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.

 

 

Dreaming for good fortune and fun

 

Crow war shirt in Metropolitan Museum of Art

I love to listen to how people talk about dreams in different cultures. As explained by the great Tuscarora ethnographer J.N.B.Hewitt, the old Iroquoian word katera’swas means “I dream” but implies much more that we commonly mean when say that phrase in English. Katera’swas means I dream as a habit, as a daily part of my way of being in the world. The expression also carries the connotation that I am lucky in a proactive way – that I bring myself luck because I am able to manifest good fortune and prosperity through my dream. The related term watera’swo not only means “dream”; it can also be translated as “I bring myself good luck.” [1]
     In a similar vein, I found a real gem in the work of an anthropologist who paid close attention to his own dreams and persuaded Crow Indians to talk with remarkable candor about theirs. Dreaming can be getting something without having to work for it.

Robert H. Lowie (1883-1957), an Austrian-born American anthropologist who became a leading expert on indigenous North American cultures, kept a dream journal for fifty years. He wrote that his dreams prevented him from becoming "the hardboiled rationalist that I certainly wanted to be when I was young...I could never quite believe that there were no psychic forces in the world because I could not shake free from the inexplicable in my own dreaming."[2]
       He wrote that his dreams helped him greatly in understanding the visionary experiences of “primitive” peoples. “I too hear voices and see visions… The difference between me and an Eskimo shaman who has heard a meaningless jumble of sounds or a Crow visionary who has seen a strange apparition is that I do not regard such experiences as mystic revelations, whereas they do. But I can understand the underlying mental and emotional experiences a good deal better than most other ethnologists can, because I have identical episodes every night and almost every day of my life.” [3]
      In his fieldwork, Lowie observed that the Crow people prized big dreams – medicine dreams – and had many painful ways of seeking one, from sun dance rituals to extreme self-inflicted dehydration to cutting off a toe or finger. However, the Crow recognized that the most fortunate and gifted dreamers were those for whom the gift came in less stressful ways. 
     "Some dreamed in their lodges," Lowie noted. "These usually became rich, acquiring plenty of horses...Men who received unsought supernatural communications of importance without being placed in conditions of stress were relatively few in number and were regarded as remarkably fortunate since they escaped the necessity of torturing themselves. In such cases the Crow use the expression bìwawa'tek (first person: bà-wawi'tawak'), he gets something without working." [4]
      One of Lowie's Crow informants, a successful warrior and hunter named One-Blue-Bead, said that dreams were his “principal medicine." In a big dream he encountered a being painted red and dressed like a Crow for battle, who seemed to be both man and hawk . In other dreams a hawk appeared and shapeshifted in phases int a man. The dreamer received a song:

      I am a bird
      I am coming

One-Blue-Bead said he was poor before he met the hawk man but “when I saw the vision I got what I longed for.” He tied a hawk feather to his back when he rode into battle and claimed that his medicine helped him kill eight enemies. 
     Possession of a medicine dream (baré wact're, distinguished from a lesser dream, or baré rámmacīre) was considered essential to health and success, to bringing soul into life. Hence the willingness to invite stress, undergo thirst and hunger and perform self-torture in the vision quests. One-Blue-Bead wore his dream medicine on his back when he rode into battle. Later, when the war days were over, he gave his dream medicine to another member of the tribe so he would have good luck in getting horses.
      It was common practice among the Crow for people who did not have a dream to pay a powerful dreamer to give them one. One-Blue-Bead told Lowie, “I never had to ask anyone else for medicine like other men. Many people had no vision. These gave lots of property to the visionary and might get a vision through him."[5]

As he neared death Robert Lowie worked on an essay on his own dreams that contains many excerpts from his journals. They are just-so stories; he does not analyze, he simply shares his adventures, which often involve travel and meeting famous people from the past - Voltaire, Samuel Johnson – and remarkably precise descriptions of people and places he never encountered in ordinary reality.
    He concludes by saying that for him dreams are a joy because "One shakes off the fetters of probability and glides through the centuries as though astride a Wellsian time machine. Events of the highest incredibility become commonplaces, and there seems to be no limit to the bizarre juxtaposition of normally unrelated ideas. It is no wonder that when I turn in at night, I feel that I may be launched upon the most exciting part of my septuagenarian existence." [6]

