At the Gate of Story

The gatekeepers cannot see where the tide of pilgrims begins. Its source lies far to the north, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, the olive groves and forests of cork, even beyond the stern keep of the man of iron dreams on a high wind-raked plateau. The travelers are so many that their feet have emptied the strait, making a land bridge between the continents. Such was the report of one who reached the Gate of Story.
      Yawning on their cushioned seats by a wall bleached to the color of smilodon bones, the gatekeepers do not rule on the veracity of this account. Like the knight of La Mancha, they know that facts can be the enemy of truth. Judging the truth of a story by whether it stirs or disturbs the hearer, they turn the man who parted the seas away. Too many others have tried to pawn this story before; it has been drained of surprise.
    "Altagracia!" croaks a man whose flesh has fallen away so his linen suit hangs off him like a flag of defeat. Some of the crowd cross themselves or finger amulets against the evil eye. An imam directs a boy to offer the parched traveler a waterskin. "Altagracia!" the man cries again, water frothing from his cracked lips.
     No one has spoken that name at this gate before. The gatekeepers motion for the man who has used it to be advanced to the front of the line. Camel drivers open a way for him with their switches, without regard for the age or gender of those they are beating back.
    "You have three minutes," says the chief keeper of the Gate of Story. He flourishes a pocket watch and spins it, on its chain, from his long pointing finger.
---"She is Altagracia," the story man begins.

She is very pale, with lustrous black hair and black eyes. Her traveling clothes are the color of sand in shadow. She wears a veil under her hat. She has pushed it back, but it can be drawn over her face to keep off blowing sand and flies. She has a good deal of luggage, including a hatbox, handled with ease by her giant black servant, Fidel, who has been assigned by her father, The Professor, to keep her safe. Fidel can speak only in little mewling sounds, which the cats of the city understand. His tongue was cut out, perhaps at his own volition, to guarantee that he will live up to his name, which means "faithful", when it comes to keeping secrets, since he is also illiterate.
---Each time the story of Altagracia is told, it expands, and the world with it. Last time I spoke of her she did not have dogs, but now she has a pair of them, resembling greyhounds, that she calls her sight hounds. I said that Fidel is illiterate and mute, but as I speak his shadow is slipping ahead of him through the city gate in the form of a black cat. It is running into the Sultan's library, where it stands on its hind legs to remove a precious copy of the seventh volume of Pliny Maior's Natural History from a cabinet that others always find locked. He wll go to the harem and delight his hearers all night long with the exact descriptions of dogheaded men, Triballes who kill with a look, and lions with the tails of scorpions. He will be rewarded with dishes of sherbert and leg-humping until the chief eunuch will order his tongue, or another particle, to be excised. The feline Fidel is not so easily bested. By naming - both in lapidary Latin and in the Berberous Arabic of the court- all the creatures of Pliny's hearsay, he has brought them to life. The eunuch's scimitar is no match for a manticore.
-
It became harder and harder to hear the teller of this tale, because as each word was uttered, the scene and the action around the gate became more profuse. The crowd parted and reformed as animals out of legend galloped and bulled their way through. The shadow of immense wings cooled the hot sand. A ship in full sail appeared on a canal that surely was not there before. A man with his head under a black cloth took pictures on glass of a couple of newlyweds boarding a train whose engine puffed perfect blue smoke rings. A cat that was also smoking, with the aid of an amber cigarette holder, shuffled a Marseille deck and purred, "Pick a card, any card at all."
---The head gatekeeper, invoking the Most High, ordered the man who knew Altagracia to pass through the Gate of Story, and threatened to do terrible things to his mother unless he passed through without delay.
---"The Gate is closed for today," he announced to the host of story pilgrims. They groaned and wept and raged. Many of them, desperate to be heard, tried to shout their stories over each other, producing a weird cacophony that made the keepers press their hands over their ears. Blue-eyed janissaries appeared on the battlements of the gatehouse and fired warning shots into the air.
---In the sudden silence, a voice said in a placeless accent, "You will hear me."
---The voice belonged to a short, spare man with a clipped goatee, who held an umbrella over his head.
---"We will hear no more Namers today," the head keeper spoke in a voice of thunder.
---"I am neither a Namer nor an un-Namer. I am the sculptor of the Immortal Sentence."
---These words, also, had never been heard at the Gate of Story. The keepers were bound by a rule laid down in the remotest of pasts to give the speaker a hearing.


When I first told this story, it took longer than one thousand and one nights to reach the end. Every day since then, I have shortened the story by a sentence. Now that it fills less than a page, I reduce it by one word in each telling. In this instance reducing is the opposite of reduction. With each word I remove, I approach closer to the quintessence of the tale, which is also the key to the making and unmaking of worlds. The consummation of my art will be to deliver the Immortal Sentence, which will replace the knowledge of the world and become the theme of all branches of a new literature and science. Some have thought that the Immortal Sentence will consist only of four letters. This cannot be known until all the words that veil it have been stripped away.


"Cease speaking!" the head gatekeeper commanded. His composure had been shaken. There was whiteness around his mouth. "You may enter."
---The man with the umbrella strode with long decisive steps - unusually fast for a person of small stature, but then he worked his whole legs, from the hips - through the Gate of Story. The immensely high cedar doors began to swing shut. The gatekeepers had gathered their cushions and magic carpets. But the head keeper turned back when a new voice addressed him by his secret name, the name he shared only with Khidr, the guide of those who have no earthly guide.
---It was a woman’s voice. When he faced her, he was pleased to see that she was veiled, though her features could be seen through the gauzy stuff. Her clothes were of English cut, he thought, made by the finest seamstress. Yet something about her made him think of the forbidden vineyards of Shiraz.
---"Come up on the rooftop," she invited him. "We will share a cup of wine."
---"Are you a djinn?" he demanded, now fearful.
---"I am the Sustainer. Every day, I must repeat the one story that keeps the world turning. Every syllable must be flawless, because this is the code on which the world depends."
---"Then why have we never seen you at this gate before?"
---"Do you suppose I have only one form?"
---"Whatever form you take, if you are repeating a story that has been told before, we will know it, and you will have failed the test."
---"You understand very little, and after hearing the story you will know even less. The nature of the story that sustains the world is that it is never different and never the same. By repeating it perfectly, each teller creates a new story and renews the world."
---"This defies both God and reason."
---"Then listen."
---Somehow the head keeper found he was seated beside her on the roof of the watchtower, with the sweet taste of the forbidden wine on his lips.
---The veiled woman speaks:
-
The gatekeepers cannot see where the tide of pilgrims begins. Its source lies far to the north, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, the olive groves and forests of cork, even beyond the stern keep of the man of iron dreams on a high wind-raked plateau. The travelers are so many that their feet have emptied the strait, making a land bridge between the continents. Such was the report of one who reached the Gate of Story.

