Dreams and Doubles – Thorstein and the Fylgja

 

I am back in the Iceland of the sagas. In the Vatnsdal Saga, the chronicle of a Norwegian family that moved to northern Iceland before Christianization, we read about dream visitations and the need to listen to a dream advisory, especially when it comes from a fylgja, or companion spirit. 
     Groa the witch invites Thorstein to a banquet. However, three nights before he is due to leave home, he dreams he receives a visitation from a fylgja, in this case his family's protective spirit. She appears in human form and asks him not to go to the witch's house. He objects that he promised to be at the feast. She responds, "It seems unwise to me, and harm will befall you from this." She appears for three nights in succession, scolding him for not heeding her warning. She touches his eyes as if to tell him he must open them and see clearly. 
     Thorstein must have listened, because on the day of his departure he says he is sick and tells the people who were going to travel with him to go home. At her place, Groa walks backwards around the house chanting spells. A rockfall on the house kills everyone inside. "Ever afterwards the place where Groa lived seemed haunted, and men had no wish to live there from that time on."
    Although fylgja is sometimes translated as "follower" we know from other tales - and from first-hand experience today - that it often travels ahead of its protege, and may be seen by others before a traveler reaches their destination.   

Quotations are from Andrew Warn's traslation of Vatnsdal Saga, chapter 36, in The Sagas of the Icelanders: A Selectuon (New York: Viking, 2000) with one significant change.  Warn turns the Icelandic word fylgja into "fetch". This is not satsfactory,  since in English "fetch" is usually taken to mean a personal double, whose appearance is ominous since it often heralds death. The fylgjur ("those who accompany") are constant companions, most visible and especially active in dreams. A fylgja is a guardian spirit rather than a shadow self, though the term has shiftng meaning in different contexts. in and out of the Old Norse polypsychic houses of selves. The fylgja watches over an individual but may also protect a whole family and be passed down through generatons. The fylgja is often seen in animal form. When it appears as human, it is apparently always female, which leads some to suggest that it be a matriarchal presence.

Photo: Vatnsdalsá River, in the landscape of the Vatnsdal Saga

When Your Dead Friend Brings You a Song That Sniffs You

Bob Weir, Grateful Dead singer and rhythm guitarist, told the Los Angeles Times that his long-time bandmate, Jerry Garcia, visited him in a dream 27 years after his death.

“He wanted to introduce me to a song,” Weir reported. “He invited the song into the room and it had the look and feel of an English sheepdog. It was about the size of the room. It was enormous, but you could see through it.

“The song came up and sniffed me. We got to know each other and be friends. Then, as it turns out, it was a jazz ballad that Jerry and I were going to sing, and it was a duet.”

The ballad, however, was incomplete, lacking a melody and chords. Weir said, "I’m going to have another installment on that dream, I think.” Time to learn the practice of dream reentry!

The form the song took in the dream is interesting. Many indigenous peoples believe that the best gift of a dream is the right song or story and that these have their own lives, whether or not they come introduced by a dead fiend.

The Aborigines of my native Australia say that the big stories are hunting the right people to tell them, like predators in the bush or a shark in the water. In South America, shamanic dreaming traditions speak of "word souls", special words of power - sung more than spoken - that have their own life and can be transferred by a dream practitioner to someone in need of an energy boost.

It's not only Jerry Garcia who can work this dream magic but he sets a great example.

Source for Bob Weir dream: interview with Joe Hagan in The Los Angeles Times, February 10, 2022.

Photo: American Kennel Club

Visits with an Ancient Philosopher-Shaman

 "I was visited last night in my sleep by one whom I presently recognized as the famous Adept and Mystic of the first century of our era, Apollonius of Tyana, called the 'Pagan Christ'.

"He was clad in a grey linen robe with a hood, like that of a monk, and had a smooth, beardless face, and seemed to be between forty and fifty years of age. He made himself known to me by asking if I had heard of his lion. He commenced by speaking of Metempsychosis."

