The tiger must be gentled to purposes of this kind. The tiger must also be fed. For six weeks, in the late 1990s, I decided to go vegetarian. Towards the end of this experiment, I visited a zoo south of Montreal with my family. I was edgy as we neared the big cat enclosures. Though the zoo was well laid out, with space for the animals to roam, big cats do not belong in confinement.
I glanced through the bars at a group of Sumatran tigers dozing in the sun.
    “Look, Dad!” my youngest daughter exclaimed. “That one is looking at you.” I looked again and saw that a male tiger had sat up and was staring at me. Suddenly he bounded from the slope where he had been napping to press his face against the bars, still staring at me. I returned his stare, wondering if he felt – as I did – that we were kin.
     He sniffed me, gave a kind of shrug, and loped back up the hill to resume his nap. I got the message. He may have considered the possibility that we were related, but one whiff on my body scent had assured him we were not. Tigers are not vegetarians.
     I returned to eating meat – starting with bacon, of course, the vegetarians’ favorite kind – and one night the tiger returned to me. Reclaiming his power was not easy. I learned again that night that there is a price for gaining and maintaining a relationship with a true animal power. The tiger irrupted into my space that night as an energy form that was entirely real, more real than the darkened room around us. He made me fight with him, hand to claw. Few, if any men, could hold their own in a wrestling match with a tiger, and I was certainly not one of them. He made me fight long and hard, until I was bloodied and torn. Then, relenting, he gave me a harder assignment than combat. He told me I must eat his heart. He opened his chest, and I took out his steaming, beating heart, dripping blood. Half-gagging, I forced myself to eat the tiger’s heart. This felt exactly like eating the living organ.
     From that time, the tiger was with me again, available whenever  I needed his help. He was ready to yield pride of place to other allies, like the bear, when their talents were needed, and even to introduce new helpers. When I landed at Cuzco in Peru in 1999, I was cautioned to be careful to avoid altitude sickness. Our guidance was to take this slowly, and relax in the hotel lobby for an hour with some coca leaf tea. It was stressed that the tea would calm and strengthen us but was unlikely to have hallucinogenic effects because the coca content was so small.

I did not regard what I saw in that hotel lobby, beyond the comings and goings of tourists and staff, as a hallucination. I saw the tiger, moving in front of the desk and a wall covered with murals with Incan themes. He was a translucent form. He signaled to me that I was going to need help up here in the Andes, and that he would send the right helper to my room that night. I should make myself ready.

    Near midnight, in my hotel room, I lay on my back on my bed, looking out the window at a night full of stars in constellations whose names I did not know, or recalled only vaguely from my childhood in the Southern hemisphere. I felt an urge to go flying up among those stars, and to bring back their names, and something like a grid opened in my perception, inviting me to go through it. My body started to vibrate and I heard the kind of humming I had long associated with the run-up to conscious astral projection. An instinct of caution was still with me. Was it really safe to leave my body in an environment I had not yet tested, without defenses?

      My thought flow was interrupted by the very palpable sense of another presence in the room. I sat up in bed and saw the energy form of a big cat approaching me. As my senses adjusted, I saw it was a puma. I was certain that this was the ally the tiger had promised to send. The puma pressed its face against mind. It spoke to me, mind to mind, in words I can transliterate like this:
      “Big cats are not intended to live at these altitudes. We took millennia to adapt, following the game animals up the mountains. You have just arrived and have not time to make the necessary adaptations. So what you need to do is this. You need to open yourself at your solar plexus and let me in. I will help adjust your body systems so you will be at home in the Andes, as we are.”

      I did what the puma suggested without hesitation, since this new helper had come with the right introduction. I felt the energy of the mountain cat streaming through my blood, toning my muscles, flexing my sinews. Over the ten days that followed – though I am not athletic and do not work out – I was the fittest member of our party. I had no difficulty with the altitude,  no fear of heights, no shortage of breath.
     Tiger is not only a fierce but reliable friend. He is willing to share his whole tribe.

Text adapted from The Boy Who Died and Came Back: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Drawings (c) Robert Moss

Dreaming with the Animal Powers

 

When shamans go dreaming, characteristically they operate under the protection and guidance of animal guardians. Forging a close relationship with one or more "power animals" is central to developing the arts of shamanic dream travel and tracking. It is invaluable in maintaining healthy boundaries and defending psychic space. A conscious connection with the animal guardians shows us how to follow the natural paths of our energy. A strong working connection with the animal powers brings the ability to shapeshift the energy body and project energy forms that can operate at a distance from the physical body. 

