Anubis in the backyard

Thirty years ago, because of a white oak and a red-tailed hawk, I moved to a farm in upstate New York on the edge of traditional Mohawk country. I brought with me my two beloved black dogs, "Sag Harbor mutts" - part Labrador, part German shepherd, larger than either breed. When Kipling's ears stood up, I joked that he looked like Anubis.
     On the night before Halloween that year, he got out on the road and was killed by a passing car. Shaking with grief, I wrapped his huge body in an old blanket, got him in the back of the battered Jeep - where he loved to ride - and drove, with a spade and mattock, up to the top of the hill on the north side of the house. I had often come here with Kipling to watch the rising of the moon. Sobbing, I dug a grave for my boy dog just outside the bounds of the human burial ground where the headstones of the first white settlers leaned at crazy angles.
   I felt that something had been cut out of my heart.
   However, I soon noticed that though Kipling's body was in the ground, he was very much still with us. Driving in the Jeep he loved, I once looked in the rearview mirror and saw him standing up, eager to see where we were. "Sit down, Kipling," I growled, before I realized that, in physical terms, my dog could not be there.
    Others saw him too. His presence was so palpable that when my elderly mother-in-law moved to a downtown street-level apartment, I asked Kipling to watch over her for the first few days, until we were able to get her a watchdog of her own. Late the first night, she heard people she considered to be ne'er-do-wells on the sidewalk in front of her door. Then she heard a dog's deep-chested growl, rising to booming barks. Someone outside said, "Forget it, there's a dog." The curious thing, according to Mary, was that the barking seemed to come from inside her apartment.
    My black dog's energy was with me in other ways, too, long after his death. I finally realized I needed to tell him it was okay to move on. I did this with an impromptu ceremony, barbecuing a steak for him on the deck, near the old loganberry tree. When I spoke words of love and releasing, the wind turned as quick as a kid on Rollerblades, and it sent the smoke skirring straight up the hill to Kipling's burial place.
    Then my black dog started coming in my dreams. He appeared to me, running and hunting as he loved to do, on a mysterious island across a river, When I called to him, he turned but appeared not to be able to see me, as if he and his world were covered by some kind of shrink-wrap that was translucent only from my side.
    Things moved along. His role in my dreams became one of a guide and ally, showing me things I needed to see but might not have noticed without his keen senses. Sometime he came out of a hollow tree, slicked with something sticky, like honey or amniotic fluid or liquid amber. He escorted me on journeys across perilous country, sometimes into realms of the human dead.
   I began to understand why the Egyptians chose a black dog or jackal as a psychopomp, or guide of the soul on the roads between the worlds. Garbed in black, he moves easily through the dark places. His keen senses make him an excellent tracker and enable him to sniff out, and dispose of, dead meat and dead energy that the spirit is meant to leave behind. And of all animals the canids are those that are friendliest to humans.
    After Kipling's sister Brandy died peacefully several years later, I dreamed that they were reunited in their spirit bodies and became one. When a black dog appears in my dreams and shamanic journeys now, I always pay very close attention, because I know I am dealing with Anubis in the Backyard. In the ordinary world, the appearance of a friendly back dog, especially under unusual circumstances, is a very good omen for me, road-tested over decades.

Text adapted from Dreamways of the Iroquois: Honoring the Secret Wishes of the Soul by Robert Moss. Published by Destiny Books. 

Photo: with Kipling and his sister Brandy at the farm in 1986.

Pumping Gas with Catherine Deneuve on the road to Conscious Dreaming

It's twenty years since the publication of Conscious Dreaming. I am moved to retell the story of the dream that brought it into the world, and how, through the magic of synchronicity, I saw that dream played out on a movie screen.

We can ask for a dream of guidance on any issue that is facing us, and when we're lucky the dream can take us out of the boxes of the everyday mind's approach to that theme. A big example in my life as both writer and dream teacher was when I was in a quandary about how to move towards publication of Conscious Dreaming, the first of my books on Active Dreaming. 

