Why we miss dream messages about the future

In dreams, perhaps every night, we travel ahead of our physical selves, scouting out challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. Dreams of the future are part of the basic human survival kit. We not only see things that will happen. We see things that may or may not happen, depending on our ability to remember and clarify the details, and then to  take appropriate action to avoid an unwanted possible future event or to manifest a happy one.
     This is part of our natural intuitive radar. It has helped humans to survive for the whole of our odyssey on the planet, and most human societies, until recently, have valued dreams and dreamers that can show us the shape of things to come.
     So why are so many of us missing our dream messages about challenges and opportunities that lie ahead? For a majority, perhaps, this is part of the cost of suffering a substantial dream drought, missing dreams with every kind of content. But even those of us who love to dream and make room in our lives for dreams often fail to notice what they reveal about the possible future.
    We have often been oriented by Western psychology and popular methods of dream interpretation to look only at the symbolic, as opposed to the literal, content of dreams. A widespread theory is that whatever is going on a dream report is a purely subjective, internal transaction between the personal unconscious and the conscious mind. This might lead us to look at every character and element in the dream as an aspect of the dreamer. This can be a fun game to play, but it fails to recognize that dreams are not only personal and subjective experiences. They can also be transpersonal, social and take us to other times and other realities.
     When we look at our own dreams, we are naturally inclined to home in on what we recognize from the past, because the past is what we know or suppose that we know. But dreams are actually organized by the future more than the past. They show us things developing within us and around us. They show us events that could play out in the future, for good or ill. In other words, they show us possible futures. We can improve our odds on manifesting a desirable possible future event, or averting, gentling or avoiding an unwanted one if we are able to look at our dream material - whatever its content - and ask, Is there any chance that this could manifest, literally or symbolically, in the future?
     If we feel the answer is "Yes", we may want to spend some time clarifying the dream information. The best way to do that, whenever we are able to do it, is to reenter the dream in a conscious journey and take a closer look at what is going on in the space of the dream, carrying the questions any investigator might bring along: What? When" Where? Who? How?
     Simply carrying the dream with us for a while, walking with it, seeing whether more of the detail comes back is another way to approach this. We'll get in the habit of noticing when incidents come up in the world around us that resemble scenes from the dream, and perhaps we'll find ourselves better poised to cope with what is coming next.
     It will help for us to make a list of personal markers that a dream may reflect coming events. One such marker may be the routine, everyday quality of a dream, reflecting situations that may come up in ordinary life. You may notice clues to the passage of time in a dream - the kids are older, the season has changed. Some markers of dream premonition or precognition may be wildly symbolic. You may notice that you dream of a tsunami or a train rushing off the tracks when a crisis is looming in your life (but don't forget a tsunami could also be a tsunami, a train wreck a train wreck).
     For highly psychic dreamers, the lively presence of dead people in a dream is sometimes a marker that information about the future is available. The dead, who are of course alive on the other side, are not confined to time as we know it, and can show us things - if they choose and if they have clarity - that we have trouble seeing by ourselves.
     However, even the most active dreamers, with good recall and a clear understanding that dreams must be searched for clues to the future, often miss messages of this kind. In my book Dreaming True I suggested  five main reasons why we misinterpret dreams of the future even when we are fully prepared to look at dreams for messages about what is to come:

1. We mistake a literal event for a symbolic one, or vice versa.
2. We misidentify people and places.
3. We fail to figure out how far in the future the dream event might be.
4. We see future events from a certain angle, that may not reveal the whole picture.
5. We confuse realities, confounding a dream that relates to external reality with dreams that are real experiences in other orders of reality.

