Dreams and Doubles – Thorstein and the Fylgja

 

I am back in the Iceland of the sagas. In the Vatnsdal Saga, the chronicle of a Norwegian family that moved to northern Iceland before Christianization, we read about dream visitations and the need to listen to a dream advisory, especially when it comes from a fylgja, or companion spirit. 
     Groa the witch invites Thorstein to a banquet. However, three nights before he is due to leave home, he dreams he receives a visitation from a fylgja, in this case his family's protective spirit. She appears in human form and asks him not to go to the witch's house. He objects that he promised to be at the feast. She responds, "It seems unwise to me, and harm will befall you from this." She appears for three nights in succession, scolding him for not heeding her warning. She touches his eyes as if to tell him he must open them and see clearly. 
     Thorstein must have listened, because on the day of his departure he says he is sick and tells the people who were going to travel with him to go home. At her place, Groa walks backwards around the house chanting spells. A rockfall on the house kills everyone inside. "Ever afterwards the place where Groa lived seemed haunted, and men had no wish to live there from that time on."
    Although fylgja is sometimes translated as "follower" we know from other tales - and from first-hand experience today - that it often travels ahead of its protege, and may be seen by others before a traveler reaches their destination.   

Quotations are from Andrew Warn's traslation of Vatnsdal Saga, chapter 36, in The Sagas of the Icelanders: A Selectuon (New York: Viking, 2000) with one significant change.  Warn turns the Icelandic word fylgja into "fetch". This is not satsfactory,  since in English "fetch" is usually taken to mean a personal double, whose appearance is ominous since it often heralds death. The fylgjur ("those who accompany") are constant companions, most visible and especially active in dreams. A fylgja is a guardian spirit rather than a shadow self, though the term has shiftng meaning in different contexts. in and out of the Old Norse polypsychic houses of selves. The fylgja watches over an individual but may also protect a whole family and be passed down through generatons. The fylgja is often seen in animal form. When it appears as human, it is apparently always female, which leads some to suggest that it be a matriarchal presence.

Photo: Vatnsdalsá River, in the landscape of the Vatnsdal Saga

Hawk reminds me we can fly

 

I am drifting around dawn in the liminal state between sleep and awake, where I recommend that you learn to spend more time because it's a natural launchpad for lucid dream adventures. It's a place where creative connections are made easily. It's a place where you are highly psychic and your psyche - come on, let's call it soul - can be quite mobile. 
     I am drifting around dawn. The image of a feather floats up on my inner screen. I see the pattern and I know it is the feather of a red-tailed hawk, a bird that has played an important role in my life.  Suddenly, I realize the feather is attached to a live bird, to a wing that is quivering in mid-air. I look at the wing, at the back of the bird, at the silver-white belly feathers.I look ino the intense yellow eyes that are looking at me and I feel an invitation. To do what? To lift up, to fly with the hawk.
    Now I am floating over the rooftops of the city and over the green park. I have gone through my window without noticing. I am vaguely aware of the body I have left in bed, but my focus is on the adventure ahead. Extraordinary things have happened when I have flown with the hawk before. This already feels so good.  I, am enjoying going with the wind, the pure freedom of flight. The hawk is no longer separate. I think the hawk and I have become a hybrid. Or I have taken the form of a hawk.
     Frequent flyers beyond the body do it in different ways, Some fly Superman style, arms out, straight as a rocket. Some swim through the air or go doggy-style, or pedal. I often find myself winging it like the birds. So maybe I am a hawk now.
      But I am distracted by mechanical noise. I have not lost track of the physical environment. I am in two places and two states of mind at once. I am floating above the city and at the same time I am aware of my body in bed and the physical life of the night city below me. I search for the source of the noise and see a helicopter, probably going to or from a nearby hospital on an emergency call. I tell myself the noise will go away. Let me stay with the hawk in flight and find out where it wants to take me this time.
      The noise of the chopper blades does fade. But now there is a louder, harsher, churning noise, I think of a military aircraft. This is really pulling me out of my lovely aerial experience. As soon as my attention shifts, I drop back in my dormant body in the bedroom with a soft thud.
      This is a small anecdote, nothing important going on, but little incidents like this remind us that in dreams and dreamlike states, we can fly. This is a talent to be grown and to be mastered. It has been valued in most cultures as far back as we can track even if many in modern society have forgotten.

