A pipe dream

I am strolling with a couple of genial male companions, talking about life. They are well-read and their humor and imagination are in fine working order. One of them is very like Mark Twain.
    We are all smoking pipes. I greatly enjoy the flavor of the mild golden tobacco I am smoking in my pipe. When it burns down, it leaves very fine white ash.
    I wake just after 3:00 AM with the taste of that pipe tobacco still in my mouth. I am surprised at how sweet and pleasing it is.

I haven't smoked a pipe in nearly four decades. I did smoke pipes as a student and junior professor, but found that they tended to leave my mouth dry and my throat sore. Also, when I gave way to temper, I had a habit of chomping down so hard that I snapped the stems.
    I am always interested when senses other than the visual come strongly into play in dreams. My taste buds were very active in this dream. The other interesting thing about my pipe dream is that I rose with clarity and energy to charge ahead with a huge job of work I'd been putting off. I sat down at my desk and labored without pause for nine hours.
    A "pipe dream", in common parlance, is an idle fantasy or vain hope. But I found that a pipe dream provided energy and focus for entirely practical matters. No, I will not take up pipe smoking in ordinary life. But I wouldn't mind smoking some more of that golden tobacco in my dreams, especially if my golden-tongued companions include Mark Twain.

Graphic: René Magritte, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe"

Female mirror guards of an African king

In the African galleries at the Field Museum in Chicago, I came upon two ladies I greatly admire. They are bodyguards of an oba, or king, of Benin, complete with armor and helmets and fierce expressions.
   Their weapons, or rather shields, are what seized my attention. They are holding up mirrors. These are intended to deflect any intended harm from the king and return it to the sender.
    The mirror defense against psychic attack is well-known across the ages, and the mirror is an ancient tool of shamans. The mirror ladies of Benin must have been formidable psychic bodyguards.

Driving Up to 80: a possible end-of-life dream

I drive into an immense walled space. The walls rise for many stories. In front of me is what appears to be a giant speedometer, hanging on the wall like a clock. I know my way forward requires me to drive straight up the wall and that I need to choose a place on the dial to aim for. I think 100 is too much, so I aim nearer 80.

    I floor the gas pedal, racing towards the wall. My car adjusts beautifully, tilting up at the first touch, as if made of rubber. I fly up the wall to a place near the 80 digits on the giant speedometer. So far, so good.
    However, getting down will be a challenge. My car now seems more like a bicycle, and I realize there is no way I can ride it down the wall. I’ll have to lower myself, little by little, gripping a edge I discover. This is the edge of an enormous panel or screen that covers part of the wall. But it crumbles like an old strip of cardboard when I try to use it as a handhold as I go down the wall.
    This doesn’t faze me. I’m willing to let go and drop the whole distance, seemingly hundreds of feet. I know that no serious harm can come to me.

Feelings: mildly curious, philosophical.

Reality: I suspect this was an “end of life” dream, rehearsing me for the last stage of life. 80 or 80-something would seem a better life term than 100, especially if by that time I am losing my edge!

Like a bird on the wire: dreamwork with daily life

Late at night, I'm winding down after leading back-to-back trainings and workshops for ten days straight. I click the monitor for the hotel TV set and channel surf until I see an elderly man with a black hat tipped over his forehead, holding a microphone like a mouth organ. He sings softly

Like a bird on the wire
like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way
to be free.