Our ancestors believed that we are born with a connection with a particular totem animal; this was the raison d'être of the clan system. Some Australian Aborigines believe, up to the present day, that when a human is born, its "bush soul" is born in the form of an animal or bird. We may feel that we have a lifelong connection with a certain animal or bird. Others may observe this in our body type, our life styles, our modes of responding to challenges. 

But in the course of a lifetime, we may develop many animal connections. Some of these may stem from our relations with the animals who share our homes and habitats, from the family pets to wild animals encountered in nature and in our travels. Animals we have met in the physical world may reappear in our dreams, as allies and helpers. 

Here are two personal examples, one involving a dog who had shared our home, the other a bird who had shared our habitat: After a black dog I had loved was killed on the road, he appeared again and again as a family protector. His presence, for a time, was all but physical. Driving the Jeep he had loved to ride in, a family member saw him in the rearview mirror and told him firmly to "Sit down!" The dog had died, but he was still very much around, watching over the family he had loved fiercely. After a time, I performed a ceremony to release his spirit. 

After this, he appeared in a different way. A larger intelligence began to work through his form, and I found a black dog - who sometimes walked upright and even drove an automobile - appearing as a guide and bodyguard in my dreams and journeys. He showed me passages into the afterlife. He played guide and escort for me on a powerful and challenging journey that finally resolved a past-life issue that had shadowed my current life in many ways. I believe that, in the year after his death, I was dealing with the individual spirit of the dog I had loved. I feel that in later years, the form of my beloved dog has fused with a larger transpersonal source of guidance, linked to the precinct of Anubis, the "Opener of the Ways". 

On the same land where I lived with my black dog, I had a series of physical encounters with a red-tailed hawk who spoke to me in a language I felt I could understand - if I only spoke hawk. In a spontaneous vision one night, when I was drifting between waking and sleep, the hawk lent me her wings, and I found myself drawn to a cabin in the woods, north of Lake Champlain, where I had the first of a series of life-changing visits with an ancient Iroquois "woman of power." I have written about this at length in my book Dreamways of the Iroquois. The hawk has appeared again and again over the years, to offer confirmation or warning in its flight patterns over the roads of everyday life, and to lend me her wings in dreams and visions.

Animal dreams may be the doorway to developing strong working relations with the animal guardians. These dreams may hold up a mirror to our health or habits. They may show us how we need to feed and attend to our bodies. They may reveal a potential we have not yet developed. They may tell a story about our lives or relationships like one of Aesop's fables. They may be the place of encounter between our dream self and a spiritual ally or guardian. 

Our true spiritual teachers come looking for us in our dreams, and often they come in unexpected forms. The cat in your dreams may be the kitty you remember from childhood, or an aspect of your self that needs to be pampered or walk by night or play hunter, or a guide that has assumed a familiar face.

Recently my beloved calico cat, who died several years ago, has taken to visiting me, typically appearing in the drifty state between sleep and awake. She is both herself and a greater being I think of as the Calico Tiger. I am sure she is more than a part of me, and more than the lovely friend who liked to lie on the arm  of my reading chair. In her latest visitation, she brought a whole army of felines with her, large and small - maybe every cat who has shared my life in all the worlds. Some have been worshipped as deities; the others may think that they should be.

Illustration: "Calico Call" by Robert Moss

In Praise of Great Mama Bear

 

Great Mother Bear

 

You feel her under your feet.

You enter her realm through the roots

of the tree that knows you.

She is endlessly nurturing, fertile and abundant.

She will nurse you and heal you as she cares for her cubs.

You can call on her blessing at any time,

once you have found the courage to enter her embrace.

 

She calms the mad warrior in men.

She strips the berserkers of old skins.

Serve her, and you join the army of the Great Mother

whose purpose is to protect, not destroy.

She will defend you, even from yourself.

 

When you call back your lost children,

she will hold you together in her vast embrace

until you are one, and whole.

When you reach across the jagged rifts in your family

to forgive and make well, you feel her rolling pleasure.

