Dreaming,
waking or in between
in any
part of the multiverse
in any
body, in any life
you are
invited to play
a memory game.
Whatever
world you are in
the trick
is to remember
the other
worlds you inhabit
where you
are dead and more alive
and the
self that is dreaming you
- "The Art of Memory". Poem and photo by Robert Moss
Mosswood Dreaming
Here, if you tread very softly among the cedars,
you may hear the low midday snores
of the soft secret race of big-footed beings
who grow pink hibiscus in their dreams.
You can’t miss the tree that is the portal
to the three worlds because it is more real
than the others. This is your One Tree,
that knows you before you know it.
When hungry spiders dressed as magic mushrooms
come skittering over your bed at night
you forget to be scared because you are hungrier
than they are. You gobble them up fast
and burp out webs of shining possibility.
You stand before the bathroom mirror
squeezing toothpaste from the tube
and a giant boa rises to rhyme with you
wrapping itself around the tube of your body,
squeezing your old dead stuff out.
You see that people have fire slumbering
in their bellies, even when they are cold
and muddled and living on ashes.
You turn on the pilot light of their souls.
Here you can walk through wild orchards
to a wild shore. You pick your way to the tide pool
where sea turtle resumes your lessons in going deep
and wearing armor that leaves your soft bits exposed
so you can’t hide from life in a hard shell.
Here you remember the power of naming.
You find the words that heal bodies.
pleasure spirits, and make worlds.
When you ask, “Where’s the rest of me?”
you create a conga line where you are joined
by the belly dancer and the golden child,
the red horse and the crocodile,
by Bigfoot, the Empress, and the Fool.
Here, when you let love spill through your eyes
every blade of grass is in love with you.
You lie in a creek bed like a pebble
and the water rounds your hard edges.
In pilgrim hands you are carried to a stony place
as an offering to mountain spirits.
You rest in a cairn for a thousand years
until you spread wings and fly to your truest lover
and let the earth have you, under warm sun.
The fire has been built for you.
You become cinnamon.
Rising again, you spread yourself.
As aurora, you color the world.
Here myths spill into the day
like ripe fruit falling into your hand.
The salmon that made Finn the first shaman
leaps from the deep pool of dreams
stuffed with the hazel nuts of wisdom
and explodes on your palate
and feeds the whole company
in a miracle of filberts and fishes.
- - Mosswood Hollow, September 12, 2014
This is how it is in the family of Colombian American writer Ingrid Rojas Contreras. Her dead Nono - her grandfather - appeared to her in a dream and showed her a river, a river she needed to
know about. He appeared in dreams the same night to her mother, Mami, and two
of her aunts, telling them all that he needed to be disinterred. He
couldn’t bear to stay longer in the place where he was buried. His daughters
did not understand why, but they knew the dream required action.
This
is a shared dream, and shared dreams are gospel, because unlike dreams you
experience on your own, shared dreams have the validity of being peer-reviewed.
At some danger and expense, the women of the family acted on
his wishes. They traveled to Bucaramanga, the town where he was buried, and
raised money to have his body exhumed. They found the reason for his discomfort.
People had smuggled encargos – demands for Nono’s help - inside his
casket, burdening him in the afterlife with their needs and desires. A typical encargo,
scrawled on a piece of paper, might read, “You will have no rest until I get a
new house.”
So the family took the remains of Nono’s body, in his white
suit, and had them burned. They made their way eventually to the river from Ingrid’s
dream and released the ashes to the waters there. “My dream gave us the river.”
Nono was a curandero, a healer and seer, both an
illiterate rogue and a person of real gifts he called “secrets,” like the
ability to talk to move clouds (and so change the weather) foresee events, or negotiate
with the dead.
When Nono
was treating an illness, he asked his dreams to guide him to the herbs he
needed, and when he roused from sleep, he hiked until the landscape matched his
vision, and there he gathered the medicine
His daughter Sojaila, “Mami”, Ingrid’s mother, had similar gifts,
though women were not supposed to be curanderos. Her gifts burgeoned
after a dreadful incident when she was eight, in which she fell down a well and
remained amnesiac for eight months. After that, as well as knowing “secrets”,
she had the ability to bilocate: to project a double visible to other people.
This often happened when her regular body was in deep sleep or she was tossing
in fever. Ingrid saw Mami’s double reading tarot cards at the kitchen table
while her body lay in bed. Mami would often go to visit her husband in her
second body – which she called her “clone” - when he was working in another
country. He would see her doing his housekeeping, sweeping the floor, scrubbing
the walls and leaving them wet.
The doubling theme is central to the book. Ingrid, too, suffered
amnesia (for eight weeks) after an accident in Chicago in her early twenties,
and the gift she found in the wound is a remarkable story in itself. And she is a dead ringer for her mother,
causing endless confusion among Mami’s relatives and former lovers.