This is the start of a dream report that Anna Kingsford entered in her journal in Paris on May 11, 1880. [1]Her visitor proceeded to give her a tutorial on reincarnation and the conditions under which humans might be reborn as animals. Apollonius explained, "There are two streams or currents, an upward and a downward one, by which souls are continually passing and repassing as on a ladder. The carnivorous animals are souls undergoing penance by being imprisoned for a time in such forms on account of their misdeeds." As a leading Victorian "platform lady" on behalf of  Vegetarianism, Anna was clearly pleased by the harsh description of carnivores.  

There is a tradition that the lion of Apollonius was the reincarnation of an Egyptian pharaoh named Amasis and that the lion wept when his past identity was recognized. Occultist Éliphas Lévi also saw Apollonius as a beardless man robed in a grey garment when he evoked him, although in this case the linen was a shroud. 

Those ancient philosopher-shamans know how to get around. Let me recall the story of Apollonius' visit to the Cave of Trophonius. Plutarch (who knew what he was talking about; his brother was a priest of Trophonius) describes a Mystery initiation at the Cave of Trophonius in ancient Boeotia in which the candidate, after lowering himself through a hole in the ground into total darkness, experienced a stunning shift in consciousness that released his soul from his body and set him sailing among the stars. Freed from the body, his soul expands and flows like a sail, among the “islands” of stars in the ocean of ether — each one presided over by a god except for the moon, which is inhabited by “Epichthonian daimons.”

He stays in the underworld two nights and a day. He receives much information from an invisible spirit about the afterworld and the beings who inhabit it. He is instructed on the relationship between higher and lower self — on how gross appetites pull people down, and how those few who listen carefully to their eudaimon (“good daimon”) may become daimons themselves, playing the role of guardian angels to others. [2]

The kathodos, or underworld descent, to the Cave of Trophonius was a true initiation ritual, requiring a literal experience of death and rebirth. Preparation normally involved sacrifice, purification and discipline. But the Trickster is always at play when authentic shamans appear, and at the Cave of Trophonius a shaman-philosopher flouted the rules.. Philostratus preserves the story of a visit to the sanctuary by Apollonius of Tyana, who told the priests, “I wish to descend into the cave in the interests of philosophy.” The priests refused to let him in, telling the people they would not allow a “wizard” to enter the sanctuary.

Apollonius went despite the priests. Under cover of dark, he and his companions pulled down part of the security wall. He went down the shaft in his regular clothes — his “philosopher’s mantle” instead of the prescribed shroud. He vanished for seven days, then reappeared miles away, at Aulis, with a book in which he had recorded the daimon’s responses to his questions. This book distilled the teaching of the “golden chain” of the Pythagorean shaman-philosophers. [3]

1. Anna Bonus Kingsford, Dreams and Dream-Stories (London: John M. Watkins, 1908) "The Metempsychosis" dream XVI. 

2. Plutarch's accounts of the Cave of Trophonius initiation are in two essays, "On the Demon of Socrates" and "On the Spirits Who Live in the Face of the Moon". Translations appear in Plutarch, Moralia (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Pres, 1994, 1995), vols 7 and 12 (respectively). For full discussion of the Trophonius initiation see my book Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and Life Beyond Death (Novato CA: New World Library, 2020) pp.143-146.
3. Philostratus, The Life of Apollonius of Tyana ( trans. F.C. Conybeare (Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press and William Heinemann, 1969) vol 2, pp.381-383

Illustration: Original drawing by Robert Moss with digital color effects. 

Ghost Writers: The Rhyming Case of the Thirteen Lost Cantos

Classic mystery writer Dorothy L. Sayers maintained that her best work was not any of her novels but her translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. When she died in 1957 the last thirteen cantos of her translation of the Commedia – the final verses of the Paradiso – remained unfinished. They were completed by her friend Barbara Reynolds in a remarkable feat of ghost-writing described by Reynolds in her 2006 biography, Dante: The Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man.

There is an extraordinary literary echo here, involving another kind of ghost. When Dante died, the same thirteen cantos were missing from his text of the Paradiso. 

Dante succumbed suddenly to malaria in 1321. He had been elated, not long before, to complete the Commedia during a burst of writing in Ravenna, on the Adriatic. Now his survivors could not find the final thirteen cantos.

In his Vita di Dante, Boccaccio relates how Dante’s children and “disciples” searched for the lost cantos for months, only to give up in despair, “enraged” that God would take Dante from the world before sharing the entirety of his work. Two of his children, Jacopo and Piero, decided they would attempt to complete the work themselves. Luckily, a miracle occurred to “check [this] foolish presumption.”

Exactly eight months after his death, Dante appeared in a dream to Jacopo. He showed himself with a shining face, in shining white garments. Jacopo asked him if he was alive. Dante replied, “Yes, but with the true life, not this life of ours [in the world]”. Jacopo asked about the lost cantos. Dante took him to a room where he used to sleep. He touched one of the walls and said, “Here is what you have been looking for.”  

Jacopo woke up and enlisted a friend to help search the house where his father had lived. They inspected the wall Dante had indicated. They searched behind a rug hanging in front of "a little window in the wall" and found the missing cantos “all moldy with the damp of the wall, and close to rotting if they had stayed there much longer.”

Illustration for the Paradiso by Giovanni di Paolo, 1450

Why the dead come calling

In dreams, the departed come calling. They call us on the phone, they email, they show up at the door, they appear right inside our bedrooms, or meet us in a familiar or unfamiliar space. Let's look at some of the main reasons for these visitations.

The Dead Come to Seek or Extend Forgiveness

One of the most important things we need to understand in our relations with the deceased is that healing and forgiveness are possible across the apparent barrier of death. This can be the key for people on both sides to heal and get on with their growing.

It sometimes seems as if one of the assignments our departed set for themselves - or have prescribed for them by their coaches and counselors on the Other Side - is to reach back to survivors not only to seek forgiveness and closure but to achieve understanding and balancing. When this succeeds, it can break the family curse of abusive or destructive behaviors passed on from generation to generation.  

The Dead Come to Settle Unfinished Business

Brian's deceased friend appeared in a dream and said with fierce clarity, "Where is that book you took from my library?" 

What is "unfinished business" for one of our deceased may extend to achieving a lucid understanding of what happened in the life they have just left, preparatory to moving on to new life experiences. Yeats suggested that in an early and important phase of the afterlife transitions, the dead engage in "Dreaming Back", revisiting the scenes of their previous life, essentially to get the story straight and understand what is really going on. During the Dreaming Back, they interact with the living, in shared or overlapping dreams.

The Dead Bring a Warning or Health Advisory

Once they are free of their physical bodies and physically-oriented assumptions about the rules of reality, our dead can become extremely helpful and reliable psychic advisers, since they can see across space and time quite easily. We have this ability too, but while we are encased in physical bodies and self-limiting beliefs about physical laws and linear time, we often forget to use our ability to see beyond these things. Departed friends and loved ones very frequently turn up in dreams to pass on health advisories. They are especially sensitive to health problems that tend to run in families.

Our dead may come to us in dreams with warnings and advisories of any kind. The Chinese Book of Zuo relates that the dead father of a general called Han Jue appeared to him on the eve of battle and told him that in the fighting the next day he should avoid veering to either right or left and lead always from the center. The general was victorious in battle, but the enemies' arrows killed all the men immediately to the right and left of his chariot.

The Dead Return as Guides and Family Angels.

A young woman I'll call Kirsty lost her grandmother - a proud, creative, take-charge kind of woman - around the same time she developed a rare and serious illness. She then received a dream visitation from her grandmother, who told her, "I've arranged to be around for two more years. You and I have lots of work to do together, Sunshine." When Kirsty enrolled for an expensive series of therapy sessions, she dreamed that she heard her grandmother's voice on her answering machine. She did not want to pick up for fear that her grandmother would not really be there.

"Pick up, Sunshine," her grandmother's voice encouraged her. When Kirsty did so, her grandmother said, "You can save a bunch on those therapy sessions if you meditate on your nickname. You are Sunshine, right? Be Sunshine! Let it stream through every cell in your body!"

With the words, Kirsty felt waves of healing light and energy rolling through her body. She proceeded to make it a practice to sit with the sun and invoke a flow of inner sunlight every day, and this felt profoundly healing. In another dream, Kirsty's grandmother called to say she was going to help her arrange a move from her apartment in Manhattan to a house with a garden, and trees, and sunlight.

Though Grandma was not visible in the flurry of real estate moves that followed, she had been very adept at this kind of thing, and Kirsty was buoyed by the feeling that she was active behind the scenes. It took less than a week to sell her condo, and she managed the house purchase in just one day. Magic. Grandma called again to say she wanted to support Kirsty in developing a new relationship. Nothing controlling, just a blessing. Kirsty was thrilled to find herself entering a warm and loving new relationship with a man who was not afraid of commitment. Kirsty's grandmother loved to paint cardinals. At her new house, Kirsty sees them all the time, glorious flashes of bright red among the greens.

The Dead Come to Prepare Us for Death

One of the most important reasons our dead visit us in dreams is to prepare us for our own crossings. It is very reassuring to know that we have friends and escorts on the Other Side. These death guides may include beloved animals, as well as humans, who have shared our lives. Valerie was sitting in her family home, exhausted from taking care of her very ill mother. She was dozing when she felt a presence. She looked up and saw her father, who had died years before. He said nothing, smiled a beautiful radiant smile and held out his hand. Then she saw her mother standing in front of him. Her mother took her father's hand, and they vanished. When the nursing home called to tell her that her mother had passed, she discovered that he mother had died at the same time she had seen her father come for her in the dream.  

The Dead Want to Pass on a Message through Us

The dead may call on us to pass on a message to someone who is disconnected - a person who is not picking up his or her own messages. This is frequently the case when an emergency is impending, and a dead well-wisher urgently wants to get an advisory through to someone who won't pick up the phone or answer the door. The dead caller will turn to someone else in the neighborhood who is more receptive and may be willing to pass the message along, directly or indirectly. This is likely to work best if the "sensitive" is family or a friend of one or both parties.

But if the message is really urgent, and nobody else is available, the dead caller may try to communicate through someone who is a relative outsider. A great many people approaching death try to blank out their awareness of what is coming, instead of using the last stages of life as an opportunity to get ready for a grand adventure that opens new vistas of growth and learning. The elderly may actively refuse to communicate with departed family and friends, because there is bad blood or, quite simply, because they are trying to avoid their appointment with death.

The Dead Come to Show Us their Realm

One of the most familiar and important reasons the departed appear in our dreams is as guides to the realms beyond physical life. A departed loved one - including a beloved former pet - may be the soul-guide, or psychopomp, who makes it easy for us to approach the big journey beyond physical death with courage and grace.

I have heard many, many accounts of this, and have been blessed to help introduce many dying people to guides with familiar faces from the other side. Here is one: "My father visited my mother looking like he did when he was courting her. She was grieving and he told her he wanted to describe the beautiful valley she would first see. He showed her in a dream a vale filled with wildflowers, birds singing, and a small brook running through. He told her he could not present it the way it really looked, that it was more beautiful than anything she could ever imagine."

The Dead Come as Guardians and Guides

The ancients believed that the illustrious dead may intervene as daimons or demigods to strengthen and support the living. Plutarch located the base for helpful daimons who were formerly humans in the astral realm of the moon.

The Dead Need Guidance from Us

The dead come calling in our dreams because they need help or guidance from us - often because they are lost or lonely or stuck somewhere not very far away. They of course have guides available on the Other Side, but they may have remained so physically oriented, enmeshed in their dense energy bodies, that they are inclined to trust someone who has a physical body more than a being who does not. Or they may simply be shy about getting to know new people.

Yeats observed, with poetic insight, that "the living have the ability to assist the imaginations of the dead". I know this to be true, since I have been called on many times to help survivors to assist departed family members to move beyond stuck places by growing their imaginations and becoming more aware of new real estate options and life possibilities on the Other Side.

Jung described a dream in which he found himself at "an assemblage of distinguished spirits". He was asked some complex questions, but the conversation was in Latin and he was embarrassed that his command of this language was not sufficient for him to respond. The dream spurred him to abandon his holiday and rush home on the train to work on an answer to the question. He later concluded that the question had been put to him by "spiritual forefathers in the hope and expectation that they would learn what they had not been able to find out during their time on earth, since the answer had first to be created in the centuries that followed."  [1]

Jung subsequently speculated that "the souls of the dead 'know' only what they knew at the moment of death, and nothing beyond that" - contrary to the "traditional views" that the dead possess great knowledge. [2]

I think it is certainly entirely possible that after death people try to attain an awareness that may have escaped them during life. But there are other possible explanations for Jung's experiences. One is that he was actually communicating across time - speaking to people from early periods not in their postmortem state but as they are in their own now time. Frederic Myers trembled on the edge of recognizing this possibility, when he floated the idea of "the permanence or simultaneity of all phenomena in a timeless Universal Soul". [3]. 

References

1 C.G.Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Ed. Aniela Jaffé. New York : Vintage, 1965, 307.
2. ibid 308
3. F.W.H .Myers, Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death. Volume 2 London: Longmans, Green, 1903, 76

For much more on this subject, please see The Dreamer's Book of the Dead. Dreaming with the departed is a major theme in my new online course Active Dreaming: The Essential Training, which starts on April 18.

Photo: "Rendezvous at Thirteenth Lake"by RM

Breaking news from the Other Side

Anna dreamed she visited a friend who had recently died. He handed her a mobile phone with just two keys, green and red and told her she could call anytime. Nothing simpler – hit green to call, red to disconnect. Anna was delighted to discover that the departed now have speed dial.
     It seems that the communications technology of the departed keeps pace with innovations down here. Since the invention of the telephone, phone calls from the dead have been a familiar feature of many dreamers’ nights. One woman got a call from her mother, who had recently passed, in which her mother said, “I can’t talk for long since I just got here. I’ll have more phone privileges later on.” The dead send email and texts and their voices come through in podcasts in contemporary dreams.
    This all helps to facilitate contact since it indulges everyday expectations about how people keep in touch with each other. Back in the Victorian era, contact methods were different. The newspaperman and psychic investigator W.T. Stead, reporting back to his daughter after he died in the wreck of the Titanic, described a communications center on the Other Side where “travelers” were trained in hand-carrying messages to the living, where necessary by focusing their energy in order to produce the clear impression of a face during séances. Stead dictated a wonderful little book, The Blue Island, through a male medium that is one of my favorite sources on the Western afterlife.
     By my observation, contact with the departed, especially in dreams, is entirely natural (and would be quite commonplace, if we were more awake to levels of reality beyond the physical) for three reasons. Our dead may still be with us. Our dead come visiting. And in dreams, we go traveling in realms where the dead are at home.
     I’m using the word “dead” here the way the Irish do. Our dead are usually alive in our dreams, because indeed they are still living, "dead" only in the sense that they have left their physical bodies behind (though sometimes they are not aware of that). Interaction with our dead – again, especially in dreams – has been, in all cultures and all times, the principal source for the human belief that consciousness survives death.  
     Our dead are a constant source of breaking news, whenever we are tuned in. They give us news flashes, ranging from personal health alerts to next year’s headlines. The departed are not trapped by the illusion of linear time. If they have cleared old business and have an interest in helping survivors to do better, they can be very helpful guides in pointing out possible future events, and what we need to do to shape those events for our health and well-being. One of my personal markers that there may be unusually important information in a dream, especially relating to the future, to health, and to life-and-death issues, is the appearance of a departed person I trust, including beloved dogs who once shared my life.
    There is breaking news from the Other Side that may be even more crucial for a fully-realized life. Through our encounters with our departed over time, we learn about transitions and alternate living situations in the afterlife, the nature of reincarnation, and realities of the soul.
    A breakthrough moment on the roads of the afterlife is when a departed person discovers that he or she does not have to retain the same appearance they had when they checked out, which is often a broken and elderly body. Dreamer after dreamer reports the joyful surprise of encountering Mom or Grandpa in the body of a good-looking, energetic young person of about thirty. Such encounters are already an important education in the nature and malleability of one of the subtle bodies, or vehicles of consciousness, that survive physical death.
     I asked my friend Wanda Burch, the author of She Who Dreams, who tracks these things as closely as I do, to report on what she has learned through successive visits with her departed parents in their changing living environments on the Other Side. Here is part of the narrative she generously contributed for this piece:
     “My dreams of my father and mother's evolution have been entertaining and confirming of a great new life. In my favorite, I visit my parents in their new house. My mom looks younger, wearing smart little outfits from the days when she was dating my dad. She leads me to a beautiful pool that looks like a natural lake lined with stones, with lily pads in the water. I praise the beautiful house, and my mom says that my dad always liked my house and wanted one like mine. ‘But I don't have a house like this,’ I tell her. ‘You will,’ she says smiling. Then my mom drives off in a junky old car like the one they had in my youth. ‘Does she really need a car?’ I ask my dad. He tells me ‘No, but she enjoys it and there’s no harm in it.’
     “A few months later, I dreamed my dad was checking in on me to tell me he was moving on. I see a charming farmhouse set among pastures and fields of crops. I know this is one of many residences for my parents. I find them and join them in a car. My father shows me that he now has his own driver and then invites me to come with him inside a lodge where he has been receiving instruction, some of it – he says – involving ‘my things.’ These include early religions, dreaming, and exploration into spiritual matters.
    "He shows me charts of the heavens and points out stars and constellations, giving me lengthy and exciting explanations about the influence of the movements of the heavens on our lives and on our dreaming. I see a jumble of stars which he says he has just discovered. Humans have not been able to see them yet because they are too many light years away; but he is working with someone – I have the feeling this is an astronomer on earth - who will soon develop the technology to see them.
     “On the way back to the farm he shows me shops, including book shops filled with new books, not yet written, on wellness and spiritual development. We continue on to the farm where my mother settles into a comfortable routine. I turn and see my father coming toward me with arms wide open, ready to hug me. My father was not a hugger, but he is now. He tells me he is going away for awhile but I can still get in touch with him if it is important. He leaves. My mom, after an initial feeling of panic, settles down and seems fine. She loves her farm and farmhouse and tells me she needs to do some tidying. We say good-bye and I awake seeing her waving to me and smiling.”
     Over the years, the number one reason why people have shared dreams with me is that they have had an encounter with a departed friend or loved one that has touched them deeply. The most important thing we can do for each other in this respect is to offer confirmation and validation that these experiences are real - and then to reassure each other about a great truth that often goes unspoken in our counseling rooms and even our churches: healing and resolution and mutual support are possible, across the apparent barrier of death.
     So dying definitely need not mean hanging up on those near and dear. It seems an increasing number of people in contemporary society are taking that notion a bit too literally. Funeral homes report a steady increase in the number of clients who are being buried with their cell phones. When Manhattan criminal defense attorney John Jacobs died in 2005, his widow buried him in a Paramus NJ cemetery with his cell phone and continued to pay the monthly phone bill. She had his cell phone number carved on his headstone so others could keep in touch too. When she and others called, they got his voicemail, promising to get in touch as soon as possible. Dream phones offer live conversation, and you don't get a monthly bill.

