When the body refuses the soul’s assignment

Edward Plunkett, known in society and to his vast reading audience as Lord Dunsany, was one of the masters of fantasy, producing more than sixty books in his lifetime at high speed, his publishers generally content to print the first drafts that he sent them exactly as they came in. He was an Anglo-Irish gentleman of the old school, a hunter, the chess and pistol-shooting champion of Ireland.  But while he rode his fields, his mind was forever beyond the fields we know, in Elfland or in a Carcassonne of the imaginal realm, where a witch queen, terrible in her beauty

Swims in a marble bath through whose deeps a rive tumbles, or lies all morning on the edge of it to dry slowly in the sun, and watches the heaving river trouble the deeps of the bath. It flows through the caverns of earth for further than she knows and coming to light in the witch’s bath goes down through the earth again to its own peculiar sea….
     When there is blood in the bath she knows there is war in the mountains.

Somewhere between here and Elfland, Lord Dunsany came by an unhappy body engaged in a painful dialogue with its soul. “The Unhappy Body” (his title for the tale) is tired; all it wants is to sleep. The soul will not allow it to rest because it has an urgent assignment for this body. Everywhere, the soul explains,

People’s dreams are wandering afield, they pass the seas and mountains of faery, threading the intricate passes led by their souls; they come to golden temples a-ring with a thousand bells; they pass up steep streets lit by paper lanterns, where the doors are green and small; they know their way to witches’ chambers and castles of enchantment; they know the spell that brings them to the causeway along the ivory mountains – on one side looking downward they behold the fields of their youth and on the other lie the radiant plains of the future.

But people forget their dreams. From their dream awakenings, they go back to sleep, forgetting the realms of magic and enchantment, and the causeway from which they can see into past and future. The soul’s urgent assignment for the body is: “Arise and write down what the people dream.”

     The body asks what reward it will receive for doing this. When told there is no reward, the body declares, “Then I shall sleep.” 

     But the soul rouses the body with a song, and wearily the body takes up a pen and starts recording what the soul wants it to preserve: a vision of dreamers rising above the roar and distraction of the city to a shimmering mountain where they board the “galleons of dreams” and sail through the skies in their chosen directions. The soul goes on telling the dreams of all these travelers. But the body is tired and mutinous; it cries out for sleep.

     “You shall have centuries of sleep,” the soul tells it, “but you must not sleep, for I have seen deep meadows with purple flowers flaming tall and strange above the brilliant grass, and herds of pure while unicorns…I will sing that song to you, and you shall write it down.”

    The body protests, Give me one night’s rest.

    Go on and rest, the soul at last responds, in disgust. “I am tired of you. I am off.”

    The soul flies away. The undertakers come and lay the body in the earth. The wraiths of the dead come at midnight to congratulate the body on its happy estate. “Now I can rest,” says the body.

Ursula LeGuin once said that Lord Dunsany is the worst temptation for the novice writer of fantasy, and it must be conceded that his prose can be overly rich and faery-infused. Yet A Dreamer’s Tales, where you will find "The Unhappy Body", is a book for the ages, and reminds us that in fantasy we can sometimes the truth of our condition more clearly than in the roar of the city.

Lord Dunsany, A Dreamer’s Tales [1910] reprint: Holicong, PA: Wildside Press, 2002

Graphics: Top, Sidney Sime illustration for A Dreamer's Tales; Bottom, Portrait of Lord Dunsany by Serge Ivanoff (1953).

Where Dreamers Have a Roving Eye

The Mehinaku of Amazonian Brazil recognize three souls in each person - a shadow soul, a sweat soul and an eye soul - that operate in different ways in life and have different fortunes after death. The eye soul is especially active in dreaming. It resides within the iris of the eye. While the body is sleeping, it goes out and about on excursions, meets other people, living and dead, and steps across time as well as space. After death, it goes to a "sky place".

