Confessions of a polyphasic sleeper

I confess that I am a biphasic and often a polyphasic sleeper. I have never really tried to sleep for six or more hours at a stretch, the widely recommended mode in our predominantly monophasic sleeping culture. Typically, I sleep (or at least lie dormant) for two distinct periods of 3-4 hours and two hours in a 24-hour cycle, sometimes adding a short lie-down of 30-60 minutes. The shorter sleep phase may be an afternoon or evening nap before a long overnight period of reading and study, to be followed by 3-4 hours in bed starting around dawn.

Now I am at home much of the time, with a tolerant family and only a few external deadlines, I sleep, wake and dream almost whenever I feel like it and the hours are completely unpredictable. I do not suffer insomnia because I don't try to sleep unless I feel like it. Since my school days, I have almost never needed an alarm clock or a wake-up call. Traveling between time zones did not bother me in the pre-pandemic era when I did that every week. In any time zone, I am nearly always awake between 3:00 and 4:00 a.m., one of my favorite hours. I am told this is the time, actuarially, when more people die and more are born than in any other hour in the cycle of 24.

    When resting in bed, I spend as much time as possible in a half-sleep or half-wake state, in the hypnagogic zone (approaching sleep) or the hypnopompic zone (after sleep). This liminal state of consciousness is immensely fertile. It presents spontaneous images that can be the portals for lucid dream adventures. It opens psychic perception and is a place of encounter with inner guides. It is a state in which we hatch new ideas and creative connections. My approach to sleep and dreaming may seem exotic to many in a society that is suffering serious dream deprivation and in general does not reward its members for recalling and sharing dreams. However my habits would be recognized and approved by most of our ancestors, cross-culturally.

    For hundreds of thousands of years, humans thought that what the pushers of sleep meds promise – an uninterrupted night of seven or eight hours’ sleep – was an unnatural and undesirable thing. Experiments by a team led by Dr Thomas Wehr at the National Institutes of Mental Health in Bethesda have supplied compelling evidence of how our technology has ripped us from our natural cycle. Deprived of artificial lighting for several weeks, the typical subject evolved the following pattern: lying awake in bed for an hour or two, then four hours sleep, then 2-3 hours of “non-anxious wakefulness” followed by a second sleep before waking for the day's activities.

     One of the most exciting findings in Wehr’s study involved the endocrinology of the night watch. The interval between first sleep and second sleep is characterized by elevated levels of prolactin, a pituitary hormone best-known for helping hens to brood contentedly above their eggs for long periods. Wehr concluded that the night watch can produce benign states of altered consciousness not unlike meditation. [1} Wehr and his team put their subjects on the Paleolithic plan, without alternatives to electrical light such as candles or fire or oil lamps. The Paleolithic two-sleeps cycle wasn’t only a stone age phenomenon; it was characteristic of how people spent their nights until gas lighting and then electricity became widespread. A seventeenth century Scottish legal deposition describes a weaver as “haveing gotten his first sleip and awaiking furth thairof.”

    Sleep historian Roger Ekirch says that “until the modern era, up to an hour or more of quiet wakefulness midway through the night interrupted the rest of most Western Europeans” - and presumably most other people - so that “consolidated sleep, such as we today experience, is unnatural.” [2] This may help to explain the extent to which so many  in our urbanized society are out of nature and out of touch with dreaming.

     “Segmented sleep” was the norm for our ancestors until quite recently, as it remains for some indigenous peoples today. Like Virgil and Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Tiv of central Nigeria speak of “first sleep” and “second sleep”. They wake at any time during the night and will talk to anyone in the hut who is also awake - often about their dreams.[3] Most interesting, the state “twixt sleepe and wake” that the French called dorveille was widely regarded as an excellent time to birth new ideas. In 1769, the artful London tradesman Christopher Pinchbeck advertised a device called a “Nocturhnal Remembrancer”, a parchment tablet inside a box with a slit to guide the writing hand in the dark to enable “philosophers, statesmen, poets, divines and every person of genius, business or reflection” to secure the “flights and thoughts which so frequently occur in the course of a meditating, wakeful night.”

