Personal Myths and Collective Dreams

Joseph Campbell maintained that “A dream is a personal experience of that deep dark ground that is the support of our conscious lives, and a myth is society’s dream. The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth.” I have long found this to be profoundly true.  In the ancient mind, there was rarely any doubt. In Homer's time, as in Cleopatra's or the Buddha's, dreams were nightly fields of interaction between gods, humans and others. Though we may be short on shared mythology in modern society, our dreams still bring us into mythic life. 

I found this excerpt in an old  journal, typed on a strip of paper I had used as a bookmark. The title of the dream was in upper case.as reproduced here:

The Big dream

IMAGES OF THE PRIMORDIAL GODS

I went through the lineage of the gods, backwards and forwards, from the anthropomorphic versions back to raw and primal images without clearly defined borders. I saw the Great Goddess. I saw Zeus streaming on the face of the waters, like an immense living island whose skin barely broke the surface. His colors were light olive and silver.
    His “hair” streamed in a deltoid pattern that could almost be mistaken for a beard, but was more reminiscent of a verdant triangle of public hair. Trying to describe his form (inside the dream) I evoked sea turtles and cuttlefish and (waking) the wings of a vast manta ray. But none of these similes contained the shape, which was too vast and too fluid to be comprehended in a single visioning.

I was excited that this dream found me again. It took me back to the era before humans had made much progress in domesticating the wild primal nature of the forces at play around them – of the elements, of land and sea, of Earth and Sky. I wrote my story "The Way to Tethys" in Mysterious Realities from another vision of this kind.
    I was curious that in the dream I call the oceanic deity Zeus rather than Poseidon, then recalled that their precincts and identities were probably not clearly demarcated in the archaic mind. Zeus is a generic term for a god as well as the name of the Big God enthroned in the Olympian pantheon (and one of the Big Three beside his brothers Poseidon and Hades). Nobody can decide whether the magnificent Artemision Bronze in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens is Zeus or Poseidon and whether what is missing from his raised fist is a trident or a thunderbolt.

The Greeks dreamed of the Egyptians who dreamed, it may be, of Atlantis. "Great stories are like dreams," Normandi Ellis takes up the big theme in Imagining the World into Existence: An Ancient Egyptian Manual of Consciousness. "The images that appear on the tomb walls and in the context of the Egyptians' sacred books are dreams...If we view the entire study of ancient consciousness and its impact on our lives as if it were a dream language, it becomes easier to peel back its layers and open to its possibilities." 

Illustration: "Eyebrows of Zeus" by Robert Moss

Wyrd and weirder

 

Read the Eddas (literally the “great-grandmothers”) and the Icelandic sagas with care, and you will find not only Viking battle stories, but some profound insights into the human condition and the interconnectedness of things.

The key word here is Wyrd, from which “weird” derives. Wyrd is often translated as “fate” or “destiny” but it is related to weohrtan, which means “to become”. Wyrd is best understood as a web of connection, joining everything that happens in this world to movements in other worlds. 

Events that may appear to be separate in time or space are connected by threads that are fine, supple and strong. Any movement in any part of the web may be felt anywhere else. Omens point to patterns, they are not just about something that is going to happen in the future. If you know the ways of Wyrd, you use them to read the patterns of connection. If you are a master of these things, you may be able to pull on the threads to change the patterns.

Wyrd is beyond the gods. The web precedes gods and men and lives after them. We call it a pattern, but like the Tao, as it plays through the Book of Changes, it is in constant motion. A lively guide to these matters is Brian Bates’ “documentary novel” The Way of Wyrd, where an Anglo-Saxon sorcerer instructs that “Wyrd itself is constant change, yet because it is created at every moment it is unchanging, like the still center of a whirlpool. All we can see are the ripples dancing on top of the water.” [1] Yet by studying the ripples you can detect what is moving at the bottom of the water, or far away across its expanse. 

Because we are part of Wyrd, we can never see the whole. So we look for ways to see enough to help us navigate. Carving and casting runes is a way. So are dreams, and those special moments when you awaken to the workings of the deeper pattern. “Man is touched by wyrd when he becomes involved in matters whose nature and origins extend beyond existence on earth,” Germanic scholar Paul Bauschatz explains. “There are times…when apparently ordinary activities acquire special significance, and it seems likely that at these times daily life is touched and colored with elements beyond our limited perceptions.” [2] There is room to re-weave the threads of Wyrd. 