The Ur-Ground of Literature

 

 The raw sexuality of her call to her lover is wild and shocking: “Plow my vulva!” He plunges into her like a “wild bull”. When they couple, he is the green life of all growing things and she is the Queen of Heaven. He is Dumuzi and she is Inanna.

     But she is called to go down into the dark places, and travels a terrifying path of ordeal and initiation. When she returns, transformed, to the surface world, she finds that her man has forgotten her, playing king of all he surveys. Her angry curse sucks the light out of his day. Now Dumuzi dreams that everything turns against him. Trees are uprooted, his hearth fire is doused, his drinking cup is thrown down, his shepherd’s crook is taken away. A fierce raptor seizes a lamb from his sheepfold, and he knows that something fearsome and unforgiving is coming for him.
     Death is coming for him, and his only hope lies in the love and feminine wisdom of his younger sister, Geshtin-anna. She is a reader, “a tablet-knowing scribe”, who knows the meaning of words and of dreams.
    She helps him to hide, but in the end he cannot escape his own demons. He is overpowered by galla demons and carried down to the realm of Inanna’s dark double, the Queen of the Underworld, into his own cycle of death and rebirth.. Grieving, both Inanna and his constant sister will seek him in the lower world, using drumming, like shamans. And they will make a deal by which Geshtin-anna will take her brother’s place in the Underworld for half the year, giving him time up top with the goddess in her sunnier disposition. But that is a later story in the cycle of Inanna.
    The Dream of Dumuzi is the oldest recorded dream. It was written in Sumer nearly five thousand years ago, scored with marks on baked clay that look like the tracks of a very thoughtful sandpiper. Almost certainly, it was written by a woman. We can’t miss the fact that the first dream interpreter on record is a woman who can read and write, the “tablet-knowing scribe.”
    Geshtin-anna becomes the goddess of dream divination (and of wine).

The Dream of Dumuzi, unclothed in its beauty and terror in a modern translation by Diane Wolkstein, is great writing, and takes us where great writers do not fear to go: into the inner chambers of the heart, into the demon-haunted mind, into the mysteries of death and rebirth. Thanks to its survival, we can say without hesitation that one of the first uses of writing – which was invented in Sumer – was to record dreams, and that one of the great things to emerge from recording dreams, at least five thousand years ago, was literature. Writers have always been dreamers. [1]        

Dumuzi was king of Uruk, not far from Ur, the most famous city of the Sumerians and the one from which Abraham set out to found a new people. So Bert States is doubly correct when he says “dreaming is the Ur-form of all fiction.” [2]
    States suggests that storytelling springs from the same “skill” that allows us to produce dream narrativesand compares the mental state of the creative writer to that of a lucid dreamer: “Just as the lucid dreamer is slightly awake, slightly outside the dream, while being largely inside it, so the waking author is slightly asleep, or slightly inside the fiction while being largely outside it.” [3] Many fiction writers (including me) would attest to the accuracy of this description. It probably applies to creative minds from many fields operating in a flow state of relaxed attention or attentive relaxation. In this state, as Samuel Beckett wrote of Proust, the writer may also be, for the moment, “an extratemporal being” [4] 
    Dreams provided both energy and inspiration for literary creation. As a boy, Aeschylus (born 525 BCE) was sent to watch over ripening grapes in a vineyard. When he dozed off, Dionysus, god of wine and drama, appeared to him and gave him instructions for a new kind of theatre. Prior to this, ancient Greek drama was rather static ritual, with a single actor on stage, and a chorus that did not interact directly with him. Aeschylus was inspired in his dream to introduce a second actor; this was the birth of Western theatre. He went on to write ninety plays, although only seven are extant.

