The Dreams Are Coming Back

 

In contemporary society, dream drought is a widespread affliction, almost a pandemic. This is deadly serious, because night dreams are an essential corrective to the delusions of the day. They hold up a mirror to our everyday actions and attitudes and put us in touch with deeper sources of knowing than the everyday mind. If you lose your dreams, you may lose your inner compass. If your dreams are long gone, it may be because you have lost the part of you that is the dreamer.
     As I describe in Dreamways of the Iroquois, traditional elders of the First Peoples of North America say bluntly that if we have lost our dreams, it is because we have lost a vital part of our soul. This may have happened early in life through what shamans call soul loss, when our magical child went away because the world seemed to cold and cruel. Helping the dream-bereft to recover their dreams may amount to bringing lost souls back to the lives and bodies where they belong. In my story “Dreamtakers”in Mysterious Realities I describe a shamanic journey to help return dream souls to people who have lost them. This is something I teach and practice.
     There are several ways we can seek to break a dream drought any night we want to give this a try. We can set a juicy intention for the night and be ready to record whatever is with us whenever we wake up. We can resolve to be kind to fragments. The wispiest trace of a dream can be exciting to play with, and as you play with it you may find you are pulling back more of the previously forgotten dream. 
     If you don’t remember a dream when you first wake up, laze in bed for a few minutes and see if something comes back. Wiggle around in the bed. Sometimes returning to the body posture we were in earlier in the night helps to bring back what we were dreaming when our bodies were arranged that way.

     If you still don’t have a dream, write something down anyway: whatever is in your awareness, including feelings and physical sensations. You are catching the residue of a dream even if the dream itself is gone. As you do this, you are saying to the source of your dreams, “I’m listening. Talk to me.”
     You may find that, though your dreams have flown, you have a sense of clarity and direction that is the legacy of the night. We solve problems in our sleep even when we don’t remember the problem-solving process that went on in our dreaming minds.
      And remember that you don’t need to go to sleep in order to dream. The incidents of everyday life will speak to us like dream symbols if we are willing to pay attention. Keep a lookout for the first unusual or striking thing that enters your field of perception in the course of the day and ask whether there could be a message there. When we make it our game to pay attention to coincidence and symbolic pop-ups in everyday life, we oil the dream gates so they let more through from the night

Dream recovery may be soul recovery. Call back your dreams and you may find you are bringing back a beautiful bright dreamer who left your body and your life when the world seemed too cold and too cruel. Maybe she has been hiding out in Grandma's cottage, or a garden behind the Moon. Sometimes the right song will help to bring back that Magical Child with all the dreams fluttering like fireflies in her hair. I wrote a song in this cause and you are welcome to try it:

 

The dreams are coming back.
Slow down and feel their firefly glow.
Stay still and hear the rustle of their wings.
Open like a flower
and let them feed from your heart.
Don’t be afraid to remember
that your soul has wings
and you have a place to go flying.
The dreams are coming back

 

 

Dream Archaeology and Vanishing Smoke

In 2012 I was honored to be invited to present the third annual lecture in memory and celebration of John G. Neihardt, the remarkable poet and scholar who gave us Black Elk Speaks, the classic and essential work on spiritual vision in Native American tradition. I spoke about how Neihardt's dreams were his passport to the Lakota holy man, just as my dreams have been my passport to wisdom keepers of other cultures, from the Mohawk to the Mununjalli of Queensland

Dreams guide us to the necessary past, to the history we need to know and use. Dreams may also trigger and direct specific lines of research. Dreaming, we have direct access to the realm of the ancestors. Sometimes they reach to us, in dreams, as an ancient priest of Nippur appeared to the Assyriologist Herman Hilprecht when he was puzzling over the meaning of two fragments of agate or as an ancient atetshents (“dreamer”) and clanmother of the Mohawk people called me to work that required me to study her language and reconstruct the shamanic dream practices of her tradition. We can choose to reach to the ancestors through dream incubation and by developing the skills of shamanic dreaming.

The practice of dream archaeology involves reclaiming authentic knowledge of ancestral traditions, including those that may have been buried or suppressed in the course of history, through a combination of careful research, active dreamwork and shamanic journeying across time and between dimensions. The dream archaeologist combines the skills of the shaman, the scholar and the detective.

We let dreams set us assignments. Secrets of the past, of which the waking mind may know nothing or very little, come to us in dreams because we are ready for them, and because the ancestors speak to us. As dream archaeologists, we work with such dreams through focused investigation, tracking that strange word, looking again at the fragments of that figurine.

