Those who attend in the Twilight Zone

 

All these people are gathered. They are like actors who have taken their places on stage and are waiting quietly for the curtain to go up. It comes to me that they are "attending", an interesting word. 
    I have the feeling they are characters who could have parts in a new book. Yet they have their own lives. None of them seems to be aware of me.
    But now a young woman slips through their ranks, to look at me directly. She is red haired, tall and slim, quite lovely. Her clothes are of an earlier time. Her gaze is deep. I cannot read her feelings, but I would like to know her. She moves away to my left, and I sense that she wants me to follow. When I go after her, however, I am interrupted by a mature woman with long black hair and very white skin who thrusts herself between us. I know she is filed with jealous hate for the redhead. 
    There is an old story here, of passion and jealousy. I sense it goes back several centuries, to the British Isles. I won't follow it now. The sunlight streaming into my bedroom round the edge of the drapes is quite bright. I reach for my French blue sleep mask (thank you Air France) and stretch out on my back, enjoying the luxury of drifting back from my twilight zone adventures into the sleep that repairs the body and allows the dream soul to go wandering without an agenda.


Often, as in this episode recorded in an old journal, I find different casts of characters waiting or popping up as I hover on the edge of sleep or linger in the twilight zone of hypnagogia. Sometimes, they appear to be quite literally on stage, or in the wings, waiting for me to show up in order to start or resume a play. More often, they seem to be characters in life dramas that are being played out in other times or in parallel worlds, dramas in which I have a lead role from which I may have been absent while attending to things in waking life.
    When I am writing, I am occasionally thrilled to discover in this way that my characters - who may or may not have been previously known to me - are assembling in this way, ready to claim their parts in my stories, or at least audition for those parts. 
    Those attending. I like this description for the people who appear on the cusp between waking and sleep, or between sleep and waking. To attend can mean to take care of or wait upon someone; in its Latin origin, in the verb attendere, it means "to stretch toward" something. Encounters with those who attend in the twilight zone can certainly help to stretch the mind. 

"Curtain Time". Dream Oracle card by Robert Moss

 

Social dreaming on Christmas Eve

Dreams are social as well as individual, transpersonal as well as personal. We get out and about, we make visits and we receive visitations. Some of us are much more social in dreams than in regular life. This was my story overnight.

After a quiet Christmas Eve with family around the tree, I traveled far and wide and brought back detailed reports in three intermissions from adventures with people who are strangers to me in the ordinary world.

In the first excursion, I am at a British military hospital during World War I trying to persuade the brass that there are more humane and healing ways to approach "shell shock" than to send soldiers back to the front or discharge them as unfit. I become lucid, aware that I am in a different body, trying to find how to apply knowledge from my current life including psychological terms that are not understood in 1917. I am starting to get a hearing from British military doctors when I step out of this scene.

 In another dream, I travel between the Hamptons and a country estate, trying to help in an emotional drama that has a woman on the verge of suicide. Despite the raw grief and rage in the scene, I feel I am getting through. I am calm and detached when I leave the scene.

In a third dream, I am staying in a vast luxury apartment in Miami. Three Latina housekeepers come in while I am trying to take a shower and lay out a four-plate feast for me. They come with happy dogs – a big black Chow and a tiny long-haired dachshund - that race around.

None of this was cheery jingle bells stuff, or the starlight of the Magi, but I felt up rather than down after each episode. The dreams seemed entirely literal, real encounters in different times and places. I was glad to see that my dream self was trying to help where help was needed, in an earlier time and an alternate reality. I could be in that apartment in Miami in the future, but I think what is unfolding there belongs to a parallel life that does not require further attention from me from this side of the swing door between the worlds.

I am pretty sure the stories are continuing to play after I thought I had checked out. I don’t feel any work is required on this side, not even my frequent dream detective work of asking “Who? What? Where? When? Why?”

I could play the part of asking “What part of me?” is each character in each dream – the ramrod stiff colonel as opposed to the would-be healer or the wounded warrior, for example.That could be fun. but would not lay to rest my deep sense that the dream figures are more than aspects of myself or a cast assembled by my inner movie producers. They have their own lives.