Gifted psychic dreamers often find themselves looking at a future event involving others as an observer, looking in from the outside. But in clairvoyant or precognitive dreams involving others, we may be drawn inside another person’s situation. Sometimes it’s as if we have stepped inside someone else’s head and are looking through their eyes. This syndrome is quite common among siblings, close family and friends. It poses special challenges in reading dreams of the future.
     We need to determine what is our stuff and what belongs to someone else's stuff. One of the ways to do that is through dream reentry, which means seeking to reenter a dream and establish – inside the dream space– exactly what is going on.
    I counseled a woman who was troubled by recurring dreams in which she saw her husband cheating on her and working himself into violent alcoholic rages in which he attacked her and was a danger to himself as well. She was not initially keen on the idea of trying to go back inside these horrible dreams, but I encouraged her to go in as an investigator and get the facts straight. With the help of my shamanic drumming, she succeeded in reentering the dream. She realized very quickly that the locale was not her own home, but her sister's place.
     Even more revealing, she found that in the disturbing dreams she had not been herself. She actually seemed to be inside the body and situation of her sister.  She now understood that she had been given insight into terrible problems that had been developing in her sister's marriage by being taken right inside her sister's situation. Now that she had clarity on what belonged to her and what did not, the dreamer was able to talk to her sister, who admitted that she was having the problems seen in the dreams. Now the dreamer could provide loving and helpful counsel and support to her sister, who had been feeling desperately alone.

Shadow photo by Jeanne Cameron

The Dream that Ousted Stalin from the Mausoleum

Further Notes on The Secret History of Dreaming

Dora Abramovna Lazurkina (1884-1974) Old Bolshevik and friend of Lenin, was arrested by Stalin’s secret police in 1937, jailed and tortured and sent to the Gulag. She was not released until 1955 and had nightmares about what she had endured until the end of her life.

At the 22^nd Communist Party Congress in 1961 she rose to say that she had dreamed that Lenin told her that he was not happy about lying next to Stalin in the Mausoleum on Red Square. After Stalin’s death, his mummified body had been interred next to Lenin’s, Stalin in his gorgeous generalissimo’s uniform, Lenin’s in a civilian black suit.

Lazurkina told the Party Congress:

I always carry Ilyich in my heart and always, comrades, in the most difficult moments, I survived only because I had Ilyich in my heart and I consulted with him what to do. Yesterday I consulted with Ilyich, as if he stood before me as if alive and said: it is unpleasant for me to be next to Stalin, who brought so much trouble to the party.

Though Molotov, a diehard Stalinist, declared that this was the dream of a witch, she got a standing ovation and “stormy applause, according to the transcript.  Khruschev was already planning to remove Stalin from the Mausoleum but wanted cover, fearing riots by Stalin’s perfervid followers, especially in Georgia. On the night of Halloween, October 31, 1961, a secret police unit carried Stalin’s corpse to a burial plot by the Kremlin wall on Halloween, where it was stripped of its decorations before being interred under a heavy stone slab.

A year later, the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, for whom I read translations when he spoke in Canberra in 1966, published a poem in Pravda titled “The Heirs of Stalin” in which he appealed to the regime not to let Stalin rise again: “And I, appealing to our government, petition them to double, and even triple, the number of sentries guarding this slab, and stop Stalin from ever rising again and, with Stalin, the past."

 

A Dreamer's Notes: Sleep Fell Upon Me

 

Sleep Fell Upon Me

When my schedule is entirely my own, as it mostly is when I am at home, I do whatever I feel like at any time. I don't think about sleep until it falls upon me. When that happens, I let my body fall into bed. Very frequently, I then find myself engaged in a marvelous adventure in another reality, where other players are waiting for me.

In the Hittite language, you don't say "I fell asleep". You say, "sleep fell upon me" or even "sleep seized me." My relationship with sleep is sometimes like that. And I notice that when sleep falls upon me like a lion on a goat, what follows is often a powerful and numinous experience, sometimes an encounter with a greater being.

What was that instrument I was playing after sleep fell on me and obliged me to take an early evening nap? It looked a bit like a set of pan pipes, but I strummed it with my fingers. It seemed to be organic, vegetal, like a dried gourd with multiple tubes, orange and yellow in color. The music it made was enchanting. I was playing it in a jungle setting, near where a river joined the sea, maybe somewhere along the coast of Brazil.

Illustration: "Strumming with Lion". Digital play by RM.

