Dreaming with the People of Amber

The first time I visited the Baltic, I dreamed of an ancient priestess who showed me the spiritual uses of amber. She brought me inside a chamber like the inside of an egg-shaped amber, glowing with golden light, and showed me how to use a smaller version of this amber as a place to see. She gave me words in Old Lithuanian that Lithuanians in my workshop at Nida, on the spit of land in the Baltic Sea called Nieringa, were able to translate with some difficulty.

On my second visit to Lithuania, I dreamed again of the People of Amber. Here is the report I wrote in my journal at the tme:

October 6. 2009. Suvalkija district, Lithuania

I am out in the woods, in the rural part of western Lithuania where I am staying. I come to some wide, shallow steps, just packed earth with wood at the edges. I notice two snakeskins, tied in knots that resemble figures of 8, then a larger one, tied in a slightly more complex knot, on a higher step, and know these were left as signs and also that the snakes were not venomous.
    Now I see vivid, brightly colored scenes of ancient battles - of Teutonic Knights who invaded these lands, and Lithuanian Grand Dukes with their knights and men at arms, struggling against great odds to force them back. This living history unfolds into times where local people took to the forests and the mud to carry on their resistance against invaders. I see people who lived with wolves and bears and tried to call on their energies in the fight. I see huge mystery beasts in the woods that look like elephants and wonder whether these are the shades of extinct prehistoric creatures, or entities created by the country''s defenders in an effort to equalize a conflict through psychic means of attack.
    I wander deeper into the woods. I am conscious that sticky mud is everywhere, and getting deeper, just as I found it roaming fields and ancient hill forts the previous day. I come to the house of a ragana - a witch - on one of the sloppy forest trails. It is just a hut among the roots of a crooked tree. I see the face of the witch before she scuttles away into hiding. She has painted the upper part of her face, from the hairline to the cheekbones, chalk-white so it looks like part of a death's head, or perhaps a venomous spider. While she avoids me, nasty slithering things rise from the mud.
    I'm willing to fight her allies, if need be, and am glad to see that an enormous Bear is with me, as a bodyguard. Yet I'm thinking that the witch is merely defending herself; I have wandered into her territory, and she has reason to fear intruders. Instead of starting a fight, I call down Light, and a bright shaft of amber light immediately descends.
    I am happily surprised to find that it serves as a tractor beam. It pulls me straight up into the air, far above the mud and the dark woods. I find myself inside what seems to be an egg-shaped amber, with female presences who remind me of ancient priestesses of this land I have met in previous dreams and journeys.
    The leader tells me, "You must understand that there are the Mud People and the Amber People, and here you belong to the People of Amber. Your duty - and that of those you train here - is to build bridges and wooden pathways so people can get across the mud safely. You must avoid allowing yourself to be sucked down into the mud. You must remember to call on the power of Light Amber to heal and to guide, and on the power of Dark Amber to remove the darkness."

I titled this dream "The Mud People and the Amber People". 

As I surfaced from this mostly lucid dream, the moon shone bright in my face for a moment, like a spotlight. Then a cloud blew above the apple trees and mountain ash outside my window, and I lay back in the gentle dark, savoring my latest encounter with the "understory" of the Baltic lands where I was traveling.
    I was staying at the country place of a "good witch" in the Suvalkija distrct in Lithuania. After attending my workshop in Vilnius, she invited me here to learn practices of healing and divination handed down in her family from mother to daughter and never written down (until I took notes, with her permission). She had burned amber in a ritual the evening before my dream. In the morning, after hearing the dream, she continued my instruction. She demonstrated how to move light amber over the body in a spiraling motion to heal. Then she showed me how she uses a dark amber (also called "vampire amber" here when used in this way) in a different pattern to extract disease and "strangers" in the body.
     Over a breakfast of dark, nutty "grandmother's bread", homemade cheese and butter and coffee chewy with grounds, we talked about the significant of "Mud People" in the literal history of Lithuania, whose name means "Rain Country". Lithuania has no real natural borders. Its main defense against invaders and occupiers, across the centuries, has been the mud. When the cities fell to enemies, people "went into the mud".

