Talk to the dead: they are alive and available

Many of us yearn for contact with departed loved ones. We miss them; we ache for forgiveness or closure; we yearn for confirmation that there is life beyond physical death. This is one of the main reasons why people go to psychic readers.

      Here’s an open secret: we don’t need a go-between to talk to the deceased. We can have direct communication with our departed, in timely and helpful ways, especially if we are willing to pay attention to our dreams and learn the arts of active and conscious dreaming.

Sometimes we sense the presence of a deceased person we have loved. Sometimes this is accompanied by physical signs, little anomalies that suggest that something is moving through the veil of our routine perception and our consensual reality. Full-fledged visitations often take place in the spacious reality of dreams and liminal states of consciousness, quite often in the hypnagogic zone.
     In whatever ways they can find to get through to us, our departed come to visit for all sorts of reasons. They come to offer us guidance or assurance of life beyond death; sometimes they need help from us because they are lost or confused, or need forgiveness and closure. Encounters with the deceased are generally our best way of gaining  first-hand knowledge of what happens after physical death.

     One of the cruelest things that mainstream Western culture has done is to suggest that communication with the departed is either impossible or unnatural.  There is nothing spooky or “supernatural” involved, though these experiences take us into realms beyond physical reality.

     The easiest way for the departed to communicate with the living is through dreams -though sometimes the departed, as well as the living, fail to realize this. In the movie The Sixth Sense a psychically gifted young boy can see and speak with the departed. He plays counselor to a man who has died, is initially confused about his situation, and then dismayed that he cannot talk to his wife. The boy instructs the dead man, "Speak to her in her dreams, only then will she hear you". As the film suggests, sometimes the living are required to play guides for the deceased.

     In most dreams, the departed appear to be living, and very often the dreamer is unaware that the person he or she encounters is “dead” until after waking. The reason is that the departed are indeed alive, though no longer in the physical realm.

     The deceased may appear as the dreamer remembers them from their last days of physical life, especially in the first dream encounters. But over time, it is quite common for the departed to alter their appearance, to shrug off signs of age and bodily ailments, and to present themselves as healthy and attractive. People who died in later years frequently reappear looking around 30 years old.

      After my father’s death in 1987, he appeared repeatedly in my dreams to offer counsel to the family, bringing specific and practical information to which I did not have access in waking life. For example, he gave me the name of the realtor on the other side of the Pacific – someone otherwise unknown to me – who moved with great speed and humanity (once we contacted him because of the dream) to help my mother sell her home and resettle in a community where she spent some of the happiest years of her life. My father also made a happy dream visit to one of my daughters, who bitterly regretted never having known him in physical life; he showed himself as a handsome horseman, about 30 years old, and took her riding.
      Through many dream encounters with my father, I was vividly reminded that a departed loved one can truly play “family angel”. After he made certain life choices on the Other Side - which he explained to me - he was no longer available in the way he had been for several years after his death. However, he surprised me by dropping in last year to give me an important personal health advisory on which I took immediate action.

     After his death, my favorite professor from my undergraduate days in Australia began to appear in my dreams as a different kind of history teacher, instructing me that each of us belongs to a family of personalities in different times and dimensions whose dramas are being played out now.

     From my early childhood, when I gained first-hand knowledge of the other side when I died and came back (in what are now described as near-death experiences) I have had had frequent contact with people who are living on the other side.I have worked with thousands of dreams and other experiences of encounters with the departed that have been shared with me by others. While the deceased person in some of these dreams may be an aspect of the dreamer’s own personality or genetic inheritance – or a mask for a messenger from the deeper Self – the great majority of these dreams involve transpersonal encounters.

     When you become an active dreamer, able to shift consciousness and travel to other realities at will, you'll know that you don't have to go to sleep in order to dream. You can make conscious journeys to the Other Side for timely and helpful communication with the departed, learning about their current environments and transitions. You can invite a loved one to have chat with you over tea or a glass of wine. You can entertain friendly spirits in the liminal space of sleep and awake, and will want to learn the arts of discernment and psychic screening to make sure that you don't invite any unwanted guests.
     Let's notice that among your friends on the Other Side are beloved animals who shared your life and can prove to be impeccable allies. 

Further Reading

Chapter 7, "Dreaming with the Departed", in my book Conscious Dreaming.

Part III, "A Little Manual for the Psychopomp" in Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and Life Beyond Death

The Dreamer's Book of the Dead

Photo: A boy psychic guides a dead man played by Bruce Willis in the movie "The Sixth Sense".