“Poetry is always the result of flooding”, a young poet told Stefania Pandolfo as she journeyed among rural Moroccan villagers for whom dreaming and poetry are vitally important, and always interweaving. A real poem bursts from an emotion that is inundating, overwhelming – until it finds creative release. [5] 
   The most respected poet in the area, one Sheikh Mohammed, was alien to poetry until he dreamed of a flood. The dream came at a time of personal trauma when he was close to despair. Previously a violent man of action, he had managed to blow off his right hand in a gun accident. He dreamed the river was coming down in flood, its front like a mountain, carrying everything it encountered in its path, trees and carrion and debris. Instead of fleeing, he stood there in the dry riverbed, watching and waiting. Then he opened his mouth and swallowed the flood and everything borne along by it. He recounted the dream to his mother and she told him that he had become a poet. This became his life’s calling.[6]
     From the priestess-scribe who wrote Dumuzi’s story to the latest novels by Stephen King and Neil Gaiman, dreams have provided wonderful material for stories and novels, scripts and poems. The dream may provide the rough first sketch of a theme or a plot or a character, with everything still to be worked out and delivered – perhaps with the help of subsequent dreams – over a considerable period of time. The dream may have the structure and detail required for a finished story or poem (but is unlikely to be “finished” in the sense that it will be truly good writing until the raw report has been shaped and polished). The dream may be inserted in a narrative and attributed to one of the characters as Graham Greene did for Querry in A Burnt-Out Case). The dream may be delivered as a story without a frame, as Franz Kafka delivered a nightmare in Metamorphosis while insisting, in the tale, that the man turned into a giant bug was not dreaming.
   The literary dream has been used as a plot device in many ways. It may be used to take the reader into the inner life of a character. It may be used to set up critical narrative tension, for example between a character’s desires and his conscience, a central theme in Dostoyevsky’s use of dreams.
    The dream can be used as an architectural device, to open and frame a story that may be anything but a dream; the medieval Roman de la Rose is a classical example, from an age when dreams were greatly respected. In the classic Chinese novel The Dream of the Red Chamber novel opens with a goddess creating a mountain from 36,501 pieces of stone, one of which - rejected - is a speaking rock whose complaint is heard by two immortals and is gifted with a very mobile life, in different forms, in the mortal world – known to gods and immortals as the Red Dust - and elsewhere.[7]

     Writing and dreaming are closely related in daily practice. Writers who keep journals and record their dreams are giving themselves a warm-up, flexing the creative muscles that will work on the larger project. Writers who may not record their dreams with any regularity nonetheless rise from sleep with their heads full of words – as Dickens related in his letter to Dr. Stone – that are pressing to come out. [8]

A writer’s dream may help to “break up the great fountains of the deep” (a phrase Mark Twain used repeatedly) releasing the power of long-buried memories, or bringing through ideas that have been growing in the preconscious or the deeper unconscious for years or decade. That is how Aslan came to C.S. Lewis, giving him the key to Narnia. As “Jack” Lewis recalled 

The Lion all began with a picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. The picture had been in my head since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself: ‘Let’s try to make a story about it.’
    At first I had little idea how the story would go. But then suddenly Aslan came bounding into it. I think I had been having a good many dreams about lions about that time. Apart from that, I don't know where the Lion came from or why he came. But once he was there He pulled the whole story together, and soon he pulled the six other Narnian stories in after him. [9]] 

     Finally, it is in dreams and flow states that writers come into contact with inner helpers. Robert Louis Stevenson communed with his “Brownies” in states of reverie, and gave them the credit for doing better than half his literary work. Yeats spoke of the “mingling of minds” that can bring assistance, in a creative venture, from intelligences that seem to belong to other times or other dimensions. Milton described the source of his inspiration as   

....my celestial patroness, who deigns
Her nightly visitation unimplored,
And dictates to me slumbering, or inspires
Easy my unpremeditated prose [] 

Milton spoke of “being milked” after his nights of inspiration, as – totally blind by the time he composed his most famous work – he dictated to a scribe.