I allow myself the gentle pleasure of recording three new travel reports in my journal, and then adding them to my digital folder on Social Dreams. This folder now contains thousands of personal entries. In many of them I meet people I later encounter in ordinary reality, often in a workshop or lecture setting. I lead a workshop in a dream, then give that workshop in regular life, and recognize people who took it with me already. Just as often, however, a social encounter in a dream remains in its own space, in an alternate reality or a parallel event track. First-hand data of this kind is a corrective to the misconception – still amazingly common among pundits on dream psychology - that whatever goes on in a dream is merely a part of the dreamer.

Journal drawing by Robert Moss

Social dreaming

Dreaming is social as well as individual, transpersonal as well as personal. I am still thinking about all the people - as yet unknown to me in ordinary life - I was with in several social settings in dreams over the weekend. When I am off the road, leading a very quiet and private life, I am far more social in dreams than in regular life. Yes, this could be "compensation", as Jung understood it, yet I think these are also entirely real interactions.    

Try to ask me what part of me the other characters may represent and you might get me to play the game, but without conviction, because my feelings lead me elsewhere.  So I have to figure out whether the mature brunette in the blue suit, who persuaded me to give those seminars for hip young people in some organization, figures only in a parallel reality and/or will show up in my future in this one. And whether I'll run into that journalist with the well-trimmed red beard in physical life.

This is not a dream report but simply a note on a theme. However, if you were to insist on the rules of Lightning Dreamwork and ask for my feelings after my social dreams over the weekend I would say that I was excited and full of happy anticipation.

For much more on social and shared dreaming, please see my book Active Dreaming.

Photo: Dream sharing at Mosswood Hollow by RM

The dreamer who sent me her notes from the lecture I gave in her dream

Some weeks after leading one of my 5-day adventures at the Esalen Institute, I received a note from one of the participants, a highly intelligent, spirited lady, a person with two PhDs who had explored consciousness in many ways. "I want to thank you for that wonderful lecture you gave last night."
    I checked the date. I had not given a lecture that evening anywhere in consensus reality. I had already intuited what she was telling me. She had attended a lecture I gave in one of her dreams. The woman from Esalen reported that in my lecture, I had listed, "very clearly and elegantly", five reasons why we misinterpret dreams about the future. I had written them on a whiteboard in view of the group.
    This gave me shivers. On that very day, I was laboring over a chapter in a book that was later published as Dreaming True. The chapter was titled "When Dreams Seem False" and on the first page I was developing a list of the five most common reasons why we misinterpret dream messages about the future. I was satisfied with my statement about the first reason we get these messages wrong. But I was not yet content with my formulation of the other four reasons, or the order in which they should appear on the page.
     I emailed the woman from Esalen. I asked her, "Any chance you kept notes from my lecture, or could reconstruct what I wrote on the whiteboard?"
     She responded within a couple of hours, sending me her version of Dream Robert's five points. They were expressed with admirable brevity, very much in my own style. Borrowing from my dream student's notes, I was able to compose the opening section of that chapter with almost no editing. Here's how it reads:

The five most common reasons why we misinterpret dream message about the future are:

1. We mistake a literal event for a symbolic one, or vice versa.
2. We misidentify people and places.
3. We fail to figure out how far in the future the dreamed event might be.
4. We see future events from a certain angle, that may not reveal the whole picture.
5. We confuse realities, confounding a dream that relates to external reality with dreams that are real experiences in other orders of reality.

Now, I am well aware that very often I am playing the role of teacher in my own dreams, with many difference audiences: with people I recognize, with people I will meet in the future, with people in countries I have not yet visited, with people in other orders of reality, including the afterlife  and what I like to call the imaginal realm. 
    I have received hundreds of reports from people who say they have attended a workshop, a lecture, a ritual or some other type of training with me in dreams. I have learned to pay close attention to reports about Dream Robert's teaching activities, because sometimes I find that he is more than a few steps ahead of me. It's a rare student of mine who brings detailed notes back from the dreaming, but I am open to more!

