Wrong plane, right conversation

En route to the West Coast to lead a new training for teachers of Active Dreaming, my first flight is delayed. I run from one end of Chicago's vast O'Hare airport to the other in hopes of making my connection. When I get to the gate at the end of the C concourse, the doors have just closed and the gate agent refuses, politely but implacably, to reopen them.

"But we have another flight leaving in thirty minutes," he says. "You might be able to get on it."

"On United? How can that be?"

"The other flight has been delayed over three hours."

Worth a try. I run to the other end of the C concourse to find a crowd of restless, edgy passengers massed around the departure gate. According to the board, there are over a dozen passengers on standby.

I study the airline agents at the gate. I pick the middle guy, who has added a touch of color and sartorial flair to his uniform.

"You are a magician," I inform him. "I know it will be your pleasure to magic up a seat fro me on this flight that does not exist."

He receives this calmly. "At the moment, the flight is fully booked. But check back when boarding is complete."

Fifteen minutes later, I am left alone with a bunch of hopeful standby passengers. The door is closing. Then a boarding pass is slipped into my hand. I get the last seat on the plane, the one that wasn't previously available.

So now I am crammed into a middle seat at the back of the bus, but I'm cheeful because I have avoided arriving six hours late, via another city, on the alternative routing the airline had given me on my voicemail. A cheerful fellow on my left strikes up conversation. He's a salt-of-the-earth, American blue-collar guy. He's worked for 33 years for the same company, and they've been loyal and good to each other. He's sure of his pension five years from now. But he has a big life issue. How does a guy retire? He has friends who couldn't make the adjustment and died within six months of retirement.

"If it were my life," I tell him, "it would be a matter of putting together my strongest passions with the skill sets I've acquired."

He's not sure whether he can name his ruling passions. But an hour or so later, after we've discussed many aspects of his life, I am able to offer the following:

"Listening to you, I have heard about a guy who loves
- the water and scuba diving
- the perfect martini
- driving and travel
- being part of a large and affecionate family or community
- sharing and giving back
and who knows a lot about
- containing and putting out fires
- networking
- retraining to go into a different element."

I continue: "If you heard a list of passions and skills like this that applied to another person, what kind of work would you envision for him?"

He thinks about it. "Maybe running an old-style diner by the beach, in North Carolina?"

He says he'll think about it some more. He adds, "I feel more mobilized than I've felt in decades."

He asks me what I plan to do when I retire. My answer: "When you love your work and do it for its own sake, you never retire."

Pixel Pixies and Shelf Elves

Charles de Lint’s story “Pixel Pixies” in Tapping the Dream Tree (Tor) was inspired by a friend’s suggestion that spirits now live in the wires, even more than the trees, travel through the internet, take up residence in computers and “live on electricity and lord knows what else”.

In the story, a used bookstore owner finds her computer playing up. She can’t exit her browser, and can’t switch to another window – and can’t log off without losing important data she had been working on but has failed to save. When she tries switching to sites on the drop-down “Favorites” menus she is switched to totally unrelated sites. A striking fey woman comes in and suggests she should try turning her sweater inside out. What has she got to lose? The bookstore lady tries it, and the problem disappears. The fey lady says, “If you’re lucky, they’re still on the internet and didn’t follow you home.”

This sets us up for a wild, entertaining story in which mischievous, vandalizing pixies – who can appear either as tiny men or as dancing lights the size of “the mouth of a shot glass” – come spilling out of the computer screen. What is to be done? The fey lady – identified now as an “oak king’s daughter” – has the solution: the primal, pre-church version of Bell, Book and Candle. The ritual requires a book that has never been read – in this case, a book with uncut pages. The bookstore lady finds one in her locked cabinet of first editions. And it is:


The Trembling of the Veil by William Butler Yeats, number seventy-one of a thousand-copy edition privately printed by T. Werner Laurie, Ltd in 1922.

The uncut book is placed on the sidewalk and used to trap the pixies – who are finally driven back into the computer and flushed into cyberspace when the bookstore lady boots up.

Yeats observed (in the preface to a collection of fairy tales gathered by his friend Lady Gregory) that pixies and similar “wild creatures and green things” tend to “creep towards our light by little holes and crevices”. So why not the passage of a computer screen – or even an incoming email?