     For this indigenous dreaming tradition, a dream is "the individual's awareness of the nocturnal wanderings of his eye soul. The dream experience is therefore ego-alien, since the eye soul is detachable and its nightly expeditions are outside the control of the individual; at the same time, however, it is ego-involving, since the eye soul is a perfect replica of the individual and its adventures are psychologically real.” [1]

    The eye soul, in its wanderings,may operate quite independently from the ordinary self. A villager may recount its adventures in the third person, like an observer in a movie theater. "My soul walked to a village beyond the river and met a beautiful white woman he did not trust."

    The Mehinaku share their nocturnal adventures as soon as they return, swinging towards each other in their hammocks. They are polyphasic sleepers, rising several times during the night to feed the wood fires that are their only source of heat - and because they have stories to tell.

1. Thomas Gregor, "'Far, Far Away My Shadow Wandered' The Dream Symbolism and Dream Theories of the Mehinaku Indians of Brazil" in American Ethnologist Vol. 8, No. 4 (November, 1981) 717

Send yourself a postcard from inside a dream

Our dream memories are often like postcards or snapshots from a journey. We have an image or two from an adventure that goes far beyond what we remember. You look at a postcard from your trip to Paris and there is so much it does not contain, starting with the smell of the morning coffee and croissants, though dwelling with the image may start to bring back more out of memory.

      Suppose we could consciously send ourselves postcards while we are still traveling in a dream country? Maybe that would help us to remember more of the dream excursion, and to home in on the most important elements in our waking mind.

      This interesting idea comes from Dr Haines Ely, the gifted and civilized host of the "Earth Mysteries" radio show on KVMR out of Nevada City, California. I enjoyed a very lively and agreeable hour's conversation on the show a few years ago, when Haines mentioned that he is often lucid in his dreams, but found himself frequently frustrated because his dreams still tended to slip away when he got out of bed. He developed the practice of taking photographs inside his dreams, which he then mails to himself as postcards while he is still in a dream country. He does all of this meticulously, as you would do it in an ordinary situation: aim the camera, focus, click the shutter, print, write the address, stamp, put in a mailbox.

     Sometimes Haines finds that despite this recourse, his dreams still dissolve when he gets up in the morning. But then the postcard image will pop up on his inner screen later in the day, as if the mailman has just delivered it.

     Listening to Haines, I realized I have often done something like this in a less meticulous way. I find myself, recurringly, wanting to take a snapshot of something inside a dream so I can keep that image and show it to other people. I generally try to use my phone to do this,as in regular life. Sometimes my dream phone camera works, sometimes it does very strange things.

     In a dream soon after the radio show, I was being royally entertained by a talking head. It was the head of a New York publisher I used to know, long gone from this world, a lovely man with whom I used to have lunch in Murray Hill. The head was on the ground, nicely balanced on the gravel of a drive or courtyard, and my deceased friend was cracking us up with a series of wicked one-liners about politics and religion.
     I wanted to take his photograph to show to friends but before I could take the picture, I was whisked away onto a movie set. The film starred Clark Gable and Rita Hayworth, and I was right there with them when the soundtrack started playing "Some Enchanted Evening". I didn't send myself a postcard from inside this dream, but I may just possibly have managed to send myself a video clip.

A Brief History of Soul Flight

The science of dream travel is ancient: in the evolution of our species, it probably predates speech and may have helped to generate language. Dream travel has a fascinating pedigree.

In many human cultures the most profound insights into the nature of the divine and the fate of the soul after physical death have been attributed to ecstatic journeys beyond the body in waking dream or vision. 

    In most human cultures, the existence of other worlds inhabited by gods, daimons, and spirits of the departed has been accepted as simple fact, a fact of extraordinary importance. Visiting these other worlds was a top priority for our ancestors, as it still is wherever there is living spirituality. From the travel reports of the boldest and most successful journeyers between the worlds, mythologies and religions are born. Soul journeying was understood to be the key to orders of reality, hidden from the five physical senses, that are no less “real” than ordinary reality and may be more so.

     For the Jivaro people of South America, everyday life is regarded as “false.” “It is firmly believed the truth about causality is to be found by entering the supernatural world, or what the Jivaro view as the ‘real’ world, for they feel that the events which take place within it are the basis for many of the surface manifestation and mysteries of daily life.”