I am watching Leonard Cohen singing one of his standards on a stage in London. Earnest PBS fund-raisers come on right after the song, offering DVDs and CDs of his "Live in London" concert to those who call in with contributions. I approve of the cause, but they go on for too long before the next song, and I switch off the set.
    However, the songs stays with me. It becomes my default sound track for many days. And I continue to be deeply and strangely moved by the image of the old poet-singer in his black hat and black suit, and the way he held that mike. Like a mouth organ, I wrote. But his cupped hands remind me of something else, of a stunned or wounded bird being gentled back to life. I had seen that happen the day before, when a baby owl flew into the window of a lodge in the greenwoods where I was leading a retreat, and appeared to be dead until a young woman picked it up and cradled it in her hands, crooning. The baby owl sat up, stared at me, and then flew into the limbs of a red cedar.
    As members of my dreaming family were gathering for a private circle I lead, I mentioned how deeply I had been touched by that glimpse of Leonard Cohen.
    "How did you feel?" Sara asked, jumping into the Lightning Dreamwork process we use to discuss dreams, and also life events.
    "I was deeply moved. I feel haunted, but not in an unpleasant way."
    "What do know about the song?"
    "I did some research. I learned that Leonard Cohen started writing this song in 1968 when he was in the midst of a deep depression when he was living on the Greek island of Hydra with his girlfriend. They had just started installing phone lines on the island. He saw a bird on a wire and this gave him his first line. It took him many weeks to complete the song - in a motel back in the United States - but writing it got him through his dark patch.
    "The song is one of his standards, one of his signature compositions. I read that he sings it in every live concert. That's got me thinking about how it may be good for me, too, to have standards I can deliver year after year, together with all the new stuff. I have some stories that are like that, stories I've told many times that people are waiting for me to tell again in my programs."
    Sara commented, "If it were my experience, I would also think about what are our standards in another sense - what is it that has brought us back when we were really down."
    This observation traveled so deep I gasped when full recognition dawned on me.
    "When I was nineteen," I now recalled, "I lost the first girl I really loved, and I wanted to die. I didn't plan to kill myself, because I have always known that there is life after life, so that is not an option. But I was starting to wish myself dead. I could only pull out of that by writing a poem, and the poem was about a bird."
    I can't recite very many of my poems from memory, but my poem of a falling bird, written when I was nineteen, is indelible:

I love the bird with broken wings
it is young and has no pride
has no voice and yet it sings
enchanted by its spiral dive
and has the beak of hooded kings
that broke the leash before they died
cold goshawk at the heart of things
that tears because it is alive
and is remote from all that clings
because the seasons claimed its bride
falling through narrowing iron rings
through talons bared like knives

I don't recall whether there was punctuation in my original text; I think not. Bringing through that poem, however, was vital punctuation in my life, perhaps as vital for me as "Like a Bird on the Wire" was for Leonard Cohen.
    I was grateful to Sara for helping me see the connection. And to another member of our dream circle who seized on the communications motif. Cohen saw his bird on a telephone wire. I said I would honor that element by blogging about the birds, the songs, and the life signatures.
    By the way, Kris Kristofferson says he wants the first stanza of "Like a Bird on the Wire" as his epitaph. Not a bad choice.

Dream detectives and Russian thrilllers

In my dream adventures, I often seem to be a kind of detective, investigating complex intrigues in many times and places. Last weekend, Robert the dream detective was again in Russia, a recurring locale. He was following the threads of a secret operation code-named "Griboyedov". 
    The name was very clear, and I recognized it on waking. It is the name of a colorful nineteenth-century Russian poet and writer who was sent as a diplomat to the court of the Shah of Iran. When Armenian girls escaped from the Shah's harem and took refuge in the Russian embassy, an angry mob stormed the building; Griboyedov died fighting them, sword in hand. He was decapitated by a kebab seller and his head was put on a stick at his killer's market stall. Not sure why his name would be used as a code today, but my mind goes to all those angry mobs attacking U.S. embassies across the Middle East.
     The plot of my Russian thriller thickened and changed in my second cycle of sleep dreams. Now the character my dream self was tracking was a sleeper agent planted in the West in Soviet times. He has gone rogue, unknown to his Russian handlers, and gives them a very nasty surprise. A key name in the second part of this double feature was "Verezhensky".
     This name was quite unknown to me, so I tried it out on a highly literate Russian friend. She gave me this intriguing instant feedback: "Ha! If this were my dream, I would think that Verezhensky is a perfect name for a villain in the story. It is a rare name, so there are fewer chances to get sued by its bearers, it sounds sophisticated - and it is derived from the archaic form of 'to harm'."
     She informs me that Вередить means to do harm, to bother, create mischief or even to cast a bad spell. The modern form is "вредить". There is also an expression "бередить раны", to open old wounds. The name is also related to two villages Verezheny in northern Moldova, near the border with Ukraine. 
     Full disclosure: I wrote spy thrillers, including some with Russian themes and characters, back in the 1980s. It seems that while I follow my present path, there is an alternate Robert who loves reading and writing superior cloak-and-dagger stuff, out there gathering fresh material. 

Notice what's showing through the slip

It's one of the cardinal rules for navigating through synchronicity: notice what's showing through the slip. Following that rule, I found a dream editor, and the wonderful publishing house that has brought five of my books on dreaming and shamanism (so far) to the world.

