The Dreams Are Coming Back

 

In contemporary society, dream drought is a widespread affliction, almost a pandemic. This is deadly serious, because night dreams are an essential corrective to the delusions of the day. They hold up a mirror to our everyday actions and attitudes and put us in touch with deeper sources of knowing than the everyday mind. If you lose your dreams, you may lose your inner compass. If your dreams are long gone, it may be because you have lost the part of you that is the dreamer.
     As I describe in Dreamways of the Iroquois, traditional elders of the First Peoples of North America say bluntly that if we have lost our dreams, it is because we have lost a vital part of our soul. This may have happened early in life through what shamans call soul loss, when our magical child went away because the world seemed to cold and cruel. Helping the dream-bereft to recover their dreams may amount to bringing lost souls back to the lives and bodies where they belong. In my story “Dreamtakers”in Mysterious Realities I describe a shamanic journey to help return dream souls to people who have lost them. This is something I teach and practice.
     There are several ways we can seek to break a dream drought any night we want to give this a try. We can set a juicy intention for the night and be ready to record whatever is with us whenever we wake up. We can resolve to be kind to fragments. 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. 
     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.
      And remember that 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 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. 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

Dream recovery may be soul recovery. Call back your dreams and you may find you are bringing back a beautiful bright dreamer who left your body and your life when the world seemed too cold and too cruel. Maybe she has been hiding out in Grandma's cottage, or a garden behind the Moon. Sometimes the right song will help to bring back that Magical Child with all the dreams fluttering like fireflies in her hair. I wrote a song in this cause and you are welcome to try it:

 

The dreams are coming back.
Slow down and feel their firefly glow.
Stay still and hear the rustle of their wings.
Open like a flower
and let them feed from your heart.
Don’t be afraid to remember
that your soul has wings
and you have a place to go flying.
The dreams are coming back

 

 

Swan Dreamers of the Pacific Northwest

 

An indigenous people of British Columbia, the Dunne-za [1] say that the  first Dreamer (naachin) was called Swan and received his gift of magical flight from the swans. Their Dreamers are their shamans and, first and last, swan people. In songs and stories they are constantly compared to swans or even equated with them. Like swans, Dreamers fly to heaven and return without dying. Swans fly south as winter comes to a land where water flows when northern lakes and rivers turn to ice. When they fly back the People know there are Summerlands beyond their sight. In the same way when Dreamers come back from heaven the People know that their dead relatives are alive in another world.
      In Canadian English the Dreamers are often called Prophets. They are said to be able "to dream for all the People", to lead the hunt in spirit, to see into the future. The great Dreamer called Swan had another name, Makenunatane, which may be translated as “His Tracks Circle the Edges of the Earth”. [2] As swans migrate between seasons, Dreamers migrate between the phases and cycles of life and death and rebirth.
      The great swan Dreamer saw the coming of white men before they arrived, when he was out flying beyond the landscape the People knew. He had trouble finding words to describe their weapons, their animals and the fish belly color of their skin. He dreamed the hunt. He spoke to the spirits of the moose and persuaded them to give their lives when the hunter came the next day, in return for a respectful send-off to their next lives. He told the hunters how to form a human net with their bodies so the game animal would be softly enfolded. This was before the People had firearms. The most important thing to know about him is that, like all great Dreamers, he was one who dreamed for all the People.
      They called the great Dreamer Swan, but the People knew that every Dreamer is also a swan. Dreamers, like swans, fly up to heaven and come back without dying. When the cold comes down hard, the swans fly away to Summerland, and they return. The rhythms of a Dreamer on the trail to heaven are those of a swan or a boat on the water. Smooth easy motion. You know the way and don’t have to worry about how to get there. Another swan Dreamer made a map of the trail to heaven on a moose hide. [3] A Dreamer might take the trail to help the spirit of a dead person get to the right place, or to rescue a soul of the living that had become lost or stolen. 
      A Dreamer might go up to get a view of things from a higher perspective, and to bring back knowledge and healing power that is packed in songs. Dreamers store their knowledge that way; each one is a walking music library, but their songs have nothing in common with white men’s music. The Dreamers are the givers of the songs that bring the People together in sacred ceremony in alignment with the spirits of the natural world. A song may be a bridge between worlds. It may confer the gift of understanding the language of birds and animals.
    When young members of the People are sent into the wilderness on a vision quest, a Dreamer will watch over them, traveling in his astral body. The vision quest itself is called “seeking a song”, shi kaa. 
     When a Dreamer is called to take the Trail to Heaven, the People who remember the old ways make a cordon sanitaire. They station themselves around the Dreamer’s cabin. They hush kids and dogs or shoo them away. They try to keep all the noise down and won’t let anyone enter the house until the Dreamer appears in the door. When a Dreamer’s soul is traveling outside the body, you don’t mess with that body and you don’t startle the soul into dropping from the sky too soon. It might be damaged or have a hard time coming back. You remember that the Dreamer isn’t taking a nap; the Deamer is on a mission for the People. 
     The powers of the Dreamers who fly like swans are suggested by their names repeated in stories and songs, generation to generation. There is Makenunatane, the legendary founder who makes tracks around the earth and whose name also carries the possible meaning “He Opens the Door”.
     Atiskise is the name of another famous Dreamer. His name literally means "Birch Bark". Birch bark is also “paper bark”, the indigenous writing material of First Peoples of northern North America. Atiskise’s name suggests he was regarded as a mailman carrying messages between the People and the animals and between the living and the departed. 
    The name of another revered Dreamer, Aledze, means "Gunpowder". He is said to travel from one place to another at the speed of a bullet. [4] 