The gods love to travel in disguise

The Greeks say the gods love to travel in disguise. In Greek folk tradition, it’s good policy to be nice to strangers, and to pay attention to what they say, because you never know what is traveling behind their masks.

On a visit to England, I landed at Heathrow airport on a redeye flight, exhausted and burdened with financial worries. I was carrying too much baggage, and had to wrestle an oversize suitcase down the steps to the Underground.

As I collapsed onto a seat on the train, a roly-poly man, bearded like Santa Claus, winked at me from the seat opposite. He said with a broad grin, “The Buddha says – Walk on the bridge, don’t build on it.”

The words slapped me in the face. They stung me awake. They were exactly what I needed to hear. Caught up in my immediate worries, stressed out and overtired, I had been forgetting one of the secrets of living the Incredible Journey:  it’s the journey, not the destination, that counts. 

The stranger on the London Tube was an example of how we play everyday angels – even gods in disguise -for each other. The Buddha-quoting Santa figure reminds me that there is a provocative Buddhist text on this theme. In the version translated by Thomas Cleary, it is titled Entry into the Realm of Reality. It describes how authentic spiritual teachers – even the greatest who walk this earth – can appear in any guise, as an exotic dancer or as a monk, as a panhandler or a king, as a scholar or a warrior.

We are most likely to run into them when we are in motion, especially when we are crossing a border into unfamiliar territory, when strong emotions are in play, and when we are facing the greatest challenges. 

Text adapted from The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence and Imagination by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Picture: from London Transport Museum

Firmness of rock

I hold memory from before your time
I contain a space you can enter
where you may find a universe as big
as the one you think is the real world.
I’m not easy to break or wear down.

Take lessons in constancy from me,
claim the power to stand your ground
but allow for the patient counsel of water.
When I stand in your way, go around
or be ready to wait eons to wear me down.

Go back to the pool in a temple of healing
where a god-man told a cripple to get up
and pick up more than his bedding.
To rise from the dead, you must pick up
the biggest stone in what you take for a world.

Do you begin to see what I am?
All of this, and more: your challenge,
your burden, your duration, your remembering.

The cry of the trees

The cry of the trees, at the very end of a training I led deep in the woods in the Pacific Northwest, was the only disturbing episode during that grand adventure. All that week, we had delighted in a world of green – frilly greens of the cedars, mossy greens hanging from high trunks and draping stumps and nurse logs, bottle-green shadows of the deep woods, juicy greens of berry bushes and young vines, splashy brown-greens of the beaver swamp.

    -On our last morning, preparing for an exercise in community visioning, I asked the members of our circle to join hands and imagine that we were creating a Dream Tree with our joined energies.

“Let your awareness go down to the souls of your feet. You feel yourself standing with the Earth. You are reaching down now, through the souls of your feet.
     "You are reaching deep into the Earth, going deep and spreading wide, as the roots of a tree go deep and spread wide. You feel your energy filaments touching and clasping the energy roots of all of us in this circle.
      "We are coming together, forming a root ball deep within the Earth. As you breath in, feel the Earth energy rising up to form the trunk of our Dream Tree – our One Tree, soaring towards the sky, spreading its canopy to catch the light.
       "Now we are feeding on sunfire…”

-In this way, we wove our energies together in a Dream Tree that we intended to use as a base for visioning, from which we could scout in different directions to fulfill a common agenda: to find new ways to bring dreaming into our environments and communities all over the map.
    I suggested that during the drumming, we would all find our way to an observation deck or tree house high in the upper branches of the Dream Tree. We could look out from there to see what we needed to see, and zoom in on things we needed to study closely, or take flight like birds to visit places many looks away.

-   When I started the drumming, the energy form of the One Tree emerged vividly. I could feel it, see it, smell it. It was unlike any previous tree of vision I have used. It was an immense elder of the rainforest, as wide and tall as a skyscraper. Its lower trunk was alive with creeping and slithering things, including thousands of snakes, hard to tell apart from the creepers and strangler vines until they darted out.

-    I moved gingerly to a shelf high above where a giant white heron was perched, looking out over vast distances. I was shot out from there, to meet one elder tree after another - a great Douglas fir, an ancient oak, a mighty poplar, a wide banyan rooting itself again and again from its branches.
    They showed me scenes of pain and destruction in the landscapes they inhabit. I was made to watch clear-cutting in the evergreen forests of the Pacific Northwest, and to be present during brutal deforestation in Brazil, with great machines rending the Earth, and the stink of smoke and the cries of dying trees everywhere.
    The grief of the trees entered my being. It was like being made to witness the rape and butchery of innocents. Choking and sobbing, I had difficulty sustaining the beat of the drum.

