In praise of bricolage

I've given up trying to translate the marvelous French word bricolage, sometimes rendered as "tinkering". It's about putting together bits and pieces on a whim, rather than approaching a project as a solid, stolid work of engineering. It's about following oneiric logic rather than plans and structures.

     Claude Lévi-Strauss,who made the word at home in French, found that this approach is central to the making of myths and the workings of "the savage mind". In his celebrated book La pensée sauvage he observed that the bricoleur employs "devious means". His game is "always to make do with whatever is at hand, that is to say with a set of tools and materials which is always finite and is also heterogeneous because what it contains bears no relation to the current project, or indeed to any particular project, but is the contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions."[1]

     Found objects, junk shops, storage basements, words overheard from strangers...these are materials for bricolage. So are your journals. I love to go through old journals plucking out curious and shiny things and arranging them on fresh pages. I was encouraged to learn that this was a regular practice for Thoreau, a dedicated journal keeper. He liked to forage through old journals plucking out promising bits and pieces - observations in nature, quotes from his reading, dreams and reflections. He copied excerpts and married them up as fresh drafts. It became his habit “to work back over his journals…to reengage old subjects in the light of new interests, to revise and recopy his own earlier journal work,measuring, weighing, culling and sorting his materials…taking up earlier threads, reweaving and combining them.”[1]

     For any writer, as for Thoreau, it opens treasuries of material and above all it supports the writing habit. Playing around with old notes removes the terror of the blank page. When you dip into an old journal, you are never at a loss for a theme. The simple processes of selection, arrangement and retitling will fire the imagination. Before you know it, you’ll be in the midst of writing something new. However, the practice of journaling from journals is not only for writers. It is a marvelous tool for self-observation, for life navigation, and for constructing a personal encyclopedia of symbols.  

     Ah, but what is best is the pure bricolage. I might start working through old journals with a specific agenda, using the search engine to pull up items from my digital files, arranging materials in orderly folders, setting production schedules. Then I am distracted or enchanted by a note I made after a concert:

Barber's Adagio for Strings: The sad and lovely waves of sound carried me effortlessly into vision: of an island in the mist, of the grace of swimming swans, and the loneliness of a solitary swan, of a bright winged being towering above the many-colored waters. Meeting me halfway in the crossing, the swan prince made me know what is required to be enfolded in his knowing. I remember how Aengus, dream god and love god, took the form of a swan.

or a quote that stuns me awake:

Plotinus on the personal guardian: "“Our guardian is the power immediately superior to the one we exercise, for it presides over our life without itself being active…Plato truly said that ‘we choose our guardian’, for, by the kind of life that we prefer, we choose the guardian that presides over our life.’

or a dream of any kind, calling me into fields of memory, mystery and delight:

The Thumbelina Exchange: A young woman has mastered the art of entering another universe by becoming incredibly small.This may have been intentional; she may have wished herself out of her life situation, at least for a fling. Not clear if she is able to return at will.

Soon the pleasure of simply playing with my finds as they come up and come back, takes over. I forget my agendas, and play with the pieces that catch my eye, arranging and fitting them together without expecting them to snap into prearranged place like a jigsaw puzzle. I don't count on it, I don't try to program it, but I am open to finding again that it is in these moments of dickering and tinkering and playing without thought of consequences that fresh and unexpected creation bursts through, as I once saw an apple tree rise from an abandoned core in a heap of compost.  

References

1. Claude Lévi-Strauss, La pensée sauvage (Paris: Plon, 1962)

2. Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986)

Walking a Dream

 

Jung said that one of the things he liked to do with a dream was to “circumambulate” it, wander around it, considering it from many angles. He liked to do this while in physical motion, wandering around his house on the lake, through the garden, into the woods.

This is a grand way to get greater perspective on a dream. Walking with a dream for a while, you may find that more of the dream narrative returns to you. You are almost sure to get commentary of some kind from what you notice playing around you, wherever you happen to be going.

You may find that both inner and outer perceptions accomplish what a dreaming people of central Africa say we must do with a dream. Like other cultures that value dreaming, the Yansi of Zaire have special words for dreamwork practice. According to anthropologist Mubuy Mpier, the Yansi share dreams every morning, and the core of their approach to dream exploration is embodied in the term a bumi ndoey, which means to “turn a dream.” [1] The teaching is that we need to turn a dream carefully, as we might lift a great rock, to see what is underneath, on the side that is not initially visible.

It’s not only a matter of letting the world illuminate the dream; it’s a case of letting the dream illumine the world. “We do not always have only to sit with closed eyes, moving around in our heads, to draw closer to an image. We can put it in our pocket and carry it with us throughout days and nights,” as Mary Watkins wrote in her passionate appeal for us to let images speak to us and through us. “You not only see different things, you see things differently” when you are seized by poetic imagery, poet and scholar Kathleen Raine observed.