References

[1]. J.N.B. Hewitt, “The Iroquoian Concept of the Soul” Journal of American Folklore vol.18 no.29, Vol. 8, No. 29 (Apr. - Jun. 1895), p. 111

[2] Robert H. Lowie, “Scholars as People: Dreams, Idle Dreams” Cultural Anthropology vol. 7 no. 3 (1966) p.379

[3] ibid

[4] Lowie, Robert H.  The Religion of the Crow Indians. New York: American Museum Press, 1922 p. 321,

[5] ibid, pp. 323-5

[6] Lowie, “Scholars as People: Dreams, Idle Dreams” p.382

 

 

 

 

 

 

What is Active Dreaming?

Active Dreaming? The phrase is a provocation, designed to shake us free from the assumption that dreaming is a passive activity.  I am grateful for the gift of spontaneous sleep dreams, the ones we don’t ask for and often don’t want. They hold up a magic mirror in which we can see ourselves as we truly are. They serve as a voice of conscience. They preview challenges and opportunities that lie in our future. Sleep dreams show us what is going on inside the body, diagnose developing complaints before medical symptoms present themselves, and show us what the body needs to stay well. We solve problems in our sleep. And, as the First Peoples of my native Australia teach, our personal dreams may be a passport to the Dreamtime, the larger reality in which we can meet the ancestors and our authentic spiritual teachers.

I work with sleep dreams in all these varieties, and many more, and welcome them to work on me. But Active Dreaming is far more than a method for decoding sleep dreams. While the techniques involved are fresh and original, they are also very ancient. They involve ways of seeing and knowing and healing that were known to our early ancestors, kept them alive on a dangerous planet, and enabled them to communicate with each other and with other forms of life in the speaking land around them.

Active Dreaming is a way of being fully of this world while maintaining constant contact with another world, the world-behind-the-world, where the deeper logic and purpose of our lives are to be found.

Active Dreaming is a discipline, as is yoga or archaeology or particle physics. This is to say that there are ascending levels of practice. In any field, the key to mastery is always the same: practice, practice, practice.

CORE PRACTICES OF ACTIVE DREAMING

First, Active Dreaming is a way of talking and walking our dreams, of bringing energy and guidance from the dreamworld into everyday life. 

We learn how to create a safe space where we can share dreams of the night and dreams of life with others, receive helpful feedback, and encourage each other to move towards creative and healing action. We discover that each of us can play guide for others, and that by sharing in the right way we claim our voice, grow our power as storytellers and communicators, build stronger friendships and lay foundations for a new kind of community. Above all, we learn to take action to embody the energy and guidance of our dreams in everyday life.

Second, Active Dreaming is a method of shamanic lucid dreaming.  

It starts with simple everyday practice and extends to profound group experiences of time travel, soul recovery and the exploration of multidimensional reality. It is founded on the understanding that we don’t need to go to sleep in order to dream. The easiest way to become a conscious or lucid dreamer is to start out lucid and stay that way. As a method of conscious dream navigation, Active Dreaming is not to be confused with approaches that purport to “control” or manipulate dreams; it is utterly misguided to seek to put the control freak in the ego in charge of something immeasurably wiser and deeper than itself.

Third, Active Dreaming is a way of conscious living. 

This requires us to reclaim our inner child, and the child’s gift of spontaneity, play and imagination. It requires us to claim the power of naming and define our life project. It invites us to discover and follow the natural path of our energies. It calls us to remember and tell and live our bigger story in such a way that it can be heard and received by others. It is about navigating by synchronicity and receiving the chance events and symbolic pop-ups on our daily roads as clues to a deeper order. Beyond this, it is about grasping that the energy we carry and the attitudes we choose have magnetic effect on the world around us, drawing or repelling encounters and circumstances.