"Pixel Pixies" gave me delicious shivers when I first read it, because on that same night I had been writing about Yeats for my Dreamer's Book of the Dead and had decided to give the prologue to that book a title curiously similar to that of the uncut book in the story: "The Night When the Veil Thins." In my night study, I felt the workings of a shelf elf, more than that of pixel pixies.

Charles de Lint has gone on to write a larger-scale treatment of this theme in Spirits in the Wires, one of my favorites among his Newford novels, in which he has developed a Canadian mode of magical realism. But I am sure he has noticed that pixies keep up with human technology - when they are not ahead of it - so a title for today might be Spirits Go Wireless.

Ryan Hurd and the Archeology of Gratitude

Ryan Hurd has a charming and generous review of this blog at his Dream Studies website, an excellent clearing-house for information on the ever-expanding field of dream research. I am tickled by his description of my Active Dreaming adventures as "shamanic lucid dreams". We do indeed travel deep into realms of the shaman, and beyond "lucid dreaming" as it is understood in much of the literature, practicing shared and group dream travel, timefolding, shapeshifting and conscious exploration of the multiverse and the multidimensional self.

Ryan is, inter alia, an expert on the phenomenon of sleep paralysis, and offers practical guidance on how to deal with this problem as well as informed speculation about the factors the factors that may be involved - from poor sleep habits to psychic intrusion - in an excellent ebook, Sleep Paralysis, available from his site.

One psychologist describes sleep paralysis with vivid imagery as "bound lucidity." Its common name may be a misnomer, since it is a phenomenon associated with the hypnagogic zone and/or the waking state rather than with sleep. In terms of physiology, what happens is that a switch malfunctions inside us so that muscle groups that need to shut down during REM states (so we don't try to act out our dreams physically) stay shut down when we are awake and want to move our bodies. Some people find this quite terrifying ans see horrible apparitions menacing them. I experienced this in my teens, but only rarely in adult life - in a time of immense psychospiritual activity analogous to Jung's "confrontation with the unconscious."

I found the best recourse was to stay calm, remember that spiritual help and protection is always available when we ask, practice a little conscious breathing and try, very gently, to flutter an eyelid or move a toe or finger. Ryan offers similar practical counsel. My only issue with his approach is that he suggests that part of the fix is to adopt a regular sleep cycle, something I have never done and don't intend to do now.

Ryan reviewed this blog before I launched my new Dream Gates blog over at Beliefnet. My intention is to post very actively on both blogs on parallel tracks. On this blog, I'll post more reports of first-hand adventures in the multiverse, and stories, essays and poems of and from the Imaginal Realm. My Dream Gates blog has already taken shape as a fun teaching vehicle that will help to bring core techniques of Active Dreaming, inspirational and instructive stories from the lives of contemporary and historical dreamers, to a much broader audience, and so contribute to the rebirth of a dreaming society. It's time! I'll welcome active discussion on both blogs.

Floating dream image by hi_jme via the Dream Studies website.

In Gardens of Imagination at McGill

A conversation that started with my article about Henry Corbin, the great French scholar of l'imaginaire inspires me to post this account from my 2006 journal of a charming sequence that unfolded at McGill University in Montreal, when I accompanied my youngest daughter there on a college tour:

I have to skip part of the tour of McGill to fix a parking problem. When I come back, I find I have time to explore a small corner of the campus by myself. I decide to check out the Arts Building, and then the Leacock Building, where the anthropology department is housed on the seventh floor. I'm planning to go up, but the elevators aren't running and the atmosphere in the lobby is already oppressively warm and stuffy and fly-blown. I'm drawn outside, to a high breezy terrace and across it, towards a handsome church-like building. I am intrigued by a discreet sign that announces that this is the home of the Islamic Studies Library.

I stroll in. The man at the desk looks up out of china-blue eyes.

"My daughter's on a tour of McGill. I thought I'd just snoop around. Mind if I take a look?"

"Go right ahead. You may want to start with the Round Room. Left, then right. It's quite beautiful."