Where Gods Speak and Listen

“The gods know what comes out of your mouth so don't bad-mouth anyone intentionally."
- My free version of lines from a dream report from a Hittite queen (probably Puduhepa) more than 3,000 years ago, cataloged as KUB 31.71 iii. The speaker appears to be a deity, perhaps the Sun Goddess of Arinna. I am playing with the French translations of 133 Hittite dream texts in Alice Mouton's Rêves hittites. Mouton writes that "the dream represented one of only two ways in which the gods could address all humans, without exception. The only other divine medium that did not require any 'professional' go-between was visual or oral prophecy."

Telling the Sheep from the Goats

I don't know whether counting sheep has ever worked as a way to bring on sleep, but checking on your goats is an important theme in dreaming and divination in ancient Mesopotomia. As explained by A. Leo Oppenheim in his classic monograph The Interpretation of Dreams in the Ancient Near East, the Sumerian word for "dream" was MÁŠ.GE.

It combines two words. GE means "night", pretty straightforward. MÁŠ means "goat" with a special spin - the goat as an animal used for extispicy, divination by reading the entrails. Built into the language was the idea that a dream is a source of divination in the night, invoked as an oracle or uninvoked, as an omen.

Illustration: "Dream Goat". Digital play by RM

"We create ourselves continuously"

Nous nous créons continuellement nous-mêmes...Pour un être conscient, exister consiste à changer, changer à se mûrir, se mûrir à se créer indéfiniment soi-même.
"We create ourselves continuously. For a conscious being, to exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly."
- Henri-Louis Bergson, L'Evolution créatrice

Illustration: "Henri Bergson" drawing by RM

Following a Word Magician

Re-reading Ian McDonald's novel The Dervish House. This amazingly gifted novelist who far transcends the scifi genre in which he has won awards. If you had told me that it is possible to include the fine-fine details of nanotechnology, cultural geography, hedge fund trading, the social behavior of crows, Bosporus navigation and the history and practice of Sufi lodges in a single novel without losing the reader's rapt attention on a single page, I would have been incredulous -before McDonald.

How does he manage to sprinkle Turkish words and names everywhere, with the correct diacritical marks, but no translation - so you are on your own when it comes to figuring out what is a çayhane or a tekke - and get that through the copy editors and make you stay with him all the way? This is a word magician of the highest order.

Forgetting and Remembering

It's a rare day when I fail to notice I have forgotten far more than I know. I see the wisdom of the invisible companion of my boyhood who taught me that all really important knowledge comes to us through anamnesis, "remembering".

I just rediscovered this (in my own Secret History of Dreaming): A Mesopotamian term for an obscure or mysterious dream is “a closed archive basket of the gods”  A great image.

Bridegroom of Dreams

 

"The seventh type of dreams, which I call lucid dreams, seems to me the most interesting and worthy of the most careful observation and study. Of this type I experienced and wrote down 352 cases in the period between January 20, 1898, and December 26, 1912.

"In these lucid dreams the reintegration of the psychic functions is so complete that the sleeper remembers day-life and his own condition, reaches a state of perfect awareness, and is able to direct his attention, and to attempt different acts of free volition. Yet the sleep, as I am able confidently to state, is undisturbed, deep and refreshing."

- Frederik van Eeden “A Study of Dreams” [1] in Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, Vol. 26, 1913

The dream explorer credited with coining the term lucid dreaming [2] was a dedicated soul journeyer.  Dr. Frederik van Eeden (1860–1932) was a Dutch writer, physician, and member of the British Society for Psychical Research (SPR). In 1913, he gave a lecture to the SPR in which he reported “lucid dreams” in which the dreamer retains the memory of his waking life, remained conscious, and could carry out “different acts of free volition.” He observed that the phenomenon of multiple consciousness and “double memory” - of both waking and dream events - “leads almost unavoidably to the conception of a dream-body.”

