Azurite Call

I had a crystal and showed many how to see in it and an even larger number to see visions according to the method of my Order.

-  Yeats, Memoirs 

My favorite dead poet showed me around a magic cottage he said was on the fourth level of the astral plane. He let me handle an azurite crystal and recommended that I should use one for scrying in the spirit vision as he and his Mystery associates did. Back in the ordinary world, I could not find an azurite crystal that matched his, though I can create one in meditation and use it as a spyglass, a laser pointer, or a transporter. I was inspired to return to the primal art of divination by rock reading and to embark on new expeditions to worlds we can find inside a stone. Here is a little more of the story, playing across many years.

Twenty years ago, in the Library of the House of Time, a place in the Real World beyond consensual hallucination, a dead poet called me to climb a steep spiral staircase I had not noticed before. When I reached the top, he transported both of us to a different locale: a pleasant country cottage. Flower beds bordered the path. From the window of his study, I could look out over changing landscapes, including the Byzantium and Renaissance Italy of his poems. He showed me secret journals and held up a marvelous deep blue crystal.
   “The azurite crystal,” he specified. He urged me to use it to open the third eye fully and see what I most needed to see. I had the impression that the crystal is not only a spyglass but a transporter. It can carry the user – if he is prepared and ready – as far as the Blue Star.
    Yeats explained that his magic cottage is on the fourth level of the astral plane. That did not sound high enough, in terms of the Theosophers' atlases of astral and causal planes. But it is the poet's place and I must assume that he knows his own address.
    After this encounter, I wanted an azurite spyglass. A gemmologist friend doused some of my blue fire by telling me that it is almost impossibe to find an azurite crystal as large as the one in Yeats's fist. I settled for a chunk of azurite stone, the size of a shooter marble but rough. The stone was held precious by both Egypt and Ireland; the Egyptians crushed it to make the blue pigment with which they colored the skin of gods and kings; the scribes who made the Book of Kells used powdered azurite to paint capital letters. This is the blue of deities and of royalty.
    If I unfocus my eyes and look at it close up, my blue stone becomes a mountain range, with a glacier or cool river of lighter blue falling down its slopes and a great open-mouthed fish in its waters. There is something of the lemniscate, the infinity sign, in the general shape. As I let my imagination loose as a leopard in this world, I see intricate knotty designs, pictographs, giant faces. A great beast with open jaws, a low brow, a great sloping muzzle. It could be a bear, or a boar, but when I see it in profile, it looks most like a lion
    I am shocked to find a face within the face. This is definitely human, and it is the face of a king. Strong and stern face, long-nosed, piercing dark eyes, slightly slanting, a short beard. Above his head, crenellations that suggest a crown. Is he the master of the Beast, or does the Beast have his head?
    I turn the stone and it shows me a second face, that might be at home on Easter Island. Another turn reveals a bird-woman, with heron legs and a beak.
    I contemplate the Beast who holds the head of a king as Yama holds the Wheel of Life on the walls of Buddhist temples. My mind turns, like the wheel, to another life and another journey.
    Before Yeats called to me from the turning stair, I made an expedition to a site in the Real World we call the Cave of the Ancestors. I found the opening I needed behind the hard spray of a waterfall. I searched rock paintings for messages. I was called by the glow of light from a standing stone to brave a mess of black adders. The stone became translucent, showing me the figure of a man who was desperate for help. Bearded and crowned, torn and bleeding, he was ready to destroy himself if his appeal to another time and another world went unheard. Something gave me the courage to drop my body and track him through the electric blue light inside the stone into his broken kingdom, to do battle with a dark power.
    Now I am holding another world between my thumb and forefinger. There are endless worlds, as Vasistha taught Rama. Any number may be found inside a stone. 

Drawing: "Yeats in the Magic Cottage" by Robert Moss

"What better guide to the Other Side than a poet?"

“What better guide to the Other Side than a poet?”