    Biphasic or polyphasic sleep might help us to recover the "perceptual diversity" that anthropologist and economic development specialist Tara Lumpkin observes is woefully lacking in contemporary mainstream Western cultures. "When a culture restrains perceptual diversity, that same culture reduces human adapatibility, which, in turn, leads to human beings living unsustainably...Coming from developed Western cultures, which highly value monophasic consciousness and the scientific method, we may not even be aware of what we are losing. It is altered states of consciousness, which speak through symbols and intuition such as dreaming, imagining and meditating, that often allow us to grasp the whole in a way that the scientific method can never provide."[4]

    Modern culture, through the suppression of natural circadian cycles and a disregard of dreaming, may have fulfilled for many Thomas Middleton's complaint that we have rendered ourselves “disanulled of our first sleep, and cheated of our dreams and fantasies.” [5]
     Perhaps you, too, will find it helpful to wake up to the fact that it's okay to be awake in the middle of the night. While sleep deprivation can be a serious problem, we do better when we stop confusing being awake in the middle of the night with "insomnia" and learn to have fun when the rest of the world is sleeping (and thinks we should be asleep). And then, whenever possible, plunge back into dreaming.


References

1. Nathalie Angier, "Modern Life Suppresses Ancient Body Rhythms", New York Times, March 14, 1995.
2. A. Roger Ekirch, "Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-Industrial Slumber in the British Isles",American Historical Review 106, no. 2 (April 2001) pp. 343-386.
3. Paul Bohannon, "Concepts of Time among the Tiv of Nigeria", Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, no. 9 (Autumn, 1953) p. 253.
4, Tara W. Lumpkin, "Perceptual Diversity: Is Polyphasic Consciousness Necessary for Global Survival?" Anthropology of Consciousness vol.12 nos. 1-2 (2002) pp. 37-70.
5. Thomas Middleton, "The Black Book", in The Works of Thomas Middleton ed. A.H. Bullen (New York: AMS Press, 1964).

Journal drawing: "Swinging Across the River" (c) Robert Moss

When you don't know you're dreaming until the dream spills into the street

Dreams offer many clues that we are not in ordinary reality. We can fly, or breathe underwater, or find ourselves inside different bodies. We have the powers of superheroes. We can talk to animals and ride dragons. We meet people who died in the regular world but are very much alive here.

    Even humdrum dreams offer many lucidity triggers: prompts to wake up to the fact that we are dreaming. We are naked in public or engage in other anomalous behavior. The scene shifts inexplicably from one location to another, as if we have teleported. There is odd repetition; the same scene plays out several times, like the black cat walking across the room in the movie The Matrix. People we know are notably older or younger than in regular life.
    When a lucidity trigger awakens us to the fact that we are dreaming, we are sometimes so startled that we are jolted out of the whole experience, back into the dormant body on the bed. When we can stay in the dream, conscious that we are not in ordinary reality, we may be on our way to grand adventures, to romance or healing, to solving a mystery or vanquishing a fear.
     To recognize that you are dreaming is not the same as telling yourself This isn't real. Dreams are real experiences. The realities in which they unfold may be as real, less real, or more real than the physical world. In a certain kind of dream experience, the reason you may not pause to say to yourself I'm dreaming is that you are conscious, in an even deeper sense, that you are in another reality, for example a world where the dead are alive, where you will join them on a full-time basis when you leave your own body behind at physical death.
     You can fail to notice you are dreaming during sleep and then wake up to the dreamlike character of everyday life. I missed several lucidity triggers in a dream, and then found elements from my dream spilling into the street, quite literally, as I took my dog on the first walk of the day.
    In my dream:

I'm at a retreat center in California, wearing a wild tropical shirt I think looks great on me. Next I am giving directions to a group of my students on how to take a train from a London station - I specify Victoria or Euston - on certain assignments. There's an air of adventure, as if I am asking them to play detectives.
    As soon as I name the stations, I am transported to a train station. I go back and forth between a pleasant waiting room and a platform. I notice a shower head near the door, outside the waiting room, and decide to take a quick shower. The flow isn't strong, and I catch water in my cupped hands and sprinkle it over myself. I find this quite enjoyable.
    I'm still naked when I hear a station announcement that the train is coming. I look along the platform and see a bus. Can this be right? Behind it, a train or tram is coming.
    A attractive lady in a dark blue uniform - a station official - smiles at me. I tell her I probably shouldn't get on the train naked. Will she hold it for me until I get dressed?
   There's a small problem. I can't find my clothes. Eventually I discover a crisp white short-sleeved shirt on a hook and a pair of boxers. This wasn't the shirt I was wearing earlier (one with a wild tropical design) but it will serve.
    I'm barefoot and pantless and missing not only my carry-on bag but my wallet and ID. Who can I call? I think of a dear friend but I am not sure he can help. 

