Real and Really Real

 

There is a yawning gap in understanding between mainstream Western psychology and neuroscience and the oldest and continuing indigenous understanding of what goes on in dreams. It is understood in every indigenous tradition I have heard about - and no doubt by all our ancestors if we go back far enough - that the dream world is a real world. Compare the view of the yogis, and you look in a mirror: for those who practice the yoga of illusory forms, waking life and dream life are equally illusory; for dreaming cultures, they are both real. 

Some dreaming cultures say more. The Seneca Iroquois say that the dream world is the real world. An Aboriginal people of the Western Desert say that the dream world is “really real”.

If you know that the dream world is a real-life world, as opposed to a rummage sale in the basement of the personal subconscious or a chemical wash in the brain, then you know that what happens in dream time does not stay in dream time. There are consequences. You bear responsibility for what you do and do not do. You are in a field of interaction with other folks, some alive in both worlds, some dead in one. You encounter beings other- than-human. 

You may walk with gods of the upper air, you may fly as a swan, you may prune rose bushes in the garden of the home you will inhabit in your next life. You may eat a peach in an orchard of tigers, you may find the girl with apple blossom in her hair,  you may study with a master who died on Earth millennia ago or has yet to be seen down there.

Illustration: Fig Tree on Magic Island. RM with NightCafe

When you feel you're a character in a novel someone else is writing

Do you ever have the feeling you are a character in a novel someone else is writing? The crazy-brilliant collector of anomalies, Charles Fort, offered the suggestion "that Momus is imagining us for the amusement of the gods, often with such success that some of us seem almost alive – like characters in something a novelist is writing; which often to considerable degree take their affairs away from the novelist." For those who have forgotten their Greek myths: Momus is the god of mockery and satire who was kicked out of Olympus because the other gods couldn't stand his savage humor. The quote is from Fort's The Book of the Damned. Its contents are less sinister, but possibly more weird, than the title suggests. By "damned", he was referring - with Momus-like mockery - to facts and ideas excluded from discussion by conventional thinking and mainstream science, like fish falling from the sky. The trick is, of course, to become authors - or at least co-authors - of our own life stories, and determine what genre we wish to inhabit. When I write fiction, I know that it is for real when a character comes alive and tries to run off with the story. In life, I sometimes feel like one of those runaway characters. Right now I am very curious to know who came up with the initial plot. In other words, I am a character in search of his author. There is a serious risk for a character who embarks on this quest. The author may have given up on you or forgotten your existence. Once contact is made, your author may decide you to write you out of his story and put Finis on your current life page. So my assignment grows. As a novelist, I create characters. As a character, I must play a larger game. I must seek to create, or at least re-create, my author.

Illustration: Momus as the tarot Fool in an eighteenth-century deck.

Oneiric geographies

 

Some dreamscapes appear to be stage sets. You step into the wings and the scene is changed, or gone completely. Some are pocket realities; go outside and there is no there there.
    When I become lucid, I sometimes explore the borders of these landscapes. Once I was deep in adventure in a rainforest. When I became aware I was dreaming, I marched off in a certain direction – to find that I came to a line where the jungle, and its world, simply ended. When I traveled through the forest in other directions, I found the same thing. Beyond the jungle world, on every side, there was nothing but a white void. Its color and texture resembled the drawing paper on which I proceeded to sketch this geography. This kind of thing may be grist for proponents of the simulation hypotheiss, which holds that our reality is something like a immensely sophisticated video game in  which vast areas await to be pixellated as ythe action develops. 
     Night after night, in a certain interval of terror and beauty in my life, I was carried away to a mountain convent that was a complete world, for training and initiation by an order of priestesses. How a mountain can be a planet, except in a painting by Magritte or a story by Saint-Exupery, is a question no dreamer needs to ask. The shape of the world mountain, when I drew it, looked like a bobbing toy, the kind you could float in a bathtub. Around it was the vastness of space, not dark or drawing-paper white, but grainy and silvery like mother-of-pearl.
     One night I was deep in magical intrigues in a vast apartment in a huge old apartment building in an old European city. With companions, I moved from room to room, accessed by wide, long halls that turned back upon themselves, counter-clockwise, like Greek keys. Sometimes a hall would end, without explanation, at a blank wall or sealed door.
    Another night, in my dream body, I walked cobbled streets, under arches, in another Old World city, perhaps Prague. I again had the sense that I was being directed, unobtrusively, to turn in a counter-clockwise spiral. Before me walked a man who was looking at me from the back of his head. It was hard to tell whether the face on his back was a mask or a double. Behind me walked a second man with two faces. Their presence was deliciously creepy, but in no way sinister or threatening for me, inside or after the dream. Though the city was dark and silent in the dream, there was a feeling of carnival, of dress-up.
     But most often, my dreamscapes seem perfectly solid, normal and void of weird anomalies. I step in and out of these scenes as if walking through a door from one room (or one world) into another. I return with the just-so feeling that I have been there, done that. I have been in a real place, with real people, engaged in real events. Sometimes these scenes are reproduced in waking life days, months or years and so they could be called, with hindsight, precognitive experiences or memories of the future. I may yet have tea on the lawn of that Irish hotel overlooking the sea, though I don’t know it in my daily life and do not currently plan to return to Ireland.
     However, these days I mostly feel that my dream self is having adventures - and sometimes leading continuous lives - in  alternate realities in some of  the Many Worlds that physics tells us are probable, on the hypothesis that to make any choice is to generate a parallel world. 

