Why the Dead Come Calling

 

Handsome Lake, the Seneca Iroquois prophet, said that the distance between the living and the dead is exactly as wide as the edge of a leaf of the maple tree. There may be not distance at all, just variable receptivity.

In dreams, the departed come calling. They call us on the phone, they email, they show up at the door, they appear right inside our bedrooms, or meet us in a familiar or unfamiliar space. Let's look at some of the main reasons for these visitations.

 

The Dead Come to Seek or Extend Forgiveness

One of the most important things we need to understand in our relations with the deceased is that healing and forgiveness are possible across the apparent barrier of death. This can be the key for people on both sides to heal and get on with their growing. 

It sometimes seems as if one of the assignments our departed set for themselves - or have prescribed for them by their coaches and counselors on the Other Side - is to reach back to survivors not only to seek forgiveness and closure but to achieve understanding and balancing. When this succeeds, it can break the family curse of abusive or destructive behaviors passed on from generation to generation.  

 

The Dead Come to Settle Unfinished Business

Brian's deceased friend appeared in a dream and said with fierce clarity, "Where is that book you took from my library?"  

What is "unfinished business" for one of our deceased may extend to achieving a lucid understanding of what happened in the life they have just left, preparatory to moving on to new life experiences. Yeats suggested that in an early and important phase of the afterlife transitions, the dead engage in "Dreaming Back", revisiting the scenes of their previous life, essentially to get the story straight and understand what is really going on. During the Dreaming Back, they interact with the living, in shared or overlapping dreams.

 

The Dead Bring a Warning or Health Advisory

Once they are free of their physical bodies and physically-oriented assumptions about the rules of reality, our dead can become extremely helpful and reliable psychic advisers, since they can see across space and time quite easily. We have this ability too, but while we are encased in physical bodies and self-limiting beliefs about physical laws and linear time, we often forget to use our ability to see beyond these things. Departed friends and loved ones very frequently turn up in dreams to pass on health advisories. They are especially sensitive to health problems that tend to run in families. 

Our dead may come to us in dreams with warnings and advisories of any kind. The Chinese Book of Zuo relates that the dead father of a general called Han Jue appeared to him on the eve of battle and told him that in the fighting the next day he should avoid veering to either right or left and lead always from the center. The general was victorious in battle, but the enemies' arrows killed all the men immediately to the right and left of his chariot.

 

The Dead Return as Guides and Family Angels.

A young woman I'll call Kirsty lost her grandmother - a proud, creative, take-charge kind of woman - around the same time she developed a rare and serious illness. She then received a dream visitation from her grandmother, who told her, "I've arranged to be around for two more years. You and I have lots of work to do together, Sunshine." When Kirsty enrolled for an expensive series of therapy sessions, she dreamed that she heard her grandmother's voice on her answering machine. She did not want to pick up for fear that her grandmother would not really be there. 

"Pick up, Sunshine," her grandmother's voice encouraged her. When Kirsty did so, her grandmother said, "You can save a bunch on those therapy sessions if you meditate on your nickname. You are Sunshine, right? Be Sunshine! Let it stream through every cell in your body!"

With the words, Kirsty felt waves of healing light and energy rolling through her body. She proceeded to make it a practice to sit with the sun and invoke a flow of inner sunlight every day, and this felt profoundly healing. In another dream, Kirsty's grandmother called to say she was going to help her arrange a move from her apartment in Manhattan to a house with a garden, and trees, and sunlight. 

Though Grandma was not visible in the flurry of real estate moves that followed, she had been very adept at this kind of thing, and Kirsty was buoyed by the feeling that she was active behind the scenes. It took less than a week to sell her condo, and she managed the house purchase in just one day. Magic. Grandma called again to say she wanted to support Kirsty in developing a new relationship. Nothing controlling, just a blessing. Kirsty was thrilled to find herself entering a warm and loving new relationship with a man who was not afraid of commitment. Kirsty's grandmother loved to paint cardinals. At her new house, Kirsty sees them all the time, glorious flashes of bright red among the greens.

 

The Dead Come to Prepare Us for Death

One of the most important reasons our dead visit us in dreams is to prepare us for our own crossings. It is very reassuring to know that we have friends and escorts on the Other Side. These death guides may include beloved animals, as well as humans, who have shared our lives. Valerie was sitting in her family home, exhausted from taking care of her very ill mother. She was dozing when she felt a presence. She looked up and saw her father, who had died years before. He said nothing, smiled a beautiful radiant smile and held out his hand. Then she saw her mother standing in front of him. Her mother took her father's hand, and they vanished. When the nursing home called to tell her that her mother had passed, she discovered that he mother had died at the same time she had seen her father come for her in the dream.  