     The question was put to me by a dead poet, as I embarked on writing The Dreamer's Book of the Dead. I did not know, up to that moment, that a modern poet and his efforts to envision and create a Western Book of the Dead were going to figure as the central panel in the triptych my book was to become. 

      It seems to me that the true poet has two gifts that are vital for a reliable and effective psychopomp, or guide of souls. The first is the magic of words: passwords that open gates, and the power of naming that can bind or appease gatekeepers or even bring things into being. Shamans and initiates of all traditions know that poetic speech is important.

    The second gift of the poet as Otherworld guide is that poets live by metaphor and are therefore friends of metamorphosis – inclined by their calling to shapeshift realities, averse to being penned in any routine concept of what is solid or ‘real’.

      What better guide to the Other Side than a poet? The more I think about it, the more the answer seems clear: none better.

The poet who posed the question died seven years before I was born. You know his name: William Butler Yeats.

     Our conversations took place in a space that was outside the physical world, but quite real to me and to others who have learned – and been invited – to go there. It is a place like a library, inside a complex building I have come to call the House of Time. There are fierce guardians at the gates of the building.   

     This is, of course, a magic library. You can find a book on any subject that pleases you, and – as in the children’s movie ‘The Pagemaster’ – when you open any book you may be transported into the scenes or dramas that it concerns. 

     Yes, the magic library is a ‘made-up’ place. But so is the Sears Building or the Eiffel Tower in the sense that they are products of thought and imagination. The magic library may outlast either of those physical structures. It has its own stability, now that generations of visitors have been here and contributed the energy of their own imagination and passion for study. It is a real place in the imaginal realm, which for initiates of many traditions is more real, not less real, than the physical plane. 

     Yeats was no stranger. I had always loved his poetry and have been able – since elementary school – to recite long passages from memory. I have had dreams and visions of Yeats and his circle for as long as I can remember. He was not only a marvelous poet; he was a Western magus, one of the leading figures in the Order of the Golden Dawn.I had met him many times before, in dreams and reverie.
     On one of my visits to the library of the House of Time, while I was drumming for a group and helping to hold the space for what Yeats called ‘mutual visioning’, I found myself drawn from the ground level of the library up a corkscrew staircase.  Yeats was waiting for me, lounging at a table on a mezzanine. He appeared as he might have in his prime, broad-shouldered, his hair flowing, gold-rimmed spectacles on the bridge of his patrician nose, wearing a loosely knotted silk bow tie and a three-piece light-colored suit. I sat with him at the table and we had a mental conversation – no need to speak aloud here, and anyway libraries are meant to be quiet - that ranged far and wide and gave me crucial counsel for my life as writer.

Since I grew up on Homer and Virgil and struggled to read Dante in medieval Italian when I was a student, I was aware that poets are extraordinary guides to the Other Side.  All the same, I was shocked when my Yeats made a spontaneous appearance, and proposed that I should let him be my guide to the Other Side. He suggested that my fieldwork should include interviewing quite a few dead people previously unknown to me – but not, perhaps, to him – on their post mortem experiences.

      I was on the Connecticut shore on a blustery day in mid-November when Yeats made his proposal. I was leading an advanced group of dream travelers, by common agreement, on a group journey to the Library of the House of Time. I was drumming for the circle and watching over the group both physically and psychically, allowing myself to enter the astral locale quite deeply, but with no fixed personal agenda. I checked on our dream travelers. Some were meeting a favorite author, or consulting the librarian, or opening books and travelling into the worlds of knowledge and memory and adventure that each one contained. A couple of brave souls were inspecting the books of their own lives, looking in to the future or to things beyond time – for knowledge of the soul’s purpose, and the connectedness of one life in time to other lives in other times, and to personalities beyond time. Everything seemed to be going well. No need for me to intervene to help someone overcome their fears or open the vision gates wider.