Jenny Blain, who has participated in the revival of ancient Norse seiðr, or shamanic rituals, observes that “this concept of Wyrd is one that is being developed within the community. Though often translated as 'fate' and sometimes equated to 'karma', it has a more dynamic sense. People are active agents in the creation of their own personal wyrd, or ørlög. Their deeds and vows, strands of ørlög, become part of the fabric of Wyrd.” Those who work the seiðr  rituals feel they are “'reading' Wyrd, seeing along the threads of the fabric to possible outcomes. Others within the community consider that seiðr in the past involved active interception of the fabric, 'tugging' at the threads,"[3] 

In English, the word “weird” derives from Wyrd. It declined from common usage in England until Shakespeare revived it, with a sinister twist, with the Weird Sisters in Macbeth. It retained some of its original meaning a little longer in Scotland, where if you called someone “weirdless” you were saying that he was unlucky. 

In more recent times, to call something “weird” is to say that it is strange, uncanny, hard to explain and maybe spooky. A “weirdo” is someone who is very strange. Yet thanks to a campaign that started in Austin, Texas, “weird” has been making a comeback. Austin is the first North American city to sprout a poster campaign to keep the city weird. Keep Austin Weird. Other cities followed suit.

One of my favorite books on Northern European traditions is The Well of Remembrance by Ralph Metzner, who embarked on a quest to reclaim the mythic wisdom of his ancestors from the Nazi curse. He was drawn to Odin, not as a war god but as the poet-shaman wandering between the worlds, facilitating direct and personal revelation. In the course of his quest, he writes, “Often I felt as though I was seized, or inspired. I would think of Odin and get insights or answers to my questions, including questions about the meanings of certain myths. Or I would suddenly find pertinent myths that I had not known before. Strange though it may sound, I would have to say that much of what I am relating in this book has been directly given to me by Odin.” [4]    

I have had similar experiences since Tolkien told me in a dream, many years ago, “You must study Scandinavian mythology.” I was at first reluctant to follow that advice, partly because of the long shadow of the Nazi attempt to hijack the gods and symbols of the North.  As I began to walk this ancestral path (I have Scandinavian blood on both sides of my family) in my reading and travel and in my dreams, I was rewarded by special moments of encounter and discovery that left me in no doubt that forces beyond the veil of the world were in play. During a trip to Europe, I had a personal vision of Yggdrasil, the World Tree, from which I wrote a poem.

Since then I have had spontaneous encounters, usually in the fertile space between sleep and awake, with Odin and Freiyja, with Idunn and Loki, and with a powerful völva, or seeress, of the old ways.

The ancestors are calling, calling. And they can use the worldwide web as well as the web of the worlds. It is amusing to note that “wired” is an anagram for “weird”. A woman named Kim shared the following story. “Sprit likes the wires. The Web, in particular. The deities who work fate, don’t they spin and snip threads? My Mom's picture popped up on a dating app my ex-husband is on. He sent a screen shot. I'd just asked my Mom that morning for a sign that she was there. He had been on that app over a year, and he showed me how faces appeared as you scrolled through and how you could indicate interest or not. My Mom was never on a dating site, and certainly wouldn't be suitable to his selected age range. I think that via the Web, we can have communication with the Other Side.”

 

References

 1. Brian Bates The Way of Wyrd: Tales of an Anglo-Saxon Sorcerer (London: Century, 1987) 75

2. Paul C. Bauschatz, The Well and the Tree: World and Time in Early Germanic Culture (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982), 28

3.   3. Jenny Blain, Nine Worlds of Seid-Magic: Ecstasy and Neo-Shamanism in Northern European Paganism (London: Routledge, 2002), 15

      4. Ralph Metzner, The Well of Remembrance: Rediscovering the Earth Wisdom Myths of Northern Europe (Boston: Shambhala, 1994) 10

 

Text adapted from Sidewalk Oracles: Playing withSigns, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

If you can't remember your dreams

 "I can't remember my dreams."

1. Ask your cat to share a dream.

2. Be kind to wisps. You may have a tiny something from a dream if you don't close the door right away.

3. Write in your journal every day, whether or not you have a dream to report.

4. Wake up to the fact that you don't need to go to sleep in order to dream. The world around you will speak to you in the manner of dreams- through signs, symbols and synchronicity - if you pay attention.

5. Try to assure the beautiful bright dreamer in you that you are safe and you are fun. She may have been in hiding for a long time.