 

Notes and References

 1. This translation of the Dream of Dumuzi is in Wolkstein, Diane and Samuel Noah Kramer, Inanna, Queen of Heaven: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer. New York: Harper & Row, 1983, pp 74-84.     Dumuzi (later called Tammuz) is a Mystery god who dies and is reborn, and the cycle of his ever-recurring death and resurrection is also the cycle of the crops in what is now southern Iraq. He dies in the spring at the time Iraqi farmers, in their hot country, harvest their wheat and barley; he is resurrected when they put seeds in the earth. In the Christian calendar, this is Easter time. The Shia ritual mourning for the martyred Imam Hussein at the site of the battle of Karbala – a rite Saddam tried to suppress – takes place at the same time. Life rhymes, and so do the life cycles of gods. See  E.W.Fernea, Guests of the Sheikh. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969.

2. Bert O. States, Dreaming and Storytelling. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993.1993, p.3. 

3.  Bert O. States, Bert O., “Authorship in Dreams and Fictions” in Dreaming vol.4 no.4 (December, 1994) pp. 239-240

4. Samuel Beckett, Proust. New York: Grove, 1931, p. 56)

5.Stefania Pandolfo,  Impasse of the Angels: Scenes from a Moroccan Space of Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997, p.259]

6. ibid p. 265

7. Tsao Hsueh-chin, Dream of the Red Chamber (1754). Trans. and adapted by Chichen Wang. New York: Anchor Books, 1989.

8. Charles Dickens letter to Dr Stone. February 2, 1851; see Warrington Winters, “Dickens and the Psychology of Dreams” in PMLA vol.63 no.3 (September 1948) pp. 984-1006.

9. Lewis, C.S., “It All Began with a Picture”, Junior Radio Times, vol. 68 (July 15, 1960) reprinted in Of Other Worlds. San Diego and New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975, p. 42.

10. Paradise Lost IX. 21-4

Text adapted from The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

 

 

 

Astral and Mental Bodies

 

After a good middle-of-the night session with Powell’s book The Astral Body, I returned to bed and at once felt in contact with my Higher Self. I felt lightness, clarity and well-being. I was encouraged to shift my attention, and entered the vision space.

    I see brilliant bands of color at the edges of my energy field. Orange and deep blue, then yellow, crimson and green. A purple band towards the outside and a lighter, translucent refulgence around it.
    I have the sense of rising above both my physical and my astral bodies.
    Now I am high up inside an immense bubble or dome of light. I realize with some surprise that the tiny object far below me – as if glimpsed from an airplane – is my physical body, with a second body floating above it. I feel am entirely liberated from the tug of feelings and desires. I am instructed that I am now in my mental body. Its form, when separated from the astral body, is that of a point of light.
    To understand the role of kama (desire) I am allowed to see the effect of descending into the astral body and removing the sphere of light that encloses the whole scene. I’m struck by the urgent, ravening quality of all the things that come through. Would-be human visitors include women filled with sexual desire; some may be thought-forms I have generated, others seem to have independent existence. Many other thought-forms press for attention, as do discarnate entities.
    I resolve to practice continuity of consciousness and pursue this teaching experience.
    I fall into a dream for a few moments. I find myself, very realistically, back in a restaurant I used to frequent in an earlier period of my life.
    For much of the night, I am conscious of learning and studying. I read complex but very clear material on the nature of the subtle bodies that I feel sure I will be able to reproduce. I’m determined to bring as much back through the filters into “brain knowledge” as possible.

- from my journal for December 28, 1995.

I enjoy opening old journals at random and seeing what was I was doing, in one world or another, in earlier phases of life. Here, nearly thirty years ago, I am road-testing Theosophist descriptions of the multiple vehicles of consciousness by traveling beyond my body and the astral plane, in a succession of subtle bodies. Dreaming is not a spectator sport. I drew on similar experiences in Dreamgates, my book for frequent fliers.

