Spirits Are Real: Vic Turner Betwixt and Between

I dreamed of attending a lecture by Victor Turner, a great cultural anthropologist who became famous for his studies of liminality, the "betwixt and between" state in the life of an individual or a culture when established norms are left behind and profound transformation may follow, with the challenge of reintegration looming beyond that. Vic has been dead in the world for many years but I found him to be very much alive in a betwixt and between state somewhere else.  

I loved the simplicity with which he addressed his audience. He told us, "I dedicated my life to explaining different peoples to each other." In my dream Vic Turner knows he's dead, in the sense that he's not on earth, in the Africa he loved, or in America, or Sri Lanka, or Manchester. He has had plenty of time to reflect on that life, though time works differently here.

I read in his wife Edie's memoir, Heart of Lightness (Berghahn Books, 2005) that he died relatively young in 1983. She describes the depth of their engagement with the Ndembu people of northern Zimbabwe. She gives a whizbang portrait of his personality: Vic was "a flat-out character; in a sense, he was out of control, his consciousness had escaped from him, it was flying ahead of him, like the arutam-souls of Jivaro Indians flying out ahead of their bodies over the battlefield."

Naturally he broke with the dialectcal materialism of his early Marxism and then with the British anthro penchant for reducing spirits to by-products of social structures. I did not have the pleasure of meeting Vic Turner before he passed on. I am glad to see that in his Bardo of Betwixt and Between, this passionate Scots scholar of liminality is still thinking about what his discipline needs to be - an anthropology of experience that requires the observer to become a participant and practitioner of the ways of another culture.

For more than two decades, his widow Edie upheld that cause like the milk tree the Ndembu call their flag, declaiming - after she watched a dramatic shamanic extraction - that "spirits are real".

In her memoir, Edie recalls how the Manchester set of Africanists agreed to uphold what later became for Star Trek the Prime Directive: leave the cultures you visit untouched. 

The Blob and Tooth Extraction

She went back to Kajima in Ndembu country a couple of years after Vic’s death. For many hours, she helped gather the tree parts and supplies required for an extraction healing. When the healer completed her operation, Edie saw a huge grey blob emerge from the patient’s back. Later she was shown a bloodied molar. She was told that the patient had been possessed by a spirit of the dead that was now trapped in the tooth. . 

The Ndembu call this type of operation a Tooth extraction and a bloody tooth is usually produced as evidence of success. The tooth is stuffed in the hole of a piece of antelope meat shaped like a donut and confined in a jar with cassava meal and blood. Edie did not doubt the blob was real (though she hints that the tooth may be just for show) and this this was true shamanic extraction. She made this the theme of a celebrated article affirming that spirits are real. * Truly, an anthropologist who stepped out from under the mosquito net. 

* E.B. Turner, "The Reality of Spirits: A Tabooed or Permitted Field of Study?" first published in Anthropology of Consciousness March 1993.

Illustration: "Under the Milk Tree" RM + AI

 

When Her Husband Saw His Own Soul

 