One of the things we want to do when we are walking a dream is to notice when it starts to play out in the world around us. There might be a considerable time gap between the dream and its unfolding in the world, so patience and a decent memory — assisted by your journal! — may be required. When a dream does begin to manifest in external reality, let an alert flash on your inner control panel. In my mind, the default version is: Dream Playing Out Now.

When the dream starts playing out, you have several options. They are not mutually exclusive. If there is no sense of danger and the original dream left you feeling happy and confident, you may be content to let the dream play again and enjoy it with all of your senses. Maybe you’ll find that a sense of “rightness” comes with this: that you have made the right choice, that you are in the right place, that at last you have found the right friend or lover or teacher. If you had a darker sense of the dream — if it involved risk or danger — you will want to be poised to change the script, solve a problem, avoid that accident or that drama at the office.

As a dream plays out in exterior reality, you may notice that its symbolism is now alive in your world. This can become a whole education on how to refresh and renew our perspectives on what is a dream and what is real. We need to take dreams more literally and waking life symbolically.

A dream may be fairly literal in the sense that it reveals something that is happening or will happen in the future in the ordinary world. Yet when the dream is enacted, we see that there is symbolism in the physical event. So a literalistic dream can point to a symbolic play in the outer world. Let’s consider an example.

A man I will call Yves dreamed that his ring finger was cut off in an accident. There was blood and pain, and he saw the splintered bone, and woke with feelings of dread and fear. When he brought the dream to me, I asked very early, as is my practice, whether it was possible that he could lose a finger in a literal accident, maybe cutting or slicing something. Did his work involve such risks? Well, yes, it did. He worked part-time pruning vines on a hillside in southern France, where he lived. He agreed that he would need to be more watchful about how he handled the secateurs.

We proceeded to discuss the symbolic levels of the dream. Hard to miss the significance of losing the ring finger in terms of a relationship. He was not married, but he had a live-in partner and felt her interest had begun to stray. This brought in the Freudian bit. Did the loss of “tall man” — the middle finger — speak of a decline in sexual performance?

Yves walked with his dream. Within the week, it began to play out when he made a false move while working in the vineyard. He only narrowly managed to avoid cutting off his own finger with the pruning shears. It was the ring finger, as in the dream. The partial fulfillment of his terrible dream led him to confront the symbolic issues. He sat down with his partner. She told him, with the sexual candor for which the French can be notable, that she was dissatisfied with his sexual performance and had already taken another lover. They agreed to separate.

[1] Mubuy Mpier, “Dreams Among the Yansi” in E.M.Jedrej and Rosalind Shaw (eds) Dreaming, Religion and Society in Africa (New York: E.J.Brill, 1992) 100-1110

Text adapted from Sidewalk Oracles by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Photos by RM