      So: my body is circling the room, my arm working the beater against the drum. My mind is tracking inside the dreamspace. And in that space, I feel the tug of a transpersonal intention. It is not coming from another member of our circle of thirty dream travelers. It is coming, quite specifically, from the figure who appears at the top of the spiral staircase that leads to an upper level of the library. It is Yeats, inviting me to join him up there, where he had called me in previous encounters. It is here that he makes his astonishing proposal: “Virgil was Dante’s guide to the Underworld, and I am willing to be yours.”

      The poet’s manner is quite brisk. He sounds rather like a tour guide announcing the schedule we’ll follow before a pub lunch. Next time we meet, Yeats advises me, we’ll visit the place of an ancient king. Later, we may delve ‘into the realm of Maeve’. Most certainly, I will need to interview quite a variety of people on their experiences of the afterlife, because these vary so greatly.

     Yeats insists on the need for me to understand the importance of Ben Bulben, the ‘bare’ mountain under which he had wanted to be buried – in Drumcliff churchyard – with the following inscription carved on his tombstone:

Cast a cold eye

On life, on death

Horseman, pass by

     Those lines had been with me since childhood, so I was a little wary of what I was receiving. I have a vivid imagination, and it seemed rather likely that it was weaving from half-buried memories. The idea that Yeats could play the role for me that Virgil played for Dante was absolutely thrilling, but was this anything more than a pleasant fantasy?

      The creator’s answer moved through me: Just let it play. Enter the game, and let the results be judged on their own merits. Whether you are talking to the actual Yeats, or the part of yourself that so loves him, or some daimon or essence of personality that is using the mask of the poet is of secondary interest. What is primary is what you bring through.

      Need I say that this offer was quite impossible to refuse?

      No sooner had I accepted the offer than synchronicity came into play, as may be counted upon when emotions are running high and bold ventures are unfurling their sails.

       I drove home from Connecticut and found a message waiting for me from a friend who had traveled in Yeats country in the west of Ireland the previous year. She had decided, for no obvious reason, to share with me her feeling that the barrows and faery mounds of Ireland had been used across the centuries as sites of shamanic initiation and interdimensional communication – even as launchpads for star travelers, coming or going.

     I shivered with excitement as I recognized the link with Yeats’s inaugural itinerary, involving two ancient tumuli in his own landscape. I hurried to research the names that Yeats had given me. My excitement deepened when I found that ‘Queen Maeve’s Tomb’ – a huge cairn that has never been opened – is right opposite Ben Bulben, at whose foot is Drumcliff churchyard where Yeats wished to be buried.

     In Yeats’s early book The Celtic Twilight, I found a passage in which he says that there is a gate to the Otherworld in the side of Ben Bulben, “famous for hawks” – “the mountain in whose side the square white door swings open at nightfall to loose the faery riders on the world.”

      I called the friend who had sent me the message, out of the blue, about the cairns of Ireland. She described how, as she drove by Ben Bulben, her Irish guide had pointed out a strange shadow moving across the side of the mountain and declared that Yeats believed that this marked a door to the Otherworld of the Sidhe and the ancestors.

      My encounters with Yeats have guided me to travel to ancient sites in the west of Ireland that were places of vision for him and portals to the realms of the ancestors and the Sidhe. 

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

Photo: Ben Bulben from Yeats' gravesite by Wanda Burch

Drawing: "Yeats in the Magic Cottage" by Robert Moss
Photo: Swan on the Door of St Columba's, Drumcliffe by RM