The library is deserted apart from a few staffers and a couple of researchers in cubicles. I walk between open stacks. Most of the titles are in Arabic or Farsi. The "Round Room" is, indeed, magical - a two-level room with books stacked on the mezzanine as well as the ground floor, with divans set in bay windows, and in the center an array of books on gardens - Arab gardens, Persian gardens, the garden as a metaphor for paradise in Islamic traditions - on a round table. Our word "paradise", I am reminded, is derived from the Old Persian pairidaeza, whose original meaning is "walled garden".

I stroll back, glancing at titles and categories, wondering where I might find the works of those princely explorers of the imagination, Suhrawardi and Ibn 'Arabi.

A man is just closing up his laptop, rising from a table where he has evidently been doing research.

"The Round Room is beautiful," I remark.

"Oh yes, it is. It's an Octagon, actually. The whole place used to be part of the Presbyterian College of Montreal."

"Do you teach here?"

"I've just finished my PhD."

"What is the theme of your dissertation?"

"Arab historiography."

"Ibn Khaldun?"

"You know Ibn Khaldun?"



I explain that when I was casting around for a theme for my postgraduate work in history at the Australian National University, a Pakistani research professor introduced me to Ibn Khaldun, and I spent long nights poring over the available translations of his Muqaddimah , or "Introduction", to world history. Writing in the 14th century, in the midst of constant war and turmoil, Ibn Khaldun brought modern principles of evidence to the grand ambition of writing a universal history. He regarded dreams and visions as essential to the making of history as climate and geography. He explained how knowledge of the future, the realm of angels, and the Divine purpose become available through dreams and visions, and how in true dreams the soul travels outside the body.

"I nearly made Ibn Khaldun the subject of my PhD dissertation," I tell my new acquaintance. "But life called me a different way."

The new Ph.D. introduces himself as Sami; he's from Lebanon. We are soon engaged in lively conversation.

I express my interest in Suhrawardi. Sami is astonished. He gropes for a phrase in English to describe the Persian philosopher of Light. I offer his Arabic title, Shaikh al-Ishraq. Sami's face is a mixture of delight and incredulity.

For the next half-hour, postponing his appointment outside the library, he makes himself my guide, introducing me to the Acting Librarian, an Armenian woman from Iraq, and the stacks. I leaf through French editions of Henry Corbin, including his translations of Suhrawardi.

It only occurs to me later that this library is a very special one, supposedly closed to all but accredited scholars, and that its custodians are likely to be especially careful about letting strangers wander around under today's jittery circumstances.

The incident seemed like a fresh call to follow the roads to the Imaginal Realm, and to soul remembering, that opened in my encounters with the Princes of the East, and led to me writing sections on Suhrawardi, Ibn 'Arabi and Ibn Khaldun in my Secret History of Dreaming.

The books on gardens on display in the Round Room came to mind that evening, when I led a dream workshop in which a woman shared a dream of a numinous meeting under a tree in a magical garden. This inspired me to lead a group journey, an exercise in shamanic lucid dreaming, in which the agreed assignment was for all participants to travel to a garden of the imagination and locate their special tree.

"Glimpse of Paradise", ceramic tile, by Armenian artist Marie Balian.

Who is doing the dreaming?

A practical psychology of dream experience needs to raise the question: which part of the dreamer is doing the dreaming? The psychic Edgar Cayce suggested distinguishing dreams that reflect the needs or wishes of the body, the mind and the spirit. But the issue involves more than needs and wishes. In dreaming, we get out there. The question is: who is the dream traveler?

In keeping with my recent theme of Eastern approaches to the Imaginal Realm, I want to note that the great Persian Sufi philosopher, Suhrawardi, offers a very clear experiential psychology of dream travel. He distinguished different levels of dreaming – with corresponding degrees of importance and reliability – according to which aspect of self is the traveler.

(1) Clear dreams or “free revelation” [kashf] are experiences of soul [ruh] traveling beyond the body, or having clear communication with a visitor. The territory visited may be a separate reality or a situation in the future. “With the eye of the free soul, by the imagination, a person contemplates in dreams the state of things which is yet in the hidden.” In this condition, the dreamer can have accurate foreknowledge of future events, and true clairvoyance. “After separation from the body, the soul knows even of the small things heard and seen of this world.”