I felt some concern towards the end of the dream, but relaxed - and fairly soon amused - on waking.
    My little dream report contains several classic examples of lucidity triggers that I missed. 

* Instant change of scene. I am whisked from California to London, quick as thought.
* Naked in public. One of the most common dream themes, and a lucidity prompt for that reason alone.
* Anomalous behavior. I take a shower in an unlikely place, fully exposed to public view. The lady station official acts in a very non-official way.
*  Repetition and recurring dream situations. Trains and train stations often feature in my dreams and I was talking about their symbology in a recent class. Naked in public, losing ID or valuables, and quick change scenes are also recurring situations here, as in many people's dreams.
* The dead are alive. I don't call my friend but it does not occur to me that, in ordinary reality, he died several years ago.

Maybe you'll want to make a list of your own lucidity triggers, including any of the ones I missed that are relevant to you.
    The entertainment value of this little episode was enhanced by what happened when I walked the dream, along with the dog, before coffee in the morning. A couple of blocks from my house, a woman was packing her car. She called to her boyfriend, at the door of an apartment, "Hey, is my wallet in there?" He responded, "I don't know."
    There was the theme of misplaced or lost ID, spilling from the dream into the street.
    It got better (or worse) when we returned to my house. On the sidewalk, I noticed a discarded pair of men's briefs. Not the kind of underwear I had in the dream (or would choose in regular life) but there was the theme of naked in public, dropped right where I live.

1916 photo of female train conductor in London. Photographer unidentfied.

    

You Can’t Get Away from Your Imagination

 

“A good local pub has much in common with a church, except that a pub is warmer, and there's more conversation.” There’s quite a stretch between the Wiliam Bake who wrote that and the ascetic monk and theologian Dorotheos of Gaza (c.506-565), recognized as a saint of the Eastern Orthodox and Catholic churches, who gave instruction on the need to eliminate passion and the virtues of meekness. Yet they are in agreement on something every human needs to know: when you die, you step into your imagination.
     In  A Vision of the Last Judgment, Blake said it like this: “The world of imagination is the world of eternity, It is the divine bosom into which we shall all go after the death of the vegetated [i.e. mortal] body.”
    Dorotheos had to step carefully, because he willingly bound himself to church doctrine, which held that the important decisions about the post-mortem fate of the soul would come when it was roused at the Last Judgment. But the monk was convinced that in the period between death and Judgment, the soul was not merely asleep, or seemingly dead. It was having experiences, and the shape and nature of those experiences was determined by memory and imagination.
    In a sermon on the “Fear of the Punishment to Come”, Dorotheos declared that the thoughts and images to which the soul was attached in life will become its new reality after death. Memories and images will have more power than they did during physical life – for one thing, because you can’t get away with them by jumping ack into your body. Desires and fears you tried to ignore, fantasies that did not play out in the world, will now come after you, capable of taking on entirely palpable shapes, gathering terrific force and intensity. You won’t be able to escape the products of your imagination. Because you have no place to go  outside it. [1]

1.Dorotheos of Gaza, Discourses and Sayings trans. E. P. Wheeler ([Kalamazoo, Michigan: Liturgical Press, 1977), pp. 183–86.Nicholas Constas attempts a paraphrase in an excellent essay that I used as a starting block. See "'To Sleep, Perchance to Dream’: The Middle State of Souls in Patristic and Byzantine Literature”. Dumbarton Oaks Papers vol. 55 (2001), p.100.

Illustration: Toll Houses Ahead

It is probably not a good idea to let your imagination get stuck within the astral geography developed in medieval times by the Eastern Orthodox church. An influential tenth-century hagiography, The Life of Saint Basil the Younger by Gregory of Thrace, opens with a vivid description of twenty "aerial toll houses" where the departed have to deal with demonic customs officials on the ladder to heaven. The demons use all their craft and brute force to shove the traveling soul down to hell through the rungs.
    There was an alleged eyewitness account of how this operates: a visitation by a deceased female servant, Theodora, who appeared to Gregory, a pious layman, after he prayed to know what had happened to her. She described how demons of the middle air stop traveling souls and grill them and inspect them to find out whether they contain some part of a sin embodied by the demon. If the demon finds something of himself in you, you are bound for Hades. This setup was reminiscent of some of the burdens of ordinary life, where tax collectors and border guards held up travelers and shook them down for money.    
    Huge murals depicting Theodora's trials are on the walls of the Bucovina monasteries in Romania. The version here is from a Russian print created in the mid-nineteenth century. 

