Endless doppelgangers in the multiverse

What would it mean if we could seize hold of the understanding that we are living, right now, in one of many worlds with endless doppelgangers in all the others - and might be on a convergence or collision path with some of them? A physicist and a fantasy writer introduce the theme. It is active dreamers who will contribute most to understanding how we can confirm and apply this model of reality on experiential, not merely speculative, levels.
    Physicist Brian Greene's book The Hidden Reality delivers a scientific model for the idea that we may all have "endless doppelgangers" leading parallel lives in parallel universes. When we develop the skills of Active Dreaming, we are able to explore this experientially - and to learn how to bring gifts and lessons from a parallel world into this one.
     Greene makes frequent use of the term "multiverse." It's worth noting that this term was used - and probably coined - a century ago by the great American philosopher, psychologist and psychic researcher William James. James wrote:

The cosmos is not a closed and harmonious system; it is a battleground of cross-currents and conflicting purposes; it shows itself, with pathetic obviousness, as not a uni- but a multi-verse.

Enter the brilliant and prolific fantasy writer Michael Moorcock, who dropped the hyphen and brough the term "multiverse" into popular usage.In his second Eternal Champion novel, The Sundered Worlds, Moorcock used the word “to describe the idea of the near infinity of co-existing space-time continua each fractionally different, in which certain struggles and stories are played out through eternity, on a vast number of planes of existence.” (I am quoting his introduction to the 1996 omnibus edition of the Eternal Champions series).
      In the very first novel in the series, Moorcock referred to "Ghost Worlds" rather than to the multiverse. Later in his writing career, Moorcock described the original Eternal Champion novel as “the shout of a young man who finds the world a more complicated place and feels, therefore, betrayed.” He also pronounces it “central” to his work, the jumping-off point for many books that followed.
     Despite the flaws in this early work, it has one feature that will appeal to dream travelers. The Eternal Champion opens in the liminal state between waking and sleeping, when “we have most of us had the illusion of hearing voices.”
     In a cold winter bed looking through the window at the moon, the protagonist John Daker, starts hearing a repeated word that sounds like gibberish: Erekosë, Erekosë, Erekosë. Each night he increases his effort to concentrate on this mystery word, his “hallucinations” grow stronger, and then “it seemed I broke free of my body altogether.” As he hangs in darkness, many other names stream through his mind, and the original strange word becomes part of a call: “Erekosë the Champion, where are you?”
     As the adventure unfolds, we come to understand that the hero has received a call from across time and dimensions, to play his part in a drama in the multiverse. The way that the call comes in the twilight state of hypnagogia will ring true for conscious dreamers.
      In the sixth novel in Moorcock's Elric series, Elric: Swords and Roses, the hero risks losing his mind in the complexity of competing timelines:

Now Elric was caught up in a kind of intradimensional hurricane, in which a thousand reverses occurred within his brain at once and he became a thousand other creatures for an instant, and where he lived through more than ten other lives; a fate only minimally different from the one that was familiar to him; and so vast did the multiverse become, so unthinkable, that he began to go mad as he attempted to make sense of just a fraction of what laid siege to his sanity.

But the vision of a seer reassures him, and us, that awakening to the nature of the multiverse can also be the source of great power for the good:

It is our firm belief that we shall one day learn the plan of the entire multiverse and travel at will from Sphere to Sphere, from realm to realm, from world to world, travel through the great clouds of shifting, multicolored stars, the tumbling planets in all their millions, through galaxies that swarm like gnats in a summer garden, and rivers of light--glory beyond glory--pathways of moonbeams between the roaming stars.

Want to know more? Read Brian Greene to satisfy that science-oriented skeptic and speculative thinker inside you. Read Moorcock to enter a fictive multiverse of possibilities. Read my chapter "Soul in the Multiverse" in Dreaming the Soul Back Home for a human model of what it means to live in the many worlds and how dreams can provide first-hand evidence that we are leading continuous lives in other realities. Above all, go dreaming and spend more time - conscious and dreaming - in the twilight zone between sleep and awake, by the techniques you'll find explained in my book Dreamgates.

