Those who attend in the Twilight Zone

 

All these people are gathered. They are like actors who have taken their places on stage and are waiting quietly for the curtain to go up. It comes to me that they are "attending", an interesting word. 
    I have the feeling they are characters who could have parts in a new book. Yet they have their own lives. None of them seems to be aware of me.
    But now a young woman slips through their ranks, to look at me directly. She is red haired, tall and slim, quite lovely. Her clothes are of an earlier time. Her gaze is deep. I cannot read her feelings, but I would like to know her. She moves away to my left, and I sense that she wants me to follow. When I go after her, however, I am interrupted by a mature woman with long black hair and very white skin who thrusts herself between us. I know she is filed with jealous hate for the redhead. 
    There is an old story here, of passion and jealousy. I sense it goes back several centuries, to the British Isles. I won't follow it now. The sunlight streaming into my bedroom round the edge of the drapes is quite bright. I reach for my French blue sleep mask (thank you Air France) and stretch out on my back, enjoying the luxury of drifting back from my twilight zone adventures into the sleep that repairs the body and allows the dream soul to go wandering without an agenda.


Often, as in this episode recorded in an old journal, I find different casts of characters waiting or popping up as I hover on the edge of sleep or linger in the twilight zone of hypnagogia. Sometimes, they appear to be quite literally on stage, or in the wings, waiting for me to show up in order to start or resume a play. More often, they seem to be characters in life dramas that are being played out in other times or in parallel worlds, dramas in which I have a lead role from which I may have been absent while attending to things in waking life.
    When I am writing, I am occasionally thrilled to discover in this way that my characters - who may or may not have been previously known to me - are assembling in this way, ready to claim their parts in my stories, or at least audition for those parts. 
    Those attending. I like this description for the people who appear on the cusp between waking and sleep, or between sleep and waking. To attend can mean to take care of or wait upon someone; in its Latin origin, in the verb attendere, it means "to stretch toward" something. Encounters with those who attend in the twilight zone can certainly help to stretch the mind. 

"Curtain Time". Dream Oracle card by Robert Moss

 

Coming back from the dead as a dream shaman

 

My retelling of a wild tale of soul retrieval and shamanic initiation among the Kwakiutl of the Pacific Northwest. After putting a dead man's vital soul back in his body and telling him he will now be a shaman, the great wolf shaman explains how he will know how to heal: "I will always make you dream".

This is what the old ones say about Lebid. He was of the people called Kwakiutl or Gwasila. Their place was up in the north of Vancouver Island, where the winters can freeze your marrow. Lebid got pretty sick and no medicine could help him. His people watched him die. They couldn't bury him the old way, because the earth was frozen hard. They just laid him outside on the ice. They would deal with his remains when the ground thawed, if nothing took care of him first. In the meantime, the next snowfall made a blanket that covered him up. 
    Wolves came around after a couple of nights. The people heard them snuffling around Lebid's mound. The wolves started to howl, maybe calling the rest of the pack for free meat. What happened next was unexpected. A man's voice joined in, and the howls began to sound like a song. Nobody went outside to see what was going on.
     Time went by. Some days you could see the sun. One morning it showed a wolf pack nearing the village. The wolves scattered at the sight of the people, but one remained. He slowly rose up on two legs and became a man. The man was rail-thin and naked except for wreaths of dark  hemlock, round his neck and waist.
    When he came close to the lodges, people saw this was Lebid, the dead man. They saw he had become a skinwalker, a shapeshifter. Some thought he was also a zombie or a witch and wanted to drive him away, or burn him. A grandmother spoke up.
     "Bring him inside. Give him soup . Let him tell his story."
     "I was dead," Lebid started with what they knew "But the wolves dragged me to their place, and their great shaman. His name is Nau'alakume.He wears a crown of red cedar."
      He described how the wolves licked him all over his body. Then the wolf shaman vomited a crystal that he inserted in Lebid’s lower sternum. The shaman opened his palms to reveal something that might have been inside the crystal, a tiny fluttering creature the size of a fly or a lightning bug. Lebid understood that this was his vital soul, that had left his body with his last breath. The wolf shaman pressed down hard on the top of Lebid’s’ head, again and again, as if to loosen the bone. He blew the tiny soul throiugh the fontanel, and sealed the opening.
     He gave Lebid his own name, with its numonous power. He told Lebid that now he had died and come back, he, too, would be a shaman, "You will be a life bringer for your people."
    Then his followers rose up, put on their wolf masks, dropped to all fours, and and escorted Lebid home.
     The revenant sang a song to honor the wolf shaman who raised him from the dead, put his soul back in his body, and gifted him with his own powers. He sang of treasure again and again. 