       My literary agent at that time found a great editor for that book, and she was eager to publish. However, my agent had also asked a great deal of money for the book - startlingly more than is usually paid for anything on the field of dreams. He had asked my opinion about the number he had in mind. The question had made me queasy, because I had gone off on my own to write this book with no commercial expectations; I was simply doing the Work I was called to do.
      Still, authors use agents to advise them on practical things like money, and I felt I could hardly ask my agent to ask for less money from a publisher than he thought he could get. The editor was shocked by the figure proposed; did we have any idea of the sales numbers for even the most popular books on dreams? She suggested a much lower number as the most her house would pay.

       What to do now? Go touting my love-child around the town in hopes of big bucks? Troubled, I asked for dream guidance. I wrote down my intention:

Show me the best way to publish my book on dreaming.

I dreamed I was driving my regular car. I pulled up at a Esso gas station. It looked like something from an earlier time because of the name (Esso, not Exxon) and the vintage pumps and general look of the place.
     I had some trouble filling up at this gas station. First, I overshot the pumps because my engine was overcharging. I had to back up. Next, I had a hard time getting the nozzle in the tank. It took time and patience to insert the nozzle and establish a good flow. The numbers on the gauge went up very slowly. At the end of this procedure, however, I had all the fuel I needed and took to the road in fine good spirits.
    I woke up chuckling over the Freudian content some people would see in this dream. However, I did not feel that there was any sexual reference. Track your dream symbols over time, and you develop a sense of their personal meaning. In my previous dreams, what was going on at gas stations - when not a glimpse of a literal event - had usually spoken of issues concerning money and resources, energy for the life journey.
    My practice is to write myself a one-liner, harvesting the central message of a dream report. This time my dream motto was a two-line summary along the following lines:

We are at the right place, but we are overcharging. We need to back up and use some finesse to get what we need. The numbers won't look good but we'll have all we need.

I called my agent and told him the dream. He chuckled, as I had done, over its possible Freudian implications. Then I read him my summary, as an action plan. I requested him to follow the exact guidance of the dream: to go back to the original editor, use diplomacy and make a deal even if the numbers did not look good at all.
    He called me back to tell me the editor was now offering less than she had been willing to pay before, because we had turned down her original offer and talked of holding an auction. Did I really want to settle for an even smaller number? Absolutely. The dream counsel was clear.
    So the deal was done. After nine months - the average period of a pregnancy - I had a beautiful fresh edition of Conscious Dreaming in my hands and was on my way to San Francisco as part of a book tour arranged by my new publisher. My publicity schedule showed me that I had a date with a columnist for the Contra Costa Times at the Embarcadero cinema. The columnist's signature ploy was to take interesting people to the movies and then use the film as a conversation starter over drinks or dinner at a restaurant. According to the schedule, we were going to watch a film titled I Shot Andy Warhol. I wasn't much interested in the movie selection, but was happy to follow the plan.

    The night before the movie date, in a hotel near Chinatown,  I dreamed I was in a damp northern landscape where a willowy blonde resembling Catherine Deneuve was coming on to me, while people moved about under a forest of umbrellas. I was gallant to the Catherijne Deneuve character, but not especially attracted to her. I had no strong feelings about the dream. It felt a bit like watching a movie. I jotted down a quick report; that is daily practice.
    When I got to the Embarcadero cinema, the columnist told me the schedule had changed. We were now going to watch the re-release of a classic French film, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, starring Catherine Deneuve. It seemed I had previewed the movie the night before. But this was not the most interesting thing that unfolded in the cinema.