Enter the world of The Man Who Could Move Clouds and
you will find yourself in a landscape teaming with the wild fauna of magical
realism. You may need to shake yourself to remember this isn’t just magical
realism: it’s magical reality. You are in a realm full of ghosts. The
ghosts may be restless spirits of the dead, or conditions that Western doctors label
complexes or disorders, or energy doubles,
or the product of leaving a part of yourself behind when you make a sudden or
wrenching life choice. Listen to this:
We have a hand in creating our own ghosts. We think we
are done with a place , or a person, and wrest ourselves away. But when leaving
happens in a wave of distress, when we leave what we still love, we conjure our
own ghost walks into being.
And this:
A circle is a straight line haunted by something living
at its middle – a ghost that causes it to bend and bend,
Ingrid Rojas Contreras showed us her astonishing power with words in a novel titled Fruit of the Drunken Tree, which brings vividly
alive the struggle of women and girls for survival in the era of constant war
between guerillas, paramilitaries, drug dealers and police. The violence is always there, in the offing,
in the memoir, along with heartbreak, deception and the brutality of men
towards women. Yet there is a dancing spirit that sashays us through, the fascination
of local customs – sleep with a mirror under your pillow in order to remember, watch
for the glow in the earth where a guaca (haunted treasure) is buried - and all the everyday magic.
Maladies and misfortunes are caused by “stories that have
not healed inside you.” The heart of healing is changing your life story for
the better. Mami heals people by mumbling incantations over a bottle of tap water and giving them a story as they drink it. She tells fortunes the same way.
In the world of Ingrid's family in three mountain towns in Santander department, we see what it means to live
in a family where everyone dreams and therefore everyone is a little bit of a
shaman. Ingrid’s Papi dreams of death under a piece of falling machinery on a
walkway at the site where he is employed as an engineer. He’s arguing with a worker
when this happens. Later, in ordinary life, he starts arguing with a worker on
that walkway. He recognizes that the dream is starting to play out and steps back
– escaping the death he dreamed when a piece of machinery fell at the exact
spot where he was standing.
The boundary between dreaming and waking, like that between the living and the dead, is porous, if frailer than the ratty shower curtain Nono was gripping when he fell and died in the bathroom. Things bleed through. On the night of Nono's death, Nona - his estranged wife - dreams she has passionate sex with him. Bit when he asks her forgiveness, she won't give it. She wakes to find she is covered in mud and there are clods of earth on the bed. She knows this is because she threw their marriage bed away in the woods, leaving it to mud and muck.
In my family, we study dreams and seek to decode their architecture.
Waking life was a constant state of confusion "but our dreams were grounding”.
Mami says, “Your dreams say more than anything you can tell me.”
I lay down to rest in the early afternoon. There is an immediate flow of imagery.
I am moving faster and faster, along a road without defined
scenery.
I speed towards a
tunnel. I’m through it almost at once, and come out in a lightly wooded
landscape. I hear water nearby. I try not to interpret what is happening
mentally. I chant the syllables of a power song inwardly to shut off the talker
in my mind.
Soon I am airborne.
This happens effortlessly; there is no need to visualize the process before it
begins. I’m flying over a thickly wooded scene.
From above, I see a man running through the woods. He’s almost or completely naked apart from some kind of face covering. This may be a mask. The main feature is long whiskers, fastened to his upper lip. The face is oblong; surely it’s a mask.
He’s running from something. What is it?
I see a magnificent
Now the tiger is on him.
It doesn’t pause to kill or devour. It opens its jaws and simply swallows the masked runner, whole. They are now one. I sense that this is as it should be.
I cease to be a spectator.
The tiger’s huge face looms up, close to my own. I’m not scared of him. He is splendid.
He leaps at me. We become one. Instead of devouring me, he seems to have entered me.
Image: Tiger Man by RM with AI assistance
But this does not mean that there is no cause for coincidence.
In our lives, meaningful coincidences often feel like they came about because
of a hidden agency, or a strong intention, or a trickster or gamester at play
just behind the curtain of the obvious world.
Most human cultures, across most of recorded history, have
believed that there is indeed a hidden hand at work in coincidence: that it is
through the play of unusual or unexpected conjunctions, and natural phenomena,
that gods or angels or animate forces of nature or other dimensions send
messages to humans or actively intervene in our world. It’s been said that
coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous. Let’s not shrug this off as a
“primitive” idea — it has worked, and continues to work, in highly practical
ways. And let’s not classify this idea as a “metaphysical” belief.