"Tea at the Irish Hotel". Journal drawing by Robert Moss

 

   

Maxims of the Hidden Poet

 You have a poet hidden inside you. In dreams, your poet makes worlds. Your poet is not hiding from you, but you may have been hiding from him or her. Let your inner poet walk with you in your world, and your world will change. You will smell colors. You will hear voices in stones. You will find a universe in a flower. You will meet a goddess at a traffic light.

Here is some of what I hear when I attend to my hidden poet.

 

Maxims of the Hidden Poet

Did you really say that your dreams have nothing to do with reality? Your real problems begin when your reality has nothing to do with dreams.                               

Dreaming, you can travel without leaving home.

You can meet your loved ones at any distance, including beyond the apparent barrier of death.

Dreaming, you are a time traveler. You visit past, future and parallel times

Your consciousness is never confined to your body and brain, except by your failures of courage and imagination.

Instead of trying to interpret dreams according to everyday assumptions, use dreams to interpret the confused messages of everyday life.

Coming events cast a shadow before them. You have felt this some mornings as you emerge from a dream you may or may not remember. The shadow of a mass event can fall like a mountain over many. Most days the shadow is softer and more intimate. As you rub sleep from your eyes, the shadow that falls over you may be cast by your roving dream self, returning to your time with a sun at its back that has not yet risen in your world.

Dreams can be the revenge of the imagination. In ordinary life your imagination may be bound to old stories and crushed by your efforts to fulfill schedules and fit in with other people’s expectations. You may have lost the power to visualize anything beyond the surface world and to find the extraordinary in the ordinary. You may have so lost contact with your great imagineer, your inner child, that you reject the magic of making things up.

Dreams can blow a hole in the hard carapace of your self-limiting assumptions through which the moreness of life comes shining through. That opening can be the portal to realms of true imagination where creators, shamans, and mystics have always wanted to go.

Everything is waiting for you to wake up. You thought you were dreaming in your sleep, but while your body slept your soul was awake. Right now, as you go about your day, your soul is dozing. Wake up and dream.

 ~

In the world you now inhabit, you need to chop wood, carry water, as dreamers do in their daily practice. Write in your journal every day. Wait like a trout fisherman in those waters between sleep and awake for the fish to arise. Light beacon fires by letting others know, at any distance, that you have dreams to share. Make a safe space to share your dreams with a friend or a circle. Help each other discern what your dreams reveal about the secret wishes of the soul, how they may show you ways to survive in the dark times and bring treasures back from darkness, and what action your dreams require of you. Let the beacon fires spread and lift up the dark.

You can heal your body and your life by dreaming a better story. Why not dream a better world? How about now?

Text adapted from Growing Big Dreams: Manifesting Your Heart’s Desires through Twelve Secrets of the Imagination by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Photo: Writing desk in Yeats' tower, Thoor Ballylee, County Galway by RM

Which is the dream?

A dream world is real. It has its own physics. For someone living in a dream world, or even just passing through, it is the regular world that seems hazy, fleeting or hallucinated.

When I leave a dream, I often feel that I step from one room into another. It's a "just so" feeling. I was there, and now I am here.

When I exit a dream, I avoid saying "I woke up." That is such a boring way to end a dream narrative. And it's entirely possible that when I open my eyes in one reality, I have fallen asleep in another world that is no less real. When I finish recounting a dream adventure, I may say. "then I left that scene" or, “then I came back to my bedroom”.

Sometimes the dream stays with me, and I am in both locations - the bedroom and that other room - in a state of dual consciousness after I come back to my body.

"In and Out" drawing by Robert Moss

Conscious Dreaming in the Real World

I used to avoid the term “lucid dreaming” because it was often associated with approaches that promised to teach people to “control” and “manipulate” their dreams. The discussion has matured greatly since then, though if you cruise the web you’ll find plenty of hucksters promising to teach you how to be a master of the universe or have guilt-free sex with anyone through lucid dreaming.

    I chose the title Conscious Dreaming for my first book on all of this. In my mind, being conscious means more than being lucid. It means being aware that at every turning, in every state of reality and consciousness, you can exercise choice. At the very least, you can choose your attitude, and that can change everything. You want to be prepared, always, to test the limits of possibility.