Dream symbols: Your car may be your Ka

A bright blue vintage car pulls in front of me as I walk my dog in the park today. It has just arrived, to join a classic car show that is getting underway. The dreamlike moment sets me thinking, about how the state of your dream car may be richly symbolic. It may reflect the state of body or soul, of work or relationship. Your car may be your Ka. It may represent what gets you around.Its condition may remind you to check your engine, or replenish your energy.
    The dream car may be your literal car, on a road you'll take in the future. It could be a time-travel machine or an energy vehicle that can take you to worlds of wonder and adventure. If it's a convertible, it may reflect your ability to change your life. If is's a 4x4 or an ATV, it may reflect your ability to get off the maps and make your own path
    Dream automobiles are not confined to ordinary rules of the road. One dreamer shared an adventure with me in which she is riding in an open cabriolet, through a pleasant countryside. They mount a hill, and cross a high plateau that ends abruptly. A voice tells her, "You can make it different."
     She finds herself suspended in mid-air, above the ocean. There is a moment of fear. Then the car shapeshifts into a sea plane. She enjoys the exhilaration of flight, then realizes she does not need borrowed wings in order to fly. She swoops and soars, then plunges deep into the ocean and feels herself absorbing deep powers of healing and remembering. In the ocean, she now recognizes a pattern of islands, and comes to realize that this landscape is vitally alive. Each island is also an "I-land", representing someone who has touched her life. There is a profound and joyful sense of unity,of the ability to connect with anyone and everything in this vital panorama.
    All starting with a car. There's a clue to magic in the type of car: a convertible. The word speaks of the power to change, to shift, to convert one's attitudes, one's way of getting around, one's life style.
    The dream car may of course be a regular car, and when there are problems on the roads of dreaming, and the car seems to be the familiar one, we want to check right away on whether those problems could possibly play out in ordinary life. To my certain knowledge, I was spared from possibly fatal road accidents on three occasions by dreams in which I saw myself driving into collisions - and was able to harvest specific information from the dreams in order to avoid those collisions. 
     Our car dreams can show us such nitty-gritty things as whether we need to get the brakes checked, or the oil, or the tires. When car dreams are as literal as this, we may notice that the symbolism comes in with the waking situation more than in the dream. If your dream warns you of a possible future collision, in addition to doing the survival stuff by avoiding that collision, you may want to reflect on where different aspects of your life, maybe relationships or obligations, are coming into conflict. If the theme is a flat tire, maybe you want to ask yourself how to avoid becoming over "tired".
     One of the few kinds of automobile I was ever truly passionate about was the old Jaguar XJ6. I owned one in England and bought a used model when I first started living in the United States. That undermined my waking passion for Jaguars, because that 1973 XJ6 - bought from a dealer in New York City! - was off the road more often than it was on it. The only mechanic I could find to work on it when I was living out at Sag Harbor was a German mechanic who would bawl at me whenever I brought the car in, "Once again you bring me this British piece of shit! Why don't you understand that the English can't make electronics?"
    So I gave up on Jaguars in regular life, but in dreams I found I was still often driving one. I dreamed I was driving a racing-green XJ6 at high speed, taking a corner at over 100 m.p.h., when everything stopped abruptly. I got out, dazed but unharmed, to inspect the car, and found that a man in a white doctor's coat was there before me. Under the hood, looking over his shoulder, I saw what looked like a set of medical gauges for things like heartbeat and blood pressure.
    The medical mechanic turned to me and said, "This is a beautiful vehicle, Robert. If you smash it up, don't think that you'll get another just like it immediately. Watch how you use it."
    I got the message! I started paying closer attention to how fast and hard I was driving my body.
    These days, when I dream of a car that seems to be an analog for my body, it is most often a vintage Rolls-Royce - a bit chunky, showing its age and its British antecedents, but all in all not a bad ride.
    In the English language, "car" sounds like "ka", the Egyptian name for an aspect of soul that operates like an energy double, travels outside the body in life, and continues with a life of its own after death that requires care and feeding. So when I hear about dream cars I often ask whether the dream is also about soul, and the care and feeding of soul.
    A dream car, for me, may also be a time travel machine. I've been picked up by drivers in vintage cabriolets and grand touring cars who have whisked me off on adventures in past eras worthy of Indiana Jones.
    Suddenly the memory comes to me of driving with my father a year or so after his death. It was hard to see much through the windows, so I opened the door, to encounter a great roaring wind, and realized we were flying higher than an airplane through an area of turbulence. I closed the door in a hurry. We got to a place where my father wanted to show me things about his new life.
    So the dream car may also be an energy vehicle, something that helps you to travel to other dimensions, your modern (or not-so-modern) version of the vimanas, the chariots of the gods.
    Feel like a spin?

Does your phone work in your dreams?

I like to spend quiet time with my journals studying how a certain symbol or dream situation recurs and evolves over time. This can amount to constructing the biography of a dream symbol. Recently I have been looking at how my phone functions - or fails to function - in dreams.

My phone camera usually seems to work in my dreams but the pictures aren't in my camera roll when I return. I have received phone calls from the departed over the years but it is far more common for me to visit them in their current environments. I usually can't make calls on my cell phone in dreams and the screen becomes very strange, which is sometimes a lucidity trigger.. Sometimes my cell phone morphs into an amazing multidimensional device.

Here is a sampling of reports I pulled up from the past dozen years. No analysis here, and few complete dream reports; just a glimpse of variations on a recurring theme. 

Interdimensional Phone and the Instant Pool 

I am traveling in a far land, where I do not expect my cell phone to work. The phone looks like a longish silver TV monitor. A male companion encourages me to try the phone any way. I hit a button at the bottom right and to my surprise a woman's voice answers immediately. I am so startled I hang up.
    She calls back immediately and I recognize her as a woman who lives with a psychologist friend. She tells me he wants me to come over that same evening. I explain that I am very far away. She's insistent. She explains that the psychologist is busy digging a pool with a backhoe since he knows I like to swim. The pool will be ready by the time I get there. I say I'll get there if I can.
   I'm aware, in the dream, that the "far land" from which I am calling is not of this world, but a country in the imaginal realm, and that my phone is more than in ordinary reality. It works to open communication between different mental planes. 4/5/09

Different Phone, Different Self

Traveling in Europe, I can't find my way to a house where I am expected. I reach for my cell phone to call my hosts. I'm surprised to see there are three or four little windows on the screen displaying maps. When I try to use the phone function, I discover the switches are different - this is not my phone, and I don't know how to work it.
     Now lucid, I make a further discovery. I am not my regular self. My hair is a mass of lustrous black curls. I appear to be in my twenties, almost absurdly pretty for a man, though well built and strong, my muscles stretching the fabric of my suit jacket. 9/25/10

Flip-Top Phone with Cartwheeling Dwarf

I have trouble with my cell phone. It's one of those old flip-top models. It has a little plastic receptacle on the upper left hand side. As I handle the phone, this comes off and falls to the ground. Other things now go wrong with the phone; the screen goes blank. It will still work as a phone, but I can’t access the address book or other functions. I could now miss an important phone interview becuse I don't recall the number and can’t look it up.
    This is unresolved as uncanny elements emerge, notably a cartwheeling dwarf. 7/8/12