-   I heard the voices of the tree elders. Their message, in different accents, was the same.

-You use trees for your dreaming.

The trees need humans to dream with them.

The trees are dying through the ignorance and greed of men,

and with them your world.
We need Tree Speakers to speak for the green world.

It is your duty to find them and give them voice and vision.

-  I want to reissue an invitation for members of our dreaming community all over the world to dream with the trees and discover what it would mean and require to become a Tree Speaker. We can embark on this – as my group did at Mosswood Hollow – by imagining ourselves coming together to create a Dream Tree, with a shared root ball deep in the Earth, and a place of vision high in the upper branches. 

photo: Great Stump at Mosswood Hollow (c) Robert Moss

An expanded version of this article appears in my book Active Dreaming: Journeying beyond Self-Limitation to a Life of Wild Freedom. Published by New World Library.

The Man Who Blew Things Up

Wolfgang Pauli was one of the greatest scientists of the twentieth century, awarded the Nobel Prize for his pioneer work in quantum physics. He was also a world-class dreamer. He described dreams as his "secret laboratory". Early in their relationship, Pauli shared 1,500 dream reports with Jung and his assistants over an 18 month period, and these were a primary source for Jung's book Psychology and Alchemy.
    The creative collaboration between Pauli and Jung over many years is one of the great examples of cross-pollination between great intellects working in different fields. The pioneers of depth psychology and quantum physics found themselves in ever-deepening agreement that there is no fundamental divide between mind and matter. In a paper on "Background Physics", Pauli discussed the need to develop “a description of nature integrating both physis and psyche” He explained that in developing this model he would use terms and concepts from physics that came alive as symbols in his dreams. [1]
    Pauli and Jung found themselves in agreement that the study of synchronicity is the royal road to the unus mundus, the identity of mind and matter in the deeper reality. Pauli made a tremendous contribution to the theory of synchronicity for which Jung became famous. Ironically, he disliked that word "synchronicity", coined by Jung.  He preferred older terms like "correspondence" or the term "isomorphy", used in mathematics to describe the identity or near identity of forms.
    In an excellent summation, Suzanne Gieser observed that “Pauli had from the start a very well-defined opinion of synchronicity: it represents a coinciding of an internal condition – for example a particular state of consciousness – and an external process which is related to the condition. The relationship between the internal and the external appears meaningful, in other words a kind of ‘sense in chance’. Pauli therefore felt that the emphasis ought to be on the experience of meaning and significance, not on the relative simultaneity as is implied in the concept of synchronicity. It would be more appropriate to speak of a meaningful connection or correspondence of meaning. The phenomena…often arise with a transition from an unstable state of consciousness into a new stable state” [2]
    Pauli lived this stuff. He became the poster boy for a dramatic mode of synchronistic phenomena that is now known, in his honor, as the Pauli Effect and can be found in almost any dictionary.
    “Pauli Effect” is a term invented to describe the way the mere presence of the pioneer of quantum mechanics, tended to cause things to blow up, especially physics experiments and equipment. At least one experimental physicist (Otto Stern) banned Pauli from coming anywhere near his laboratory.

    Pauli was brilliant, but he was also a roiling mass of conflicted emotions. His mother’s suicide, his father’s subsequent marriage to a woman half his age, his discovery as a young adult that his parents had concealed the fact that three of his grandparents were Jewish, his heavy drinking and a disastrous early union with a cabaret dancer who ran off with another man, all contributed his violent mood swings. The way the material world seemed to react to him is a case study in how mind and matter interact, so egregious that we can hardly miss drawing the lesson that thoughts and feelings are actions that change the world we inhabit.

   Pauli's friend and colleague Rudolf Peierls (a German-born physicist who moved to England and later worked on the Manhattan Project) described the Paul Effect as follows: “This was a kind of spell he was supposed to cast on people or objects in his neighborhood, particularly in physics laboratories, causing accidents of all sorts. Machines would stop running when he arrived in a laboratory, a glass apparatus would suddenly break, a leak would appear in a vacuum system, but none of these accidents would ever hurt or inconvenience Pauli himself.” [3]

   When important experimental equipment in Professor James Frank’s laboratory at the Physics Institute at the University of Gottingen blew up for no apparent reason, someone remarked that this could be the Pauli effect. However, Pauli was nowhere in the area; he was on a train, traveling to Denmark. It was later discovered that at the time of the lab explosion, the train carrying Pauli from Zurich to Copenhagen was making a stop at Gottingen station.