They took me to the edge of the world by the magical power of heaven, the treasure
I was healed when the power of Nau’alakume, the life bringer, the treasure, was really thrown into me
I come to cure with this power of healing of Nau’alakume, the treasure. Therefore I will be a life bringer.
I come with the water of life given into my hand by Nau’alakume, the means of bringing to life, the treasures 

     If his people had any doubt that he now possessed the powers of a true shaman healer, a "life bringer", Lebid reassured them that he would operate under the wisest direction, delivered in what they all knew to be the most reliable way.
     He said that the great shaman, Nau'alakume, had told him, "I will always make you dream". Lebid told his people, "When you get sick, I will dream for you and my dreams will show me what you need to be healed."

 

Source: I have retold a report of the narrative of a Kwakiutl informant in Franz Boas' classic work The Religion of the Kwakiutl Indians. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1930) vol 2, pp. 46-50. It is worth noting that an elder of the Kwakiutl told Boas that "dreams are the news the soul brings us when it comes back from its journeys.". Franz Boas, "Ethnology of the Kwakiutl" in F. W. Hodge (ed.) Thirty-fifth annual report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1921) pp. 724-725.

Wolf Mask. A Northwest Coast wolf dance headdress in Rayna Green, The British Museum Encyclopaedia of Native North America, Bloominton: Indiana University Press, 1999, p.177. 

Arnold Toynbee, Time Traveler

 

The great English historian and philosopher of history Arnold Toynee,who gave us a theory of the rise of civilzations, sometimes found hiself visiting the distant periods he studied as an eye witness. In section XIII of volume X of A Study of History, he departs from his familiar narrative style. He called this section “The Inspirations of Historians”. He titled  part E “The Quest for a Meaning Behind the Facts of History”. He opened with this statement:

A tenuous long-distance commerce exclusively on the intellectual plane is an historian's normal relation to the objects of his study; yet there are moments in his mental life -- moments as memorable as they are rare -- in which temporal and spatial barriers fall and psychic distance is annihilated; and in such moments of inspiration the historian finds himself transformed in a flash from a remote spectator into an immediate participant, as the dry bones take flesh and quicken into life.

Mulling over dry research – a précis of one of the lost books of Livy’s History – Toynbee was hurled into the blood and thunder of  war between Rome and confederate Italian states. By his own acount, he was “transported, in a flash, across the gulf of time and space from Oxford in A.D. 1911 to Teanum in 80 B.C., to find himself in a back yard on a dark night witnessing a personal tragedy that was more bitter than the defeat of any public cause." He witnessd the fate of Mutilus, a proscribed confederate leader denied sanctuary at his home by how own wife, who killed himself with his own sword.
    Toynbee's experiences of mental transport across time quickened as he traveled to ancient sites. He enteed the perspective of Philip of Macedon checking his battle lines. He was among a roatring criwd at Ephesus. He fell into “the deep trough of Time” after climbing to a ruined citadel in Laconia.
    In London, soon after the Great War, walking by Victoria Station, he was gripped by a sense of the universal movement of time streaming through him and around him. He felt himself "in communion, not just with this or that episode in history, but with all that had been, and was, and was to come." He felt history flowing through him in a mighty current, with his own life rolling like a wave within this vast tide. With this torrent inside him, he could still note the granular details of the station wall - the Edwardian red bricks and white stone facings. He wondered why what he felt was tremendous illumination had opened for him in this pedestrian seting.
     Perhaps, in addition to visiting the past, Toynbee was tapping into the future. A year or so after his experience near the station, on January 8, 1920, Victiria replaced Charing Cross as the main London station for contnental services. The service to Paris via Dover and Calais started the same day. 

"I can't remember my dreams"

You may hear this a lot. We are living in an era in which many people are suffering from a protracted dream drought.This is a serious malaise because if you have lost touch with your dreams, you have lost access to many gifts, including your power to tap into a wiser source than the everyday mind, to rehearse the possible future, to hear the voice of conscience and to find energy and direction to carry you through the day.
     "I can't remember my dreams." This statement is still a big step up from saying,"I don't dream", which really just means "I don't (or won't) remember", but is often freighted with a hardhead denial of the reality and importance of dreaming
     What do you say to someone who says they can't remember their dreams? I sometimes start like this:

1. I would drop that statement altogether, because every time I repeat "I can't remember my dreams" I am programming myself to make that the case.

2. I would wake myself up to the fact that I don't need to go to sleep in order to dream.The world around me will speak to me in the manner of dreams, through signs and symbols and synchronicity, if I pay attention.

3. I would try to call up a dream or memory from early childhood and put myself back into that scene. My inner child is a world-class dreamer and if I can only get more in touch with her my dreams will come back.

If I am called to offer more extensive guidance, I might offer any or all of the following

WAYS TO BRING BACK DREAMS

1.Set an intention for the night

Before sleep, write down an intention for the hours of dream and twilight that lie ahead. This can be a travel plan (“I would like to go to Hawaii” or “I would like to visit my girlfriend/boyfriend”). It might be a specific request for guidance (“I want to know what will happen if I change my job”).

     It could be a more general setting of direction (“I ask for healing” or “I open myself to my creative
source”).

    You might simply say, “I want to have fun in my dreams and remember.”

     Make sure your intention has some juice. Don’t make dream recall one more chore to fit in with all the others.

     If you like, you can make a little ritual of dream incubation, a simple version of what ancient seekers did when they traveled to temples of dream healing like those of Asklepios in hopes of a night encounter with a sacred guide. You can take a special bath or shower, play a recording of the sounds of nature or running water, and meditate for a while on an object or picture that relates to your intention. You might want to avoid eating heavily or drinking alcohol within a couple of hours of sleep. You could get yourself a little mugwort pillow – in folk tradition, mugwort is an excellent dreambringer – and place it under or near your regular pillow.

2. Be ready to receive

Having set your intention, make sure you have the means to honor it. Keep pen and paper (or a voice recorder) next to your bed so you are ready to record when you wake up. Record something whenever you wake up, even if it’s at 3 a.m. If you have to go to the bathroom, take your notebook with you and practice doing two things at once. Sometimes the dreams we most need to hear come visiting at rather anti-social hours, from the viewpoint of the little everyday mind.

3. Be kind to fragments.

Don’t give up on fragments from your night dreams. The wispiest trace of a dream can be exciting to play with, and as you play with it you may find you are pulling back more of the previously forgotten dream.The odd word or phrase left over from a dream may be an intriguing clue, if you are willing to do a little detective work.

    Suppose you wake with nothing more than the sense of a certain color. It could be quite interesting to notice that today is a Red Day, or  a Green Day, to dress accordingly, to allow the energy of that color to travel with you, and to meditate on the qualities of red or green and see what life memories that evokes..

4. Still no dream recall? No worries.

If you don’t remember a dream when you first wake up, laze in bed for a few minutes and see if something comes back. Wiggle around in the bed. Sometimes returning to the body posture we were in earlier in the night helps to bring back what we were dreaming when our bodies were arranged that way.

     If you still don’t have a dream, write something down anyway: whatever is in your awareness,
including feelings and physical sensations. You are catching the residue of a dream even if the dream itself is gone. As you do this, you are saying to the source of your dreams, “I’m listening. Talk to me.”
     You may find that, though your dreams have flown, you have a sense of clarity and direction that is the legacy of the night. We solve problems in our sleep even when we don’t remember the problem-solving process that went on in our dreaming minds.     

5.Remember you don’t need to go to sleep in order to dream.

The incidents of everyday life will speak to us like dream symbols if we will are willing to pay attention. Keep a lookout for the first unusual or striking thing that enters your field of perception in the course of the day and ask whether there could be a message there. Sometimes it’s in your face, as happened to a woman I know who was mourning the end of a romance but had to laugh when she noticed that the bumper sticker of the red convertible in front of her said, “I use ex-lovers as speed bumps.”