"Bilocation at St. Martin de Londres". Journal drawing by Robert Moss

Materializing a dream, embodying a dream lover

 

The literature of India contains many versions of the story of dream lovers who find each other in waking reality, sometimes after a long and difficult quest. In a story in the twelfth century Kathasaritsagara (Ocean of the Stream of Story) King Vikramaditya sees in a dream girl he does not know, in an unknown country, and falls in love with her. As he embraces her, his pleasure is interrupted by the cry of a night watchman. The same night, in a distant land, Princess Malayavati – who had a horror of sex and avoided men – dreamed she had found the perfect lover and was lying with him on the connubial couch when they were interrupted by her chambermaid. After many plot twists, the dream lovers meet, recognize each other, and are united in their physical bodies as they had been in their dream bodies.
      The broader theme, pf materializing a dream, is also central to Indian accounts of dreaming. Roger Caillois observed that “India, which may well be considered the center of asceticism and moral discipline, has invested the dream with other powers again. The recluse, carried away by his meditation, gives a material existence to the images of his dreams, if he can only succeed in sustaining them with sufficient intensity. The dream then becomes lucid, deliberate and creative it becomes, in fact, a consciously willed effort that will be realized provided only that it is pursued sufficiently long and with sufficient vigor.”  [1]
    The biography of the famous poet Tulsidas, who composed an epic devoted to Hanuman the monkey god demonstrates the power and the process of this kind of yogic dreaming, . A tyrant imprisoned the poet in a stone tower. “The poet set himself to dream, to meditate, to dream again, to put to work all the resources of a mind straining to empty himself of all distracting content. Then from the dream arose Hanuman and his army of apes who overran then kingdom, seized the tower, and set the poet free.”

 

1. Roger Caillois, “Logical and Philosophical Problems of the Dream” in G.E. von Grunebaum and Roger Caillois (eds) The Dream and Himan Societies (Berkeley; University of California Pres, 1966)

The soul is only partly confined to the body

 

One of Jung's great finds in his study of alchemy was a passage from de Sulphure, a tract by Michael Sendivogius, that Jung paraphrased as follows:

The soul is only partly confined to the body, just as God is only partly enclosed in the body of the world. [1]

In this conception the soul is "the vice-regent of God" and dwells in the life spirit of the blood. It rules the mind and this rules the body. Soul operates within the body, but the greater part of its function is outside the body. The power of the soul is that of imaginatio. Through its "imaginative faculty", the soul can operate in the deepest regions (profundissima) outside the body. It has absolute and independent power to do things beyond what the body can grasp.

When it so desires, it has the greatest power over the body, for otherwise our philosophy would be in vain. Thou canst conceive no greater, for we have opened the gate unto thee. [2]

The picture that emerges is of a lively, ever-shifting engagement between soul and the world of the body, an engagement that generates physical events from a deeper matrix. By implication, we see that individuals may be less separate than they supposed, joined in realms where soul is at home in overlapping fields of energy that may approximate group souls. It goes without saying that in this vision of reality, soul must survive the death of the body, since it exists and operates outside the body, as well as in it, during earthly life.

Jung's assistant Aniela Jaffé preserved the following thought from Sendivogius: 

The soul by which man differs from other animals operates inside his body, but it has greater efficacy outside the body, for outside the body it rules with absolute power. [3]

References

1. C.G.Jung, Psychology and Alchemy trans. R.F.C. Hull.  Collected Works volume 12 (Princeton University Press, 1968) p. 282
2. ibid, pp. 279-80.
3. Aniela Jaffé, Jung’s Last Years and Other Essays  (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1984) p.76

 

In Praise of Astral Travel over Astral Projection

 

A wise practitioner of natural magic I knew long ago made a distinction between astral travel and astral projection and recommended the first over the second. "You can be anywhere you think you are, in the mind, without needing to separate from the body".