Among dreaming peoples, the reality of the soul journey and the objective, factual nature of the travelogues brought back are not in doubt. The travel reports will be compared with those of previous explorers.

    Shamans ride their drums to the Upper, Middle and Lower Worlds to gain access to sources of insight and healing, to commune with the spirits and rescue lost souls. Aboriginal spirit men journey to the Sky World, climbing a magic cord projected from their own energy bodies, at the solar plexus or the tip of the penis.

    Before compass and sextant, before charts, the great open-sea navigators guided their shipmates across the oceans by fine attunement to the patterns of waves and wind and stars and by the ability to scout ahead and consult a spiritual pilot through dream travel. Traditional navigators in the Indian Ocean reputedly had the power to travel ahead of their vessels in the form of seabirds or flying fish to set a safe course. The shipmakers and sea captains of the Bugis of Sulawesi — who once had a fearsome reputation as pirates — still journey to the spirits for guidance on the right trees and natural materials to use in the construction of their prahus as well as on their ocean crossings.

    The ancient Taoist masters were known as the feathered sages because of their reputed power of flight, which sometimes involved shape-shifting into the form of cranes.

In ancient Greece, shaman-philosophers were renowned for their ability to travel outside the body, appear in two or more locations at the same time, and commune with their colleagues. The Pythagoreans taught and practiced soul travel and believed that spiritual masters born centuries apart could communicate by this means.

    The ability to project consciousness beyond the physical body, to fold space-time, influence events at a distance, and project a double are all recognized siddhis — or special powers — of advanced spiritual practitioners in Eastern traditions. Vedic literature from India is full of vivid accounts of soul-flight by humans and beings-other-than-human. In the Mahabharata, the dream-soul, or suksma atman, is described as journeying outside the body while its owner sleeps. It knows pleasure and pain, just as in waking life. It travels on “fine roads” through zones that correspond to the senses, the wind, the ether, toward the higher realms of spirit.

    Shankaracharya, the ascetic exponent of Advaita Vedanta, practiced soul-flight and the projection of consciousness to another body. Challenged to a debate on sex — a subject of which he was woefully ignorant at the time — he is said to have left his body in a cave under the guard of his followers while he borrowed the body of a dying king, whose courtesans schooled him in all the arts of the Kama Sutra.

    Soul travel was well understood in the Sacred Earth traditions of Europe, from the earliest times until the murderous repression associated with the witch craze. One of the most fascinating accounts is Carlo Ginzburg’s The Night Battles, a monograph on the Benandanti, or “good-farers” of the Friuli region, who journeyed to defend the health of the community and the crops.

    Soul journeying is also central to Christian spirituality. In II Corinthians, Paul refers to his own soul journey when he speaks of “a man who was caught up into the third heaven, whether in the body or out of the body I know not.” Saint Columba, the founder of the great monastery at Iona, regularly traveled outside his body to scout developments at a distance.

Saint Anthony of Padua was renowned for his ability to travel outside the body and appear in two places at once. There are reports of him preaching in two churches at the same time.

    In Jewish tradition, the story of Elijah’s chariot of fire is the model for visionary ascent to higher realms. Among the Kabbalists, soul-flight to the higher planes was held to be the reward for long years of study and solitary meditation. A key element in Kabbalist meditation (hitboded) was the chanting and correct vibration of sacred texts. Rabbi Isaac Luria (1534–72) recited phrases from the Zohar over and over, as Eastern meditators use their mantras. He entered an altered state in which he received visitations from spiritual teachers — notably Elijah — and could travel freely outside the body, to visit “heavenly academies.”

    Soul-flight is not an art reserved for yogis, mystics, and shamans. The projection of consciousness by “remote viewing” or “ traveling clairvoyance” has been central to the history of warfare. Go back through the old battle sagas and you will find tales of warrior shamans who shape-shifted to spy out enemy positions. The druid MacRoth, in the Irish epic the Tain, performs this service for his royal patron, flying over the enemy ranks in the shape of a black warbird. Native American sorcerers were employed by both the French and the English to carry out similar scouts during the French and Indian War.