To live consciously is to accept the challenge to create, which is to move beyond scripts and bring something new into the world.

This approach is not only for individuals and friends and families, but for communities and for our deeper attunement to the cause of the Earth.  Active dreamers become Speakers for the Earth, and rise to full awareness of the truth of the indigenous wisdom that we must be mindful of the consequences of our actions down to the seventh generation beyond ourselves. Active dream groups can offer a model of intentional community, and can foster a new mode of leadership that empowers each member to claim her voice and play guide to others as they learn to speak and embody their own truth.

Dream art: "Conference of the Birds" by RM

See my book Active Dreaming for the fullest explanation of the basic techniques, includingh guidance on creating and growing dream sharing circles. 

Writing and Dreaming

 

Writing and dreaming are intimately connected, as far back as we can travel through the history of humans making marks intended to be read by others. It seems that in many cultures, humans developed systems of writing because they needed better and more specific ways to record and honor dreams, when dreaming was understood to be a field of interaction between humans and greater powers.
      The techniques of writing may themselves have been the gift of dreams. It is surely no accident that in ancient pantheons a god of writing is also a giver and interpreter of dreams. Ibis-headed Thoth, with his stylus, venerated in night rituals of dream incubation, is a famous exemplar. His consort the star goddess Seshat, patron of scribes and keeper of the akashic records, is also depicted writing.
      The cuneiform scripts of Mesopotamia and the hieroglyphs of Egypt were not devised merely to figure out how many bales of cotton or bundles of reeds had delivered, but to record dream encounters with the gods, and oneiric geographies of the Otherworld. From these recorded visions, mythologies grew and spread their waving fronds over whole peoples.
       Among indigenous peoples, we can see the process at work up to the present day. Look at the intricate pictographs of the Anishnaabe, or Ojibwa, of the Great Lakes. They are drawn on long scrolls of birch bark, the papyrus of the Northeast woodlands of North America. They record the trials of the soul between birth, through trial and initiation, to the womb of rebirth. They depict life as a spiritual adventure, where success will be followed by a zigzag path of new challenge and temptation. They are vision maps. They spring from the soul journeys of shamans, and the shared dreaming of initiates gathered in the medicine circle of the Midewiwin.


Photo: The Egyptian goddess Seshat writing with a stylus, in a carved relief on the back of a statue of Ramses II at Luxor

 

Huge and Hugr: The Norse Polypsychic Self

"The air and the paths were alive with magic." The words come from the Volsunga saga, which excited Richard Wagner and Tolkien and still excites the Marvel Cinematic Multiverse. They are spoken when völvas – seers, forest witches - are doing some body swapping. They are arranging for two men to swap bodies for sex in one case and for deception in the other. Swapping bodies, how is that possible? 

We are deep in a world of sorcery and magic, of dreaming and dream travel, in which the self is not recognized as some kind of unitary thing. There are four members in the polypsychic family. They travel in and out of bodies where they reside and can take different forms. They can become animals or birds or aquatic creatures. They can change gender. Gods do this. Giants do it. Seers and sorcerers do it. Any human may release one of their parts to wander beyond the body, in one form or another, in their dreams. 

In early Scandinavia a human body was a house for at least four separable and mobile aspects of energy and identity: the hamr (“shape" or "form”), the hugr (“thought” as in the name of Odin's raven), fylgja (“follower”, a double in animal, human or hybrid form), and hamingja (“luck”, sometimes like a personal god). Human identity is interwoven with both gods and animals.

The Norse self is a family, not a unity: different members come and go their own ways, leaving the body at will or under direction. This generates several forms of the double, such a key feature of this mindscape that a leading scholar of Old Norse traditions, Régis Boyer, titled a book about them Le monde du double. None of the Norse terms translate as “soul” in the sense of a unique and nontransferable core self. The Old Norse word for “soul,” sál, was a Christian import. [1]   

Hamr (pronounced like “hammer”) is literally “shape” or “skin.” The hamr is the form that others perceive. It can be changed. Shapeshifting is skipta hömum, “changing hamr.” One who can do this is called hamramr, “of strong hamr.” [2] If the hamr of an individual os injured, the physical body receives the same wound.  