Departed Family Member Calls from Embassy Party

We usually meet in person at one of her places on the Other Side, but she is calling me on my cell phone on an urgent family matter. She says she is at an embassy party with a new boyfriend. There is lots of static on the line and I hear snatches of Spanish and Portuguese. I get the message. 1/17/19

Photo Odyssey in Wild North

I take a long wak through a wildly beautiful northern landscape, along a river. A young woman experienced in seidr tells us that when she invokes the spirits she starts by calling on Polar Bear. I am eager to photograph extraordinary scenes. The river now seems to be a deep fjord. Across the water I see what may be an ancient bridge or palace facade, with zigzag patterns of green and purple and many arches.
    I take many, many pictures on my cell phone camera. As I return to the body I parked in the bed, I am disappointed to realize that these photos will not be in the camera roll on my phone. I check anyway. Hey, you never know.4/34/21

Survey says

In the midst of my search, I conducted an informal survey of some 200 dreamers who follow my work, asking the question, "Does your phone work in your dreams?" The responses fell into three roughly equal-sized cateories:(1) I never dream of a phone;(2) my dream phone doesn't work; (3) my dream phone usually works.
     Those of a certain age reported that they could typically make and receive calls in their dreams only on rotary dial phones; they had trouble with mobile phones.               Many dreamers reported receiving phone calls from the deceased, and sometimes from friends at a distance. 
     Sometimes issues with dream phone seem to relate to problems with communication in ordinary reality, or the need to get some help. 
     Many dreamers report that problems with the dream phone provide a lucidity trigger, an alert that they are dreaming. For some,a call coming through on the dream phone flags the message as important: listen up! Sometimes the dream call seems to reflect dream clairsentience or precognition. You talk to someone on the phone in your dream and then they call you or show up in ordinary reality.
     A few active dreamers say they try to stay off-grid in their dreams, and use free-floating intuition or bird allies to send and receive messages.

Explain Your Cell Phone to a Space Alien

I want to play the Space Alien Game for a moment. Suppose you had to explain a phone - specifically, a so-called smart phone - to a visitor from  a far galaxy who understands little about humans and Earth conditions What would you say? I might say:

A cell phone is or may be

a mobile communications device

a way to send and receive messages

a camera and recorder

a search engine

a way to send and receive money

a home entertainment system

a geo-locator

an alarm clock

a calendar

ID

a portal to the world-wide web

No doubt you can add to the list and decide what are the most important features for you. So an issue with your mobile phone in your dream might reflect issues on any of those fronts. It might also alert you to the fact that you are not in ordnary reality and have extraordinary access to the multiverse and the quantum information field, according to your lucidity and ability to pursue an unfolding adventure and bring back gifts.

Back to my personal journals. Here's my report of an experience that opened me to the fuller possibiities that may be on offer when your dream phone starts working differently.

April 23, 2019

THE AMAZING STATE OF MY PHONE

My phone isn't working properly. It seems to have lost its keyboard. There is a beautiful but unfamiliar picture on the homescreen,which seems have lost its icons.

I realize that the picture is a loose leaf drawing pinned at the top of the device. I remove it, expecting that this will reveal my keyboard and familiar homescreen. Instead I find another drawing and another. There are many.

I ask a pleasant young woman - an Eng Lit type, I think - if she knows about cellphones. She's willing to help but is soon marveling with delight over the pictures falling from my phone. As I unpin the pictures money falls out - greenbacks in all denominations and dozens of quarters. And other things.

When I remove the last picture the shell of the phone gleams silver. It is tilted and narrows at the top so it looks like a vessel, a miniature starship from Star Trek or Star Wars.

Dream reentry

I stay with the dream after waking. I try to study the pictures. The first one looks something like a lilac tree and something like a waterfall. When I look more closely I see the shape of a great tree that is rooted in the sky rather than the earth.

The second picture is of a dacha in the snow, maybe in Russia, and a wolf. Another shows a belle of ancien regime France in full regalia. Another shows a royal Egyptian couple enthroned. Other pictures are blurry or abstract. I understand that they are portals or storyboards through which it is possible to communicate with these personalities and even enter their lives.

I understand the symbolism of all that change that fell from among the pictures. I am being invited to change my mode of communication and perception.

 

Photo and Journal Drawing by Robert Moss

 

 

Birth of Athena

If you devour a mother goddess

make sure you have loyal friend nearby
armed with the ax of the crescent moon.
It’s like this: the feminine power
you thought you could master
is going to stir and swell in you
until your whole being is a trembling womb
that can only open at the top
like a volcano rising from the ocean floor.
It will blow out your brains
unless your head is opened.
So keep a helper with the right tool handy
and be ready for the bright fury
with owl eyes and blazing mind
who will burst from your head fully armed
and love you to death, setting her spear
at the throat of your certainties.