Tales of the feats of great Dreamers were essential teaching stories among the People, and those who wished to learn were expected to sit quiet and listen, as did the white ethnographer. There is an edge of sadness to Ridington's reportng because we understand that a great tradition is dying out, unable to withstand the effects of colonization and what has followed. We need to hear these voices, which will resonate with real dreamers everywhere and which evoke the wisdom of all our ancestors if we reach back far enough. 
    Listening to the elders of a North American Indian people, we sometimes hear voices of ancient India. In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, we find that in dreams the soul flies to and from the nest of the body. The enlightened being who has transcended the wheel of rebirth is saluted as Paramahamsa, the "greatest swan". In the two syllables of the Sanskrit word hamsa [5] we hear the sounds of inhalation and exhalation, the breath of soul. I feel a similar soul breeze blowing through the three syllables of wabashu, the Dunne-za word for "swan" [6].
    I am certain that the Dreamers of the Pacific Northwest and the sages of early India are in agreement with this statement in the Panchavimsa Brahmana: "Those who know have wings, those who are devoid of knowledge are wingless." [7]

    

References 

1.       Dunne-za, also rendered as Dane-za, means “People” in the sense of Real People in their southern Athapascan language. They are related to the Dene-tha (yet another transliteration) of Alberta.  Most indigenous North American peoples use this term for themselves in their own languages. The Dunne-za used to be called the Beaver Indians. Ethnographer Robin Ridington lived with the Dunne-za for many years, won the confidence of elderly Dreamers, and gave us remarkable and moving accounts of their practices. "To my astonishment," he reports, " I found myself learning from my subjects as well as about them....The Dunne-za assume, I came to learn, that events can take place only after people have known and experienced them in myths, dreams and visions."  Robin Ridington. Trail to Heaven: Knowledge and Narrative in a Northern Native Community. (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1988) pp. x-xi.

2. Ridington says that the name Makenunatane means literally "His Track, Earth, Trail" and comments that "the name suggests his tracks circle around the edge of the world to complete a circle." Ridington, Trail to Heaven p.78. I hope I did not step off the edge in turning this into the phrase “His Tracks Circle the Edges of the Earth”.