Photo "Under the Bean" (c) Robert Moss
   

The man with the sunburst tattoo at the third eye

I met a dubious character in my dream wanderings last night. I saw him first as a vigorous 40-ish man with wild dark hair and beard, wearing a long, loose coat or robe of many colors. At his third eye, he wore a tattoo of a sunburst. It was inked in flashing colors, giving the impression of solar flares. He also clearly meant to indicate to those he was trying to impress that his third eye was open, and capable of projecting immense psychic power.
     His energy was that of a sorcerer; his style that of a huckster. I watched him in a marketplace, up on a little platform, seeking to win followers with his tricks. I gave him a wide berth.
     But later in the dream, after traveling far and wide, I met him again. I did not recognize him to begin with, standing near an arch in an old brick building that might have been St James's Palace in London. He was now an old man, very tired and pale, his skin almost white, dressed in a three-piece black suit. His hair was close-cropped, curly and white, his lips almost colorless. I would not have known him except for the sunburst tattoo. It was now leached of color, its lines puckered like the edges of an old wound.
    He stared at me intently, and I remembered a figure in a dream of long ago - a leader of a British esoteric order - who had sought to impress me by opening a third eye, quite realistically, in a gathering of his acolytes. Would the old man with the faded sunburst tattoo try a similar stunt? Apparently not. We took each other's measure for a long moment, then I moved on.
~
Dreaming is traveling. We get around, we visit various neighborhoods in a geography much vaster than that of the physical world, we meet other people. I could play psychology games with this dream - for example, by asking "what part of me" is like the man with the sunburst tattoo, in his two versions and his aging - and they could be interesting, up to a point. But I know, as a lifelong dream traveler, that he is not merely an aspect of myself; he is a transpersonal figure, living another story that occasionally (it seems) intersects with my own. I don't feel inclined to follow his trail, but I'll be on the lookout for his possible further appearances in my night life. I haven't got his number yet, but I know his mark.

Social dreaming

The idea (prevalent in Western psychology, when it values dreams at all) that dreams are primarily products of the personal subconscious would puzzle dreamers in most ancient and indigenous cultures, for whom the most interesting dreams are social and transpersonal. Certainly dreams surface a great amount of material from our personal psyches, which is why it is often productive to ask the question, of any and every element in a dream, "What part of me does that represent?"

Yet our dreams often take us far beyond the boundaries of the personal unconscious. In dreams, we make journeys and we receive visitations. Some of us are far more social in our dreams than in regular life. So when we think about what happened in a dream, it may be more relevant to ask "Who was I with?" and "Where did I go last night?" than "What part of me?" was involved.

I am thinking about social dreaming - a phrase I would like to see in our vocabulary - because my friend Wanda Burch just shared a delightful example of a dream experience she shared with her husband. Their dream recall was triggered by a TV commercial that offered a potted orchid as a gift for buyers of a certain product. Wanda said to her husband Ron: "I was in a room - I don't recall where I was or how I got there - but I know I was with two people and one of them was you. I don't know where we were going but I looked to the left and there were large yellow orchids on a table and then I looked to the end of this long room -"

Looking startled Ron finished her statement "- and there was a single arching grey orchid, more stunning in its placement than the yellow ones."

"Yes," Wanda confirmed, "and it was displayed like an old Japanese painting, slightly to the right -"
"- of a chair," Ron again filled in the blank.

In almost identical speech, they both added, "with filtered light coming through the slats of some sort of dark wooden blind or window covering."

They could not identify the third person in the dream, someone who had a magic touch with orchids. But they shared the most vivid and precise recollection of a space they had entered only in dreaming.

I like this account for its everyday simplicity. I know that Wanda is no slouch at social dreaming because she has often participated in dream adventures with me, in which the locales have ranged from conference venues and vacation homes to far-flung countries and imaginal realms. Wanda was present, as an observer, in one of the most important dreams of my life, and her exact account of what took place around a certain purple fire, in a circle of ancient warrior chiefs, was vital confirmation for me of the objective reality of that experience.

In my Active Dreaming workshops, I often guide participants on adventures in social dreaming that are conscious and intentional. Last weekend, for example, we went on a group journey - powered and focused by shamanic drumming - to a fascinating location in the imaginal realm that I call the House of Time, which offers many portals for time travel, the investigation of past and future life experiences, and a library where master teachers sometimes make themselves available. I give directions for this journey in my Dream Gates CD series and also in Dreamgates the book (which contains material beyond the audio series). In the workshops we also learn to travel inside each other's dreamspace as dream trackers.

What the shared orchid dream brings home is just how natural the experience of social dreaming may be. Since in dreaming we are not confined to the body or the rules of Newtonian physics, why would it be strange for us to share experiences, according to our interests and our passions, with those who are connected with us? Of course, in dreaming we may discover that we belong to an extended family vastly greater than our regular family, whose members are not confined to one world or one time!