    One of the most famous soul journeyers in European history was the Swedish scientist Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), the son of a Lutheran bishop. He was in his fifties when powerful visitations by the spirits transformed his life; he then embarked on repeated journeys into their realms. He encountered angels who escorted him on guided tours of many kinds of heavens and hells..

    It is not surprising that the dream explorer who coined the term lucid dreaming was another 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.” He later wrote a novel, The Bride of Dreams, about dream travel outside the body.

    Frequent flier Robert Monroe asserted with reason that “a controlled out-of-body experience is the most efficient means we know to gather Knowns to create a Different Overview” — a new definition of reality.

Text adapted from Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and Life beyond Death by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.


Drawing: "Storm Bird Carries Me Home" by Robert Moss

From the Place between Sleep and Awake

Quite tired after recent travels and exertions, I spent many more hours than usual in bed. The Parade of Faces appeared almost whenever I closed my eyes: face after face of strangers, popping up one by one, or in crowds. I knew that some of these people were “dead”, while others were fellow dream travelers. Some of the street scenes were ones I may encounter in the future. Most of the strangers seemed unaware of my presence, but a few looked at me directly.

    I drifted in and out of dreams, often lucid, in which I found myself in two dozen social situations I remember with people I don't know in ordinary reality, though some of the locales are familiar - the Mermaid Cove, the Winter Cave of the Dreaming Bear, the scholar city of Anamnesis, London in World War II, various lecture halls - are familiar from other dreams and journeys. I tried not to control any of this, just to stay present to scenes that intrigued me. The traveling self may be in many more places in the multiverse than we are aware of in the everyday mind.

Note on Recording Practice

I make a practice of keeping a log of HG (hypnagogic) experiences as well as of dreams and experiences of synchronicity. My feelings will guide me on what details matter, and I certainly do not attempt to record everything I remember from dreams and liminal states, just as I don't write down what I ate for breakfast after waking or how many times my dog relieved himself in the park. A map as big as a country is no longer a map, as in the Borges story.
    In any event, there are obvious limits to how much even the most dedicated dream journal-keeper can bring back from a night in the multiverse. No doubt everything is recorded somewhere - more likely in nonlocal mind than the basement of the personal subconscious - but since we can't yet Google our dreams, it is essential (and can be wonderful creative fun) to develop searchable logs over time. They become the most important scientific data (in the sense of state-specific science, adequate to the field under investigation) in this area that we will ever attain. 

    On some days, my inner guidance is to write down whatever I remember as soon as possible, and let further writing and pattern recognition emerge as I do that. This works really well when I start by drawing something from the dream. On other days, my guidance is to forego journaling altogether in favor of simply writing with the energy and elements my dreams and HG experiences have given me.
    Some of the things that happen in Dreamland and stay in Dreamland have enduring effects even when we are amnesiac about what happened. 

Drawing: "Faces at the Threshold" by Robert Moss

The Moon and the numen

I come again,in a thick bilingual edition of Jorge Luis Borges' Selected Poems, to his long ode to the Moon where he explains why it will always escape the nets of the poets. I am thrilled again by this verse:

Siempre se pierde lo esencial. Es una
Ley de toda palabra sobre el numen.
No la sabrá eludir este resumen
De mi large comercia con la luna. 

In Alan S. Trueblood’s translation this becomes:

The essential thing is what we always miss.
From this law no one will be immune
nor will this account be an exception,
of my protracted dealings with the Moon. [1]

I am not satisfied with the translation. It vanishes the critical word"numen", leaving not even a synonym,  thus fulfilling Borges’ law! And how essential this word “numen” is. It is indeed quite central to our understanding within Western tradition of the interplay of the sacred and the profane. Partly inspired by Rudolf Otto, Jung and Eliade both sought to trace the operations of synchronicity through the game of hide-and-seek played by the numinous.

    The word numen, naturally, comes from the Romans. It is used to mean the presence or the will of a sacred power. Cicero uses the term to signify the "active power" of a god. De divinatione 1.20  Ovid has  Numen inest (Fasti (III, 296)  meaning “there is a god (or spirit) here.” Its literal meaning is a “nod”, or “given the nod”.