6. Find friends with whom you can share dreams and personal stories in a fast, fun way that leads to action to embody creative and healing energy from another world in ordinary life. Make dreamwork socially rewarding, and you have a strong incentive to bring a new story to the table every day.

7. .Learn the Lightning Dreamwork process. Accept no substitutes!

Become a Kairomancer and Navigate by Synchronicity

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

My book Sidewalk Oracles offers eighteen kairomancy games you can play any day.

Photo: The Houses Have Eyes. Taken in Sibiu, Romania by Robert Moss 

When you don't know you're dreaming until the dream spills into the street

Dreams offer many clues that we are not in ordinary reality. We can fly, or breathe underwater, or find ourselves inside different bodies. We have the powers of superheroes. We can talk to animals and ride dragons. We meet people who died in the regular world but are very much alive here.

    Even humdrum dreams offer many lucidity triggers: prompts to wake up to the fact that we are dreaming. We are naked in public or engage in other anomalous behavior. The scene shifts inexplicably from one location to another, as if we have teleported. There is odd repetition; the same scene plays out several times, like the black cat walking across the room in the movie The Matrix. People we know are notably older or younger than in regular life.
    When a lucidity trigger awakens us to the fact that we are dreaming, we are sometimes so startled that we are jolted out of the whole experience, back into the dormant body on the bed. When we can stay in the dream, conscious that we are not in ordinary reality, we may be on our way to grand adventures, to romance or healing, to solving a mystery or vanquishing a fear.
     To recognize that you are dreaming is not the same as telling yourself This isn't real. Dreams are real experiences. The realities in which they unfold may be as real, less real, or more real than the physical world. In a certain kind of dream experience, the reason you may not pause to say to yourself I'm dreaming is that you are conscious, in an even deeper sense, that you are in another reality, for example a world where the dead are alive, where you will join them on a full-time basis when you leave your own body behind at physical death.
     You can fail to notice you are dreaming during sleep and then wake up to the dreamlike character of everyday life. I missed several lucidity triggers in a dream, and then found elements from my dream spilling into the street, quite literally, as I took my dog on the first walk of the day.
    In my dream:

I'm at a retreat center in California, wearing a wild tropical shirt I think looks great on me. Next I am giving directions to a group of my students on how to take a train from a London station - I specify Victoria or Euston - on certain assignments. There's an air of adventure, as if I am asking them to play detectives.
    As soon as I name the stations, I am transported to a train station. I go back and forth between a pleasant waiting room and a platform. I notice a shower head near the door, outside the waiting room, and decide to take a quick shower. The flow isn't strong, and I catch water in my cupped hands and sprinkle it over myself. I find this quite enjoyable.
    I'm still naked when I hear a station announcement that the train is coming. I look along the platform and see a bus. Can this be right? Behind it, a train or tram is coming.
    A attractive lady in a dark blue uniform - a station official - smiles at me. I tell her I probably shouldn't get on the train naked. Will she hold it for me until I get dressed?
   There's a small problem. I can't find my clothes. Eventually I discover a crisp white short-sleeved shirt on a hook and a pair of boxers. This wasn't the shirt I was wearing earlier (one with a wild tropical design) but it will serve.
    I'm barefoot and pantless and missing not only my carry-on bag but my wallet and ID. Who can I call? I think of a dear friend but I am not sure he can help. 

I felt some concern towards the end of the dream, but relaxed - and fairly soon amused - on waking.
    My little dream report contains several classic examples of lucidity triggers that I missed. 

* Instant change of scene. I am whisked from California to London, quick as thought.
* Naked in public. One of the most common dream themes, and a lucidity prompt for that reason alone.
* Anomalous behavior. I take a shower in an unlikely place, fully exposed to public view. The lady station official acts in a very non-official way.
*  Repetition and recurring dream situations. Trains and train stations often feature in my dreams and I was talking about their symbology in a recent class. Naked in public, losing ID or valuables, and quick change scenes are also recurring situations here, as in many people's dreams.
* The dead are alive. I don't call my friend but it does not occur to me that, in ordinary reality, he died several years ago.

