Wake Up and Smell the Stories

 

"I heard something scratching at my door in the middle of the night," the young man in the front row began. "When I opened the door, I found my dead cat, the one that died a couple of months ago. Then I noticed my house had four stories, which is a couple more than it ordinarily has. I was wondering what was going on in those extra stories up top. Then I heard my dad's voice. He was calling to me, 'Hurry up! You don't want to miss the music!'"-
    "How did you feel when you woke up?" I asked. It's always my first question, of any dream.
-  "Kind of nervous. My dad passed last spring, and I didn't know what he meant." -      "Have you had any previous contact with your father, since he passed?"
    "Oh sure. I feel like he's been dealing with a lot of stuff, and I've been helping."
    "How did your father sound, when he spoke about the music?"
    "He sounded real happy. Like something happy was going on."
    "If it were my dream," I said carefully, "I might think that my father's discovered something really good, and he wants to share it with me. Maybe he wants to show me that he's found his way, in his new life. If it were my dream, I might want to see if I could have a proper conversation with my dad. I want to know the rest of our story. Those extra levels to the house give me the sense of space and possibility. I might want to light a candle for dad, and put out something personal pertaining to him - like photo - and maybe something to eat or drink that he would enjoy, and see whether I can just start up a dialogue. Could you give that a try?"
    "Sure," the young man nodded. "I like the idea of getting the rest of the story."-

I looked around the group. "Would anyone else like to share a dream?" A few hands went up. This was a group of newbies, gathered for an evening program at an adult learning center. For some of them, this was the first time they had talked about a dream in their whole adult lives.
   "I dreamed I went to this very pricey restaurant," an older woman began. "I started sipping a glass of wine and the glass broke in my teeth and the shards of glass were inside my mouth, stabbing me. I was trying to tell people what had happened, and that I needed help., but they wouldn't believe me, even though there was blood everywhere."
  "How did you feel when you woke up?"
  "I couldn't understand why they wouldn't believe me."
  "Yes, and how did you feel about that?"
  "It's hard to say. Slightly disturbed."
  "But you didn't feel frightened, for example? Or disgusted."
   "Nothing that strong."
   "Well, that's interesting. That sets a little distance. Sometimes it's revealing that we don't have strong feelings around a dream. Reality check - could you go to a restaurant like that in the future?"
   "Sure."
   "Is it possible this could involve an occasion, maybe with family, when there is some conflict brewing and it's difficult to say your piece?"
   "That's entirely possible."
    "If it were my dream," I pursued, "I'd think about the broken glass in terms of emotional conflicts. I'd think about my need to express myself in such a way that others can hear me and believe me, on whatever I need to get out."
     This resonated deeply with the dreamer. After more discussion, I asked her for an action plan. She said she would start by keeping a journal and getting practice that way in saying what she needed to say.
    "Can you come up with a one-liner that moves in that direction?"
     She produced one right away, "I'm going to tell my story."
     This threw my mind back to something I had seen the previous morning in my local paper, at the bottom of the local news page. It was an ad for coffee. Across a landscape of green mountains scrolled the following text: I realized today's the day I will tell my story.
     The ability to tell our story - and in doing so, choose the stories we are living - is not only a creative gift, it is a vital survival tool. We live by stories. If we don't understand that, we are probably living inside old, unacknowledged stories that may cramp and confine us, stories passed down through families or imposed on us by others. A grand way to get into the practice of telling our own stories is to share our dreams, large and small.

Another woman in the group began, slightly diffident, to talk about a recurring dream from which she was always relieved to wake up. "I have a baby, maybe eighteen months old, and I'm supposed to take care of her. I want to get away because I don't know who she is."
      When I asked some questions, she added, "The baby is fine. I'm the one who's not fine."
      "If it were my dream, I might wonder whether what I running from was actually a part of myself. I might want to sit down quietly, at the right time, and take a closer look at that very young child and see whether she is a very young part of me that separated out for some reason but is now ready to bring her joy and energy into my life."
       This struck a chord. She was willing to give it a try. Through our dream stories, we sometimes find a part of us that was missing is calling to us, seeking a way to gain entry to our lives, to make us stronger and more whole.

 

- Notes from my road as a dream teacher. I teach at many levels. There is great joy in teaching beginners and watching the light of spirit come on in their eyes, and their excitement in finding there are ways to share dreams and personal stories that are safe and fun and socially rewarding. The simple four-step method of dream sharing I am using here is my own creation. It always leads to an action plan to embody and apply energy and guidance form the dream in everyday life. I call it the Lightning Dreamwork process, and it is explained, along with other core techniques, in my book Active Dreaming. 

The Master of Deadlines

 

He is there again, by the fire. He does not warm his hands, which are always cool. His clothes are immaculate His hair and mustache are glossy with pomade. His eyes are black holes.