Architects of the Imaginal Realm

"You are a space architect,"one of my students declares. "You create tents of vision and bring us inside for shared adventures."
     I like the idea that I am an architect of imaginal space. I dream of scholar cities and pleasure domes, of temples and libraries in a real world that is constantly and delightfully under construction. I invite others to accompany me to the Moon Café, and the House of Time, to the Silver Airport and the Cosmic Video Store. I give them route maps and floor plans. I tell them how to deal with gatekeepers, what to offer and what to leave behind.
     I help invited visitors to frame their intentions: to meet a guide or an ancestral soul, to find a find a new song or look (if they dare) in their Book of Life, to design a home on the Other Side, to embrace a lover in an apple orchard at the edge of Faerie. I don’t lead them around like a tour guide. I open space, then turn them loose to make fresh discoveries on their own.
    The travelers add to the locations they visit. Their very presence makes the ground more solid, the structures more durable and more complex. They are composed of subtle stuff, but may endure longer than buildings of steel and concrete.
     The taste and imagination of visitors add flourishes and sometimes whole floors. In these ideoplastic environments, every visitor is a builder and decorator. A bronze mirror replaces a daguerreotype; a cello is heard in a music room that wasn't there before; a wall of books in the Magic Library rolls back to reveal a druid wood; golden carp gleam in the pool of the Garden of Memory.
    I created a huge tent, the kind used for family reunions and elegant outdoor weddings, and told my invited guests that they could come here to encounter and reclaim multiple aspects of self and soul. I showed group after group the way to this House of Gifts, and to make sure they did not get lost, I assigned the sheepdog of shamanic drumming to sort out their brainwaves. These visits produced marvels. Then I noticed that what I had raised as a tent had grown in wondrous ways. From one side, it looked like a fairytale castle; from another, like a Victorian mansion with many wings and countless rooms to open one by one.
     The act of observation, we are informed by quantum physics, makes things, even worlds. Looking brings definite events into manifestation out of a soup of possibilities, Heisenberg's "world of tendencies." Frequent explorers of the Imaginal Realm are quite familiar with the observer effect. I am constantly astonished, though rarely surprised, by how the travelers who follow my maps change what they look at. There is now a pink woman with an elephant's head at the ticket counter of the Cinema of Lost Dreams, and there is a three-headed oracle on the dark side of the Moon.

Art: René Magritte. "The House", 1947.

Three Words from Emerson in the House of Time

While leading an adventure in Active Dreaming, I guided a group of brave and ready souls on a journey to a real place in the Imaginal Realm that I call the House of Time. It is the kind of locale that creators, shamans and mystics have always wanted to visit, a place where we may encounter an inner teacher who is the master of any field that compels our best attention and study, and where any book of secrets - even that Book of Life containing our sacred contract - may be accessible. If you would like to go there, you’ll find detailed instructions in my book Dreamgates.

      While drumming for the group to provide fuel and focus for the journey to the Library in the House of Time, I found myself in contact with intelligences who have guided and inspired my work in the past. It seemed that Ralph Waldo Emerson, in high collar and frock coat, had joined the group. I do not say this was the individual spirit of the great sage; I do not claim the privilege of a personal interview, and I am sure that wherever Emerson may now be, he has many things to do. I say only that for a few moments I seemed to be in the presence of a figure who embodied some essence of Emerson's thought. I was eager to receive insights I could easily retain, while my consciousness was working on several levels, including that of drumming for the members of the group and watching over their own adventures.

    
My Emerson gave me three words: Rectitude. Plenitude. Attitude. The following morning, in the twilight before dawn, as the first pink suffused the gray sky, I tracked these clues through Emerson's essays and letters, and through the pedigrees of the terms themselves. 

RECTITUDE

In its origin, rectitude is the virtue of being straight, or upright, in your conduct and condition. It derives from the Latin rectus or straight. It has nothing to do with a narrow moralism. As Emerson wields this word, it is the property and armor of the brave soul who dares to live by his own lights. In his famous 1838 address to Harvard Divinity School - a speech the faculty tried to suppress but the senior class insisted upon - Emerson defined "the grand strokes of rectitude" as "a bold benevolence", and that independence of mind that enables us to ignore the counsel and caution of our friends when they seek to hold us back from pursuing our calling, and the readiness to follow that calling without concern for praise or profit. Those who can do this are "the Imperial Guard of Virtue" and "the heart and soul of nature." They "rise refreshed on hearing a threat"; they come to a crisis "graceful and beloved as a bride"; they can say like Napoleon at the Massena that they were not themselves until the battle began to go against them.