Image: The Eternal Champion of Michael Moorcock's multiverse, by Gerald Brom.

Here on this Earth to make a report on it

I am savoring these lines from a poem titled “Consciousness” by the Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz:

I think that I am here, on this earth,
To present a report on it, but to whom I don’t know.
As if I were sent so that whatever takes place
Has meaning because it changes into memory.

These words go deep into the soul. Say them aloud, and see what stirs in you. Perhaps you will sense, however obscurely, a soul assignment older than your entry into your present life experience. This is the beginning of soul remembering: reclaiming the knowledge that belonged to you, in spirit, before you came into your present body.

     With poetic clarity, Milosz also evokes our responsibility, as conscious humans, to be the authors of meaning in our own lives. This requires us to construct stories, and then share them.

      Some must take on this task for whole peoples. In my travels in the Baltic, I became vividly aware of the enormity and vital importance of this task among populations that suffered three savage occupations – by the Soviets, the Nazis and then the Soviets again – during World War II and remained under the iron boot of a totalitarian system that deformed memory and sought to crush the spirit for another 50 years. The Baltic republics are again under the shadow of a huge and threatening neighbor.

      From my travels in Latvia, I brought home a searingly brave and beautiful book, With Dance Shoes in Siberian Snows. The author is Sandra Kalniete, a Latvian art historian who became her country’s foreign minister after independence. She reports on her efforts to construct the true story of her family’s tragic experiences as deportees to the slave labor camps of the Soviet Gulag, where she was born. As the reader trudges, starved, with her mother and grandmother through the Siberian snows, a tiny flame flickers.

…whatever takes place

Has meaning because it changes into memory.

Image: Milosz's refugee certificate from the French Government in the Beinecke Library at Yale.

A Writer's Way

Writing, like anything else you want to do well, is a practice. Having something you really want to say is important, but it may never come through without a practice that supports delivery. I thought I would share some of the elements of practice that work for this writer.

A WRITER'S WAY

1. Show Up. Make time to write something EVERY DAY. What writers do is write.

2. Borrow Habits That Worked for You in Other Areas of Life. As you look over your personal history, do you find you were most productive when working regular hours, among other people? Or when you were solitary, seeking to fulfill an assignment under deadline? Apply the habits that worked before to your writing practice.

3. Keep a Journal. This is essential practice for any well-lived life, not only a writing life. This is a place for you to commune with your Self, compose your personal encyclopedia of symbols, store quotes and ideas, and gather the raw materials for what may become a script or story.

4. Warm Up. Journaling, blogging, writing literate Facebook posts or  email letters - as long as they are real letters, not just office stuff - are excellent ways to start working those writing muscles, and material you can rework in a story or essay may just pop up. 

5. Set a Time Limit (until you are on a roll and simply can't stop). 30 minutes is great. So you can't finish something in half an hour - even greater, because the next time you sit down you don't have to start with a blank page. I have a 15-minute "hourglass" on my desk. I find I am often amazed by how much I can get down in a quarter hour.

6. Sideline the Editor and Avoid Feedback Felons. Don't judge or evaluate what you are writing until it's done. And do not let others play editor or critic - avoid Feedback Felons (anyone who gives you less than positive encouragement or saddles you with wrong or premature expectations or is simply jealous because you are creating and they are not).

7. Keep Your Fingers Walking. Don't agonize over trying to perfect any part of what you are writing until you have sketched out the whole thing.

8. Relax - and Pay Attention. The flow state is one of relaxed attention, or attentive relaxation. You are stretching yourself, and your ability to receive and bring through, without forcing anything on the level of the control freak in the ego. If you're stuck, put on some music, take a shower or a swim - getting in flow with water always helps - take a walk for five unscheduled minutes and see what the world gives you.