Hugr is “thought” or “mind.” It corresponds to a person’s conscious cognitive processes. It can perhaps be called the ego-self.  The hugr generally stays in the house of the body, but can reach across distance as a mental act and have notable effects. Someone with strong hugr reaches and changes things with their mind.  

Fylgja, literally “follower”, is generally perceived in an animal form by those with second sight, although human fylgjur are also mentioned in literature. The fylgja is a companion spirit whose fortunes and that of its owner are intimately connected; wound or kill the fylgja and you wound or kill its owner. Though its name means “follower” it is depicted traveling ahead of its owner, like the vardøger who arrives ahead of its person. The fylgja may appear in the dreams of someone who will encounter its owner in the future. Mysteriously, the term is also applied to the afterbirth.[3]

Hamingja is the fourth of these separable selves. The word is used in the abstract to signify “luck”. [4] However, hamingja is a personified and transferable force. It can be passed on within  families. It can be loaned to someone to help them in danger or sickness. [5] It may be comparable to the personified shimtu of Mesopotamian sacred psychology. When a person dies, his or her hamingja is often reborn in one of their descendants, particularly if the child is named after them. In Viga-Glum’s Saga, the hamingja bequeaths itself to a relative, without special naming. In the sagas the action is often driven by prophetic dreams, 'voices from destiny' conveyed through the hamingja. 

Apart from language differences, none of this would seem strange to many ancient and indigenous cultures, which also regard humans as composite beings. The work of Swedish anthropologist Ernst Arbman sent legions of anthropologists in quest of "free souls", "vital souls", and "ego souls" among aboriginal peoples. [6] The recent work of German Assyriologist Annette Zgoll may help us to understand what is going on in the sagas and the Eddas through lenses from a more ancient civilization that have been brilliantly reground.

In ancient Mesopotamia, Zgoll observes, humans are "permeable beings full of beings" [7], open structures through which permanent residents and transients, including personal deities, protective spirits, dream doubles and demonic intruders, come and go. A human is like a house. The body is a defined structure that gives space to a variety of entities - some more external than internal - that work in humans. So why not call the composite self what it is - oikonomorphic, which is to say, "house-like"? [8] It's a great suggestion, though I doubt that "oikonomorphic" is going to become a household word; for now, you won't even find it on Google. However the description plays well when applied to the Norse polypsychic self.  

With or without the old names, the double is still very much part of folk practice as well as belief in Northern lands. Girls at midsummer hope to call up the image of a potential lover or husband. Psychics are credited with helping police by summoning the double of a criminal. Forest witches talk of sending a double in animal form at a distance to gather information or support someone in need of strength.

Then we have the phenomenon of the vardøger, the double who goes ahead of you. "Harbinger", "forerunner", and psychic predecessor" have been suggested as kennings of vardøger. "Advance guard" or "spirit guard" might be closer to the Old Norse roots. The derivation is from Old Norse varðhygi which combines two names for aspects of our composite nature: (a) a protector, a "guard" or watchman" (vǫrð) and (b) a mobile, separable aspect of "mind" or spirit (hugr). Georg Hygen, a Norwegian scientist and psychic researcher, wrote a book om the vardøger that he subtitled "our national paranormal phenomenon.” [9]

References

[1] Raudvere, Catharina. “Trolldómr in Early Medieval Scandinavia” in Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark, Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, Volume 3: The Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. 

[2] Price, Neil S. The Viking Way: Religion and War in Late Iron Age Scandinavia. 2^nd edition. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2013.

[3] Price op cit p. 59, Raudvere op cit, p. 102

[4] Ellis, Hilda Roderick. 1968. The Road to Hel: A Study of the Conception of the Dead in Old Norse Literature. New York: Praeger, 1968. p. 132.