My dreams of the People of Amber offer light in more than one landscape. I have invited groups near and far to enter that amber space of sanctuary and healing.One of those groiups met with me in a forest of dark green pines and silver birches at Kurzeme on the Bay of Riga in neighboring Latvia . Fueld by shamanic drumming, we journeyed tigether therough the dark woods of histiry and personal struggle into the amber light.In Riga, I found the egg-shaped amber in the photo. It fitted my palm, and my dream.

I recount furher adventures in Lithuania, including an encounter with a Merlin of the Baltic and dream archaeology at a working site in Kernave, in The Boy Who Died and Came Back. 

Orenda and the practice of giving thanks

In the indigenous North American way, giving thanks is a practice for every day, not just for an annual holiday. Here is a little of what I learned after I was called in dreams by an ancient woman of power to study the traditions of the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois.

Orenda is the power that is in everything and beyond everything. It clusters in certain things – in that tree, in that stone, in that person or gathering – and if you are sensitive you will feel its weight and its force.
    People come from another world – in the Iroquoian cosmogony, they call it Earth-in-the-Sky – and the origin and purpose for life here below is to be found in that Sky World. Tosa sasa ni’konren, they say. “Do not let your mind fall” from the memory of that other world where everything is directed and created by the power of thought, and everything lives in the glow of a great Tree of Light.

    The first person on Earth who was anything like a human came from that Sky World, after she fell – or was pushed – through a hole among the roots of its great tree. As she fell, she was caught on the wings of great blue herons, who carried her gently down to a chaos of water. Animals, diving into the black deep, found earth for her, so she could begin to make a world. Turtle offered its great back and First Woman danced a new world into being. Under her feet, a handful of soil became all the lands we live on.

    The memory of Earth-in-the-Sky in no way blurs the knowledge that orenda – which is power, spirit, energy, consciousness all at once – is in everything. In the way of the Onkwehonwe, the Real People (as the Iroquois call themselves) we must remember that our relations with our environment are entirely personal, and require appropriate manners.
    If you want to take something from the Earth, you must ask permission. The hunter asks the spirit of the deer for permission to take its life and wastes nothing from its body. I once watched a Mohawk medicine man gathering healing plants. He started by identifying the elder among a stand of the plants and speaking to this one, seeking permission. He offered a little pinch of native tobacco in return for the stalks he gathered for medicine.

    In this tradition, the best form of prayer is to give thanks for the gifts of life. In the long version of the Iroquois thanksgiving, you thank everything that supports your life, and as you do this you announce that you are talking to family.

I give thanks to my brothers the Thunderers
I give thanks to Grandmother Moon and to Elder Brother Sun

In the Native American way, as Black Elk, the Lakota holy man, said, “the center of the world is wherever you are.” For him, that was Harney Peak. For you, it is wherever you are living or traveling. You may find a special place in your everyday world. It may be just a corner of the garden, or a bench under a tree in the park, or that lake where you walk the dog. The more you go there, and open both your inner and outer senses, the more you will find that orenda has gathered there for you.
     A woman who lives near the shore told me that she starts her day like this: “I go to the ocean in the morning at sunrise and put a hand in the water and say Good morning, thank you, I love you. I feel a response from this. The tide will suddenly surge up a little higher, hugging my feet, which is kind of cold in winter but wonderful in warmer weather. I talk to everything out loud like this.”
     The simple gesture of placing your hand in the sea, or on a tree, or on the earth, and expressing love and gratitude and recognition of the animate world around us is everyday church (as is dreamwork), good for us, and good for all our relations
    It is good to do something every day, in any landscape, to affirm life in all that is around us. This may be especially important on days when the world seems drab and flat and even the eyes of other people in the street look like windows in which the blinds have been drawn down. The Longhouse People (Iroquois) reminded me that the best kind of prayer is to give thanks to all our relations, to everything that supports life, and in doing so to give our support to them. When I lived on a rural property, I began each day by greeting the ancient oak on the dirt road behind the house as the elder of that land.
    These days, it is often enough for me to say to sun and sky, whether on the sidewalk or in the park or among the streaming leaves of Grandmother Willow

I give thanks for the morning
I give thanks for the day
I give thanks for the gifts
    and the challenges of this lifetime

Photo of Grandmother Willow by RM

For more on indigenous tradition, please read my book Dreamways of the Iroquois. For more on everyday practice, please see my book Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life.