       The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is outrageously Freudian. Every time an umbrella goes up or down, or a wine cork is popped, that's about you-know-what. I chuckled at alll the elbow-in-your ribs insinuations.
       In the shaky plot line, the hero of the story, whose name is Guy, or Everyman, has a life dream. He wants to own an Esso gas station. When his life dream is realized, I found myself looking at the circa 1964 Esso gas station from the dream I had incubated many months before. This was  amazing confirmation that I had made the right choice. The dream I incubated led me to make a deal with the publisher who had now sent me to San Francisco to witness my dream played out on the big screen.
      Had I been a Freudian, I might have missed the message of my dream of problems at the gas station. Yet Dr Freud got his moment, through the minds of the script writers of the film in which my dream was played out, nine months after the dream and more than three decades after The Umbrellas of Cherbourg was first released.

An Easter dream: The Millet Seed Sermon

In the very early hours of Easter Sunday, I woke with delight from a dream in which I was lecturing and demonstrating a simple ritual centered on millet seed. It seemed like I was giving a sermon in a light-filled space with honey-colored wood, standing at a very simple pulpit. I spoke of this tiny seed as a symbol of creation, of death and rebirth, and of the growth of the very big from the very small.
   Later that day, at our Easter dinner, I told my Millet Sermon dreamlet to a dear friend who, as a Dominican sister, is quite accustomed to giving as well as hearing sermons. 
   When I said. "I dreamed I gave a sermon on millet seed" she thought I meant that in the dream I gave a sermon while standing on top of a millet seed. Laughing, she described the vivid mental image of me as a tiny figure in a micro-world using a millet seed as my pulpit.
    I loved this mental painting, which transported us into one of my favorite themes involving the multiverse: how we may be living in one of many nested worlds, and that the universe we think is so large may be one in which the furnishings of our lives are the size of millet seeds (or vastly smaller) in proportion to universes that contain ours.

This Easter, I looked over my records of dreams on this special day, and found this report from 2009.

Dreaming Back: Yeats on how the dead get their stories straight

To understand the important things and live that knowledge, we need poetic clarity. When I was writing my Dreamer's Book of the Dead, I turned for that often to one of my favorite dead poets, W.B. Yeats.

     Yeats’s fullest account of sleep and dream experience is in the 1925 edition of A Vision; unfortunately he dropped much of this in the greatly revised edition of 1937, where he substitutes an interesting but second-hand description of states of consciousness borrowed from an exposition of the Upanishads: “In the waking state the man uses all his faculties and is confronted by a real world, but the waking state is in reality a dream condition.” Beyond waking and dream, in this view, is dreamless sleep, in which the sleeper “desires no desires and sees no dream”, losing contact with desire. “Man passes from waking through dreaming to dreamless sleep every night and when he dies.”

     The living and the dead inhabit all three worlds, and meet in the intermediate dream state. The dreams of the living are also the work of the dead, who use the living person to complete their life reviews – and, we might add, as vehicles to deal with unfinished business, satisfy appetites and desires and agendas they have not released, and for continuing enjoyment of the life of the senses.

     Yeats describes an early phase in the after-death transitions that he calls Dreaming Back.

In the Dreaming Back the Spirit is compelled to live over and over again all the events that had most moved it; there can be nothing new, but the old events stand forth in a light which is dim or bright according to the intensity of the passion which accompanied them. 

During this phase the “Husk” may or may not be discarded. His use of this term is blurry; sometimes he appears to be describing the dense energy body the Hawaiians call the “sticky self”, at other times an astral vehicle. Despite the confusions, Yeats is very clear on one point: "If the Husk…persist, the Spirit still continues to feel pleasure and pain, remains a fading distortion of living man, perhaps a dangerous succuba or incubus, living through the senses or nerves of others." This may be intentional persistence, which some have called avoidance of the “second death”

If there has been great animal egotism, heightened by some moment of tragedy, the Husk may persist for centuries, recalled into a sort of life, and united to its Spirit, at some anniversary, or by some unusually susceptible person or persons connected with its past life…    If death has been violent or tragic the Spirit may cling to the Passionate Body for generations. A gambler killed in a brawl may demand his money, a man who believed that death ends all may see himself as a decaying corpse. 