His first attempt to give full expression to what he had experienced took the form of a novel De nachtbruid: De gedenkschriften van Vico Muralto ("The Night Bride: The Memoirs of Vico Muralto") first published in Dutch in 1892. An English language edition, retitled The Bride of Dreams, was published in 1913, the year he spoke at the SPR. He told the SPR that "the fictitious form enabled me to deal freely with delicate matters, and had also the advantage that it expressed rather unusual ideas in a less aggressive way - esoterically, so to speak."

He had many interests: as a writer, he belonged to a prominent Dutch literary group and found an international audience with his novel Hedwig’s Journey in 1900; as a physician, he worked on a cure for TB; as a pacifist he founded a society called Walden; as a reformer he worked for compensation for dismissed strikers; as a spiritual seeker, he looked East, and back to Western mystics like Boehme before immuring himself in the Catholic church in 1922 (which may have been foreshadowed by all the tortured theological musings in Bride of Dreams and his belief in demons, shared with the SPR), He took on Freud, rejecting his  theory of dreams as wish fulfilment. He had two wives, Martha (divorced in 1907) and Geertruida, with him till his death. Two children from each marriage.

Van Eeden’s autobiographical novel The Bride of Dreams, features a protagonist and narrator dressed up rather unconvincingly as an Italian aristocrat, Count Muralto.  The book is tedious and talky – and occasionally seemingly antisemitic - until we get to chapter 12 when the Count begins to discuss his dream life. The chapter starts with an account of detailed dream observation of a tree he is sure he could not invent, the incident van Eeden mentioned in his paper for the SPR. There are dream encounters with the dead, including a reunion with the protagonist’s father, who shows the love and compassion lacking in life, when the father tried to kill them both on a boat and died cursing his son.

We learn about the Count’s experiments in becoming conscious inside his dreams, and sustaining consciousness as he passes between waking and dream states. There is convincing material on how the dream body, which has its own sensorium, experiences pleasure and pain. In a lurch back to medievalism, the narrator blames “demons” for terrors and confusion, including the phenomenon of false awakening. The book trumpets the idea that out truest life, and clearest knowing, may be attained in dreams. "The solution of the secret of our lives lies in our dreams."

Here is his account of the blossoming tree:

one night while dreaming of a blossoming orchard in Italy, I succeeded in observing with thorough consciousness. I saw the branches as they crossed one another, and the festoons of vines stretching from tree to tree, whilst I soared through, a few yards from the ground, with a pale blue sky above me. And while observing yet more closely I pondered how it was possible to reproduce so exactly and minutely in a vision obviously emanating from myself and which I had myself created, the apparent motions of these myriad crossing twigs and the confusion of the young foliage. And in my dream, and realizing that I was dreaming, I came to the conclusion that this vision must be a reality, an objective reality as the philosophers of reason would say, because to me - the observer - it manifested a distinctly personal existence. As I soared by, the twigs described their apparent motions exactly as I had observed by day, and how should I, who could not even draw a tree, be able to create these extraordinarily compiled moving images? 

He found himself “thoroughly wide awake in the midst of… deep sound sleep”

As the Count, he expresses his desire to master continuity of consciousness and double his life

In my first elation I hoped that I might sometime reach the point where I could pass from waking to sleeping without loss of conscious- ness, and night after night contemplate the dream-sphere with all the calmness of day - thus doubling my entire life.

As we follow the Count’s experiments in lucid dreaming, we see him planning destination travel:

In order actively to carry out a thing in the dream world, I must resolve upon it betimes and definitely determine upon the plan. During the actual dream the time is usually too short, the incidents pass too fleetingly. Sometimes I soar on in swift flight so that everything rushes by me without my being able to delay the pace. It is usually after one of these happy dreams with full consciousness, that I plan out, that very morning before getting up, what I shall do the next time in my dream. And then, every evening before falling asleep, it is once more distinctly formulated and stamped upon the memory

He finds himself leading a double life, with the certainty that his dream life is no less real than his waking one. "I led for many years a double life, in which the incidents of the day did not seem more important to me than the observations of the night." 