This poem is in my collection Here, Everything Is dreaming: Poems and Stories published  by State University of New York Press/Excelsior Editions.

Image: Attic black figure vase c.560 bce, in British Museum. Hephaestus splits the skull of Zeus with a two-headed mallet or ax to birth the goddess Athena from his head. Zeus is seated on a swan-backed chair and holds a lightning bolt in his hand. Athena springs from his head, shield in hand, ready for action. Hephaestus waves his hand in the style of an Eileithyia, a birth-goddess.

How to talk to the Creator

 

Ruby Modesto, a shaman of the Desert Cahuilla in southern California, describes how her calling and guidance came to her through dreams. Listening to her voice, as mediated by anthropologist Guy Modesto, is to be in the presence of a wise woman of great common and uncommon sense.

      She tells us, as her grandfather told her, how to talk to the Creator and find his or her voice in the world around us. I want you to listen to her words about this:

     “Grandfather Francisco taught me how to pray to Umna’ah, our Creator. He told me to go alone into the mountains, to find a quiet beautiful place and to pray. He said I should talk out everything, say whatever I felt or needed, and then listen for an answer.

     “That’s the secret: to listen. You have to say everything that’s in your mind, cry until you’re empty. Then listen. He will speak to you.”

     To my ear, this is beautifully said and it is counsel to be followed any day, but especially on days when we are feeling lost or confused. Go alone to a special place, a place where you can hear the speaking land. Get out everything you need to express. Shout it out, cry it out, until you are empty.Then listen until you are filled with the guidance and strength you have opened a space to receive.

     For Ruby, that special place in nature was up in the Santa Rosa mountains near the traditional valley home of her people of the Dog Clan of the Cahuilla. For me, a good place to talk to the Creator is a lake in the woods that is quiet unless I get too close to a beaver lodge – which will get the male beaver thwacking his tail – or the red-tailed hawk is urgent to speak to me in her own tongue.

-

Quotes are from Ruby Modesto and Guy Mount, Not for Innocent Ears: Spiritual Traditions of a Desert Cahuilla Medicine Woman. Arcata, CA: Sweetlight Books, 1980.

Photo: Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains National Monument. Public Domain.

There Are Things That Like to Happen Together

 

Jung’s lifelong practice of field perception and observation of special moments of synchronicity is a model of how to navigate with the help of coincidence and let the interweaving of inner and outer experience open a path to “absolute knowledge.”

He had a little garden room on the lake where he would often receive clients and colleagues in his later years. He would receive all the natural phenomena that were buzzing or splashing or sighing within his field of perception — the flight of insects, the wake of a boat, a shift in the wind — as a commentary on whatever was going on in his interaction with his visitor.

Jung’s willingness to trust an unexpected incident — and accept it immediately as guidance for action — is evident in a meeting he had with Henry Fierz, who visited him in hopes of persuading him to support the publication of a manuscript by a recently deceased scientist. Jung had reservations about the book and opposed publication. The conversation became increasingly strained, and Jung looked at his watch, evidently getting ready to tell his guest he was out of time. Jung frowned when he saw the time.

“What time did you come?” he demanded of his visitor.

“At five o’clock, as agreed.”

Jung’s frown deepened. He explained that his watch had just been repaired, and should be keeping impeccable time. But it showed 5:05, and surely Fierz had been with him for much longer. “What time do you have?”

“Five thirty-five,” his visitor told him.

“Since you have the right time and I have the wrong time,” Jung allowed, “I must think again.”

He then changed his mind and supported publication of the book.

Well do well, in our daily practice, if we simply recognize that there are things that like to happen together, and allow those patterns to reveal themselves.

 

Look What’s Going Down the Toilet

Shortly before the stock market crash in 1987, in the restroom on an airplane, I dropped a small wallet containing my credit card and checks from the brokerage account I had at that time — and only just managed to catch it before it vanished down the toilet.

 Had this been a dream, I might have written a one-liner like: “If you’re not very careful, your stock market investments will go down the toilet.” Unfortunately, in 1987, I was not yet fully aware that incidents in waking life speak to us exactly like dream symbols. I failed to harvest the message, neglected to take the appropriate action to limit the risk to my brokerage account — and saw a large percentage of my net worth go down the toilet.

 

Three Geese in Flight

Nearly twenty years later — poorer but hopefully a little wiser — I was at the Iroquois Indian Museum in the rural Schoharie Valley of upstate New York. I was giving an informal talk about my book Dreamways of the Iroquois, and I was gratified that the large audience included many people of the First Nations as well as many descendants of the first European settlers.

Afterward, a long line of people wanted me to sign their books.

A pleasant, mature woman sprang into action, finding seats for the older people and helping others to stay cheerful while they waited.

When things became less busy, she asked if she might sit and talk with me. Of course. She introduced herself with modest dignity. “I’m Freida Jacques.  For twenty-seven years I have served as Mother of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga people.”

I felt honored and humbled to be in her presence.