I appreciate the simple wisdom here, following my remarkable experiences overnight. Awake around 3 am, I lay on my back and let my awareness wander in the fertile liminal space of hypnagogia. My impressions became strongly sensory, above all visual. As I moved beyond familiar locales, space seemed to open up immensely. Without specific intention, I found myself following a winding road lined with scrub and then with modest Asian market stalls. Movement was effortless, with a rocking motion that made me feel I was in a rickshaw.

I came to a magic market and the first of a series of deeply moving encounters with departed friends and relatives, rich in new information. They showed me their current residences and activities. 

I was treated to an etheric healing session by a beautiful and severe therapist I met for the first but perhaps not the last time. I was introduced to a new counselor, whose rigorous questioning led me to define a new project with clarity and forward-moving energy that was lacking until now.

I am quite sure that these were transpersonal encounters.

Through all of this, I was fully aware of my body in the bed, able to hear my cats and the city sounds outside the building without being distracted from my astral adventures. In other words, I was fully lucid in two worlds. You can travel beyond the body without leaving the body unattended and transitions don’t have to involve bumps and grinds and rolling about.  Like my friend the mage, I recommend bilocation over pursuing out of-body experiences for their own sake.

I also recommend journaling your adventures in astral travel as soon as your full attention has returned to the body. I often do this by tapping out an email to myself on my phone. I enjoy the thought that I am sending myself a message from the dreamworld. This morning, however, I wanted to record the most important statement in my travel report by hand, with a fountain pen. There is magic in hand writing, as those who work with old grimoires understand. 

However you write your report, another key rule for me is: do it before coffee. Yes, I know this is cruel, but it is part of the price for becoming a real dream magician. 

At the Gate of Story

 The gatekeepers cannot see where the tide of pilgrims begins. Its source lies far to the north, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, the olive groves and forests of cork, even beyond the stern keep of the man of iron dreams on a high wind-raked plateau. The travelers are so many that their feet have emptied the strait, making a land bridge between the continents. Such was the report of one who reached the Gate of Story.

---Yawning on their cushioned seats by a wall bleached to the color of smilodon bones, the gatekeepers do not rule on the veracity of this account. Like the knight of La Mancha, they know that facts can be the enemy of truth. Judging the truth of a story by whether it stirs or disturbs the hearer, they turn the man who parted the seas away. Too many others have tried to pawn this story before; it has been drained of surprise.
---"Altagracia!" croaks a man whose flesh has fallen away so his linen suit hangs off him like a flag of defeat. Some of the crowd cross themselves or finger amulets against the evil eye. An imam directs a boy to offer the parched traveler a waterskin. "Altagracia!" the man cries again, water frothing from his cracked lips.
---No one has spoken that name at this gate before. The gatekeepers motion for the man who has used it to be advanced to the front of the line. Camel drivers open a way for him with their switches, without regard for the age or gender of those they are beating back.
---"You have three minutes," says the chief keeper of the Gate of Story. He flourishes a pocket watch and spins it, on its chain, from his long pointing finger.
---"She is Altagracia," the story man begins.