- Robert Moss

Painting by James Uxcell

Braving up to Bear

Last evening, on my way to dinner at the Zamek ("Castle") restaurant in the lovely northern Bohemian town of Nove Mesto nad Metuji, I met an old friend on guard duty at the gate. I was carried back in memory to a time when a bear frightened me in my dreams, and I discovered that I was required to go back to the place of fear and brave up in order to claim the healing and protective power of a wonderful shamanic ally.
    I grew up in Australia, which has no native bears. Koalas are cute but they are not bears. My boyhood dreams and imaginings transported me back to the Europe of my ancestors, and warriors who went into battle wearing bearskins to claim the fighting fury of this magnificent ally. And I remember wanting, as a small boy, a giant teddy bear glimpsed in a Melbourne department store around Christmas that my parents declined to buy for me. But I had no sense of being especially close to bears. Other animals took me flying or prowling through the jungles of the night.
    After I moved to North America, however, the bear came to me in a very direct way. I dreamed, night after night, that a bear was inside my house. It usually appeared standing on two legs. It did not menace me directly, but it was so much bigger than me that I was scared. I could see the great claws hanging down.
    One night, the giant bear appeared in my bedroom. It was impossible to understand how its tremendous bulk could fit in the space. As I surfaced from the dream, I felt the continued presence of the bear in the room. I shook with fear and excitement.
    I decided then that I must do what I would now suggest to anyone else: that I must go back inside the dream and face the bear on its own ground and discover what needed to be done/ When we practice dream reentry in my workshops, we use shamanic drumming to fuel and focus the journey, and sometimes I drum for myself at home. On this occasion, I did not have far to go. The bear had been in my own house. And I had the energy of my fear and excitement to fuel my desire to meet it face to face.
    I sat back in an easy chair after closing the curtains and turning off the phone. I willed myself back into the reality where the bear was waiting for me. Quick as thought, I was there.
   The bear was more vividly alive than anything in the ordinary setting. It was rank and feral; I could smell it. It was mountainous. It took a real act of will to make myself rise, in my second body, and walk up to it. The bear raised its great arms and wrapped them around me. It seized me so fiercely I thought it was going to crush my rib cage. Then the bear's embrace softened into a hug.
    We now seemed to be the same size. That felt a lot better. The bear willed me, with its mind, to look down at my chest. I was amazed to see something like a thick umbilical cord. It joined my heart center to that of the bear. Vital energy was pumping back and forth between us. In a way I could not explain, the bear and I were joined at the heart.
    The bear wanted me to dance. Even I can manage a bear dance.
    The bear told me, with its mind, Call on me and I will show you what you need to heal. Call on me and I will help others to heal.
     I have been doing this for decades, and Bear has proved to be an impeccable ally. When I open a circle, we often sing a song that I borrowed from the Kanienkehaka, or Mohawk people, to welcome the Bear:

Don't cry little one
Don't cry little one
The Bear is coming to dance for you
The Bear is coming to dance for you

In personal crises of illness, Bear has come to me with amazing medicine, sometimes cracking open my body to remove an organ, cleanse it and renew it, before replacing it in a bed of soft ferns and herbs. Bear appears to others in the gatherings I lead as animal doctor and soul healer. I have seen Great Mother Bear help people to reclaim child selves who went missing through pain or grief or loss, holding the adult and the child together until they are one.
    I did not know when I decided to brave up and meet the beast in my bedroom that Bear is the great medicine animal of North America, and that the Lakota - who have many ways of meeting the sacred - maintain that the greatest healers are members of the Bear Dreamers Society, who are chosen and called by the Bear in dreams and visions.
    I know that the gifts of Bear are beyond itemizing. And I know that these gifts would not have been accessible to me, or to those I seek to help, had I not gone back inside a scary dream and stepped through a fear to find the power that was seeking me. What we most fear is sometimes what we must do.


Photo of guardian bear at the castle in Nove Mesto nad Metuji by Robert Moss

Bear Sightings

You stood in the middle of a country road

to make me stop and listen.

I got round you and said, when my heart slowed,

that a bear in the road is just coincidence.

So you came over in the middle of the night

and stood between me and the moonlight

and scared me so bad with your size and the surprise

I jumped out of my skin.

A fox barked in the woods and snickered,

“What are you thinking of?

In your body or out of it,

you are now in the dream of the Bear.”

So when you came again, taller than my ceiling,

I made myself enter your embrace.

I thought I would die in your arms;

instead, I grew to your size, and we danced.

You showed me we are joined at the heart

as an unborn child is joined to its mother

by a thick umbilical pumping life juice.

You told me to call on you for healing.

There are days when I still forget you.

One night, from a hilltop, I saw you on the road

like a walking mountain, dwarfing the cars.

I feared you would crush them like matchbox toys.

Fox barked again, and I saw you were the shadow

thrown by the moonlight from my shoulders.

I had not known your power with me had grown so big,

and that I must choose whether it will harm or heal.

I am still remembering you. I remember now

that I knew you when I was a soldier in leather armor

fighting under the banner of the Bear Goddess.