"At the Gate of Story" is included in Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories by Robert Moss. Publshed  by Exlesior Editions/State University of New York Press. 

Illustration: "Gate of Story" by Robert Moss

Place of the Lion

The Dream

I am driving in a large open car along a once-grand avenue near the water in a city on the Black Sea. To our left are splendid buildings from the Belle Epoque that once housed department stores, hotels, restaurants. Everything has fallen into disrepair; signs are missing letters or hanging loose; some buildings look abandoned. Business is still being done though it doesn't correspond to the old signage.
     The person giving me this private tour explains that old magic is still alive in this fallen city. In particular, the ancient art of bonding with an animal familiar is practiced even in the best families, though proscribed by the church and frowned on by the state. Behind the columns of that now-shabby emporium, for example, is an establishment known to its clientele as Lion Inspiriting. Here the most awkward and tongue-tied can be learn to speak in a commanding voice, and the timid and cowardly can be infused with courage.
     I want to see how this works. Quick as thought, I am guided through a marble hall, up stairs to a half-lit parlor where I am invited to recline on a divan. I am aware that there is a stuffed lion in the room, so shabby and dusty I am sure it is an old taxidermy specimen rather than merely a prop or a toy. A black and white film starts to play. Grainy, silent. Nothing much happening for a long time except close ups of waving patterns in high glass. I am amazed at the detail. I can see every blade of glass. I realize the scene is not only on a screen. It is all around me. And it is not only black and white; There is some green and blue, and a glow of colors I can't normally see.
     Am I inside the night vision of a lion?
     The stuffed lion is no longer where I saw him before.

Feelings when I leave the dream: Excitement and delight.

Reality check: The city reminds me of Constanța, the Romanian city on the Black Sea where I led a fourt-day workshop years ago. The signs on the buildings are in the Roman alphabet, but I'm not certain they are in Romanian.

There is a villa in Constanța called the House of Lions. I don't recall seeing it when I was in the city and don't know whether it is the marbled building in my dream.

I love lions and have made a shamanic practice of connecting people with Lion spirit to claim their voice and find their courage. My original title for my book Active Dreaming was The Place of the Lion and there is a lion door knocker on the cover.

The werewolf is well-known in Romania (and is far more common than the vampire) but I have not heard of werelions here. However, I did once meet a werelynx in the Carpathian mountains. 

I find shifts between color and black and white (going either way) very significant in dreams.

I enjoy the slightly creepy Gypsy-Steampunk quality of the room where things go black-and-white. Of course Romania is famous for Romany. And in the middle of the night I was reading some hilarious chapters in Robertson Davies' novel The Rebel Angels about Gypsy magic in the heart of bourgeois Toronto.

What do I want to know?

Where does this story want to go next?

Bumper sticker

When the lion speaks everyone listens.

 Revisting the dream

When I look again to see how the story could develop, I imagine the narrator - now distinct from myself - discovering he is in the body of the taxidermy lion, which is now animated but shedding hair and bits of hide as it moves around awkwardly. To his horror, he finds that something else has taken the human body he left on the divan. It raises up and leave the premises. He is trying to track it but in this form people will flee from him or try to capture or kill him.

Dialogue with a dream character 

The Alteri

I ask the proprietess of the shapeshifting salon called Lion Inspiriting, Who are you?

She tells me, “We are Alteri”.

Does this mean alters, as in other personalities? 

Surely the lion isn’t native to these parts. She laughs at me for forgetting my history. The lions of the Hatti and of Ishtar, of Egypt and Africa. The cave lions of long ago. Her people are not captives of time or borders.

[Unedited entry form my joirnal for May 10, 2021]

Photo: House of Lions in Constanța.

On Dream Reentry: A Brief Introduction

Think of it this way: In your night dream, you went to a place, which may resemble a site in ordinary reality or may be somewhere quite extraordinary where the physics are utterly different. Either way, because you were in a certain place, you may be able to find your way back there, just as you could return to that café or bookshop or house party you once visited in your regular life. 

     Why would you want to do such a thing? There are plenty of excellent reasons. Maybe you’ve been running away from your dreams and leaving them broken and unfinished because there’s something in your dream world that scares you. If you can find the courage to go back inside one of those nightmares, wide awake and conscious, and face what frightened you, it’s more than likely you’ll find power and healing waiting for you on the other side of the terror. The fiercest dragons guard the richest treasures, said Rilke, with a poet’s clarity.
     You may want to go back inside a dream because you were having a great time that was interrupted by the alarm clock or the kids tickling your toes. You may want to go back in to have more of a conversation with someone who appeared to you in a dream - your departed grandmother, maybe, or a wise old man you suspect is a guide - or to read a letter you left unread. You may want to see what’s on the top floor of that mysterious house, or down in the root cellar. You may have a mystery to solve. You may want to clarify whether that plane crash could take place in the future, as either a literal and symbolic event, and what you need to do with that information (once you have it clear) in order to avoid or contain an unwanted development.
     You may simply want to know more about a dream. The best way to understand a dream is to recover more of the experience of the dream. Dreams are experiences, not texts, and a dream experience, fully remembered, is its own interpretation.          
      Through dream reentry, one of the core techniques of Active Dreaming, my original synthesis of dreamwork and shamanism, you can pursue any of these agendas, or simply enjoy the fun and adventure of using a personal dream image as a portal to the multiverse. The best time to attempt dream reentry may be when the dream is fresh and you are still closely connected to it - lazing in bed after waking, or slipping back into bed after a bathroom stop. But if the dream has energy for you, you may be able to go back inside it long afterwards.
      For ancient and indigenous shamans, the chief cause of many of our complaints - fatigue, low energy, excessive vulnerability to illness and allergies - is soul loss. The understanding is that in any human life, we may lose part of our vital energy and identity through pain or grief, shame or abuse or wrenching life choices. The cure is to try to find that missing piece and bring it back and put it where it belongs. 
       Our dreams offer us roads to soul recovery. You dream of being back in the old place. This may be your childhood home, or the place you shared with your ex. Such dreams may be telling you that you left a part of yourself at that place, at a certain time in your life. They may be issuing an invitation for you to reach back into that time and place and reclaim something that belongs to you — that beautiful younger person whose dreams were interrupted but can now be lived by you, if you are together.