     "Where the soul has great intensity and where those consequences affected great numbers”, the Dreaming Back may last, with diminishing pain and joy, for centuries. Yeats pictures souls in this state tapping into the minds of the living, and reading letters and books through their eyes. With the help of “teaching spirits” a soul in this phase “may not merely dream through the consequences of its acts but amend them, bringing this or that to the attention of the living”

    During this phase the dead often appear to the living in dreams. “It is from the Dreaming Back of the dead…that we get the imagery of ordinary sleep. Much of a dream’s confusion comes from the fact that the image belongs to some unknown person, whereas emotion, names, language belong to us alone.”

     Following Eastern thought, Yeats sometimes seems to suggest in his later work that the dead we encounter in dreams are those who are still undergoing purification or re-education. But he accepts that the living also have contact with those who are on higher level, as his own life experiences amply confirmed. The idea of the Fourth State, turiya comes in (from the Mandukya Upanishad). In the state, reached through contemplation and wakefulness, “the soul is united with the blessed dead”.

-

Text adapted from The Dreamer's Book of the Dead by Robert Moss. Published by Destiny Books.

Art: "Yeats in the Magic Cottage" by RM.

A Victorian Ghost Hunter Reports from the Other Side

I love the Victorian ghost hunters, especially F.W.H. Myers, W.T. Stead, William James and other founders and luminaries of the Society for Psychical Research. They were passionately dedicated to producing evidence of the survival of consciousness after physical death that would meet the scientific standards of their day. They attended séances and tested mediums, bringing their inner skeptics with them while keeping their eyes on the prize: evidence that the soul has a life beyond the body. In that cause, the ghosts they tracked were not only spirits of the deceased but “phantasms of the living”, a phrase that became the title of a hefty study of the mobility of consciousness and paranormal phenomena including poltergeist activity and sightings of doppelgangers.
    Stead was also a social reformer and a very active editor and reporter, dubbed “the first investigative journalist” because of his role in exposing scandals that lifted the tablecloths from the dirty legs of Victorian society. He developed considerable personal psychic powers of the kind that Myers called "supernormal". He claimed to communicate with his assistant by telepathy. For five years he practiced channeled writing in front of invited groups at his home in Wimbledon, bringing through a description of life on the Other Side by a young woman friend, Julia Ames, after her early death.
 

Stead was among the passengers on the Titanic, and drowned when the supposedly unsinkable luxury cruise ship hit an iceberg in 1912. One of the curious facts of his life is that twenty years earlier, Stead had published a short story in which a ship called the Majestic hits an iceberg. Stead called the captain of the Majestic Smith; the Titanic was commanded by a Captain Smith. This seems to have been a case of precognitive fiction, though Stead evidently failed to make the connection when he boarded the doomed ship.
    Stead promised family and friends that after he died, he would endeavor to communicate from the other side with first-hand information about what life is like there. Stead – or an intelligence operating in his name – succeeded brilliantly in a beautiful little book called The Blue Island: Experiences of a New Arrival Beyond the Veil. It was channeled by male mediums in the presence of Stead’s daughter, who provided the psychic link to her father.

      Stead begins his account, in a brisk, no-nonsense way, by describing what it’s like to be a new arrival on the other side. The beginning was choppy – first hundreds of bodies in the water, then hundreds of souls being carried through the air, some very reluctantly, still fighting and struggling to hold onto their physical possessions.  “We seemed to rise vertically into the air at terrific speed.”  They travel for an uncertain length of time and come to a place of “brightness” where they are received by old friends and relations. At first everything appears as “physical and quite as material” as on earth. 

     Stead’s father and an old friend welcome him and show him around. “It was like nothing else so much as merely arriving in a foreign country and having a chum to go around with.”

    The life just passed now seems very different, as if fifty years have whizzed by. No sense of grief at this stage.

    There are a couple of anomalies. One is that Stead’s father looks much younger than he did at the time of his death. Another is the quality of the light that suffuses everything. It is “a light shade of a deep blue.” 