PLENITUDE

Plenitude is fullness or abundance, coming from the Latin plenus, or "full". For Emerson, plenitude - abundance - is our natural condition, and we miss it only by failing to live from the fullness and integrity of our own spirit. When we develop self-trust, we gain "the plenitude of its energy and power to repair harms," he instructs in his essay on Heroism. "There is no limit to the Resources of Man," he adds in a letter on that theme. "The one fact that shines through all this plenitude of powers is...that the world belongs to the energetic, belongs to the wise."

ATTITUDE

Attitude has an even more suggestive etymology. It first came into usage to describe the posture an actor playing a role strikes on the stage. Go further back, and we find it is kissing cousins with the word "aptitude" and both share a common root in the Latin aptus which means "fit" or "suited" - in short, ready something. Our attitudes indeed determine what experiences we are apt to encounter on our roads of life. "The healthy attitude of human nature," Emerson instructs us in his essay on Self-Reliance, is "the nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner" - in other words, the confidence that the universe will support us. In the face of hardship and challenge, we need to strike that posture of determination that "by [that] very attitude and...tone of voice, puts a stop to defeat," Emerson adds in his letter on Resources.

    We are now entering one of the great open secrets of life. "We are magnets in an iron globe," as Emerson wrote in an essay titled "Resources". "We have keys to all doors....The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck."  We choose which doors will open or remain closed. We decide what we will attract or repel in life according to whether we are straight, and full, and ready.

Adapted from Active Dreaming: Journeying Beyond Self-Limitation to a Life of Wild Freedom by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library. 

Painting: William James Stillman, "The Philosophers' Camp in the Adirondacks" (1858). Emerson is at the center of the scene.


Emerson portrait: Watercolor by Philadelphia artist Nile Livingston

Architects of the Imaginal Realm

"You are a space architect,"one of my students declares. "You create tents of vision and bring us inside for shared adventures."
     I like the idea that I am an architect of imaginal space.I dream of scholar cities and pleasure domes, of temples and libraries in a real world that is constantly and delightfully under construction. I invite others to accompany me to the Moon Café, and the House of Time, to the Silver Airport and the Cosmic Video Store. I give them route maps and floor plans. I tell them how to deal with gatekeepers, what to offer and what to leave behind. 
     I help invited visitors to frame their intentions: to meet a guide or an ancestral soul, to find a new song or look (if they dare) in their Book of Life, to design a home on the Other Side, to embrace a lover in an apple orchard at the edge of Faerie. I don’t lead them around like a tour guide. I open space, then turn them loose to make fresh discoveries on their own. 

    The travelers add to the locations they visit. Their very presence makes the ground more solid, the structures more durable and more complex. They are composed of subtle stuff, but may endure longer than buildings of steel and concrete.
     The taste and imagination of visitors add flourishes and sometimes whole floors.In these ideoplastic environments, every visitor is a builder and decorator. A bronze mirror replaces a daguerreotype; a cello is heard in a music room that wasn't there before; a wall of books in the Magic Library rolls back to reveal a druid wood; golden carp gleam in the pool of the Garden of Memory. 

    I created a huge tent, the kind used for family reunions and elegant outdoor weddings, and told my invited guests that they could come here to encounter and reclaim multiple aspects of self and soul. I showed group after group the way to this House of Gifts, and to make sure they did not get lost, I assigned the sheepdog of shamanic drumming to sort out their brainwaves. These visits produced marvels. Then I noticed that what I had raised as a tent had grown in wondrous ways. From one side, it looked like a fairytale castle; from another, like a Victorian mansion with many wings and countless rooms to open one by one.
     The act of observation, we are informed by quantum physics, makes things, even worlds. Looking brings definite events into manifestation out of a soup of possibilities, Heisenberg's "world of tendencies." Frequent explorers of the Imaginal Realm are quite familiar with the observer effect. I am constantly astonished, though rarely surprised, by how the travelers who follow my maps change what they look at. There is now a pink woman with an elephant's head at the ticket counter of the Cinema of Lost Dreams, and there is a three-headed oracle on the dark side of the Moon.

