Le rêve a laissé son manteau

On my last night at l'Hameau de l'Etoile, the refurbished 17th century village in the south of France where I have been leading new adventures in Active Dreaming, I dreamed I was leading the group on a spiral dance through stables where powerful horses stamped and snorted their approval. As we danced, I improvised the words of a song with alternating verses in French and English. As I woke, the title of this dream was with me: "Le chanson des écuries du rêve" - "The Song of the Dream Stables."

I sat down with a cup of coffee to write with the energy of this dream. What came streaming through me was not exactly the Song of the Dream Stables but rather a poem in the rhythms of Charles d'Orléans, the poet-prince of medieval France who has featured in my dreams for manyyears. It was a sequence of dreams, visions and synchronicity - extraordinary even by my standards - that brought me to France in 2005 to lead a previous workshop at a chateau near Blois, the city Charles most loved, and where his body lies under the protection of the most fearsome gargoyles I have ever seen. The repeating line in my poem is borrowed from one of Charle's lyrical poems. Le temps a laissé son manteau.

Here is the poem as I delivered it to the group, in French, the day before I flew home for Thanksgiving:

Le rêve a laissé son manteau
de brume, de soie et du regret
Je marche entre la terre et l’eau
pour nettoyer à castanet

La lune m’a donné sa pleine face
J’encontre esprits de là-haut
Je dois assigner chacun à sa place
Le rêve a laissé son manteau

Les vents racontes légendes d’or
je glisse comme grue, je mange taureau
Je vive entre la mort et l’amour
Le rêve a laissé son manteau

A rough translation:

      The dream has dropped its mantle of mist, of silk and of regret I walk between earth and water to cleanse with their percussive beat

      The moon has given me her full face I have met spirits that come from there I must assign each to its rightful place The dream has dropped it mantleT

      The winds narrate golden legends I glide as the crane, I eat the bull I live between love and Death The dream has dropped its mantle.

     "Eating the bull" is no bull. Taureau is a preferred dish of the gardian, the cowboy of the Camargue, and I ate steak de taureau au fleur de sel in a restaurant named the House of the Moon Bull (Casa Toro Luna) on the square in the medieval town of Aigues Mortes.

      Graphic: Illumination from an early collection of poems of Charles d'Orléans, depicting his time as a hostage in the Tower of London.