    Stead and his companions walk along a beautiful deserted beach to a huge domed building whose interior is a lovely shade of blue. And Stead is seized with the desire to write again. His father explains over a delicious lunch that Stead realizes he does not actually need that this building is a way station, “a temporary rest house” – one of many – constructed to resemble earth conditions and cushion the adjustment to the other side. In this phase, individuals are able to engage or indulge in whatever activities please them, since “the chief work on this island is to get rid of unhappiness at parting from earth”. You can swim or read or ride. After a while, activities that are rooted in physical rather than mental or creative experience will begin to pall, but creative individuals and thinkers will find tremendous opportunities opening to them.

    In this phase, life is amazingly similar to life on earth. “We are only a very little way from earth, and consequently up to this time we have not thrown off earth ideas.”  For example, people lie down to “sleep” out of habit, even though sleep is no longer required in this permanent dream state. And they continue to dress and occupy bodily forms resembling those on earth. It’s a phase of gradually shedding old habits and addictions and yearnings for physical life.

    When an individual has reached the point of actively desiring new learning and growth, “he will be drawn like a piece of steel to a magnet, into contact with this or that house or organization dealing with the subject on which he desires knowledge.” Now the departed person is going to school – perhaps a whole succession of schools.

   One of the things you get to learn here your thoughts are actions and “accomplished things” here. You’ll do far better if you arrived with some prior experience of monitoring the contents of your mind and choosing the thoughts to which you gave energy and attention. “There are so many thoughts possible, and all of them are registered here.” 

    Not surprisingly, given Stead’s vigorous interest in communication between the living and the dead while he was among the living, it does not take him long to start checking out communications options on the other side. This produces one of the most interesting sections of his afterlife tour. He cautions that there is no sense of time as it is experienced on earth, so the departed may not understand that they have been on the other side for years or decades – or alternatively only for hours or days – when they start communicating with survivors.

    Stead describes a communications center, “an amazingly well organized and businesslike place” constantly filled with ex-physicals. “Those who had on earth believed and those who had not, came to try and wire a message home.” The ones who feel a “heart call” always get priority. When Stead’s turn came, he was surprised that there was no gee-whiz equipment, “all and only the human element”. A “man of some importance” explains the system to him.

They had a system of travelers, whose work was very close to physical earth. They had the power of sensing people who could and would be used for this work at the other end. 

    Stead, ever the intrepid correspondent, tries various ways to get his messages back to survivors and file his stories. In his first efforts to get through, he has a helper. They enter a room that seems to have walls made of muslin. With the aid of the “official”, Stead discovered he can see and move through these curtain walls. Stead sees and hears several people gathered for a séance. The official teaches him that he can make his presence known by visualizing himself among these people in a physical form, and then imagine that a strong light is cast over him. He fails on his first try. But he practices and practices until he makes an impression, and some of the sitters see him. Then he practices repeating a message until one of the sensitives picks it up and says it out loud.

    He discusses how the living can reach to the departed in a similar way. You concentrate on an individual in the spirit world, and if you put enough energy into that thought, the individual you have in mind will feel you and you may be able to open a communications channel. “We are practically always able to come in close contact with the person who is thinking of us.”

Anyone who sits for a moment and allows his mind to dwell on some dear one who has “died” will actually draw the spirit of that person to himself. He may be conscious or unconscious of the presence, but the presence is there.

    The unknowing receiver may pick up a tremendous flow of inspiration and information he may think is his own, even while dazzled by the quantity and quality of what is streaming in.

    He describes the sadness of the departed who find that their survivors refuse to understand that they are alive. They will break off efforts to communicate if their survivors persist in regarding them only as dead – and wait for their loved ones to join them.

     There are lands beyond the Blue Island – travel to them is like traveling among the stars. These are the Real World; the Blue Island is a transient environment, a place of acclimatization. In the world beyond it, people create homes or palaces for themselves according to taste – but can lose them if they don’t progress.