 “I hope you have not forgotten our arrangement.” His words fall like cards on green baize. His accent is perfect Oxbridge, a little dated, the kind a maharajah might have spoken at Royal Ascot or the tennis club before the fall of the Raj. “You haven’t brought me a fresh story since yesterday, even though we have agreed that you will continue to live in your present body only as long as you tell stories that entertain me.”

I protest that his demand is unreasonable. A fresh story a day is hard to deliver. Worse, the bargain reeks of plagiarism. “I am not Scheherazade,” I point out.

“And I am not a minor monarch in an Arabian fairytale, my dear. Nonetheless, a story a day is the requirement. You used to say that you like impossible deadlines. I am the master of deadlines.”

I tell him, “I am not afraid of you.”

For an instant, he lets his gentleman’s guise shimmer. I see through it, to the terrible, mountainous form he is given in temples that rise from steaming jungles and peeling tenements in the East. I bind him with my will to the playboy maharajah guise. If I cannot choose where I will meet Death, I can still insist that he wears the costume I choose. No lolling, multiple ayes and arms, no tusks or butcher’s knives, no bouncing skulls.

He opens his dinner jacket to reveal the noose that is swinging from his cummerbund.

“I just delivered a story,” I shift my approach. “It is a story about you. It helped her.” I indicated the sleeping form of the lady in the window seat of the airplane. “She is going to Bangalore because the doctors told her that her mother is dying. I told her that you can be a great healer and teacher. I made you sound like the mentor they make you out to be in the Katha Upanishad, the giver of the Nachiketas fire.”

The flames around him flare up. None of the dormant passengers in the cabin notice. The flight attendants in the galley go on snacking and gossiping.

 “I came because I heard my name. But you did not tell it to my face. Begin again. And make sure you come up with fresh words.”

I have written many stories about my encounters with Yama, most of which will remain in my journals. You will find a longer and memorable one, "A Storytelling of Crows" in my book Mysterious Realities. 

At the Gate of Story

The gatekeepers cannot see where the tide of pilgrims begins. Its source lies far to the north, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, the olive groves and forests of cork, even beyond the stern keep of the man of iron dreams on a high wind-raked plateau. The travelers are so many that their feet have emptied the strait, making a land bridge between the continents. Such was the report of one who reached the Gate of Story.
      Yawning on their cushioned seats by a wall bleached to the color of smilodon bones, the gatekeepers do not rule on the veracity of this account. Like the knight of La Mancha, they know that facts can be the enemy of truth. Judging the truth of a story by whether it stirs or disturbs the hearer, they turn the man who parted the seas away. Too many others have tried to pawn this story before; it has been drained of surprise.
    "Altagracia!" croaks a man whose flesh has fallen away so his linen suit hangs off him like a flag of defeat. Some of the crowd cross themselves or finger amulets against the evil eye. An imam directs a boy to offer the parched traveler a waterskin. "Altagracia!" the man cries again, water frothing from his cracked lips.
     No one has spoken that name at this gate before. The gatekeepers motion for the man who has used it to be advanced to the front of the line. Camel drivers open a way for him with their switches, without regard for the age or gender of those they are beating back.
    "You have three minutes," says the chief keeper of the Gate of Story. He flourishes a pocket watch and spins it, on its chain, from his long pointing finger.
---"She is Altagracia," the story man begins.