She is very pale, with lustrous black hair and black eyes. Her traveling clothes are the color of sand in shadow. She wears a veil under her hat. She has pushed it back, but it can be drawn over her face to keep off blowing sand and flies. She has a good deal of luggage, including a hatbox, handled with ease by her giant black servant, Fidel, who has been assigned by her father, The Professor, to keep her safe. Fidel can speak only in little mewling sounds, which the cats of the city understand. His tongue was cut out, perhaps at his own volition, to guarantee that he will live up to his name, which means "faithful", when it comes to keeping secrets, since he is also illiterate.
---Each time the story of Altagracia is told, it expands, and the world with it. Last time I spoke of her she did not have dogs, but now she has a pair of them, resembling greyhounds, that she calls her sight hounds. I said that Fidel is illiterate and mute, but as I speak his shadow is slipping ahead of him through the city gate in the form of a black cat. It is running into the Sultan's library, where it stands on its hind legs to remove a precious copy of the seventh volume of Pliny Maior's Natural History from a cabinet that others always find locked. He wll go to the harem and delight his hearers all night long with the exact descriptions of dogheaded men, Triballes who kill with a look, and lions with the tails of scorpions. He will be rewarded with dishes of sherbert and leg-humping until the chief eunuch will order his tongue, or another particle, to be excised. The feline Fidel is not so easily bested. By naming - both in lapidary Latin and in the Berberous Arabic of the court- all the creatures of Pliny's hearsay, he has brought them to life. The eunuch's scimitar is no match for a manticore.
-
It became harder and harder to hear the teller of this tale, because as each word was uttered, the scene and the action around the gate became more profuse. The crowd parted and reformed as animals out of legend galloped and bulled their way through. The shadow of immense wings cooled the hot sand. A ship in full sail appeared on a canal that surely was not there before. A man with his head under a black cloth took pictures on glass of a couple of newlyweds boarding a train whose engine puffed perfect blue smoke rings. A cat that was also smoking, with the aid of an amber cigarette holder, shuffled a Marseilles deck and purred, "Pick a card, any card at all."
---The head gatekeeper, invoking the Most High, ordered the man who knew Altagracia to pass through the Gate of Story, and threatened to do terrible things to his mother unless he passed through without delay.
---"The Gate is closed for today," he announced to the host of story pilgrims. They groaned and wept and raged. Many of them, desperate to be heard, tried to shout their stories over each other, producing a weird cacophony that made the keepers press their hands over their ears. Blue-eyed janissaries appeared on the battlements of the gatehouse and fired warning shots into the air.
---In the sudden silence, a voice said in a placeless accent, "You will hear me."
---The voice belonged to a short, spare man with a clipped goatee, who held an umbrella over his head.
---"We will hear no more Namers today," the head keeper spoke in a voice of thunder.
---"I am neither a Namer nor an un-Namer. I am the sculptor of the Immortal Sentence."
---These words, also, had never been heard at the Gate of Story. The keepers were bound by a rule laid down in the remotest of pasts to give the speaker a hearing.


When I first told this story, it took longer than one thousand and one nights to reach the end. Every day since then, I have shortened the story by a sentence. Now that it fills less than a page, I reduce it by one word in each telling. In this instance reducing is the opposite of reduction. With each word I remove, I approach closer to the quintessence of the tale, which is also the key to the making and unmaking of worlds. The consummation of my art will be to deliver the Immortal Sentence, which will replace the knowledge of the world and become the theme of all branches of a new literature and science. Some have thought that the Immortal Sentence will consist only of four letters. This cannot be known until all the words that veil it have been stripped away.


"Cease speaking!" the head gatekeeper commanded. His composure had been shaken. There was whiteness around his mouth. "You may enter."
---The man with the umbrella strode with long decisive steps - unusually fast for a person of small stature, but then he worked his whole legs, from the hips - through the Gate of Story. The immensely high cedar doors began to swing shut. The gatekeepers had gathered their cushions and magic carpets. But the head keeper turned back when a new voice addressed him by his secret name, the name he shared only with Khidr, the guide of those who have no earthly guide.
---It was a woman’s voice. When he faced her, he was pleased to see that she was veiled, though her features could be seen through the gauzy stuff. Her clothes were of English cut, he thought, made by the finest seamstress. Yet something about her made him think of the forbidden vineyards of Shiraz.
---"Come up on the rooftop," she invited him. "We will share a cup of wine."
---"Are you a djinn?" he demanded, now fearful.
---"I am the Sustainer. Every day, I must repeat the one story that keeps the world turning. Every syllable must be flawless, because this is the code on which the world depends."
---"Then why have we never seen you at this gate before?"
---"Do you suppose I have only one form?"
---"Whatever form you take, if you are repeating a story that has been told before, we will know it, and you will have failed the test."
---"You understand very little, and after hearing the story you will know even less. The nature of the story that sustains the world is that it is never different and never the same. By repeating it perfectly, each teller creates a new story and renews the world."
---"This defies both God and reason."
---"Then listen."
---Somehow the head keeper found he was seated beside her on the roof of the watchtower, with the sweet taste of the forbidden wine on his lips.
---The veiled woman speaks:
-
The gatekeepers cannot see where the tide of pilgrims begins. Its source lies far to the north, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, the olive groves and forests of cork, even beyond the stern keep of the man of iron dreams on a high wind-raked plateau. The travelers are so many that their feet have emptied the strait, making a land bridge between the continents. Such was the report of one who reached the Gate of Story.