Tea Rose Gate

 

There’s a garden among the stars

where flowers are gates to other worlds.

Try the pink rosebud that opens shyly.

plunge through its smooth and fragrant folds

into the Victorian garden where tea is laid

and sweet girls play and show a blushing priest

a bunnyhole that leads to Wonderland

and a ginger cat issues opaque directions.

Take the dare of the “Drink Me” bottle

and you’ll become inconceivably small

even faster than Alice, so fast you won’t see

a grass blade rear into a royal palm

and ants turn into six-legged horses.

You’ll grow, by diminishing, into a world

vaster than the one you knew before,

you’ll swim among stars no telescope has seen,

you’ll find light-ships among the galaxies,

immensity held in the iota of a speck

that eludes the electron microscope

but not the home-drawn voyager.

This poem is in the collection Here Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories by Robert Moss. Published by Exclesior Editions, State University of New York Press. 

Island of dreams

 

The island opens and veils itself
each wave brings clues and treasures
a button or a bassinet
a shift for a selkie
a love letter in a champagne bottle
a speaker phone in a conch shell
a mermaid who is dormant, not dead
undeniable evidence of Atlantis

But they are gone with the next wave
hard to catch even when
we haunt the hot sands
or leap from the lava cliffs.

Often we are called the other way
through the forest of tigers
to the Mountain of Thirty Birds
where the mists are flirty
and swallow direction and distance
as we hunt for the memory palace
and the lover we left in the Moon Café.
The island opens and veils itself again.

- Robert Moss

Words of Counsel from an African Divination Priest

 

Many years ago, I received some counsel from a babalawo, a high divination priest of Ifa, from the Yoruba tradition. He offered three insights on how we should approach oracles (including our dreams) and life possibilities that have stayed with me, indelibly. I will offer them here as things all of us may want to consider in posing questions about our life issues. They may help to enlarge our understanding of the issues themselves.

ONE
Don't ask what you already know!

TWO
There are two things in your life it is difficult to change: your basic character and your maximum allotment of time and energy in this world. Everything else is open to negotiation.

THREE 
You must find out who defends you before the greater powers.

I can hear questions flocking. Apply these insights and find your own way.

The Door to the Dream Vault

 

Often it feels like the door to a bank vault, that door between night dreams and the daylight world. You've been into a deep place, full of valuable things you'd like to bring back with you. But as you leave the treasure house, a door swings shut behind you. Maybe you try to catch the door before it closes, but it's so heavy and its movement so strong that you frequently find you can't manage that.
    When the door is sealed tight behind you, you may look for a way to reopen it. But the combination is tricky, and there may be a time release, as with the doors to some vaults. that won't open until a certain hour or date unless you can find a supervisor or an override mechanism.
     Many people just shrug and go about the business of the day, leaving the door between the worlds shut. Some people dedicate themselves to keeping it shut, because they don't make room in their lives for dreams or because something once happened on the other side that scared them. But even the most passionate and dedicated dreamers go through periods when the vault door slams shut, morning after morning, leaving the strange feeling that we are missing out on something really important.
     I have recorded many thousands of my own dreams over the years, sometimes a dozen from one night. Because I know just how much goes on in the dream worlds, I get edgy when I find I have lost my night dreams. Yes, I make a practice of living as if everything around me is a set of dream symbols. And I have developed many techniques for entering states of conscious dreaming, including the use of shamanic drumming. But I treasure the gifts of spontaneous night dreams, especially the ones we don't ask for and may or may not want, because they hold up a magic mirror to our lives and show us things with an objectivity we can rarely achieve in ego-centered consciousness. They may also be adventures across time and in other dimensions of reality. 
    Dreaming is social as well as individual. We get out and about and meet others: other dreamers, the deceased, beings other-than-human. Sometimes I feel that behind the door of the bank vault is a lively, well-appointed restaurant, as in the photo from a converted bank in Butte, Montana.
     Let's assume you know all about setting an intention for the night. (My favorite one is "Show me what I need to see.") And that you have trained yourself to be ready to catch and record dreams at whatever hour you stir from them. But now you are finding that, despite your best efforts, that heavy metal door keeps swinging shut behind you, keeping the treasure (and the beauty or terror or both) down in the vault. What to do?
     See if there is a wisp that followed you as the door was closing, or slipped through the tiniest crack before it was sealed airtight. In ancient Mesopotamia, dreams were called "zephyrs" because, like little breezes, they can slip through a chink in the ordinary world. Stand under the shower, or sit with a cup of tea, and see whether the wisp will reveal itself in the rush of the water or the rising steam. If you can grab that wisp, it can take you back behind the sealed door, in its own special way.
     If you can't catch even a wisp, be alert for how the logic of the dreams you missed may now be playing out in the world around you. Find signs and symbols as the day unfolds, and read them as if they were dreams. 
     As general practice, we want to learn how to slow down the closing of that tremendous door, by schooling ourselves to linger in the twilight zone between sleep and waking. Instead of jumping out of bed when you wake, however you wake, see if you can stay for a time between the worlds, in the twilight state that researchers call the hypnopompic or hypnagogic zone. A great place to develop the practice of conscious or lucid dreaming.
    You might try this, when you wake up and find your dreams are missing. Picture yourself standing in the doorway between the worlds. It is open, like the door of the bank vault in the photograph. One one side is your dormant body in the bed. On the other is an adjacent world, a world from which your traveling self is returning. You can look both ways. If you are crafty, you may be able to tiptoe back into the vault and grab something you can bring back to the daylight side. It could be pure gold. Or the deed to a magic kingdom.