 

 

   
   

Elemental magic and the nameless god of druids

 

If you want to understand why the Celts placed such high value on "goodly speech", study the incantations delivered by the druid Mogh Roith in the anonymous epic The Siege of Knocklong. Even in English translation, you feel water streaming and fire crackling and wind blowing and earth heaving as the words arouse elemental magic.

     When Moghh Roith, in defense of Munster, is kindling magical fire against the army of the High King Cormac and his five fairy druids, he includes these lines

God of druids
My god above every god
He is god of the ancient druids

There is mystery here. In their new book A History of Irish Magic, Sally North and James North comment that "the god is invoked without naming him. In no surviving Irish text is the god of the druids ever named. If, as supposed, the gods of the ancient Irish were the Tuatha De Danàan, whose names are known and frequently cited, it is noteworthy that the druids scrupulously avoid naming their own god, even when calling on him directly." [1]  
      Assuming this is correct, why is it so? It must be noted that Mogh Roith, in his metal bird mask and bull's hide cloak and flying chariot, with his power to raise a great wind with his breath, often seems to have godlike powers himself.
     A sampling of his elemental magic through incantation:

Magic breath

Against Mogh Roith sent a magic breath northwards against the fairy druid Colpa, so that “the stones and sand of the earth became furious devastating balls of fire all the way to the ford;” [2]

Calling the power of water

Munster was thirsty and its nobles and fighting men were listless, deprived of vital energy. The druid called on the power of water

I invoke a special stream,
drops seep through rocks;
a stream of pleasant taste
to the north-east.
I invoke a cool waterfall [3]

When he had completed this the solidity of the earth was fractured by the onrush of water. The druid said to the nobles, “Drink to get back your strength and energy, your warlike vigor and your power and dignity."

The water was distributed to all, men, horses and cattle, until all were satisfied. The magic exhaustion which had oppressed them was lifted.

 

Magical fire

I knead a fire, powerful, strong;
it will level the wood, it will dry up grass;
an angry flame, great its speed
it will rush up, to the heavens above;
it will destroy forests, the forests of the earth,
it will subdue in battle the people of Conn.

sharp smoke of the rowan-tree,
gentle smoke of the rowan-tree,
I practise druidic arts [4]

With elemental magic he can raise the dragon - or a gianyt eel - subdue his enemies and turn them into stones.

References

1.Sally North and James North, A History of Irish Magic. Loughcrew, Co. Meath: Holythorn Press, 2024 pp.23-24

2.Ibid p.86

3.Ibid p.69

4. Ibid p.71. Alas, the Norths' otherwise excellent book has few source notes and no bibliography.

The full text of the English translation of The Siege of Knocklong by Seán Ó Duinn is accessible online at https://celt.ucc.ie/published/T301044.html. 

Illustration: "Elemental Magic" RM + NightCafe

An Ottoman Voice in My Committee of Sleep

 

Once again in a dream I am playing scholar and scribe, working with a team to collate, translate and edit several versions of an Ottoman Turkish text that may be derived from Old Anatolian. A female philologist is working on this. We compare several words for dream in Turkish – rüya, hayal, düş – and older terms from the Turkic language group and the different states and qualities each implies.  

I smile, on waking, at this new evidence that specialists in my Committee of Sleep, monitoring my research into different dreaming cultures and dreaming minds, are trying to nudge me in their preferred directions.
    These are a few of the subjects my dreams have prompted me to research over the past year.

The biography of Yeshe Sogyel
The city of Ugarit and the Library of Ashurbanipal
Irish and Scots folklore of the Cailleach
The life and music of Nina Simone
The cult of Cybele
telestike or statue-animation in late antiquity
The life of Pemalingpa and other tertöns or “treasure revealers”
Aerial tollhouses on Eastern Orthodox road maps to the afterlife
The genre in Chinese poetry known as Youxian or “Wandering as an Immortal”
The burial rites of the Toraja of south Sulawesi
Dion Fortune’s approach to “intermediate beings”
shamanic dream practices of the Passamaquoddy