  When he arrived at Princeton in 1950, an expensive new cyclotron that had recently be installed burned for no obvious reason, and there was again speculation about the Pauli Effect.

   Such phenomena happened outside the laboratory.

   When the Jung Institute was inaugurated in Zurich in 1948, Pauli attended the opening ceremony, since Jung had asked him to become a “scientific patron” and so represent the convergence of physics and psychology. At the time, Pauli's mind was turning on the tension between two earlier approaches to knowledge represented by the alchemist Robert Fludd and the scientist Johannes Kepler. When Pauli entered the reception room for the Jung party, a large Chinese vase inexplicably slid off a table, creating a flood that drenched some of the distinguished guests. Pauli saw huge symbolic significance because of the echo of “Fludd” in the phenomenon of the spontaneous “flood”. This incident inspired him to write his paper “Background Physics”.

    On another occasion, Pauli was sitting at a table in the window of the Café Odeon, thinking intently about the color red and its feeling tones. While thinking “red”, he was unable to take his eyes off a large, unoccupied car parked in front of the restaurant. As he watched, the car burst into flames and his field of vision was filled with fiery red.

    In yet another, quite hilarious, incident in New York, Pauli was lunching with Erwin Panofsky, the famous art historian and two other scholars. When they rose from the table after dessert, three of the men found that they had been sitting - inexplicably - on whipped cream, now smeared over their trousered rumps. The only one unscathed, of course, was Pauli.

    According to his close colleague Marcus Fierz, “Pauli believed thoroughly in his effect.”  He experienced an unpleasant inner tension before things blew up. After the event, he felt relief and release from tension, even moments of euphoria. No doubt he enjoyed his ever-growing reputation for producing wickedly strange phenomena. This was, after all, the man who dressed up as Mephistopheles for a skit in front of Niels Bohr’s circle in Copenhagen. [4]

The best story on the Pauli Effect is from Rudolf Peierls. Some of Pauli’s fellow-scientists plotted to spoof the effect attributed to him at a reception. They carefully suspended a chandelier by a rope that they intended to release when Pauli entered the room, causing the chandelier to crash down. “But when Pauli came, the rope became wedged on a pulley and nothing happened – a typical example of the Pauli effect.” [5]

It has been suggested that the reason Pauli was not invited to join the Manhattan Project – which recruited many physicists from his circle – was that the directors knew Pauli’s reputation and were worried that he would blow up something vital.

Refererences

1. C.A, Meier (ed) Atom and Archetype: The Pauli/Jung Letters, 1932-1958 (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001) 176, 180
2. Suzanne Gieser, The Innermost Kernel: Depth Psychology and Quantum Physics  (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2005) 284.
3.R.E.Peierls. “Wolfgang Ernest Pauli 1900-1958” in Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society vol 5 (February, 1960) 185.
4. Charles Enz, No Time to Be Brief: A Scientific Biography of Wolfgang Pauli (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) 150.
5. Peierls, ibid.

Text adapted from chapter 11 of The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.   


No the upside-down photo is not an example of the spontaneous working of the Pauli Effect. However, the fact it nearly failed to load could be.

The Double on the Balcony

You are not my shadow.
You stand closer to the sun.
Of all my doubles, you are the most interesting.
You are watching when I forget you.
You are with me when I don’t notice.
You are not my judge, or my guardian angel.
You are the one who remembers.
You are my witness on the balcony above the world.

My friend the witchdoctor calls you
My “double in heaven”. You smile at this,
Reminding me the African lives are mine, not yours.
You saw all of it, from your balcony,
But did not drink the blood or savage joy.
It’s the other way round in other lives, you say:
From life to life, we change places.
When you come down to Earth
I take your seat on the terrace above.

We are together now, for a moment.
I’ve slipped out of the body
That neither confines nor delights you
To join you on your balcony above the world.
The wine in the cup is the color of moonlight.
Below us are all the roads of the world,
The casts and dramas of the many lives
Laid out in dioramas, as manageable from here
As toy soldier sets, or tea-party dolls.

You chide me gently (since humans are forgetful animals)
For forgetting you. I have been a serial amnesiac,
Losing bright nights when we roamed together,
And an ingrate – not seeing your hand in everyday miracles,
Not hearing your voice in the still sure moments of knowing,
Not feeling the breeze of your wing when you come,
In reluctant extremity, to restrain or release me.

When my road was blocked, you were the one
Who reminded me we can fly.
You love to travel in disguise
And I often missed you behind your masks.
When I mislaid my sense of humor
You burst in as a stand-up comic
And shocked me alive with belly-bawdy farce.
It’s easy for you to bring light, and lighten things up:
You stand closer to the sun.