Ankh at the heart

I am asked to find a symbol for the heart.

    It comes immediately. It is a standing ankh, silver-bright. Waters stream over and around it. I know that its gift is neverending life.
     I remember drinking healing waters from a vessel shaped like an ankh, and holding such a vessel to the lips of those in need of strength or healing.
     I remember an ancient baptism: an ibis-headed god of the Moon and of writing pours the waters of life over the chosen initiate.

     How often have I seen the ankh in the hands of deities, grasping it by the loop, giving meaning to the name the Romans gave it: crux ansata, the handled cross, the cross you can handle.
     The essence of male and female are wound together in its form. Here are the knot of Isis and the djed pillar of Osiris, the womb and the phallus or backbone of the bull.
     I remember other uses for this eternal symbol of life. Of looking through the loop, as through a viewfinder, into the world-behind-the-world.
     Gratefully, I say the old, old words.

I am life
I am love
I am truth

     From life to life, from world to world, there are forms that return.

Note: Egyptologists contiue to speculate whether the form of the ankh was chosen because of its resemblance to a certain phsyucal object. There was popular theory that ut might be modeled on a sandal strap. ings'. The ankh symbol has also been identified wth a girdle knot, a mirror, a double-axe, a penis sheath, and the thoracic vertebra of a bull. The rival comparisons are discussed in Andrew Gordon and Calvin. Schwabe, The Quick and the Dead: Biomedical Theory in Ancient Egypt (Leiden:Brill, 2004) pp.102-4. 

Celtic Metamorphoses

 

A horned god stands back to back with a second self. 
You pass the gatekeeper, into a field of metamorphoses. 
You turn into the curl of a wave, or a waterbird in flight. 
Fish becomes man, dog becomes dragon.
You reach for a flagon of unmixed wine
and the handle becomes the hound that chases the duck
that swims into your mouth on a red river. 

Long-beaked bird-men are alive on a Shetland cross.
Gold and silver and bronze glint at the throats
and on the forearms of queens and heroes.
Here everything is in connected, everything in flux,
vital energies change form and surge beyond form. 
A technology of enchantment captures minds
and binds them in tendrils, endlessly looping,
making knots without end, no strings you can pull. 

Are those the antlers of an ancient elk, bigger than moose.
on the head of that statue from a warrior grave?
You put them on and look with his sight over fertile land,
proud of your kin and ready to fight for them.
You reach under his leaf-shaped shield.
and turn the unseen handle that gathers the force
to send out your spirit double on its excursions.

The boar is everywhere, before you and around you. 
Be careful. You pause to hear the hot howl of war
from the throat of a boar-headed carnyx.
Swords and shields, iron and oak, ash and bronze.
Shields that are plain at the front but have hidden powers
at the back and in the coiling serpents at the grip.
Shields with glaring eyes and hidden faces of raging bulls.    