You prepare to reenter a dream as follows:

1. Pick a dream that has some real energy for you. It doesn’t matter whether it is a dream from last night or from 20 years ago, as long as it has juice. It doesn’t matter whether it is a tiny fragment or a complex narrative. It makes no difference whether you choose to work with a night dream, a vision or waking image. What’s important is that the dream you choose to revisit should have some juice — whether it is exciting, seductive, or challenging.

2. Begin to relax. Follow the flow of your breathing. If you are holding tension in any part of your body, tense and relax the muscle groups associated with that part of your body until you feel yourself becoming loose and comfy in your body.

3. Focus on a specific scene from your dream. Let it become vivid on your mental screen. See if you can let all your senses become engaged, so you can touch it, smell it, hear it, taste it.

4. Clarify your intention. Come up with clear and simple answers to these two questions:

What do you want to know?

What do you intend to do, once you are back inside the dream? 

You may need one thing more: something to energize your adventure in conscious dreaming and to help you shut out distracting thoughts. Shamanic drumming — a steady beat on a simple frame drum, typically in the range of three to four beats per second (but sometimes faster) - is a marvelous tool for helping to shift consciousness and travel into the dreamspace. The steady beats serve to override mental clutter and focus energy and intention on the journey. The rhythms of the drum correspond to brain wave frequencies in the theta band, associated with the hypnagogic zone and its dreamlike imagery. If you want a physiological explanation of why shamanic drumming is such a powerful tool for shifting awareness, you could say that the “sonic driving” of the drum herds our brain waves into the theta band, opening us to its characteristic flow of imagery. I have made my own recording of shamanic drumming specifically for the dream reentry adventure. 

When you reenter a dream, you can invite one or more friends to go with you, to support you as you face your dream challenges on their own ground, and to gather information for your benefit. When two or more people are able to enter the same space in nonordinary reality and bring back mutually confirming information from that space, they have produced hard evidence of the objective reality of other realms. Through this process, we can bring through immensely valuable guidance and healing for each other. 

 

Text adapted from Active Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library

Illustration: "Stepping through the Magic Clock" by RM with Night Cafe

Adventures through the Dream Gates: Meeting Great Turtle

 

This is a story about what you may gain if you stay with a dream after waking and let a fuller story unfold. I rediscovered it while engaged in a favorite pastime: opening an old journal at random and seeing what an experience I recorded years or decades ago may say to me now. Sometimes old mysteries remain unsolved. I often notice recurring themes and situations that help me to become more aware of my attitudes and behavior, providing a necessary witness perspective on my life roads.        
      Sometimes a dream I did not understand at the time has meaning and application for me today because subsequent events have provided a context. I notice again and again that I dreamed events long before they played out – hard evidence, of the only form relevant here, of long-range precognition.  I discover that I missed warnings or advisories that could have smoothed my path and try to learn from my lapses how to get better at discerning and acting on oneiric clues to the possible future.
      Sometimes a dream I recorded looks like a dramatic production, maybe an instalment of a streaming tv series, staged by a personal film crew behind the curtain of the world. Very often - and this is most interesting for me - my dream reports seem to contain memories of events in another reality: a real life world that is running on a different time continuum or in an alternate universe near or far from the ordinary one.
     The report that follows appears to belong to the latter category.The action is played out in another reality, starting with an alternate version of a country where I used to live. When I stay with the dream, something irrupts from the mythic depth, a great power of Earth and of deeper knowing acknowledged by the First Peoples of the land where I now live. The gift of connection with Great Turtle is a blessing in the ordinary world today, as it was eight years ago. 

January 3, 2017

Dream and lucid dream reentry

I save a turtle, Great Turtle saves me

My youngest daughter is driving. We are in London. I tell her to head for Green Park so I can walk the dog there. I wave in the general direction. However, she drives us into a very narrow, twisting street in an area I don’t recognize. It’s very dangerous. Cars and trucks keep rushing at us from around blind corners, in the middle of the road, which has narrowed so only one vehicle can pass at a time. We come to a stop at what is virtually a hairpin bend, and just avoid a collision with a car that shoots out from behind it. My daughter is quite upset. I persuade her to stay in the car while I walk the dog.
    The dog and I are now in a shopping area. Time has changed. It seems that shops in a colonnade at my left hand are just opening. We walk behind two short squat women. One turns into a shop; she may be going to open it. They bid each other goodbye and the second lady walks on with a dog with silky hair that hangs to the ground.
    My dog and I pass them. Unusually, he takes no interest in the long-haired dog. He is after something up ahead. I glimpse it under a lamppost. It looks like a pigeon that has gotten hold of a paper plate. My dog rushes at it, with me hurrying behind. It jumps up onto my left shoulder. I am surprised to see that it is a little turtle. The “paper plate” is its shell.
     I experiment with removing the turtle. It clings to me with determination. Since I have not figured out what to do with it – beyond keeping it away from my dog – this is okay.