    In my experience, it is less important to be aware that we are dreaming than to be capable of exercising choice, pursuing goals and considering consequences, whatever state of reality and consciousness we may be in.
    The ability to embark on dream journeys at will, travel to certain locations, contact transpersonal beings and exercise wakeful powers of goal-setting and decision-making in the dream state  is what is prized by traditional dreaming peoples. In other words, they rank volitional dreaming above lucid dreaming, to employ a helpful distinction suggested by anthropologists Roger Ivar Lohmann and Shayne Dahl in a recent essay.[1]
      As a lucid dreamer, you may experiment with creating environments in nonordinary reality where you can live out your wildest fantasies or engage in training or meditation. I am greatly in favor of practicing reality creation on the imaginal plane. However, you don’t want to fall into the delusion that everything you experience in dreaming is merely a figment of your own imagination, or that everyone you encounter is a projection or aspect of yourself.
     You will come to understand that dreaming – lucid or otherwise – is a portal to other realms of reality in the multidimensional universe. They may have their own physics, whether similar or wildly different from the physics of everyday experience on Earth.  These realms include the territories where the dead are alive.
     This is common knowledge in ancestral and indigenous traditions, which understand that the dream world is a real world and may actually be more real than much of ordinary life, where we are sometimes in the condition of sleepwalkers. In dreaming cultures, it is recognized that the most important events in our lives may take place in dreams.              
     Anthropologist Irving Hallowell wrote of the Ojibwa, “When we think autobiographically we only include events that happened to us when awake; the Ojubwa include remembered events that hat have occurred in dreams. And, far from being of subordinate importance, such experiences are for them often of more vital importance than the events of daily waking life. Why is this so? Because it is in dreams that the individual comes into direct communication with the atiso’kanak, the powerful ‘persons’ of the other-than-human class.”[2]

     Shamans say that in dreams that matter (waking or sleeping) one of two things is happening. Either you are journeying beyond your body, released from the limits of space-time and the physical senses; or you receive a visitation from a being — god, spirit, or fellow dreamer — who does not suffer from these limitations. In the language of the Makiritare, a dreaming people of Venezuela, the word for dream, adekato, means literally a “flight of the soul.”[3]
     Among the Semang-Negrito peoples of the Malay peninsula, "walking into a dream" means entering an altered state of consciousness and a separate reality.  What is experienced in dreams is at least as real as what goes on in the day. One of the souls of the dreamer travels in other worlds. [4]

    If you have been primed to think that what goes on in dreams is all about your  own thoughts and projections, you may be shocked into awareness that the dream world is a real world when you find yourself in a lucid dream in which other players are clearly beyond your control. 
    For Jung, the dawning came in his encounters with the mentor he called Philemon, who appeared to him as an old man with kingfisher blue wings and convinced the psychologist, as Jung put it, of the objective reality of figures who appear in inner experiences. "it was he who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche." [5]
    I once dreamed that I was rattling along at high speed in a yellow New York City cab. I became lucid when I noticed that the taxi driver was a dead man yoked to the steering wheel by a rope around his neck. I yelled for the cab to stop. When it did, I heard the kind of recorded voice you get in New York cabs. It said, "This is not a dream. You are in the afterlife."
    I proceeded to have adventures in a number of strange Underworld locales and bardo states. Getting out of here was not straightforward. I had to ask for help. It came in the elegant shape of a being I had met many times before, who is recognized in certain traditions as a form of the sacred Gatekeeper. I was lucid throughout this odyssey, and volitional in the sense that I remained fully conscious of my power to choose my course. But the other players and the environment itself had their own reality and solidity.
     A bigger experience in a state of dream lucidity brought me to my first encounter with the spiritual teacher I have called Island Woman in my books. This episode began in the hypnopompic zone, when I stirred from sleep in the middle of the night. Among the stream of images rising on my inner screen, I chose a double spiral of the kind I had seen on a guardian stone at the entrance to Newgrange, the megalithic temple-tomb in Ireland.
     Instantly, I found myself floating above my body - a reminder that in dreaming (lucid or not) we often travel beyond the body and brain. I enjoyed the very sensory experience of flight. I lifted over trees and rooftops, soaring and swooping like a bird. I felt some pain when my wingfeathers rubbed the dried needles of an old spruce tree.

     Then I felt the tug of someone else's intention. I chose to follow the call. It brought me on a long flight over pristine woodlands - modern highways and developments were gone - to a cabin somewhere near Montreal where a wise and ancient woman spoke to me over a wampum belt. I did not understand her language until a series of later experiences - and some helpful synchronicity - led me to my first friends among the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois. They had me repeat words I had recorded phonetically. Eventually we determined that my interlocutor was speaking to me in an archaic form of the Mohawk language, "the way we may have spoken it three hundred years ago."
     I was required to study Mohawk to understand the teachings of an arendiwanen, or "woman of power", who had called me in a lucid dream into a real world beyond linear space and time. This transformed my life. [6]
    
References

1. Roger Ivar Lohmann and Shayne A.P. Dahl, "Cultural Contingency and the Varieties of Lucid Dreaming" in Ryan Hurd and Kelly Bulkeley (eds) Lucid Dreaming: New Perspectives on Consciousness in Sleep (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2014) vol 2., 24-25.
2. A. Irving Hallowell, "Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior and World View" in Stanley Diamond (ed) Culture and History: Essays in Honor of Paul Radin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 207-44.
3. Marc de Civrieux, "Medatia: A Makiritare Shaman's Tale" in David M. Guss (ed) The Language of the Birds (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1985) 74.
4. Diana Riboli, "Dreamed Violence and Shamanic Transformation in Indigenous Nepal and Malaysia" in Lucid Dreaming: New Perspectives, vol, 2, 75.
5. C.G.Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Vintage, 1973) 183.
6. For the full story, see Robert Moss, Dreamways of the Iroquois (Rochester VT: Destiny Books, 2004) and The Boy Who Died and Came Back (Novato CA: New World Library, 2014).

Photo by RM
Drawing: "Island Woman" by Robert Moss

Reality, Illusion and the Rupture of Time in Eliade's Strange Tales

Mircea Eliade is best known in English as a historian of religion, but he was also a prolific author of fiction and fantasy. He regarded the long novel published in English as The Forbidden Forest as his chef d'oeuvre, but many readers will find its loops and repetitions wearisome. However, his shorter fiction can be captivating while evoking some of Eliade's favorite philosophic themes: how the sacred is "camouflaged" in the profane, how at any turning we may encounter a moment of theophany, when the divine irrupts into everyday life and we are released from limits of time and space.
     I have been rereading the stories published in translation as Two Strange Tales. Perhaps we should call stories like this nonfiction fantasy rather than fiction. In "Nights in Serampore", Eliade makes himself a lead character. He assigns roles to actual people under their real names, in this case well-known people he encountered in India: the Russian (Eastern Orthodox) scholar of Islam Bogdanov, the Dutch Secretary of the Asia Society, van Manen, and Swami Sivananda (“Shivananda” in this version). The two Westerners, with the narrator (Eliade himself) are in the habit of driving to a rich man’s house in the woods near Serampore, sixteen miles from Calcutta, for long nights of talking, smoking and drinking in a lovely setting, in the perfumed air.

    A mystery develops. A Hindu professor reputed to be a master of tantra and yogic siddhis is seen on the road in his dhoti with the saffron stripes on his forehead. Questioned later, he denies having been there. He is spotted again, after Eliade has been discoursing on “awful” methods used to acquire occult powers in Hindu tradition, like meditating all night while seated on a corpse. That evening, as the threesome leave the rich man’s house, something strange happens during the car ride. It is taking far longer than it should to get to the highway, the trees are getting bigger and bigger. Eliade closes his eyes for a moment and when he opens them the jungle is wild and unfamiliar.
     They hear a woman’s screams. They get out of the car and follow a flickering light through the jungle. It brings them to charcoal burners, and an old, rather grand house. The owner receives them, but moves and speaks very slowly, using only an archaic form of Bengali. The visitors are confused. They forget the screams that brought them here. Then they remember something, and start to ask questions. The owner of the house informs them that they heard the screams of his wife as she was stabbed to death. Look, here is her body, being carried in on a bier.
    Eliade and his friends leave in discomfort and confusion. They can hardly stay when the lady of the house has just been murdered. Weary and drained, they pause under a tree where Eliade takes a nap. Eventually they find their way back to the car. The driver acts as though they never left. Confounded, Eliade and his companions retrace their steps. They return to the tree where Eliade took a nap. They see their footprints on the ground and follow them. They come to a clearing where the signs of their passage end. There is no grand house, no charcoal burners, no murdered woman being prepared for cremation.
    They learn that there was a great house at this place, but that was a hundred and fifty years ago, before it was burned to the ground. The case of the murdered woman, whose name was Lila, was notorious. She died resisting men who were trying to abduct her. It seems that Eliade and his friends were transported across time. Their adventure was not only metaphysical, since it produced physical effects – their torn and dirtied clothes, their footprints on the ground.
     When they seek to make sense of this, their suspicions fall on Suren Bose, the yogi magician. Could he have worked an enchantment, to distract them from spying on whatever he was doing in the forest? How could this be?
     Eliade’s question remains unanswered until he goes to a monastery in the Himalayas and tells his story to Swami Sivananda. The swami explains: “No event in our world is real, my friend. Everything that exists in this universe is illusory. Not only the death of Lila and her husband’s grief, but also the encounter between you, living men, and their shades – all these things are illusory. And in a world of appearances, in which no thing and no event has any permanence, any reality of its own – whoever is master of certain forces can do anything he wishes. Obviously he doesn’t create anything real either, but only a play of appearances.”
   When Eliade struggles with this, Sivananda stages a demonstration. The swami squeezes Eliade's arm and drags him along. Eliade staggers. Hi senses blur. Now he seems to be in a different time and place, back in the humid forest of the south. Sivananda makes him walk faster. He is again at the charcoal kilns, at the big house in the forest. “Wake me up!” Eliade pleads.

In his introduction to Two Strange Tales, Eliade discusses the importance of fiction in his work. Both stories turn on the use of supposed yogic techniques to wield occult powers. The mélange of reality and fiction in these stories, he observes, is well-suited to his concept of “camouflage”, of how the sacred is concealed in the profane. He writes that

in these two stories “camouflage” is used in a paradoxical manner, for the reader has no means to know whether the “reality” is hidden in “fiction” or the other way round, because both processes are intermingled. 

     A favorite technique of mine aims at the imperceptible yet gradual transmutation of a commonplace setting into a new “world’, without however losing its proper, everyday or “natural” structure and qualities...The parallel world of the fantastic is indistinguishable from the given ordinary world, but once this other world is discovered by the various characters it blurs, changes, transforms or dislocates their lives in different ways. 

      Each tale creates its own proper universe, and the creation of such imaginary universes through literary means can be compared with mythical processes...The imaginary universes brought to light in littérature fantastique disclose some elements of reality that are inaccessible to other intellectual approaches.

    The second story, "The Secret of Dr. Honigberger", involves another real person, a colorful German-Romanian from Brasov. The narrator (Eliade himself) receives an invitation from a Mrs Zerlendi to inspect her husband’s Oriental collection. He arrives at the kind of house that often features in Eliade’s fantastic tales, “one of those houses that I never can pass without pausing for a closer look”, an old villa behind an ironwork fence and an overgrown garden with a dried-up pool, where a world disappearing from other parts of the city is strangely preserved. The main entrance is protected by a sunroof of frosted glass, of the kind that struck me when I visited Eliade’s old neighborhood in Bucharest, on a street near Mantuleasa.

      Eliade is seduced by an immense library of 30,000 books. We learn that Mr. Zerlendi was doing research for a biography of Honigberger, a German-Romanian from Brasov who became famous for his adventures in the East. However, Zerlendi disappeared many years before. Going through Zerlendi’s notebook, Eliade finds clues to what happened. Among all his composition books, Zerlendi left a journal written in Sanskrit, correctly assuming that it would take a rarely qualified investigator to recognize and interpret its contents. In this journal he recorded his experiments with yogic techniques, including the art of invisibility.
     Central to his practice was the kind of dream yoga or lucid dreaming that places high value of maintaining continuity of consciousness between waking, dreaming and other states.

After some time I woke up sleeping, or, more precisely, I woke up in sleep, without ever having fallen asleep in the true sense of the word. My body and all my senses sunk into deeper and deeper sleep, but my mind didn’t interrupt its activity for a single instant...

     I was astounded to behold, with my eyelids closed, the very same scene as I had with my eyes open…I saw in any direction I wanted to, I saw wherever I turned my thoughts, whether or not I had my eyes open. 

He sees others moving in their dream bodies.

The unification of consciousness is attained by means of a continuous transition, that is, one without a hiatus of any sort, from the waking state to the state of dreaming sleep, then to that of dreamless sleep, and finally to the cataleptic state. 

Eliade comments: “All the Indian ascetics that I have known who have consented to give me any explanations regarded this stage, the unification of the states of consciousness, as the most important of all. Anyone who did not succeed in experiencing this could never derive any spiritual benefit from following yoga practice.” 

     Dr Zerlendi applied himself to placing himself in cataleptic trance for longer and longer periods. He believed he had proved that he stepped outside time when he rose after 36 hours to find his face as freshly shaven as when he lay down. He laid in suspended animation for 12 hours without drawing breath. He declared, in his secret book, “I know the way to Shambhala. I know how to get there.”

     He made it his aim to transport himself to Shambhala. To do this he would have to step outside time. He practiced the art of invisibility as a step towards gaining the power of teleportation, de-materializing in one reality in order to re-materialize in another.
     Seized with excitement, Eliade smuggles the journal out of the house, in order to study Zerlendi's techniques closely. He will return the book covertly before anyone notices it is missing.
    There is a slight problem. When Eliade returns to the house to interview Mrs Zerlendi again. When he succeeds, nobody remembers him. He protests that he was working in the library for two full months. This is quite impossible, they tell him. There is no library in the house. There used to be one, but it was broken up and sold off twenty years before.
   Eliade goes to the house again, hoping that it will be as he first found it. Now the whole scene is falling apart, like a broken dream. The Zerlendi house is being pulled down.
    My favorite passage in the story: "I have always divided people into two categories: those who understand death as an end to life and the body, and those who conceive it as the beginning of a new, spiritual existence. And I never form an opinion of any man I meet until I have learned his honest belief about death." 

Nonfiction fantasy. I like the genre description I just invented. In Eliade's case, it not only means that he gives himself permission to use the identities and circumstances of "real" people, starting with himself. It means that the stories are derived from experiences in realities beyond the physical that may be no less real and sometimes intersect - magically or catastrophically -with the world of the senses. 


Quotations are from Two Strange Tales by Mircea Eliade, published (appropriately) by Shambhala (Boston, 1986). The translation is credited to Herder & Herder.

Art: "Nights in Serampore" by Christian Bode (2016)

News from Tibet: if dreams are illusions, so is life, so dream more!

I am always astonished when Westerners drawn to Buddhism tell me that in what they know of that tradition, dreams are regarded as illusions from an unclear mind, for which the Rx is to cleanse and purify the mind, in order to dream no more. 

Serinity Young, a leading scholar of Buddhist dreamways, observes in Dreaming in the Lotus: Buddhist Dream Narrative, Imagery, and Practice, “without dreams and dreaming there would be no Buddhism”, since it was his mother’s dream of the six-tusked white elephant that announced both his coming and his nature. Especially in Tibetan Buddhism, dream yoga is a practice for raising and focusing consciousness, and a training ground for death and the afterlife journey.

There is a most instructive episode in the life of the great Tibetan spiritual teacher Milarepa (1040-1123), who has been described as “the greatest poet-saint” in Buddhist tradition.  He instructed his disciples to report their dreams. “Remember your dreams tonight and report to me tomorrow. I will then interpret them for you.”  He cautioned his followers to cleanse their minds of “habitual thoughts” that would carry over into the dream space and confine them to deceptive and illusory experiences.

In the morning, he asked his disciples to report their dreams. The most interesting narrative came from Gambopa, Milarepa interpreted Gambopa’s a rich and complex dream, explaining that it foreshadowed Gambopa’s future role as a great teacher and his spiritual heir.

Despite this revelation, Milarepa cautioned his followers not to assign excessive importance to dreams, since dreams partake  of “the illusory nature of all beings. Yet he applauded Gambopa for dreaming well: “Your dreams were marvelous, wondrous omens foretelling things to come.”

Milarepa delighted in recounting his own numinous dreams portending the growth of his lineage. “Last night I dreamed that an eagle flew from here to Weu and alighted on the top of a precious gem. Then many geese flocked around it…They disperse in different directions, each goose again gathering about five hundred more companions.”

His essential message was that dreams may be illusions, but probably less so than ordinary life – so go dream some more! 

Milarepa quotations are from Garma C.C. Chang,  The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa: The Life-Story and Teaching of the Greatest Poet-Saint Ever to Appear in the History of Buddhism (Boston: Shambhala, 1977)

Text adapted from The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Image: Milarepa

Tibet; 18th century
Ground Mineral Pigment on Cotton Rubin Museum of Art
Gift of Shelley and Donald Rubin)

 

Maxims of the Hidden Poet

Did you really say that your dreams have nothing to do with reality? Your real problems begin when your reality has nothing to do with dreams.

Instead of trying to interpret dreams according to everyday assumptions, use dreams to interpret the confused messages of everyday life.

You have a poet hidden inside you. In dreams, your poet makes worlds. He is not hiding from you, you have been hiding from him. Let him walk with you in your world and your world will change. You will smell colors. You will hear voices in stones. You will find a universe in a flower. You will meet a goddess at a traffic light..

Coming events cast a shadow before them. You have felt this, some mornings, as you emerge from a dream you may or may not remember. The shadow of a mass event can fall like a mountain, over many. Most days the shadow is softer and more intimate.. As you rub sleep from your eyes, the shadow that falls over you may be cast by your roving dream self, returning to your time with a sun that has not yet risen in your world at its back.

Dreams can be the revenge of the imagination. In ordinary life our imagination may be bound to old stories and crushed by our efforts to fulfill schedules and fit in with other people's expectations. We may have lost the power to visualize anything beyond the surface world, and to find the extraordinary in the ordinary. We may have so lost contact with our Great Imagineer, our inner child, that we reject the magic of making things up.

Dreams can blow a hole in the hard carapace of our self-limiting assumptions through which the moreness of life comes shining through. That opening can be the portal to realms of true imagination where creators, shamans and mystics have always wanted to go.

Everything is waiting for you to wake up. You thought you were dreaming in your sleep, but while your body slept your soul was awake. Right now, as you go about your day, your soul is dozing. Wake up and dream.