In clear dreams, the dreamer becomes a remote viewer. This is a practice that can be developed in waking states of altered consciousness, or mukashafa. The Prophet Muhammad scouted out the progress of a caravan en route to Mecca in this way. The Caliph Umar, from afar, scouted an ambush that had been laid for his general Sariya (and sent his general a telepathic warning that was received).

(2) Symbolic dreams or “fancied revelations” are dreams in which the lower self [nafs] is dominant. Clear vision is cloaked by the “fancy garments” of appetite and desire. Landscapes traveled in such dreams are “the stages of lust.” Interpretation is required to separate a message from the fancy dress.

(3)“Pure fancy” is when “sensual thoughts” take over completely and higher consciousness [ruh] is “veiled from considering the hidden world.”

Source: H. Wilberforce Clarke (trans.) A Dervish Textbook - Kashani's Recension of Suhrawardi's Gifts : from the 'Awarifu-l-Ma'arif (London: Octagon Books, 1980).

Night poems

I

You see a flash of blue in the air at midnight,
that blue, the blue of a kingfisher's wings,
and you take flight from the seen to the unseen.
Poor strategy: the unseen is my home.
You hide from me where I live.















II

When you thought the fire was out
flame leaps from the heart of the wood
so strong you're surprised it is safely contained
in what you expected to be a cold hearth.
There is no smoke detector to warn you
if it were burning out of control.
Know this: tended or untended, the fire lives.
It will consume you. As fire lives in wood
I live in you.

A night with the Princes of the East

The Assignment

An old friend has asked me to lunch with a pair of foreigners, a man and a woman who are Persian or Near Eastern. We go to a restaurant where he disappears to converse with staff in the background. I join the foreign couple at a table. We seem to be the only patrons in the restaurant, which is either windowless or has the windows heavily draped. the decor is expensive but anonymous, generic hotel or airport lounge style.
     The first phase of the conversation is guarded and superficial. I decide I'm ready to go, having discharged my personal obligation.
     My friend approaches me, highly agitated, as I prepare to leave. He gestures at a set of handwritten notes and a typed memo that he slipped to me earlier but I haven't bothered to read. These papers, especially the handwritten notes, make it plain that the people I am lunching with are top priority. It is vitally important for me to pursue the conversation and draw them out, so that their words can be captured on tape. I have been picked to pursue this opportunity because the couple trust me.
     I yield, lingering at the table to drain glass after glass of cheap armagnac. The man matches me, glass for glass, with cognac. The mood is increasingly jolly and intimate. I can only guess at the size of the bill for all these drinks, but I plan to present the bill to my friend. The waiter, an oily Levantine type, seems to be in on the plot. He refers to us as "Excellencies" and "Your Highnesses." It seems the "assignment" will be completed by the end of our session, which looks likely to continue for the rest of the afternoon.
     I woke from this dream in a pool of moonlight, lying on a bed in a cabin in the Hero Islands on Lake Champlain. I was excited and intensely curious, wanting to know much more about the message I was supposed to record. I needed to go back into the dream, and made it my intention tod do this, lying on my back on the bed. I kept a pad and paper close to my hand. ff I succeeded in resuming my conversation with the mysterious strangers, I was determined not to forget my assignment to record the proceedings.

The Prince and Princess of Fars

I focus on the restaurant as my portal for dream reentry.. The name of the restaurant is "The Golden Cage" or "The Golden Bowl". I confirm that the restaurant, though spacious, is tightly sealed - no views of the outside.

     I try to examine the papers my friend gave me. I find there are three documents, in a large manila envelope: handwritten notes, on several smallish pieces of high-quality bond; a typed memo; and a clipping from a newspaper. The newspaper is the Tehran Times. The headline describes a visit by "The Prince and Princess of Fars."

     I need to talk to them.

     The man shows himself. He is pleasant-looking, clean-shaven, with an oval face, black hair combed straight with the slightest suggestion of sideburns, large dark brown eyes, immaculately dressed. The woman's features, by contrast, are indistinct. She is veiled, not in Islamic style but in "High Priestess" mode of the Tarot trump.