My body is stirring in the bed. Grey light is spilling through the bedroom curtains. I am fully lucid. I am in London and in bed in upstate New York. I could leave the dream now, but I want to stay in it. I want to take care of the little turtle that is still clutching my shoulder. My sensations in my dream body are more acute than those of the dormant bdy in bed. 
    I walk with a protective hand over the turtle while I keep my dog on a short leash with my other hand. I look for a safe place to set down the turtle. There is a large garden on the next corner. Behind an ornamental iron fence, I see steps leading down to a pond. There is a sculpture garden and there are statues of animals – including a turtle – there. This seems like a good place to release my little refugee.
    I open the gate and walk down the steps. I tie the dog up while I set down the turtle near the pond. It seems fine now.
    But there is a tremendous stir in the waters. They fountain upwards. With a great roar an immense being rises from the water. Its great head looms over me. I look up at the leathery skin, the lures of the tongue, the ancient, heavy-lidded eyes. I know in this moment I am looking at Great Turtle, A’nonwara, the Teacher of the Deep. In its gaze, I remember the story of the Real People: how the Light Twin descended to the deep realm of Great Turtle, to learn how to wage the eternal battle with the Dark Twin.   
    Great Turtle wants me to descend to his realm. I let myself drop. I am on my back in the water, falling, falling. I have no problem breathing. I go through utter dark to a place of light. There is a world of light own here, in the depths of water. Here Turtle adjusts its form and becomes humanoid (nothing like the Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles, however). Knowledge streams into me, of how life came from another world to the world that was danced into being on Turtle's back.
    Tosa sasa nikon'hren. "Do not let your mind fall." Do not forget the higher world, Earhth-in-the -Sky, that contains the origin and purpose of life on Earth. When humans let their minds fall, they bring down the Dark Times. 

I returned from this adventure feeling blessed.

I ran a reality check on the contents of my dream. I know Green Park and often walked there when I lived in London. I am certain I will never walk my little dog there. I have been in London with my daughter and we could make a future trip but it is most unlikely she would be driving. I don't think the dream anticipates a literal future situation, but rather an alternate reality which becoems the stage for a deeper - indeed a mythic - drama. 
    I live on what Native Americans call Turtle Island. I have great respect for the snapping turtle (the kind in the dream) and its cousin the sea turtle. They can’t retreat into their shells. Their underbellies are not armored apart from a tiny shield piece called a plastron. I have studied the cosmology of the Iroquois (the Onkwehonwe, or “Real People”) in which Great Turtle not only offers its back as a home for Sky Woman but becomes a form of the Great Teacher of the Deep. I have swum with sea turtles. 

I immediately made a drawing of Great Turtle. His fierce appearance reflects my original nervousness as this huge creature exploded from the water. His intentions, however, were wholly benign.

When I went back through my journal, tracking all my turlte sightings in both worlds over several decades, I rediscovered a poem I wrote to honor Great Turtle in 2012, five years before our unexpected encounter in Green Park:

A'nonwara (Turtle Dreaming) 

I am the turtle that does not hide.
I wear the armor of a knight, not a skulker.
My vulnerable belly says, Get me if you can;
I stick my neck out.

You call me slow, but on water
I am faster than you, and fast on land.
Deep down, I am the teacher you need
to show you how to fight the Dark One.

I am the broad back you live on.
Ignore me for too long,
go on harming my other children
and I will shake you off my back.

Journal drawing: "Great Turtle Rises" by Robert Moss

The Romance of Dreaming

 

On Valentine Day, romance your dreams. The romance of dreaming is played out beyond your present life and your present world. Through dreaming, as the Irish poet-painter AE (George Russell) promised, "Your own will find you". Someone you loved and lost five thousand years ago may call you to remember that romance, and look for its fulfillment in new bodies that have ancient eyes.

    Yes, I am a romantic about these things. But I am also a practical romantic. I know that we can dream the way to manifest the kind of love that transcends time, and also that dreaming will show us how to do what we love and let the world support us. However, this requires us to develop the practice of active dreaming, which involves not only growing our dream recall and keeping our journals, but learning to clarify the content of dreams and above all taking action to bring energy and guidance from the dream worlds into the physical world.
    One of my favorite teaching stories about this comes from India. It is sometimes called "The Sketcher of Pictures". It goes like this:

 

The princess (and all women may be princesses, or queens) is dreaming. She dreams of the perfect lover, who satisfies her in every way. The dream streams like silk. It smells like jasmine and honeysuckle.
   She opens her eyes and howls with pain and loss, because although her surroundings are opulent she knows no one like the man of her dreams.
   Her father sees that she is very sad and asks what is wrong. When she tells him it has something to do with a dream, the king summons his wise men to listen to the dream and tell her what it means. They gather in a council chamber, ready to give their interpretations.
    As the princess recounts her dream, a wild man rushes into the room, his hair a white storm about his shoulders. He is a rishi who lives in the woods and cares nothing for the rules of the court. He grabs a piece of paper, makes a quick sketch, and hands it to the girl.
    When she looks at the picture, the princess is stunned. The rishi has captured the very essence of her dream lover.
     Abandoning the conclave of dream interpreters, she runs after the wold man from the woods. When she catches up to him, she begs him to tell her the identity or her dream lover. "Who is he? Where can I find him?" Clearly the rishi knows the man of her dreams.
     Good teachers don't give you everything all at once. The rishi says only, "The map is in your dream." Then he takes off into the woods.
     The princess thinks about it. What does it mean, that a dream contains a map? When she thinks about it some more, she realizes that she was not with her lover among the clouds. She was in a bed in a room in a house in a city in a certain landscape. Though she recognizes none of these places, she has vivid memories of them and feels she would know them again.
     So she sets out on the quest. In an Indian village, they may take hours to tell this part. There will be tigers, of course, and bandits, and deserts and snakes and all manner of perils. There will probably be elephants.
     But let's catch up with the princess at the moment when her quest is almost over, because there on the horizon, after long travels and many ordeals, she sees the city from her dreams. And now she is rushing through those streets the house from her dream, and up the stairs to the bedroom from her dream, where she finds her lover rising from his dream of her.

 

It sounds like a fairy story, but there are no fairies in it, or any of the gods, demons and others from the rich forests of Hindu mythology. There are only humans, and what humans can do when they learn to make maps from their dreams and have the will and stamina to follow their maps.
    Through the perfume of romance, we receive a lesson in practical romanticism. Do the work in dreamwork. Recognize that dreams require action. Learn - why has it taken you so long? - that a dream is a place. Because you have been there, you can go there again. This can bring you, in this physical world, to place of your dream lover. More often, it will bring you to places in a more spacious universe where you can rejoin the beloved company of your soul, those who love you across time and space, even when you make each other crazy.
   Give a hug to someone you love on Valentine Day. Bring flowers or chocolates if you must. But don't let the day pass without sharing dreams.