9. Gag the Demon of Expectations. You want fame and fortune from this, or at least some respect from your friends? Fine. But don't let your expectations damn your performance. Write for the heck of it, have a good time doing this for its own sake.

10. Put Yourself Where the Big Story Can Grab You. Writing, at its core, is about releasing a story. Never forget that the Big story is hunting YOU. The whole art of telling it is to keep moving - further and further from the tame and settled lands - until you get deep enough into the bush for the Big story to jump on you. Then everything will be different, and fabulous.

11. Remember Your Writing Partner. You may have various writing partners, but right now I am talking about the big one, the creative spirit the Romans called the genius. The more you are willing to give yourself to your writing for its own sake, to dare something new, the closer you draw this guiding power and its limitless energy.

12. If You Must Work to Deadline, Make Sure It's an All-But-Impossible Deadline. Our genius loves us best - and helps us most - when we take on the greatest challenges, and play the game hardest.

Photo: RM in Yeats' tower, Thoor Ballylee, in County Galway.

Opening the Spring of the Muses

Hi
Hooves on Helicon

Harder. The hooves drive sparks from the rock.
The great wings beat the air, driving a warm wind
Across the snowy slopes of the mountain.

Again, the hooves come down. And again.
The rock groans and yields, releasing the jets
Of the secret spring. I am down on my knees,
Catching the water in my open mouth.
Shockingly cold and pure, it floods my senses
And a figure takes form before me, from the mist.
I know her as grey-eyed Clio, muse of History.
Her sister appears at my other side. I know she is
Sophrosyne, or Tempering. She is not on the roll-call
Of muses; she has come because I need her instruction.
Above my feminine guides, huge as the mountain,
Is their mother, Memory. Knowing is remembering.
I am here to help people remember the origin
And purpose of their lives. My sun-father shines
A blessing on the peak, twin ravens, black and white.

- from my collection Here, Everything is Dreaming: Poems and Stories.

In the myth, the Hippocrene spring on Mount Helicon, sacred to the Muses, is opened when Pegasus drums his mighty hooves on the rock. It's a way of creation.

Sophrosyne is, indeed, not in the roll-call of the Muses. But she appeared in the lucid dream that gave birth to this poem.

Image: Apulian red-figure vase, 4th century BCE.

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Following the Amber Road: Dreaming with my Ancestors

Guest Blog by Tenaya Amelia Wieczorek

“This is where the wolf resides. Show me the way through deep forest. Take me back to where I came from, long before. I know the path begins in the dark trees… They know my name. Our family has always worshipped a form of the great Mother. I surrender to your grace. I feel you ever inside me…Holy, wholly.” - The Amber Road painting text 2017

These words are inscribed on the ochre-colored road in my painting The Amber Road. This is the story of how this painting came to be, guided by dreams of my ancestors.

     For the past few years I’ve been obsessed with genealogy shows on television. On both Who Do You Think You Are, and Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates Jr., famous people trace their ancestry, often revealing unknown family stories and thrilling revelations of ancestors that share common interests and life experiences. 

     In the late spring of 2015 I got my DNA tested and had some surprising revelations of my own! All my life I was told that I was half Yugoslavian (Serbian and Montenegrin) and half Polish. When I was in 5^th grade I became obsessed with Ireland, and dreamed of travelling there, so I started tucking away extra coins into a large green glass wine jug to save up money for the journey. My grandmother recalls that I used to tell people that “My dad is Polish and my mom is Yugoslavian, but I’m Irish!”
     So when I opened my DNA results I was shocked to find out I did indeed have a tiny percentage of blood from the British Isles, as well as several other places and cultures that I have felt a profound connection with. I have had dreams and visions of reindeer herding people from the far north, and I discovered that I have Yakut (Siberian) as well as Scandinavian blood.
     As I sat in front of my computer, dumbfounded, with chills running up my spine as I read the results, a vision formed in my mind’s eye of lines of ancestors fanning out in long rows behind me, stretching all the way to early, prehistoric times. It was the first time I had a visceral sense of myself as being connected to the ancient past, to indigenous people, my people. I saw the thrumming beauty of DNA woven like threads in a basket rushing forward to the present… and had the sense that I AM MY ANCESTORS. For a moment I stepped outside of time and space and felt part of a vast continuum of humanity, like I had a place in history. I wept at the feeling of homecoming, confirmation and remembrance.