She is very pale, with lustrous black hair and black eyes. Her traveling clothes are the color of sand in shadow. She wears a veil under her hat. She has pushed it back, but it can be drawn over her face to keep off blowing sand and flies. She has a good deal of luggage, including a hatbox, handled with ease by her giant black servant, Fidel, who has been assigned by her father, The Professor, to keep her safe. Fidel can speak only in little mewling sounds, which the cats of the city understand. His tongue was cut out, perhaps at his own volition, to guarantee that he will live up to his name, which means "faithful", when it comes to keeping secrets, since he is also illiterate.
---Each time the story of Altagracia is told, it expands, and the world with it. Last time I spoke of her she did not have dogs, but now she has a pair of them, resembling greyhounds, that she calls her sight hounds. I said that Fidel is illiterate and mute, but as I speak his shadow is slipping ahead of him through the city gate in the form of a black cat. It is running into the Sultan's library, where it stands on its hind legs to remove a precious copy of the seventh volume of Pliny Maior's Natural History from a cabinet that others always find locked. He wll go to the harem and delight his hearers all night long with the exact descriptions of dogheaded men, Triballes who kill with a look, and lions with the tails of scorpions. He will be rewarded with dishes of sherbert and leg-humping until the chief eunuch will order his tongue, or another particle, to be excised. The feline Fidel is not so easily bested. By naming - both in lapidary Latin and in the Berberous Arabic of the court- all the creatures of Pliny's hearsay, he has brought them to life. The eunuch's scimitar is no match for a manticore.
-
It became harder and harder to hear the teller of this tale, because as each word was uttered, the scene and the action around the gate became more profuse. The crowd parted and reformed as animals out of legend galloped and bulled their way through. The shadow of immense wings cooled the hot sand. A ship in full sail appeared on a canal that surely was not there before. A man with his head under a black cloth took pictures on glass of a couple of newlyweds boarding a train whose engine puffed perfect blue smoke rings. A cat that was also smoking, with the aid of an amber cigarette holder, shuffled a Marseille deck and purred, "Pick a card, any card at all."
---The head gatekeeper, invoking the Most High, ordered the man who knew Altagracia to pass through the Gate of Story, and threatened to do terrible things to his mother unless he passed through without delay.
---"The Gate is closed for today," he announced to the host of story pilgrims. They groaned and wept and raged. Many of them, desperate to be heard, tried to shout their stories over each other, producing a weird cacophony that made the keepers press their hands over their ears. Blue-eyed janissaries appeared on the battlements of the gatehouse and fired warning shots into the air.
---In the sudden silence, a voice said in a placeless accent, "You will hear me."
---The voice belonged to a short, spare man with a clipped goatee, who held an umbrella over his head.
---"We will hear no more Namers today," the head keeper spoke in a voice of thunder.
---"I am neither a Namer nor an un-Namer. I am the sculptor of the Immortal Sentence."
---These words, also, had never been heard at the Gate of Story. The keepers were bound by a rule laid down in the remotest of pasts to give the speaker a hearing.


When I first told this story, it took longer than one thousand and one nights to reach the end. Every day since then, I have shortened the story by a sentence. Now that it fills less than a page, I reduce it by one word in each telling. In this instance reducing is the opposite of reduction. With each word I remove, I approach closer to the quintessence of the tale, which is also the key to the making and unmaking of worlds. The consummation of my art will be to deliver the Immortal Sentence, which will replace the knowledge of the world and become the theme of all branches of a new literature and science. Some have thought that the Immortal Sentence will consist only of four letters. This cannot be known until all the words that veil it have been stripped away.


"Cease speaking!" the head gatekeeper commanded. His composure had been shaken. There was whiteness around his mouth. "You may enter."
---The man with the umbrella strode with long decisive steps - unusually fast for a person of small stature, but then he worked his whole legs, from the hips - through the Gate of Story. The immensely high cedar doors began to swing shut. The gatekeepers had gathered their cushions and magic carpets. But the head keeper turned back when a new voice addressed him by his secret name, the name he shared only with Khidr, the guide of those who have no earthly guide.
---It was a woman’s voice. When he faced her, he was pleased to see that she was veiled, though her features could be seen through the gauzy stuff. Her clothes were of English cut, he thought, made by the finest seamstress. Yet something about her made him think of the forbidden vineyards of Shiraz.
---"Come up on the rooftop," she invited him. "We will share a cup of wine."
---"Are you a djinn?" he demanded, now fearful.
---"I am the Sustainer. Every day, I must repeat the one story that keeps the world turning. Every syllable must be flawless, because this is the code on which the world depends."
---"Then why have we never seen you at this gate before?"
---"Do you suppose I have only one form?"
---"Whatever form you take, if you are repeating a story that has been told before, we will know it, and you will have failed the test."
---"You understand very little, and after hearing the story you will know even less. The nature of the story that sustains the world is that it is never different and never the same. By repeating it perfectly, each teller creates a new story and renews the world."
---"This defies both God and reason."
---"Then listen."
---Somehow the head keeper found he was seated beside her on the roof of the watchtower, with the sweet taste of the forbidden wine on his lips.
---The veiled woman speaks:
-
The gatekeepers cannot see where the tide of pilgrims begins. Its source lies far to the north, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, the olive groves and forests of cork, even beyond the stern keep of the man of iron dreams on a high wind-raked plateau. The travelers are so many that their feet have emptied the strait, making a land bridge between the continents. Such was the report of one who reached the Gate of Story.

"At the Gate of Story" is included in Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories by Robert Moss. Publshed  by Excelsior Editions/State University of New York Press. 

Illustration: "Gate of Story" by Robert Moss

At the Gate of Story

 The gatekeepers cannot see where the tide of pilgrims begins. Its source lies far to the north, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, the olive groves and forests of cork, even beyond the stern keep of the man of iron dreams on a high wind-raked plateau. The travelers are so many that their feet have emptied the strait, making a land bridge between the continents. Such was the report of one who reached the Gate of Story.