She said, “I don’t dream in the night so much, or don’t remember. I dream like this. I need to know if I should accept an invitation to go out west, and I look up and there are three geese in flight, flying west like an arrowhead, with a hawk in front of them. Those three geese, the way they were flying, told me to go west.”

A man waiting behind her couldn’t restrain himself. He shoved his business card across the table. The name of his business was Three Geese in Flight, and he specialized in both Celtic and Iroquois books.

“That’s very interesting,” I told him. “Since I started dreaming in the Mohawk language, and studying Aboriginal peoples, some of my fierce Scottish ancestors have started walking through my dreams, basically saying, ‘Look here, laddie. We know a thing also. Don’t forget to talk to us.’ Sometimes they say things in Scots Gaelic. I really don’t know how I’m going to cope with that. Mohawk was bad enough.”

Then a tall, lean, tweedy man waiting behind the bookseller couldn’t hold back.

He pushed forward and gave me his hand.

“I’m a retired English professor,” he told me. “I have devoted the rest of my life to preparing the definitive grammar of Scots Gaelic.” He gave me his card. “If you need help translating those Gaelic words in your dreams, I’m your man, laddie.”

 

 

Text adapted from The Three "Only" Things by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

 

Robin Hobb's Ways of Magic and Dreaming

Notes from a Reading Life

I don't know why it took me so long to start reading the exceptional fantasy novels of Robin Hobb. Since I devoured Assassin's Apprentice,the first book in her Farseer trilogy,I have been cracking a new novel in the vast cycle every week or so. I might have finished the 13 novels by Hobb that I have in my current reading pile (she has published many more, under more than one name) except that I have just a few other reading assignments. I must also confess thatI have a polyamorous relationship with books, hopping in and out of bed with many in a single night.
     The names of her characters - King Shrewd, Prince Chivalry, Lady Patience - looked silly to me before I started in, but within a few pages I had made the adjustment. I wasn't sure to begin with that I wanted to give time to yet another neo-medieval series, replete with swords and sorcerers and dragons, but soon she had me in her spell, and her dragons are most superior..
     I am fascinated by the ways of magic described in Hobb's splendid series and by the wildly shamanic and moving treatment of human-animal bonding. Best of all, as her protagonist deepens his practice, he - and the reader - learns more and more about the power of dreaming.

At the start of Royal Assassin, Book 2 of The Farseer Trilogy).we are told we are in a world where there are three kinds of the magic.

The first is the Skill, inborn in royals of the Farseer dynasty and sometimes appearing as a "wild strain" in people whose ancestors came from outside the settled lands of the Six Duchies. "One trained in the Skill is able to reach out to another's mind, no matter how distant, and know what he is thinking. Those who are strongly Skilled can influence that thinking, or have converse with that person. For the conducting of a battle, or the gathering of information, it is a most useful tool."

The second magic is the Wit, denounced by many as "beast magic" and sometimes punished by a gruesome triple execution by hanging,cutting and immersion in water.  We are told by a cautious chronicler that "The Wit, it is said, gives one the ability to speak the tongues of the beasts. It was also warned that those who practiced the Wit too long or too well became whatever beast they bonded to. But this may be only legend." We will learn much more through the voice of the protagonist-narrtaor, FitzChivalry as we enter his deep bonding with a wolf, which gives us some of the most powerful writing and most moving scenes in the cycle.

Then there are the Hedge magics: potions and palmistry, skrying and spell-making and herbal remedies.

 The force of the Skill is dramatized when Fitz comes to the tower room where his master, King-in-Waiting Verity, has been using it to confuse the minds of the terrible Red Ship Raiders. Startled by his entrance, Verity "turned to me and his face was like heat, like light, like wind in my face. He Skilled into me with such force that I felt driven out of myself, his mind possessing mine so completely that there was no room left to be myself in it. For a moment I was drowning in Verity, and then he was gone, withdrawing so rapidly that I was left stumbling and gasping like a fish deserted by a high wave." The Skilled royal steadied him and apologized.

Our hero Fitz, a royal bastard, is both Skilled and Witted, though he is given no useful training in either magic. He learns the depth of animal bonding after he purchases an abused wolf cub from a vendor who has been keeping it in a cage. The wolf hates and distrusts humans. But with time and exquisite care Fitz is able to grow and gentle their relationship until they are closely bonded, able to converse mind to mind, to protect and heal one another and even to share, for a time, each other's bodies. The country folk who are Witted call themselves Old Blood. Hobb's description of what evolves between Fitz and the wolf he comes to call Nighteyes is wildly and truly shamanic, also so deeply human and canine.  

In Assassin's Quest (Book 3 of Farseer trilogy) we learn more of the risks of the "magic of minds"known as the Skill.  "It requires a great deal of energy to wield it on a daily basis, and it offers to its practitioners an attraction that has been misnamed as a pleasure. It is more of a euphoric, one that increases in power proportionately with the strength and duration of Skilling. It can lure the practitioner into an addiction to Skilling, one which eventually saps all mental and physical strength, to leave the mage a great, drooling babe." 