    Nil sine numine is the state motto of Colorado. “Not without the numen”. It derives from Virgil: non haec sine numine devum eveniunt (“these things do not come to pass without the will of Heaven”) from Aeneid(II, 777).

    So, back to the Borges verse. Try this:

We always lose the essential when we try
to find words to describe sacred power.
I don’t know how to escape this law
in reporting my long engagement with the moon.

And on to Rudolf Otto, who belied his Prussian appearance – Kaiser moustache, high-collared tunic, ramrod bearing – as a deep student of mystical experience. 

He insists (as I am doing in my account of the experience of synchronicity) that you cannot be taught the concept of the numinous; you must feel it. He writes in  The Idea of the Holy that the numen “cannot, strictly speaking, be taught, it can only be evoked, awakened in the mid; as everything that comes ‘of the spirit’ must be awakened.”  “It cannot be ‘taught’, it must be ‘awakened’ from the spirit….In religion there is very much that can be taught…What is incapable of being so handed down is this numinous basis and background of religion, which can only be induced, incited, and aroused.” We require “a penetrative imaginative sympathy.” [2]

    His effort is to convey “the feeling which remains when the concept fails, and to introduce a terminology which is not any the more loose or indeterminate for have necessarily to make use of symbols.” He adds, The numinous is felt as objective and outside the self” 

    The feeling is of mystery edged with shudders. Mysterium tremendum. Feelings may span the spectrum from a gentle tide, through sudden eruption with spasms and convulsions, to “the strangest excitements” to “wild and demonic forms” to “hushed, trembling and speechless humility of the creature in the presence of – whom or what? In the presence of that which is a mystery inexpressible and above all creatures.”

    Sophocles wrote of the experience of awe in the presence of the numen in Antigone, in a line which Otto renders as

Much there is that is weird; but nought is weirder than man. 40

He also quotes Goethe’s Faust (Part II, Act 1, scene v):

Das Schaudern ist der Menschheit bestes Teil,
Wie auch die Welt ihm das Gefühl verteuere,
Ergriffen fuhlt tief das Ungeheuere.

Awe is the best of man; however the world’s
misprizing of the feeling would prevent us,
Deeply we feel, once gripped, the weird Portentous.  

        

My free rendition:

Shuddering is the best part of being human
though the world can stifle our feelings

we are gripped in our depths by something vast and uncanny

1. Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems ed. Alexander Coleman (New York: Penguin Books, 2000) 108

2. Ruldolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational. Translated by John W, Harvey. (London: Oxford University Press, 1952) 60.

Drawing: "Moon at the Foot of My Bed" by Robert Moss

In the Cave of the Dreaming Bear

Some nights, at the edge of sleep. I picture myself approaching the roots of a great tree – the oak that once called me to a country home, or a beech, or an ash – singing the chorus of the song that was given to me as a key to a place of regeneration and creation.

Praise and serve the Mother
and let her grace unfold
Praise and serve the mother
and reenchant the world

An opening appears for me among the roots, and I go down into the breathing dark of a warm and cozy space. I snuggle with a family of bears. We are family. I am welcome.
    Then I am called into the embrace of a primal form of Earth Mother, and am nourished and loved and replenished.
    I can now go down to a cave deep in the world of the tree. It is light-filled and full of creative tools and toys, especially art supplies. There is a long wooden pointer there. It points unerringly, like a huge compass needle, in the direction I need to take. Sighting along it, or with it, I can see scenes of possible and desirable futures in the outer world.
    I can go from here along paths where other adventures await. I may start following the flow of an underground river to a waterfall, where I can enter a place of the ancestors by going through and under the falls, or leap up over the falls into a different kind of experience.
    I can picture myself rising up through the tree, as through a library from a Borgesian dream, with countless levels filled with bookcases and galleries. I can make it my intention to read in these books and bring back a few pages in the morning.
     I always hope that the pages I’ll bring back will be from books of my own that are not yet written or published in this world, but can be.

I am launching my new online video course.The School of Imaginal Healing, for The Shift Network this week by leading a journey to the Cave of the Dreaming Bear.

Art by Tracy Cunningham