[5] Ellis pp. 132-3.

[6]Ernst Arbman, Untersuchungen zur primitiven Seelenvorstellung mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Indien in Le Monde Oriental, vol. 20 (1926) pp. 85-226; and vol 21 (1927) pp.1-185. Arban's most famolus dstudent, felow-Swede Åke Hultkrantz, gave us tyhe spendid work Conceptions of the Soul Among North American Indians: A Study in Religious Ethnology Stockholm: The Ethnographical Museum of Sweden. Monographic Series. no. 1, 1953. 

[7]Annette Zgoll, “Der oikomorphe Mensch Wesen im Menschen und das Wesen des Menschen in sumerisch-akkadischer Perspektive” in Bernd Janowski (ed) Der ganze Mensch Akademie Verlag, 2012. p.86

[8] ibid., p.91

[9] Georg Hygen. Vardøger: Vårt paranormale nasjonalsfenomen. Oslo: Cappelen, 1987.

Illustration: "Leaving the Body in Uppsala". Text by RM+DALL-E 3

Plutarch on swimming with daimons

Plutarch (46-c.120 ce), biographer, Neoplatonist philosopher and priest of Apollo, wrote a great deal about daimons. [1] They can be slippery and ambiguous intermediary beings - thinlk of the "daemons" in A Discovery of Witches - so it is not surprising that his descriptions vary and sometimes seem contradictory. His daimons can be tutelary guides or evil influences, assistants to deities or gods awaiting promotion. There is the daimonion of Socrates, that inner voice you can trust, not to be confused with daimon tout court. The daimon may be an influx of sudden energy and courage, or an enforcer of personal fate. There are daimons in the astral realm of the Moon who mix up dreams for humans in a special bowl, watch over the celebration of the Mysteries, and may descend to intervene in human affairs – and can be demoted and thrown down if they fail to reach certain standards. [2]
     Plutarch seems happiest and most confident when he writes about daimons as spirits of the departed who have risen to higher understanding and can make humans their protégés. In a marvelous simile, he compares them to once-great athletes who gather to watch living swimmers in the sea, leaning in “with hand and voice” as those in the water approach the shore. We are given to understand that this is about more than the challenges of one lifetime. It is about the journey of the soul over multiple incarnations to reach a higher level of being. And in this role daimons are presented as operating under the supervision of the highest deity.
      The passage comes during a dialogue in De genio socratis in which a series of speakers discuss the nature of daimons and their role in human lives. Then we read this, from the mouth of a “stranger”:

 The gods order the life of few among men, such as they wish to make supremely blessed and in very truth divine; whereas souls delivered from birth and henceforth at rest from the body — set quite free, as it were, to range at will — are, as Hesiod​ says, daimons that watch over man. For as athletes who from old age have given up training do not entirely lose their ardor and their love of bodily prowess, but look on with pleasure as others train, and call out encouragement and run along beside them, so those who are done with the contests of life, and who, from prowess of soul, have become daimons, do not hold what is done and said and striven after in this world in utter contempt, but are propitious to contenders for the same goal, join in their ardor, and encourage and help them to the attainment of virtue than they see them keeping up the struggle and all but reaching their heart's desire.
     Daimons do not assist all indifferently. When men swim a sea, those standing on the shore merely view in silence the swimmers who are still far out distant from land. But they help with hand and voice those who come near, and running along and wading in beside them bring them safely in. This, my friends, is the way of daimons. If we are head over ears in the welter of worldly affairs and are changing body after body, like conveyances, they allow us to fight our way out and persevere unaided, as we endeavor by our own prowess to come through safe and reach a haven.
      But when in the course of countless births a soul has stoutly and resolutely sustained a long series of struggles, and as its cycle draws to a close, it approaches the upper world, bathed in sweat, in imminent peril and straining every nerve to reach the shore,​ God holds it no sin for its daimon to go to the rescue. One daimon is eager to deliver by his exhortations one soul, another another. Having drawn close, the soul can hear, and is saved. But if it pays no heed, it is forsaken by its daimon and does not come to a happy end. [3]