Almost every night brings another research assignment delivered in a dream. Sometimes it is just a postcard or a mysterious word (“Phthonios”), sometimes an immense cinematic drama, maybe playing on several screens.
     Thankfully, I sometimes find that the dream is a prompt to recover work I have already done – including essays and draft chapters – that I had forgotten. This may be, in part, the case with my Ottoman prompt. Under the Ottoman empire dreams were valued highly, and even a Sultan kept a dream journal. When I try to marshal what I have learned about Ottoman dreams, I think of the brilliant Turkish scholar Asli Niyazioğlu, who has made a most rewarding study of the role of dreams in Ottoman biographies. I posted an article based on one of her books here.
     Accepting that the Turkish lady in my dreams was pushing me to go further I found a scholarly essay by Asli on the influence of dream interpreters of the Halveti (Khalvati) Sufi order over Ottoman sultans. In the late sixteenth century, the Sultan himself had his dreams recorded and sent to the Halveti şeyh for interpretation. The Sultan’s senior architect, successor to the famous Sinan, took up his profession because of a dream interpreted by the sheikh in this way. [1]
     Asli explains in this interview how in Ottomoan biographical dictionaries, dreams are often presented as keys to career decisions. She explains that a common Ottoman term for dream was "mirror"; dreams were seen as mirrors in which divine intention was reflected. 

 

 1. Asli Niyazioğlu, “Dreams, Ottoman Biography, Writing and the Halveti Sunbuli Sheikhs of Sixteenth-Century Istanbul" in  Ralph von Elger and Yavuz Kose (eds) Many Ways of Speaking about the Self: Middle Eastern Ego-Documents in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish (14th-20th Century) Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2010, pp. 171-184.

Art (Top) Ottoman woman enjoying coffee,early 18th century, unknown artist. In Pera Palace Museum, Istanbul. (Bottom) Miniatutre of Ashab-i Kehf (Sleepers of Ephesus) in Topkapi Palace museum, Istanbul.

 

 

 

Meeting a Merlin of the Baltic

I saw him again last night, in the twilight between awake and sleep. He first appeared as a giant dark eagle atop a conical hill, able to see across vast distances. He showed himself again as hybrid, eagle-man, and then as able to project the form of an iron wolf. Lyzdeika. I have not forgotten you. 
     Shall we recall our meeting at your birthplace in May, 2013? Here is my report of my quest for a Baltic shaman-priest:

The Shaman from the Eagle’s Nest

 On my second visit to Lithuania, I was taken to the old city of Kernave and shown a conical hill that was the reputed birthplace of a shaman-priest named Lizdeika. According to tradition, he was found, as a baby, in an eagle’s nest on that hill.  Lizdeika lived closed to wolves, and was reputed to be able to shapeshift into their form. He plays a central role in the unfolding of the most famous dream in Baltic history.
    Camped with an army near the present site of Vilnius, Grand Duke Gediminas dreamed of an iron wolf that howled. He consulted Lizdeika - by now the krivu krivaitis, or high priest of the old religion — on the meaning of the dream. Lizdeika told the grand duke he should build a fortified city on the hill where he had been sleeping. The city of Vilnius was founded because of this dream, and in front of the cathedral is a statue of Gediminas’ iron wolf.

