A (very) adult Pippi Longstocking

I rarely read crime novels, but I've made an exception for the "Millennium" trilogy by Swedish author Stieg Larsson. I got the first one - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - to see what all the excitement was about, and because I thought its characters and settings might be good preparation for my first visit to Sweden last month. Initially dismayed by the proliferation of detail on the genealogy of a complex industrial dynasty with skeletons in every closet, I was hooked when Larsson slipped a remarkable heroine in through a side door. Lisbeth Salander is a tiny tattooed Goth type mistaken for a homeless kid, a low-rent hooker and a psychotic retard. Though lacking in social graces, Salander is a world-class investigator with a photographic memory, the problem-solving skills of a math prodigy, and the martial arts prowess to leave a gang of local Hell's Angels in the dirt. With brain and fists and hacking skills and tasers, she fights men who hate and abuse women until you want to get up and cheer.

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As I eagerly followed this fiery waif through her further adventures in The Girl who Played with Fire (in which she takes on white slavers in edgy alliance with the author's journalistic alter ego Mikael Blomkvist) it hit me that Larsson has produced a Pippi Longstocking ("the strongest girl in the world") for mature audiences. There are in-your-face clues scattered throughout Larsson's books, including a cover name Salander borrows from the name of Pippi's house in the woods (Villekulla Cottage). When I visited Stockholm, I discovered that Salander's fictional address on Lundagatan is just down the street from the actual home of Pippi's creator, Astrid Lindgren, overlooking the park that now bears Astrid's name.

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The Girl who Played with Fire is so much better than The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - the plot more tightly woven, the characters more deeply and sharply defined - that I couldn't wait for the US edition of the third novel in the trilogy (The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest) to be published so I'm now reading the UK edition, which I had shipped from across the big pond.

The publishing history of a trilogy that has now sold over 25 million copies is as strange as anything in the novels. Stieg Larsson died of a huge heart attack, aged only 50, in 2004. He had received death threats from neo-Nazi groups he had made it his business, as a journalist, to expose, and was mixed up in extreme-left politics, so naturally conspiracy theories have flourished, though no evidence of foul play had turned up. He had completed three novels out of a projected series of ten when he died, but had only recently made contact with a Swedish publisher. He said he wrote when he couldn't sleep and to get his mind off his worries. Everything about him is now contested except the success of his fiction. A Swedish biographer who claims to have known him well maintains that he couldn't be the author of the novels because he was a lousy writer, a claim angrily rejected by Larsson's legions of admirers. Larsson's long-term girlfriend has been denied any share in his estate because he left no valid will.

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PS: Halfway through The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest anyone who has managed to miss the Pippi Longstocking connection will finally "get" it.

No time for Whoopi

As I approach the bank tellers in a local branch, one is saying to another: "What did Whoopi say? 'He's stuck somewhere...stuck between the somethings?''"

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"I don't have time for no whoopee," says a blue-collar customer doing some routine business at the far left end of the counter. "I gotta work."
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"You got no soul," his teller informs him.

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"Are you talking about Whoopi Goldberg?" I ask the first teller.

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"Sure am."

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"In the movie Ghost." I make a flying guess.
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"That's it."

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"Where she says that someone is stuck between the worlds."

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"Hear that?" she calls to the other tellers. "Whoopi says he's stuck between the worlds."
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"Like you, Stan," the teller at the end challenges the customer who doesn't have time for no Whoopi. He looks foggy, but concerned.

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"Stan," she pursues him. "Where is your soul?"

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"I dunno." He turns a shade paler. "I guess I'm kinda hoping it's still in my body."

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As I finish my business, I congratulate everyone at the bank counter. "This has been grand entertainment. Not what you generally hear in a bank."

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"You never know what a day may bring," says the middle teller, silent until now.

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"Ain't that the truth," says my teller. "You might even get kicked out of that stuck-between place into another world."

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"Stan," his teller isn't done with him. Her Whoopi impression is pitch-perfect. "You in danger, boy."

Dreamers of the Day

My in-flight reading for my trip back to the East Coast from California yesterday was a recent novel by Mary Doria Russell, Dreamers of the Day. She borrows her title from a much-quoted passage in T.E.Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom: “All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.”