This poem is in my collection Here, Everything Is Dreaming, published by Excelsior Editions.

Poems really shouldn't be explained. Robert Frost once said to someone who asked him to explain what one of his poems was about, "You want me to say it in worse English?" Nonetheless, I'll add two notes to the poem above because I am interested in encouraging conscious exploration of the many aspects and levels of the multidimensional self.
    The Yoruba of West Africa say that while we are living our lives in the "marketplace" of this world, we have a "double in heaven" who observes us from a higher level, and that we swap roles from life to life.
    In a big dream Wolfgang Pauli encountered a mysterious bright-and-dark stranger. Having been mentored for years by Jung on the categories of analytical psychology, the great physicist asked, "Are you my shadow?" To which the stranger responded, "You are my shadow. I stand between you and the sun." This episode is fully recounted in chapter 11 of  The Secret History of Dreaming.

Dream Stories

I dreamed of conversing with Roger Caillois in French before I started reading him, and sought out his published works to honor my dream. I found that he was a wonderfully gifted French dream explorer and literary adventurer, a friend of the Surrealists, a student of games and myths and a traveler in the realms of stones and minerals.
     He edited a remarkable anthology titled The Dream Adventure, which sows many fertile ideas about the relationship between dreams and story. The anthology has three parts. The first is a lively introduction by Caillois distinguishing two fundamental approaches to dreams – that of those who wish to interpret dreams, and that of those who wish to enter and explore the dreamspace itself (which is vastly more exciting and creative).

      Then comes a selection of dream experiences from classical Chinese texts, many of which show the influence of Taoist modes of soul journeying. In one of the Chinese tales, a man on his way home is shocked to hear his wife partying with strangers inside a temple. He grabs a loose tile and hurls it, breaking plates on the table and scattering the revelers. When he returns home, he finds his wife rising from her bed, chuckling over a funny dream in which she was partying with strangers in a temple, then interrupted by someone throwing a tile that broke the crockery. “This then,” Po Hsing-chien (776-827) concludes, “is a case of dreaming spirits being encountered by a waking person.”

      Another Chinese tale, P’o Sung-ling’s “The Painted Wall” – written long before Through the Looking Glass or What Dreams May Come - a man called Chu enters a picture and marries the beautiful maiden he admired in it. Recalled to the other side by his companions’ shouts, he turns and sees the maiden in the picture now has the topknot of a married woman. How can this be? A priest responds: “Visions have their origins in those who see them.”

      The third, and major section of the book, is devoted to dream-inspired short fiction. As all good writers know, while many dreams come fully shaped as stories or scripts, it can be a challenge to turn dreams into effective fiction. If we start by revealing that the action takes place in a dream, we may set the reader at a distance, losing the magical “just-so” quality of an actual dream experience. So some of the most dreamlike fiction may never mention the word “dream”. Caillois has hunted with great skill for stories in which dreaming is an integral and thrilling part of the action.

        One of my favorites is “The Distances” by Argentine writer Julio Cortazar. In this chilling story, Alicia dreams again and again, with increasing vividness and detail, of a sad woman with broken shoes on a bridge in the cold of Budapest; they beat her; she is miserable and alone. When she marries, Alicia persuades her husband to take her to Budapest, where she’s never been. Out walking, she finds herself drawn to the bridge from the dream. In the middle of the bridge is the sad woman with the broken shoes. They embrace and Alicia knows ecstasies of joy. As they separate, she begins to scream – because she sees the smartly-dressed form of Alicia Reyes, hair slightly mussed by the wind, walking confidently away…they have switched bodies.

      Another of my favorites is “The Brushwood Boy” by Rudyard Kipling, who was no stranger to the possibilities of dreaming. In Kipling’s story a boy and a girl who have never seen each other in waking life start meeting each other in dreams and have high adventures that often begin at a pile of brushwood near an ocean. As the years pass, they continue to meet and adventure in their shared world, which defies the laws of ordinary reality. Decades after the first of these dreams, they meet each other in waking life, recognize each other, and come together as a couple.

      I do not know what inspired Kipling to write this tale, through perhaps I should, since I once lived in a house in East Sussex that he visited and was just over the hill from the setting that inspired “Puck of Pook’s Hill”. I do know that the premise of “The Brushwood Boy” – that in dreams we may live continuous lives, shared with others – is quite correct, and (if better understood) would transform our consensual notions of reality. I know this because one of my soul-sisters and I started meeting each other in the dreamspace when we were nine years old, more than three decades before we met in waking life – and have been sharing adventures in parallel realities ever since.