After the Danish explorer Knud Rasmussen had lived for six months with the Netsilik Inuit, some of his hosts opened up about their dreams, their shamans and their sacred stories. The stories were only told to the right person at the right time, because, Rasmussen noted, “all that is described in them did really happen once, when everything in the world was different to what it is now. Thus these tales are both their real history and the source of all their religious ideas.” [1]
      Over long nights by the fire in an ice hut or a tent, the women were especially loquacious and some were formidable. Nalungiaq, a Netsilik woman, was married to her third husband, who had killed her second husband, who had killed her first husband, all from the desire to possess her. She described a time when there was no time, when the world was dark and there was no difference between humans and animals; they could take each other’s forms.
      She spoke of how the dead are alive in dreams. “We believe that dead people whom we see so vividly in dreams really are alive. In that way dreams have taught us that people live on after death. For very often our dear departed come to us while we sleep, and we see that they live, and that they are the same as when they lived together with us on earth.” [2]
      Rasmussen heard many stories of how souls wander beyond the body, and sometimes get lost or stolen, which is when the services of a shaman, an angakok. may be required.
      Manelaq, the wife of Qaorssuaq, told how her husband once saw his own soul, wandering apart from his body, and where this led. Qaorssuaq had lain ill for a long time, and no one could understand what was wrong with him. Then one day, he saw "his own living self" a little way away.
      "No one else could see him. Seeing himself suddenly outside his own body he began to shiver all over. What he saw was his own soul, and it was owing to his illness that it had left his body. All trembling he stretched out his arms towards his soul and cried: 'Come nearer, come nearer. Come to me, come back to me!'
       " I could not understand what was happening to him and had to hold him by the hood when he kept on trembling. At the very moment I took hold of him the vision disappeared, but the soul did not return to his body. It had fled just at the moment it was perhaps on its way back to his body, for I was unclean and just in those days had my bleedings, and therefore the soul fled from me."
       Help came in the form of a couple who were both shamans. "When they heard what had happened, they insisted that 1 should go into a corner of the -tent, right over behind the fireplace; there I had to lie with my head hidden in a heap of caribou bones. While I remained concealed there, the two shamans conjured and summoned their helping spirits. They held a great seance in order to call the soul back to Qaorssuaq's body. And it was not long before he again saw his soul.
       "The two shamans, to whom nothing was impossible, could see it too. They uttered magic words and spoke with their helping spirits' own tongue until the soul came quite close to Qaorssuaq. Then they suddenly sprang to him and began to beat him here and there on his body, the consequence being that the soul was frightened and became so scared that it slipped into Qaorssuaq's body once more.
       "At the very same moment he was well again and I could hear him shouting and singing with joy. Only then did I venture to rise from the heap of animal bones where I had hidden my head till then, and we all sang with happiness. In that way Qaorssuaq got his soul back again." [3]
      It may seem odd that the vagrant soul was induced to get back in the body rather than go further away when the beating began, but it seems the shamans knew what they were doing. The magic words were certainly an important part of their operation. Inuit shamans have special language to do special things. Rasmussen later recounts a story of how magic words were used by an angakok to create a kind of Inuit golem , turning a neap of snow into a black bear. [4] Calling up helping spirits is central to Inuit shamanic practice, as in other traditions. An Inuit name for a spirit helper means "one that exists to be questioned" and the variety of entities that may play this role can be startling. Rasmussen mentions one shaman whose helping spirits included the moon, a sea scorpion, and one of his father’s living dogs. [5] 
     Inuit shamans were unwilling to share much of their training and practice with an outsider, and some told Rasmussen that the great shamans were no more; their tradition was in deep decay. Nonetheless, he was able to report how Inuit shamans are often called by the spirits in dreams. were prolific dreamers and "lived long in a dual world as real shamans must do". In the shaman’s calling, the spirits took the initiative, in dreams. If you could retain your dream experiences and apply them to the world around you, you had keys to mysteries impenetrable to others. [6]
     Rasmussen collected stories of shamanic soul flight, which Mircea Eliade, controversially, thought was the central feature of shamanic practice. [7] His most memorable tales came from Inuit recounting the deeds of illustrious ancestors. “I am a shaman myself,” an informant named Samik told him, “ but I am nothing compared with my grandfather Titqatsaq. He lived in the time when a shaman could go down to the mother of the sea beasts, fly up to the moon or make excursions out through space.”   
    Titqatsag was a frequent flyer. He loved spirit flight, and had a friendly rival, Muraoq, who also took to the air. They met in spirit flight over sea ice midway between their villages. As they converged, Muraoq spread his arms, like a bird gliding on its wings, but did not judge distance well and crashed violently into Tirqatsaq, who fell down onto the ice. He could not move until Muraoq called in helping spirits to get him up. Then the incident was mirrored. Back in the air, Tirqatsag crashed into Muraoq, who dropped to the ice and had to be rescued by his rival’s helping spirits in turn. Even shamans may need flight controllers. [8]

 

References

1.       Knud Rasmussen, The Netsilik Eskimo Social Life and Spiritual Culture. Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921-24, (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghhandewl, 1931) p. 207.
2. Ibid., p. 213
3. Ibid. p. 216
4. ibid., pp.288-91.
5. ibid., p. 294
6. ibid,, p.296
7. Mircea Eliade, Eliade. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974).
8. Rasmussen op.cit., pp 299-300.

Illustration RM + AI

 

Dream Divination, Jinn and the Marabouts of Paris

 

Voyance dormante, "sleeping divination", they call it. In the West Africa diaspora in Paris, you can hire a marabout to do it for you. He may send up special prayers and look up secret invocations in a little book to attract the help of angels or jinn. He may lie down on his right side in the recommended posture of the Prophet.
     Liliane Kuczynski gives us a fascinating account of how this works based on her observation of  a Fula dream diviner, Dia. [1] Born on the east bank of the Senegal river, Dia came from a well-known family of silangi diviners, believed to have special knowledge of plants through their friendly relations with the jinn.
      Dream incubation is called listikhar (Fula)  or istikhara (Arabic), the placing of a choice in Allah’s hands. A marabout preparing to do dream divination for a client may perform a variety of rituals belonging to ilm al-asrar, the "science of secrets”. The marabout starts with prayer, may prepare an esoteric text -for example, a diagram including the numerical formula of the client’s name and a word that summarizes their request – and place this or a twig from the sacred doki tree under his pillow. He proceeds to seek a dream from the angels to clarify and resolve his client’s problems. Before sleep, the marabout may say aloud, "Angels, take care of [the client’s name]" and then add a specific request. The diviner lies down on his right side. In his dreams, he hopes to meet invisible guides, see what he asked to see, and maybe bring about unseen intervention.
     The client visits the marabout twice: the first time to explain their problem and the second to hear the result of the dream divination.
      In traditional Islamic dream interpretation, dreams are divided into three categories. The “true dream” (al-ruya) is a dream inspired by God or his Prophet, and an experience of a higher aspect of spirit or consciousness. The evil or deceptive dream is inspired by Shaytan, the Devil. Then there is the great profusion of dreams, void of any real importance, that reflect the confused, desire-driven wanderings of the nafs, a lower aspect of consciousness.
     Beyond this tripartite schema, the marabouts in Paris invoke help from other sources, to be delivered in dreams.  Kuczynski reports that besides Allah, marabouts invoke "other invisible beings, mighty enough to provide someone with help, advice and solutions to anxieties." They are deliberately vague in identifying these allies, often referring only to "a person" or "someone". Evasive vocabulary is designed to avoid naming players in a very dangerous world invisible to ordinary sight. There are many intermediary beings between Allah and humans. Sometimes they are ranked in hierarchies but by Kuczynski’s observation "in a marabout mind, terms like ‘angel’, ‘jinn’, ‘spirit’, ‘rahwan’ and ‘maleika’ are quite synonymous. The main feature of all these beings is that they are dangerous. For this reason, marabouts must perform many rituals before invoking them, in order to persuade them to answer their requests." [2]
   The jinn, of course, have a mixed reputation. appropriate given their mixed nature. [3] Some are said to be Muslim, others clearly not. While made of fire and air, they can take any physical form they choose. Some are regarded as sources of evil and misfortune, and maladies including madness. The word jinn and the word junun, madness, have the same root. [4] The Qur’an organized jinn into six different types: Jinni, the true Jinn, Aamar, those who live among mankind, Arwaah, those who antagonize the young, Shaytan, the evil ones who bother humans, Maarid, said to be the most powerful of all Jinn and worse than a demon, and finally the Ifreet, that cause a lot of harm to become stronger [5] 
   Marabouts are able to collaborate with the jinn. They may invoke Allah, angels like Jibril and Asrafil, and the jinn at the same time. Most intriguing:

Some diviners are closely related to jinn, which they appeal to in any circumstance and whom they consider their relatives – namely their wives. Marabouts are also believed to act on the partner jinn of the client; this jinn, which everyone has, is often viewed as the double of a person, and to be their most vulnerable aspect. [6] The conclusion that arises is that the dreamer’s inspiration depends upon a very composite world. It mixes Allah with an invisible group of powerful beings that are not clearly defined in Islamic teachings, and who give rise to all sorts of discussions, even from a religious perspective. In some marabout practices, it doesn’t appear obvious whether jinn belong to a transcendent or an immanent world. Nature, as it appears in the forms that jinn may take, is not so distant or distinct a force. [7]

As for the dreams that come, the marabouts are described as flexible and eclectic in their readings, rarely inclined to go by the dream books, like the famous one named for Ibn Sirin but certainly not authored by him [8], that are perennially popular in the Muslim world. Dia has played dream detective, catching a thief - he claimed - by the clues he found in a night vision. 
      Dia's engagement with the jinn appears to have been demanding. He was often tired and ill, in need of protection from hostile jinn and sorcerers. His psychic defense involved washing with herbal compounds, chanting divine names, and appealing to specific jinn and other spirits in a Fula secret language. Although not really literate, he recorded many of his secret invocations in different languages, including Arabic, in a little notebook [9]
      Lana Nasser instructs us, in an excellent essay, that jinn interact with humans mostly through dreams and visions so it is not surprising that some individuals may make a profession out of maintaining and focusing this kind of contact. It is commonly believed that the realms of jinn and humans are separated by an opaque veil that prevents direct interaction between them. However, there are some who claim to see and communicate with jinn. They are said to possess bassar (sight) and  the veil is lifted for them. A sheikh (traditional healer) in Amman, Jordan described it as “a gift and a curse at the same time, a gift because it is grace from Allah but a curse because you start carrying around others’ burdens as well as your own.” [10] 

 

References

 1. Liliane Kuczynski. “Dreaming in the Practice of African Marabouts in Paris” in Zarcone, Thierry and Angela Hobart. Shamanism and Islam: Sufism, Healing Rituals and Spirits in the Muslim World. London: I.B. Tauris, 2013, pp. 217-230 

2, Ibid p.223

3.  “The earliest mention of [jinn] appears in the Koran, where they are described as supra-human beings composed of fire and flames, not perceivable by man, and capable of emerging in a variety of forms. Many regard them as the nature spirits of the pre-Islamic Arabian world, forces that were beyond the control of man and at odds with his desires. These spirits were gradually brought under the control of Allah, the majority of them being converted to Islam and serving as his companions. Those that were not converted formed part of the unbelieving world and were viewed as opposed to the rule and power of Allah. But Islamic religious literature, and the official view of the faith, is generally accepting of the djinn. Even the legal literature of Islam seriously discusses the position of the djinn, particularly with respect to questions of marriage, death, property, and inheritance. Opinions on their nature and legality have certainly varied over the centuries, but the prominence and strength of this aspect of Islam have never been denied.” Rene A. Bravmann, “Gyinna-Gyinna: Making the Djinn Manifest”. African Arts Vol. 10, no. 3 (April, 1977), pp. 46-52.

4. Lana Nasser. “The Jinn: Companion in the Realm of Dreams and Imagination” in Kate Adams, Kelly Bulkeley & Patricia M. Davis Adams (eds)  Dreaming in Christianity and Islam: Culture, Conflict, and Creativity. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009, p. 144. 

5.  Hussein G. Rassool. “Existence and types of Jinn: Evidence from the Qur’an, Sunnah and scholars.” in Evil Eye, Jinn Possession, and Mental Health Issues: An Islamic Perspective. London: Routledge, 2018. p 113 

6. This refers to the qarin. See the recent study by Dunja Rašić,. Bedeviled: Jinn Doppelgangers in Islam and Akbarian Sufism. Albany NY: SUNY Press, 2024. 