Maybe you'll want to make a list of your own lucidity triggers, including any of the ones I missed that are relevant to you.
    The entertainment value of this little episode was enhanced by what happened when I walked the dream, along with the dog, before coffee in the morning. A couple of blocks from my house, a woman was packing her car. She called to her boyfriend, at the door of an apartment, "Hey, is my wallet in there?" He responded, "I don't know."
    There was the theme of misplaced or lost ID, spilling from the dream into the street.
    It got better (or worse) when we returned to my house. On the sidewalk, I noticed a discarded pair of men's briefs. Not the kind of underwear I had in the dream (or would choose in regular life) but there was the theme of naked in public, dropped right where I live.

1916 photo of female train conductor in London. Photographer unidentfied.

    

Walking the Dream of the World War II Pilot

 

One of the games I like to play with my journal is to open an old one to the same month and day in a previous year and see what was going on then and whether life is rhyming today.It seems an appropriate pastime at anniversaries, and as the year turns. I went back in my journals to the beginning of 2015 just now. Here is how I recorded the start of an ordinary day at home back then. Nothing big going on. There was the dream, though..

In my dream, I am in London in the time of the Blitz. I returned from this excursion feeling excited and moved and deeply stirred. My dream took me into the life of a Royal Air Force pilot in a time of danger and love and romance. He loved women, and women loved him. One of the women he adored was a wartime nurse. They did not get to spend much time together. They were with each other in my dream. 
     It seemed I was in his body, in his situation, sharing his moments of passion and his fierce willingness to put his life on the line for what he believed in. As I slowly came back from this dream adventure, I felt his presence, as if for a moment both of us were in bed in my time. I was grateful for this deep and renewed connection with someone I believe to be a member of my soul family in another time, and outside time. .
     When I was satisfied I was holding the essence of my dream of the pilot, I got out of bed, showered, threw on clothes. I had one swallow of coffee – literally, because my little dog was waiting for his walk. Dogs walk you no matter what. So very soon I was out on the street with my dog, heading for the park.
      I was now taking the second step in my daily practice. The first step is to hold the essence of the dream, not necessarily all the details, but the essence. I had that. Out on the street, I was walking my dream as well as my dog. I was not puzzling over the dream, and certainly not trying to analyze it. The dream was simply in my mind, and perhaps in my energy field. I was open to the world showing me something that might reflect the dream, as the dream cast its reflection on the world.
     As I walked the dream, I was ready to do another daily practice, which is to pay attention to three things that enter my field of perception, through any or all of my senses. These three things do not have to be extraordinary, weird or even surprising. They may be things you might never notice at all, let alone look at twice, unless you were playing this kind of game. A license plate might catch your eye, because it is a novelty plate or has a combination of letters and numbers that intrigues you. You attention might be drawn by the cry of a bird, or the words of a stranger talking on his cell phone or doing karaoke with his headphones. Maybe something dropped on the sidewalk or left on the curb for trash collection will catch your eye. Maybe you’ll smell cooking, or diesel fumes, or a perfume that takes you back to Paris in the spring of a certain year.
    Paying attention to things like this, on any street on any day, is a way of consulting sidewalk oracles. When the takeaway is a set of mostly visual images I think of this as playing Sidewalk Tarot. Whatever pops up might be a card from a divination deck. It might be your card of the day, or part of a three-card spread, or a larger spread.
    That morning, while the dog sniffed a hydrant, I noticed a license plate I had never seen on my street before. The plate was distinguished by the red letters RN. It belonged to a registered nurse. Nothing unusual here, but those letters RN were very special to me, because I was walking with the bittersweet memories of a wartime romance with a nurse. I had the soft, cozy sense of confirmation. I felt that an unseen hand had patted me on the shoulder.
    I walked on with my dog into the big park. We took the longest path, around the lake. I paused to admire the beautiful weeping willow across water and thin ice. She was green last week. Now winter had yellowed and thinned her gorgeous hair. 
    When I returned to my house, I grabbed a full mug of coffee and went to my study to do my next daily practice. I wrote my dream report, starting with the date and the title I had chosen for my dream. I might be missing certain details by now, but I had the essence, and key incidents returned to me, vivid and strong, as I wrote. I noted my feelings, and added a few lines about the connection between this dream and my other dreams and “far memories” of a British pilot in the Second World War. I added a further note on synchronicity, my sighting of the RN’s license plate. This morning I did not record three sidewalk sightings. The RN was enough.
    I was now ready to play another game that is part of my everyday practice. I did a bit of bibliomancy. The word means divination by the book. People have done it with sacred and special books, like the Bible the Koran or the poetry of Rumi or Dante or Homer, for as long as humans have had books.
    I do my book-dipping with whatever book falls to hand. On the day I walked with the dream of the pilot, I decided to go back to Heraclitus. The work of this often enigmatic Greek philosopher survives only in fragments. Because of their brevity, they are good to consult if you would rather play with a sentence than a longer passage.
    I opened Charles Kahn’s edition of Heraclitus casually, with my non-dominant hand. My eye fell on a one-liner. The translation read: Gods and men honor those who have fallen in battle. In part of myself, I wanted to ignore that message and try again. The line spoke of war and violence and we have quite enough of those in my world. 
    But my dream was still with me, the dream that took me into the life of a brave man who was killed in a necessary war, a war for humanity against the unspeakable evil that had taken possession of Germany under Hitler. Once again, I felt a deep sense of confirmation, a firmer hand on my shoulder. Gods and men honor those who are fallen in battle.  I thought of another line in Heraclius, about the dead and the living are constantly engaged, how the fortunes of mortals and immortals interweave, how we may live in the dead and they may live in us.
    I felt the deep, deep sense of recognition and gratitude and blessing.  I wrote a one-liner from this: 