 

[1] For a careful discussion of Plutarch’s depiction of daimons, see Frederik E. Brenk “In the Light of the Moon: Demonology in the Early Imperial Period” in Wolfgang Haase (ed.), Philosophie, Wissenschaften, Technik (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1987) pp. 2117-2130
[2] See my article "Pluarch in the light of the Moon"
[3] Plutarch, De genio socratis, 593c-594a. trans. P.H. De Lacy and B. Einarson in Moralia vol 7 (London and Cambridge, Mass: Loeb Classical Library, 1957) pp. 481-3. I have made minor changes for clarity.

 

Image: Fresco from a tomb in Paestum (originally Poseidonia) in Magna Graecia (modern Campania, Italy), 5th century bce.

 

Where Too Much Sleep Is Perilous for the Soul

Heavy, uninterrupted sleep is dangerous, reports Roberto Romero Ribeiro, a Brazilian ethnographer who lived with the Maxicali (aka Tikmũ’ũn) of Minas Gerais. [1] In common with most if not all indigenous peoples, the Maxicali believe that in dreams the soul (koxuk) goes wandering. It can fall into bad company, or get lost, or even be taken captive. You don’t want to wake a sleeper because the soul may still be out there and could have a hard time getting back.
     On the other hand, you don't want to sleep like white folks who go out for the count for seven or eight hours. If your soul is away too long, you’ll get weak and sick. The ideal is to sleep lightly and wake several times and share the dreams that are with you with those close to you. 
     When Roberto, exhausted by native rituals, grabbed a few hours' extra sleep, his hosts were worried about him. "Are you sick?" they asked when he stirred. “Get up, get up! You’re going to get sick! ã yok, ã yok! ã pakut ax!"
     The striking vocabulary of dreaming among the Maxicali reflects the view that in dreams the soul is projected from the body. Their word for "dream" is  yõnkup The root yõn means “to throw”.It also appears in the verb mõ’yõn, “to sleep",  a combination of mõ, “to go” and yõn. During lively football matches in the villages, you hear all the time: Nũy ã yõn!  So, to sleep is to go throw the soul. The Maxicali say the dream soul exits through the mouth. It may follow dangerous paths that lead to the villages of the dead. They are uneasy about encounters with the dead, because the departed may be eager to get surviving family or friends to live with them - which would mean that the soul would not return to the body.
      In its excursions, the dream soul may meet many other spirits, of the forest or the waters, of sorcerers or allies. Forgetting your dreams is bad because you lose track of your soul and miss what it can show you from the future. You need t remember where your dream soul went because this can reveal sources of illness and potential for healing.     
      When you tell a dream to relatives or shamans, they will want to know whether you heard singing. The spirit people called yãmĩyxop are famous for their songs. They can be wonderful allies, but they may also demand rewards for their favors, for example in the form of feasts and rituals. The language of debt and payment is used by the Maxicali to describe their relationship with spirits. Someone who is cured by the shamans “owes” a debt to the spirits and must “pay” by performing a new ritual. In this context the shamans are called “collectors “for the spirits. 
     Early chroniclers noted that the habit of sleeping light related not only to the need to keep track of the wandering soul but to scan whatever was going on in the external environment at night. "The sleep of these people is not like, in general, that of civilized people, continuous and long...They sleep poorly and their precautions are constant, whether day or night, throughout the occupied area. A dry leaf that falls, a branch that breaks off from the trees, as soon as the care is heard, it is carefully observed, examined; Stopping what you are doing, you listen while the incident lasts.” [2]

 

[1] Roberto Romero Ribeiro Júnior “Numa terra estranha: sonho, diferença e alteração entre os Tikmũ’ũn (Maxakali)” Revista de Antropologia. vol. 65 no.3 (Nov. 2022).
[2] Jacinto Pallazollo. Nas Selvas do Mucuri e do Rio Doce (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1973) p. 118

Picture: Text-to-image, RM with DALL-E 3