Retrieving the Soprano from Gounod's Faust

Waking hours before dawn, I thought I had let my dreams slip, but lingered in bed to see if they would come after me. Yes. I see a small pocket-sized book, with a light green paper cover, from an earlier time. There is a one word title, Faust.
    Slipping back inside the dream, I open the book, curious to see which version of the best-known devil story in Western literature this may be. Goethe? Christopher Marlowe?
    Neither. I am looking at the libretto of an opera. This is Gounod's Faust, a grand five-act opera. Some parts of the libretto have been tagged in pencil, very lightly. These are lines sung by Siebel, the young soldier who is Faust's rival for the beautiful Marguerite, a man of honor and devotion.
    I am seized with excitement. My mother's aunt, Violet Concanen, known in the family as "Aunty Dick" performed as Siebel - traditionally played by a female soprano - with the great Dame Nellie Melba as Marguerite, in Gounod's Faust at the Melbourne Opera House. I have an photo of Aunty Dick in that role.
   I come back from the dream space and look for the photo. It's in a little album my mother gave me, with many pictures of Aunty Dick, who my mother adored. Here she is as a dreamy teen, and all dressed up as a young Edwardian lady, and in a kimono for her part in the Mikado. And here she is in cloak and medieval garb, dressed to fight the devil.
   I don't think I have the little green book of the libretto, though in my personal forest of books one can never be quite sure. But it takes almost no time to find a bunch on online versions, and videos of Siebel's famous aria in the third act, "Faites-lui mes aveux," including a wonderful performance by Sophie Koch at Covent Garden here.
    Siebel gathers a bouquet of flowers for Marguerite. Mephistopheles makes the flowers wither.