Illustration: "The Sketcher of Pictures" by Robert Moss

 

Real and Really Real

 

There is a yawning gap in understanding between mainstream Western psychology and neuroscience and the oldest and continuing indigenous understanding of what goes on in dreams. It is understood in every indigenous tradition I have heard about - and no doubt by all our ancestors if we go back far enough - that the dream world is a real world. Compare the view of the yogis, and you look in a mirror: for those who practice the yoga of illusory forms, waking life and dream life are equally illusory; for dreaming cultures, they are both real. 

Some dreaming cultures say more. The Seneca Iroquois say that the dream world is the real world. An Aboriginal people of the Western Desert say that the dream world is “really real”.

If you know that the dream world is a real-life world, as opposed to a rummage sale in the basement of the personal subconscious or a chemical wash in the brain, then you know that what happens in dream time does not stay in dream time. There are consequences. You bear responsibility for what you do and do not do. You are in a field of interaction with other folks, some alive in both worlds, some dead in one. You encounter beings other- than-human. 

You may walk with gods of the upper air, you may fly as a swan, you may prune rose bushes in the garden of the home you will inhabit in your next life. You may eat a peach in an orchard of tigers, you may find the girl with apple blossom in her hair,  you may study with a master who died on Earth millennia ago or has yet to be seen down there.

Illustration: Fig Tree on Magic Island. RM with NightCafe

Wyrd and weirder

 

Read the Eddas (literally the “great-grandmothers”) and the Icelandic sagas with care, and you will find not only Viking battle stories, but some profound insights into the human condition and the interconnectedness of things.

The key word here is Wyrd, from which “weird” derives. Wyrd is often translated as “fate” or “destiny” but it is related to weohrtan, which means “to become”. Wyrd is best understood as a web of connection, joining everything that happens in this world to movements in other worlds. 

Events that may appear to be separate in time or space are connected by threads that are fine, supple and strong. Any movement in any part of the web may be felt anywhere else. Omens point to patterns, they are not just about something that is going to happen in the future. If you know the ways of Wyrd, you use them to read the patterns of connection. If you are a master of these things, you may be able to pull on the threads to change the patterns.

Wyrd is beyond the gods. The web precedes gods and men and lives after them. We call it a pattern, but like the Tao, as it plays through the Book of Changes, it is in constant motion. A lively guide to these matters is Brian Bates’ “documentary novel” The Way of Wyrd, where an Anglo-Saxon sorcerer instructs that “Wyrd itself is constant change, yet because it is created at every moment it is unchanging, like the still center of a whirlpool. All we can see are the ripples dancing on top of the water.” [1] Yet by studying the ripples you can detect what is moving at the bottom of the water, or far away across its expanse. 

Because we are part of Wyrd, we can never see the whole. So we look for ways to see enough to help us navigate. Carving and casting runes is a way. So are dreams, and those special moments when you awaken to the workings of the deeper pattern. “Man is touched by wyrd when he becomes involved in matters whose nature and origins extend beyond existence on earth,” Germanic scholar Paul Bauschatz explains. “There are times…when apparently ordinary activities acquire special significance, and it seems likely that at these times daily life is touched and colored with elements beyond our limited perceptions.” [2] There is room to re-weave the threads of Wyrd. 

Jenny Blain, who has participated in the revival of ancient Norse seiðr, or shamanic rituals, observes that “this concept of Wyrd is one that is being developed within the community. Though often translated as 'fate' and sometimes equated to 'karma', it has a more dynamic sense. People are active agents in the creation of their own personal wyrd, or ørlög. Their deeds and vows, strands of ørlög, become part of the fabric of Wyrd.” Those who work the seiðr  rituals feel they are “'reading' Wyrd, seeing along the threads of the fabric to possible outcomes. Others within the community consider that seiðr in the past involved active interception of the fabric, 'tugging' at the threads,"[3] 

In English, the word “weird” derives from Wyrd. It declined from common usage in England until Shakespeare revived it, with a sinister twist, with the Weird Sisters in Macbeth. It retained some of its original meaning a little longer in Scotland, where if you called someone “weirdless” you were saying that he was unlucky. 

In more recent times, to call something “weird” is to say that it is strange, uncanny, hard to explain and maybe spooky. A “weirdo” is someone who is very strange. Yet thanks to a campaign that started in Austin, Texas, “weird” has been making a comeback. Austin is the first North American city to sprout a poster campaign to keep the city weird. Keep Austin Weird. Other cities followed suit.

One of my favorite books on Northern European traditions is The Well of Remembrance by Ralph Metzner, who embarked on a quest to reclaim the mythic wisdom of his ancestors from the Nazi curse. He was drawn to Odin, not as a war god but as the poet-shaman wandering between the worlds, facilitating direct and personal revelation. In the course of his quest, he writes, “Often I felt as though I was seized, or inspired. I would think of Odin and get insights or answers to my questions, including questions about the meanings of certain myths. Or I would suddenly find pertinent myths that I had not known before. Strange though it may sound, I would have to say that much of what I am relating in this book has been directly given to me by Odin.” [4]    

I have had similar experiences since Tolkien told me in a dream, many years ago, “You must study Scandinavian mythology.” I was at first reluctant to follow that advice, partly because of the long shadow of the Nazi attempt to hijack the gods and symbols of the North.  As I began to walk this ancestral path (I have Scandinavian blood on both sides of my family) in my reading and travel and in my dreams, I was rewarded by special moments of encounter and discovery that left me in no doubt that forces beyond the veil of the world were in play. During a trip to Europe, I had a personal vision of Yggdrasil, the World Tree, from which I wrote a poem.

Since then I have had spontaneous encounters, usually in the fertile space between sleep and awake, with Odin and Freiyja, with Idunn and Loki, and with a powerful völva, or seeress, of the old ways.

The ancestors are calling, calling. And they can use the worldwide web as well as the web of the worlds. It is amusing to note that “wired” is an anagram for “weird”. A woman named Kim shared the following story. “Sprit likes the wires. The Web, in particular. The deities who work fate, don’t they spin and snip threads? My Mom's picture popped up on a dating app my ex-husband is on. He sent a screen shot. I'd just asked my Mom that morning for a sign that she was there. He had been on that app over a year, and he showed me how faces appeared as you scrolled through and how you could indicate interest or not. My Mom was never on a dating site, and certainly wouldn't be suitable to his selected age range. I think that via the Web, we can have communication with the Other Side.”