I am in communion with the dead. They are alive in me, and I am alive in them. 

Text partly adapted from Sidewalk Oracles by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library. 

When Fish Keep Falling from the Sky

 

The Anomalies inspector is insistent: I must return to the “original” way of recognizing and working with synchronicity that I developed a long time ago. This centers on the understanding that anomalies in our ordinary reality – as in dreams – can awaken us to a deeper game. When the anomalies multiply, this can indicate that a consensual reality is in jeopardy.
     The risk of collapse increases with public perception of the anomalies. Thus it might start with one person dreaming that fish are falling from the sky. Then many people dream of this. It becomes a skit on late-night TV, where the host and his guest are rained on by fish and a celebrity chef rushes in with a skillet. Next we have a TV shrink talking about collective delusions, and a TV psychic quoting Fortean phenomena. Soon there are reports from far-flung places – from Texarkana, from Kyrgizstan, from Tuva – that fish are falling from the sky.
   “At this point,” says the Anomalies inspector, “your reality starts to unravel."
    I look up at the sky in case fish are falling.
    "You taught us this long ago," she insists.
    I have forgotten more than I know.

- This dream played through many awakenings. I had forgotten it until I found this summary report in muy journal for June 26, 2017. 

Tickling the cosmic body

 

When you become conscious that everything is connected in the weave of life – as above so below, as within, so without – you may discover that if you pluck a thread anywhere, you stir the whole pattern. For Synesius of Cyrene, the Neoplatonist philosopher I call the Bishop of Dreams, prophecy requires us to see that we are parts of a cosmic body in which all things are related and can influence each other. At the risk of levity, I am tempted to call the practice derived from this tickling the cosmic body.

“Prophecy is among the best of human pursuits…it gives signs of all things through the medium of all things, because all things which are within that living being that is the cosmos are akin…These signs are different kinds of writings in the book of existence. One wise man learns one sort of writing and another another…All things have significance for all. If birds had wisdom, they would have constructed an art for knowing the future based on observing humans, as we do by observing them. “It was necessary, I believe, that the limbs of this universe which feels and breathes as one belong to one another as parts of a single whole…A person who knows the kinship of the parts of the cosmos is wise, for they can attract one thing by means of another.” [1]

In his important treatise De insomniis ("On Dreams") composed around 405 and dedicated to his teacher Hypatia, "The Philosopher", Synesius urges us to keep a “day book” for our observations of twitches in the cosmic body as well as a “night book” for dreams.   He declares that “All things are signs appearing through all things…they are brothers in a single living creature, the cosmos…they are written in characters of every kind”. The deepest scholarship lies in reading the sign language of the world; the true sage is a person “who understands the relationship of the parts of the universe”. [2] He observes elsewhere that “The same things very often happen in different places and times”.[3]

References

1. Synesius "On Prophecy" trans. Augustine Fitzgerald in Essays and Hymns of Synesius of Cyrene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930). Lightly edited by me.

2. Synesius "On Dreans" in Essays and Hymns 3. Quoted in Alan Cameron and Jacqueline Long, Barbarians and Politics at the Court of Arcadius (Berkeley:  University of California Press,1993) p.289.

Illustration: Integra naturae speculum artisque imago ("A complete mirror of nature and an image of art"). The Anima Mundi depicted by Robert Fludd (1617). Here the world soul is feminine and there is a key to correspondences between all parts of the cosmos. Public domain.