     Here's the story:

I had just done devoted an hour on my radio show to the theme of “three 'only' things", the notion that we have three wonderful resources for guidance and everyday magic that we tend to dismiss as "only" this or that, by saying (for example) that a dream is "only" a dream, or that a moment when the universe gets personal is "only" coincidence, or that a flash of inspiration is "only" imagination.
    The show went very well, and I had a strong urge to reach out to someone in publishing immediately and propose a book on this theme. When I picked up the phone, I intended to call a senior editor at a major New York publishing house with whom I had worked before. On a sudden instinct, I looked up the number for an editor with a smaller house on the West Coast.     

    Her name was Georgia Hughes, and she was the editorial director for New World Library, an independent publisher based in Novato, California. Up to this point, I had communicated with Georgia only by letter and email. First contact was made when she approached me for an endorsement of a fine book on Celtic tradition, Frank MacEowen’s The Mist-Filled Path. Later I had emailed Georgia to advocate Wanda Burch’s beautiful book She Who Dreams.
    I did recall a dream from many years before in which it seemed that a woman called “Georgia” — who appeared in an American Indian setting but was not herself Native American — was playing a very important and positive role in my publishing life.    I found the number for New World Library. A robot voice guided me through the in-house directory, which eventually revealed Georgia’s extension. I punched it in, expecting to get voicemail. After all, she was the editorial director of the house, and such people tend to be very busy and not often — if ever — available to first-time callers.   
     Georgia answered her own phone and greeted me warmly when I said my name. She spoke to me as if we were old friends, referring to a recent phone conversation.      

    “Excuse me,” I interrupted, puzzled. “We’ve never spoken on the phone, though we did trade some pleasant emails.”     

     “Of course we’ve talked on the phone. You told me about your vacation.”     

     “Do you know who this is?”      

     “Absolutely! You’re Robert Moss. You’re the author we are publishing.”      

     “That is amazing. I’m calling to discuss a book you may want to publish, but in my reality you haven’t even heard about it yet.”      

     There was a short pause on the phone, then Georgia realized she had confused me with another author, Richard Moss.      

     I refused to hear her apology. “There are Freudian slips and then there are cosmic slips, and I love what this slip may be telling us. I’m calling to explore whether you might want to publish a book that involves coincidence — including how we can get guidance from slips and apparent screw-ups. And you start our conversation by telling me you know absolutely who I am and that I am the author you are publishing. What could be cooler than that?”
     We had a lively conversation about dreams and coincidence for half an hour, at the end of which time I promised to send Georgia a formal proposal the next day. I stayed up all night to pull it together. The time is always Now. Could you resist going with a slip like that?

The book that resulted was, of course, The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence and Imagination and I tell this story of the everyday magic by which the author-editor connection was made in the Acknowledgments. I continue to be enormously grateful for Georgia's slip on the phone, and for her extraordinary gifts as editor and friend. 

When the heart of Liberty was torn open

On the anniversary of the tragedy of September 11, 2001, I am remembering a dream that vividly conveyed both the depth of the national trauma and the hope of a gift that might come through the wound.
    A couple of days after the terror attacks, I flew to California to lead a workshop on shamanic dreaming at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. In the opening session, people were eager to share dreams and deep emotions relating to 9/11. We heard a number of reports of possible dream precognition of the event, confirming my impression that mass events throw a shadow before them.
    However, the most powerful and moving dream shared that day was a night vision that came to the dreamer after the tragedy, when she was struggling to understand the terrible enormity of what has taken place in New York.
    She saw the Statue of Liberty as a living goddess. She saw the great goddess savagely attacked, torn open from the crotch to the throat. Sobbing and gagging as she watched the Manhattan sky filling with blood and ashes, the dreamer was amazed to see that the heart of Liberty, now clearly visible, continued to beat. As it went on beating, the heartbeat seemed to go out in all directions, touching people, stirring them to open their own hearts.
    This powerful vision, in its terror and its beauty, is seared into memory, along with the literal scenes of 9/11. It gives hope that our society may come through trauma and sectional hatred to return to the heart.

I'll be talking about the continuing national trauma of 9/11, and about how to heal the trauma of our wounded warriors, with psychotherapist and educator Edward Tick Ph.D, the author of War and the Soul, on my "Way of the Dreamer" radio show today. You can hear the interview live from 12:00-1:00 PM Eastern (9:00-10:00 AM Pacific) via www.healthylife.net, or download from my archive after the broadcast.