He is fully aware that he has a subtle body, or dream body: "I knew now that I had another body, beside the ordinary one, an animæ corpus, with a proper world of perception; and this knowledge rested upon equally good foundations as every one's knowledge concerning the existence of his ordinary body."

He can travel to many worlds without moving his body:

That I, without stirring from my place, could arrive in a totally different world, in many worlds, all with a proper space, all with the same evidence of real existence, all full of life, full of sensations, fall of beauties and transports - this became for me a matter of simple experience. And no one only knowing it from hearsay can realize how different and how much more profound is the effect of actual experience.

He asks, how much of all this is his own creation? and gives an interesting response:

the insensible world is in part our own creation, subject to our will, built up from the conclusions gathered in our day-life, with the faculties and powers which by practice and use we have in this same life made our own. Everything is the product of imagination; the sun and the stars are also works of God’s imagination.

NOTES

1. Frederik van Eeden “A Study of Dreams” in Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, Vol. 26, 1913.

2. Van Eeden was not the fitrst author to use the term "lucid dream". The Marquis d'Hervey de Saint-Denys wrote in detail about his personal adventures in rêves  lucides in Les Rêves et les Moyens de Les Diriger: Observations pratiques, first published anonymously in 1867. He used the term uses the term to mean "aware of my true situation."  

C’est-a-dire le premier rêve lucide au milieu duquel je posséderais bien le sentiment de ma situation. 

"That is to say, the first lucid dream in which I had the sensation of my situation."

- [anon] Les Rêves et les Moyens de Les Diriger. Paris: Librairie d’Amyot. 1867, p.287.

Drawing: "Bridegroom of Dreams" [Frederik van Eeden] by Robert Moss

Waking the Sleeping King

 

In one of Madame d'Aulnoy's classic fairy stories, “The Blue Bird” an abused princess survives incredible   trials and transformations. Disguised as a beggar girl, she at last manages to gain access to the Echo Chamber in the castle of King Charming, who loves her as she loves him but believes her lost. What is said in the Echo Chamber can be heard distinctly in the royal bedchamber above. The princess wails her story of love and loss, assuming it will awaken the king to the fact that she is alive and available and recall him to the pledges they exchanged.

But night after night, the king fails to hear. The princess has used up nearly all of the magic a good witch gave her — which has enabled her to buy entry to the Echo Chamber — before she learns that the king does not hear her because he takes a sleeping-draught every night. She manages to bribe a page to withhold the sleeping potion. Awake in the night, the king hears her love pleas, goes in search of her, and they are united.

This is a much more relevant story for our times than the theme of the sleeping princess. Here the woman has to wake up the man, as is so more often the case. How many “sleeping kings” do we know? How many forms do their “sleeping draughts” take? Whenever you run into a guy who has lost touch with his dreams, who may even say, “I don't dream”, remember you may be dealing with a sleeping king, and you may be called on to play the role of the awakener.

The very adult message in this story made me want to know more about the author. Where did her clarity of perception, amongst all the fantasy and finery (and raw horror, too) come from? The story of the author of “The Blue Bird” is fascinating, and takes us into the raw depth of lived experience from which the pre-Disney and pre-Victorian fairytales come — in this case, not from peasant folklore but from the no less brutal life dramas of France's real-life princesses.

 At age fifteen, Marie-Catherine le Jumel de Barneville was kidnapped from a convent school and raped under the pretext of an arranged marriage — the polite name for an arrangement by which her father sold her to a rich and depraved aristocrat three times her age. The Baron d'Aulnoy was odious, a heavy drinker and gambler with very unpleasant sexual penchants. Three years into the marriage, it looked like Marie-Catherine had found a way out of her cage when her husband was arrested on charges of high treason against the king. However, under torture two of the accusers confessed that they had invented the treason charges because they were Marie-Catherine's secret lovers. The baroness had to flee to Spain, where she restored herself to royal favor — over many years — by functioning as a secret agent for the French.