A few months prior to these revelations I recorded the following dreams:

The Amber Rosary and Blessed with Cabbage Water 5/14/2015

I dreamed that I needed to be on my way, and dusk was falling, so I took up jogging, unsure of where I was going, or how to get back to my car. I couldn’t remember where my room was for the night, and I hadn't checked in yet. It felt like Virginia~ the trees were bare and lacy, so I knew it was late fall.

I came to a tent set up in a driveway and saw two nuns in white, and immediately thought they might be able to help me. The one in front saw me right away. She was sprinkling holy water on people with a purple cabbage leaf. That felt so familiar to me, connected to my Polish heritage. There were religious items laid out on the table, rosaries etc. The nuns chanted in what I first thought was Polish, then realized was Latin.

Dipping a cabbage leaf in a bowl, the nun sprinkled me with holy water, and indicated I should take an amber rosary that was in a cloth bag on the table. I wasn't sure if I should make a donation or not. I walked around to another table and saw all sorts of baked goods, including triangular scones with rosaries baked into them. I asked the nuns for directions, worried because I couldn’t remember my eventual destination, and my phone was low on juice. They couldn't help me, and said I should ask someone at a service station. I saw a woman from Spirit Rock Meditation Center with medium length dark hair and couldn't remember her name, but was relieved to see someone familiar. I knew she would help me. We started chatting and I picked out a rosary, and I told her how I was embarrassed that I had forgotten her name. She said her name was Sarah and I saw that she had become Sarah A., my dear friend and I was overjoyed!

At the back of the booth two young 15-year-old girls were helping out and they started singing for us! They sang haunting Appalachian/Eastern European sounding harmonies~ quietly at first, then building in strength and power, completely a cappella. We were riveted by their perfect harmonic sound. It gave me chills of recognition.

Then it was time for me to be on my way so I took off jogging and wished I had settled into my accommodations before I have left on his journey.

At Dream Teacher Training Level One in July 2015 at Mosswood Hollow in Washington State I encountered a wonderful woman and fellow dreamer, Stefania, who was also of Polish descent. I shared these dreams with her and we discussed many levels of connection and symbolism. She was the first Polish person I had really connected with outside of my family, and it felt like we held keys of wisdom and knowledge  for each other.

    Just days before leaving for the Dream Teacher Training I had the following dream:

Our Family Has Always Worshipped a Form of the Great Mother 7/12/15

I dreamed I was with Sonia and Tadek (my siblings) and Sonia had on a beautiful, intricate, spiritual piece of jewelry. It was a thin gold chain that draped around her body with tiny carved figures made of jade, aquamarine and citrine and faceted rosary-like beads. It was a prayer/spiritual device. We were at Nana and Dziadzi’s (my Polish grandparents) house in Fremont in the front yard. Nana Aggie was there and she pointed out a large white plaster statue of the Virgin Mary in a place of honor amid the cactus and juniper bushes, and she told me that: “Our family has always worshipped a form of the Great Mother.”

