Soul leaves when you refuse to follow dreams

Soul goes away when we refuse its wishes and assignments. Somewhere between here and Elfland, Lord Dunsany, the Anglo-Irish master of fantasy, came by an unhappy body engaged in a painful dialogue with its soul. “The Unhappy Body” (his title for the tale) is tired; all it wants is to sleep. The soul will not allow it to rest because it has an urgent assignment for this body. Everywhere, the soul explains,

People’s dreams are wandering afield, they pass the seas and mountains of faery, threading the intricate passes led by their souls; they come to golden temples a-ring with a thousand bells; they pass up steep streets lit by paper lanterns, where the doors are green and small; they know their way to witches’ chambers and castles of enchantment; they know the spell that brings them to the causeway along the ivory mountains – on one side looking downward they behold the fields of their youth and on the other lie the radiant plains of the future.

But people forget their dreams. From their dream awakenings, they go back to sleep, forgetting the realms of magic and enchantment, and the causeway from which they can see into past and future. The soul’s urgent assignment for the body is: “Arise and write down what the people dream.”
    The body asks what reward it will receive for doing this. When told there is no reward, the body declares, “Then I shall sleep.” But the soul rouses the body with a song, and wearily the body takes up a pen and starts recording what the soul wants it to preserve: a vision of dreamers rising above the roar and distraction of the city to a shimmering mountain where they board the “galleons of dreams” and sail through the skies in their chosen directions. The soul goes on telling the dreams of all these travelers. But the body is tired and mutinous; it cries out for sleep.
    “You shall have centuries of sleep,” the soul tells it, “but you must not sleep, for I have seen deep meadows with purple flowers flaming tall and strange above the brilliant grass, and herds of pure while unicorns…I will sing that song to you, and you shall write it down.”
     The body protests, Give me one night’s rest.
     Go on and rest, the soul at last responds, in disgust. “I am tired of you. I am off.”
     The soul flies away. The undertakers come and lay the body in the earth. The wraiths of the dead come at midnight to congratulate the body on its happy estate. “Now I can rest,” says the body.

 Soul loss has many causes. The world seems too cold and cruel, and part of us goes away. In cases of profound trauma, this may be a survival mechanism. Soul leaves because we are compelled to make a wrenching life choice. While we take or leave a certain road, or a certain partner, in our default reality, another part of us rejects that choice and travels on a different road, or lingers at the place where we parted company. We grieve the death of a beloved person, and part of us follows that loved one, even into lands of the dead.
    Dunsany reminds us that we can lose soul because we refuse to take on the assignments that nourish and entertain our creative spirit. Soul leaves when we won't follow dreams. This is no fantasy, but a truth we need to recognize and act upon, for a reason stated with wonderful clarity by Mary Oliver in an essay titled "Of Power and Time": "The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time."

Adapted from Dreaming the Soul Back Home by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

"The Unhappy Body" is in A Dreamer's Tales by Lord Dunsany.
"Of Power and Time" is in Mary Oliver's recent book, Upstream.

Art: John William Waterhouse, "Day Dreams"

  

Dream reentry in the Mabinogion

Reading the great cycle of Welsh epics known as the Mabinogion with the eye of a dreamer, we can discern an ancient account from the British Isles of the technique I call dream reentry – going back inside a dream in a conscious journey.

    What follows is a simple retelling of the central part of a wonder story from the Mabinogion called "The Dream of Macsen Wledig". King Macsen is the Emperor of Rome, and the dream woman who becomes his queen is Elen of Britain, perhaps even the goddess known as Elen of the Ways.

The King Who Dreams, and Reenters His Dream

A great king is out hunting with his men when he is overcome by the sudden urge to nap, under the heat of the sun. His men make a tent for him with their shields, set up on spears, on the slope beside the river, and once the king is away, floating rather than riding towards a mountain upstream that seems to touch the sky.

     Beyond the mountain, he comes to a great plain, and beyond this a great harbor where he crosses a bridge made of ivory to board a ship that speeds him to a beautiful island in a Western sea. He surveys the whole land, and enters a castle where he finds two handsome young men playing a board game that is something like chess but has different moves and much greater stakes. Beyond them, a white-haired man with the air of majesty is enthroned in a chair with two eagles, fashioning new pieces for the game.
    In front of the royal game-maker is a woman who shines like the sun, lovely in her flowing white garment and red-gold clasps and armlets and necklaces, flashing with jewels. She rises to greet the traveler, and they are joined in an  embrace that claims the king's heart. They fit together, as one, on her throne.