7.  Kuczynski p. 223 

8. See John C. Lamoreaux. The Early Muslim Tradition of Dream Interpretation. Albany NY: SUNY Press, 2002. 

9. Kuczynski p. 226. 

10. Nasser, “The Jinn”, p.146.

 

Illustration: "Voyant marabout" RM + AI

 

Dreams of the Tiger Sultan

Tipu Sultan, Muslim ruler of Mysore in southern India from 1782 to 1799, spent much of his reign fighting the British and their allies, the Marhattas. He was called the Tiger of Mysore because of his fierce battle prowess and his self-identification with the tiger which featured everywhere in his ambit. A life-sized tiger statue was the base if his jeweled throne; gold tiger heads glared from the canopy above his own. He had a mechanical tiger constructed that mauled and tore at the figure of a prone English soldier when turned on.
     Tipu was also profoundly interested in dreams. He looked to his dreams for guidance on the future, especially the outcome of battles, and for direct access to tutelary spirits, including the Prophet himself. He recorded his dream in Persian in his own hand and kept his journal secret even from his closest advisers.
     Tipu’s manuscript journal was discovered after he was killed in battle at Seringapatam in 1799. It was presented to the Court of Directors of the East India Company in 1800 by Alexander Beatson on behalf of the Governor-General, Marquess Wellesley. The story of its discovery is recorded in Beatson’s signed and dated note at the end of the volume:

This register of the Sultaun’s  [sic] dreams was discovered by Colonel William Kirkpatrick, amongst other papers of a secret nature in an escritoire found in the Palace of Seringapatam. Hubbeeb Oollah, one of the most confidential of the Sultaun’s servants, was present at the time it was discovered. He knew that there was such a book of the Sultaun’s composition; but had never seen it, as the Sultaun always manifested peculiar anxiety to conceal it from the view of any who happened to approach while he was either reading or writing in it.[1]

 

A woman in man’s clothes 

In the dream report numbered #13 in the translation of the journal made by Mahmoud Husain for the Pakistan Historical Society. Tipu describes what he saw before he went to battle against a Marhattaa force that greatly outnumbered his own:

I had a dream: It seemed to me as if a handsome young man, a stranger, came and sat down near me. I passed certain remarks in the manner in which one might, in a playful mood, talk to a woman. I then said to myself: “It is not my custom to enter into playful discourse with anyone.”
      Shortly thereafter, the youth rose, and walking a few paces, returned to loosen his hair from beneath his turban, and opening the fastenings of his robe, displayed his bosom, and I saw it was a woman. I immediately called and seated her and said to her: “Whereas formerly I had only guessed you were a woman, and I had cut jokes with you, it is now definite that you are a woman in the dress of a man. My conjecture has come true.”
      In the midst of this conversation the morning dawned, and I woke up. I conveyed the contents of the dream to other people and interpreted it thus: That please God those Marhattas have put on the clothes of men, but in fact will prove to be women.

The sultan saw his dream fulfilled. As he wrote, “By the favor of God and the aid of His Messenger on the morning of Saturday, I made a surprise attack upon the army of the unbelievers. Advancing with two or three hundred men, I myself penetrated the camp of the unbelievers, crushing them as I went and they all fled like women.” [2]

References

1.British Library IO Islamic 3563, f. 29v.

2. Tipu, Sultan. The Dreams of Tipu Sultan. Trans. Husain Karachi: Pakistan Historical Society Publications no. 7. n.d. [1957]  pp.63-4.

Photo: Tipu's mechanical tiger is in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London

 

 

"I wish to see with your eyes," says the angel

 

“Every angel is terrible,” Rilke says in his Duino Elegies, "and yet, alas, I invoke you, almost deadly birds of the soul.” Wings - and the resemblance to birds - is what most of us first associate with angels, though the earliest angels to appear in Judeo-Christian texts are wingless.

This morning a friend sent me video of a recitation of a French translation of Pushkin's poem "The Prophet" in which a desperate spiritual wanderer, thirsting in the desert, meets a six-winged angelic being, one of the high order of seraphim. His eyes are changed to those of a young eagle. In his ears he hears "the shudderings of heaven" and the "huge wingbeats of angels". His heart is ripped out and replaced with a flaming coal and - utterly changed - he can fulfill his calling as a prophet.

Pushkin was inspired by the Old Testament (especially Isaiah 6: 9-13), Rilke by the angels of Islam he had read about in a French biography of Muhammad. I am inspired by their winged poetry to post the illustration I made this week from one of my many dream visions of the "almost deadly birds of the soul".  

 

March 13, 2024 

From a lucid dream that unfolded spontaneously in the hypnopompic zone.

"I wish to see with your eyes," says the angel

The camel appears first, pushing its nose up close. I see a vast expanse of desert and a city of verdant gardens beyond. I think of journeys I have made along the path of Gimel (the Camel), the path of the High Priestess in Kabbalistic Tarot. Why not?

I don’t have to mount the camel. As soon as I consent to the journey, I am looking at the sculpted profile of a mythic bird, its curved beak sharply defined against a deep blue sky. It reminds me of the homa birds on capitals at Persepolis, as I have seen them in European museums.

The next instant the eye blazes like a fire opal, the statue comes alive and soars up into the sky. I try to follow it. I fly up above the clouds and see a great white tower. I have been here before.

I descend gently towards my body on the bed. I hear an inner voice I think is that of an angel: "I wish to see with your eyes and feel with your senses."