 

The Dead Want to Pass on a Message through Us

The dead may call on us to pass on a message to someone who is disconnected - a person who is not picking up his or her own messages. This is frequently the case when an emergency is impending, and a dead well-wisher urgently wants to get an advisory through to someone who won't pick up the phone or answer the door. The dead caller will turn to someone else in the neighborhood who is more receptive and may be willing to pass the message along, directly or indirectly. This is likely to work best if the "sensitive" is family or a friend of one or both parties.

But if the message is really urgent, and nobody else is available, the dead caller may try to communicate through someone who is a relative outsider. A great many people approaching death try to blank out their awareness of what is coming, instead of using the last stages of life as an opportunity to get ready for a grand adventure that opens new vistas of growth and learning. The elderly may actively refuse to communicate with departed family and friends, because there is bad blood or, quite simply, because they are trying to avoid their appointment with death.

 

The Dead Come to Show Us their Realm

One of the most familiar and important reasons the departed appear in our dreams is as guides to the realms beyond physical life. A departed loved one - including a beloved former pet - may be the soul-guide, or psychopomp, who makes it easy for us to approach the big journey beyond physical death with courage and grace. 

I have heard many, many accounts of this, and have been blessed to help introduce many dying people to guides with familiar faces from the other side. Here is one: "My father visited my mother looking like he did when he was courting her. She was grieving and he told her he wanted to describe the beautiful valley she would first see. He showed her in a dream a vale filled with wildflowers, birds singing, and a small brook running through. He told her he could not present it the way it really looked, that it was more beautiful than anything she could ever imagine."

 

The Dead Come as Guardians and Guides

The ancients believed that the illustrious dead may intervene as daimons or demigods to strengthen and support the living. Plutarch located the base for helpful daimons who were formerly humans in the astral realm of the moon.

 

The Dead Need Guidance from Us

The dead come calling in our dreams because they need help or guidance from us - often because they are lost or lonely or stuck somewhere not very far away. They of course have guides available on the Other Side, but they may have remained so physically oriented, enmeshed in their dense energy bodies, that they are inclined to trust someone who has a physical body more than a being who does not. Or they may simply be shy about getting to know new people.

Yeats observed, with poetic insight, that "the living have the ability to assist the imaginations of the dead". I know this to be true, since I have been called on many times to help survivors to assist departed family members to move beyond stuck places by growing their imaginations and becoming more aware of new real estate options and life possibilities on the Other Side.

 Jung described a dream in which he found himself at "an assemblage of distinguished spirits". He was asked some complex questions, but the conversation was in Latin and he was embarrassed that his command of this language was not sufficient for him to respond. The dream spurred him to abandon his holiday and rush home on the train to work on an answer to the question. He later concluded that the question had been put to him by "spiritual forefathers in the hope and expectation that they would learn what they had not been able to find out during their time on earth, since the answer had first to be created in the centuries that followed."  [1]

Jung subsequently speculated that "the souls of the dead 'know' only what they knew at the moment of death, and nothing beyond that" - contrary to the "traditional views" that the dead possess great knowledge. [2] 

I think it is certainly entirely possible that after death people try to attain an awareness that may have escaped them during life. But there are other possible explanations for Jung's experiences. One is that he was actually communicating across time - speaking to people from early periods not in their postmortem state but as they are in their own now time. Frederic Myers trembled on the edge of recognizing this possibility, when he floated the idea of "the permanence or simultaneity of all phenomena in a timeless Universal Soul". [3]. 

 

References

1 C.G.Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Ed. Aniela Jaffé. New York : Vintage, 1965, 307. 
2. ibid 308
3. F.W.H .Myers, Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death. Volume 2 London: Longmans, Green, 1903, 76

Text adapted from The Dreamer's Book of the Dead by Robert Moss. Published by Destiny Books. 

Photo: Cemetery in Ann Arbor by RM

Paleopsych 101

At a benefit dinner, the wife of a bank president asked me, “What exactly is it that you do?”

      I told her, “I’m a paleolithic psychologist.”

     She nodded respectfully, possibly associating me with the clinical psychiatrist seated above the salt.

I had stolen the phrase from Frederic Myers, the great Victorian psychic researcher. Myers coined the term Paleolithic psychology as an erudite joke, to describe “the habits of thought of the savage who believes that can travel in dreams.”  He apologized to his respectable readers for “the apparent levity of a return to conceptions so enormously out of date” — while sowing the seed of doubt that “modern science” had actually surpassed the “primitive” understanding of the soul.

     Myers chose the path of true science, which is always ready to revise the reigning hypotheses in the light of fresh evidence.  In his master work Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death, he wrote: “My own ignorance…I recognize to be such that my notions of the probable or improbable in the universe are not of weight enough to lead me to set aside any facts which seem to me well-attested.” He arrived at a “root-conception” of “the dissociability of the self, of the possibility that different fractions of the personality can act so far independently of each other that the one is not conscious of the other’s actions,” and that “segments of the personality can operate in apparent separation from the organism.” Myers observed such phenomena in “true apparitions” of the departed, but also in “traveling clairvoyance” by living persons, which sometimes produce “phantasms of the living” that are visible in other places.