      One stage that cannot be avoided is the life review. “Each one is interviewed by one of the Advanced Spirit Instructors and the whole record of earth is discussed and analyzed”. An individual may now be required to live for a time in renewed contact with people on the earth plane “in order, by influence, to make good for our past misdoings” 

    In a later progression, the spirit enters what Stead calls the Return Or Stay Sphere where reincarnation may become an option. We have greater or lesser degrees of choice in such matters according to how successful (or otherwise) we have been in cleansing ourselves of guilt and fear and in developing into a deeper understanding of what all of this is about – which is love and courage and growth and creation.

Part of this article is adapted from The Dreamer's Book of the Dead by Robert Moss. Published by Destiny Books.

What the bleep the body knows before the mind does

A phenomenon that has long intrigued me is how the body sometimes seems to “know” about a future event and responds as if that event has already taken place. This is sometimes called presentiment. In my last post here, I described how I seemed to experience presentiment in relation to the horrific terror attacks in Brussels while changing planes at Brussels airport a month earlier.
     Here I will start with a more benign example, one for which there is also solid evidence, as recorded during a visit to my doctor's office. Here presentiment amounts to experiencing anticipatory symptoms.

     I went to my doctor’s office for an annual physical. A new medical assistant took my blood pressure to get us started. Though she did not faint, but my blood pressure was much higher than normal in the initial reading, much higher even than it had been when I had hobbled into that office two months before with a serious knee injury that had not yet been diagnosed.

    I was startled by the blood pressure reading, since I was in excellent spirits and feeling no anxiety about this visit to the doctor.

    “What do you want to do next?” the assistant asked. “The bloodwork or the EKG?”

“Let’s go for the blood and get a little color.” We briefly discussed how people react to having blood drawn. Personally, I have never minded the needle or the sight of the blood.

     The assistant found the right place and stuck a needle in my left arm. As she extracted the needle after filling the syringe, she started a gusher. I had never seen anything like it in all my years of giving blood or blood specimens. In an instant, my whole left arm was covered in blood, and blood was spattered all over my freshly laundered linen pants.

     The assistant squealed and rushed about, trying to stop the blood flow at the same time as she attempted to treat my pants with hydrogen peroxide.

     “You’re upset!” she panted. The odd thing was that I really wasn't upset at all. I responded quite philosophically, as if the incident had taken place in the past, even as the blood was still spurting and spattering.

     When things were under control, and she calmed down, I asked her to check my blood pressure again. “I want to test a hypothesis,” I told her. “There’s hard laboratory research that suggests that subjects can exhibit physical responses to events before the actual events take place. I want to check whether the spike in my blood pressure came about because - in some way - my body knew what was going to happen and had an anticipatory response.”

     She gaped at me, her eyebrows climbing her forehead, but she obliged.

     She gasped when she gave me the new reading after releasing the pressure cuff. The first number had dropped by fifteen points; the second number had dropped by thirty points. She was amazed because she thought that after the crazy turmoil of the blood gusher, my readings should have gone up, not down.

    “Not if my body knew and reacted to what was going to happen ahead of time,” I suggested quietly.

     When the doctor - a careful, conservative practitioner - came in and heard the data, he was quite impressed. “Maybe there's something in that theory,” he allowed. He decided to check my blood pressure himself. The numbers dropped even lower.

     To my mind, this is pretty persuasive first-hand evidence of the possibility that the body, through its own ways of knowing, may anticipate and respond to an event that has not yet taken place.

     In my book Dreaming True I call this “The White Queen Gambit.” As you may remember, in Through the Looking-Glass the White Queen screams before she pricks her finger. When her brooch-pin subsequently flies open and she does prick her finger, she doesn’t need to scream. “I’ve done all the screaming already,” says the Queen. “What would be the good of having it all over again?”