Feelings: excited, curious

Reality: Persian traditions have often called to me and I am fascinated by the heaven birds of Persian mythology. In The Conference of the Birds the homa does not join the flight because he has obligations to make kings. He confers spiritual radiance on a true king; Inayat Khan takes this as a metaphor for spiritual consecration beyond earthly coronation. The homa according to legend never touches the earth and is hard to find. The Sufis say that even a distant sighting is a blessing.

Illustration: "Camel and Homa" by Robert Moss

 

Personal Myths and Collective Dreams

Joseph Campbell maintained that “A dream is a personal experience of that deep dark ground that is the support of our conscious lives, and a myth is society’s dream. The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth.” I have long found this to be profoundly true.  In the ancient mind, there was rarely any doubt. In Homer's time, as in Cleopatra's or the Buddha's, dreams were nightly fields of interaction between gods, humans and others. Though we may be short on shared mythology in modern society, our dreams still bring us into mythic life. 

I found this excerpt in an old  journal, typed on a strip of paper I had used as a bookmark. The title of the dream was in upper case.as reproduced here:

The Big dream

IMAGES OF THE PRIMORDIAL GODS

I went through the lineage of the gods, backwards and forwards, from the anthropomorphic versions back to raw and primal images without clearly defined borders. I saw the Great Goddess. I saw Zeus streaming on the face of the waters, like an immense living island whose skin barely broke the surface. His colors were light olive and silver.
    His “hair” streamed in a deltoid pattern that could almost be mistaken for a beard, but was more reminiscent of a verdant triangle of public hair. Trying to describe his form (inside the dream) I evoked sea turtles and cuttlefish and (waking) the wings of a vast manta ray. But none of these similes contained the shape, which was too vast and too fluid to be comprehended in a single visioning.

I was excited that this dream found me again. It took me back to the era before humans had made much progress in domesticating the wild primal nature of the forces at play around them – of the elements, of land and sea, of Earth and Sky. I wrote my story "The Way to Tethys" in Mysterious Realities from another vision of this kind.
    I was curious that in the dream I call the oceanic deity Zeus rather than Poseidon, then recalled that their precincts and identities were probably not clearly demarcated in the archaic mind. Zeus is a generic term for a god as well as the name of the Big God enthroned in the Olympian pantheon (and one of the Big Three beside his brothers Poseidon and Hades). Nobody can decide whether the magnificent Artemision Bronze in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens is Zeus or Poseidon and whether what is missing from his raised fist is a trident or a thunderbolt.

The Greeks dreamed of the Egyptians who dreamed, it may be, of Atlantis. "Great stories are like dreams," Normandi Ellis takes up the big theme in Imagining the World into Existence: An Ancient Egyptian Manual of Consciousness. "The images that appear on the tomb walls and in the context of the Egyptians' sacred books are dreams...If we view the entire study of ancient consciousness and its impact on our lives as if it were a dream language, it becomes easier to peel back its layers and open to its possibilities." 

Illustration: "Eyebrows of Zeus" by Robert Moss

The Question on the Bridge

 

After midnight, I lie on my back and close my eyes. I do much of my best work in bed but not when I approach it in the spirit of work. I tell my friends who are serious meditators that my favorite spiritual practice is horizontal mediation, but I don’t say this seriously. No mantras, no breathwork by the numbers, no specified body postures, no fixed agenda. I’ll just let my body get comfy and be open to what flows in my mind and my inner senses. Relaxed attention, or attentive relaxation. That’s all I require of myself. Sometimes it enables me to maintain continuity of consciousness through all the phases of the night. 
     When images come, I may let them rise and fall, content to see what is surfacing from my subconscious or looking in from the limitless universe outside me. If no images come, I’ll be content to drift off into industrial sleep and let my body rest. I may wake up to the fact I am dreaming inside a dream, or not. I may not recall my dreams from the first sleep cycle, though I will check and pay attention to my feelings and sensations when I am missing a story. I can usually detect a dream hangover even when I have lost the dream that caused it. Most often it’s the sense of being jet lagged, or travel worn. I know where that comes from. With or without travel plans, my dreams are often excursions. I get out and about. I visit places on the other side of this world, and in parallel worlds, and in worlds where the dead and the living rub shoulders. The Society for Psychical Research called such outings psychical excursions. A Moroccan dream interpreter calls them exits of the soul.
      For now, though, I’m just lying on my back. My right leg is bent at the knee, giving me the look of the Hanged Man in the Tarot. I straighten it out and give it a good stretch. Shreds and blotches of color float by on my mental screen. There’s a wriggling something pushing in from the edge that could be a giant millipede if I let it, but I wish it to become a lovely many-leaf plant. Geometric patterns form and reform, then textures, weaving and netting, then a parade of faces – some like cartoons or kids’ drawings, many realistic, so many. For a while, it’s like rush hour at a subway station. Everything is changing and racing fast and there are constant popups and inserts. It’s hard to hold onto anything much. I remember William James saying that in ten minutes in the liminal space of hypnagogia, he saw a thousand images. That sounds about right.
      Things are still busy on my mental screen, but there are two notable changes. First, the scene is slowing and stabilizing. Second, I am in it. I’m no longer a voyeur. I’m out and about, on a bridge, with streams of pedestrians moving both ways on either side of me. I smell salt water, engine oil, and fish. The people on the bridge are mostly dark skinned. Many of the women wear hijabs and long form-concealing dresses. A few are in full burkas. A boy on a bicycle is selling round breakfast rolls. I can smell the poppy seeds.
     I am happy when my senses come alive as they are doing now. It means I’m there, in a real place I may or may not be able to name. It means I have bilocated, because while I am walking on the bridge, wishing for one of the poppyseed rolls,  I am perfectly aware that my body is in bed, and I can look in on it. I can wave to myself if I like, though that might confuse the people on the bridge. Or rather, it wouldn’t, because there is no sign that they can see me or are remotely aware of my presence.
   I know exactly where I am now. I am in suspension. I am on the Bosphorus Bridge, a steel suspension bridge that joins the continents of Europe and Asia. Before me and behind me are the two halves of the enormous world-city, Istanbul.  I see boats of all sizes on the water, monstrous container ships from the Black Sea, ferries from the Princes Islands, fishing dhows and floating restaurants.
     I'm not conscious of cars or trucks on the bridge, just the stream of pedestrians walking both ways, of varied ethnicity and dress.
      A woman steps out of the crowd. With a few steps, she is in front of me. She wears a long white silk garment, streaming to her ankles. Her matching hijab covers her face except for her dark shining eyes. In this simple Muslim garb, she is unspeakably elegant, and I know she is very beautiful. There is a faint smell of roses. She looks hard at me and asks, "Are you Turkish - or Romanian?"
     I am so surprised by the question, cadenced by the pause, that I fall out of the dream and am fully back in the body on the bed.
     Fortunately, I have some experience of revisiting dreams.
     I will myself back to the bridge, and wish the woman in white to still be there.
     There is a shimmer where she stood, then she reappears. It’s a little like watching an image emerge from a blur of pixels. But now she seems fully present. I smell roses, and the long dark hair she keeps covered. I told her I am amused by her question. I have friends in both Turkey and Romania. I taught and traveled in both countries and flew back and forth between Istanbul and Bucharest.
      She has brought me a message. She speaks for a Sufi order – she names it - that is interested in my work and would like to meet me. Will I be coming to Turkey soon?
       I would be honored to meet, I tell her.