 

References

 1. Brian Bates The Way of Wyrd: Tales of an Anglo-Saxon Sorcerer (London: Century, 1987) 75

2. Paul C. Bauschatz, The Well and the Tree: World and Time in Early Germanic Culture (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982), 28

3.   3. Jenny Blain, Nine Worlds of Seid-Magic: Ecstasy and Neo-Shamanism in Northern European Paganism (London: Routledge, 2002), 15

      4. Ralph Metzner, The Well of Remembrance: Rediscovering the Earth Wisdom Myths of Northern Europe (Boston: Shambhala, 1994) 10

 

Text adapted from Sidewalk Oracles: Playing withSigns, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Oh Baby! Don't You Love to Fly in Your Dreams?

Nothing beats the sensation of flying on your own in dreams. Frequent fliers have their preferred styles. Some fly with their arms out in front of them, Superman style. Some swim through the air, some pedal. Some sprout wings, or borrow the wings of a bird, or become a bird. Some perform aerial acrobatics. Some are content to drift and gaze and ride a thermal.

It's fun to whizz around the multiverse as a point of light or a disembodied thought form, but I relish the carnal, corporeal quality of many of my flying dreams. In the big OBABE (out-of-the-body-into-another-body) experience [*] that brought me to an ancient indigenous arendiwanen ("woman of power") I knew the joy of catching the right wind and the mild discomfort of brushing the dried-up needles of an old blue spruce as I flew on the wings of a red-tailed hawk tailored to my size.

If I am not getting around in the air on my own, the next best thing is to catch a ride in a seaplane. This sets the mood for Indiana Jones type adventures, though I was flying in seaplanes in my dreams long before those movies were dreamed up. Sometimes I have a flight companion: a wise professor who used to look old but now appears to be younger than me. He is excellent company and isn't scared to go where medieval cartographers cautioned. "Here Be Dragons".

This matter of dream flight raises so many interesting questions. Try any of these as conversation starters. Do you fly in your dreams? Do you enjoy it? What is your preferred style? What is your takeoff procedure? Are you aware you are traveling outside your physical body? What kind of a body are you in now?

[*] Pronounced "Oh Baby". Yes, I made this up.

Trainer Bikes for Dream Fliers

There are flight schools for oneironauts. You can sign up for some that I lead on this side of consensus reality, but of course you won't stay there for long. You must dream your way to a real school of this kind. I train dream pilots and lead flight missions, on the far side of consensus reality, several nights a week, and what happens in the dream world sometimes stays there.
     I enjoy comparing what goes on in other flight schools. Every shamanic lineage and Mystery order has created one. Some have been operating for many centuries.

During one of my dream rambles, I discovered a flight school with period French ambience and interesting training equipment. Here is my journal report.

I am walking on the beach. The colors are the wonderfully vivid hues of poster paints. The sea is French blue, with fluffy little whitecaps. The sand is oriole-yellow. There is a distinctly French Impressionist quality to the whole scene, so much so that I feel that if I turn around quickly, I might catch a glimpse of the artist who has just painted it - and maybe the scene will end at the edge of his canvas. Yet the scene is entirely alive.
    I walk with a male companion, studying the scene. He is wearing a frock coat and a top hat, has a neatly trimmed black beard, and is swinging a walking stick. I notice that everyone on the beach, like my companion, is dressed in the clothes of another era. The women wear full bathing costumes, and the men wear sleeveless tops with their bathing trunks. There is something more remarkable. Nearly everyone has a cycle. More sedate couples ride bicycles - including at least one tandem bike, built of two - along the esplanade. Others are riding on the sand, or through the shallows of the water. More daring cyclists are riding in mid-air, ten feet off the ground.
    While many of the bicycles are intact, some are just the vestiges. One lady sits on a padded seat, gripping handlebars and pedaling away, but below her the bike has vanished - no frame and no wheels, A beaming boy is riding high into the air, riding a bike that is invisible except for the handlebars. A dashing young man with hair like a raven's wing and an artist's silk scarf billowing from his neck is showing off, doing aerial acrobatics, on a bike that has completely vanished, while he has his fists clenched as if gripping the handlebars and his legs are cycling away.
      My companion explains to me that this is a school for dream fliers. "All the bicycles you see are training bikes. As dreamers become conscious that they are dreaming and grow their understanding of what is possible here, the machines become less and less necessary. The bicycles fade and finally disappear." I follow his upward glance and see some high-flyers among cotton-wool clouds who move through the air like swimmers, or rocket-men. [September 22, 2008]

When I turned up this report many years later, I decided to return to the scene of the flight school with trainer bikes and see what is going on now. I have developed a method for revisiting a dream whose simple name is dream reentry. You can do this right after you awaken from a dream, which may be the best time, because the scene is fresh and so are your feelings around it. You can also do it years or decades later if the dream still has real energy for you. I lay on my back, pulled the memory of the school on the beach up on my mental screen, and willed myself back inside. My first strong impressions were kinesthetic. I foud myself gripping the handles of a bike. I did not need the handlebar to fly. However, I thought it would be fun to experience what others did with a prop like this. As I tightened my grip, I was off - whizzing far from the scene of the flight instructor and his cadets on the beach. I was speeding ten or twenty feet above golden fields of grain, wind in my hair. I was delighted to see I now had a companion, a black Shepherd-Labrador mutt pacing me on the farm road below, reveling in his run. I abandoned any thoughts of a further agenda, giving myself to the sheer pleasure of flight in the company of a dear friend. [December 29, 2021]

I wonder whether the Marquis of Dreams, Léon d'Hervey de Saint-Denys, found the flight school on the beach. It feels like they belong to the same period and the same culture. The marquis was the first to use the term "lucid dream" (rêve lucide) in his book Les rêves et les moyens de les diriger: observations pratiques, first published anonymously in 1867. His "practical obseravtions" did not include guidance on dream flight or astral travel. Howver,his book includes a memorable page from his journal in which he dreams that he leaves his body as if dead. He finds himself with a “savage" tribe, engaged in their battles.  He decides to go the Moon, and is there quick as thought. He describes a cratered landscape that is quite real to him. He decides to go back to earth. As he descends into his chamber, he sees his body lying in the bed before he gets back inside it.