     -Lawrence of Arabia ("Neddy" Lawrence) is a major character in Dreamers of the Day, along with other historical figures including Winston Churchill and his wife Clementine, Lady Gertrude Bell, and other Brits involved in Middle East treaty-making in Egypt in 1921, which gave us Iraq and - distantly - the agonies of the current war. The author's brilliant device is to make a hitherto diffident Midwest 40-ish spinster, who has decided to give life a whirl after losing everyone near to her in the great influenza pandemic, her camera eye on all these intrigues.=

    There is wonderful writing, like this glimpse of the dust along the Nile: "Dust rises at every step, fine as flour. It is dried river silt, all that dust. Add water, and the soil is so ferile that you could plant a pencil and harvest a book."

-   Mary Doria Russell is nothing if not ambitious in her literary designs. In her first novel, The Sparrow, she tracked the first human space mission to visit an inhabited planet other than our own. The key character, a Jesuit, is inspired by the brilliant Jesuits, like Father Jean-François Lafitau, who founded the modern science of anthropology in the 17th century through their close study of the customs of native tribes in north-eastern America. The shocker is that on the planet that has been discovered, there are two intelligent, humanoid and sympathetic species - one of which eats the others. The predators are also the poets.

-   The intended shocker in Dreamers of the Day is that the narrator, the Cleveland spinster Agnes Shanklin, turns out to be reminiscing from the Other Side, where she is hanging out with great men from the more distant past who visited Egypt and returned there, at least for a time: Napoleon, General George McClellan, even St Francis. What they have in common, it seems, is that they all drunk from the Nile - Agnes by falling in it from a fishing skiff. While I'm always interested in depictions of afterlife locales, this one doesn't work for me. And the fact that the narrator is dead is telegraphed much too far in advance, losing any surprise factor.
-    But I enjoyed the long view of the origins of our ruinously misguided adventure in a country that should never have been invented, the deft handling of the mystery of Lawrence's complex identity and of Agnes' belated affair (with a charming German Jewish spy who inserts himself into her life by walking her sausage dog) and the fine gossipy treatment of the doings of the great and often mistaken, including the discomforts of travel with Winston, especially on the camel ride that produced a famous photograph in front of the Sphinx.

-    At the end of the novel, the author probes the meaning of her title. "A dreamer of the day is dangerous when he believes that others are less: less than their own best selves and certainly less than he is." She goes on (in Agnes' voice): "A true prophet sees others, not himself. He helps them define their own half-formed dreams, and puts himself at their service. He is not diminished as they become more."

-    Plain good sense, from a novelist who constantly reaches through fiction to seek truths about our human condition; what challenges it and what sustains it.

A book to live...or die...by

Sonoma, California

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Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover. The new edition of my book Dreamgates has a beautiful cover, designed by Tracy Cunningham, that makes you want to step inside it. Flying to California this week to talk about Dreamgates at a series of fine independent bookstores that are bravely weathering current conditions - Book Passage in Corte Madera, Readers Books in Sonoma, Copperfields in Sebastopol - I saw the cover work its magic.

Like all well-trained authors, I had a copy of my new book with me along with my in-flight reading. A young woman - an editorial assistant in her 20s - sitting next to me on the first flight caught sight of the gorgeous cover and asked if she could have a look at it. She went straight to the last pages of Dreamgates, where I tell the story of a weave of dreams and synchronicity that guided me on how to publish my first book on dreaming (Conscious Dreaming) and led me, a year after a crucial guiding dream, to a scene in the Embarcadero cinema in San Francisco where that dream unfolded, in ordinary reality, in front of my eyes. My rowmate exclaimed, shiny-eyed, "I want to live like this." She proceeded to devour as much of the book as she could before we landed.

On the second flight (Chicago-Oakland) my rowmate was a feisty lady aged 75 who's lived for 20 years in Carmel, California. She, too, asked to see the book with the gorgeous cover. She opened it at random to a section that explores the idea that we can "design a home in the afterlife". This didn't faze her one bit. "I've put all this time and effort into making myself a perfect home in Carmel," she said. "I'm 75 and I guess it may be time for me to start looking seriously into real estate options on the Other Side." She leafed through a section of Dreamgates about visiting our departed loved ones in their present environments, not only to have timely and helpful communication, but to gain first-hand knowledge of conditions in the afterlife. She told me, "I'd love to see what my husband's been up to since he died thirteen years ago. You mean this book can teach me how to do that?" I showed her the section in Dreamgates that contains simple and practical instructions for making a conscious dream journey to meet a loved one on the Other Side. She announced she would get the book and give this a try. She added, patting the book, "I think I want to die like this."