 

The next day, I receive an invitation from a friend to return to Turkey to lead a workshop. Does my friend know the Sufi order that was mentioned on the bridge? Yes. It is famous for accepting women as equals with men, and for incorporating some shamanic methods for shifting consciousness.
      There are dreams that spill into the world.

Illustration: "Are You Turkish or Romanian?" RM + AI

Looking for Muirthemne

 

First, the dream. Then, the half-dream and the poet speech.

May 7, 2025

dream
Looking for Muirthemne

I'm in a familiar, frustrating dream situation: I have set off from a certain location but now I can't find my way back, because my rambles have taken me into strange territory. Sometimes I find I have forgotten the address and the name of the place where I am staying. Not so this time. Seeking direction, I tell people, "I am going to Muirthemne." They don't understand me. Am I saying "Miercoles", Spanish for Wednesday?

When I return from my dream outing, I recognize the Irish word and my mind goes to Lady Gregory's translation of the old legends of a warrior hero. The book was published in 1902 as Cuchulain of Muirthemne and was in the advance guard of the Irish literary revival. Augusta Gregory described how her friend and protege W.B. Yeats instructed her to take on this task: "I dreamed that I had been writing some article & that W.B.Y. said 'It's not your business to write – Your business is to make an atmosphere'". [1]

Yeats was not faint in his praise for the book he inspired in a dream. He began his Preface to Cuchulain of Muirthemne with these lines: "I think this book is the best that has come out of Ireland in my time. Perhaps I should say that it is the best book that has ever come out of Ireland; for the stories which it tells are a chief part of Ireland’s gift to the imagination of the world - and it tells them perfectly for the first time." 2]

In a Note in the text on the conversation of Cuchulain and Emer he salutes the “poet speech” of early Irish literature that "everywhere brings the odor of the wild woods into our nostrils." He hints that poet speech can lift the veil between the worlds.

So I lay down again, letting my body relax towards the half-dream state, and sang in my mind a poem that came to me long ago in a dream. I knew it to be a wing song when it came, a song that lifts you and gives you the power of flight beyond the body and beyond the world, and may entertain friendly spirits as well. When I first woke with the song, I phoned two musical friends to ask them to record the notes so they were not lost. My friends were out so I sang into their voicemail. I managed to retain the tune, and to record several verses, although one is enough for flight.

On my back in bed this morning, with early light seeping through the drapes, I sang We are sleeping till we're dreaming We are dreaming for awakening We're awakening for our homecoming into the La-and I had vivid sensations of lifting effortlessly from my body in the bed. I felt great wings extend outward and upward from my shoulders. I revelled in the power of ascent. I felt like a sea bird, perhaps a swan. I sported with the winds. I enjoyed the skirl of landscapes and waterscapes far below, and then islands in mist, and long blue ragged hills and at last a broad green plain with tiny tufts of wool that must be grazing sheep and a dolmen arch worthy of a bard or a tribal king or one of the shining ones.

References

1. Judith Hill. Lady Gregory: An Irish Life. Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2005.p.150

2. W. B. Yeats, Preface to Cuchulain of Muirthemne: The History of the Men of the Red Branch of Ulster, arranged and put into English by Lady Gregory. London: John Murray, 1902.