Drawing: "Golden Path" by Robert Moss

Wrinkles in the veil of reality

Coincidence, especially in the form of reincidence*, provides clues that our default reality might be in process of being re-booted. Think of the moment in the movie The Matrix when the black cat crosses the room in exactly the same way twice. This is a signal that a virtual reality is about to collapse – in this case, to be collapsed by the alien forces that are keeping humans in thrall by caging their minds in an artificial world.
     There is a vast genre of Eastern literature about this kind of thing. In their dastangos, Urdu storytellers - eagerly heard in princely courts and humble markets - preserved an imaginal geography that includes constructed realities known as tilisms. The word tilism, related to the more familiar "talisman" describes a realm of enchantment created by sorcerers that becomes a prison for one who falls into it.
     Any world may prove to be a tilism, a mind trap constructed by Dark Side magic in defiance of "the laws of God and of nature". The vast tilism of Hoshruba, with its multiple layers of illusion and deception, is the realm of Afrasiyab, the Emperor of Enchantment. Its geography is more various and complex than that of the ordinary world. 
     There are tilisms within tilisms, nested worlds created by magic and imagination. Humans live in such places but do not see where they are. It is much easier to fall into a tilism than to get out. The only way to pierce the veils of illusion and overthrow a tilism is to find the tablet that holds the secrets of the tilism, including the conditions for its destruction and the name of the person who will destroy it. The tablet could be concealed anywhere, often inside the tilism itself. **      
    The “real world” of the first Matrix movie is a nightmare reality where insectoid machines suck energy from humans who allow their bodies to lie dormant because their minds are trapped in a techno-tilism. But the “real world” beyond our consensual reality may be a brighter, not a darker, one. The shaman-priests of the Kogi warn that the Aluna, the psychospiritual field around the earth, has been polluted by human thought-forms and hungry ghosts to the point where it is difficult for higher intelligences to reach us.
     Star travelers (not only in C.S.Lewis’s adult fiction, The Cosmic Trilogy) report that Earth is known by sentient beings elsewhere in the galaxy as the Veiled or Cloaked Planet, because we have been wrapped in the fabric of illusion, limiting our access to higher intelligences, and theirs to us.
    Noticing wrinkles and loose threads in the fabric of ordinary reality, we begin to lift the veil. Pull on a few of those loose threads, and the fabric of perceived reality may unravel quickly. In Borges’ story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia leads to the discovery of an alternate reality that soon replaces the “real" world.

* Reincidence. A term I invented for a recurring series or riff of synchronistic phenomena over time.

**These traditions were largely unknown in the west until an Urdu scholar and novelist named Musharraf Ali Farooqi was stirred by a dream to embark on a fantastic enterprise. He dreamed he was visited by mythic creatures who came galloping right out of the great Urdu story cycle known as The Adventures of Amir Hamza. He made a tremendous contribution to world literature in giving us an elegant 900-page translation of this work, published by The Modern Library. But this was only the start of his labors. Farooqi has since produced the first volume of a projected 24-volume translation of the oceanic Tilism-e Hoshruba. Titled Hoshruba: The Land and the Tilism

Gates of Ivory

Thanks to last night’s dreams, I have no doubt why Virgil had his hero return to the ordinary world through the Gate of Ivory. The famous passage in Book VI of the Aeneid has sparked endless discussion among scholars and thoughtful readers.

There are two gates of sleep: one is called the Gate of Horn and it is an easy exit for true shades; the other is made all in gleaming white ivory, but through it the powers of the underworld send false dreams up to the heavens. Here on the night did Anchises walk with his son and with the Sibyl and spoke such words to them as he sent them on their journey through the Gate of Ivory.(Aeneid 6.893-898)

     In both Homer and Virgil, there are twin gates of dreams: false dreams come to humans through the Gate of Ivory, true dreams come through the Gate of Horn. The symbolism is clear: ivory is opaque, while polished horn, as the ancients knew it, is translucent and sometimes almost transparent. False dreams were thought to be brought to humans by low spirits; true dreams by higher guides. False dreams were held to be prevalent before midnight, true dreams after midnight.
    So one theory about Virgil is that Aeneas and his seeress companion, the Cumaean Sybil, returned from the Underworld after meeting the hero’s dead father Anchises because they traveled back before midnight, Then there’s the political theory, that Virgil was making a camouflaged dig at the emperor Augustus. The hero is returning to a world made false by Roman imperialism.
     A dream of last night confirms me in the view Virgil has Aeneas return through the Gate of Ivory because he is coming back to a world that is no more real, and may be more illusory, than the Otherworld territory where he has been.
     In the dream, I led a series of group journeys through various portals to places in the Imaginal Realm and in the afterlife. We shared very rich experiences. Each time I sounded the recall with my drum and brought our shamanic travelers back to their bodies, I enjoyed startling them by saying, “You are now in a dream.” Or: “You are now in the afterlife.” The last statement produced notable shock effects.
     I riffed on it with successive groups, saying at one point (as a voice in a much older dream had once declared to me), “This is not a dream. You are in the afterlife.”
     Thoughts come flocking, like the wild geese over the lake in my line of sight as I write. From the viewpoint of the beings we were before we came into this world, our physical existence is literally the afterlife. In dreams and visions, we often travel to realities where the dead are alive. We frequently fail to realize that we are with the “dead”. We also miss the fact that we are traveling in environments we may inhabit when we have left our present bodies behind. We may have known some of these places for eons, in the spaces between lives..
     So then: as you return from your night adventures, are you coming back through the Gate of Ivory or the Gate of Horn?

     

P.S. I have no doubt that my father came through the Gate of Horn when he recently brought me a vital medical advisory that I acted upon.

Images (1) Wooded path photo by RM (2) Aeneas and the Sybil c 1800, artist unknown.

Wake up and dream

Did you really say that your dreams have nothing to do with reality? You are in real trouble when your reality has nothing to do with dreams.

Instead of trying to interpret dreams according to everyday assumptions, use dreams to interpret the confused messages of everyday life.