You are in the afterlife now

 

In this part of Manhattan, on a mild sunny day, you can imagine you are in a village, even seventy blocks north of Greenwich Village. I stop into an old-time two-fisted bar and order a martini, straight up, from an approving bartender. The couple who take the stools beside me are red from an island vacation, sporting sunglasses and bright prints. They ask for piña coladas.The bartender snarls, “We don’t serve none of them fruit drinks here.” This is precious, in an era when other establishments pretend that something made with chocolate can be called a martini. My drink is perfectly chilled. 
    I see across the Big Pond to a friend who is burning juniper in an old-time ritual on a hill above the Baltic Sea. The water gleams behind her, through pines and silver birches. An eagle owl soars overhead, searching. Her eyes are searching the juniper smoke. Can she see me in the shapes that form? Is she trying to call something through? 
     I toast her, and the Sisters, with the last of my gin. I give the bartender a $5 tip. I don’t know when I’ll see him again.
     I have an appointment on the other side of the island, at The Dead Poet. 
     I walk across the park. 
     On the corner next to The Dead Poet, a panhandler with black eyes, beaked like a crow, has come up with a creative line. He croaks at bypassers, “You are in the afterlife.” 
     A well-fed lady squeaks and hurries by. A man in a suit looks aghast. He pulls cash from his pocket and drops a large bill in the beggar’s cup.
      I lean against a mailbox, watching the pattern repeat. “You are in the Underworld,” the wild-eyed panhandler riffs on his theme. People either rush by, pretending not to hear, or they tremble and throw money at him, hoping to buy a Get Out of Jail Free card.
      It’s my time. They are waiting for me in The Dead Poet. 
      Crow Man is watching my feet when he caws, “You are in the afterlife.” 
      “Finally,” I say very clearly and distinctly. “It is a pleasure to meet a man who understands where he is.”
      Crow Man looks in my face and starts to tremble. He holds out his cup, but not for me to donate. He is offering me the payment for the Ferryman.

 

[from a 15 minute timed writng exercise]

Photos by RM

 

"I can't remember my dreams"

You may hear this a lot. We are living in an era in which many people are suffering from a protracted dream drought.This is a serious malaise because if you have lost touch with your dreams, you have lost access to many gifts, including your power to tap into a wiser source than the everyday mind, to rehearse the possible future, to hear the voice of conscience and to find energy and direction to carry you through the day.
     "I can't remember my dreams." This statement is still a big step up from saying,"I don't dream", which really just means "I don't (or won't) remember", but is often freighted with a hardhead denial of the reality and importance of dreaming
     What do you say to someone who says they can't remember their dreams? I sometimes start like this:

1. I would drop that statement altogether, because every time I repeat "I can't remember my dreams" I am programming myself to make that the case.

2. I would wake myself up to the fact that I don't need to go to sleep in order to dream.The world around me will speak to me in the manner of dreams, through signs and symbols and synchronicity, if I pay attention.

3. I would try to call up a dream or memory from early childhood and put myself back into that scene. My inner child is a world-class dreamer and if I can only get more in touch with her my dreams will come back.

If I am called to offer more extensive guidance, I might offer any or all of the following

WAYS TO BRING BACK DREAMS

1.Set an intention for the night

Before sleep, write down an intention for the hours of dream and twilight that lie ahead. This can be a travel plan (“I would like to go to Hawaii” or “I would like to visit my girlfriend/boyfriend”). It might be a specific request for guidance (“I want to know what will happen if I change my job”).

     It could be a more general setting of direction (“I ask for healing” or “I open myself to my creative
source”).

    You might simply say, “I want to have fun in my dreams and remember.”

     Make sure your intention has some juice. Don’t make dream recall one more chore to fit in with all the others.

     If you like, you can make a little ritual of dream incubation, a simple version of what ancient seekers did when they traveled to temples of dream healing like those of Asklepios in hopes of a night encounter with a sacred guide. You can take a special bath or shower, play a recording of the sounds of nature or running water, and meditate for a while on an object or picture that relates to your intention. You might want to avoid eating heavily or drinking alcohol within a couple of hours of sleep. You could get yourself a little mugwort pillow – in folk tradition, mugwort is an excellent dreambringer – and place it under or near your regular pillow.