3. Cuchulain of Muirthemne p.23. 

Illustration at Top: "Looking for Muirthemne" RM + AI

Four Mosswood Poems

Griffin Rider

Track the griffin you once rode
to the airport where it lies caged and bound
under the control tower that plays
the jingle from the music box
you were given when you were six.
Free the winged lion. Feed it the manna
your controllers stole from its core.
See your bright dreamer awaken in its eyes.
Ride it again to find the girl whose mother let her
fall out of the sky but has been kept safe
in a garden on the dark side of the Moon,
When she is back in your heart,
ride to the House of Stone and Guilt
where the hag turns in circles of self-loathing
and offer forgiveness, the heart of healing.

 

Masks

“Put off your mask,” she says.
I tell her, “I’m not wearing one.”
“That is the best disguise.”
In this city, when people are unmasked
you see the false face behind the false face.
I do not speak of magicians.
They put  on masks to step into
the energy of an old god or a wild shaman,
a force of chaos, of disease or whirlwind,
and must then master that power
to bend it to their purpose.  If they fail
or wear the mask too long, it becomes poison.
Don’t wear any mask for too long
or you may find you have no face left
except the one molded by the role you played
or that you can’t find yours self in the mirror
because you have become a ghost of the living.

 

Heron Staff

The space is full of flapping and feathers
and discordant bird cries. I sit still
with my heron blue staff. I will remind them
there are right and wrong ways to call on gods.
I am enthroned between Hestia and Ogygia.
I must keep the balance. Any judgment I make
will be on myself as well as the bird people.

 

Surprises in Flight

I’m going up like a rocket to see my Teacher
in a higher world, a seventh heaven.
I have juice for the flight. Lift-off from my world tree
is flawless, and the drum frees me from the little mind.
I see over cities and continents. Then I am hooked,
rocking in midair, because a long arm has reached out
and plucked at my sleeve. I come down gracelessly
to join him on his balcony above the world.
He is impossibly beautiful, as always, in his white suit.
“We need to talk,” he says. “The Family are waiting for you,
up among the gods. But they want you to write more books
and deliver a lot more entertainment before you check out.
Don’t be in a hurry to leave. Enjoy what you can in a body.
We will be swapping places soon enough.”

- Mosswood Hollow, July 13, 2018

Riding Inside the Tiger

 

I teach and learn by sharing stories and - especially when it comes to dreaming - I don't want to hear from educators and experts who don't share their personal experiences. In this respect Namkhai Norbu does not disappoint. Especially in his book on Dzogchen, The Crystal and the Way of Light (even more than in his book on dream yoga) he shares memorable dream experiences.
     The simplest and most endearing comes from very early in his life. When he was quite small, he dreamed many times that he was riding inside the belly of a roaring beast he thought must be a tiger. In those days no motor car had ever been seen in his remote part of Tibet. When he encountered automobiles years later, he realized what his dreams had prepared him for. I am so charmed by this tale that I have turned it into a drawing. 

When the dreamer is ready, the teacher will appear 

Namkhai’s account of his dream education suggests a modification in a well-known maxim. It’s not just that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. It’s also: when the dreamer is ready, the teacher will appear.
     Aged sixteen, as a student teacher in China, Namkhai dreamed he met a very old man he knew to be a master. The master lived in a white Chinese-style cement house; the name Padmasambhava was written in Tibetan over the dor. The master chanted a mantra of Padmasambhava. Then he instructed Namkhai to go round the house to a great rock and look for the entrance to a cave. Inside the cave, he would find eight natural mandalas. The dreamer’s father appeared and chanted the Prajnaparamita sutra. Namkhai joined in chanting the sutra and they walked round the inside of the cave together. He could see the edges of the mandalas but not their full form before he woke up.
     A year later, back in Tibet, Namkhai heard a visitor talk to his father about an extraordinary old man who was living in a village of white Chinese-style houses in the region. He felt strongly this was the old man from his dream. Reminding his father of the dream, he asked if they could visit the old man in the white house. They set off on horseback and rode for four days. They came to a vialge of white concrete Chinese-style houses and knew the master’s house because mantra of Padmasambhava was over the door. The old man was Chamchun Dorje, a Dzogchen master; he became Namkhai’s primary teacher.[1]     

When you wake with a dream in your hand 

“What if you slept,” Coleridge wrote, famously, “And what if in your sleep you dreamed and what if in your dream you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower
and what if when you awoke you had that flower in your hand, ah, what then?”
     Coleridge’s question was answered for Namkhai in his early dream education. He learned that a certain kind of dream can spill over into the world. He woke with something he had dreamed in his hand.
     One of his uncles was renowned as a tertön, a "treasure revealer" of hidden texts that sometimes appeared as tiny scrolls in unusual places, apparently transmitted across generations by ancient masters. While staying with his uncle in a remote area, Namkhai dreamed he was visited by a dakini.
     She gave him a small scroll of paper containing a sacred text. She said this was very important and that on waking he should give it to his uncle. In the dream he knew he was dreaming. He gripped the scroll tightly in one fist and wrapped the other around it. It was not permitted to disturb his uncle until after his morning rituals, so he drifted off still with his fists clamped together.
     Waking at dawn, he opened his hand and found there really was a tiny scroll within it. He was too excited to wait. He woke up his uncle and presented the scroll. His uncle took it and said matter-of-factly, “Thank you, I expecting this” as if there had been a routine delivery at the door. [2]  

When you are called to travel to a deceased master 

When he was living and teaching in Italy, Namkhai’s guru, Chamchun Dorje, called him in a dream to return to Tibet. He traveled to his master in the dream. His guru told him that it was time for him to take up Todgal, a higher level of Dzogchen practice.  For this, he needed to go to another teacher, Jigmed Linba. 