You have a poet hidden inside you. In dreams, your poet makes worlds. He is not hiding from you, you spent years hiding from him. Let him walk with you in your world and your world will change. You will smell colors. You will hear voices in stones. You will find a universe in a flower. You will meet a goddess at a traffic light.

 Everything is waiting for you to wake up. You thought you were dreaming in your sleep, but while your body slept your soul was awake. Right now, as you go about your day, your soul is dozing. Wake up and dream.

- from "Maxims of the Hidden Poet" by Robert Moss

Paintings by Toyen (1) Sleeping (1937) (2) Dream (1937)

"You can go back to your dream now," she said

Esalen Institute, Big Sur, California

In the middle of the night, I stirred awake, then let myself relax into the drifty, liminal state between sleep and awake. Soon I was traveling in a lucid dream, roaming night landscapes.
   I set purpose and direction by repeating to myself, I am in a place of healing and creation.

   I floated, more than walked, to a set of massive stone steps going down to a sandy beach, where waves broke gently against the shore. At the base of the steps, I felt I needed to turn left. I found that there were people here. Some were gathered in front of a vendor's stall, set up in a niche between the pillars of the carriageway above us.  
   Curious objects were on the vendor's table: tall, cylindrical pottery vases.They were brown in color with a design that resembled the weave of basketry, perhaps two or three feet high. I wondered if they were urns for ashes of the dead, or vessels for votive offerings. I looked again at the structure around and above the stall. I realized it was the remains of a Roman aqueduct.
   "Robert." I heard my voice, spoken in a flutelike woman's voice.
   I turned to try to find the speaker. She appeared to me first in drifting robes, like a woman of the desert. I had a glimpse of her in modern, smart casual clothes, cashmere sweater and skirt. She slipped away, looking over her shoulder to make sure I followed.
    In the peak scene, she was holding me and bouncing me like a baby, at the head of a happy conga line of dancers. I felt nourished and joyful.
    She told me, "You can go back to your dream now."
    I found this shocking, and thrilling.
    I thought I was in a lucid dream. She seemed to be telling me I had moved beyond dream states into a separate reality.

    

As I traveled back to my resting body in the bed, in a physical reality between the Pacific Ocean and the redwood forest, I tried to hold the scenes from my adventure in my mind. Some escaped me, but what remained gave me several interesting leads. I need to search for pottery vases like the ones in my dream. I need to think about whether the location with the Roman aqueduct could be one of the places where I currently travel - like Montpellier in Languedoc - or a place where I will go in the future, or a place in another reality. I will remain open to further contact with the mysterious woman who gave me healing and led me to question, yet again, the nature of dreaming and of reality.

     I will add last night's experience to my long list of examples of how a figure in a lucid dream may alert us to the fact that a dream is rarely "only" a dream and may be a full experience of a world beyond the ordinary senses.
 

Photo: Garden Goddess at Esalen by RM. The woman in my lucid dream did not look like this version of the goddess, but something of the divine mother trails about her.

Book of Shadows

Between you and the world
falls a screen
that holds the fingerprints of possibility.
Study them like a detective
and you find clues to the future
you can use to change it
or embrace it.

Look carefully and you may find
the screen is smudged
by old habits and regrets
and must be cleaned
before you can trust the patterns.

On some days, in many lives,
you don’t see that the screen is there.
That’s when the movies start playing
that you confuse with the world.
You can get stuck in a Book of Shadows
not knowing how to turn the pages.
You may be caught in the threads
 of an ancient tapestry
of a sleeping king and a red boar.

The trick is to touch the friction ridges
of fate gently, and harvest fine powder
to make the inks and paints
to create your own design for life.
Since the screen between you and the world
becomes your world
use it to make your reality.
The time is Now.

-          Hameau de l’Etoile, October 11, 2015

Photo: The view from my balcony in the Pigeonnier at the Hameau de l'Etoile on the morning I wrote this poem, which flowed directly from a dream.

The hidden chain

I am studying a pattern of islands. I can see from the observation deck – which might be on a space station – that the islands are the peaks of underwater mountains, not truly separate but part of a range. This is a simple model for patterns of coincidence. We see some resemblance between surface events because they are part of a larger structure, a hidden chain.
    I wake with the impression that in the same dream I am with a group that monitors anomalies such as coincidence for clues to the convergence, confluence – or collision – of different aspects of reality. As the islands are joined in the underwater mountain range, so surface events may be part of deeper structures and woven from one fabric. How that fabric is folded or torn changes everything.
    I start to speculate that there really is a corps of observers who monitor wrinkles and rents in reality fabric. Are they interdimensional cops, or at least maintenance teams? I feel they are observers, not enforcers, and essentially benign. Would their findings lead to interventions or repair operations? Are there rival groups? Are these observers able to cross between parallel worlds and travel across time?
    I haven’t finished forming the last question before the answer comes to me: of course.

- from my journal

Photo: Palau island chain. NOAA Photo Library. Public domain.