Image: illustration for Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities 

Ringmasters of Time's Circus

In the House of Time

Here is a place where I can slip between parallel lives.
    I step through the door of an elevator, to find that the space within is vastly greater than seems possible from the outside and the box is not much like an elevator car. There are sliding glass doors on the far side, one set after another after another.
    Only intention is required to open them. With intention, they slide apart so quickly and totally that they seem to melt away. I have come this way before, to observe parallel selves who made different choices and are leading different lives from my present self. I always find these excursions instructive. I may take comfort from the fact that I have avoided worse mistakes in my present life than in others. I may be able to borrow a gift, a lesson or a skill from a parallel self. I can remain an observer, or I can try to enter the mind and body of another self, as we often do in dreams of the night.
    Doors fly open. I consider joining the Robert who is lazing by a warm beach in the South Pacific after a long swim.  
    But wait. There are other beings around. They seem to exist in the spaces between parallel lives. How could I have failed to see them on previous visits to the Elevators of Time?
    They are in rich apparel, from different times. They could be a caravan of performers, yet each has the quality of a ringmaster, ready to preside over the entertainments. There is a huge bearded black man dressed like a grandee of the Renaissance, maybe for a production of Othello. There is a prince who has real ram's horns in his curling hair. There is a tall beauty in a bustier and glittering gauzy gown dusted with stars. There is a magician in a tall top hat and a tail coat. And others whose likenesses I fail to capture.
    Ringmasters. Yes, that is the right word for the way they preen themselves. I wonder if they are also producers, helping to shape dreams of many lives.
    I have often felt that a certain kind of dream is probably a dramatic production, arranged by an unseen set of scriptwriters, directors and special effects people. The dead are sometimes employed in making dream movies for the living.
    Those of us who are frequent fliers in the multiverse, embarking on conscious journeys into other realities are sometimes aware that roads we follow and environments we visit are products of imagination. This does not mean that they are anything less than we real. Indeed, they may be more real than much of our ordinary reality. Perhaps I shall try to interview the Ringmasters of Time's Circus.

- Report from a recent group journey I led to various locales in the House of Time.

Postscript

Now I am looking at an image of Hermes Crioforos, Hermes "Who Takes the Lamb". Hmm, I wonder whether the fellow with ram's horns in his curling hair has an ancient and interesting pedigree. 



Journal drawing (c) Robert Moss
    

Prague journal: tracking a dream itinerary in the Magic City

Prague, Czech Republic

It is dark in the part of the city where I am walking, as if there has been a blackout. I must go carefully, and be wary of shady characters in the streets.
    I arrive without incident at a gas station that is brightly illuminated. Families are gathered there with bicycles, as if about to depart on a group bike tour. Smiles and laughter, lots of happy energy. The scene feels familiar. Beyond the gas station, I must take care crossing busy roads with tram lines and converging lines of traffic.
    It is daylight when I come to a bridge. I must cross this bridge in order to get to an important meeting. I don't approach the bridge in an ordinary way, by walking a footpath or climbing up steps. I start scaling a rickety structure that seems to be part of the frame. As I climb higher, it becomes hard to find secure handholds or footholds. Metal struts are missing or hanging loose. I am now very high above a river valley, and I realize I am in real danger.
    But wait a minute. I remember that I have watched this scene on a cinema screen. I am in the middle of the action in a film in which the hero climbs a bridge in exactly this way. He gets to the top without falling. Since I am playing the hero's role, and the film is already "in the can", there is no problem. The moment I recognize this, I am across the bridge, on my way to my meeting.
    The meeting is in the offices of a film production company. The offices are rather shabby, and unfinished. In the bathroom, there is raw plaster on the walls and the sink has not yet been installed. The movie producer I am meeting seems rather coarse and vulgar, but I reflect that this is not unusual with certain types in the movie business.
    Others are there for the meeting, people who may be involved in a film we will make together. I am drawn to a handsome older woman in a blue dress. She was once a well-known singer who appeared in several films. Her glory days are over, but she is still attractive and I am intrigued by the idea that she may have a part in the film. She has a female companion, in a matching blue dress, rather plain, of the type that would be cast as a governess or housekeeper in a period English film.
    The singer opens her mouth. The jaws open wider than seems possible for a human, as wide as a big cat. Out comes an incredibly beautiful stream of sound. I am awed by this voice, and by the spectacle of the jaws opened tiger-wide. I am startled to notice that the song is not coming from the singer, but from her plain companion. There is a mystery here.