2. Be ready to receive

Having set your intention, make sure you have the means to honor it. Keep pen and paper (or a voice recorder) next to your bed so you are ready to record when you wake up. Record something whenever you wake up, even if it’s at 3 a.m. If you have to go to the bathroom, take your notebook with you and practice doing two things at once. Sometimes the dreams we most need to hear come visiting at rather anti-social hours, from the viewpoint of the little everyday mind.

3. Be kind to fragments.

Don’t give up on fragments from your night dreams. The wispiest trace of a dream can be exciting to play with, and as you play with it you may find you are pulling back more of the previously forgotten dream.The odd word or phrase left over from a dream may be an intriguing clue, if you are willing to do a little detective work.

    Suppose you wake with nothing more than the sense of a certain color. It could be quite interesting to notice that today is a Red Day, or  a Green Day, to dress accordingly, to allow the energy of that color to travel with you, and to meditate on the qualities of red or green and see what life memories that evokes..

4. Still no dream recall? No worries.

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

     If you still don’t have a dream, write something down anyway: whatever is in your awareness,
including feelings and physical sensations. You are catching the residue of a dream even if the dream itself is gone. As you do this, you are saying to the source of your dreams, “I’m listening. Talk to me.”
     You may find that, though your dreams have flown, you have a sense of clarity and direction that is the legacy of the night. We solve problems in our sleep even when we don’t remember the problem-solving process that went on in our dreaming minds.     

5.Remember you don’t need to go to sleep in order to dream.

The incidents of everyday life will speak to us like dream symbols if we will are willing to pay attention. Keep a lookout for the first unusual or striking thing that enters your field of perception in the course of the day and ask whether there could be a message there. Sometimes it’s in your face, as happened to a woman I know who was mourning the end of a romance but had to laugh when she noticed that the bumper sticker of the red convertible in front of her said, “I use ex-lovers as speed bumps.”

     When we make it our game to pay attention to coincidence and symbolic pop-ups in everyday life, we oil the dream gates so they let more through from the night.

Part of this article is adapted from Active Dreaming: Journeying beyond Self-Limitation to a Life of Wild Freedom by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Drawing: "Dream that Got Away" by Robert Moss

The Ganesh Splash

Just for fun, from an old journal:

A woman reported a dream in which she watches three elephants bowing to me with deep reverence. Then they rise up and splash me copiously with water sprayed from their trunks. She has the feeling that this is to make sure I don't get puffed up over the honor they have given me. In her dream, I welcome this with laughter and joy.

I chuckled when I read this account, and also felt that little tingle that comes when life rhymes. About the same time she sending me her dream, I was spraying members of a workshop circle in Connecticut with salted water, my favorite psychic cleansing agent. Having given them their shower, I proceeded to splash myself with water from the same vessel.

There was another rhyme. That same morning, I shared or reported three unlikely and mildly embarrassing screw-ups in front of the group, of the kind that made it entertainingly clear that the leader was far from infallible.     

I felt confirmation, when I read the dream report, that I had received a trunk call from Ganesh aka Ganesha, the elephant-headed form of the Gatekeeper beloved and honored in India. From now on, I think I'll add the term "Ganesh Splash" to my personal lexicon of the modes of meaningful coincidence. 

Ganesh Splash: An unlikely and mild embarrassment that prevents you from taking yourself too seriously (or allowing yourself to be guru-ized by others), produced with love and laughter.

 

When a door is closed, look for one that is opening

 

In a difficult passage in my life, I was hell-bent on pursuing a certain project that I calculated would pay my bills and give me some room for creative expression. But every time I tried to push forward, I found myself blocked. Something inside me resisted my ambitions, and the world seemed to rebuff me at every turning.

Despondent, I sat down and tried to make sense of my situation.
    Suddenly, I had a clear vision of myself from a witness perspective.
    I saw myself beating on a heavy wooden door, studded with metal, banging my fists until my knuckles were raw and bloody. I saw myself pausing to take a few rasping breaths, seemingly exhausted, before pounding again on the door that would not open.
    Okay, that's how it is. Like many night dreams, my spontaneous vision was holding up a magic mirror to my actions and attitudes. Was that all?
    I felt a prickling sensation at the back of my neck. I found myself drawn from my observer position into the scene, which was more alive to me now than the family room where I was sitting. My second self was still beating his fists uselessly on the unyielding door. But the prickling sensation was guiding me to turn around and look at something invisible to him. I turned to my right, and saw an elegant, mysterious figure beckoning me with a crooked finger. There was a Trickster quality about him. He was standing in a beautiful archway. Behind him a winding path led up a slope among flowering trees into a landscape of beauty and abundance. I felt that everything I was seeking in life was through that arch.
    The Gatekeeper waited for me to grasp what he was showing me.
    My vision and understanding were still far from complete.
    If all this bright promise was waiting for me, through an open door, what was I doing beating myself bloody at the door that would not yield?
 