In September 2015, in a moment of Facebook synchronicity, a video popped up that I am certain has changed the course of my life. The video was of Laboritorium Piesni, a young all-female polyphonic singing group from Gdansk, Poland. At the first sound of their voices rising in song (just like the sisters in the Amber Rosary dream) and the heartbeat thud of the drum, I was riveted, blood pounding and my eyes filled with tears. I felt my ancestors clamor around me as I listened to the voice of the ancients sing through these young women that could be my sisters. Suddenly my Polish lineage felt relevant to me, I could see myself among these women, singing draped in earth-colored fabric, dancing in a circle, arms tracing the shape of sacred energies…

    The song, Sztoj pa moru, was the fuel for my painting, The Amber Road, that I began at an intuitive painting workshop in October 2015 in Portland Oregon with inspiring teacher Flora Bowley and finished a year later.
     Using deep turquoise, black, ochre and fluorescent red, applied with a large foam brush, I created a dark under painting for the first layer, which is unusual for me~ I usually work in bright, vibrant colors. After the layer dried, I approached it again, and as this song looped on repeat  in my headphones, the painting began to reveal itself and I was pulled into the dark woods I often visit in dreams.
    I consciously steered myself into the Amber Rosary dream as the art studio faded away and the harmonic music circling through my ears induced a mild trance state. I painted for six hours that day and five the next day, barely stopping as the world of my dream came to life before my eyes, infused with the energy and essence of my ancestors~ The sacred purple cabbage leaf dripping holy water, the dark trees looming overhead, the white plaster Mary statue, draped in gold chains, who, as my mother pointed out later, actually looks like a Black Madonna.

Chestnuts for Mary 10/15/2016

I dreamed it was a holiday (Thanksgiving or Christmas) and I was with my family. There was a high wooden mantle (like the one at my adolescent home) and Mimi said I should “Give some chestnuts to Mary.” There was a large framed image/icon of mother Mary, and I arranged autumn leaves, orange cherry tomatoes, 2 termite wings and 2 chunks of tree sap/amber on the mantel in front of the image. Mimi placed a several chestnuts up there and it felt right. 

At Thanksgiving, when I visited my mom and grandma in Oregon, I noticed my mom had a greeting card that looked very much like the image of the goddess in the dream, which inspired me to lead a simple ritual to honor this dream and our ancestral line. We bought chestnuts and lit candles and frankincense, and I played music from Laboritorium Piesni’s new album. We sat quietly around the table, holding our chestnuts and pouring our prayers into them. Through closed eyes, with the resonant voices rising in waves around us, I saw a vision of my ancient family, in concentric circles of women and circles of men, dancing around a fire outside of a village in former Yugoslavia. I felt my beloved departed also in the room (my dad, Popi, Dziadai and Nana, Ciocia Jane and Uncle Tadek among others) as we called up a connection to our ancestral line. Then, beginning with my grandmother, we offered our chestnuts to the image of Mary on the hearth, our prayers flickering by candlelight.

During this visit I showed my mom a photo the Amber Road painting in progress, and she exclaimed that the goddess figure actually looked like a Black Madonna, which was unintentional on my part, but resonated as soon as she said it. It also immediately made me think of my Polish grandmother’s funeral card, which depicts the famous Black Madonna, Our Lady of Czestochowa, from Poland. In the course of my research into this particular Black Madonna, I learned that King Louis of Hungary (1326-1382) brought the Black Madonna to Poland in response to a dream.    
    I discovered that there are numerous Black Madonna statues located throughout Europe, and that some theories suggest that they may have originally been depictions of pre-Christian goddesses such as Isis, Demeter, Persephone, Astarte, and Athena. When Christianity came to various areas in Europe, people had to take down their shrines and “cloak” their goddesses in the more acceptable guise of the Virgin Mary and child, much like is done in syncretic religions such as Candomble and Santeria.  This seems related to what my grandmother told me in the dream:  “Our family has always worshipped a form of the great Mother”.

     I put the finishing touches on the Amber Road painting by adding red, blue and ochre fabric motifs to the tree trunks. The motifs are based on embroidery from a blouse my great grandmother brought back from Yugoslavia in the early 1950s. These red “flags” are markers, guiding the way through the trees, encoded with patterns and messages, just like my blood and DNA is encoded with vital information. In the Amber Rosary dream I was trying to find my way, looking for my place, and now these flags, woven of memories, stories, dreams, and recollections are pointing the way. 

