The Doorstopper Method for Keeping Your Dream Gate Open

 

Here's one of the games I invented for retrieving lost dreams.
   Picture a door to your dream world.
   As you left, you stepped through this door, back into your body in the bed.
   Some of your dreams are fluttering around you. Perhaps you have some of them in your pocket or what you think of as a safe container. I picture a glass jar like the ones I used to catch fireflies on summer nights.
    But a strange thing happens. As soon as you step through the door, back into an ordinary space, your dreams take flight. They won’t stay in your pockets. The container won’t hold them. They wing away, like butterflies through that door, which closes so fast you can’t prevent them leaving. Now the door is sealed tighter than a bank vault and you can’t find a way to open it.
    Try this: as you return from your dreams, imagine that the door to the dream world stays open for a while, because there is a doorstopper. I picture this stopper as a black dog. He’s alive, of course, though he may remain very still while his role is to keep the door from closing. Gradually he will let the door close. This is what must happen, so your waking life is not so full of dream creatures that you can’t tell where you are any more and end up on the couch of the mad-doctors.
     But you have enough time now to catch some of those escaping dreams. You are permitted to go back through that ever-so-slowly closing door, go in a little ways, and grab what you can.
     When I first played this game, I was surprised to see that a flight of steps began at the threshold. When I climbed the steps, I found myself in a pleasant wooded setting, with dreams gathered on the branches or flitting about.
     I invited them to play with me, and some consented to accompany back to the ordinary side of everything, which gets less ordinary in their company.
     As I stepped back through the door, heading for my body where I had parked it on the bed, I patted the head of the black dog who had managed the portal. He had become bigger and even more noble, shifting from the role of doorstopper to that of Gatekeeper. 

Drawing by Robert Moss with digital colorization

Making friends with death and French language through dream telepathy

I dreamed I was struggling to explain something important in my faulty French. I woke, checked online, and read a message (in French) from a friend in France. He reported that he had been trying to help a man who was struggling to understand what he describes as "an absurd experience for a Cartesian spirit like mine."

The "absurd experience" was a dream in which the skeptic met his departed father. His father was eating breakfast, wearing a beautiful blue shirt. In ordinary life, the man did not believe such an encounter was possible. Waking, the Cartesian did not believe that an encounter with the dead was possible, In the dream, he rushed to his father, gave him a big hug, and was deeply moved.

Trying to make sense of what happened, the dreamer exclaimed, " On devrait nous apprendre, quelque part, à apprivoiser nos rêves. We need to be taught how to make friends with our dreams."

Apprivoiser is a very interesting word. It is often translated as "to tame" or "make gentle". Its most famous use is in the beloved story of the Little Prince, who learns from the fox that in order to learn the secret of life he must "tame" the fox in the sense of making friends with something wild.

My friend thought that I might be able to help the man who had dreamed of his dead father. I could hardly refuse this appeal to help after seeing the word apprivoiser. I wrote a book called The Dreamer's Book of the Dead. It explains why contact with the deceased is neither weird nor even unusual, since they are alive somewhere else. They call on us and we visit them, especially in dreams. We discover that healing and forgiveness are always available, across the apparent barrier of death.

When foreign rights to The Dreamer's Book of the Dead were sold, my French publishers came up with this title for the translation: Apprivoiser la mort par le rêve.

I wrote to the Cartesian who had the "absurd" experience of a loving encounter with his father on the Other Side:

"I have seen it so many times: a man encounters his deceased father in a dream. He discovers that to die in this world is to live in another world. This transforms his understanding of what it means to dream, to live and to die."

I wrote this in my faulty French, My dream had rehearsed me for this minutes before. 

Telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance? Maybe all three. The categories we use for "supernormal" phenomena may blur. What is clear is that in dreams our perception reaches beyond our ordinary senses. We send and receive messages. We make visits and receive visitations. We are prepared for challnenges and opportunities that lie ahead. We have easy access to the departed. And any dream is likely to tell us something we do not already know, in the waking mind.

- Journal report from January 6, 2016

Drawing by Robert Moss