I felt charmed and blessed that in chance encounters on two planes on launch day, Dreamgates was judged a good book to live - or die - by. That seemed to cover a lot.

Attitude Indicators and other clues to the future

Virginia Beach

At the workshop I've been leading at A.R.E. (the Edgar Cayce organization) a nice man named Dan comes up to talk to me about ways in which he finds dreams coaching him for the future. "I'm a private pilot," he explains. "Though I haven't flown in the ordinary way in years, in my dreams I'm often airborne. In a bunch of my dreams, a voice tells me I need to check my attitude indicator."

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I thought I had misheard him. Did he mean to say, altitude indicator? Nope. "The first time I was told to check my attitude indicator, I saw that the gauge was really wacky, showing I was up and down and all over the place. The next day, at my work, a supervisor told me he didn't like my attitude. Since then, I'm glad to check my attitude indicator on my dream plane and make adjustments in my regular life when indicated."

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I like the way Dan's dream producers borrowed the cockpit scene with which he was thoroughly familiar to introduce an oneiric technology for self-scanning that helps him to navigate situations that lie ahead. Dan went on to explain that the behavior of his dream compass also gives him course correction. "I might be trying to follow a bearing of NNW. Then my compass swings to SSE, and when I try to reset my course, the compass swings back again. That tells me when I need to change my direction in my regular life."

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Ways in which dreams help us navigate the future have been an important theme at the conference. I recounted a tiny dream of my own from the night before I flew to Norfolk, Virginia, en route to Virginia Beach. In my dream:

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I look at two hairbrushes lying next to each other. Their bristles face each other; the handles extend in opposite directions. Both are the size and shape of my regular hairbrushes, but one seems to have lost its color. The handle and backing of the brush look almost transparent.

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I woke with a sense of mild surprise. In waking reality, I have two hairbrushes the same shape and size as those in the dream. One lives in my suitcase; the other on my bedroom dresser. I make a point of leaving one at home when I travel.

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Because of the dream, I checked on the status of my travel brush which I had moved to a new suitcase purchased a few days before. To my surprise, I could not find the brush. I prolonged my search, again because of the dream, wanting to avoid the two hairbrushes scenario by not bringing down my "bedroom brush" before I had made the most thorough check. Finally satisfied my suitcase brush was nowhere to be found in the bag, I brought down the house brush and set off with that on my trip

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When I got to my hotel in Virginia Beach, I found the TSA had inspected my bag. No doubt thanks to their probing hands, the missing hairbrush had now rematerialized - lying bristle to bristle against the other hairbrush, exactly as in the dream. Maybe the "transparency" of this brush in the dream was a clue that it would go missing for a while.

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I shared this absurdly trivial report to my audience at the conference - and am sharing it here - as a reminder of a feature of dreaming we never want to ignore or minimize: dreams are constantly giving us glmpses of the future. If we can dream something as insignificant as the future situation of a couple of hair brushes, surely we can dream more important events that lie in the future - as we do, all the time, even when many persist in not paying attention.

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Many are first awakened to the reality of dream precognition by a dream fulfilled in a future event that is either quite trivial (hence harmless and often humorous) or tragic (with a depth and darkness of feeling it's hard to ignore). Through practice, we come to realize that we are dreaming the future all the time. Our dream selves are forever traveling ahead of us, scouting the ways. Our engagement with the future in dreams is not confined to precognition, in which we see things we couldn't ordinarily know ahead of time. More interesting than seeing the future that will happen is seeing into possible futures that can be influenced for the better once we learn to read our dream information correctly and apply the insights to make better choices. This is the theme of my book Dreaming True.