The forces that cause meaningful coincidence may be quite
physical. We miss this because we cannot observe their workings with our
ordinary senses and our regular assumptions. These forces include our own
thoughts and feelings, and those of others connected to us. They may include
the powers that Jung called “archetypes” — as long as we remember that in
Jung’s mature thought the archetypes are not structures but “habitual currents
of psychic energy” and “systems of readiness for action,” and that they are as
much physical as psychic. The physical forces that play with us through
coincidence may include our parallel selves in parallel universes, interacting
with our world in constant and complex weavings through what quantum physics
has taught us to call “interference” patterns, forever shifting the balance of
probabilities for any specific outcome.
Quantum physics shows us the universe as a dynamic web of
connection. Subatomic particles are not separate “things”; they have meaning
and identity only through their connections with everything else. Those
connections do not depend on physical proximity or causation. Particles that
have once been in contact with each other remain connected through all space
and time.
Quantum physics also confirms that when we go to the heart of
physical reality, there is no separation between mind and matter. Subatomic
particles exist in all possible states until they are observed — at which point
something definite emerges from the soup of possibilities.
Inner and outer, subjective and objective, interweave and move
together at quantum levels, on a human scale, and no doubt everywhere in the
universe. We live in an energy field where everything resonates — to a greater
or lesser degree — with everything else. The world we inhabit mirrors our
thoughts and feelings, and vice versa.
In the hidden order of reality, there is no distinction between
mind and matter. The split between inner and outer — subjective and objective —
that we experience in ordinary life is unknown in the deeper reality.
Richard Wilhelm’s account of the Chinese rainmaker contains
the essence of a worldview in which the human mind and the external world form
a whole. A village has been without rain for weeks. The desperate villagers
send for a rainmaker. When the old man arrives, he shuts himself up in the
house provided for him, performing no ceremonies until the rains come. When
asked how he brought the rain, he explains that when he arrived he noted a
state of disharmony in himself, so he retired to compose himself. When he
restored his own equilibrium, the rain came according to its natural pattern.
As we become more awake to what is going on, we may become
personal magnets for coincidence, “strange attractors” that draw more and more
interesting and unexpected encounters and events toward us. The brilliant
analyst and classicist Marie-Louise von Franz, who knew both Jung and Pauli
well, alluded to this: “The larger our consciousness is, and the more it
develops, the more we get hold of certain aspects of the spirit of the
unconscious, draw it into our own subjective sphere, and then call it our own
psychic activity or our own spirit.”
-
Image: "Moving a Curtain" by RM with AI assistanvce
Less can be more. I am going to start sharing brief notes from my commonplace book (aka my journal) on this blog, ranging from current movie reviews to snippets of ancient philosophy.
Soul in Slumberland
The movie Slumberland, available on Netflix, is getting rave reviews and deserves them. It's deeply moving and visually stunning, sad and scary at times but relieved by flashes of wild humor and with a deeply satisfying ending. We travel through many dream doors and learn how it might be possible to enter the dreams of others. We see that loving contact with the departed is possible in dreams. We learn what can be gained when we brave up to nightmare fears. We are drawn to think about whether there are dream producers and dream regulators who try to give us the dreams they think we need and apply certain rules.
Most exciting, for me, is the vivid depiction of what can happen if we lose a vital part of ourselves - the beautiful bright dreamer - through soul loss and it goes off to live in another world, leaving us bereft of dreams and their magic in regular life. And what it means to get that dreaming self back in the body.
Beneath the Threshold
The Stoics had an optimistic belief in divine pronoia: that the gods sent forewarning to humans out of benevolence. They defined divination as “the foreknowledge and foretelling of things that happen fortuitously” (Cicero De Divinatione2.13). The future that cane be foreseen for them is not predetermined.
Two modes of divination described by the far-traveled philosopher Posidonius are observation of the "affinity of al things" and the close study of dreams. He spent time with druids in Gaul and wrote five books on divination, of which only fragments survive, mostly in the pages of De Divinatione, a philosophical dialogue by Cicero. The concept of sympatheia - the "affinity of all things” (συμπάθεια τον όλον) – presents the world, including the gods, as a unified organism with mutually interrelated parts that turn on each other. Everything is part of a cosmic body. Just as your whole body may respond to the lightest touch on your little toe, what happens to any part of the cosmos may resonate with the whole and generate an event far away.
Posidonius taught that the soul travels free from the body during
sleep. “Divination finds a positive support in nature, which teaches us how
great is the power of the soul when it is divorced from the bodily senses as it
is especially in sleep and in times of frenzy or inspiration: (Cicero de div
1.129). The Stoics held that dream divination is open to all, a view resoundingly espoused by Synesius of Cyrene in his wonderful little book On Dreams around the year 404.
Image: "Subliminal" by RM with AI assistance
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