The Hermit Crab, Garfield the Cat and the Space Alien Game

When I am sharing dreams I often enjoy playing the Space Alien Game. This means asking the dreamer to explain a character or element in the dream as if speaking to an extra-terrestrial who has just dropped in from another star system and has little or no idea of how things operate on Earth. Speaking as an inter-galactic drop-in, I may ask you to explain a refrigerator, or a hippopotamus, or George Clooney. If we are talking about George, it won't be enough to tell me that he is a movie star, because I may never have heard of films or actors. You are going to have to explain what is a cinema, and what is a role - and what roles you most associate with Clooney.
     I once played the Space Alien Game with a dream of Garfield the Cat. During a break in an evening lecture for a church group, a very earnest woman approached me with a question. She wanted to know whether she could meet her guardian angel in her dreams. "Absolutely!" I told her without hesitation.
    I started to explain dream incubation. "I've done that," she cut me short. "I've read your book Conscious Dreaming and I know about setting intentions for dreams. The problem is, I asked three times to meet my guardian angel. And three times I got Garfield the Cat."
    It struck me that the original meaning of "angel" - άγγελος - in Greek is "messenger". Was there some sense in which Garfield could be a messenger for a woman who had clearly given much of her life to service for others?
    "Pretend I've just landed from another star system," I invited her. "I've never seen the funny pages and I know almost nothing about humans or their imaginations. Tell me who is Garfield the Cat."
     "Well, he's greedy and selfish and always looking out for Number One."
     "Is there a sense in which he could be a messenger?"
     She thought for a moment, then glanced at the line at the well-stocked buffet. "Do you think it would be okay if I jumped the line and got a piece of chocolate cake before it's all gone."
     "Garfield would say, Go for it!"
     She ran to the buffet, shouting, "Garfield told me to do it!" and came back with chocolate cake and the grin of a mischievous child all over her previously solemn face.

I played the Space Alien Game on another occasion with a dream of a hermit crab. A woman artist who felt trapped in a hollow marriage told me that for years she had dreamed of a hermit crab, or a succession of them.
    "I've just arrived from Arcturus," I informed her.'"Tell me about the hermit crab."
    "It's a sea creature. It's different from other crabs because it doesn't grow a shell of its own. It borrows the shells of other creatures. It moves from house to house."
     Her eyes widened in recognition as she made the last statement. "I know what the hermit crab is telling me," she said with sudden conviction. "It's telling me I no longer need to stay trapped in a borrowed house that no longer suits me."
     She took decisive action to honor this insight. She took on a teaching job her husband had told her she would never be able to fulfill, asserting her own value and moving towards financial independence. She started spending more time by the sea which she recognized as her natural habitat, and made a series of paintings celebrating the freedom of wind and wave and light. When she was ready to leave the marriage, she met a new partner who was able to fulfill emotional and sexual needs that had long been repressed.

In our Active Dreaming approach to sharing dreams, we recognize that it is the task of the guide to help the dreamer become author of meaning for her own dreams, and her own life. Asking a dreamer to explain a dream element to an innocent or mystified ET can bring up deep levels of knowing that had not previously entered consciousness. As with any of our processes, we always want the exchange to end with action to embody the guidance and energy of the dream in physical life. This may bring back the playful child to the over-serious adult. It may free the creative spirit from the confining shell of a sterile relationship.These are examples of real magic, which is the art of bringing gifts from one world into another world.

Many faces of the Guide

The Guide can take many forms, in dreams and on the roads of waking life. Our true spiritual teachers often use shock or humor in their efforts to wake us up to the real nature of things, and they love to play dress-up.
     An earnest woman in a church group once asked me, at the break, whether she could meet her guardian angel in her dreams. "Absolutely", I told her. When I began to explain the process of dream incubation, she interrupted me. "I've done that three times, and each time I asked to meet my guardian angel, I got Garfield the Cat."
     I asked her to explain to a visiting space alien, "Who is Garfield the Cat?" She explained that he's greedy and always looking out for Number One. "Angel means messenger", I pointed out to her. Could there be a message in Garfield's approach to life? This earnest woman, who had clearly given a lot of her life to service to others, thought about this, then stole a quick look at the buffet and asked, with a mischievous glint in her eyes, "Would it be okay to jump the line and get some chocolate cake while it's still left? I reassured her that Garfield, as guardian angel, would say "Absolutely.”
    The angel can be terrifying as well as funny. Rumi evokes beautifully the terror Mary felt when the Archangel Gabriel appeared to her in the moment of annunciation. In the presence of a supremely greater power, she literally jumps out of her skin. Whereupon the angel who is patron of the astral realm and of dream travel says to her (in paraphrase): "You flee from me from the seen to the unseen, where I am lord and master? What are you thinking of?"

    The truth of our dealings with higher sources of knowledge - and above all the Guide of our soul - is that we don't need to go looking for them because they are forever looking for us. When Dante at last finds Beatrice (the Guide appearing in the form of a beautiful women he loved and lost) after the terrible journey through all the hells of the medieval imagination, she reproaches him that for many years she was seeking him in dreams, and he would not listen.

    The Australian Aborigines say that the Big stories are hunting the right people to tell them. It's like that with the powers of the deeper world. Here's a poem I wrote about this:

Hunting Power

You say you are hunting your power

But your power is hunting you.
I'll go up to the mountain, you say.
I'll fast and live on seaweed
I'll hang myself on a meat-hook
Under the hot sun. I'll give up sex
And wine and my sense of humor.What are you thinking of?
For you to go hunting your power
Is as smart as the mouse hunting the cat.

Go out in the garden any night
Step one inch outside the tame land
And you are near what you seek.
Open the window of your soul
Any night and your guide may come in.
The issue is whether you'll run away
When you see what it is. To make sure
You succeed, tether yourself like a goat
At the edge of the tiger wood that breathes
Right beside your bed. He'll come.

"Hunting Power" is in my collection Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories published by Excelsior Editions (State University of New York Press).

Drawing by RM