    These dreams have given me exciting clues and set me on a path to discovering the lines of my family, known and unknown. I have been talking to family members and consulting a family history my father wrote. I’ve started learning the Polish language, with hopes of attending a singing workshop with Laboritorium Piesni when they come to the US for the first time in the fall of 2017. My big dream is to travel to Poland in September 2018 to visit places my family lived, and to study polyphonic singing and Polish crafts, such as basket making and paper cutting, as well as traditional herbal medicine and pagan practices. My dreams are weaving the way…

Tenaya Amelia is a life-long dreamer trained as a teacher of Active Dreaming by Robert Moss. Intuitive, sensitive and creative, she holds a safe and vibrant space to explore the inner realms. Tenaya weaves together intuitive painting, collage, expressive movement and evocative music into her unique offerings. She is based in Northern California and offers workshops, private dream sessions and a monthly dream salon.  Tenaya is Robert's guest on his Way of the Dreamer radio show on Tuesday March 14. Listen to the show live or download from the archive

Our days are full of dream residue

We often wake with a dream hangover, even if we don't recall the dreams that caused it. Freud said that dreams are full of "day residue", thoughts and memories left over from waking life. It is no less true that our days are full of dream residue.

     Sometimes we become aware of this when we wake up feeling jet-lagged or even as if we have been run over by a truck, even though we seemed to sleep well enough. This is often the effect of what esoteric writers used to call "astral repercussion". You get out and about in an energy body, in night dreams, and what happens to that astral vehicle may reverberate in your physical system. In extreme cases, like those Dion Fortune made the stuff of the highly illuminating and sometimes cautionary tales in her Secrets of Doctor Taverner, bruises or apparent wounds may be left on the physical body.
    Those jetlag sensations may be caused by a lot of dream travel;  if you are flying across the world in a dream body, especially if you are crossing large bodies of water (which drain energy from the subtle body) you may have quite literal reasons to feel the way you would feel after a long flight on a plane. Frequent fliers need to learn more about the nature and care and maintenance of energy bodies, which is a major theme in my book Dreamgates.

     Our dream activity, remembered or not, often sets the tone for the day. Sometimes we rise with a terrific surge of energy and confidence or a clear sense of direction that was lacking the day before. We may say that we slept well; chances are we also dreamed well.

     The "vigilance" theory developed by Finnish dream researcher Antti Revonsuo maintains that in dreams the brain rehearses for patterns of challenge and opportunity that lie ahead, preparing us to move faster and more effectively when certain situations arise, and that this activity is important and useful whether or not we remember our dreams.

     Deja vu is one of the most striking examples of dream residue, though many of us fail to understand how it comes about. We meet a person or enter a scene that is absolutely familiar to us; we are sure we have seen this before. Most often this is because we are now catching up, in waking life, with an event that first took place in a dream.

    Sometimes dream residue is so outrageous and in our face that we can't fail to see it. In my book Conscious Dreaming I report an episode shared with me by a nurse who dreamed she received a visitation from a guide who appeared as half-woman, half-deer. In the morning, she was amazed to find deer scat on the rug in her second-floor apartment. It seemed impossible that it could be there - unless it spilled from the dream.

    We might recall Coleridge's famous questions:

What if you slept? And what if, in your sleep, you dreamed? And what if, in your dream, you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower? And what if, when you awoke, you had the flower in your hand? Ah, what then?

Then we would know that the dream experiences are real, and that what goes on in the dream world doesn't necessarily stay in the dream world. It happens.

Photo of Cafe Jet-Lag in Les Halles, Paris by Robert Moss

Shamans as dreamers, dreamers as shamans

The shamans who interest me are world-class dreamers who can travel between different worlds in the multiverse at will.
    They know the roads of the afterlife because they have died and come back. They walk with Death at their left shoulder, as an ally, not a dread.
    They know where to find lost souls and how to guide them to where they belong, in one world or another.
    They travel in the company of animal spirits, and can borrow their senses and use their forms.
    They are time travelers who can scout out the future, repair the past and heal ancestral karma.
    They are poets of consciousness who entertain the spirits by bringing them fresh words. They heal body and mind and re-enchant the world by telling better stories about them.
     