Illustration: "The Gate of Story" by Robert Moss

Adapted from Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories by Robert Moss. Published by Excelsior Editions.

The Ganesh Splash

Just for fun, from an old journal:

A woman reported a dream in which she watches three elephants bowing to me with deep reverence. Then they rise up and splash me copiously with water sprayed from their trunks. She has the feeling that this is to make sure I don't get puffed up over the honor they have given me. In her dream, I welcome this with laughter and joy.

I chuckled when I read this account, and also felt that little tingle that comes when life rhymes. About the same time she sending me her dream, I was spraying members of a workshop circle in Connecticut with salted water, my favorite psychic cleansing agent. Having given them their shower, I proceeded to splash myself with water from the same vessel.

There was another rhyme. That same morning, I shared or reported three unlikely and mildly embarrassing screw-ups in front of the group, of the kind that made it entertainingly clear that the leader was far from infallible.     

I felt confirmation, when I read the dream report, that I had received a trunk call from Ganesh aka Ganesha, the elephant-headed form of the Gatekeeper beloved and honored in India. From now on, I think I'll add the term "Ganesh Splash" to my personal lexicon of the modes of meaningful coincidence. 

Ganesh Splash: An unlikely and mild embarrassment that prevents you from taking yourself too seriously (or allowing yourself to be guru-ized by others), produced with love and laughter.

 

Have a Close Encounter with Death, Wake Up in a Different Life

 

I went back to Philip K. Dick’s Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. An engaging sci fantasy yarn about a future American police state. The protagonist, TV celebrity and alpha “Six”, Jason Taverner, is hurled out of his privileged life by a familiar plot ruse that works: he has a close brush with death and finds himself in a different reality.
    The device is used beautifully in The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You and in the BBC Wales series Life on Mars. In Kin, the protagonist wakes up in another world where he regains his humanity and sense of life’s purpose before being sent back to the reality he came from, where he has bills to pay.
    In Life on Mars, a cop is thrown back to 1973 while his body lies in a coma after a near-fatal accident. He has an identity here, close to the one he has in the present. He is again a police inspector, with transfer papers that say he was reassigned from “Hyde”. In 1973 he was (and is) four years old, and catches a glimpse of his child self. He gets engaged in cleaning up a corrupt police department and introducing methods for collecting and handling evidence that no one has heard about. From time to time – through a voice on TV or a phone call no one else can hear - he learns about his situation in the present. Will he die in 1973 as well as the present if they turn off the respirator?
     

In Flow My Tears the close call is delivered by an otherwise unexplained monster from a B horror, a “cluster sponge” with fifty feeding tubes flung at him by a psychotic girlfriend. He kills the thing with whisky, but some of the feeding tubes stay in. When he comes round, he’s not in hospital but in a cheap hotel in a bad part of L.A., minus all the I.D. that makes life possible in this reality. The people he knows – agent, lawyer, official mistress – are all in this reality but they don’t know him and when he manages tocheck, there is no record of his birth…
      The scifi elements are charmingly creaky, like old space cowboy flicks without special effects. No cell phones or internet here. When Taverner wants to phone, he drops gold dollar coins in a public phone booth. (Where do you find public phone booths these days?)
      Great relief reading this after Dick’s Valis. Reading that requires a sojourn in a mind that is imploding. You can watch the tenements fall over and into each other.