3.       ibid p.77. The map was made by a Dreamer named Decula. .

4.       Robin Ridington, “They Dream about Everything: The Last Dreamers of the Dane-zaa” in Ryan Hurd and Kelly Bulkeley (eds) Lucid Dreaming: New Perspectives on Consciousness in Sleep (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2014) vol. 2, p 174.

5. Hamsa can mean "swan" or "goose". The water birds are related, both members of the subfamily Anserini in the tribe of Cygnini, both frequently featured as companions and vehicles of a goddess, as the swan serves Saraswati and Aphrodite and the swan or goose serves Nanshe of ancient Mesopotamia, a theme discussed with extraordinary care in Julia M.Asher-Greve,  and  Joan Goodnic Westenholz, Goddesses in Context: On Divine Powers, Roles, Relationships and Gender in Mesopotamian Textual and Visual Sources, Fribourg & Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013, pp.965-1011.

6. Ridington, Trail to Heaven, p. 189.

7. Panchavimsa Brahmana trans. W, Caland ( Calcutta: The Asiatic Soiciety of Bengal, 1931) chapter 14

Swan Rising. Photo by Romy Needham

 

 

Book of Shadows

Between you and the world
falls a screen
that holds the fingerprints of possibility.
Study them like a detective
and you find clues to the future
you can use to change it
or embrace it.

Look carefully and you may find
the screen is smudged 
by old habits and regrets
and must be cleansed
before you can trust the patterns.

On some days, in many lives,
you don't see that the screen is there.
That's when movies start playing
that you confuse with the world.
You can get stuck in a Book of Shadows
not knowing how to turn the page.
You may be caught in the threads
of an ancient tapestry
of a sleeping king and a red boar.

The trick is to touch
the friable ridges of fate
tenderly and harvest fine powder
to make inks and paints
to create your own designs for life.
Since the screen between you and the world
becomes your world
use it to make your own reality.
The time is Now.

- Robert Moss

Oneiric geographies

 

Some dreamscapes appear to be stage sets. You step into the wings and the scene is changed, or gone completely. Some are pocket realities; go outside and there is no there there.
    When I become lucid, I sometimes explore the borders of these landscapes. Once I was deep in adventure in a rainforest. When I became aware I was dreaming, I marched off in a certain direction – to find that I came to a line where the jungle, and its world, simply ended. When I traveled through the forest in other directions, I found the same thing. Beyond the jungle world, on every side, there was nothing but a white void. Its color and texture resembled the drawing paper on which I proceeded to sketch this geography. This kind of thing may be grist for proponents of the simulation hypotheiss, which holds that our reality is something like a immensely sophisticated video game in  which vast areas await to be pixellated as ythe action develops. 
     Night after night, in a certain interval of terror and beauty in my life, I was carried away to a mountain convent that was a complete world, for training and initiation by an order of priestesses. How a mountain can be a planet, except in a painting by Magritte or a story by Saint-Exupery, is a question no dreamer needs to ask. The shape of the world mountain, when I drew it, looked like a bobbing toy, the kind you could float in a bathtub. Around it was the vastness of space, not dark or drawing-paper white, but grainy and silvery like mother-of-pearl.
     One night I was deep in magical intrigues in a vast apartment in a huge old apartment building in an old European city. With companions, I moved from room to room, accessed by wide, long halls that turned back upon themselves, counter-clockwise, like Greek keys. Sometimes a hall would end, without explanation, at a blank wall or sealed door.
    Another night, in my dream body, I walked cobbled streets, under arches, in another Old World city, perhaps Prague. I again had the sense that I was being directed, unobtrusively, to turn in a counter-clockwise spiral. Before me walked a man who was looking at me from the back of his head. It was hard to tell whether the face on his back was a mask or a double. Behind me walked a second man with two faces. Their presence was deliciously creepy, but in no way sinister or threatening for me, inside or after the dream. Though the city was dark and silent in the dream, there was a feeling of carnival, of dress-up.
     But most often, my dreamscapes seem perfectly solid, normal and void of weird anomalies. I step in and out of these scenes as if walking through a door from one room (or one world) into another. I return with the just-so feeling that I have been there, done that. I have been in a real place, with real people, engaged in real events. Sometimes these scenes are reproduced in waking life days, months or years and so they could be called, with hindsight, precognitive experiences or memories of the future. I may yet have tea on the lawn of that Irish hotel overlooking the sea, though I don’t know it in my daily life and do not currently plan to return to Ireland.
     However, these days I mostly feel that my dream self is having adventures - and sometimes leading continuous lives - in  alternate realities in some of  the Many Worlds that physics tells us are probable, on the hypothesis that to make any choice is to generate a parallel world. 