Weary, I went to die in wild country, but you healed me.

I remember that when the Real People laid my body

in the blanket of mother Earth, I found rest

in the heartwood of an oak until, stirring from my long nap,

I sought life in a newborn cub that could fit in a pink palm.

You are healing. I have seen you open yourself

as a medicine chest, offering all you contain.

You are protection. I have seen you gather your kind

to form an unbreakable circle of defense against the dark.

Behind all your forms, you are the Mother.

You made me find the right song

to open a door in the roots of the Life Tree

and receive your blessing in a world beneath the world.

I bring others here, to be nursed and healed

in your generous lap, and be joined to their dream selves,

their wonder-children, their powers of healing and creation –

that fled from them when they fled from you.

This poem is in my collection Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories. Published by Excelsior Editions/State University of New York Press.

Drawing by RM

Soul tree

We can’t lose our way if we go to the root of things, to the roots of a tree. By finding the right tree — a tree you know that also knows you — you can reconnect with the soul of nature. You can find grounding for soul in this world, and a shaman’s ladder to travel between the worlds.

     At the start of most of my depth workshops, I lead a standing meditation, in which each person in the circle finds the image of a special tree and then lets the body take the form of that tree, rooted in earth, rising between earth and sky, feeding on sun fire. We let our bodies sway as we stand, as a tree will sway in a strong wind, giving a little in order not to be snapped.
      We see the seasons changing around us. We feel what it’s like to have a squirrel run up our trunk or to have birds nesting in our hair. As the meditation deepens, we feel ourselves reaching deep into the earth, through the root system, going deep and spreading wide. We feel, with our inner senses, how we can travel this way to connect with the animal powers, and with ancestral spirits, and to receive healing and blessing in the realm of the Great Earth Mother.

     Then we let our awareness ascend to the high branches. We picture ourselves perched up there like a bird, or a happy child in a tree house, able to look out in all directions from this excellent place of vision. We imagine that we can fly now to a person or place at a distance and look in on them, and sometimes, quick as thought, we are there.
     We discover that, from our place in the high branches, we can not only see across any distance in space, but we can also scout across time and travel into the possible future to see what lies on the roads ahead for ourselves and others. This is something that tree-seers have always been good at.

     Now we go higher, into the world of the tree. We feel ourselves rise up into the canopy, up to the green crown, and then feel ourselves rising up higher and higher until the sky opens and we are in the first of the many levels of the Upper World. We are on our way now to make or renew our connections with our authentic spiritual teachers. They may take many forms and may be using “contact pictures” adjusted to our level of understanding.
    Beyond all the other forms of the guide on these levels, there is one that will never fail us and that is always waiting for us to resume contact: the soul of the soul (as the Sufis say beautifully), the captain of the heart, the Higher, or Greater, Self.

    Your soul tree can be your portal to all these realms of adventure, discovery and connection.

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

Drawing from Robert Moss journal

Bear in the Secret Library

I have a secret library in my house. It contains several rooms filled with rare and precious books, many of them beautifully bound, arranged on bookcases that rise to the ceiling.

     It's hard to believe, but I often forget the very existence of this amazing cache. Often I remember it only when I am thinking of moving. Then I am in a lather to make sure that I don't leave any of the most important books behind. This task is not straightforward, because now I must find the concealed entrance to the secret library. Things have to be moved to free the wall without a door that will swing open if I can remember how to work the hidden catch.

     I remember a night when it took me a while to move what needed to be moved and open the false wall. Then I was able to go down a broad, rather grand staircase. I was surprised and delighted to see something unexpected on the bottom step: a very large bearskin. As I descended to it, the bearskin rose up and became a huge brown bear. I was so happy to be with Bear. I hugged him and danced around with him.

    Then I noticed that the whole first room of the library was full of animals. At first they looked like taxidermy specimens, stiff and stuffed. In front of the fireplace, noses in the air, were two great dogs who once lived with me; I loved them fiercely. Elsewhere in the room, I saw a red fox, a wolf, a mountain lion, a stag, a moose. As I moved around the room, they all came alive and I found myself at a joyous reunion with a council of animal guardians.

    Libraries can hold more than books. In your dreams, as in mine, you may find yourself in possession of a secret library. Try to remember it tonight, and see what you may want to transfer from your dream life into your waking world: knowledge that has always belonged to you, on another level;a book you have not yet written but can now bring through; a renewed connection with your animal spirits.

Photo by RM.