You find your end at last, in the cauldron from the bog,
under the fierce stare of gods you cannot name.
You swim in bull's blood, down to the scene of passion
where a naked woman warrior exults, sword in hand,
over the dying bull whose potency will pass,
with the rush of his blood, to one who is called this way.

- Robert Moss

Where a Dog Is the Soul's Best Vehicle

I have always known that dogs are marvelous soul friends and can play a psychopomp role for those traveling beyond death. In my contunuing reserach into conceptions of soul among indigenous people, I came upon a note by a Catholic missionary suggesting that among the Inuit a dog could be not only a soul companion but a soul vehicle for the deceased.

Father Roger Buliard reported from his time among the Copper Inuit (called Eskimos in his day) that they took great care to propitiate the anernek - translated as "breath", soul or spirit - of the animals they hunted so that the caribou, for example, would remain friendly. They were no less solicitous in dealing with the anernek of dead Inuit.

"When a relative dies," Father Buliard reported, the Inuit "give his name quickly to a dog, so that the spirit will have a place to rest until a child is born to inherit it. The anernek is a fleeting thing, easily lost, and every artifice must be brought to bear to prevent its prowling and causing trouble.”

Other interesting revelations in this note (1) the breath soul is closely associated with the name; (2) the clear belief in metempsychosis, that at least one of the multiple souls of a human can occupy successive bodies.

Source: Roger Buliard, Inuk. New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1951. pp.264-65.

Illustration: "Esquimaux Dogs" by John James Audubon in The Quadrupeds of North America (1845-1848). Public domain.

The Dreams Are Coming Back

 

In contemporary society, dream drought is a widespread affliction, almost a pandemic. This is deadly serious, because night dreams are an essential corrective to the delusions of the day. They hold up a mirror to our everyday actions and attitudes and put us in touch with deeper sources of knowing than the everyday mind. If you lose your dreams, you may lose your inner compass. If your dreams are long gone, it may be because you have lost the part of you that is the dreamer.
     As I describe in Dreamways of the Iroquois, traditional elders of the First Peoples of North America say bluntly that if we have lost our dreams, it is because we have lost a vital part of our soul. This may have happened early in life through what shamans call soul loss, when our magical child went away because the world seemed to cold and cruel. Helping the dream-bereft to recover their dreams may amount to bringing lost souls back to the lives and bodies where they belong. In my story “Dreamtakers”in Mysterious Realities I describe a shamanic journey to help return dream souls to people who have lost them. This is something I teach and practice.
     There are several ways we can seek to break a dream drought any night we want to give this a try. We can set a juicy intention for the night and be ready to record whatever is with us whenever we wake up. We can resolve to be kind to fragments. The wispiest trace of a dream can be exciting to play with, and as you play with it you may find you are pulling back more of the previously forgotten dream. 
     If you don’t remember a dream when you first wake up, laze in bed for a few minutes and see if something comes back. Wiggle around in the bed. Sometimes returning to the body posture we were in earlier in the night helps to bring back what we were dreaming when our bodies were arranged that way.

     If you still don’t have a dream, write something down anyway: whatever is in your awareness, including feelings and physical sensations. You are catching the residue of a dream even if the dream itself is gone. As you do this, you are saying to the source of your dreams, “I’m listening. Talk to me.”
     You may find that, though your dreams have flown, you have a sense of clarity and direction that is the legacy of the night. We solve problems in our sleep even when we don’t remember the problem-solving process that went on in our dreaming minds.
      And remember that you don’t need to go to sleep in order to dream. The incidents of everyday life will speak to us like dream symbols if we are willing to pay attention. Keep a lookout for the first unusual or striking thing that enters your field of perception in the course of the day and ask whether there could be a message there. When we make it our game to pay attention to coincidence and symbolic pop-ups in everyday life, we oil the dream gates so they let more through from the night

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

 

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

 

 

Swan Dreamers of the Pacific Northwest

 

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

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

    

References 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Swan Rising. Photo by Romy Needham

 

 

Book of Shadows

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

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

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

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

- Robert Moss

Oneiric geographies

 