---Yawning on their cushioned seats by a wall bleached to the color of smilodon bones, the gatekeepers do not rule on the veracity of this account. Like the knight of La Mancha, they know that facts can be the enemy of truth. Judging the truth of a story by whether it stirs or disturbs the hearer, they turn the man who parted the seas away. Too many others have tried to pawn this story before; it has been drained of surprise.
---"Altagracia!" croaks a man whose flesh has fallen away so his linen suit hangs off him like a flag of defeat. Some of the crowd cross themselves or finger amulets against the evil eye. An imam directs a boy to offer the parched traveler a waterskin. "Altagracia!" the man cries again, water frothing from his cracked lips.
---No one has spoken that name at this gate before. The gatekeepers motion for the man who has used it to be advanced to the front of the line. Camel drivers open a way for him with their switches, without regard for the age or gender of those they are beating back.
---"You have three minutes," says the chief keeper of the Gate of Story. He flourishes a pocket watch and spins it, on its chain, from his long pointing finger.
---"She is Altagracia," the story man begins.


She is very pale, with lustrous black hair and black eyes. Her traveling clothes are the color of sand in shadow. She wears a veil under her hat. She has pushed it back, but it can be drawn over her face to keep off blowing sand and flies. She has a good deal of luggage, including a hatbox, handled with ease by her giant black servant, Fidel, who has been assigned by her father, The Professor, to keep her safe. Fidel can speak only in little mewling sounds, which the cats of the city understand. His tongue was cut out, perhaps at his own volition, to guarantee that he will live up to his name, which means "faithful", when it comes to keeping secrets, since he is also illiterate.
---Each time the story of Altagracia is told, it expands, and the world with it. Last time I spoke of her she did not have dogs, but now she has a pair of them, resembling greyhounds, that she calls her sight hounds. I said that Fidel is illiterate and mute, but as I speak his shadow is slipping ahead of him through the city gate in the form of a black cat. It is running into the Sultan's library, where it stands on its hind legs to remove a precious copy of the seventh volume of Pliny Maior's Natural History from a cabinet that others always find locked. He wll go to the harem and delight his hearers all night long with the exact descriptions of dogheaded men, Triballes who kill with a look, and lions with the tails of scorpions. He will be rewarded with dishes of sherbert and leg-humping until the chief eunuch will order his tongue, or another particle, to be excised. The feline Fidel is not so easily bested. By naming - both in lapidary Latin and in the Berberous Arabic of the court- all the creatures of Pliny's hearsay, he has brought them to life. The eunuch's scimitar is no match for a manticore.
-
It became harder and harder to hear the teller of this tale, because as each word was uttered, the scene and the action around the gate became more profuse. The crowd parted and reformed as animals out of legend galloped and bulled their way through. The shadow of immense wings cooled the hot sand. A ship in full sail appeared on a canal that surely was not there before. A man with his head under a black cloth took pictures on glass of a couple of newlyweds boarding a train whose engine puffed perfect blue smoke rings. A cat that was also smoking, with the aid of an amber cigarette holder, shuffled a Marseilles deck and purred, "Pick a card, any card at all."
---The head gatekeeper, invoking the Most High, ordered the man who knew Altagracia to pass through the Gate of Story, and threatened to do terrible things to his mother unless he passed through without delay.
---"The Gate is closed for today," he announced to the host of story pilgrims. They groaned and wept and raged. Many of them, desperate to be heard, tried to shout their stories over each other, producing a weird cacophony that made the keepers press their hands over their ears. Blue-eyed janissaries appeared on the battlements of the gatehouse and fired warning shots into the air.
---In the sudden silence, a voice said in a placeless accent, "You will hear me."
---The voice belonged to a short, spare man with a clipped goatee, who held an umbrella over his head.
---"We will hear no more Namers today," the head keeper spoke in a voice of thunder.
---"I am neither a Namer nor an un-Namer. I am the sculptor of the Immortal Sentence."
---These words, also, had never been heard at the Gate of Story. The keepers were bound by a rule laid down in the remotest of pasts to give the speaker a hearing.


When I first told this story, it took longer than one thousand and one nights to reach the end. Every day since then, I have shortened the story by a sentence. Now that it fills less than a page, I reduce it by one word in each telling. In this instance reducing is the opposite of reduction. With each word I remove, I approach closer to the quintessence of the tale, which is also the key to the making and unmaking of worlds. The consummation of my art will be to deliver the Immortal Sentence, which will replace the knowledge of the world and become the theme of all branches of a new literature and science. Some have thought that the Immortal Sentence will consist only of four letters. This cannot be known until all the words that veil it have been stripped away.