We also carry our exploration into the dream space, by learning to go back inside a dream, wide awake and conscious, as an archaeological team may penetrate to previously hidden levels of a site, or the inner caves where the great revelations are to be found. I call this technique dream reentry. It is practiced wide awake and conscious, and may be a joint venture by a whole group of active dreamers. We use shamanic drumming to fuel and focus our expeditions, using a dream image as a doorway to harvest more information, open direct dialogue with the ancestors, and go to the deeper levels of reality where the meaning of things can be found.

We are open to the phenomenon that Yeats, with poetic insight, called the “mingling of minds”. This means that when we give our best efforts and passion to our chosen work or study, we draw the support of intelligences beyond the everyday world, including those of past masters in the same field.

Dream archaeology guided my research and writing, at every turning, in the creation of the three novels that comprise my Cycle of the Iroquois - Fire Along the Sky, The Firekeeper and The Interpreter - and in the retelling of Iroquois cosmology and the reclaiming of ancestral methods of shamanic dreaming in my nonfiction Dreamways of the Iroquois.

At the Neihardt Lecture,  I spoke in the presence of the Four American Kings - portraits by Jan Verelst of three Mohawk chiefs, and a Mahican, who were received like visiting sovereigns when they sailed to England in 1710 and were received by Queen Anne. I found myself dreaming into the life of one of them in the late 1980s. His name was rendered in colonial documents as Sayenqueraghta, a name I translated as Vanishing Smoke. A Mohawk of the Bear Clan, he was the grandfather of Joseph and Molly Brant. His dreaming and his war magic are reflected in the extraordinary tatttoos on his face and chest, meticulously copied by the Dutch artist, who must have wondered at their meaning and perhaps at their energy as the Mohawk posed in the typical posture of an Old World grandee.

In my novel The Interpreter, I describe the London experiences of Vanishing Smoke and the Mohawk war leader and skilled politician called Hendrick by the Dutch and the English from their own perspective. This includes the shock of finding themselves in a roiling city of over 700,000 people, when the largest city they had previously seen (Boston) had a population of only 5,000, and the Mohawk population on traditional Mohawk land had fallen to just 580 thanks to smallpox and flight to Canada.

The historian in me required me to check every detail in the historical records of the trip. The dreamer and novelist in me then enabled me to add what is not in the documents - for example, how a Bear Clan Mohawk might respond to the torment of a chained bear being mauled by attack dogs for the pleasure of gamblers, when the four "kings" were taken to a bear pit in Hockley-in-the-Hole for what the Englishmen of the time considered fine entertainment.

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Fire Along the Sky,  The Firekeeper and The Interpreter are now available in handsome new editions from Excelsior Editions, an imprint of the State University of New York Press. 

"Thank you for dreaming in our ancestral ways"

I know it is hard for some people to grasp how an Australian outsider came to find himself in the position of helping to restore lost or interrupted dreamways to Native American peoples whose ancestors called him to this work in dreams. The story is not an ordinary one. I did not go looking for the ancestors of the Onkwehonwe (the Real People, called Iroquois); they came looking for me.
    When I moved to a farm on the edge of traditional Mohawk country in upstate New York, I started dreaming into the lives of people who had lived seven generations before me - above all into the life of Sir William Johnson, an Anglo-Irishman who lived with the Mohawk and became King's Superintendent of Indians, and a Mohawk clanmother and "woman of power" who sought to influence him for the good of her people.
    The Mohawk woman called me in a lucid dream, to a meeting where she showed her wampum credentials as Mother of the Wolf Clan. She insisted that I should study her language, which was unusually difficult because she communicated in the Mohawk of nearly 300 years ago, employing a spiritual vocabulary derived from her birth people, the Huron or Wendat.
    I have described the personal odyssey that unfolded in my books Dreamways of the Iroquois and The Boy Who Died and Came Back (where I write more openly about my trans-temporary engagement with William Johnson and his world than I have cared to do previously).
     I call my dream mentor Island Woman; a Mohawk name for her birth people means People of the Island. She was captured by a Mohawk war party when she was five years old. Her precognitive dream about this led her to try to rouse her village but her people stayed asleep. In the Native American way, once taken and adopted, she was fully integrated into the Mohawk community and became a respected atetshents (dreamer, healer, shaman) as well as a clanmother. But she retains that Huron/Wendat spice in her speech, when she communicates with me across time and dimension.
     I have been honored to have many Native people from Island Woman's territory approach me for help in reclaiming the old dreamways and even the old words that have gone missing from modern vocabularies. I am blessed by the friendship of Nathalie Shendaehwas Picard, a fine Huron/Wendat musician and educator from Island Woman's birth people. She is one of the gifted Native American dreamers who have graduated from my training for teachers of Active Dreaming.
     She offers this testimonial:

Thank You to Robert for Dreaming  in Our Ancestral Ways

I am from the Turtle clan of the Huron-Wendat people of Wendake, Quebec. After almost a century of dormancy, our ancestral language is now being taught in the community.

I used to feel alone, as a Wendat dreamer when this heritage was trying to connect with me in a way that I could not really understand... Until one day, I discovered Dreamways of the Iroquois by Robert Moss, one of the most significant book that opened a door for me, changing my life and helping me connect the dots. This Australian writer who was living in NY, was dreaming in our ancestral ways, after his encounter with a Mohawk-Huron clan mother in the dreamtime. I am so grateful that he made his life journey to share with the world her teachings, in his own original innovative and empowering way.

I believe that as for our language, the same things is happening with our old ways of dreaming that has awakened, thanks to Robert Moss.

In Wendat tradition, dreams were matters of survival, guidance, medicine, power, and the best way to connect and nurture your soul.

Now, Robert's creative work is building an International community of dreamers who are weaving again a dreamspace that contains all possibilities, along with Island woman's and Robert's wisdom and makes alive the Wendat dreaming tradition.

Robert Moss "yatonwes" (I thank ) for learning Island woman's language and making your dream come true! Tho ïohtih!

--Nathalie Shendaehwas Picard, musician and dream teacher from the Turtle Clan of the Huron-Wendat people.

Photo: With  Shendaehwas at my training for teachers of Active Dreaming

Island Woman on Dreaming with the Animal Spirits

When we discover any possible power animal connection, we want to (1) study the natural habits and qualities or the animal (2) track it through folklore, mythology and spiritual traditions (3) learn from the animal itself, by journeying to it, and then with it (4) feed and honor the animal in our bodies and our lives.

    I want to let one of my great teachers on this subject speak to you on this subject. She is a true "wolf woman". Born Huron, she was adopted by the Mohawk as a child and became the mother of the Wolf Clan of the Kanienkehaka (People of the Stone, as the Mohawk call themselves in their own language) and a powerful  atetshents (dream shaman). She called me from across time. Because of her, I was required to study the Mohawk language, and she helped to put me on my path as a dream teacher.
    I call her Island Woman in my books and the drawing shows how I first saw her, in a night vision in which I was carried to her on the wings of a red-tailed hawk. Here she is, speaking on the animal spirits in my book Dreamways of the Iroquois :

"If we are not in touch with our animal spirits, we don't know how to be in our bodies or how to feed them.

    "Everybody is born with a soul in the wild, an animal double. That animal soul can move from one animal body to another, which is a good thing because animals usually have shorter lives than humans, or their lives are cut short. The needs of that animal are your needs. If your animal is a meat eater and you don't eat meat, you are going to get sick. If that animal is a runner and you don't get off your butt, you are going to get sick.

    "As you grow in power, you will meet other animal guardians. A true person of power, an arendiwanen, has many animal guardians, and when they are not traveling around, they live in power objects and in power centers inside her body. I keep some pretty big packs and herds of animals in my solar plexus, because I need extra to give to people who have lost their own animal spirits, maybe because they forgot to feed them, maybe because they chose a tame life and the animal spirits became disgusted with them....

    "Some of the kids go vision questing to get an oyaron [power animal]. To go out in the wilderness by yourself, to fast and stay up all night and know fear are good things. A powerful oyaron won't bother with anyone who isn't brave enough to face him and claim his power, and we come into knowing by being alone with the spirits. But there are powerful callings that are announced when we are sleeping in our regular space. We may think we are hunting the spirits, but it's usually the other way round. They are hunting us, which is why they can always be found. Especially in dreams."

- from "The Teachings of Island Woman" in DREAMWAYS OF THE IROQUOIS by Robert Moss. Published by Destiny Books.

Drawing of Island Woman (c) Robert Moss 

A dream prompt from a deceased scholar of the Iroquois

First of a series occasional notes on my rambles as a dream archaeologist. 