     It seems that the body, or the energy field around it, has intricate antennae that are constantly scanning for changes that will affect it. Most of us know about this from everyday experience. You have a “gut feeling” about something. You feet a sense of dread or elation, a lifting of the heart or a churning in the stomach that has no evident explanation until a subsequent event takes place that would cause such physical reactions. When the event catches up with the anticipatory symptoms, you and your body may be quite calm and detached – because you’ve done the screaming or the hyperventilating already.

     Scientific research into this phenomenon, sometimes described as “time-reversed interference”, has been going on since the 1990s. Dean Radin ran tests in a University of Nevada lab at Las Vegas that involved showing subjects a series of photographs on a screen that were calculated to produce vividly contrasting somatic reactions, read by scanning heartbeat, perspiration, and so on. A photo of a peaceful rustic scene might be followed by hard porno or a picture of a gruesome crime scene. The very interesting finding was that many times subjects had the physical reactions a certain picture would be expected to produce moments before the image came up on the screen.

    I told the story of my gusher in the doctor’s office to Larry Dossey MD, one of the trailblazers for mind-body medicine in America, and asked him what he thought of my theory that the spike in my blood pressure was an anticipatory symptom. Dossey commented, “I think your interpretation is right on target.  People need to know that these ‘presentiment’ effects are not just laboratory curiosities but are phenomena that get played out in real life zillions of times, under our very noses, quietly, often without our realizing they’re happening.”

    Maybe we can all do a little better if we let our bodies tell us what’s going down. This is a case of “what the bleep we know” that we don’t usually recognize that we know. In my book Sidewalk Oracles I suggest rules for playing the White Queen Gambit. Here they are:

GAME RULES FOR PLAYING THE WHITE QUEEN GAMBIT

1.Pay attention to any sudden change in what you feel in your body.
2.Self-scan to check the source of the shift. If it does not seem to reflect the current state of your body or your feelings, ask whether it is possible that your body’s sensors are picking up something that is happening at a distance, in space or time. You may be experiencing presentiment. Alternatively, you could be experiencing telepathy, which literally means “fellow-feeling at a distance.”
3. Check for subsequent events or discoveries that may reflect that shift in your body.
4. Develop a personal code for signals of this kind. For example, you may find that a certain kind of sudden, sharp and brief pain in the head is a message that someone is trying to contact you. Or you may notice when you smell a certain aroma that is not emanating from your immediate environment, that is a signal that someone at a distance who is connected to you has opened a link. Notice exactly how your body acts in anticipation of a subsequent physical event.
5. Log your findings in your journal. 

Game rules adapted from Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Feeling for Brussels: presentiment and prayer

I've been hearing from people who seem to have dreamed the horror in Brussels at the time of the tragedy, or before it. F.W.H. Myers, the Victorian researcher who coined the word "telepathy", defined it as "fellow-feeling at a distance". As humans, we are connected to all things human and it is natural that some of us will dream and sense what others are suffering, even half a world away, especially if we have a personal connection to the places and people involved. Mass events throw a shadow before them that touches many, in dreams and in other ways.   
      Since the news of the terrible events in Brussels, I have been reflecting on my own strange experiences at Brussels airport last month, when I was changing planes. I was overwhelmed by horrible feelings of dread. As I walked to my departure gate, I started sweating more violently than ever before in my life. I told a friend afterwards that I was "sweating bullets". I slumped into a seat feeling that the world was about to end.I found my imagination lurching into a vivid fantasy of what it would mean to die here, in transit and in a state of confusion, and what it might take to make the right connection after death.   
     I am not a nervous flyer, and I catch many planes every month, generally relaxed and open to what the adventures may bring. I am now inclined to think that my terrible feelings and sensations at Brussels airport were an example of presentiment - of knowing something in the body before the event takes place that might cause those somatic conditions. And that my fantasy may have been advance knowledge of the immediate after-death condition of some of those who suffered untimely deaths. I will pray for them to find the right guides and the right paths on the Other Side.