The marquis was a sinophile and in his essays on Chinese, literature and his selection of Chinese poetry and fiction for translation, his imagination must surely have been fired up by the frequent description of dreams as excursions by the aerial hun soul and "roaming with immortals". In Poésies de l'époque des Thang he writes that "sometimes it is the spirit of a sleeping man who takes advantage of the body's sleep to travel alone through space, crossing distances with the speed of thought."

Journal drawings by Robert Moss

Oracles Full of Omphê

 

There's oomph and then there's omphê. In ancient Greek, omphê [ὀμφή] is the divine voice. It may speak through an inspired priestess, or through a special tree, or the cry of birds, or a lightning storm. Before you can hear it, you may feel your world shaking.

Philostratus wrote of Dodona, the place of the great oak oracle of Zeus and Dione, "this place is full of omphê."  It is un univers sonore, Stella Georgoudi takes up the chorus. [1]

The divine voice is different from the human voice though it may use human vocal chords. Homer's gods might seem to feel and behave like humans, especially in their domestic dramas, but they have powers that mortals cannot understand: amazing speed and strength; an endless capacity to shapeshift or disguise themselves; invisibility. Then there is the voice thing. The voice of a god can be thunder or leaping fire or the roar of ocean or a graveyard hiss that stills the breath. "Whereas gods have the power to imitate the voices of mortals, no mortal without divine assistance can speak with the voice of a god: a mortal voice (Homer uses the term audê) is different from omphê or ossa, a divine voice. Gods not only have different and remarkable powers of voice production, they also have (or once had) their own language." [2]

Omphê is the voice of the Pythia when she speaks for Apollo. In the Argonautica it is also the voice of a talkative crow who speaks to the seer Mopsos [Apollonius of Rhodes III 927-939]. Even at Delphi, famous for prophecies delievred in poetic speech, omphê could be heard in the voices of birds, especially crows and herons and wrens. [Plutarch, Pythia].

In the Odyssey,the hero visits Dodona to ask the oak whether he should go home or remain in hiding. Zeus speaks to him from the oak. It is not specified whether the divine voice was heard through the rustling of leaves or the creaking of bark or the birds among the branches. One way or another, the will of Zeus was audible from the oak.

In Ovid, an oak at Aegina sprung from an acorn from Dodona speaks when it starts to tremble and its branches shake without wind. [Metamorphoses VII 629-630]

Athena, the daughter of Zeus who sprang fully-armed from his head, carved an oak bough from Dodona into the prow of the Argo, endowing Jason’s ship with prophetic power in the perilous voyage for the Golden Fleece.

Sophocles calls the oracle oak poluglossos: polyglot, many-tongued, many-voiced. To hear it can be like hearing a crowd. The voices may rise and swirl in any language, and of course in the language of the birds. Wasn't the oracle founded by three black doves who flew here from Egypt?

The Hesiodic Catalogues speak of three doves who lived in the oak tree. They may correspond to three female shaman-seers known as the Black Doves. The far-seers at Dodona prophesied in a shamanic ecstasy, and “afterwards they do not know anything about what they have said.” [3] Herodotus called them the Black Doves, Peleia Mêlaina. [Herodotus II.55]

The oracle at Dodona was older than the Olympians, always dedicated to the Goddess as well as the God. In its heyday, it was full of noises at the trembling edge of omphê. There were the many voices of the variable winds in the leaves, the rush or babble of nearby streams, the chanting of barefoot priests sworn to live close to Earth Mother, the prophetic speech of the black doves advising clients. In later times there was also the  clash and clang of bronze cauldrons suspended from the trees. They sounded like gongs when the winds pushed them together. 

References

1. Stella Georgoudi, “Des sons, des signes et des paroles : la divination à l’oeuvre dans l’oracle de Dodone”in Stella Georgoudi et al (eds) La raison des signes. (Leiden: Brill, 2012). P.71

2. Elizabeth Minchin, "The words of gods: Divine discourse in Homer's Iliad" in Sacred Words: Orality, Literacy and Religion (Leiden: Brill, 2011)  pp.17-35.

3. Walter Burkert, Greek Religion. trans. John Raffan. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1985) p.114

Photo: Remains of the oracle of Zeus and Dione at Dodona in Epirus

 

If you can't remember your dreams

 "I can't remember my dreams."

1. Ask your cat to share a dream.

2. Be kind to wisps. You may have a tiny something from a dream if you don't close the door right away.

3. Write in your journal every day, whether or not you have a dream to report.

4. Wake up to the fact that you don't need to go to sleep in order to dream. The world around you will speak to you in the manner of dreams- through signs, symbols and synchronicity - if you pay attention.

5. Try to assure the beautiful bright dreamer in you that you are safe and you are fun. She may have been in hiding for a long time.

6. Find friends with whom you can share dreams and personal stories in a fast, fun way that leads to action to embody creative and healing energy from another world in ordinary life. Make dreamwork socially rewarding, and you have a strong incentive to bring a new story to the table every day.

7. .Learn the Lightning Dreamwork process. Accept no substitutes!

Yeats on the Daimon and the Mingling of Minds

 

When we are passionately engaged in a creative venture - love, art or something else that is really worthwhile - we draw support from other minds and other beings, seen and unseen. According to the direction of our will and desire, and the depth of our work, those minds may include masters from other times and other beings. - We draw greater support the greater the challenges involved in our venture. Great spirits love great challenges.

Whether we are aware of it or not, all our life choices are witnessed by the larger self that Yeats called the daimon. The daimon lends or withholds its immense energy from our lives according to whether we choose the big agenda or the little one. The daimon is bored by our everyday vacillations and compromises and detests us when we choose against the grand passion and the Life Work, the soul's purpose. The daimon loves us best when we choose to attempt “the hardest thing among those not impossible.”