 On my fifth visit to Lithiuania, several years later, I stood in the rain on Lizdeika’s green hill and asked for the blessing of the ancestors, in the midst of a circle of Baltic dreamers who were eager to reclaim the old ways. Kernave means Wet Place, setting a perennial weather forecast in a country whose name means Rain Country. We had managed to perform a traditional Baltic fire ceremony that morning, despite the unremitting rain, and I had been impressed by how greedily the fire spirits swallowed offerings of Lithuanian beer, the heavy, dark beer that is like liquid bread. Now I was drumming for our circle, to open direct communication with the spirits of this land. My personal hope was to make contact with Lizdeika. I believed I had dreamed of him, before this trip, as a Baltic Merlin whose story needed to be told.
     As soon as I tapped the drum, the landscape opened, to my inner eye, as if a zipper has been pulled from the zenith to the muddy path at my feet. I saw a windswept figure above me, at the top of the hill. He was a man wearing a feathered robe, or a bird the size of a man. I sensed his fierce determination. I understood that I was required to earn the right of entry into his realm. I must start, now, by disclosing my shamanic connections, by showing him that I was his peer. This was not so hard.
     I found I had at my left shoulder a kinsman in his own feathered cloak. It was raven black. I recognized the druid from fourteen centuries ago who had often been my companion, in my time and in his own. On my right side was a wolf pack. It seemed to have traveled here with me. I had been privileged, in this country of the wolf, to have enlisted the protection and guidance of the wolf family before, because of my connection with the ancient Mohawk Mother of the Wolf Clan. This soon proved to be extremely important.
     We were given a private tour of the archaeological museum of Kernave later that day. Kernave is an active site, with ongoing excavations. The museum director, who participated in my workshop, responded cordially to my request that she should tell us about unsolved mysteries that we might be able to investigate as dream archaeologists. 
     We heard a singularly creepy ghost story involving a mutilated corpse. On the night local archaeologists excavated a grave at the edge of the ancient burial ground, strange things happened. They had dug up the remains of a woman who had been decapitated. Her head had been buried face down in the earth. Her hands and feet had also been cut off and transposed. The archaeologists speculated that she was a witch who had been dug up and mutilated in this way to prevent her from going around bothering the living. There was a second theory; that her body had been hacked up this way to turn her into a cemetery guardian, a protector of bodies and souls and grave goods. That night one of the archaeologists heard rushing winds outside her tent on site. She went out to see the energy form of a giant stallion reared up on its hind legs. All the animals around went wild, dogs howling, birds screaming. All the archaeologists rushed out. What was going on that night? What had they released? They covered up the body in its original site.
     After lunch, I suggested to our group that we might use objects we had seen in the museum, as well as any impressions we had picked up around Lizdeika’s hill, as portals for a journey to encounter the spirits of the land and recover essential history. One of our explorers chose as her portal the skull of a princess that had impressed all of us. The princess had been buried wearing a diadem with symbols of a mother giving birth and the Tree of Life. In her journey, our dream archaeologist traveled through one of the eye holes of the skull and then looked out, through the priestess’ eyes, into scenes of her life and her world. Another brave explorer used the skeleton of a horse that had been buried alive at the center of a circle of human graves; it was buried standing, its neck and legs were broken. Another of our trackers chose to investigate the mystery of the missing swords; only one sword (and this just the hilt and pommel) was in the museum. I gently discouraged tracking the phantom of the mutilated corpse.
    My own intention for this expedition was to go back to the scene at Lizdeika’s hill when I saw the landscape opening as if it had been unzipped. After I began the drumming, however, I was distracted by the tale of the mutilated body and our discussion of the missing swords. I traveled rapidly through many scenes of violence from the past. I saw a duke hurrying down wooden stairs and ladders to fight or flee under sudden attack. I saw raganas, wood witches, as ancient masters of psychic warfare, creating Baltic versions of the golem to menace and terrify enemies. It seemed that they had used bodies like the one in the cemetery, rather than clay, in this cause. Some may even have worked with Kabbalists in times when the survival of the Lithuanian Jews was imperiled.
     I saw warriors and/or their weapons — swords and spears — and/or figures of wood or amber representing them planted vertically in the earth with the idea that in need they would spring from the ground, fully armed, to fight invaders.
      Now I was back at the place of Lizdeika. He stared at me from pale blue eyes. The human features around the eyes kept changing, and I became aware that he has occupied many bodies. Then the shape around the constant pale blue eyes became the head of a wolf. He really is a wolf as well as a man.
    He began running like a wolf, pelting across the landscape. I ran after him, adopting a similar wolf form. Then he rose from the ground and became a dark eagle. I became a bird and flew after him. There were several more animal transformations. Then he became a grass snake and slipped through a crevice among the rocks. I became a snake and slid through after him.
     We were now in a different space, a kind of sanctuary between the worlds. I felt the presence of one greater than him, a female presence. It came to me that as a wolf, he is subject to the Alpha in his pack, who is the She Wolf, the Mother of the Clan. They have relations in other forms, on other planes. He is linked to Menulas, the Moon God; she to Saule, the Sun Goddess. They seemed to enjoy my own encounter with Moon Man and Sun Woman in Paris.      It came to me that Lizdeika’s main obligations were not as counselor to dukes or high priest of the recognized pagan line, but to these hidden powers. What happened to the Lizdeika of history, who advised Gediminas? He had wanted his body to be left for the bird, up on a tree on the hill where he was found as a baby. But it was necessary to dispose of his body faster, because enemies — and maybe witches — were coming who would desecrate it or (worse) use it for sorcery. So he was burned and the ashes were dropped in the river. However, his vital soul was preserved inside a soul catcher, an amber whose natural shape resembled that as a man. It is from this container that he was able to enter and use successive human (and animal) bodies.
     I met a Merlin of the Baltic, neither good nor bad, just so, and — like the Merlin of my Celtic ancestors — never confined to one time, ever shape-shifting, through the stories he weaves and the stories that are woven around him.

Text adapted from The Boy Who Died and Came Back by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library. 

Photo: At the hill of Lizdeika, Kernave, May 2013. 