     When the noise of the world pulls him out of his dream, the king's vital energy stays there. His soul has been claimed. He wants only to go back inside his dream and live with his beloved. His followers become troubled when he no longer joins their pleasures or speaks in their councils. When they confront him, warning him it is being said that the king is no longer fit to rule, the king tells his dream.
      The wise ones of the kingdom confer. They advise him to send his men out to search the world, for three full years, to find the woman of his dream. Perhaps the hope that she can be found will enable the king to keep enough of himself in the body to perform his duties. Nobody questions that the dream woman exists. She is somewhere, because the king finds her there whenever he dreams.

      The searchers go out, and they fail in their mission. Now the advisers have a better idea. They will send scouts to the place where the king first dreamed of the woman who holds his heart. Starting from here, the scouts will try to identify landmarks from the dream that will guide them to the lady who shines like the sun.
      The king agrees to the plan and appoints thirteen men to be seekers in his cause. They are successful. Following the leads from the dream, from the place where the king entered it, the scouts find the mountain that touches the sky, and the ivory bridge to the ship that goes to the Western island, and the castle where young men play a game while a kingly man makes new pieces....and the woman who shines like the sun.
     But she is not impressed by the king's delegates, for all their show of rank and power. She will not go with them. If their king wants her, he most come and pay court to her himself.

      So the king takes the road of his dreams, and finds the lady sitting with her royal father as he makes pieces for the game that is no ordinary game. The golden-haired woman leaps into his embrace. They make love that night, and are married, and the king shares his power and his possessions with her as she directs. Just as she gave the king a road to her in his dreams, it is now the pleasure of this Lady of the Ways to make roads across the land.

-

Scholars discuss the history that has been shapeshifted in this tale, and mostly agree that a Spanish general in the armies of Rome - one Magnus Maximus - most closely resembles Macsen, although there are huge differences between their careers. We should bear in mind (as the great French schola Maie-Louise Sjoestedt reminded us in Gods and Heroes of the Celts) that while some cultures view myths historically, the Celts tend to view history mythologically.

     If we will only go deep enough into this story,  we may discover, like the king, the way to bring soul back into the body and marry the worlds. The map is inside the dream. The road brings love and healing and power in the physical world, but it must be followed through two worlds.

     When the trackers, and then the king himself, go back to the place of the dream, they also practice dream reentry. The mountain as high as the sky is no worldly mountain; the bridge of ivory is no ordinary gangway. The most important part of the journey to the beloved of the soul - who is also a goddess of the land, and in this version the Sovereignty of Britain - is a dream journey.

Art: "The Dream Maiden Visits Angus" by Ernest Charles Wallcousins (1883-1976)

Colors that call souls

“Notice the colors that call souls,”

the poet says to me in the space of a dream.
I see the green of fresh shoots and
the purple of royalty and young grapes.
Because we are in a Celtic mood
I am thinking there must be three.
I see a triad of colors of a ripened field,
of corn and wheat and orange poppies.
The colors have substance but I cannot say
whether they are garments or vessels.
I know they clothe spirits and lead them
though memory and desire into soul-houses.

- January 9, 2017, from a morning dream

Art: "Yeats in the Magic Cottage" by Robert Moss

Note: I cannot say that the file, the poet seer of my new dream, is Yeats, my companion in dreaming and mutual visioning over many years, but I recall now that Yeats made many experiments with flashing colors according to the Golden Dawn system. I rose with his glorious poem of soul and its transfigurations - "The Song of Wandering Aengus" - streaming in my mind like a salmon run. The body, in the Carmina Gadelica, is the coich anama, or "soul-shrine". 

The Office of Lost and Found Dreams

What happens to the dreams we don't remember?
    I've asked myself that question on mornings when I've awoken with little or no dream recall, while feeling that the night had been active.
    One such morning, I decided to linger in bed and see whether I could find a place where I could recover lost dreams. I found myself approaching an old-time cinema, that reminded me of a movie theater where I used to go, as a boy, to watch Saturday matinees. I was amazed and delighted to find that, this time, the movie titles on the marquee and the images on the posters in the lobby all throbbed with significance in my present life.
 
Waking the Sleeping King was blazoned in lights.