I was excited and eager to know more when I rose from this dream during my Prague workshop. I discussed it with some of my dreamers, and received helpful feedback, but the big discoveries came in a workshop session, when we formed small groups for exercises in dream reentry and tracking. This is a core technique of Active Dreaming. We take turns to share dreams we would like to explore in depth by traveling back inside the dreams, with the help of shamanic drumming. While the dreamer reenters his dream, the others in the group travel with him, providing support and gathering information.
    I shared my dream of the long journey to the film company with three Czech women. I told them I would like more details on every stage of the itinerary. I was especially interested in the strange way my dream self approached the bridge, and the mystery of the singer whose voice seemed to be another person, and in what we were doing at the film company.

I learned a lot from my own journey back through my dreamscape. It became clear to me that I was in Prague, from beginning to end, but also in an alternate reality of the kind it is very easy to access in that magical city. The gas station reminded me vividly of a period Esso gas station in a pivotal dream in my life that guided me in publishing Conscious Dreaming, my first book describing my synthesis of dreamwork and shamanism. As described in my later book Dreamgates, that dream led me to the publisher who sent me, a year later, on book tour, to a cinema in San Francisco where I found myself watching the re-release of "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg". When the male lead in the film achieves his life goal, of owning a 1950s-style Esso gas station, I recognized the key scene from my dream playing out in front of me, on the screen. So: the movie theme was clearly important. And just as important was the sense of abundant juice, and energy, available at the dream gas station. 
    One of my Czech trackers picked up on the energy theme. "The gas station is a place where you re-charge and gather energy, among a community of people who believe in your work and can carry it in all directions, each traveling in their own way, on their own vehicles."
    In my reentry, the rickety structure I was trying to climb now looked to me like a set of scribbled notes and sketches for a work-in-progress. My power to teleport over the bridge came when I realized that, on a certain level, the work has already been completed.
    The most fascinating tracking was done by the Czech woman who located my dream, stage by stage, in the geography of Prague. She described a gas station within walking distance where families and friends gather to begin group bike tours. Next, a train bridge which it would be difficult or impossible for pedestrians to walk. Then, up the hill, the offices of a Czech film company that works with many foreign film producers.

I became quite excited, since when I returned to the film company in my own reentry, it seemed that I was at a place where a movie was being developed from my work, centering on a location in the imaginal realm that I call the House of Time. I have described some of the group shamanic journeys I lead to this most interesting place in Dreamgates and in The Dreamer's Book of the Dead I report on conversations I have had there with "my" W.B.Yeats. If there is an ideal shooting location for the House of Time in ordinary reality, it may well be Prague, the city of magicians.
    The singer and her separated voice? All my Czech trackers saw a theme of soul loss and soul recovery here, and they may be right. I had thought about how a central part of my work is helping people - especially women - to claim their voice. In my reentry, I found that the women in blue dresses were auditioning for roles in the film, with many other actors waiting in other rooms. A story to be continued....

top photo: Vysehrad through the girders of the Výtoň iron bridge (c) Robert Moss