"Cease speaking!" the head gatekeeper commanded. His composure had been shaken. There was whiteness around his mouth. "You may enter."
---The man with the umbrella strode with long decisive steps - unusually fast for a person of small stature, but then he worked his whole legs, from the hips - through the Gate of Story. The immensely high cedar doors began to swing shut. The gatekeepers had gathered their cushions and magic carpets. But the head keeper turned back when a new voice addressed him by his secret name, the name he shared only with Khidr, the guide of those who have no earthly guide.
---It was a woman’s voice. When he faced her, he was pleased to see that she was veiled, though her features could be seen through the gauzy stuff. Her clothes were of English cut, he thought, made by the finest seamstress. Yet something about her made him think of the forbidden vineyards of Shiraz.
---"Come up on the rooftop," she invited him. "We will share a cup of wine."
---"Are you a djinn?" he demanded, now fearful.
---"I am the Sustainer. Every day, I must repeat the one story that keeps the world turning. Every syllable must be flawless, because this is the code on which the world depends."
---"Then why have we never seen you at this gate before?"
---"Do you suppose I have only one form?"
---"Whatever form you take, if you are repeating a story that has been told before, we will know it, and you will have failed the test."
---"You understand very little, and after hearing the story you will know even less. The nature of the story that sustains the world is that it is never different and never the same. By repeating it perfectly, each teller creates a new story and renews the world."
---"This defies both God and reason."
---"Then listen."
---Somehow the head keeper found he was seated beside her on the roof of the watchtower, with the sweet taste of the forbidden wine on his lips.
---The veiled woman speaks:
-
The gatekeepers cannot see where the tide of pilgrims begins. Its source lies far to the north, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, the olive groves and forests of cork, even beyond the stern keep of the man of iron dreams on a high wind-raked plateau. The travelers are so many that their feet have emptied the strait, making a land bridge between the continents. Such was the report of one who reached the Gate of Story.

Illustration: "The Gate of Story" by Robert Moss

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

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

Notes from a Reading Life: Salute to Pat Controy

I love to read about writers reading. I devoured The Road to Xanadu, an immense scholarly study of Coleridge's vast literary diet on his way to delivering "Kubla Khan". I delight in Jorge Luis Borges' accounts of his passionate lifelong love affair with books, and in the bookish essays that stud Mircea Eiade's journals and autobiographies. 

Pat Conroy's memoir My Reading Life has prompted me to publish more of my adventures in reading and how they spill into my experience or the world, and the roads I travel in dreams. Listen to Pat Conroy:

 "Writers of the world, if you've got a story, I want to hear it. I promise it will follow me to my last breath. You will hearten me and brace me up for the hard days as they enter my life on the prowl. I reach for a story to save my own life."

Conroy's word magic never falters as he gives us his memoir of his life as a reader. He made it his practice to read at least 200 pages a day. "Reading," he insists, "is the most rewarding form of exile and the necessary discipline for a novelist who wants to get better."

Shifting to his own fiction, he declares, "I do not record the world exactly as it comes to me but transform it by making it pass through a prism of fabulous stories I have collected on the way."

Reading was always his approach run to those wild day-nights when he wrote his heart out, completing The Great Santini by writing in a Georgia cabin for 24 hours straight. "The idea of a novel should stir your blood, and you should rise to it like a lion lifting up at the smell of an impala."

Yes.

Yes.

June 3, 2021

Thomas Wolfe's Magic Apple

I have been using A Reading Life for morning bibliomancy. I opened it at random today and found this:

"Why'd you want me to eat this apple, Mr Norris?" Mr Norris drove fast along the curves of the mountain road, pausing, selecting his words with care. "It's high time, boy, that you learned that there is a relationship between life and art."

Mr Norris was Conroy's English teacher. He had introduced Conroy to Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel when he was 16 and the boy had fallen in love with his first literary hero. They had just been to visit the boarding house in Asheville, owned by Wolfe's mother, where Thomas had grown up and watched his brother die. Mr Norris had plucked an apple for Conroy from Thomas' favorite tree.

Now that is a teacher!

Conroy writes: "Wolfe hovers over a blank page like God dreaming of paradise. With every word he writes he tries to give you a complete and autonomous world. Because he cannot do otherwise, Wolfe takes you high up into the mountains, past the tree line, to those crests and snowy peaks of the highest points of the earth. He stammers, he murmurs, he hunts for the right words, and words spill out of his pockets and cuffs and shirtsleeves as he tries to awaken us from the dream of our own barely lived-in lives."

That magic apple delivered some juice. Follow the sweetness and it could lead you back to Thomas Wolfe, writing in Look Homeward , Angel

“And who shall say--whatever disenchantment follows--that we ever forget magic; or that we can ever betray, on this leaden earth, the apple-tree, the singing, and the gold?”

"How does one learn to tell stories that please kings?"