I turned to study again the situation of the Robert who was beating on the door. I discovered two things. While with one hand the Gatekeeper was beckoning me through the open gate of possibility, with his other hand he was holding that heavy, metal-studded door shut. The real shocker was that I could now see what was behind the door I had been desperate to open. The space behind it looked like a jail cell. I had been exhausting myself in an effort to put myself in a place of confinement.
    This powerful vision led me to make some radical life choices. I abandoned the project on which I had been working for months. Little by little, I found myself on the path between the flowering trees, in a world of ever-burgeoning creative possibility.
    The vision helped me to gain clarity on some rules for conscious living that work for me:

1. When one door closes, or won't open, look for the door that opens onto better things.

2. Before you push too hard, check whether you are at the right door.

3. Recognize that there is a Gatekeeper in life who opens and closes doors, and be ready to honor him (or her) and pay the price of entry, which may simply be a clear eye and an open heart.

Oh, there are a couple more. 

4. As long as you stand in your own way, you will find the world stands in your way.

5. The obstacle is the way.


#4 is borrowed from Henry David Thoreau: "As long as man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way."

#5 is borrowed from the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius

Drawing: "The Door That Won't Open" by Robert Moss

A Seat at the Fox's Bar

 

I land at Washington's Dulles airport late, on a little prop plane that is not the one I was scheduled to take, after one of the bumpiest rides I have ever experienced outside a war zone. 
    I have time before my connecting flight to São Paulo, and I am starving. The only halfway decent place for a sit-down lunch on my concourse is a pub called The Fox and Firkin. It is jam-packed. But wait: a woman is getting up from the bar. A young man helps her to disentangle her luggage. I thank her for providing me with a seat at the right moment. "You'll enjoy this young man," she tells me.
    The young man at the bar is behaving oddly, hopping back and forth between the now vacant seat and the one he was sitting on. He finally decides I may have his previous seat. Clearly there is going to be some kind of engagement here. His baby-blue eyes float up out of a pale and desperate face. "I know you are an elder." 
    He asks me to guess his age. I do. Now he is almost beseeching. "What can you tell me about life?"
    "Never leave home without your sense of humor."
    "I know. But I get so intense, so aggressive. Like, if someone bumps the back of my seat -" he bumps the back of my seat to make his point ["-I want to get up and get in that guy's face."
     "I'll tell you something else I have learned about life," I remark after he hits the back of my seat a second time. "We always have the freedom to choose our attitude."
     He stops banging my seat. "Oh my God, you're right. It's amazing you just sit down next to me and say that."
     He pushes his face close to mine as if he needs to be petted. I am trying to think who he reminds me of. Got it. He resembles Smeagol, the Gollem in Lord of the Rings. The absence of hair on his head is the least notable point of resemblance.
     He wants something from me I can't yet fathom.
     But as he goes on talking, questioning, I begin to sense its shape. He talks about his military Virginia family, his estrangement from his dad. It is clear this has left a deep wound. My guess is that his father has not been able to accept that his son is gay.
     I tell him that, I too, come from a military family and that I was estranged from my father until three years before his death, when we became the best of friends. I tell the young man that if it were my life, I would make it my game to make all well with my dad while he is still in the world.
    "You're giving me goosebumps." He shows me. His whole arm is chicken skin.
    "Truth comes with goosebumps."   
    He is crying now. "You come into the bar, you take a seat, and you tell me the most important things I've ever been told."
     "Here's something else I've learned. The world speaks to us through coincidence and chance encounters. It's a kind of magic."
     "Is that what you are? A magician? You got me crying at the bar for chrissake."
    "Well that lady who gave me her seat did give you a good review."
    He wants to pay for my burger and beer. Of course I won't let him. He asks for a hug. I do give him that. 
    As usual, when plans get scrambled the Trickster comes into play. There is more than what we understand as chance going on in chance encounters. And sometimes they take place for the benefit of someone else.

Drawing by Robert Moss  

Text adapted from Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity