In dreams begins responsibility

 

I enjoy playing quote detective. The twin epigraphs in Yeats's poetry collection Responsibilities, first published by Cuala Press in 1914, make an interesting study that involves the valuation of dreams and the very nature of dreaming.
      In dreams begins responsibility. This can be read in several ways. What we choose and do in dreams has consequences. What will manifest in conscious life has its roots in what Yeats elsewhere called the "fibrous darkness". We are responsible for what we do or do not do inside the dreamworld. Or are we?
     Disowning responsibility for the actions of the dream self has been a popular cop-out among Euro-Americans for a very long time. Saint Augustine was one of  those who wanted to deny responsibility for he did in his dreams, since he was embarrassed that he continued to have sex in his dreams after taking vows of chastity. He tried to absolve himself by making a distinction between “happenings” and “actions.” Dreams fall into the former category. Things just happen to you and you can't be held responsible for them. [1]
     This is nonense to traditional dreaming cultures. They know the dreamworld is a real lifeworld, and hold dreamers responsible for their actions within it. Real Mystery initiates and conscious dream travelers - of whom Yeats was one - generally feel the same.
    Where did Yeats get his quotable quote? He gave the source as an "Old Play". Attributing a made-up quotation to an Old Play was a favorite ruse of Sir Walter Scott, and Yeats may have been following his lead. Some hear an echo of a passage in Nietzsche's Morgenröthe:

“Dream and responsibility. - You are willing to assume responsibility for everything! Except, that is, for your dreams! What miserable weakness, what lack of consistent courage! Nothing is more your own than your dreams! Nothing more your own work! Content, form, duration, performer, spectator - in these comedies you are all of this yourself! And it is precisely here that you rebuff and are ashamed of yourselves, and even Oedipus, the wise Oedipus, derived consolation from the thought that we cannot help what we dream!” [2]

In dreams begins responsibility. The line continues to reverberate. Delmore Schwartz, famous as the poet of Depression-era Brooklyn, wrote his story ”In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” over a weekend when he was twenty-one. He borrowed his title from Yeats's Old Play, but made "responsibility" plural. In Schwartz's story, his protagonist's dream double is in a cinema watching a grainy old silent movie. He puts us there, hearing the crackle of the projector, watching the black-and white frames. The movie watcher recognizes his mom and dad, on the hot afternoon on Coney Island when his father proposed. Seething with emotion, the young man in the cinema stands up and yells at his parents, across time, not to get married - and then later, not to break up. An usher hustles him out of the theater - and he wakes up, as the author may have done. [3]
    This gives a further slant on responsibilities that begin in dreams. In dreams, we look into secret places and travel across time. What if – more than just shouting at a screen – we could reach into a mind and situation across time and change something that might alter a whole history? Delmore Schwartz left that question unspoken but it may have occurred to Yeats, who maintained that we are required to question our dreams.   
    Yeats thought that dreams place responsibility on the dreamer to seek to understand what they offer - advice, a warning, an explanation, a deeper reality, conversation with higher beings, interaction with other dreamers. Dreams are to be questioned before sleep and to be examined on waking, to tease out their implications and the action needed. He saw the questioning of dreams as a form of divination. Yeats wrote in his mid-forties that “since I was a boy I have questioned dreams for [Maud Gonne’s] sake” [4] In the Automatic Script of 1919, on being told “don’t forget you are to have a dream,” Yeats asked, “On what shall I question?” [5]
    He was haunted across his life by the aching divide between dreams of a fully consummated love and a spiritual marriage with Maud Gonne, and her repeated refusal to accept him as her mate in ordinary life. There was the unavoidable sense that he had failed in one of the largest responsibilities his dreams had given him. Yet he never despaired of dreaming. He said that the dreams that had been “granted” to him – as opposed to the dreams he had “sought” through incubation, meditation or magical formulas - had been his truest source of knowing.[6]

The second epigraph to Responsibilities takes us to China. It is based on a misreading of a French translation of the Analects of Confucious, probably passed on to Yeats by Ezra Pound. The original text refers not to the Prince of Chang but to the Duke of Zhou, associated by the Confucians with public virtue. [7] The apothegm was originally constructed to mourn a decline in social mores and the growth of government corruption. However, the mention of a dream figure is what seized the Chinese imagination, so the Duke of Zhou came to be regarded as a patron – even a god – or dreams. The sorrow of Yeats’s second epigraph streams from the understanding that to lose contact with the greater minds that become accessible in dreams is to fall from one’s own greater self.    
     Yeats journaled his dreams and visions and engaged in many experiments to set up what we might call lucid and mutual dreaming. He spent a good deal of his time lying on his back in half-dream states. He learned the merits of entering a state of relaxed attention, open to the spontaneous flow of images. “One must allow the images to form with all their associations before one criticizes.” He agreed with Goethe that if one is critical too soon, images will not form at all. “If you suspend the critical faculty, I have discovered, either as the result of training, or, if you have the gift, by passing into a slight trance, images pass rapidly before you. If you can suspend also desire, and let them form at their own will, your absorption becomes more complete and they are more clear in color, more precise in articulation, and you and they begin to move in the midst of what seems a powerful light.” [8] He tried to stay with a dream or reenter it when he was dissatisfied or disappointed with what had been accomplished.
     He made this ringing declaration of his trust in dreams in an essay on Shelley: "I have observed dreams and visions very carefully, and am now certain that the imagination has some way of lighting on the truth that the reason has not, and that its commandments, delivered when the body is still and the reason silent, are the most binding we can ever know." [9]

 

References

1. Augustine Confessions  Book X Chapter 30. See discussion in Owen Flanagan (2000) Dreaming Souls: Sleep, Dreams and the Evolution of the Conscious Mind  (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) pp. 18, 179-183.

2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality. Cambridge University Press, 1997, p.78

3. Delmore Schwartz, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories (New York: New Directions, 1978)

4.W.B. Yeats, “PIAL Notebook” 8v, quoted in Neil Mann, “W. B. Yeats, Dream, Vision, and the Dead” in Matthew Gibson and Neil Mann (eds) Yeats, Philosophy, and the Occult (Clemson SC: Clemson University Press, 2016) p.158 n.18. The "PIAL Notebook", kept by Yeats from 1908 to 1917, was named after Maud Gonne’s Golden Dawn motto, Per Ignem ad Lucem ("Through Fire to Light") 

5. Steve L. Adams, Barbara J. Fielding and Sandra L. Sprayberry, Yeats Vision Papers Volume 2 (London and Iowa City: Macmillan/University of Iowa Press, 1992) p. 166. 

6. Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume I. The Poems ed. Richard J. Finneran. (New York: Scribner, 1997) p.601.

7. The source is Confucius 7:5, as translated by Guillaume Pauthier in 1858 and then retranslated by Ezra Pound in his Canto XIII. See Mann, “W.B. Yeats, Dream, Vision and the Dead” p.155 n.1 

8. W.B. Yeats, Mythologies (London and New York: Macmillan, 1955) p. 344. 

9. W.B. Yeats, “The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry” Essays and Introductions. (London: Macmillan, 1961) p. 65.

Where a Dream is the Price of Admission

In traditions where the importance of dreaming is understood, the right dream may be your price of admission to the good stuff.

It is common in Tibetan tradition for spiritual teachers to ask students to bring them a dream to determine if they are ready to receive important teachings. A student without a dream is regarded as blocked and possibly unclean. He is required to undergo purification and perform practices to reopen his connection with spiritual allies. He is not allowed to continue his studies until he can produce the right dream.
    Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche gives a personal example, from the time of his training with Lopon Rinpoche, in his book Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep. The story is doubly interesting because it involves long-range dream precognition. At 13, as a student,Tenzin dreamed he was handing out slips of paper with the Tibetan syllable A written on them to people boarding a bus.       He brought this dream to his teacher, who did not comment, but allowed him to proceed to a further level of instruction. Fifteen years later, waking events caught up with the dream. Invited to travel to the West for the first time, Tenzin found himself assigned to hand out slips of paper with the Tibetan syllable A on them to people boarding a bus. These were to be used in a meditation exercise.[1]
    When the French ethnographer Jean-Guy Goulet told the Guajiro (a South American people also known as the Wayuu) that he wanted to live with them and study them, they replied that they would only allow him to live with them if he “knew how to dream”. [2]
    In 1994, a dream proved to be my admission ticket to the Dreaming of an Aboriginal people in my native Australia. I dreamed I was carried back to Australia by a sea eagle, to a reunion with my mother, and then guided into the hinterland of south Queensland, to the banks of a muddy creek. Something immense was thrashing and rising from the waters. Nearby were Aborigines painted for ceremony. An elder told me, "This is the first of all creatures. This is the beginning of our world."
    When my mother died suddenly, three months later, I was grateful that the dream had prepared me for this event, through our loving exchange in the dream itself, and by how it inspired me to reach out to her and heal some misunderstandings. I flew back to my native country. After the funeral, I went "walkabout" for a few days, and found myself at an Aboriginal housing co-op in a dusty town in the hinterland called Beaudesert. When I started talking about dreams, I was told I needed to talk to Frank. Who was Frank? "Oh, he's our spirit man." Frank's place proved to be three days bush walk away, so this lead seemed like a non-starter.
    But Frank walked in as I was getting ready to go; shamans are tricky. He invited me down to the pub to talk. He sipped orange juice and sniffed me, literally, checking if I was another white fella trying to rip off his people yet again. Then I told him the dream. His manner changed radically. He sat very still, his eyes blazing like fire opals.
   "Oh, I guess you've come to me for a reason, mate. You've just told me the start of the creation story of my people, the Mununjalli, as it is told to made men. That thing you saw in the water was the bull eel. We say it is the first of all creatures."
    Yet a dream had taken me deep inside the Dreaming of an ancient and indigenous people. Because of my dream, Frank volunteered to show me the place of the Bull Eel Dreaming. Skirting quicksand and snakes, after many hours I found myself on the bank of the muddy creek from my dream. No bull eel in evidence that day, which was fine with me.[3]

 References

1. Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep (Boston: Snow Lion, 1998) pp. 12-13.
2. Jean-Guy Goulet, “Dreams and Visions in Other Lifeworlds” in David E. Young and Goulet (eds) Being Changed by Cross-Cultural Encounters (Peterborough, Ontario; Broadview Press, 1994). p. 22.
3. The full story is in my book Conscious Dreaming. (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1996).

News from The Secret Commonwealth

 

In a book titled The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies, Robert Kirk (1644-1692), a Gaelic scholar and Anglican vicar at Aberfoyle in Scotland,  describes a “secret way of correspondence” with the invisible world: a means of crossing between ordinary and nonordinary reality at will. Kirk subtitled his work “An Essay of the Nature and actions of the Subterranean and for the most part Invisible People, heretofore going by the names of Elves, Fauns and Fairies and the like.”

Subtle bodies The inhabitants of these realms are not disembodied. They have “light changeable bodies, like those called Astral, somewhat of the nature of a condensed cloud. They shape-shift and can make their “bodies of congealed air” appear and disappear at will.

Middle nature: The fairies are “of a middle nature betwixt man and Angel,” like the daimons of the ancient world. Kirk discusses rival opinions in his parish about whether the “good people” are spirits of the departed, clothed in their subtle bodies; “exuded forms of the man approaching death”; or “a numerous people by themselves.” He suggests that all these descriptions may be valid for different groups.

Doubles. Kirk reports that each of us has a double who is fully at home in the Otherworld. The old Scots Gaelic term for this double is coimimeadh (pronounced “coy-me-may”), which means “co-walker.” Kirk improvises a series of synonyms for the double, including: twin, companion, echo, “reflex-man,” and living picture. The double resembles the living person both before and after she or he dies. The double survives physical death, when the co-walker “goes at last to his own land.” When invited, the co-walker will make itself “known and familiar.” But most people are unaware that they have a double. Since it lives in a different element, it “neither can nor will easily converse” with the everyday waking mind.

As natural as fishing As a man of the Church, Kirk goes to great lengths to argue that there is nothing ungodly about “correspondence” with Otherworld beings, quoting reports of visionary experiences in the Bible. He also contends that it is as “natural” to encounter the inhabitants of the Otherworld as it is to go fishing; both involve moving into another element. Yeats brings this to poetic life in "The Song of Wandering Aengus", where a man fishing with a hazel rod catches a little silver trout that becomes a girl with apple-blossom in her hair.  

Kirk reassures us that we are dealing with “an invisible people, guardian over and careful of man,” whose “courteous endeavor” is to convince us of the reality of the spiritual world and of “a possible and harmless method of correspondence betwixt men and them, even in this life.” 

However, local legend has it that members of the Secret Commonwealth found the minister too mouthy about them and carried him away one summer evening when he was walking on a dun-shi, a fairy hill behind his house.  He was taken before his book was published. It remained for Sir Walter Scott to discover and publish it in 1815. The frontispiece is a watercolor drawing  hy Sir D.Y. Cameron depicting the Hill of the Faitries at Aberfoyle. Bailie Nicol Jarvie describes this hill and its legends in Rob Roy.

Kirk's successor as minister at Aberfoyle, the Rev. Dr. Grahame, in his Sketches of Picturesque Scenery, recounted that as Kirk was walking on the fairy hill, he sunk down in a swoon, which was taken for death. “After the ceremony of a seeming funeral,” Scott continued the story in Demonology and Witchcraft , “the form of the Rev. Robert Kirk appeared to a relation, and commanded him to go to Grahame of Duchray. ‘Say to Duchray, who is my cousin as well as your own, that I am not dead, but a captive in Fairyland; and only one chance remains for my liberation. When the posthumous child, of which my wife has been delivered since my disappearance, shall be brought to baptism, I will appear in the room, when, if Duchray shall throw over my head the knife or dirk which he holds in his hand, I may be restored to society; but if this is neglected, I am lost for ever." According to this story, Kirk did appear at the christening, and “was visibly seen;” but Duchray was so gobsmacked that he did not throw his dirk  and Kirk went away again.

Kirk lived in a world not yet "dispeopled of its dreams" as Andrew Lang wrote in his introduction to a 1893 edition of The Secret Commonwealth. Lang proceeded to discuss experiences of the co-walker:  "All things universally have their types, their reflex: a man’s type, or reflex, or ' co-walker' may be seen at a distance from or near him during his life—nay, may be seen after his death. The gifted man of second sight can tell the substantial figure from the airy counterpart."

Lang was especially interested in the kind of double that goes ahead of you for which the Norwegians use the term vardøger, who "was often seen of old to enter a House, by which the people knew that the Person of that Likeness was to visit them in a few days....It may have occurred to most of us to meet a person in the street whom we took for an acquaintance. It is not he, but we meet the real man a few paces farther on. Thus a distinguished officer, at home on leave, met a friend, as he tells me, in Piccadilly. The other passed without notice: the officer hesitated about following him, did not, and in some fifty yards met his man. There is probably no more in this than resemblance and coincidence, but this is the kind of thing which was worked by the Highlanders into their metaphysics."

Illustration: Robert Kirk Goes Away. RM+AI

Celtic Shapeshifting

In the dream, I walk through a house, speaking with fervor about my plans for a new class on Celtic shapeshifting. I walk briskly between rooms, waving my arms like a swan on the water. Standing in the kitchen, I declaim the first lines of the Robert Graves version of the Song of Amergin

I am a stag: of seven tines,

I am a flood: across a plain,

I am a wind: on a deep lake,

I am a tear: the Sun lets fall. [1]

I repeat the phrase, "Celtic shapeshifting". I say it again as I leave the dream. The Song of Amergin claims affinity with all animate life, with the swan and the stars, with a tear the sun lets fall. I also feel breeze from the tale of Tuan mac Cairill, who survived the Flood as a mighty salmon, and became a hawk and many other creatures after. [2] How can I not recall his kinsman Fintan mac Bochra, who changed form when he changed his moods?

In his prose poem "Stone Boat", the poet John Moriarty gives us this grand Irish shifter of moods and forms. Once he has been paid with a story - in the Celtic way, you never come in to the good stuff without a story. sung more than spoken - Fintan reveals, "At Connla's otherworld well it was that I first realized that being human is a habit. It can be broken. Like the habit of going down to the river by this path rather than that, I broke it. And so it is that, although I always know who I am, I can never be sure that what I am going to sleep at night is what I will be when I wake up in the morning. In me the mutabilities of sleep survive into waking. What I'm saying is, my shape depends on my mood."

Then Fintan gives a lively poke: "You only need to break the habit once, the habit of being human I mean, and then you will be as you were between death and rebirth. Between death and rebirth our bodies are mind-bodies, and that means they are alterable. Alterable at will. We only have to will it and it happens, we flow from being a swan in Lough Owel into being a hind on Slieve Bloom into being a hare on Beara." [3]

Through the texts, we hear ancient bardic voices celebrating and affirming our connection with all living things in an animate, conscious world, and the shaman's ability to recruit allies in many realms and borrow their forms and their powers.

In his book Becoming Animal, David Abram tells us that "traditional tribal magicians or medicine persons seek to augment the limitations of their specifically human senses by binding their attention to the ways of another animal... The more studiously an apprentice magician watches the other creature from a stance of humility, learning to mimic its cries and to dance its various movements, the more thoroughly his nervous system is joined to another set of senses...Like anything focused upon so intently, the animal ally will begin visiting the novice shaman’s dreams, imparting understandings wholly inaccessible to her waking mind."[4]

Sometimes, of course, the forms are unwelcome, the result of a curse or of karma.

I have been in many shapes before I attained a congenial form. [5]

Now I am away with Aengus, following fire in the head into an enchanted apple orchard to catch a silver trout that becomes a lovely girl with apple blossom in her hair.....[6]

References

1. Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux 1986) p.13 2. Kuno Meyer “Tuan mac Cairill’s Story to Finnen of Moville”, appendix to The Voyage of Bran to the Land of the Living. (London: David Nut 1897), pp. 285–301
3.John Moriarty, "Stone Boat" in Dreamtime (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2020) p. 21

4. David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010) pp. 217-8

5. Cad Goddeu, "The Battle of the Trees". Graves version, White Goddess p. 30.
6. W.B. Yeats, "The Song of Wandering Aengus" in Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, 1958) pp.66-7.

Illustrations: RM+AI

Azurite Call

I had a crystal and showed many how to see in it and an even larger number to see visions according to the method of my Order.

-  Yeats, Memoirs 

My favorite dead poet showed me around a magic cottage he said was on the fourth level of the astral plane. He let me handle an azurite crystal and recommended that I should use one for scrying in the spirit vision as he and his Mystery associates did. Back in the ordinary world, I could not find an azurite crystal that matched his, though I can create one in meditation and use it as a spyglass, a laser pointer, or a transporter. I was inspired to return to the primal art of divination by rock reading and to embark on new expeditions to worlds we can find inside a stone. Here is a little more of the story, playing across many years.

Twenty years ago, in the Library of the House of Time, a place in the Real World beyond consensual hallucination, a dead poet called me to climb a steep spiral staircase I had not noticed before. When I reached the top, he transported both of us to a different locale: a pleasant country cottage. Flower beds bordered the path. From the window of his study, I could look out over changing landscapes, including the Byzantium and Renaissance Italy of his poems. He showed me secret journals and held up a marvelous deep blue crystal.
   “The azurite crystal,” he specified. He urged me to use it to open the third eye fully and see what I most needed to see. I had the impression that the crystal is not only a spyglass but a transporter. It can carry the user – if he is prepared and ready – as far as the Blue Star.
    Yeats explained that his magic cottage is on the fourth level of the astral plane. That did not sound high enough, in terms of the Theosophers' atlases of astral and causal planes. But it is the poet's place and I must assume that he knows his own address.
    After this encounter, I wanted an azurite spyglass. A gemmologist friend doused some of my blue fire by telling me that it is almost impossibe to find an azurite crystal as large as the one in Yeats's fist. I settled for a chunk of azurite stone, the size of a shooter marble but rough. The stone was held precious by both Egypt and Ireland; the Egyptians crushed it to make the blue pigment with which they colored the skin of gods and kings; the scribes who made the Book of Kells used powdered azurite to paint capital letters. This is the blue of deities and of royalty.
    If I unfocus my eyes and look at it close up, my blue stone becomes a mountain range, with a glacier or cool river of lighter blue falling down its slopes and a great open-mouthed fish in its waters. There is something of the lemniscate, the infinity sign, in the general shape. As I let my imagination loose as a leopard in this world, I see intricate knotty designs, pictographs, giant faces. A great beast with open jaws, a low brow, a great sloping muzzle. It could be a bear, or a boar, but when I see it in profile, it looks most like a lion
    I am shocked to find a face within the face. This is definitely human, and it is the face of a king. Strong and stern face, long-nosed, piercing dark eyes, slightly slanting, a short beard. Above his head, crenellations that suggest a crown. Is he the master of the Beast, or does the Beast have his head?
    I turn the stone and it shows me a second face, that might be at home on Easter Island. Another turn reveals a bird-woman, with heron legs and a beak.
    I contemplate the Beast who holds the head of a king as Yama holds the Wheel of Life on the walls of Buddhist temples. My mind turns, like the wheel, to another life and another journey.
    Before Yeats called to me from the turning stair, I made an expedition to a site in the Real World we call the Cave of the Ancestors. I found the opening I needed behind the hard spray of a waterfall. I searched rock paintings for messages. I was called by the glow of light from a standing stone to brave a mess of black adders. The stone became translucent, showing me the figure of a man who was desperate for help. Bearded and crowned, torn and bleeding, he was ready to destroy himself if his appeal to another time and another world went unheard. Something gave me the courage to drop my body and track him through the electric blue light inside the stone into his broken kingdom, to do battle with a dark power.
    Now I am holding another world between my thumb and forefinger. There are endless worlds, as Vasistha taught Rama. Any number may be found inside a stone. 

Drawing: "Yeats in the Magic Cottage" by Robert Moss

The Mudang Rides a Red Horse

 

She is newly initiated as a mudang, or shaman, and is expected to lead a big ritual - a gut - to win the favor of gods and spirits. And she is sick and has lost her voice. Her grandmother, a well-known mudang or manshin herself - asks what she dreamed on the last night of the lunar month.
     She remembers riding a red horse. A swing swayed in front of her. She climbed on to it and the swing carried her to a mountain where she saw a twisted pine. She jumped off the swing and climbed the tree. Grandma gets her to clarify that the swing went forward, then assures her this is a good dream, "foretelling immense blessings. Wait and see." The young manshin's voice comes back and the ritual is a success. [1]
    This is one of the many dream incidents reported in a memoir by well-known Korean shaman Kim Keum-Hwa titled I Have Come on a Lonely Path. Her dreams helped to bring her through appalling hardship - poverty, near-starvation, domestic abuse, police brutality - and to follow her calling as “a mediator between humans and gods”.
     Early in life, she was compelled to learn a mode of lucid dreaming in order to survive horrifying nightmares. Far from riding a red horse, she felt herself in danger of being trampled under the hooves of red horses that rushed at her from the sky, along with tigers and other menacing beings. Again and again, she woke exhausted and dripping with sweat. She managed to tell herself that because she was dreaming, she could choose to respond to these night invasions in some other way than fleeing in terror. When she faced her invaders, they welcomed her to their sky. She flew with them, played with them traveled with them to other worlds. ."I would mingle and play with the people in my dreams, ride clouds and cross streams in a Milly Way mist, and traverse completely different worlds. When I awakened after wholeheartedly playing in my dream, my head stopped aching and my heart felt more at ease.”
     The ecstatic sky journey, central to the shaman's calling and practice in many cultures - and seen by Eliade as universal [2] - is not featured in most accounts of Korean shamanism. In Korea the mudang is typically made in one of two ways: either the ritual tools and skills are passed down through the family or the shaman-to-be is claimed by the spirits in Shinbyeong, the notorious shaman sickness. Kim Keum-Hwa's vocation was announced in both ways. She came from a family of female shamans, and her near-death experiences in childhood lead one mudang to say that her only cure would be the purple headscarf, a badge of a senior shaman. During a full moon ritual when she was still a girl she felt she was going to be hit by stars pouring from the sky. She ran towards a creek, fainted, and the gods entered her body - a wild and typical case of initiation by possession or what her family liked to call "embodiment".
      In her first years as a mudang, she barely escaped starvation performing rituals of propitiation and exorcism. She tried to get evil spirits out of her mother’s body by feeding her grains of rice - one for each year of her age - and getting her to spit them out. She then forced the rice into the beak of a chicken that was sacrificed and buried with her mother's old clothes. . 
      Life became easier when Kim Keum-Hwa was awarded well-publicized prizes, and prize money, as a champion traditional dancer, welcomed onstage in the United States as well as her own country. This did not save her from a disastrous marriage and family tragedies. 
     Throughout her life, however, she had her dreams as counselors. She often dreamed the future. She dreamed the exact location of the body of a man who had drowned himself in a river. She communicated with the ancestors in dreams and conveyed their wishes and messages to their survivors. 
    A mudang, she tells us, is "a person who must embrace all the han and tears of others. Because I have been deeply hurt and suffered in this human life, I can understand others' pain and heal their suffering."
     She also declares that "mudangs dream much more than the average person. They not only dream during their sleep but also witness dream-like visions during their waking hours....The dreams of manshins are special - dreams that can feel like reality, while the reality of a manshin can unfold like a dream." 
    The gift of her dreams might be specific information like the best date for a ritual or a diagnosis for a patient. "Sometimes the spirits inform me of certain events in advance through dreams." Sometimes the gift of a dream is pure energy. In a big dream, she is teetering on the edge of an abyss but finds the courage to jump. Her leap of faith takes her to a lush landscape an she rises from sleep surging with confidence that caries her through the challenges presented by a series of difficult clients the next day.
     She describes how dreams helped her and those close to her through the passage from life to death. Before her mother died, she appeared in a dream, waving her thin hand at the dreamer, and said, "Do not follow". This led Keum-Hwa to give her mother special care, and to pray for her safe and easy passage. Her dream told her she must let go. One night, Keum Hwa was inspired to call to her mother, across a distance, "Fly away like a crane, like a butterfly". In the morning she received word that her mother had passed. 

Coda: Dreaming Beyond the Veil

Summarizing his careful study of the long history of Korean Muism - Korean shamanism - eminent  Korean  scholar Tongshik Ryu observed that "the religious structure of shamanism is in the creation of a new world and new human lives...By negations of secular ego and history human beings return to a primordial mythic world to dream a new creation through free meeting with the spirits. For the restoration of the mythic world the negation of the realistic world is absolutely necessary, i.e. death is required. Shamanism learned the skillful art of death in drink, song and dance." [3]
     In Kim Keum-Hwa's memoir we are present at many meetings with the spirits and we see the central role of "drink, song and dance" in the folk rituals that survive in the cities and still employ - at least part-time - an estimated 200,000 mudangs in South Korea. We are taken further. In the rituals the spirits are called through the veil. In dreams, the dreamer penetrates the veil and meets them on their own ground.
     In Kim's history of her dream life we see again  and again how in dreaming  supernormal faculties - precognition, clairvoyance, telepathy - are entirely normal. We see how dreams can diagnose and prescribe for specific conditions. And how dreaming is a field of interaction between the living and the dead, and between the human and the more than human. 
    

References

1. Kim Keum-Hwa. I Have Come on a Lonely Path: Memoir of a Shaman trans. Peace Pyunghwa Lee. Alpharetta GA: Alpha Sisters Publishing, 2024, p.75. All quotations from Kim Keum-Hwa are from this autobiography. She died in 2019.

2 Mircea Eliade. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974.

3. Ryu, Tongshik. The History and Structure of Korean Shamanism trans. Jong-il Moon. Seoul: Yonsei University Press, 2012.

Illustration: RM + AI

The Two Lilas and the Endless Worlds

 

Your life and your dreams are both made of stories. You won't forget this if you immerse yourself in one of the greatest storybooks ever made. The earliest version of the Yogavasistha was probably compiled in the seventh century. Its original title was the Mokshapaya, or Way of Release. Authorship has been attributed to the sage Valmiki, also credited with producing the epic Ramayana. The voice we hear is that of another sage, Vasistha. He takes on the task of restoring the spirits and the will to action of the boy prince Rama of Ayodhya. Hence the full title of the text, The great story of Rama as told by the sage Vasistha in order to expound his philosophy of Yoga. Rama’s services are urgently required to defend gods and humans against an army of demons, but he has slumped into lethargy and despair. 
    Rama asks the sage, “What is the point and purpose of this useless existence?” The whole dialogue that follows - filling more than 27,000 verses and powered by sixty-four extraordinary stories - is a response to that question. Vasistha charts the path to release from vasanas, the habitual tendencies and karmic traces that hold the soul in bondage to the wheel of repetition. He describes the way of ascension through higher worlds to the realm of pure consciousness. But this is not only a guide to moksha, or liberation. It is a call to re-engagement with the world, to live the bigger story.
    Vasistha is my kind of teacher. He offers real philosophy, deep as Advaita Vedanta or the Upanishads, but he does not teach through admonishment or abstraction; he teaches by telling really good stories. 
    One of his core teachings is that "this universe is but a long dream...There is no real difference between the waking state of reality and the dream state. What is real in one is unreal in the other - hence, these states are essentially of the same nature." [1]
     Beyond other systems of yoga, the yoga of Vasistha hinges on seeing the world as a dream. [2] In order to be truly awake, one must fully understand sleep and dream. The world appears and disappears, realities come and go like dream states.
    Make that worlds. There are countless worlds, including universes concealed inside stones or subatomic particles. "In every atom there are worlds within worlds." The Sanskrit term is jagadanantya, which literally means "the endlessness of worlds".[3] Hugh Everett III might want to join the conversation at thsi point; he was the atheist proponent of the Many Worlds Interpretation in quantum mechanics which holds that the universe is constantly splitting into parallel versions.
    The sage continues: "No one can count the number of universes (and consequent creations) that are arising at this minute from the Supreme Being. The mind that humans possess is ever fluctuating and gives rise to all things in these visible worlds. This external appearance which exists as a reality is a creation of human desires. It is as unreal as a goblin shown to terrify children. This world is as unstable as a stool made of banana leaves.”
    The longest story in the Yogavasistha, and one of the most wildly entertaining, is the tale of Lila, or rather The Two Lilas. Queen Lila, fearing the death of her beloved husband, King Padma, prays to the goddess Sarasvati that they should not be separated. When the goddess appears after the death of the king, she shows Lila how to preserve his body while traveling to find his soul essence in different realms. Lila is excited though incredulous when the goddess tells her than among other life experiences she and her husband have shared is the partnership of Visastha - no less - and his wife in a universe within a tiny space. How can Lila know this for sure? The goddess explains that she can go there and see for herself. But for this kind of travel, Lila must affirm to herself, “I shall leave my body here and take a body of light. With that body, like the scent of incense, I shall go to the house of the holy man." 
    Once Lila learns to drop her physical body and travel in a subtle body, she embarks on a series of fantastic journeys, involving parallel lives, reincarnation, mind-created worlds and the ascent to pure consciousness beyond the illusions of form. Lila and Sarasvati "roamed freely in their wisdom bodies. Though it seemed that they had traveled millions of miles in space, they were still in the same 'room' but on another plane of consciousness." 
   They fly to the top of Mount Meru, they see spaceships ang gods and celestial dancers and the abode of the creator. In a marvelous skirl of humor, the narrator tells us "like a couple of mosquitoes they roamed all these planes."
    In a scene made for big-screen sci fantasy, Lila meets her double - also a queen, in another life story - in a palace where they watch a futuristic battle. Rockets burst into a thousand warheads and gunships like elephants rain fire from the sky. "What looked like elephants had been propelled into the air from the battlefield and they were raining fire on the city." It seems a ninth century author is able to foresee twenty-first century battles or Star Wars scenarios from the ancient future. In this world at war King Padma is embodied as another king, Viduratha, who will be slain in battle because he has set his mind on liberation, not victory. “Whatever vision arises within one’s self is immediately experienced." 
    Lila wants to know why there is an exact double of herself in this scene. They can see and interact with each other though others may see only one of therm. Sarasvati explains that it was the longing of her deceased husband, Padma, that generated Lila’s double in this world where Padma has been reborn as Viduratha. “Due to excessive love towards you your husband Padma thought, at the moment of death, of enjoying your company without being ever separated. Accordingly he was able to get you here. Whatever is thought of by one at the time of his agonizing death, that will be realized by him afterwards."
    We are given a fascinating description of soul transfer, or body swapping. After the death of Viduratha, Sarasvati puts his jiva - his soul - into the embalmed corpse of the first Lila’s dead husband, Padma.

             Through the nose

Saraswati, removed the grip she had on the jiva of Viduratha which therefore entered into the nasal orifice of Padma's body in the form of prana and permeated the whole parched up body. Whereupon blood began to circulate freely throughout and the deceased king woke up, rubbing his eyes. Padma woke up and asked who they were.

     Lila is eventually able to remember eight hundred of her past lives and step in and out of lives that her parallel selves are living beyond the wheel of time.
     We are given hints as to the nature of the true life teacher. Sarasvati tells Lila she is more than a goddess; she is higher consciousness. Beyond the play of reality and illusion, waking and dreaming, there is the limitless nondual field of pure consciousness. This is the only reality. Both liberation and enlightened reengagement with the world require the jiva to understand this fully.
     Which brings us to Vasistha's most important teaching You must transcend the world but then return and embrace it. The aim is to become the jivanmukta, the living liberated being, who can engage with the world without being entangled with it. Lila means play. Beyond the gloom of the world, seek the divine play. If life is a dream, grow your ability to change the dream or create a new one.
     Vasistha’s purpose in telling stories to Rama is not only to awaken him to the fluid interplay of reality and illusion, and the conditions for moksha (liberation) but to help him acquire the non-attachment that will enable him to act in the world without succumbing to its entrapments “doing yet not doing what has to be done” The stories show that our lives are shaped by the mind’s capacity to create and sustain reality. Existence is a dreamlike projection of consciousness. Boundaries between waking life, dreams, past and future lives, and parallel realities are fluid.
     So, reality is not as fixed as we tend to tell ourselves. When we recognize that much of what we accept as real is a mental construct, we can change the construct.
     If we see life and death as illusions, perhaps we can bring more clarity and courage to our actions. Why fear death? And why get stuck in the conditions of a single life experience? We are many. Lila identified eight hundred incarnations before she stopped counting. How many doubles and counterparts does any one of us have, whether as aspects of our present personality or transpersonal counterparts in different times or dimensions?
    We are led to assume that all of this will bring Rama into the field to fight the demons. Be in the world not of it. Knowing that the world is an illusion does not mean withdrawing from it. We want to navigate with awareness and to live with awareness and non-attachment, lucid in the dream of life, taking part in life’s play while remembering that it is a playground. 
     Vasistha teaches us that will (paurusa) can overcome fate (daiva) when exerted by a mind that has awakened. “Those who have removed the veil from reality can imagine things so precisely that those mental perceptions are actually experienced.” Certain people, of whom Vasishtha is one, have the power of making their dreams, become physical objects- objects that did not existed until a powerful dreamer dreamed them into reality. [4] Don't forget

Your real life is a dream and the dream is real

Your real life is an illusion and the illusion is real

 

CODA: A Crown Prince Recommends a Book of Stories to Take You Beyond This World

In the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin is a Persian translation of the Yogavasistha with 41 miniature paintings, probably commissioned by the first Mughal emperor Akbar and completed under the patronage of his son and successor Jahangir. There is a fascinating note in Jahangir's own hand in the margin of folio 1b. A recent translator gives us this version:

"God is great! - This book Ğög Bäsistha [sic] which belongs to the stories of the ancients, (and) which I translated in the time when I was crown-prince ...is a very good book. Whenever somebody hears it with the ear of understanding, and if he considers only one percent of it, it is surely to be hoped that he will make the bațin ['what is beyond this world'] his destination by the instrument of the zahir ['what belongs to the apparent world']" [5]

From his time as crown prince, Jahangiir not only claims full credit for the translation but pierces to the main intent of this astonishing Hindu text, where philosophy is animated by amazing tales of doubles, parallel worlds and oneiric adventures. The yoga of Vasistha leads to awakening to ultimate reality "beyond this world" through the magic of story - and then guides the hearer to act in the world with the clarity and courage of non-attachment. To hear or read just one of Vasistha's stories, it's been said, is to become enlightened.

 

References: 

1. Swami Venkatesananda. Vasistha’s Yoga. (Albany NY: SUNY Press 1993) p. 71. Unless otherwise mentioned, all quotations from the Yogavasistha in this essay are from this 800-page abridgment.

2. Christopher Key Chapple gives an elegant summary of the seven states in Vasistha’s yoga: “Vasiṣṭha’s sevenfold Yoga begins with restraint from activity (nivṛtti) leading to deep thinking (vicāraṇa) and non-attachment (asaṃsaṅga). After these three preliminaries Vasiṣṭha proclaims that in the fourth state one sees the entire world as if it were a dream. For Vasiṣṭha, this process of dissolution holds great lessons. Is the world real? According to Vasiṣṭha, the answer is a resounding no. Once one sees through the fixity of any given circumstance. In the fifth Yoga, one can descend (or ascend) into the realm of an experience of non-duality, wherein one operates as if in a state of deep sleep, translucent and transparent (advaita suṣupta). This catapults the individual into a state of true freedom (jīvan mukta), preparing one for the seventh Yoga, one’s final release from the body (videha mukta) at the time of death. Unlike any of the other Yoga systems, the Yogavāsiṣṭha process hinges on seeing the world as a dream.” Christopher Key Chapple.  “Worlds of Dream in the Yogavāsiṣṭha: Virtual and Virtuous Realities” Embodied Philosophy 2020 

3. Garth Bregman. “The Existence of an Endless Number of Worlds Jagadānantya in Mokṣopāya and the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics” in  Christopher Key Chapple and Arindam Chakrabarti (eds) Engaged Emancipation: Mind, Morals, and Make-Believe in the Moksopāya (Yogavāsistha) (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015) p.97.

4. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty.“The Dream Narrative and the Indian Doctrine of Illusion in Daedalus  vol. 111, no. 3 (Summer, 1982),p.102

5. Heike Franke. “Akbar's Yogavāsiştha in the Chester Beatty Library” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 161(2) (January 2011) 359-375

 

Illustration: Two Lilas with the Goddess. RM + AI

 

A scholar of the Imaginal Realm

I am a great admirer of the work of Henry Corbin. A lifelong student of the medieval Sufi philosophers - especially Suhrawardi and Ibn 'Arabi - and of Shi'ite mysticism, Corbin brought the term mundus imaginalis, or Imaginal Realm, into currency in the West. In Arabic, the term is Alam al-Mithal and it refers to the true realm of imagination, an order of reality that is at least as real as the physical world, with cities and schools and palaces where human travelers can interact with master teachers.
   Corbin’s great work Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi is a marvelous essay in visionary spirituality that embodies his driving purpose of helping to free the religious imagination from all types of fundamentalism. I remember being seized with excitement when I first read his Avicenna and the Visionary Recital with its account of soul travel to real places beyond this world.
    Corbin is not an easy read; he assumes that his readers will be polymaths fluent in at least half a dozen languages, ancient and modern. But his work is indispensable.
    There is a fine biographical study by Tom Cheetham, The World Turned Inside Out: Henry Corbin and Islamic Mysticism. (Woodstock, CT: Spring Journal Books, 2003). Here we can read about the incident that generated his life’s work. His professor at the Ecole Practiques des Hautes Etudes, Louis Massignon, had returned from Teheran with a lithograph copy of the major work of Suhrawardi, Hikmat al’Ishraq When Corbin mentioned that he had seen some scattered references to Suhrawardi, Massignon immediately handed his only copy of the Arabic text to him, saying “I think there is in this book something for you.” Corbin later said, “This something was the company of the young Shaykh al-Ishraq [Teacher of Light], who has not left me my whole life.” He eventually translated Suhrawardi's master work as The Oriental Theosophy.
    Corbin regarded study as a quest. At age 70, looking back on his scholarly journey, he wrote that “to be a philosopher is to take to the road, never settling down in some place of satisfaction with a theory of the world…The adventure is…a voyage which progresses towards the Light" (The Voyage and the Messenger).
    In approaching the Sufis, he came armed with his early study of Protestant mystics, from whom he borrowed the idea that there is a primary distinction in religion between the Revealed God and the Hidden God, and that we can only come to know the God behind God through what in us is God-like - "the presence in us of those characteristics by which we know God."
      Corbin spent World War II in Istanbul as the only French scholar in residence at the French Institute of Archaeology. He went to Teheran at the end of the war, and spent at least part of every year in Iran for the rest of his life. His love of Persia is reflected in his description of it as “the country the color of heaven”. He died on October 7, 1978, and was spared the spectacle of seeing the land of the mystic poets in the grip of violent Islamist fanatics.
     Cheetham evokes the core of Corbin's presence in the world of ideas – his “simple, passionate refusal to accept the understanding of ourselves and our world that dominates modern secular consciousness”. Manifest history, for Corbin, is possible only because of a hidden order of events, a "divine history" unfolding behind the curtain of the world. "There is a historicity more original, more primordial than the history of external events, history in the ordinary sense of the term." In my attempt to write part of that history, in my Secret History of Dreaming, Corbin was one of my guiding lights.
      If you are coming to Henry Corbin for the first time - or seeking to distill from all you have learned from him - I recommend his book The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism. There you will find Suhrawardi's hymn to Perfect Nature. Freely adapted, it contains the following beautiful invocation of the Guide:

You, my lord and prince, my most perfect angel, my precious spiritual being
You are the Spirit who gave birth to me and you are the child who is born of my spirit
You are clothed in the most brilliant of divine lights
May you manifest yourself to me in the highest of epiphanies
Show me the light of your dazzling face
Be my mediator [between the worlds]
Lift the veils of darkness from my heart.

    I have used these magnificent words in guiding meditation and imaginal journeys in my circles of active dreamers, to open the heart and facilitate direct contact with the "soul of the soul," the Guide on a higher level. There is a two-way movement. We make a journey of ascension, rising from the heart center to the place of the Guide. Then we return, with heart, to carry the radiance of the Higher Self into embodied life.

Illustration: RM + AI

Reality is illusion, bound by a dream

 

Listen up. Leave your chores and worries. You need to know where we are.

    First there is Nainema. He is illusion. He is called “Father with an Illusion”. He is all there is.
    The illusion that is Nainema affects itself deeply.
    Nainema takes the illusion that is himself into himself. He holds the illusion by the thread of a dream and looks into it. He is searching, but finds nothing.
    He looks again. He breathes. He holds the phantasm and binds it to the dream thread with a magical glue that comes from inside himself.. Then he takes the phantasm and tramples the bottom of it, He goes on stamping until he has made an earth that is big enough for him to sit on.
    Seated on the earth he has made, holding onto the dream, he spits out a stream of saliva. The forests are born from  this and begin to grow.
    He stretches himself out on the earth and dreams a sky above it. He pulls blue and white out of the earth. Now there is sky.
    Gazing at himself, he – the one who is the story itself – creates this story to tell us how it is.
    Now do you understand? 