     In his book Primitive Culture, Myers’s contemporary Edward Tylor, who held the first chair of anthropology at Oxford, beautifully summarized the challenge to modern science that is posed by shamans and frequent fliers who are at home with the spirits and often journey in their realms:

The issue raised by the comparison of savage, and civilized spiritualism is this: do the red Indian medicine man, the Tatar necromancer, the Highland ghost-seer and the Boston medium share the possession of a belief and knowledge of the highest truth and import, which, nevertheless, the great intellectual movement of the last two centuries has simply thrown aside as worthless? Is what we are habitually boating of and calling new enlightenment, then, in fact a decay of knowledge? If so, this is a truly remarkable case of degeneration and the savages on whom some ethnographers look as degenerate from a higher civilization may turn on their accusers and charge them with having fallen from the high level of savage knowledge.

The basic insights of paleopsychology are as follows:

1. Spirits are real.
2. We are not alone: we live in a multidimensional universe peopled with beings — spirits of nature, gods and daimons, angels and ancestors — who take a close interest in our affairs and influence our lives for good or ill.
3. We are more than our bodies and brains, which are only vehicles for soul.
4. The soul survives the death of the body.
5. Soul journeying is the key to the spiritual worlds and the knowledge of ultimate reality. The soul makes excursions outside the body in dreams and visions. The heart of spiritual practice is to learn to shift consciousness at will and travel beyond time and space. Through soul-flight, we return to worlds beyond the physical plane in which our lives have their source and are able to explore many dimensions of the Otherworld.
6. Souls are corporeal, though composed of much finer substance than the physical body.
7. People have more than one soul. In addition to the vital soul that sustains physical life — closely associated with the breath — there is a “free soul,” associated with the dreambody, which can travel outside the body and separates from it at physical death, as well as an enduring spirit whose home is on the higher planes.
8. Souls — or pieces of soul — can be lost or stolen. This is the principal  cause of disease and misfortune.
9. Some people have more souls than others and have the ability to make excursions to different places at the same time.
10. At death, different vehicles of soul go to different lots. Through conscious dreaming, it is possible to explore the conditions of the afterlife to prepare for one’s death and to assist souls of the dying and departed.
11. We are born with counterparts in nature. For example, we are born with a totem animal and a relationship with natural forces (wind or water or lightning) that are part of our basic identity and help to pattern the natural flow of our energy.
12. We are born with counterparts in other places and times, and in other dimensions of reality. When we encounter them through interdimensional travel, they become allies and sometimes teachers.

Text adapted from Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and LifeBeyond Death by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.


Art: Henri Breuil's sketch of "The Sorcerer", a painting found in the cavern known as "The Sanctuary" at Trois-Frères, Ariège, France

The dream holds true in half the total universe

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James observed that "The founders of every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine."

   That “direct personal communion" has been conducted through dreams and visions and interior dialogue and observation of signs and marvels in the natural world, all facets of dreaming in the broader sense understood by our ancestors and by active dreamers in all cultures. James reminds us that religion without dreaming is divorced from its very origins.
   In a letter to Henry Rankin on June 16, 1901, he put it this way: "The mother sea and fountainhead of all religions lie in the mystical experiences of the individual, taking the word mystical in a very wide sense. All theologies and ecclesiasticisms are secondary growths superimposed."  Borrowing from his friend, the great British psychic researcher and scholar, Frederic Myers, James explained that "mystical consciousness" is related to the existence of an "extended subliminal self, with a thin partition through which messages make irruption."
   For most of us, it is through dreams that the subliminal self most frequently irrupts through that "thin partition" into everyday awareness.
   In Principles of Psychology, James offers these interesting reflections on the orders of reality we may enter in dreams, and why dreaming is our mode of experiencing half the "total universe":

The world of dreams is our real world whilst we are sleeping, because our attention then lapses from the sensible world. Conversely, when we wake the attention usually lapses from the dream-world and that becomes unreal. But if a dream haunts us and compels our attention during the day it is very apt to remain figuring in our consciousness as a sort of sub-universe alongside of the waking world. Most people have probably had dreams which it is hard to imagine not to have been glimpses into an actually existing region of being, perhaps a corner of the spiritual world.

And dreams have accordingly in all ages been regarded as revelations, and have played a large part in furnishing forth mythologies and creating themes for faith to lay hold upon. The 'larger universe,' here, which helps us to believe both in the dream and in the waking reality which is its immediate reductive, is the total universe, of Nature plus the Super-natural. The dream holds true, namely, in one half of that universe; the waking perceptions in the other half. 

Dwell with that last statement for a moment.  The dream "holds true" in half the "total" universe, and is our way to access and experience this reality. If James is correct, then if we have divorced ourselves from dreaming, we are only halflings, only half present in the universe.