Dream tigers

In the drifty state before sleep, I became aware that there was a tiger in my bedroom. He was longer than the bed, magnificent in his beautiful striped suit, staring at me with golden eyes, whiskers a-quiver. I felt a shiver of wild excitement edged with a little fear. This tiger was real, and he was dangerous. Yes, he is "my" tiger - it's no secret that I have a long connection with Tiger, who has been a marvelous ally, not least in soul recovery work - yet he is also his own being. He is hunting me, and who knows where that will lead tonight? I accepted the invitation to travel with him, into the night. With the morning light, most of our adventures slipped back into the night forest, except for the delicious sensations of stretching and swimming in warm waters in the long, well-muscled body of the big cat that most loves to swim.

-    The little tingle of fear in the hypnagogic zone was a reminder of what is required to entertain a genuine relationship with a BIG spiritual ally. "Every angel is terrifying," said Rilke. Whether the ally shows itself as the angel or the tiger, we are required to brave up to claim and work our connection. When I first started living in the United States, it was the Bear - the great medicine animal of North America - who required me to brave up: to step into the embrace of something much bigger than me, to recognize that we have a heart connection, and to call in its power for healing for myself and others.
-    Animal guardians are not cute symbols to be looked up in books or flaunted as New Age decals. They are living energies, both personal and transpersonal, that need to be celebrated and fed in our bodies and our lives. We know they are true allies when they turn up when we need them and lend us their instincts and sensorium, which operates beyond the merely human range. Shamanic types may have connections with many animal guardians and may work temporary connections with the guardians - active or potential - of those they help. Like shamans, we can encourage animal spirits to take up residence in certain centers of our energy bodies, but they have their own characters and agendas. You can gentle the ferocity of the tiger, but you cannot ignore that it can rip out your throat.
-    If we cease to nourish and entertain our animal spirits, they go away, and we may experience their loss as fatigue or depression or blurred vision, drugged senses or a failing immune system. I once experimented with going vegetarian for six weeks. In that period, I visited a zoo with my family. I am usually very restive around the big cat enclosures even when - as in this case - the space is fairly generous, because big cats don't belong in captivity. We came to an enclosure where a family of tigers were lazing in the sun. My daughter clutched my arm. "Daddy, he's looking at you." The male tiger was now sitting up, staring at me in intently. He loped to the bars and examined me at close range. I had the keen sensation that he was trying to figure out whether I was family. He sniffed me then gave the tiger version of a shrug, and padded back to his pride, rolled over and went back to sleep. I was obviously not a member of the tribe of tiger that day. Tigers are not vegetarians. If you think you have a tiger connection and dine on tofu, forget it.
-     When I reverted to meat-eating, Tiger returned. His reappearance then was as startling and just-so as his manifestation in my bedroom last night. But that time he required me to brave up all the way to resume our relationship. I had to fight him, hand to paw, for what seemed like hours. I had to let him tear me limb from limb. When I was magically reassembled, I had to follow his instructions to tear out and consume his bleeding heart. This did not feel like a symbolic event. In the morning, I had to wash crusted blood from around my mouth.
-    I will say for the tiger what the children say of Aslan: "He is terrible and he is good." Children love the tiger, who may jump from their stories as Tigger or Shia Khan, the maneater. They know that Tiger can protect them when adults do not. Our own lost children - the child selves lost to pain and abuse and grief and shame - sometimes return to us when Tiger appears to let them know it's safe.

-   On a certain night, I embarked on many dream adventures in exotic landscapes. In the last scene, I was lazing on a chaise-longue in an upstairs room, enjoying a gentle breeze wafting through the slats of wooden shutters. I jumped down and prowled the spacious room, among rattan furniture and Eastern bronzes. I heard the clatter of hurrying footsteps on the stairs, and saw men in strange wooden armor, with spiky protrusions. They entered the room with caution, fanning out, long poles in their hands. After waking, I recalled that I had seen a photo of park rangers in Bengal wearing wooden armor of this kind when endeavoring to drive tigers back within prescribed boundaries. I wondered what form my dream self had taken that night.

Tiger mask by RM.

The Lion Who Fell from the Moon

Impressions, momentary and vivid, would wash over him: a potter’s vermilion glaze; the sky-vault filled with stars that were also gods; the moon, from which a lion had fallen….