 

Freudian slips and others

I am leafing again through the book in which Freud gave the most complete account of the phenomenon known (after him) as the Freudian slip. First published in 1901 as The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, it's a collection of essays that was probably better-known and more widely read in Freud's lifetime than any of his other works.
    In my favorite local used bookstore, a shelf elf placed a copy of an elderly Macmillan edition, with A.A.Brill's translation, in my line of sight. The paper label on the spine had rubbed nearly away, like the label on a well-soaked bottle of wine, so I had to pull the book off the shelf to see what was facing me, which begins to sound like a Freudian joke in itself.

    The merits of Freud's study of slips of the tongue and memory lapses are threefold. First, he assigns meaning to incidents that many of us tend to overlook. Forgetting the name of a town where you once stayed, or giving the wrong name to someone you know perfectly well, isn't simply a memory lapse or passing confusion; it speaks of something in you and your life situation which merits close attention, because you can learn from it. Second, Freud does dreamwork with these incidents, applying the same principles of analysis to episodes in waking life as he applies to dream symbols. Third, his prime lab rat, first and last, is himself. Like Jung (and unlike lesser scientific minds that fail to realize that knowledge is state-specific) he knows that understanding begins with self-knowledge, and that the most important data on inner events (and their interplay with outer events) must be gathered from first-hand experience.

    We follow Freud down some interesting trails as he studies such phenomena as forgetting names and otherwise well-known phrases and word substitution. He recounts a chance encounter with a fellow-traveler on a train who begins to quote the famous line, in Latin, in which Queen Dido of Carthage issues a terrible curse against Aeneas, the hero who loved her and left her. Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor (Aeneid, IV 625). "Let someone arise from my bones as an avenger."
    In the days where a good education still required Latin, Freud's educated companion would be expected to get the quotation right. But he cannot recollect the harmless indefinite pronoun aliquis. By the end of a long conversation in which Freud guides his travel companion through the free association process he also applies to patients' dreams, they understand that there may be deep significance to the suppression of a seemingly harmless pronoun. In aliquis the speaker now recognizes the echo of "liquid" and "liquefaction" in the Latin word. This reminds him that he's alarmed that his girlfriend may have missed her period. He's scared that he is the "someone" who will be cursed if he abandons his girl and a baby he doesn't want.

    Now we come to the defect in Freud's approach to Freudian slips, which he called Fehlleistungen, which means "faulty actions" or "misperformances.". He wants to insist that word-amnesia and name substitution are related to "disturbing complexes" that prompt the psyche to seek to repress memories and information that may cause us pain. We hear of a man who simply cannot remember the name of a business partner who stole his girlfriend and married her; he just doesn't want to know. Freud can't remember the name of a town he knows well (Nervi) when treating a neurotic at a time when he himself is feeling nervous and may be heading for a migraine.

    While Freud's theory of repression may apply to some of his examples, there's both more and less going on with our slips and memory lapses than he allows for. Common sense tells us that memory gaps can be the result of all sorts of life factors, from fatigue to drug or alcohol abuse to migraine to information overload. Einstein once made people laugh because, asked for his phone number, he had to look it up in the book. He declared that he had so much on his mind that he didn't need to burden it by adding the need to remember things he could easily look up.

    I am generally pretty good with names, so when I call someone I know by a name that isn't their own I pay attention to what may be showing through my slip, In one of my workshops, I kept calling a man "Michael" though I was perfectly well aware that his name was "Don." Finally I asked, "Who's Michael?" Through tears, he explained that Michael had been his partner for many years; Michael had died but Don felt him close and was actually wearing his sweater that day.

     One of my rules for life navigation is: Notice what's showing through your slip. To which I will now add: And don't tag it a Freudian slip until you've explored what else may be going on. 

Text partly adapted from Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life, where you will find more on the game of noticing what's showing through a slip.

Photo: RM at Freud's last home at 20 Maresfield Gardens Hampstead

Walking the Dream of the World War II Pilot

 

One of the games I like to play with my journal is to open an old one to the same month and day in a previous year and see what was going on then and whether life is rhyming today.It seems an appropriate pastime at anniversaries, and as the year turns. I went back in my journals to the beginning of 2015 just now. Here is how I recorded the start of an ordinary day at home back then. Nothing big going on. There was the dream, though..