One of the posters showed a boy riding a monster of the deep through a stormy ocean. Another depicted a steamy romance.
    The girl at the ticket kiosk smiled and gestured for me to go through. Soon I was settled in a comfy padded velvet seat in a private screening room. As dream images filled the screen, I realized I had a choice. I could remain a comfortable observer, or I could enter the fray.
    On another morning, after coffee, I decided to try the same method again. This time, instead of going back to the movie house, I found myself drawn to the kind of video store that is almost defunct, thanks to our new instant delivery systems. This video store was vast, with its products arranged on many levels, On the first floor, dreams were arranged like DVDs on shelves, according to familiar categories - Drama, Comedy, Family, and so on, There was a large Adult section most of whose content was quite unfamiliar to me. I realized that a block had been placed on some of this material, so that it did not reach my conscious mind, or - in cases where the film had been rated I (for Intrusion) was not allowed through during the night.
    I discovered sections devoted to my dreams of individual people. I had only to focus on a name or title, and the movie began to play all around me, so I could enter it at will. 
    On a lower level of the dream video store, I discovered that I could explore dream adventures I may have shared with other people, but had not remembered. I found an immense archive of shared dreams involving each of these people. One was as large as a Gothic cathedral, with shelves rising to the high roof many stories above. I watched several dream movies in each location. They took me deeply and vividly into scenes of other lives and other times - of leopard people in Africa, of Celtic voyagers in a coracle on a cold northern sea, of a turning castle in a high desert landscape where everything is the color of sand except for the pretty star-shaped flowers, blue and purple, on a terrace. The dream movies revealed a hidden order of connection in all these relationships, transcending our present lives.
    On yet another day, when I felt impelled to go searching for lost dreams, I was drawn to a building like an old-fashioned post office. It resembled the post office in a rust-belt city where I once lived. When I arrived in front of it, in my conscious dream, the sky turned dark. I mounted the high steps, and walked past the mail boxes towards the counters. Most of the steel shutters were down and locked for the night, but one was still half-open. Behind it, I saw letters spilling from pigeon holes and heaps of giant mail bags and packages. A little black women in  a blue uniform hurried to the desk and handed me a letter. I was moved to tears when I opened it and found a message from a beloved family member, long deceased.
   When I turned to thank the postal clerk, I realized that I knew her. I had glimpsed her, in half-forgotten dreams, slipping mail through a letter drop in the door of my house, a letter drop that is not in the physical door. She strongly resembles a figure from history I was called to study by dreams I did remember - Harriet Tubman, a world-class dreamer who used her visions as maps to guide escaping slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad before the American Civil War.
   I suspect there are back rooms in my dream post office where there is more to discover. Maybe one of them is like the Cabinet Noir in the old French post offices, where mail judged suspect by the authorities was held for inspection, and often never delivered to the addressee.
    All of which leads to this suggestion: if you are missing your dreams (and your dreams are missing you) try taking a little quiet time, when you won't be disturbed, and announce this as your intention:

I would like to go to a place where I can find my lost dreams

Maybe this will take you to a movie theater, a video store, or a post office, or another place entirely, constructed from your own life memories and suited to your imagination. In whatever form it appears, you will be entering the Office of Lost and Found Dreams.

If you are very lucky, you might find yourself sharing a date with a companion - a beautiful dreamer who belongs to you but may have been missing from your life for a while. The Iroquois say that if we have lost our dreams, it is because we have lost a vital part of our soul that is the dreamer. So dream recovery can also be soul recovery.

Healed in the grip of She Bear

A she-bear is among us. I volunteer to deal with her. She is enormous, maybe six hundred pounds. Light in color, lighter than honey-brown. She grips my head in the crook of her arm, and holds it against her, close to her face. We spend four days in this intimate embrace. It is not uncomfortable, but I am aware that at any moment she could break my neck.

   At the end of four days, the people who were with me at the outset gather around us again. One is a woman scientist or zoologist. They now have the means to release me.
    But the she-bear lets me go without a struggle, confident of our relationship. She shambles away into a space that had been prepared for her, in a room off the corridor of an institutional building, a university or teaching hospital facility.

   When I start talking about her, she returns to look at me.
    I stare into her beautiful eyes. 

    “You are Artemis,” I tell her. “I am Osiris.”

Feelings: I had been suffering persistent wooziness and blurred vision before the dream. These symptoms were now gone. I felt physically restored, confident about things, open to adventure.

Reality: I have come to know the Bear as the great medicine animal of North America, where I live. I knew that warriors in the Europe of my ancestors called on the power of the Bear as a fierce protector. I know that Osiris is the model of one who rises from death, under the wings of a goddess.
   For the connection between Artemis and the Bear, I turned to my personal library, and immediately found this, in the Jane Ellen Harrison's classic work Themis: A Study of the Origins of Greek Religion: "The well-born, well-bred little Athenian girls who danced as Bears to Artemis of Brauronia, the Bear-Goddess, could not but think reverently of the great might of the Bear.”

   Harrison added the important general insight that "the mystery gods…are never free of totemistic hauntings, never quite shed their plant and animal shapes. That lies in the very nature of their sacramental worship. They are still alive with the life-blood of all living things from which they sprang."