The Tuscarora ethnographer John Napoleon Brinton Hewitt was a fascinating figure who epitomized the Iroquois ability to live in two worlds. Hewitt sat patiently with the old Speakers on the reservations, married a Washington socialite, attended a Unitarian church, and, without a relevant diploma, awed droves of newly minted anthropology Ph.D.s at the Smithsonian with his inexhaustible scholarship and command of languages.
      He appeared to me in a dream when I was writing my book Dreamways of the Iroquois. He presented himself in an Edwardian wing collar and frock coat, to urge me to read his essay on Tawiskaron, the Dark Twin in Iroquois cosmology). This proved to be an invaluable source, previously unknown to me, when I was eventually able to locate in volume 2 of the long out-of-print 1910 edition of the Smithsonian Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico.

The coming of the Peacemaker

Say my name in the bushes and I will stand here again.
- promise of the Peacemaker

The shining one comes from a land across the water, from the True North. He does not enter this world in an ordinary way. He comes through a young woman who has never known the touch of a man. She has been chosen by an extraterrestrial god as the landing place for an envoy who is being sent to save humans from themselves. His human grandmother dreams his identity and his mission.
    He comes from his Earth-in-the-Sky in a time of terror when the minds of men are darkened and confused . An immense power if darkness has occupied the twisted body and diseased mind of a sorcerer-tyrant called Thadodaho, the Entangled One, and his hydra-shadow falls everywhere across the land. Humans have fallen lower than any beast, killing and raping and eating one another.
    The god-man grows up fast. Fast is essential, because he is needed urgently. He flies into the killing fields across an inland sea in a vehicle humans cannot understand. He spreads the good word that we are all related and should treat one another as kin. He announces himself as the Peacemaker. His first apostle is a fallen woman who feeds and fucks with the killers but is transformed by the shining one's radiant light, weeping tears of cleansing joy and recognition.
    But the Peacemaker is hard for most people to understand. He needs a Speaker. he goes to the house of a fallen man who has lost every vestige of his once-noble self and now devours his own kind. The Peacemaker shows the cannibal his own shining face in a mirror. The fallen man becomes Hiawatha, the Awakened One.
    Together, Hiawatha and the Peacemaker survive many ordeals and spread the word that we are all kin. They gather a gentle host, and bird-men fly ahead, scouting the way. They confront the dark sorcerer and break his power. Instead of killing the Entangled One, they cleanse and renew his mind, and raise him up to be the first of the men of good minds, the lords of the new-born Confederacy. The chiefs are crowned with deer antlers by the woman who has become the Mother of Nations, the Queen of Peace.
    One of the world's greatest experiments in enlightened government and federation has begun. It will shame and awe divided American colonists into dreaming up their own plan that evolves into the Constitution of the United States. But the story is bigger. It teaches us that psychic forces are at the root of hatred and violence, and that resolving our conflicts requires us to reach out to cleanse and heal those whose minds have become darkened and confused. It reminds us that, even in the darkest moments of human history, there are saving powers that seek to rescue us from ourselves and recall us to the soul's purpose.
    The Peacemaker's mission is for all people, and it is for now as well as then. There is still a Hiawatha in the roll call of the chiefs of the Six Nations. Though the Peacemaker returned to the Real World above the sky when his work in the Shadow World was done, he promised us that he will return when he is called by people of good minds. "Say my name in the bushes, and I will stand here again,"

Text adapted from Dreamways of the Iroquois: Honoring the Secret Wishes of the Soul by Robert Moss. Published by Destiny Books.

Graphic: Hiawatha confronts Thadodaho. Drawing by Seth Eastman after an Iroquois original, in Henry Schoolcraft, Historical and Statistical Information respecting the History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States (6 vols., 1851-7). Photo (c) Robert Moss