My chills of recognition make me pause, just three lines into the story. Borges named this one after himself: “The Maker”, El Hacedor. Previous translators squirmed at the title “The Maker”. They thought people might confuse it with Our Maker; they feared leaving sulphurous traces of a heresiarch. So they considered and sometimes used “The Poet”, “The Artificer”, “Il Fabbro”. But Borges chose the English himself. And yes, he meant maker of worlds.
     The maker wrote this as he was nearing blindness in the vast library in Buenos Aires whose flying books had made love and married and danced the tango and fought with knives inside his mind. I can think of no one, not even Jung, who has housed so many books in his head and incited so much action between them. Borges was now engaged in constructing a total library in the imaginal realm, his version of paradise. Never a tame library, but one where wild things are.

...the moon, from which a lion had fallen….

    I am seized again with wild familiarity, the hot breath at my neck, claws at my kidneys.
    Borges’ line has a rhyming cousin, short, stocky and flat-faced, wearing a robe of skins hung with bronze mirrors. I know where to find it.  I keep it locked behind glass doors, along with the Red Book, The Golden Bough and other books that like to flap about and  prowl in the night.
     Sometimes the doors rattle and the key turns unassisted but today, things are quiet and I must fetch the book myself. It was published in Oxford five years after Borges died, so he could not have known it but might have known some of its sources. Its words are spun from conversations with shamans and elders of the Daur Mongols, lovers of horses, fermented mare’s milk, and drums that they ride to other worlds.
     Like Borges, these shamans are forever talking about tigers and lions. While Borges tried to make dreamtigers and was never quite satisfied, around Hailar or the Nomin River it’s not hard. Lie by the water watching butterflies and a tiger twice as long as you may come for you, as it would come for a tethered goat.
     Out here the lion may demand a deeper seeing, since you won’t see lions in Daur country with your ordinary eyes.
     The Oxford anthropologist asks a Daur shaman, Urgunge Onon, about this. He speaks from the tellings, which is how his people describe their traditional knowledge. Anthropologists may know about shamanism but the people who practice it in the old ways don’t have any “isms” in their vocabulary.
     Urgunge says, “Wild animals of the forest have two kings [khan], the tiger [tasaga] and the lion [arsalang].
     “Lion?” The anthropologist is amazed. “But you don’t have lions in Manchuria.”
     “They will be thinking of …er..what is it in English? Leopard. Leopard is just like lion, is that right?”
     “But you don’t have leopards either.”
     “No, that is true. So the conclusion is: in reality the khan of animals is the tiger; in imagination the khan is also the lion, even if we do not have lions in Mongolia. Everybody knows the story of the lion who jumped to catch the moon, then it died, you see. This is definitely the lion. The tiger never did that.”
     The lion who fell from the moon did not really die, of course. Borges knows that. So does Henri Rousseau, called the Customs Man.
     Some nights, coming in or out of sleep, I feel him lying with me on the bed, back to back.

Texts mentioned: 

"The Maker" in Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin Books, 1998).
Shamans and Elders: Experience, Knowledge and Power among the Daur Mongols  by Caroline Humphrey with Urgunge Onon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).

Art: "Sleeping Gypsy" by Henri (dit Douanier) Rousseau, 1897, in the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
     

Brushes with the red fox

When the fox is around, the message for me is always Pay attention. The fox is a liminal animal, and its appearances suggest that we are entering an edgy time. I feel a Trickster energy in play when the fox is about.

     Once, when I was talking about the fox in front of a workshop circle in the Big House at Esalen, a fox popped up behind me, clearly visible to the group through the window. When they started laughing and pointing, I turned around. The fox promptly disappeared. This scene was repeated several times. That fox seemed to enjoy performing for the group while playing hide-and-seek with me. I became quite careful about monitoring the shifting energies of the group that week.

     I pay special attention to the comings and goings of the red fox. In my personal mythology, the red fox connects me to ancestral dramas. In shamanic lucid dreaming, I once tracked a red fox, glimpsed in dreams, to a scene in ancient Britain involving a tragic love affair and a druid sacrifice and the issues these raised in my current life.

     The oldest evidence we have of shamanism in Europe is the remains of a woman of power who was buried inside a crypt of mammoth bones in the wooded Pavlov hills of what is now the Czech Republic. She was interred 30,000 years ago. Her body was painted red, and in her hand was placed the body of a fox,apparently her spirit ally.

     Similar clues to the importance of the fox in early magic come from other parts of Europe. The druid prince dug out of the Lindow Moss in northern England, preserved by the chemical stew of the bog, was found to be wearing a collar of red fox fur.

     As a power animal, fox brings many gifts, of craft and cunning and camouflage. Fox knows when to hide and when to hunt, and how to wait in concealment for the right opportunity.