     When we make it our game to pay attention to coincidence and symbolic pop-ups in everyday life, we oil the dream gates so they let more through from the night.

Part of this article is adapted from Active Dreaming: Journeying beyond Self-Limitation to a Life of Wild Freedom by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Drawing: "Dream that Got Away" by Robert Moss

The Apple of Fate

 

On a cool fall night, I lie down on my bed. As soon as I close my eyes, I see a form of the Great Earth Mother, vast and voluptuous. She rises before me, large as a mountain, and opens a fertile valley. I fly through this like a swallow, and come out in a world suffused by sourceless light.. There is a sense of being in a contained space, protected by translucent walls that are spirals of light. 
   There is a feminine presence. She lets me know she is willing to be a guide for me in this realm. She is very tall and slender, dressed in blue. Her name is of the North. Though the light is everywhere, she moves within a fine mist that makes her features hazy.
    She tells me this is a place of purification, of cleansing “down to the bone marrow.” She speaks to me of soul, and where it travels.“Where your desire goes, there you go in soul flight out of the body, and in the soul’s journey after death.”
    She shows me a ball fired high into the air, sailing up above the clouds. She tells me, “This is the Apple of Fate. When it returns to Earth, your present life will be over.” We agree I do not need to know the exact time or circumstances of its return.

 

Reading and reflecting on this report in my journal, from nearly thirty years ago, I am stirred again by the vision of the Apple of Fate. Now I am considering goddesses known to my Northern ancestors who were especially fond of apples. Idunn is a Nordic goddess who carries apples in a box crafted from ash wood. In the Prose Edda, when the gods start to feel old, they ask her to feed them her apples, which carry the magic of rejuvenation. This is why Idunn's name means Ever Young, or Rejuvenator. The Prose Edda contains the story of Idunn’s abduction and rescue, both the work of Loki) Idunn’s husband Bragi, the skaldic god of poetry, who gave his name to the cup (bragarfull) with which toasts to the mighty Viking dead were raised..
    In a story of the goddess Frigg in the Volsung Saga, an apple from the goddess can produce a new birth as well as fresh juice. When king Renr prays for a child, Frigg's messenger, a crow, drops an apple in his lap, and soon his wife is pregnant. Then there are the Apples of Hel, They are mentioned in an 11th century poem by the skald Thorbrion Brunarson, who saw the apple as food of the dead. 
     I do not find the phrase Apple of Fate in the Icelandic texts, or the excellent works of Hilda Ellis Davidson, the great English scholar of Nordic paganism. But I see that the intriguing Nehelennia is also depicted as carrying a supply of apples. With the breath of her name I feel a wind from the mythic ocean gusting through my study. Nehelennia, whose best-known temples were on the coast of the Netherlands, was a Celtic-Germanic goddess who was a special patron of voyagers, those traveling by sea or across the astral tides, and those making the crossing to the Otherworld and the afterworld. 
    Apple of Fate is a term that could fit the apple in the Garden of Eden, or the apple in the story of Paris' choice between the three goddesses, since in each of those stories a choice involving an apple determined a fate. But those stories don't resonate with me in relation to the blue lady and what she showed me. And anyway, the apple of Eve and the apple of Paris weren't apples as we know them. Apples were unknown west of Kazakhstan until some of the soldiers of Alexander the Great brought them back from his campaigns; even then, these "apples" were only small and tart, like crabapples.
    I wonder where my Apple of Fate is now, flying or falling or bumping along the ground. As the lady in blue suggested, I don't need an exact fix on that, at least, not yet….

Drawing by Robert Moss: Lady of Apples

I made the drawing after a vision in the hypnagogic zone on January 2, 2021. I heard the name "Idunn" quite distinctly. I was wafted into an enchanted apple orchard. I smelled the apple blossom in the golden hair of a lovely young woman who seems sweet and innocent.I let myself drift into a sleep dream in which I drove north, ever north, faster and faster with a young woman who seemed to be both my daughter and my research partner. The wind rushed past us as the beating of great wings. We were excited because we had found the key to a mystery.I drew Idunn by an apple tree with apple blossom in her hair, dressen in apple-green rather than blue and holding her golden apples in a basket rather than an ashwood box because that is the way I saw her this time.  