We derive the term “fairytale” from this extraordinary survivor, Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy.. She titled her first collection, published in 1697, Les Contes des Fées. She spun her tales for adults, rather than children, in her seventeenth-century salon, in fashionable colloquial style, as reflected in the subtitle of her second collection, Les Fées à la Mode. Hers is a true-life story of spinning soiled hay into gold.

Text adapted from Active Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library. 

      An English translation of "The Blue Bird" appeared in The Green Fairy Book, the third of Andrew Lang's Fairy Books of Many Colors, first published in 1892. 

Dreaming beyond the brain

 

The new science of dreaming tells us the following: 

-          Almost everyone dreams, every night.

-          Humans average six dreams (or dream sequences) every night, whether or not they remember

-          Dreaming, or at least some form of mentation, is going on in all stages of sleep, not just the rapid-eye movement state discovered in a Chicago laboratory in 1953. [1] 

-          A part of the brain that becomes highly active in dreaming (the inferior right parietal cortex) is also involved in creating structures for our perceptions, in both physical and imaginal space.

-          The behavior of the waking brain is quite similar to that of the dreaming brain during creative states, as when jazz performers enter a riff of improvisation. [2]

-          “A type of spatial and temporal binding underlies dreaming that is analogous to the perceptual binding thought to underlie waking consciousness.” [3]

While cognitive neuroscientists have tended to dismiss dreams as nonsense, new studies even within that field support the idea that dreaming plays a critical role in growing learning skills and consolidating memory. “Dreaming about newly learned material enhances subsequent recall of that material.”[4]

There are excellent books available for those who want to know more about the neurobiology of dreaming, ranging from Andrea Rock’s very readable and accessible The Mind at Night to the hardcore technical papers collected in the three volumes of The New Science of Dreaming.

However, while brain science tells us important things about the quality of our reception, it no more tells us how our dreams are made than pulling apart a television monitor can show you how and where a movie produced and how it travels from a network to your screen.

Notes

1.This is not a consensus, however; some researchers, such as Harvard’s J. Allan Hobson, continue to insist on a tight association between dreaming and REM sleep.

2. Charles J. Limb and Allen R. Braun, “Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical Performance: an fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation” in The Public Library of Science Journal, vol. 3 no. 2 (February 2008) pp. 1-9.

3. Tore A. Nielsen, and Stenstrom, Philippe, “What are the memory sources of dreaming?” in Nature 437:27 (October 2005) p. 1287.

4. ibid p. 1289.

Journal drawing by Robert Moss

The Other Bollingen

 

Carl Gustav Jung, the great dream shaman of Switzerland, built a personal sanctuary near the village of Bollingen on the northern shore of Lake Zürich and called it his Tower. He was partly inspired by childhood fantasies of a castle on an island on a lake.  As his project expanded, he envisioned it as an architectural model for the structure of the psyche, and an inner stronghold. He started construction of the first tower in 1923 after the death of his mother. He added an upper story to the main house in 1955 after the death of his wife Emma.  He wrote that “these two dates are meaningful because the Tower is connected with the dead.”
     Shortly before his death, Jung dreamed of the “other Bollingen”, its counterpart in another world. The place was suffused with sourceless light. The deep voice he had come to trust told him his new home had been completed and was now ready for him to move in. Then he saw a mother wolverine teaching her child to dive and swim in a stretch of water.
     In her beautiful biographical memoir of Jung, infused with her intimate knowledge of him, Barbara Hannah recalls that he had often dreamed of this Other Bollingen, in various stages of construction, and had always understood that he was seeing a location on the Other Side of death. The new dream made it clear to her that he would soon be leaving to go to the Other Bollingen. “In fact, it may have been this dream that loosened his strong tie to his earthly Bollingen.”* 
      What has he learned and accomplished in his new home in the Imaginal Realm? What does he now know about soul and its transformations? Has he composed a new book? Has he raised the Tower higher? I provide possible answers to these questions in my story "The Other Bollingen" in Mysterious Realities.

* Barbara Hannah, Jung, His Life and Work: A Biographical Memoir (Boston: Shambhala, 1991) 344