Tickling the cosmic body

 

When you become conscious that everything is connected in the weave of life – as above so below, as within, so without – you may discover that if you pluck a thread anywhere, you stir the whole pattern. For Synesius of Cyrene, the Neoplatonist philosopher I call the Bishop of Dreams, prophecy requires us to see that we are parts of a cosmic body in which all things are related and can influence each other. At the risk of levity, I am tempted to call the practice derived from this tickling the cosmic body.

“Prophecy is among the best of human pursuits…it gives signs of all things through the medium of all things, because all things which are within that living being that is the cosmos are akin…These signs are different kinds of writings in the book of existence. One wise man learns one sort of writing and another another…All things have significance for all. If birds had wisdom, they would have constructed an art for knowing the future based on observing humans, as we do by observing them. “It was necessary, I believe, that the limbs of this universe which feels and breathes as one belong to one another as parts of a single whole…A person who knows the kinship of the parts of the cosmos is wise, for they can attract one thing by means of another.” [1]

In his important treatise De insomniis ("On Dreams") composed around 405 and dedicated to his teacher Hypatia, "The Philosopher", Synesius urges us to keep a “day book” for our observations of twitches in the cosmic body as well as a “night book” for dreams.   He declares that “All things are signs appearing through all things…they are brothers in a single living creature, the cosmos…they are written in characters of every kind”. The deepest scholarship lies in reading the sign language of the world; the true sage is a person “who understands the relationship of the parts of the universe”. [2] He observes elsewhere that “The same things very often happen in different places and times”.[3]

References

1. Synesius "On Prophecy" trans. Augustine Fitzgerald in Essays and Hymns of Synesius of Cyrene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930). Lightly edited by me.

2. Synesius "On Dreans" in Essays and Hymns 3. Quoted in Alan Cameron and Jacqueline Long, Barbarians and Politics at the Court of Arcadius (Berkeley:  University of California Press,1993) p.289.

Illustration: Integra naturae speculum artisque imago ("A complete mirror of nature and an image of art"). The Anima Mundi depicted by Robert Fludd (1617). Here the world soul is feminine and there is a key to correspondences between all parts of the cosmos. Public domain.

Synesius on the Dream Oracle

 

You have direct access to sacred knowledge, in your dreams. Your dreams are a personal oracle that reveals the future and helps you prepare for it. Don’t let anyone tell you what your dreams mean; get rid of dream dictionaries. Pay attention to signs from the world around you; know that everything in the universe is interconnected and constantly interweaving. Use your imagination. What you grow there will be stamped on your world and on your soul – on the energy body in which you will travel to another life after death. [1] 

Amazingly, these insights come from a fifth-century bishop of the church. His name was Synesius of Cyrene, and his treatise On Dreams, composed around 405, is one of the wisest books ever written on dreams, coincidence and imagination. Synesius was a most unusual bishop. In his life and work we find – alas, only briefly – a confluence between the best of the ancient practice of philosophy and the new religion of the Roman empire.

Synesius was a Greco-Roman aristocrat who could trace his pedigree back to the founders of Sparta, seventeen hundred years before him. He lived on a great estate in Cyrene, part of modern Libya, enjoyed the pleasures of both the hunt and the study, and chuckled over the fact that rural folk in his area still thought “the king of the world” was Agamemnon. [2]

 He had the best education possible in his time, in Alexandria, in the school of Hypatia, the extraordinary woman scientist, mathematician, and Neoplatonist who strode the streets of the world-city in her philosopher’s cloak, surrounded by eager students. 

It was in Alexandria that Synesius experienced his first and deepest conversion, when he found “the eye of the soul” within him opening to reveal the sacred depth of the universe. His consciousness expanded to give him the clear vision of the One beyond the many. He saw the reality behind the forms of religion. In his quiet hours, he dedicated himself to “mysteries without rites” devoted to awakening the divinity within the human that corresponds and coincides with the divinity within and beyond the cosmos. [3] He was a convert to philosophy as it was understood in the Greco-Roman world: the love and practice of wisdom. 

It was in Alexandria, around 405 and recently married, with the Barbarians at the gates of Rome, that he wrote his treatise on dreams. 

He makes it clear that his discussion of dreams is grounded in personal experience. Dreams have guided him in the hunt, showing him how and where to find the game. Dreams have led him to “swarms of wild beasts that have fallen to our spears”.[4]

He was guided by dreams when his city sent him to Constantinople to plead for favors from the emperor. In a hothouse of political intrigue, his dreams helped him to tell friend from foe, and alerted him to hostile intrigues in which his enemies hired “ghost-raising sorcerers” to attack him by black magic.

The dream oracle “helped me in the management of public office in the best interest of the cities, and finally placed me on terms of intimacy with the Emperor.”

His dreams contributed to his success as a writer and orator. The dream source “frequently helped me to write books”, correcting his style, and helping him to prune archaic Attic expressions – products of his love of old books - from his essays and poems. 

Synesius explains that dreams are “personal oracles”. We want to claim authority over our own dreams and reject anything and anyone who tries to come between us and the dream source. “We ought to seek this branch of knowledge before all else; for it comes from us, is within us, and is the special possession of the soul of each one of us.