I thought this was a very strange thing to say because I knew, of course, that Jigmed Linba was a great Dzogchen master of the eighteenth century who had been dead for many years. I thought perhaps I had misunderstood what my master had said so I asked him to explain, but he just said, “Jigmed Linba is up on the mountain behind the house. Go and see him right away.” [3] 

Disbelieving, Namkhai scaled a sheer cliff, noticing that the whole text of a tantra was incised on it, with the title of the text on a standing stone at the top, He found a cave where a beautiful boy with long flowing hair, dressed in a filmy blue garment, was seated. Could this really be the deceased Dzogchen master?  He clambered up on top of the rock and said to the boy, “I was told to come to you.” The boy motioned for him to sit, then took out a little scroll and began reading a Dzogchen text on the Four Lights of Todhgal.
     Look through the Tibetan Buddhist biographies in Serinity Young’s Dreaming in the Lotus and you will find that, again and again, gurus dream with their disciples and the masters appear in dreams to convey essential teachings.[4] This theme is well crystallized by Lama Choedak Yuthok: 

Some people actually gain enlightenment during dreams. Some practitioners while in the middle of dreams which they recognized as dreams, invited great lineage masters of past ages. They came and gave teachings, and some of these practitioners became enlightened as a result. There are a lot of whispered teachings like this. They are known as ‘near lineage’ teachings. Some practitioners who received these could write, teach and transmit the teachings with amazing eloquence. They did not have to bother about studying any texts. One master received three months’ worth of teachings in the course of a single three-hour dream.

 

References 

1. Namkhai Norbu Crystal and the Way of Light: Sutra, Tantra and Dzogchen ed. John Shank (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987) pp.9-10.
2. ibid pp. 51-52.
3. ibid p.102.
4. Serinity Young , Dreaming in the Lotus: Buddhist Dream Narrative, Imagery, & Practice (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1999).
5. Lama Choedak Yuthok ed. Pauline Westwood, Lamdre: Dawn of Enlightenment. (Gorum Publications, 1997).

 

Illustration: “Riding Inside the Tiger” by Robert Moss

 

 

Hollywood versions of the afterlife

 

Hollywood has given us some very interesting versions of what may go on after death and how the living and the deceased interact. The  film Hereafter, directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Matt Damon, explores patterns of connection between living people and those on the Other Side: the gift (or curse) of a natural psychic medium; a twin's abiding link with the brother who died; the familiarity of a near-death survivor with other realms.

Home base, in Hereafter, is this world rather than the Other Side. Depictions of the afterlife that intrigue me most are those that take us deeper into Otherworld geography, especially those in which the Otherworld is home base. Here are notes on a few of my favorite Hollywood visions of the afterlife in classic movies, and conversation themes they suggest. . 

1. Dreaming is the best and easiest way to talk to the departed. The vital importance of dream communication with the departed is brought home by the movie The Sixth Sense.  A psychic boy meets the Bruce Willis character, a man who had recently died but is foggy about his situation and distraught because he can no longer touch or talk to his wife. When he tries to speak to her she can’t hear him. The boy tells the dead guy how to proceed: "Speak to her in her dreams, only then will she hear you".
2. Why the departed stay earthbound or feel obliged to play tricks. The wonderful movie Ghost is quite instructive on how the Departed can stay earthbound through addictions and desires (witness the smoker on the subway, desperate for a last drag), and how and why the Departed may feel compelled to produce physical effects to get attention from survivors
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3. The afterlife journey (like this one) is all about love and courage. The hilarious Albert Brooks comedy Defending Your Life gives a quite plausible version of a process of afterlife review and assessment, and makes the vital point that our courage – or lack of it – and our ability to love, and express that love, may be central to our progression in any world.
4. In the reality we inhabit after death, thoughts are things. The movie What Dreams May Come dramatizes the fact that on the imaginal plane – which we enter in dreams and journeys, and where the Departed may find or build their homes, at least for a time – “thoughts are things”. This is a real world, but it is a world whose substance is ideoplastic; in other words, it will take on the shapes of our strongest thoughts and desires. To do well here, on either side of death, it is necessary to train the imagination

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Movie stars can get to know a few things about the afterlife from sources other than movie scripts. According to Dan Aykroyd (the star of Ghostbusters), John Belushi reached out to living people after his death, desperate for help to get to a better life situation than the one he found himself in after he checked out through a dug overdose. Aykroyd said on the Larry King Show back in 2004 that a mutual friend called Isaac had a dream encounter in which Belushi asked for help in order to go into the Light. The reality of this contact seemed to be confirmed by the fact that Belushi used a personal name for his grandmother (“Nana”) that the dreamer did not recognize, but was known to Belushi’s widow. “So Isaac did a meditation with this woman that he worked with her inLos Angeles, and they had a vision of John, you know, extricating himself from bad circumstance, call it Limbo or the Bardo region, Purgatory. And they were able to cross him over into the light.”

This is a very old note awaiting update. I am interested in seeing recommendations and mini-reviews from others.