"Tea at the Irish Hotel". Journal drawing by Robert Moss

 

   

The swan’s cure – a wonderful script for imaginal healing from Aldous Huxley

 

He's a cynical, worldly Englishman and right now his body is broken and screaming with pain. He's fallen from a cliff and he's on his back in a hut on an island in Southeast Asia, racked with fever. He is visited by a beautiful bronze-colored girl in a sarong who talks like she's been educated at Oxford before or after spending a year as assistant to a bodhisattva. She knows things about healing that his culture doesn't know and his mind is absolutely unwilling to accept. But she finds a chink in the closed door of that cynical mind, using memory.
    He is from England. Does he know the city of Wells? Of course he knows Wells, he snaps back at her.  She says she used to go walking there, by the water. There was an extraordinary sense of peace. And when she closes her eyes now she can see it all so clearly, green grass and golden sunlight on the stones of the church across the moat, and she can hear the bells and the jackdaws in the tower. Can he hear them too? Yes, he can hear the birds. 
    In this way, in her soft lilting voice, chanting more than speaking, she leads the patient inside a scene he remembers until he is there as well as on his sickbed. He can see the daisies and dandelions in the grass, the austere geometry of the cathedral tower challenging the tender blue of the sky.
    "And the swans."
     Yes, the swans. Impossibly beautiful, yet entirely real. He sees the curve of the swans' white breasts lifting and parting dark waters.
    "Effortlessly floating."
     The words give him deep satisfaction. As the dreamy voice leads him, he finds himself floating with the swans, on that smooth surface between darkness below and tender blue above, between here and far away, between one world and another. 
     Floating like a white bird on the water, he allows himself to slip into the flow of a great smooth silent river, allowing the sleeping river of life to carry him into a profound peace.
     The patient drifts off, contented, as the voice continues to chant. Above the river, he sees huge white clouds and at her suggestion, he floats up towards them until he is streaming on a river of air, up into the freshness of high mountains. He feels a delicious cool wind on his skin, and falls deeper into sleep, his fever broken.

 

I have paraphrased an extraordinary passage in Aldous Huxley's last novel,Island (first published in 1962) that is a magnificent description of imaginal healing. When Susila, the beautiful young healer, reports to her doctor father on what she did with the patient (the cynical journalist Will Farnaby) she says "he went off more quickly than expected" because she opened his imagination by calling him to a place in England that he knew. She explains that she worked with indirect rather than direct suggestions. "They're always better." She gave him a different body image, one that suggested grace and strength to carry him beyond his present injury, so it became "a miserable thing in revolt against a huge and splendid thing."
     There is a model here for how to grow a vision of healing for someone who is in need of images to make the body well. Start by taking them through the doorway of a life memory. Don't harp on physical symptoms. Give the body - as well as the mind - of the patient living images strong and graceful and fresh enough to shift it beyond its current complaints, as the swan glides on the water or lifts off to claim the sky.
     I teach a similar practice I call dream transfer, in the understanding that we can gift a dream - a healing image, a vision of possibility, even a road map to the afterlife - to someone in need of a dream. 

photo by Romy Needham

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.