We are given further ruminations on the magic of the Old Blood: "The Wit seems to be a form of mind linking, usually with a particular animal, which opens a way for understanding of that animal's thoughts and feelings...What the Wit may be is a man's acceptance of the beast nature within himself, and hence an awareness of the element of humanity that every animal carries within it as well." 

As his faculties come more fully alive, Fitz finds himself able to enter the perception and seemingly the bodies of people at a distance, initially without control. When the coastal duchies are plagued by the raiders, his dream self joins a boy in a desperate battle ."I do not think the boy could sense me. This was not my Skilling out but his reaching to me with some rudimentary Skill sense of his own. I could not control his body at all, but I was locked into his experience. I was riding this boy and hearing his thoughts and sharing his perceptions." . Before he can figure it out, the boy's throat is cut and for a moment he is joined in the rapture of a bloody death. 

Later he Skill-dreams into another desperate fight against the Red Ship Raiders. He enters the body of a Duke's daughter and wields his battle ax, through her, with amazing effect. The cost of his unplanned Skill dreams is terrible headaches and fatigue for which he takes a dreadful remedy. 

He has to learn discernment, targeting, how to set up walls so he is not open to anyone, Skilled or Witted, who leans his way. The urgency becomes clear as we witness the continuing raids, which deploy a mode of psychic warfare that reduces opponents to ravening zombies, and a vicious struggle for the Farseer throne. We learn that the Skill unlocks powers initially beyond imagination. Ancient masters created portals and highways into a deeper universe and sculpted living dragons from black memory stone, and the arts can be revived. 

In Fool's Errand (book 1 of The Tawny Man trilogy, the sequel to the Farseer threesome) Fitz discovers the treasures of hypnagogia. experiences in the liminal space between sleep and awake: "I lingered in the hinterlands of sleep. Sometimes I think there is more rest in that place than there is in true sleep. The mind walks in the twilight of both states, and finds the truths that are hidden alike by daylight and dreams. Things we are not ready to know abide in that place, awaiting that unguarded frame of mind. " 

SPOILER ALERT: You may want to skip the two following short paragraphs if you have not already read Fool's  Errand

His communication and bonding with the wolf deepens. He escapes death by fleeing the "battered husk" of his physical body and sharing the wolf's body, with his consciousness, for a time. "I shared residence with the wolf in his body, perceiving his thoughts, seeing the world through his eyes."

Later, when Nighteyes is near death, Fitz risks everying by projecting himself into the wolf''s body again, to heal his heart by becoming his heart, moving it back to a regular pattern. You have a hard head indeed if either of these passages leaves you dry-eyed. 

 In Fool's Fate (Book 3 in The Tawny Man trilogy) we learn more, with Fitz, about traveling in dreaming and joining others in their dreams. Without giving away too much of the plot, a character who is richly endowed with the raw power of Skill but has very little brain is bringing down the energy and spirit of a whole ship's crew through his nightmare visons. Fitz can't contain this alone. He must travel into the dream space of a young woman who is a more powerful dreamer. He gets through the dark thorny woods that oppose him, finds her in a glass tower and begs her to help calm the dark dreams that are afflicting many. He tells her, "You are very strong in the magic that lets one person go into another person's dreams and change them." 

Together they enter the space of  man who is drowning in his dream. The girl is able to change the dream. "Now it's my dream, and in my dream we can walk on the waves." She helps construct a pleasant new dreamscape woven from the dreamer's happy childhood memories, where he can lie safe and warm on an immense bed. She tells him -in the new dream - that he can return to this sanctuary whenever he chooses. All he has to do is think of a pillow on the bed.

Robin Hobb is weaving some true dream magic here, even as her character says, "This dream-changing is not magic. It is just a thing I can do."

My favorite character in the series,the Fool (no room to explain him here) says early in the stories,  "You can only understand a thing when you become it." As we follow what this means for Fitz, we come alive to what it may mean in our own lives.

 

Dreams are the novels which we read when asleep

 

Notes from a Reading Life

“Dreams are the novels which we read when asleep,” according to an anonymous “writer” quoted by Charles G. Leland in the preface to his anthology The Poetry and Mystery of Dreams, published in Philadelphia in 1855. Perhaps the writer was Leland himself. It’s a curious anthology, originating in the ancient idea that prophecy and poetry are intimately connected; did not the Pythia speak in verse? Leland even finds room for a Bohemian drinking song, translated from “Czech-Slavonian” by himself:

Drink good beer and never fear, 
Love the girls both far and near!