Let's go back to the beginning. In all the descriptions of the shaman in the literature – as wounded healer, as guide of souls, as walker between worlds, as negotiator with the spirits – there is an essential element that is rarely featured strongly enough, and is sometimes missed altogether.
     First and last, the shaman is a dreamer. Shamans typically receive their calling in dreams, and are initiated and trained in the Dreamtime. The heart of their practice is the intentional dream journey. They may incubate dreams to diagnose for a patient and to select the appropriate treatment. They travel – wide awake and lucid – in their dream bodies to find lost souls, to intercede with the spirits, to fight sorcerers and to guide spirits of the departed along the right roads.

     In indigenous North America, the dominant word for "shaman" (and also for "healer" or spiritual elder") means Dreamer, as in one who dreams strong, one who can dream for others, one who can travel at will into other realities. In Mohawk (a language I had to learn because of my dreams) the word is "rateshents". Among the Dane-zaa of northern B.C. and Alberta, the Naachin, or Dreamers, are the shamans who travel between worlds and open roads for others.

    Anyone who dreams, as the Kawahiv, an Amazonian dreaming people say, is "a little bit shaman". We stand on the brink of claiming this power when we remember our dreams and start to develop the practice of working with dreams as daily practice.
    Dreaming, a contemporary American woman finds herself in a different body, traveling with her clan beside a river in a primal landscape untouched by the ax. She knows the lives and relations of these native people intimately and feels the coming of a hard winter.    She sees an eagle flying near the river, and someone tells her, “You can go fly with it.” She is afraid to go too far from the river, so she waits until the eagle hovers overhead. Then, as she told me later, 

I fly an eternal moment with this magnificent bird: beautiful brown, glistening feathers with golden speckles. Eagle is above me, beside me, then lands in the river. I land downstream and float on the warm white foam. The river is blanketed in white foam.

    After I dry off, I fly over the river again. I see turtles where Eagle had flown and landed. The turtles are a darker green. They are solid on the foam, not moving, just peacefully sunning themselves.

The dreamer asked me how she should approach the meaning of this dream. For me, an experience of this kind requires not analysis but honoring. Her dream was a journey into the life circumstances of an indigenous people, an entry into a “past” life that might be a previous experience of her own multidimensional self, or that of an ancestor of the land where she lives, or of her wider spiritual family. Within that life experience, she learned what indigenous dream shamans know: you can become an eagle.

The story of the woman who flew with the eagle is adapted from Dreaming the Soul Back Home by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Drawing by Robert Moss

Why do we dream?

"Why do we dream?" asked the blue butterfly girl, looking around the circle of animals she had invited to her tea party by the garden gate.

    "You dream so we can always be together," said Bear, without hesitation. "You dream so you will always have a friend. "

    "You dream so you can see," said Hawk. His golden eyes flashed.

    "You dream so you can learn to be brave like me," said Lion.

    "Nonsense," said Mr. Fox. "You dream so you can tell stories about me."

    "Grandfather," the girl looked into the tea water. "Why do we dream?"
    Grandfather Teller's voice bubbled like a pot about to boil. "You dream because humans are the animals that tell stories about all the others."