There is a passage in Yeats’s essay Per Amica Silentia Lunae (“The Friendly Silence of the Moon”) that may explain how we can develop a co-creative relationships with minds operating in other times or other dimensions. It should be understood that when Yeats refers (in the first line) to "fellow-scholars" he is not thinking about people of his own time, but minds that are working and reaching out from beyond time and space: 

I had fellow-scholars, and now it was I and now they who made some discovery. Before the mind’s eye, whether in sleep or waking, came images that one was to discover presently in some book one had never read, and after looking in vain for explanation to the current theory of forgotten personal memory, I came to believe in a Great Memory passing on from generation to generation. But that was not enough, for these images showed intention and choice. They had a relation to what one knew and yet were an extension of one’s knowledge. If no mind was there, why should I suddenly come upon salt and antimony, upon the liquefaction of gold, as they were understood by the alchemists, or upon some detail of cabbalistic symbolism verified at last by a learned scholar from his never-published manuscripts, and who can have put it together so ingeniously?...The thought was again and again before me that this study had created a contact or mingling with minds who had followed a like study in some other age, and that these minds still saw and thought and chose. 

– W.B.Yeats, Mythologies (New York: Macmillan, 1959) pp. 345-6.

 

 Drawing: "Yeats in the Magic Cottage" by Robert Moss. From a vision.

May Brigid's blessings be with you

Blessings to you on the day of the High One, the Exalted One. That is the meaning of Brig, from which the name Brigid (also Brigit, Brighid, Brigantia of England and Brigindo of eastern Gaul) derives. The church made the goddess a saint, one of the most beloved saints of Ireland, with various biographies, the best of which is recollected in Kildare, where the flame of Brigid burned constantly until Henry VIII, and burns again today. She is a power of the land, and of the deeper world, that the church and the people can agree on. In Ireland and in Scotland, you feel her presence in stones and trees, in high places and in deep wells.

In the stories told at Kildare, the woman Brigid is born at sunrise, as her mother stands straddling a threshold, one foot out and one foot in. When Brigid’s head comes out, the sun’s rays crown her with flame. We can see why she is the patron of people who open doors between the worlds – of shamans, seers and poets – and of all who work with fire, in the peat, in the forge, in the cauldron of imbas, the fire of inspiration.

Marija Gimbutas wrote of her (in The Living Goddesses): “Brigid is an Old European goddess consigned to the guise of a Christian saint. Remove the guise and you will see the mistress of nature, an incarnation of cosmic life-giving energy, the owner of life water in wells and springs, the bestower of human, animal and plant life.” She is “Mary of the Gael”, and she is the Triple Goddess and Robert Graves’ Three-fold Muse. She is patron of poetry, healing and smithcraft. In Scotland she is Bride, and the White Swan and the Bride of the White Hills. In the Hebrides she is the protector of childbirth.

Lady Augusta Gregory, Yeats’s friend, described Brigid in Gods and Fighting Men as “a woman of poetry, and poets worshiped her, for her sway was very great and very noble. And she was a woman of healing along with that, and a woman of smith’s work, and it was she first made the whistle for calling one to another through the night.” We are now entering the prime time of this High One, when nature awakens around February 1.

She may appear as a snake from beneath the earth, even in Ireland, the country without snakes:

This is the day of Bride the Queen will come from the mound

This is the time of Brigid’s feast of Imbolc which coincides with the lactation of the ewes and the first signs of spring. You know the lambs are coming soon. You see snowdrops pressing up from the hard earth, perhaps through its white mantle. You offer the gifts of the goddess to the goddess: you pour milk on the ground, you bake and leave out special cakes. To she who spins and weaves life itself, you offer woven fabrics or offer a cloth – a handkerchief, a scarf, a pillowcase – to be blessed as it rests on the earth overnight. To this bringer of fire, you light a candle and offer your heart’s flame.

In the old country, in the old way, young girls carry her images – straw dolls or brideogs – in procession from house to house, and the goddess is welcomed and decked with finery. The dolls are laid on in “bride beds”, with a staff or wand of power resting beside them. At Imbolc, as on other days, you may raise the High One’s energy with poetic speech. Best to do this by a stream or a spring, or (if you know one) a sacred well. She does have a fine love of poets and those who bring fresh words into the world.

There is a legend that, in one of her womanly forms, Brigid married the great poet Senchan Torpeist,  foremost among the learned fili (bards) of Ireland. It was this same Senchan, it is said, who recovered the great poem known as the Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley) when it was feared lost forever, by raising the shade of the druid poet Fergus to recite all of the verses.

Among the bevy of Celtic blessings in the great repository know as the Carmina Gadelica, collected by Alexander Carmichael in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland around 1900, some of the sweetest call on Brigid. In “Womanhood of Brigit” (#263 in the Carmina Gadelica)

Brigit of the mantles
Brigit of the peat-heap
Brigit of the twining hair
Brigit of the augury.
Brigit of the white feet
Brigit of calmness
Brigit of the white hands
Brigit of the kine.

Many kinds of protection are then asked of Brigid – safety from death or injury or mishap in many forms. Next comes a verse that makes it plain that Brigid is regarded, among all else, as a guardian of sleep and dreams:

Nightmare shall not lie on me
Black-sleep shall not lie on me
Spell-sleep shall not lie on me
Luaths-luis shall not lie on me.

I need someone more learned in Scots Gaelic than myself to translate Luaths-luis. Its literal meaning seems to be something like “fast-moving lice” for which our modern phrase might be “creepy-crawlies.” In the “Blessing of Brigit” (numbered #264 in the Carmina Gadelica) we have words that might please the Lady on her feast day, or any day:

I am under the shielding
Of good Brigit each day;
I am under the shielding
Of good Brigit each night.
Brigit is my comrade woman,
Brigit is my maker of song,
Brigit is my helping woman
My choicest of women, my guide

Brigid’s Day is also a fine time for courting, and a time to dream, and seek guidance from dreams.

Brigid's Flame

I dreamed this poem at Imbolc in 2020

May the radiance of her blue mantle
surround you and protect you
May you burn with her fires:
fire of seership,
fire of craft,
fire of inspiration,
fire of healing,
fire of transformation
fire of heart.
May you always stand ready
to wrest the killing irons
from evildoers and oppressors
and to take up the Sword of Light
in defense of the weak and the just
May you always be a lover of poets
and commit poetry every day.