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Along the way to making full use of our dream radar, we want to get into the habit of asking of any dream material: is it remotely possible that this could play out in some way in the future, literally or symbolically? It's helpful to look for personal markers that flag the likelihood that a certain dream relates to a possible future event. The literal, even mundane or humdrum, quality of a certain dream, can point to a literal, workaday future situation. A media motif, such as seeing or reading the news, may suggest "breaking news" from the dream place. A "pop-up" - content that feels like an insert in the midst of a dream sequence - may often be a marker of either breaking news or telepathy, or both. I give a recent example involving a "pop-up" that guided my travels to Sweden in my blog post "At the Sign of the Dodgy Fish" (March 11).

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I greatly like Dan's attitude indicator; maybe we can all learn to look in the cockpit of dreams for similar devices that will give us reliable navigational guidance on how we are flying and where we are headed in our lives.

Visits with my favorite professor

I am with my favorite professor, Manning Clark. We sit in a cafe, discussing my progress towards a PhD dissertation. He is delighted I am working for my doctorate, but the content of my dissertation will need careful thought in order to satisfy all three supervisors. While Manning will support whatever I choose to do, the other two supervisors - Australians of a younger generation, with a different approach to academic research - are going to want me to demonstrate the ability to do exact research and analysis, and would like me to include some Australian material in my dissertation.

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In my outline, I have borrowed an idea from Spengler that 5,000 years ago there was a fundamental change in human societies that can be observed all over the planet. While Manning is happy for me to play off this sweeping notion, he counsels that the other supervisors won't like Spengler.

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This is a very friendly, relaxed conversation, and I am greatly enjoying my time with Manning.
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I wake cheerful, sunny and optimistic.

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Some background: Manning Clark, Australia's famous narrative historian, was chair of the history department at the Australian National University when I arrived there as an undergraduate in the late 1960s. He was a wonderful mentor and friend. He encouraged his students to read Dostoyevsky and Faulkner, Freud and Jung to understand the springs of human action. Raised on the King James Bible, he exhorted us to find "the ditch where we are digged". I vividly remember the dinners at Manning's house where he put vodka in the soup to loosen tongues. Manning's constant help and encouragement kept me on an academic track for a short time (I was appointed Lecturer in Ancient History at the ANU at the ripe age of 21) when I was powerfully tempted to do other things - like becoming a full-time journalist or joining the Australian foreign service.
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Manning died in 1991. Since his death he's turned up in some very important dreams, always as guide and friend. Once I met him in a building that resembled the Institute of Advanced Studies at our old university in Canberra. In an airy, light-filled space, I watched him move a pair of shoes across a broad table each time he completed a section of the new research he was doing. Puzzled and intrigued, I asked him about the nature of his new work. "I'm working on parallel lives," he explained. He demonstrated what this meant by showing me how he had found close interweaving between the life of Lenin and the life of Dionysius of Syracuse, an ancient Greek tyrant. From being a historian of lives lived in Chronos time, it seemed that Manning had become a meta-historian, working to trace the interplay of lives unfolding in different times. When I thought about the shoes he was moving about on his desk, the symbolism came home to me. My professor is matching up soles. Sounds like...?
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I've noticed before that my favorite professor tends to turn up in my dreams when I am embarked on new writing projects requiring detailed research and careful selection of materials. I'm not planning a PhD dissertation; I started on one four decades ago but gave that up to go off to see the world and sniff cordite as a foreign correspondent. However, I am again teaching some university courses and I am currently working on several new books.

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It's nice to feel Manning's benign presence, which will remind me to cherish my Australian identity and what I can bring to my work from my Aussie connections, including the link with the Aboriginal people who believe that our personal dreams can take us home to the Dreamtime, where everything truly important has its origin. His counsel will also encourage me to stay away from cloudy generalizations like the Spenglerian cycles of history. It will draw me, again, to the pursuit of trans-temporal history, which sounds like an oxymoron but may be a key to understanding how things really work, through the interplay of personalities in different times and dimensions.

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Portrait of Manning Clark (with his dog Tuppence) by Arhur Boyd (1972). This used to hang in his home in Canberra and is still on view there for 6 months of the year (in what is now the Manning Clark House); for the rest of the year it is in the National Portrait Gallery.