Dreams set us research assignments.My dream last night of the Rawi and the Evil Queen might find its place in a collection of nested stories like A Thousand and One Nights, the proper title of the book we often call the Arabian Nights. So I am about to immerse myself again that immense book of wonders. On the way to sticking my head under this tent of visions, I found a note I wrote on a luminous memoir by Moroccan writer Fatima Mernissi. It seems that the engine of her best creative work was a question that welled up when she was first told, as a young girl, about Scheherazade, who had to come up with a new story every night on pain of death: 

  “How does one learn to tell stories which please kings?” 

In her account of a harem girlhood in Morocco, Fatima Mernissi gives us a stunning example of how storytelling can facilitate soul healing. Her text is  A Thousand and One Nights. As Fatima explains what these stories meant to her, and what they mean for Muslim women in general, we become aware that in the West, we have almost no inkling of what they mean.  

Scheherazade, the young bride of a savage tyrant who has killed her many predecessors, must spin a captivating tale every night to make the king postpone his plan to have her beheaded at dawn. Her husband, King Schariar, is possessed by the spirit of revenge. He discovered his first wife in bed with another man – a slave – and killing her was not enough to dissipate his raging hatred and distrust of women. He ordered his vizier to fetch, one by one, every virgin girl in the kingdom. He spent one night with each, then killed her. Now there are only two virgins left: the vizier’s own daughter, Scheherazade, and her little sister. Though her father wants her to escape, Scheherazade is willing to do her duty. She has a plan that will change everything. 

As Fatima Mernissi tells it: “She would cure the troubled King’s soul simply by talking to him about things that had happened to others. She would take him to faraway lands to observe foreign ways, so he could get closer to the strangeness within himself. She would help him to see his prison, his obsessive hatred of women. Scheherazade was sure that if she could bring the King to see himself, he would want to change and to love more.” 

Scheherazade keeps the King spellbound through a thousand one nights, and at the end he is changed. He gives up his habit of murdering women.

Fatima first heard of Scheherazade from her mother, in the closed world of a harem in Fez. The word “harem” here does not mean a stable of concubines and slave girls, but a closed male-dominated world in which women of all ages are kept under lock and key, forced at every turning to think about the hudud, the boundary enforced by religion, law and custom. When little Fatima  learns about Scheherazade, her first and eager question to her mother is: “How does one learn to tell stories which please kings?”

This, of course, is the question we all need to answer, to heal our relationships – with ourselves as well as others – and our world. 

Mernissi notes: “I was amazed to realize that for many Westerners, Scheherazade was considered a lovely but simple-minded entertainer, someone who relates innocuous tales and dresses fabulously. In our part of the world, Scheherazade is perceived as a courageous heroine and is one of our rare female mythological figures. Scheherazade is a strategist and a powerful thinker, who uses her psychological knowledge of human beings to get them to walk faster and leap higher. Like Saladin and Sindbad, she makes us bolder and more sure of ourselves and of our capacity to transform the world and its people.”

 

Quotations from Fatima Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood.  (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison Wesley, 1995)

Pictures: Sani ol Molk. "Scheherazade and the Sultan"(top); illustration for a Persian edition of the Thousand and One Nights (bottom).

You don't give a lion a haircut

I spent the whole night, while my body slept, helping people to find and shape stories. With some, this meant helping them to find their voice, to speak in front of others, free of text, and to release their stories from the clutter of biography and explanation. First the adventure, later the discussion. With others, it meant getting the right words to line up together on a page. So many pages! Some beautiful creamy art paper, others veined like parchment, some ruled in composition books, others quite unruly.
    Some of the stories came from dreams. Some grew from the slightest wisp, the merest snippet from the night. Some were necklace stories, strung like bright beads on a string of incidents from the speaking land: the caw of that crow, the fall of that card, the vanity plate that read Camelot.
    Some were the work of literary privateers, given permission to steal a little from others. Some were inspired by shelf elves who arranged for a certain book to turn up or vanish at a creative moment.
   The unstoppable stories were the ones that had been seeking the teller for years, even a whole lifetime. I helped people shape these wild ones too, but only a little. You don’t give a haircut to a lion.

When I left my bed to walk my dog in the morning light, I felt deeply satisfied, the kind of satisfied when you have done a job that you chose to do as well as you can. Helping people find their best stories, and tell them so well that others want to hear them, is one of my greatest pleasures. And one of the greatest gifts of the Active Dreaming methods I have created is that we are forever encouraging each other to become both storytellers and story makers.

I will have the pleasure on embodying this dream at two beautiful physical locations where I am leading my 5-day residential retreat "Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming" this year: at Mosswood Hollow near Seattle in May and at Ryzmburk near Česká Skalice in the Czech Republic in August.

photo: Path of Magic at Mosswood Hollow by RM

Reclaiming our essential stories

We live by stories. Our first and best teachers, in our lives and in the evolution of our kind, instruct and inspire by telling stories. Story is our shortest route to the meaning of things, and our easiest way to remember and carry the meaning we discover.  A good story lives inside and outside time, and gives us keys to a world of truth beyond the world of fact.