He comes again and again to his beloved Chaucer and Chaucer’s ringing validation of dreams:

Dreames be significations 
As well of joy as of tribulations, 
That folks endure in this life present: 
There nedeth to make of this none argument

"A tale is not beautiful if nothing is added to it."
- Tuscan proverb quoted by Italo Calvino in the introduction to his collection of Italian Folktales, which contains many wonder tales translated from Tuscan dialect, including "The Sleeping Queen" (La Regina Marmotta).,recorded from te oral narration of a laborer around 1880. The manner of the queen's awakening could keep Freudians and Jungians and anthropologists arguing for weeks. For Calvino it is enough to declare that "folktales are real". 
In the course of his journey into folklore, he tells us, "the world about me gradually took on the attributes of fairyland, where everything that happened was a spell or a metamorphosis...I had the impression that the lost rules which govern the world of folklore were tumbling out of the magic box I had opened."

The only dream expert is you

You are the final authority on your dreams, and you should never give the power of your dreams away by handing them over to other people to interpret. Yes, our dreams can be confusing and opaque, and we gain greatly from other people's insights, especially when those other people are "frequent fliers" who work closely with their own dreams and have developed a fine intuition about what may be going on in dreaming. So it's okay to ask for help. More than that, we often need help because we are too close to our own issues, or too inhibited by self-limiting to see what may be obvious to a complete outsider.

     However, we need to learn some simple rules about how to share and comment on dreams. I suggest the following guidelines for both sharing and self-study:

1. Record or tell the dream as clearly and exactly as possible. Dreams are real experiences, and the meaning of the dream is often inside the dream experience itself. Give your story a title.

2. Consider your feelings, inside the dream and especially on waking. Your first feelings around a dream are a quick and usually reliable guide to its relative importance, urgency and quality (e.g. positive/negative, literal/symbolic).

3. Always run a reality check by asking: Is it remotely possible the events in this dream could be played out in waking life? I have never seen more time wasted in dream analysis -- and more life-supporting messages lost -- than when we fail to recognize that our dreams are constantly rehearsing us for challenges that lie around the corner. In our dreams, we are all psychic.

4. If you are going to comment on someone else's dream, always begin by saying (in these words or similar words), "If this were my dream, I would think about..." This way, you are not leaning on other people and presuming to tell them the meaning of their dreams or their lives. If we can only encourage more people to follow this vitally important etiquette for dream-sharing, we'll create a safe space for many people to share dreams and work with them in everyday situations. Most important, we will help each other to become authors of meaning for our own dreams, and our own lives.

5. Try to go back inside the dream and recover more information. A dream fully remembered is often its own interpretation. You may find dream reentry much easier than you thought when you wake up to the fact that a dream is also a place; because you have been to that place, you can find your way there again.

6. Try to come up with a one-liner to summarize what happens in the dream (or encourage the dreamer to do that). This will often turn out to be a personal dream motto that will orient you towards appropriate action -- to act on the dream guidance and honor the dream.

7. Always do something with the dream! Dreams require action. We need to do far more than interpret dreams;we need to bring their energy and insight into manifestation in waking life.

The simple guidelines above are central to my Active Dreaming approach. You can learn more about fun, everyday techniques for working and playing with dreams and using them as portals for adventure and healing in a larger reality in my books; The Three "Only" Things and Active Dreaming are good places to jump in.

Art: René Magritte, Belgian, La légende des siècles (1952).

Notes from a Reading Life: Wendy Doniger's Implied Spider

"When Kevin Costner wanted to learn an Indian dialect for his film Dances with Wolves, he didn't realize that there were different grammatical forms for men and women; he learned the language from a woman, and hence, apparently unknowingly, throughout the film referred to himself as 'she' and 'her'."

This delightful anecdote in Wendy Doniger's book The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth reminded me of my first attempts to learn the Mohawk language on and off reservations. In Mohawk the primary nouns and pronouns are feminine. So Okwari is Bear but in English it is also she-bear. If you want to specify you are talking about a male bear you must add a prefix and say Rokwari.

Doniger's Kostner anecdote comes in a discussion of how women's voices have been suppressed in the literature of many cultures. Throughout Doniger displays the fruits of her omnivorous reading and proves herself a worthy successor to Mircea Eliade as professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago.

Myths are her passion but she declines to give any fixed definition of the word "myth". You can catch her on the fly, however, saying things like this:

"A myth is a story that is sacred to and shared by a group of people who find their most important meanings in it."

And this:

"Myths from other people's cultures often provide us with useful metaphors that are more refreshing than our own."

I strongly endorse the last statement. Doniger gives an example of what it has meant to her in another provocvative book, Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India. Here she describes how she found her “seed text”, bija mantra, in the story of an Indian goddess, Saranyu. This goddess, little-known in the West, cloned herself in order to get away from a husband she detested, leaving a compliant Hindu version of a Stepford Wife at home while she ranged free as a wild mare. This story kept after Doniger for decades, prompting her to reach deeper and deeper into its well. Whenever she heard it, she would say, “That’s the story of my life.”

I weave  myths from every culture accessible to me into my courses, refreshing old stories as they refresh us. To touch our lives a myth must come vitally alive in our imaginations and our experience of the world.