Drawing by Robert Moss

Becoming a dream seer

Our dreams are constantly coaching us for challenges and opportunities that lie ahead of us on the roads of life. It's possible that we rehearse everything that will take place in the future in our dreams, though we forget most of it. 
    Across human evolution, dreaming has been a vital survival mechanism. In the days when we were naked apes without good weapons, our dream radar - our ability to scout across both space and time - often enabled us to avoid becoming breakfast for saber-toothed tigers or leathery raptors. 
    A recent theory posits that dreaming prepares us for challenges by putting us through frequent workouts in threat simulation, helping us to develop the reflexes and responses that will get us through. I suspect our relationship with the future in dreams is much deeper and more important than this. In dreaming, we have access to the matrix in which the events and circumstances that will manifest in our physical lives have their origins. We can not only see future events; we can choose - to varying degrees, and according to our level of consciousness - which among many possible future events will manifest. 
    It's my impression that we are dreaming the future all the time. If you adopt the practice of recording your dreams and comparing the dream data with subsequent events, it won't take long for you to notice some match-ups. The incidents you preview in your dreams may be trivial or terrifying, blah or wonderful. They may be events in your own life, or events in the future history of the world. Our dreams start preparing us for what life will give us months, years, even decades ahead of events. In dreams, we have several kinds of engagement with the future: 

Precognitive Dreams 

Through precognition, we see events and circumstances ahead of time, as they will be played out. A precognitive dream may be literal, or symbolic or both. For example, a dream of a tsunami might turn out to be both a preview of a literal disaster and advance notice of an emotional storm that will hit with the force of a tsunami. We may not understand what we have seen in a precognitive dream until a physical event catches up with that dream. It may also be difficult for us to understand what we have seen because we are looking at things from a certain angle, perhaps the perspective of a different person. But with practice, we can learn to recognize markers that a dream relates to future events, and we can then move to clarify and use the dream information.

Early Warning Dreams 

Dreams may contain early warnings of a possible future development we may not want - a crisis at work, the bust-up of a relationship, a health problem, a car accident. We may not want to focus on any of these unpleasant possibilities. But if we are willing to study what an early warning dream is telling us, we will often find that it is giving us vital information that can help us avoid a possible future problem if we take appropriate action. Sometimes we dream the future for the benefit of another person, even a great cause. What will then happen depends whether we can find an effective way to get the dream information to the person who can best act upon it. 

Early Opportunity Dreams 

Early opportunity dreams may also require action if we are going to manifest a future we'll enjoy. You dream you are in your ideal home, or doing the work that nourishes your soul and your bank account, or you are with your soulmate, who is someone you have not yet met in the regular world. These dreams may be inspiring and encouraging, but you won't want to leave them floating away from your physical life like helium balloons that have lost their strings. You'll want to figure out what practical action you can take to move decisively in the direction of that happy dream. 

Choosing Alternate Event Tracks 

Any future we can see (in dreams or through wakeful intuition) is a possible future. We can influence the odds on the manifestation of a specific future event. While it may seem impossible for an individual to change certain future events perceived in dreams - like a natural disaster or death at an advanced age - it may still be possible to work with the dream information in a useful way: for example, to alert friends not to go on vacation in the place where the dreamed hurricane will hit, or to help someone whose death is near, and the family, to meet that situation with grace and closure. 

As dreamers, we discover and inhabit the true nature of time, as it has always been known to dream travelers and is now confirmed by modern science. Linear time, as measured by clocks, and experienced in plodding sequences of one thing following another, always heading in the same direction, is an illusion of limited human awareness, at best (as Einstein said) a convenience. In dreaming, as in heightened states of consciousness, we step into a more spacious time, and we can move forwards or backwards at varying speeds. We not only travel to past and future; we travel between alternate timelines. 
   With growing awareness, we can develop greater and greater ability to choose the event track - maybe one of infinite alternative possible event tracks - that will be followed through a certain life passage, or even the larger history of our world. 
   This may be a case of the observer effect operating on a human scale. It is well understood that at quantum levels, deep within subatomic space, the act of observation causes plucks a specific phenomenon out of a bubbling cauldron of possibilities. It may be that, in the cauldron of our dreaming: through the act of observation, we select a certain event track that will begin to be manifested in the physical world. By a fresh act of observation, or re-visioning, we can then proceed to alter that event track, or switch to an entirely different one. 

Text adapted from The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams,Coincidence and Imagination by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library

Photo: Hawk Eye by Steve Jurvetson