     Consciously or unconsciously, our lives are directed by stories. If we are not aware that we are living a story, it's likely we are stuck inside a narrow and constricted one, a story bound tight around us by other people's definitions and expectations. When we reach, consciously, for a bigger life story, we put ourselves in touch with tremendous sources of healing, creativity and courage. 

     How do we find the bigger story in our lives? The answer is easier than we might think. The First People of my native Australia say that the big stories are hunting the right people to tell them.. All we need do is put ourselves in places where we can be found.

    J.M.G. Clézio dedicated his Nobel prize for literature  to a storyteller of the rainforest of Darien, a woman who roamed from house to house spinning magic words in return for a meal or a drink. In his acceptance speech, Le Clézio painted a vivid word-picture of Elvira: “I quickly realized that she was a great artist, in the best sense of the term. The timbre of her voice, the rhythm of her hands tapping against her chest, against her heavy necklaces of silver coins, and above all the air of possession which illuminated her face and her gaze, a sort of measured, rhythmic trance, exerted a power over all those who were present. To the simple framework of her myths...she added her own story, her life of wandering, her loves, the betrayals and suffering, the intense joy of carnal love, the sting of jealousy, her fear of growing old, of dying. She was poetry in action, ancient theatre, and the most contemporary of novels all at the same time.”
   Is it too late to hope that we can bring back storytelling in our modern urban consumer society? I think not. As we practice telling our dreams and the stories of our life experiences simply and vividly we become bards and griots and storytellers without labor. The first step in the Lightning Dreamwork game requires us to encourage whoever is ready to tell a dream (or, for that matter, any life experience) to tell it simply and clearly, without background or analysis or interruption or reading from notes. We give undivided attention for the duration of the telling, and require the teller not to miss the opportunity to claim her audience.

“The world can’t end,” writes Michael Meade in The World Behind the World, “unless it runs out of stories. For this world is made of stories, each tale a part of an eternal drama being told from beginning to end over and over again. As long as all the stories don’t come to an end the world will continue.” 

   Scheherezade tells stories so she may live through another night, and tells them so well she turns a monstrous tyrant into a decent human being.
   In Healing Fictions, James Hillman explains how effective therapy is an exercise in storytelling. “Psychoanalysis is a work of imaginative tellings in the realm of poesis, which means simply “making”, and which I take to mean the making of imagination into words. Our work more specifically belongs to the rhetoric of poesis, by which I mean the persuasive power of imagining in words, an artfulness in in speaking and hearing, writing and reading.” 

    True shamans have known this for millennia.The shamans who interest me are one who heal bodies and souls, and our experience of the world, by telling better stories about them
   The Irish storyteller beautifully evoked by Ruth Sawyer in The Way of the Storyteller  tells stories so “each may find something for which his soul had cried out.” Or “to keep the heart warm in a country far from home.”

   You must know your story and tell your story and have your story received. This is a central teaching of the Sefer Yetzirah, a seminal text of Kabbalah.
    Learn to do that, and you can survive the worst nightmares of history, and bring heart and healing to others.

Text adapted from Active Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Art: "Grandfather Tells a Story" by Albert Anker (1884)

Make dream sharing a daily social activity

One of the main reasons so many in our society are suffering from a dream drought is that we are not encouraged to share dreams and often don't find the experience rewarding when we do so. The simple four-step Lightning Dreamwork process, which I invented in 2000, gives us a way of sharing dreams that is fun and fast and orients us to give helpful, non-intrusive feedback and guide each other towards action to embody the creative and healing energy of dreams and apply their guidance. Once you have mastered and internalized this technique, you can do it just about anywhere, with just about anyone.
    If you are playing dream helper, you need to lead the person who is sharing with you through these four simple steps:

1. Get the story, with a title
Encourage the person sharing to tell their experience as simply and clearly as possible, avoiding too much autobiography or self-interpretation. We claim real power when we learn to tell our stories so that others want to hear us, and sharing dream reports this way is wonderful practice. A story needs a title, and so much from a dream pops into focus and perspective when we give it one.

2. Ask three essential questions
The first is about feelings, especially first feelings after the dream, which are the first and often the best indicators of whether the material is urgent or not, negative or positive, personal or less so. The second question is the reality check and it has two aspects. Ask what the dreamer recognizes from the dream in the rest of their life (including the life of imagination) and also whether it is possible the the dream will manifest in the future in some way, literally or symbolically. Next, ask the dreamer: What do you want to know?