Dream rehearsals

I'm teaching another workshop. Our space is large and pleasant, two connecting rooms, one of which has large picture windows through which I can see public gardens. I have the group move back and forth between the two rooms, depending on whether we are doing performance, or shamanic journeying, or work in smaller groups.
    The group is eager for me to speak about Iroquois dreaming traditions, and I embark on this in a leisurely way, by noting that the word "Iroquois" does not exist in the language of the Six Nations of the Longhouse, who call themselves Onkwehonwe (Real People, in Mohawk) or Haudenosonee (Longhouse People, in Seneca). "Iroquois" is a word borrowed by whites from tribes that were traditionally hostile to those who are now called Iroquois. Some say it means "rattlesnake". More likely, it is a term we owe to Basque fishermen who came into contact with Algonquians around the mouth of the St. Lawrence river in the 17th century. They developed a pidgin language for trade, and in this frontier argot the Mohawk and their kin - feared enemies of the Algonquians - were called Hilokoa, the Killer People. The French who became masters of eastern Canada heard this as "Iroquois" and this version stuck. Many members of the Six Nations are content for it to be used in English or French, and I used it in the title of one of my books, Dreamways of the Iroquois.
    There is great excitement as I go on talking in informal professorial style, but I am watching the time because I want to give the circle the experience of group shamanic dream journeying. We have been seated in the inner room, which has few if any windows. I go to check the state of things in the other room, with the picture windows, and find that there is a problem. People walking in the park are curious. Some have their noses pressed to the glass. A few have even wandered into our space and are looking at items on the altar, having found a sliding door unlocked. I shoo them away and call for our coordinator to put up signs and make sure the doors are locked and our space is secure.
    Now I notice a man in the group who has been sleeping on the floor in here while the rest of us were in the other room. I quite like him, and was truck by the depth of his connection with the Western Mystery traditions. He stirs from his sleep and apologizes that he's exhausted from all his overnight studies and experiments. I gently suggest that he might need to get his head out of the old books and into the space of fresh possibilities.

I woke from the dream this morning feeling cheerful, recognizing that I have probably been coached for quite specific issues involving a future workshop. I do occasionally give workshops in spaces within parks and public gardens, and I'll watch our need to ensure that our space is private and protected under those circumstances. I'll be prepared for the sleepy esotericist, and I'll be encouraged not to hold back in sharing my research as an independent scholar, especially into Iroquoian traditions.
    It is also possible that I led a workshop, in a parallel reality, overnight. Many people report attending workshops with me in their dreams, and I'll be curious to see whether any report a situation like this.
    "Workaday" dreams of this kind (dreaming with people in interesting spaces is my everyday work, and play) are often the ones from which we can extract immediate and practical guidance on how to prepare for coming events. Before I led my first public dream workshop, I dreamed the exact number of participants and also that there would be a problem with a man who would try to record the session without asking permission. In the dream, I saw him fiddling with a micro-recorder under a dark jacked while seated next to a grand piano. In the workshop the following evening, a man in a dark jacket sat next to the piano. As soon as he reached for his recorder, I was able to stop him pressing the Play button, because my dream had rehearsed me for this.
    On another occasion, when I was scheduled to speak at a college in high summer, I dreamed that the air conditioning system in the lecture room was so loud that people could not hear me; we were posed with the choice of broiling in the summer heat or having an inaudible speaker. My action was to drive to the college and check the A/C. As in my dream, the fans were incredibly noisy. I was able to save my lecture by having it moved to another auditorium. I include many personal episodes of this type of dream rehearsal in my book Conscious Dreaming,
    Still on the theme of "workaday" dream rehearsals: the dream may come long before the event it previews. Thirteen months before leading a three-day residential retreat at a new venue, I dreamed that 67 people had signed up for one of my programs. Much of my long dream report was then devoted to bizarre and surreal scenes. At the time of the dream, I had never heard of the venue where I found - more than a year later - that 67 people were enrolled for my program. That match-up made me scout the full dream report to see what else in it might have been a helpful rehearsal. As the workshop unfolded, I recognized that the dreams participants were sharing closely resembled those "bizarre and surreal scenes" in my dream report, which now served me as a personal counselor, guiding me on how to handle specific individuals carrying specific challenges and imaginal histories.
    How could I be poised to relate a dream rehearsal to an event thirteen months later? Because I follow the discipline of keeping a detailed journal, giving a title to each entry. How could I find a report from more than a year before? Because I also live by synchronicity, in this case using a specific and fun version of bibliomancy (divination by opening a book at random) that for now I'll call journal-mancy (since imerologiomancy seems a bit too much). I opened an old journal at random on the morning of that three-day retreat, and out fluttered a closely-typed three-page report that began "There are 67 people enrolled for my workshop."
    When people who remember dreams tell me they can't recall dreaming a future event, I say: Look again. Ask of any and every dream, and especially the workaday ones, Is it remotely possible that this will play out in the future? If the answer is, Yes, then consider whether the dream is more than precognitive; it could be a rehearsal that will help you to prepare for coming events and shape then for the better.

Dress rehearsal for "The Mikado" at the Savoy theater, 1895