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

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

 

   

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

 

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

 

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

photo by Romy Needham

Those who attend in the Twilight Zone

 

All these people are gathered. They are like actors who have taken their places on stage and are waiting quietly for the curtain to go up. It comes to me that they are "attending", an interesting word. 
    I have the feeling they are characters who could have parts in a new book. Yet they have their own lives. None of them seems to be aware of me.
    But now a young woman slips through their ranks, to look at me directly. She is red haired, tall and slim, quite lovely. Her clothes are of an earlier time. Her gaze is deep. I cannot read her feelings, but I would like to know her. She moves away to my left, and I sense that she wants me to follow. When I go after her, however, I am interrupted by a mature woman with long black hair and very white skin who thrusts herself between us. I know she is filed with jealous hate for the redhead. 
    There is an old story here, of passion and jealousy. I sense it goes back several centuries, to the British Isles. I won't follow it now. The sunlight streaming into my bedroom round the edge of the drapes is quite bright. I reach for my French blue sleep mask (thank you Air France) and stretch out on my back, enjoying the luxury of drifting back from my twilight zone adventures into the sleep that repairs the body and allows the dream soul to go wandering without an agenda.


Often, as in this episode recorded in an old journal, I find different casts of characters waiting or popping up as I hover on the edge of sleep or linger in the twilight zone of hypnagogia. Sometimes, they appear to be quite literally on stage, or in the wings, waiting for me to show up in order to start or resume a play. More often, they seem to be characters in life dramas that are being played out in other times or in parallel worlds, dramas in which I have a lead role from which I may have been absent while attending to things in waking life.
    When I am writing, I am occasionally thrilled to discover in this way that my characters - who may or may not have been previously known to me - are assembling in this way, ready to claim their parts in my stories, or at least audition for those parts. 
    Those attending. I like this description for the people who appear on the cusp between waking and sleep, or between sleep and waking. To attend can mean to take care of or wait upon someone; in its Latin origin, in the verb attendere, it means "to stretch toward" something. Encounters with those who attend in the twilight zone can certainly help to stretch the mind. 

"Curtain Time". Dream Oracle card by Robert Moss

 

Coming back from the dead as a dream shaman

 

My retelling of a wild tale of soul retrieval and shamanic initiation among the Kwakiutl of the Pacific Northwest. After putting a dead man's vital soul back in his body and telling him he will now be a shaman, the great wolf shaman explains how he will know how to heal: "I will always make you dream".

This is what the old ones say about Lebid. He was of the people called Kwakiutl or Gwasila. Their place was up in the north of Vancouver Island, where the winters can freeze your marrow. Lebid got pretty sick and no medicine could help him. His people watched him die. They couldn't bury him the old way, because the earth was frozen hard. They just laid him outside on the ice. They would deal with his remains when the ground thawed, if nothing took care of him first. In the meantime, the next snowfall made a blanket that covered him up. 
    Wolves came around after a couple of nights. The people heard them snuffling around Lebid's mound. The wolves started to howl, maybe calling the rest of the pack for free meat. What happened next was unexpected. A man's voice joined in, and the howls began to sound like a song. Nobody went outside to see what was going on.
     Time went by. Some days you could see the sun. One morning it showed a wolf pack nearing the village. The wolves scattered at the sight of the people, but one remained. He slowly rose up on two legs and became a man. The man was rail-thin and naked except for wreaths of dark  hemlock, round his neck and waist.
    When he came close to the lodges, people saw this was Lebid, the dead man. They saw he had become a skinwalker, a shapeshifter. Some thought he was also a zombie or a witch and wanted to drive him away, or burn him. A grandmother spoke up.
     "Bring him inside. Give him soup . Let him tell his story."
     "I was dead," Lebid started with what they knew "But the wolves dragged me to their place, and their great shaman. His name is Nau'alakume.He wears a crown of red cedar."
      He described how the wolves licked him all over his body. Then the wolf shaman vomited a crystal that he inserted in Lebid’s lower sternum. The shaman opened his palms to reveal something that might have been inside the crystal, a tiny fluttering creature the size of a fly or a lightning bug. Lebid understood that this was his vital soul, that had left his body with his last breath. The wolf shaman pressed down hard on the top of Lebid’s’ head, again and again, as if to loosen the bone. He blew the tiny soul throiugh the fontanel, and sealed the opening.
     He gave Lebid his own name, with its numonous power. He told Lebid that now he had died and come back, he, too, would be a shaman, "You will be a life bringer for your people."
    Then his followers rose up, put on their wolf masks, dropped to all fours, and and escorted Lebid home.
     The revenant sang a song to honor the wolf shaman who raised him from the dead, put his soul back in his body, and gifted him with his own powers. He sang of treasure again and again. 