     There are clues in language to the qualities associated with the fox. To "outfox" someone is to outsmart them. "Foxy" can mean crafty, or sexy, or simply red-haired. "Shenanigan" - an act of mischief - is derived from the old Irish sionnachuighim, meaning "play the fox".The Trickster character of the fox is central to countless folk tales, fables, and children's stories.

      East Asian cultures are uneasy about the fox, and especially about foxy women. In traditional Japanese and Chinese culture, possession by a fox spirit is held to account for many problems, especially in women. In folk tales there are women who are foxes, putting on human disguise to seduce men.

     Here are some verses from a long poem I wrote from a hundred encounters with the red fox, on the roads of two worlds:

From Brushes with the Red Fox

You live on the edges of my life

at the margin of the tame land and the wild

and your appearances are always edgy for me.

You know when to hide and when to hunt.

Men chase you on horseback, with dogs,

yet turn chicken when you turn up unannounced.

You are tricky. I doubt I'll ever be at ease with you.

But you are a determined messenger

and a necessary link to old and sacred things

You call women I care for to reclaim lost soul

and become foxy girls, immune to glass ceilings,

setting their own boundaries, living unbounded life.

- from my collection Here, Everything Is Dreaming

Great Mother Bear

You feel her under your feet.
You enter her realm through the roots
of the tree that knows you.
She is endlessly nurturing, fertile and abundant.
She will nurse you and heal you as she cares for her cubs.
You can call on her blessing at any time,
once you have found the courage to enter her embrace.

She calms the mad warrior in men.
She strips the berserkers of old skins.
Serve her, and you join the army of the Great Mother
whose purpose is to protect, not destroy.
She will defend you, even from yourself. 

When you call back your lost children,
she will hold you together in her vast embrace
 until you are one, and whole.
When you reach across the jagged rifts in your family
to forgive and make well, you feel her rolling pleasure.

- The Dragon's Egg, Mystic, May 25, 2014

 
Drumming Bear painting by Cristina Craciun
Mother Bear drawing by Robert Moss

Wings of the hawk

Members of my dreaming family are helping me to put on the wings of a red-tailed hawk. They are perfectly fitted to my size, and are part of a full outfit. The plumage covers my chest, my back, and my whole head except for the face. Now the dreamers are helping me to put on the face mask. I notice the curve of the beak, and the enormous holes for the eyes. I shake out my wings and tilt forward. I lift up and fly over the furniture, laughing.
    Other dreamers have put on garments and power objects associated with their own allies among the bird tribes and the animal powers. We are together on the sacred mountain where we have gathered for seventeen years to deepen our practice as dream healers and dream ambassadors, to commune with the spirit of the land, and to share adventures in the multiverse. This is so right. There is such joy and excitement among us.

The joy and excitement stayed with me as I rose from this dream last night. 
    I was filled with gratitude for all that Hawk has shown me - and shown to others, through me - since I got in a car and drove 120 miles north of Manhattan in 1986. I was ready to change my life, and was seeking the right ways. I though they were likely to involve putting down deeper roots in my adopted country, living close to the land and its seasons. I had dreamed of an endless struggle that was finally resolved when I followed the counsel of an old poem - Antaeus-like, grow strong. In Greek mythology, Antaeus is the son of Ge, or Gaia, our ancient Mother Earth. Whenever he is thrown in a fight, he rises with renewed and even greater strength, because of his renewed contact with Earth.
   

So on my very first weekend in what I learned to call "upstate" New York, I found a falling-down farmhouse on many acres. Half the land was virgin woodland that had never heard the sound of an ax. When I sat under an old white oak behind the house and watcheda red fox trotting to or from his earth at the edge of a cornfield, I knew this was the right place. But in rational terms, a snap decision to move to this area, where I knew no one, too far to commute to the City, seemed nuts. I needed a confirming sign. As I leaned my back against the oak, a red-tailed hawk came circling overhead, squalling at me in a language I felt I would be able to understand if only I spoke hawk. She dropped a feather between my legs. It was the clincher; I bought the property.