 

The Doorstopper Method for Keeping Your Dream Gate Open

 

Here's one of the games I invented for retrieving lost dreams.
   Picture a door to your dream world.
   As you left, you stepped through this door, back into your body in the bed.
   Some of your dreams are fluttering around you. Perhaps you have some of them in your pocket or what you think of as a safe container. I picture a glass jar like the ones I used to catch fireflies on summer nights. Or you think you have alreday recirded them in your journal, or captured them with your cell pnone camera.
    But a strange thing happens. As soon as you step through the door, back into an ordinary space, your dreams take flight. They won’t stay in your pockets. The container won’t hold them. They wing away, like butterflies through that door, which closes so fast you can’t prevent them leaving. Your journal for the night is blank and there is nothijng new in your cameral roll. Now the door is sealed tighter than a bank vault and you can’t find a way to open it.
    Try this: as you return from your dreams, imagine that the door to the dream world stays open for a while, because there is a doorstopper. I picture this stopper as a black dog. He’s alive, of course, though he may remain very still while his role is to keep the door from closing. Gradually he will let the door close. This is what must happen, so your waking life is not so full of dream creatures that you can’t tell where you are any more and end up on the couch of the mad-doctors.
     But you have enough time now to catch some of those escaping dreams. You are permitted to go back through that ever-so-slowly closing door, go in a little ways, and grab what you can.
     When I first played this game, I was surprised to see that a flight of steps began at the threshold. When I climbed the steps, I found myself in a pleasant wooded setting, with dreams gathered on the branches or flitting about.
     I invited them to play with me, and some consented to accompany back to the ordinary side of everything, which gets less ordinary in their company.
     As I stepped back through the door, heading for my body where I had parked it on the bed, I patted the head of the black dog who had managed the portal. He had become bigger and even more noble, shifting from the role of doorstopper to that of Gatekeeper. 

Drawing by Robert Moss with digital colorization

Making friends with death and French language through dream telepathy

I dreamed I was struggling to explain something important in my faulty French. I woke, checked online, and read a message (in French) from a friend in France. He reported that he had been trying to help a man who was struggling to understand what he describes as "an absurd experience for a Cartesian spirit like mine."

The "absurd experience" was a dream in which the skeptic met his departed father. His father was eating breakfast, wearing a beautiful blue shirt. In ordinary life, the man did not believe such an encounter was possible. Waking, the Cartesian did not believe that an encounter with the dead was possible, In the dream, he rushed to his father, gave him a big hug, and was deeply moved.

Trying to make sense of what happened, the dreamer exclaimed, " On devrait nous apprendre, quelque part, à apprivoiser nos rêves. We need to be taught how to make friends with our dreams."

Apprivoiser is a very interesting word. It is often translated as "to tame" or "make gentle". Its most famous use is in the beloved story of the Little Prince, who learns from the fox that in order to learn the secret of life he must "tame" the fox in the sense of making friends with something wild.

My friend thought that I might be able to help the man who had dreamed of his dead father. I could hardly refuse this appeal to help after seeing the word apprivoiser. I wrote a book called The Dreamer's Book of the Dead. It explains why contact with the deceased is neither weird nor even unusual, since they are alive somewhere else. They call on us and we visit them, especially in dreams. We discover that healing and forgiveness are always available, across the apparent barrier of death.

When foreign rights to The Dreamer's Book of the Dead were sold, my French publishers came up with this title for the translation: Apprivoiser la mort par le rêve.

I wrote to the Cartesian who had the "absurd" experience of a loving encounter with his father on the Other Side:

"I have seen it so many times: a man encounters his deceased father in a dream. He discovers that to die in this world is to live in another world. This transforms his understanding of what it means to dream, to live and to die."

I wrote this in my faulty French, My dream had rehearsed me for this minutes before. 

Telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance? Maybe all three. The categories we use for "supernormal" phenomena may blur. What is clear is that in dreams our perception reaches beyond our ordinary senses. We send and receive messages. We make visits and receive visitations. We are prepared for challnenges and opportunities that lie ahead. We have easy access to the departed. And any dream is likely to tell us something we do not already know, in the waking mind.

- Journal report from January 6, 2016

Drawing by Robert Moss