This is the creation story as told by the Huitoto (or Uitoto) a people of the Colombian rainforest who live by slash-and-burn agriculture, fishing, and their deep connection with the life of the jungle around them. They move through the forest at night using luminous fungi as flashlights.

   Their cosmogony is no more strange than the discovery, in quantum physics, that the act of observation plucks events into manifestation from a cosmic noodle soup of potentialities. Reality begins with illusion. A cosmic illusion becomes self-aware, looks into itself. The act of observation begins to collapse a formless wave into form. But nothing is definite until the process is tied down with the thread of a dream, and juiced by divine acts of emission.
    As in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, the place of creation is a state of conscious dreaming. In this Upanishad, whose title means The Great Forest Book, the state of conscious dreaming is described as a state of "emitting" [srj], a word that can also mean the ejaculation of semen. The dreamer "emits" [srjate] or projects from himself "joys, happinesses and delights...ponds, lotus pools and flowing streams, for he is the Maker." The word srj is also used to describe the way a turtle projects its head and paws from under its shell.
     In both stories from the forest, we learn that ancient wisdom traditions have taught for millennia that quantum effects observed at the smallest levels of the universe may be at work in the largest: that microcosm is macrocosm. Nainema's story tells us that reality starts with illusion. Quantum physics suggests that the universe is made of dream stuff. Go dream on it.

Sources: I have based my retelling of the Huitoto creation story on two texts. The older is in Paul Radin, Monotheism among Primitive Peoples (Basel: Ethnographical Museum 1954) pp 13-14; paraphrasing and summarizing K. T.Preuss, Religion und Mythologie der Uitoto (Gottingen, 1921). The more recent is in David  Leeming and Jake Page, God: Myths of the Male Divine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) 157-158

Illustration: RM+AI

What's the use of dreaming?

Most human societies until relatively recently have understood that dreaming is important for three reasons above all. First, dreams give us access to sources of wisdom beyond the ordinary mind - to the God or Goddess you can talk to, to the ancestors, to the animate powers of nature, to the greater Self. "It is an age-old fact," declared the great psychologist C.G.Jung in his last major essay, "that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions." 

Second, dreams show us the future, in ways that can contribute to the well-being and survival of whole communities. They not only rehearse us for events that will happen; they show us possible futures,. If we are able to harvest and clarify the information, and then take appropriate action, we can improve the odds on manifesting a desirable future event, or avoiding an unwanted one.

Third, dreaming is medicine, in several senses. In somatic or prodromic dreams, we are shown what is happening inside the body and symptoms it could develop in the future. So dreams can be a source of vital, even life-saving, diagnosis.

When we do get sick, dreams are a factory of imagery that can help us to get well. Medical science is increasingly receptive to the fact that the body receives images as events, and responds accordingly. Where do we get the images that will persuade the body to adjust in the direction of health? The best images we can use for healing are those delivered by our own dreams. We know they are timely and they are authentic, or own material. The dream image may initially be scary, but I would insist that any image that belongs to us can be developed in the direction of wholeness and healing, if we are prepared to work with it.

Still on the theme of dreams in relation to healing, dreams put us in touch with multiple aspects of ourselves - with the shadow side we may have repressed or denied, with the magical child who may have parted company with us when the world seemed too cold and too cruel, with our animal spirits. Working these connections consciously can help us be stronger, and more. It can lead to soul recovery, which is what happens when we bring home vital parts of our energy and identity that went missing to live in our bodies and our lives. 

Dreaming is an essential human activity, as essential as sex or sleep. If we have lost contact with our dreams, the Iroquois say, we have lost a vital part of our souls. Dreams are important and useful for everyone.

Through our dream radar, we are able to see challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. This is part of our survival kit. Dreams hold up a magic mirror to our everyday attitudes and actions - sometimes in a quite shocking or humorous way - helping us to see ourselves from a higher perspective. In this way (as Dostoyevsky reminded us in Crime and Punishment) the dreams of the night can be a corrective to the delusions of the day.

And then there is the entertainment and refreshment value of dreams, whose gift may simply be a good story or a good laugh. You have access in dreams to a night cinema where the movies are screened  especially for you. You can sometimes step through the screen and become scriptwiter, director and star of your own productions. If you don't remember your dreams, you are missing out on the movies.

Dreaming you can travel without leaving home, not a small thing in the time of pandemic. You can come back with the memories of a delicious vacation. You can rendezvous with friends and loved ones far away, since dreaming is social as well as personal. 

Illustration: "Three Bands of Dreaming" by RM

The dream that guided Jung to reach for a more general audience

 

 Near the end of his life, Jung finally managed to put his best and most original ideas in a form that was simple enough to reach a general audience, without diluting or dumbing anything down. He might not have done this except for a dream. After watching Jung's very human interviews with John Freeman for the BBC in 1959, the publisher of Aldus Books had a bright idea: why not ask Jung to write a book for a general audience?
     Jung's answer, when approached by Freeman, was a flat No. He was now in his 80s, and did not want to take the time that remained to him for this. Then Jung dreamed that he was standing in a public place and lecturing to a multitude of people who were not only listening with rapt attention but understood what he was saying. The dream changed his mind.
     Jung had said in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, "All day long I have exciting ideas and thoughts. But I take up in my work only those to which my dreams direct me." Now he proved this, again, by embarking on the book that was published (after his death) as Man and His Symbols. He conceived it a collaborative effort and invited trusted colleagues like Marie-Louise von Franz to contribute chapters.
    His personal contribution was a long essay titled "Approaching the Unconscious" . The essay is, first and last, about dreams. He completed it just ten days before the start of his final illness, so this work may be called his last testament. It testifies, above all, to the primary importance of dreams in Jung's psychology and in his vision of human nature and evolution. Jung makes this ringing statement: "It is an age-old fact that God speaks, chiefly, through dreams and visions." 

Illustration "The Hiddem Door" RM+AI

“The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.” - C.G. Jung, "The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man". 1931 lecture.