They took me to the edge of the world by the magical power of heaven, the treasure
I was healed when the power of Nau’alakume, the life bringer, the treasure, was really thrown into me
I come to cure with this power of healing of Nau’alakume, the treasure. Therefore I will be a life bringer.
I come with the water of life given into my hand by Nau’alakume, the means of bringing to life, the treasures 

     If his people had any doubt that he now possessed the powers of a true shaman healer, a "life bringer", Lebid reassured them that he would operate under the wisest direction, delivered in what they all knew to be the most reliable way.
     He said that the great shaman, Nau'alakume, had told him, "I will always make you dream". Lebid told his people, "When you get sick, I will dream for you and my dreams will show me what you need to be healed."

 

Source: I have retold a report of the narrative of a Kwakiutl informant in Franz Boas' classic work The Religion of the Kwakiutl Indians. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1930) vol 2, pp. 46-50. It is worth noting that an elder of the Kwakiutl told Boas that "dreams are the news the soul brings us when it comes back from its journeys.". Franz Boas, "Ethnology of the Kwakiutl" in F. W. Hodge (ed.) Thirty-fifth annual report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1921) pp. 724-725.

Wolf Mask. A Northwest Coast wolf dance headdress in Rayna Green, The British Museum Encyclopaedia of Native North America, Bloominton: Indiana University Press, 1999, p.177. 

Arnold Toynbee, Time Traveler

 

The great English historian and philosopher of history Arnold Toynee,who gave us a theory of the rise of civilzations, sometimes found hiself visiting the distant periods he studied as an eye witness. In section XIII of volume X of A Study of History, he departs from his familiar narrative style. He called this section “The Inspirations of Historians”. He titled  part E “The Quest for a Meaning Behind the Facts of History”. He opened with this statement:

A tenuous long-distance commerce exclusively on the intellectual plane is an historian's normal relation to the objects of his study; yet there are moments in his mental life -- moments as memorable as they are rare -- in which temporal and spatial barriers fall and psychic distance is annihilated; and in such moments of inspiration the historian finds himself transformed in a flash from a remote spectator into an immediate participant, as the dry bones take flesh and quicken into life.

Mulling over dry research – a précis of one of the lost books of Livy’s History – Toynbee was hurled into the blood and thunder of  war between Rome and confederate Italian states. By his own acount, he was “transported, in a flash, across the gulf of time and space from Oxford in A.D. 1911 to Teanum in 80 B.C., to find himself in a back yard on a dark night witnessing a personal tragedy that was more bitter than the defeat of any public cause." He witnessd the fate of Mutilus, a proscribed confederate leader denied sanctuary at his home by how own wife, who killed himself with his own sword.
    Toynbee's experiences of mental transport across time quickened as he traveled to ancient sites. He enteed the perspective of Philip of Macedon checking his battle lines. He was among a roatring criwd at Ephesus. He fell into “the deep trough of Time” after climbing to a ruined citadel in Laconia.
    In London, soon after the Great War, walking by Victoria Station, he was gripped by a sense of the universal movement of time streaming through him and around him. He felt himself "in communion, not just with this or that episode in history, but with all that had been, and was, and was to come." He felt history flowing through him in a mighty current, with his own life rolling like a wave within this vast tide. With this torrent inside him, he could still note the granular details of the station wall - the Edwardian red bricks and white stone facings. He wondered why what he felt was tremendous illumination had opened for him in this pedestrian seting.
     Perhaps, in addition to visiting the past, Toynbee was tapping into the future. A year or so after his experience near the station, on January 8, 1920, Victiria replaced Charing Cross as the main London station for contnental services. The service to Paris via Dover and Calais started the same day.