I cannot touch a flower without it fading.

But Siebel uses white magic against the dark. When he refreshes the flowers with the holy water that Marguerite uses in her daily devotions, they come back to life, and he sings, "I laugh at you, Satan."
    The devil has more tricks. Mephistopheles has captured the soul of the aged, decrepit philosopher Faust, who was so depressed by his failure to find wisdom that he decided to kill himself. In Gounod's version, based on a play by Michel Carré called Faust and Marguerite, Faust curses the joy of peasants he hears laughing and cries out to the powers of hell, who promptly respond. Mephistopheles appears in a puff of smoke and seduces Faust with promise of knowledge, youth, and sensual delights, at the price of his soul. Captivated by a vision of the beautiful Marguerite, Faust shows what all his studies have been worth by making the deal, and we have been talking about Faustian bargains ever since.
    Faust shows up at Marguerite's house, sings a magnificent aria, and presents himself in the guise of a dashing and mysterious young suitor. Though intrigued, Marguerite doesn't yield to his advances, and Siebel, with his bouquet, may still have a chance - until Mephistopheles trumps the flowers by magicking up a box of jewels and a remarkable  mirror. "How beautiful my reflection is," sings Marguerite, looking in that mirror. "I am the princess greeting her subjects as she passes by." 
    I turn back to the album. I read that Aunty Dick was so popular as Siebel that she got more curtain calls than Melba at the premiere at the Melbourne Opera House, which must have strained relations with the diva. Here she is again, lovely as Dorothy in the opera of the same name. Here is the program for a state dinner in Perth where she sang for the Prince of Wales. They served peach Melba - named for Nellie - and cheese straws for dessert. The Prince of Wales asked her to dance, and she found him "drunk as a lord".
    I met her only once, in the world, when I was very young, and my mother took me across the vast continent by train from Melbourne, where I was born, to meet her family in Western Australia. Aunty Dick, who was also a singing teacher, urged me to "breathe from the diaphragm."
    She left this world long ago, but I have seen her in dreams, and once found her very happily engaged in making music and giving singing lessons at a school in another world. I suspect she is quite capable of arranging a book delivery.

My Aunty Dick (Violet Concanen) as Siebel in Gounod's Faust

Soul of a book

A man is with me in my writing cave. He wants me to help him fit a book he has written into my computer. I am reluctant - I have so much to do, and he wants me to do this on my computer? I know I could do what he asks, though the operation is anything but a routine data transfer. It involves taking a whole life-size, embodied energy and transferring it into the computer. This life-size energy may be the whole form of my visitor, who appears as a shadowy figure in a long flapping coat, his features indistinct in the grainy dark.

While considering his request, I tune into the reminiscences of a group of middle-aged women. they are talking on a terrace overlooking a lake. On this side, it's a very orderly lake with manicured borders. It may be one of those man-made lakes created for expensive developments and gated communities. But on the far side of the lake, things are wild. There are islands over there, and wild men, and the ladies are giggling a little as they recall adventures that had with the wild men when they were quite young.

I need to understand what was going on with my male visitor, who wants me to put his story into my computer. I'm lucid now, and want to converse with him, but it seems he has moved on, at least for now. I have the impression of two images he has left with me. They remind me of Tarot cards, except that they are three times as long, in proportion to their width, as any card from a deck. One shows a series of fire triangles, making a high column. The colors are mostly reds and oranges, with sparks coming of the edges. The other card depicts what looks like a crescent beach in the moonlight. This "beach" card is a window; as I look at it I see that the whole scene is alive and watch the waves rolling in.

Feelings: Intrigued, slightly disappointed I was slow to grasp what might be going on with my visitor.

Reality: I am ready to consider new book projects, having completed another non-fiction book this week. I am open to new ideas and new characters (for fiction). I recently had the experience - leading a group journey - of realizing that books, too, have souls. Was my caller the soul of a possible book? Or a parallel self who has actually written the book, in a parallel world? Now that would be an interesting writing partner!

Question: What is going on with the male visitor who wants me to transfer his story to my computer? What can I learn from the women? What is the significance of the "calling cards"?

Action: Draw the calling cards. Done (see above). Further action: have a go at writing narrative in a new first-person voice (of someone other than my present self).