3. Play the "If it were my dream" game
Now you are ready to offer feedback. It's very important that you should do this the right way. Your purpose is not to presume to tell another person what their dream (or their life) means. Your role is ti help the dreamer become author of meaning for their own dream, and their own life. You are free to offer any associations you like - including episodes from your own dreams and your own life that come to mind in the presence of the new dream that is being shared. You can take a Freudian view, or a Jungian view, or a transpersonal or shamanic view. However, you will offer your feedback by saying "if it were my dream", owning your own projections. 

4. Get an action plan
Dreams require action! If we don't do something with our dreams we do not dream well. The appropriate action may range from shamanic shopping - getting the red shoes or the stuffed giraffe featured in a dream - to doing prep for the job interview rehearsed in a dream, to writing, drawing or crafting from a dream, to going back inside a dream (through the dream reentry technique) to gather more information and possibly dream the dream onward to healing and resolution. A dream may of course require much tending. You may find yourself walking with a certain dream for days or years before it yields all of its meaning in the light of subsequent events and discoveries. However, the time is always Now, and it's good to do something with a dream right away. For temporary closure in dream sharing, you can ask the dreamer to come up with a bumper sticker, a slogan or banner that harvests something from the dream as a forward-moving statement.

But what do you do if you are dealing with a person - maybe yourself - who maintains that they don't remember dreams, from the night before or from the last three decades? You can start by suggesting, gently but firmly, that it's simply not true that they have nothing from the night. Their dreams may have left a wisp or a crumb, a sense of color, a snatch of a song. Even when no content whatsoever is recalled, there are thoughts, feelings, sensations that linger. We all have dream hangovers even when we don't recall what caused them. Such elements may give you the seeds of a conversation in which you'll find yourself playing the Lightning game.
    Another approach with the dream amnesiac is to ask them to pull up the last dream they remember, maybe from many years before, even as far back as early childhood, when something may have scared them so much in the night that - in the absence of adult support and understanding - they scared their dreams away. Recalling, tending and reentering an "old" dream of this kind can amount to trans-temporal healing, and result in soul recovery: the recovery of the magical child, the beautiful bright dreamer who went missing from a life when the world seemed too scary.
     Of course, even prolific dream recallers have dry spells. When I sit down to breakfast with a circle of dreamers, as is often the case at residential retreats, people are made to realize, very quickly, that a story is expected of them. Saying "I got nuttin" is just not acceptable. If you do not have a dream, you can bring a story anyway - from your life memories or your imagination.
     I think of Graham Greene, who became one of England's best-loved and most prolific novelists and literary entertainers. His appetite for dreams and stories was trained over the three months he was required to spend, at age 16, in the home of one of the first shrinks in London. Graham had suffered a nervous breakdown at the fancy boys' school where his father was headmaster, and had to be removed from view while he recovered. His treatment was simply this: the shrink required Graham to appear in his study at 11 a.m. every day, ready to deliver a dream report. There were days when Graham did not remember a dream, so he developed the ruse of making something up that sounded like a dream. So he acquired the gift of story, which can be the gift of making worlds.
     So we come to my plea for action, the kind of action through which we contribute to the rebirth of a dreaming society, person by person.
     Make it your practice to find someone with whom you can share a dream or story by our Lightning process every day. If you can't do this face to face, do it by phone, by Skype, by email or text, or within a private social media forum like the "secret" Facebook pages where members of my trainings and online courses are having the best time sharing dreams and life experiences.
     Your dreams are social as well as individual, personal as well as transpersonal. When you make sharing dreams a regular social activity, you'll find you bring joy and juice to any day, grow wonderful deepening friendships, and harvest essential guidance for soul and survival, for navigating your life roads in this world and the many worlds.


For much more on the Lightning Dreamwork game, see my book Active Dreaming. For the application of this process to experiences from everyday life, see Sidewalk Oracles. On trans-temporal healing with the child self, see Dreaming the Soul Back Home. For a full account of Graham Greene's dream life, see The Secret History of Dreaming.

Photo by RM:  "A wonderful nine-yer-old dreamer shares a dream with our dreaming family on Gore Mountain".

Stories are hunting us

I hear them at night, sometimes, east of the Well of Memory, west of the Mountains of Desire. They talk like herons after dark, like bears rousted from sleep, like wind tunnels, like alien phone sex, like broken gutters, but mostly like a storytelling of crows. When the Moon gets old, I send my shadow to listen.

    “Back off!” says a story that might be a griffin to one of the hungry ones. “He’s mine!”
    “But I’m starving.” The smaller, snaggle-toothed story is drooling.
    “Go snack on something your own size,” says the bigger story. “This is my ride.”
    There is pushing and scuffling, and bad talk from tall tales.
    Stories are hunting the people who will tell them. Do you hear them? If you are lucky, the one that gets you will have some real teeth.

Drawing by Robert Moss