    In the farmhouse, in nights of adventure, I found myself rising from my sleeping body in a second body equipped with the wings of the hawk. It was on hawk's wings that I flew to the ancient arendiwanen ("woman of power") and atetshents ("dreamer") I have called Island Woman in my books. She began my instruction in ways of dreaming and healing that went far beyond anything I had heard about in Western society. She insisted that I learn her language, an archaic form of Mohawk laced with Huron. I discovered that she had an historical identity. She lived in the early 1700s, captured as a child from the Hurons and adopted by the Mohawk people, who eventually raised her up to be Mother of the Wolf Clan.
    In night visions and shamanic journeys over all the years since then, I have found myself flying on the wings of the hawk to perform rescue missions, to scout out the possible future, and to enter the sacred realm of the Peacemaker, from whom we learn that we must seek to heal the minds of our enemies rather than kill them.
    When I have been uncertain of my way, or have simply needed further confirmation, hawk has appeared on the roads of my life in quite literal ways. A hawk going my way is always a good sign for me. So is a hawk having a good breakfast on roadkill, or something livelier. Once, when I was leading a fire ceremony above a waterfall in the western Connecticut woods, a red-tailed hawk came circling overhead, dropping lower and lower, screaming at me like the one above the white oak at the farm. There was again the gift of hawk feathers, not from the bird itself but from a man who had come from Akwesasne, the Mohawk reservation on the Canadian border. He chose this moment to offer me hawk feathers as a gift from Island Woman's descendants.
    We'll gather again on the sacred mountain this weekend. I look forward to fulfilling the dream of putting on the wings - and keen vision - of the hawk again, where my second self met some of his dreaming family last night.
    

Drawing: "Dreaming in Hawk". (c) Robert Moss.

Dreaming with the animals we know best

When shamans go dreaming, characteristically they operate under the protection and guidance of animal guardians. Forging a close relationship with one or more “power animals” is central to developing the arts of shamanic dream travel and tracking. It is invaluable in maintaining healthy boundaries and defending psychic space. A conscious connection with the animal guardians shows us how to follow the natural paths of our energy. A strong working connection with the animal powers brings the ability to shapeshift the energy body and project energy forms that can operate at a distance from the physical body.

     Our ancestors believed that we are born with a connection with a particular totem animal; this was the raison d’être of the clan system. Some Australian Aborigines believe, up to the present day, that when a human is born, its “bush soul” is born in the form of an animal or bird. We may feel that we have a lifelong connection with a certain animal or bird. Others may observe this in our body type, our life styles, our modes of responding to challenges.

     But in the course of a lifetime, we may develop many animal connections. Some of these may stem from our relations with the animals who share our homes and habitats, from the family pets to wild animals encountered in nature and in our travels. Animals we have met in the physical world may reappear in our dreams, as allies and helpers.

     Here are two personal examples, one involving a dog who had shared our home, the other a bird who had shared our habitat:
     After a black dog I had loved was killed on the road, he appeared again and again as a family protector. His presence, for a time, was all but physical. Driving the Jeep he had loved to ride in, a family member saw him in the rearview mirror and told him firmly to “Sit down!” The dog had died, but he was still very much around, watching over the family he had loved fiercely. After a time, I performed a ceremony to release his spirit.

     After this, he appeared in a different way. A larger intelligence began to work through his form, and I found a black dog – who sometimes walked upright and even drove an automobile – appearing as a guide and bodyguard in my dreams and journeys. He showed me passages into the afterlife. He played guide and escort for me on a powerful and challenging journey that finally resolved a past-life issue that had shadowed my current life in many ways.

     I believe that, in the year after his death, I was dealing with the individual spirit of the dog I had loved. I feel that in later years, the form of my beloved dog has fused with a larger transpersonal source of guidance, linked to the precinct of Anubis, the “Opener of the Ways”.

      On the same land where I lived with my black dog, I had a series of physical encounters with a red-tailed hawk who spoke to me in a language I felt I could understand – if I only spoke hawk. In a spontaneous vision one night, when I was drifting between waking and sleep, the hawk lent me her wings, and I found myself drawn to a cabin in the woods, north of Lake Champlain, where I had the first of a series of life-changing visits with an ancient Iroquois “woman of power.” I have written about this at length in my book Dreamways of the Iroquois. The hawk has appeared again and again over the years, to offer confirmation or warning in its flight patterns over the roads of everyday life, and to lend me her wings in dreams and visions.

     Animal dreams may be the doorway to developing strong working relations with the animal guardians. These dreams may hold up a mirror to our health or habits. They may show us how we need to feed and attend to our bodies. They may reveal a potential we have not yet developed. They may tell a story about our lives or relationships like one of Aesop’s fables. They may be the place of encounter between our dream self and a spiritual ally or guardian.
     Our true spiritual teachers come looking for us in our dreams, and often they come in unexpected forms.The cat in your dreams may be one who shares your life now, or the kitty you remember from childhood. The dream cat may be an aspect of your self that needs to be pampered or walk by night or play hunter. It could be the familiar of another dreamer, or a guide that has assumed a familiar face. It could have slipped the reins of Freya's chariot, with a nod from the goddess, to take you flying across the night sky.