     The man is the Shams of my previous encounter. He is wearing a beautiful grey-blue shirt with a narrow white banded collar under his tailored suit. He says I may know the veiled princess as Fatima. He urges me to study the typed sheet my friend gave me. I review the paper, and find it contains a list of 20 questions. The first questions give me shivers:

1. What is the nature of exile?
2. What are the conditions for the return?

As I record the questions on my pad, Shams, gives me his responses, for the record:

1. What is the nature of Exile?

To be an exile is to be separated unwillingly from your homeland. This is the condition of the soul when it comes into the body. It is the condition of the higher man when he is separated from his Higher Self.

2. What are the conditions for Return?

The return requires courage, the willingness to deny the ways of the world. It is always a journey to the Mountain. It requires cutting the cord of attachment to worldly things.
There are many tests and obstacles along the way, also distractions and temptations. But Home reaches out to guide the returning exile. There is always a guide. The appearances of the guide are almost always unexpected. The face may be that of a familiar friend, or a stranger.

3. What is the Source?

The Source is the bottomless well of remembering. You may see it as a passage or a bore-hole, leading to inexhaustible reserves. Do not confuse the bore-hole with what lies beyond it. From a certain viewpoint, the bore-hole is also the birth canal. You may learn to swim back, into the Water of life, into the womb of the Ancient Mother.

4. Who is the Guide?

The guide is the emissary of the level of Intelligence - the level of the Real - that you are able to work with at this time. The guide takes the form you are ready to recognize.

5. What is the Kingdom?

The kingdom is this world. But a true crown is earned only through the blessing of the Other World. the true crown is Xvarnah.

6. Is there eternal conflict between good and evil?

There are competing forces in the cosmos. Humans interact with the battles and struggles of races beyond the human. The conflicts of this world are related to those of subtler kingdoms.
In dealing with problems of good and evil, humans must know that
- In the universe, humans interact and have intercourse with beings other-than-human that are friendly, neutral, hostile or inimical to men.
- Demons are real, often generated by human thought and emotion. The Sphere of the Moon is the principal center of demonic interaction and interference with humans.
- There are "criminal souls".
- The principle of "active evil" is also a real phenomenon.
- In the world of duality, it is necessary to take sides (witness 1939). Embodied beings, in a world of duality, cannot evade this choice.

7. What is the work of the Invisible Schools?

You are born (which is to say, re-born) within a spiritual tradition or lineage. You are called in dreams and visionary states to resume contact with teachers of your Order. You may be invited to attend other schools but you are born with one primary connection.


8. What are the conditions for soul travel?

The keys to the practice are in meditation, concentration, the presence of the guide, courage for the journey. Also a trustworthy map and a password. Above all, the traveler's robe.
It is not only a matter of leaving the physical body, but of putting on the heavenly body.
This has to be earned, to be grown (or rather, re-grown).
     The celestial body, the true Body of Light, is required for the high experience of soul travel.

I broke contact for a moment to tiptoe into the bathroom. When I returned, I was given some personal information, and was then able to return to the questions. The ninth question involved the nature of the soul. We got through 13 of the 20 questions, but the quality of my reception began to waver, and we agreed to reserve the completion of the dialogue for another time. I dated my journal report as I always do. August 1, 1998.
     I pulled on shirt and shorts and walked down to the lake. In the twilight before dawn, I lay out on the floating dock and watched the changing light on the lake. A silver streak near the horizon gradually increased in size. A rosy blush spread over it, cloudlike against the silver, until the water looked more like the sky than the sky itself. A field of bright, clear blue, shaped like an elongated triangle, emerged within the rosy "clouds". I seemed to be looking into a lake in the sky, into an Otherworld landscape. Fish broke the surface. The black silhouettes of nightbirds and early fishers glided above the lake, to plunge after fish. I saw a kingfisher, mighty in head and chest, take possession of the far shore.

The river in the Imaginal Realm is from a manuscript in the Turkish Museum in Istanbul, an anthology of Persian poets published in Shiraz in 1398. It is reproduced in Henry Corbin's Spiritual Body & Celestial Earth