The Scottie of Kaunas

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I am in Kaunas, Lithuania, where two river deities, the god Niamanas and the goddess Neris, share their fluids. On the way to the workshop I am leading in the Old Town of Kaunas, I pause for coffee at a bijou establishment on the square called the Šokoladas Cafe. No sooner have I sat down than the door opens and in walks a very confident black Scottish terrier, followed by his master. 

I greet the Scottie with enthusiasm. His name, I am soon informed, is Oscar, which I especially like because I was recently reading the poems of Oscar (O.V. de L.) Milosz, an older relative of the Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz, who is well-known as a poet and esotericist in France and was a very active diplomat in the cause of Lithuania early in the 20th century. I tell Oscar's owner about Sadie, the Scottie who was recently picked as Best Dog in the Westminster dog show in the United States for the second year in a row. Oscar's human taps eagerly away at his I-phone and quickly finds Sadie.

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A friendly black dog in an unlikely place is usually a good sign for me, and I have seen very few dogs in the streets since my arrival in Kaunas, so the arrival of the Scottie in the coffee shop makes me feel the day will turn out well. 

I report this little incident to our workshop members soon after opening the circle. A woman from Latvia is amazed. "I think that's the dog in my dream last night." She recounts a dream that came after she set the intention of receiving guidance on her job situation during the night. In the first scene, she is in a boxy office, playing interviewer and interviewee for a job opening at the same time. A young woman comes in with a chunky black dog with a silver collar, looks around and announces that she doesn't want to work in a box. When she walks out with her Scottie, the dreamer feels longing to be with the dog. In a second scene, she finds herself playing a game for a prize she doesn't want. The young woman with the black dog reappears, heading off in a different direction altogether. Again, the dreamer feels longing to be with the black dog and go wherever it is going.
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"Since the black dog is always a reliable guide for me in my dreams," I say, "I would want to re-enter that dream and follow that black dog and see whether it brings me to the guidance I am seeking." The Latvian dreamer readily agreed to do this, and what followed - during a drumming session - was a marvelous journey that involved an ocean crossing, the release of a captive from a solitary island, and insight into both work and life situations.
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In one of the smaller groups we form for dream-sharing, I recount one of my own dreams from my nights in Kaunas:
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ACTIVATING THE ANCIENT ARTIFACT

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I study an ancient artifact. It stands against a wall on a stone pathway that leads towards the sea. It is of rather abstract design, with long curving elements. People here are intrigued and excited by it, but don't know what it means or what to do with it. I stand with the sculpture, leaning my body inside its structures (it's about my height). Then I push down, decisively, with my foot, inside the base, with rather the motion you might use on a motorbike. This has the effect of turning on the "ignition". The artifact is evidently a powerful machine. I decide it needs to be stabilized while we work out exactly how to use it. I prop a staff that branches into three short sections at the top inside the structure, a little like a trident, as an extra support.

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"So how did you feel when you woke up?" asks Jurga, a Lithianian high school senior. She is playing guide for our Lightning Dreamwork process.
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"Excited. Charged with energy."

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"What do you recognize from this dream in your life?"
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"Well, I think I am here in Lithuania. Some of the people with me may be from the workshop. I've been trying to study ancient Baltic symbols and traditions, and I've found that the sources are limited and the meaning of some ancient symbols is unknown or disputed by scholars. The staff with the three short branches at the top looks natural, like something taken from a tree."
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"Could the dream play out in the future in some way?"
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"I doubt that I'll find an artifact that is literally a machine. But I'm open to the idea that I could help to discover the meaning of a lost symbol and activate it in some way."
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"What do you want to know?"
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"I'd like to know what the dream is telling me about my intention, which was to receive guidance on leading this workshop."

"If it were my dream," Jurga comments, following our protocol flawlessly, "I would think that the structure I bring alive is this workshop group, where my job is to raise the energy of the group while keeping it stabilized and moving in the right direction."
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I told Jurga I thought this was spot on. My action plan? To be guided by this understanding in leading the workshop. Oh yes - and to remain open to finding a lost symbol. It transpired that in one of our group journeys, to a very interesting locale in the imaginal realm that I call the House of Time, I did just that. I found myself entering the life of a 19th century merchant and collector of antiquities who acquired a three-headed ancient "Curonian" figure as yet unknown to the scholars. But that is another story.