In my dream, I am in London in the time of the Blitz. I returned from this excursion feeling excited and moved and deeply stirred. My dream took me into the life of a Royal Air Force pilot in a time of danger and love and romance. He loved women, and women loved him. One of the women he adored was a wartime nurse. They did not get to spend much time together. They were with each other in my dream. 
     It seemed I was in his body, in his situation, sharing his moments of passion and his fierce willingness to put his life on the line for what he believed in. As I slowly came back from this dream adventure, I felt his presence, as if for a moment both of us were in bed in my time. I was grateful for this deep and renewed connection with someone I believe to be a member of my soul family in another time, and outside time. .
     When I was satisfied I was holding the essence of my dream of the pilot, I got out of bed, showered, threw on clothes. I had one swallow of coffee – literally, because my little dog was waiting for his walk. Dogs walk you no matter what. So very soon I was out on the street with my dog, heading for the park.
      I was now taking the second step in my daily practice. The first step is to hold the essence of the dream, not necessarily all the details, but the essence. I had that. Out on the street, I was walking my dream as well as my dog. I was not puzzling over the dream, and certainly not trying to analyze it. The dream was simply in my mind, and perhaps in my energy field. I was open to the world showing me something that might reflect the dream, as the dream cast its reflection on the world.
     As I walked the dream, I was ready to do another daily practice, which is to pay attention to three things that enter my field of perception, through any or all of my senses. These three things do not have to be extraordinary, weird or even surprising. They may be things you might never notice at all, let alone look at twice, unless you were playing this kind of game. A license plate might catch your eye, because it is a novelty plate or has a combination of letters and numbers that intrigues you. You attention might be drawn by the cry of a bird, or the words of a stranger talking on his cell phone or doing karaoke with his headphones. Maybe something dropped on the sidewalk or left on the curb for trash collection will catch your eye. Maybe you’ll smell cooking, or diesel fumes, or a perfume that takes you back to Paris in the spring of a certain year.
    Paying attention to things like this, on any street on any day, is a way of consulting sidewalk oracles. When the takeaway is a set of mostly visual images I think of this as playing Sidewalk Tarot. Whatever pops up might be a card from a divination deck. It might be your card of the day, or part of a three-card spread, or a larger spread.
    That morning, while the dog sniffed a hydrant, I noticed a license plate I had never seen on my street before. The plate was distinguished by the red letters RN. It belonged to a registered nurse. Nothing unusual here, but those letters RN were very special to me, because I was walking with the bittersweet memories of a wartime romance with a nurse. I had the soft, cozy sense of confirmation. I felt that an unseen hand had patted me on the shoulder.
    I walked on with my dog into the big park. We took the longest path, around the lake. I paused to admire the beautiful weeping willow across water and thin ice. She was green last week. Now winter had yellowed and thinned her gorgeous hair. 
    When I returned to my house, I grabbed a full mug of coffee and went to my study to do my next daily practice. I wrote my dream report, starting with the date and the title I had chosen for my dream. I might be missing certain details by now, but I had the essence, and key incidents returned to me, vivid and strong, as I wrote. I noted my feelings, and added a few lines about the connection between this dream and my other dreams and “far memories” of a British pilot in the Second World War. I added a further note on synchronicity, my sighting of the RN’s license plate. This morning I did not record three sidewalk sightings. The RN was enough.
    I was now ready to play another game that is part of my everyday practice. I did a bit of bibliomancy. The word means divination by the book. People have done it with sacred and special books, like the Bible the Koran or the poetry of Rumi or Dante or Homer, for as long as humans have had books.
    I do my book-dipping with whatever book falls to hand. On the day I walked with the dream of the pilot, I decided to go back to Heraclitus. The work of this often enigmatic Greek philosopher survives only in fragments. Because of their brevity, they are good to consult if you would rather play with a sentence than a longer passage.
    I opened Charles Kahn’s edition of Heraclitus casually, with my non-dominant hand. My eye fell on a one-liner. The translation read: Gods and men honor those who have fallen in battle. In part of myself, I wanted to ignore that message and try again. The line spoke of war and violence and we have quite enough of those in my world. 
    But my dream was still with me, the dream that took me into the life of a brave man who was killed in a necessary war, a war for humanity against the unspeakable evil that had taken possession of Germany under Hitler. Once again, I felt a deep sense of confirmation, a firmer hand on my shoulder. Gods and men honor those who are fallen in battle.  I thought of another line in Heraclius, about the dead and the living are constantly engaged, how the fortunes of mortals and immortals interweave, how we may live in the dead and they may live in us.
    I felt the deep, deep sense of recognition and gratitude and blessing.  I wrote a one-liner from this: 

I am in communion with the dead. They are alive in me, and I am alive in them. 

Text partly adapted from Sidewalk Oracles by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.