Comment: In my current state of hibernation (the literal meaning is simply "passing the winter") I am deep in old journals. The report above comes from my journal for April 1999. As I read the journal entry again, the memory of healing streams through me, sweet and bright as mountain honey.
Bear has come to me again and again, over many years, to offer healing for me and for others. Great Mother Bear has come to offer soul recovery healing for many who come to my workshops. I have seen it again and again: Within the supportive energy of a circle of active dreamers, you journey with the drum to find a missing part of yourself, perhaps that magical child who took leave of this world because it seemed too cold and too cruel, and has been living all these years in a Land of Lost Girls or Lost Boys. You find that child, but she won't come to live fully in your body and your present life unless you can convince her you are safe and you are fun. That's not so easy. But when you take her in your arms, and hold her, Great Mother Bear comes and wraps her great arms around both of you, holding you gently but firmly together until you are one.

Drawings by Robert Moss

Rescuing Turtle, Releasing the Artist Within

More than ever, my dreams are driving me to draw and paint in watercolors in my journal. I dreamed that my little dog rushed ahead of me at what I first thought was a pigeon that had picked up a paper plate. When I got closer, I saw that the "pigeon" was actually a tiny turtle. It managed to jump up on my left arm, near the shoulder, and held on tight.
    I began to leave the dream but thought No, I must make sure the little turtle is safe. Fully lucid, I walked, with the tiny turtle on my shoulder and my dog held on a short leash, until I saw a pleasant garden, with a pond and some statues, behind an ornamental iron fence, I opened the gate, tied my dog up, and walked down steps towards the pond. I saw a safe spot on the grass to release the turtle from my shoulder.
    No sooner had I done this than the waters spurted and roared. A huge being exploded from the waters and loomed over me. I realized this was a giant snapping turtle, maybe a distant cousin of the one I rescued. Though huge and fearsome, the intent of the giant turtle was wholly benign. I was instantly reminded of the role of the snapping turtle in the cosmology of the Iroquois, the Native American tradition I know best. A'nonwara, Turtle, lends its back for the Woman Who Fell From the Sky to dance an new Earth into being. And Great Turtle is also the teacher of the Deep.
    In my conscious dream, Great Turtle invited me to go to the depths of the waters to recollect essential things. I did this, and I feel blessed.
    My first action to honor the dream was to make this picture. Our dreams call us to release the artist, as well as the writer, within.

Drawing of Great Turtle from Robert Moss journal January 3, 2017.

Soul tree

We can’t lose our way if we go to the root of things, to the roots of a tree. By finding the right tree — a tree you know that also knows you — you can reconnect with the soul of nature. You can find grounding for soul in this world, and a shaman’s ladder to travel between the worlds.

     At the start of most of my depth workshops, I lead a standing meditation, in which each person in the circle finds the image of a special tree and then lets the body take the form of that tree, rooted in earth, rising between earth and sky, feeding on sun fire. We let our bodies sway as we stand, as a tree will sway in a strong wind, giving a little in order not to be snapped.
      We see the seasons changing around us. We feel what it’s like to have a squirrel run up our trunk or to have birds nesting in our hair. As the meditation deepens, we feel ourselves reaching deep into the earth, through the root system, going deep and spreading wide. We feel, with our inner senses, how we can travel this way to connect with the animal powers, and with ancestral spirits, and to receive healing and blessing in the realm of the Great Earth Mother.

     Then we let our awareness ascend to the high branches. We picture ourselves perched up there like a bird, or a happy child in a tree house, able to look out in all directions from this excellent place of vision. We imagine that we can fly now to a person or place at a distance and look in on them, and sometimes, quick as thought, we are there.
     We discover that, from our place in the high branches, we can not only see across any distance in space, but we can also scout across time and travel into the possible future to see what lies on the roads ahead for ourselves and others. This is something that tree-seers have always been good at.

     Now we go higher, into the world of the tree. We feel ourselves rise up into the canopy, up to the green crown, and then feel ourselves rising up higher and higher until the sky opens and we are in the first of the many levels of the Upper World. We are on our way now to make or renew our connections with our authentic spiritual teachers. They may take many forms and may be using “contact pictures” adjusted to our level of understanding.
    Beyond all the other forms of the guide on these levels, there is one that will never fail us and that is always waiting for us to resume contact: the soul of the soul (as the Sufis say beautifully), the captain of the heart, the Higher, or Greater, Self.

    Your soul tree can be your portal to all these realms of adventure, discovery and connection.

Text adapted from Dreaming the Soul Back Home by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Drawing from Robert Moss journal