The dream oracle speaks to us wherever we go. “We can’t abandon this oracle even if we try. It is with us at home and abroad, on the field of battle, in the city and in the marketplace.”

Dreams are our common birthright. They belong to rich and poor, to kings and to slaves. The dream oracle turns no one down because of race or age, status or calling.

Even the worst tyrant is powerless to separate us from our dreams – which may hold the key to his overthrow – “unless he could banish sleep from his kingdom”.

“Dream divination is available to all, the good genius to everyone.”

It is no wonder that dreams show us the future, because dreams are experiences of soul and “the soul holds the forms of things that come into being”

 Synesius dismisses dream dictionaries – popular in his time, as in ours – with admirable vigor. “I laugh at all those books and think them of little use”. General definitions don’t work because each dreamer is a different mirror for dream images – some are funhouse mirrors, some are made of varied materials. Big dreams do not require interpretation; their meaning is in the experience of the dream itself. Dreams that are “more divine” are “quite clear and obvious, or nearly so”, but come only to those who live “according to virtue”.

Steeped in Homer, he can’t avoid mentioning the scene in the Odyssey where the Gates of Horn and Ivory are described. In his view, both Homer’s Penelope and legions of commentators and borrowers failed to understand that dreams, in themselves, are never false. Penelope assumes that there are true dreams and deceptive dreams “because she was not instructed in the matter.” Deception arises through false interpretations, not false dreams. If Penelope had understood the nature of dreaming better, “she would have made all dreams pass out through the Gate of Horn…We should not confuse the weakness of the interpreter with the nature of the visions themselves.”

 Synesius recommends setting an intention for the night. “We shall pray for a dream, even as Homer prayed. And if you are worthy, the god far away is present with you…He comes to your side when you sleep, and this is the whole system of the initiation.”

 Synesius also stresses the value of keeping a dream journal, and of writing and creating from dreams. “It is no mean achievement to pass on to another something of a strange nature that has stirred in one’s own soul”.

 Synesius urges us to keep a “day book” for our observations of signs and synchronicities as well as a “night book” for dreams.  “All things are signs appearing through all things…they are brothers in a single living creature, the cosmos…they are written in characters of every kind”. The deepest scholarship lies in reading the sign language of the world; the true sage is a person “who understands the relationship of the parts of the universe”.

 Five years after writing his essay On Dreams, Synesius was persuaded by Theophilus, the Patriarch of Alexandria, to accept the bishopric of Ptolemais. It seems that he was baptized at the same time, rather late in the day according to our common understanding of what is involved in becoming a bishop of the church.

Synesius’ entry into the episcopate was a political, rather than a spiritual, event. The influence of his wife – who he loved deeply – may have been important; she was presumably Christian, since Theophilus was at their wedding in 403. Winning an aristocratic philosopher to the church was a coup for the Patriarch; though Christianity had become the religion of the empire, the old houses were still keeping their distance. For Synesius, assuming the rank and responsibilities of a bishop was both a case of noblesse oblige and an accommodation to the movement of history. In 399, the Serapeum – the great temple complex of Serapis at Alexandria – had been destroyed, and the might of the Roman Empire was now being used to stamp out pagan practices. The new God was fast supplanting the old ones.

In theological language, Synesius joined the Christians through adhesion rather than through the transformative experience of a full conversion. [5] But we can trace some possible lines of convergence between his philosophy and the Christian message. He believed in One divinity, behind the many forms of the divine. He wrote of the “fall” of the soul from a state of knowledge and truth. He believed that in times of darkness, a saving power may be sent to rescue humanity from itself and its deceivers. His essay On Providence depicts a world dominated by dark forces whose purpose is to drag humans down and destroy them if they reach for the light. Behind the surface events of history is the struggle between the higher instincts of humanity and the darkness within and around it. The power of light in humanity runs down, and must be restored periodically, at the end of the great cycles of history. But sometimes, when humans are in extremis, divine intervention may take place before the end of a cycle, to keep the game in play. [6] 

If Synesius lived long enough to learn the end of his mentor, Hypatia, he would have been left in no doubt that the darkness was rising. Though Hypatia’s students included Christians, the fanatical Cyril, who became bishop of Alexandria in 412, saw her as magnet for pagans. His violent diatribes against her helped to inflame a mob, led by a church lector, that pulled Hypatia from her carriage at night. In their collective dementia, these frenzied fundamentalists dragged her into a church called the Caesarium, tore off her clothes, and flayed her alive with sharp-edged shells. Then they butchered her body and burned the pieces to ashes. [7] 

In such a world, Synesius offered the means of communicating with a higher realm, and bringing gifts from it into everyday life. He taught that the realm of imagination is “the hollow gulf of the universe” where the soul is at home. Imagination is “the halfway house between spirit and matter, which makes communication between the two possible”. [Bregman 148] The soul travels in this realm in dreams.

For Bishop Synesius, dreaming is everyday church. It is also a way of entry into the real world. According to Synesius, dreamer do not return to reality when they awaken; dreaming, they are already there. 

 

 References

1. Jay Bregman, Synesius of Cyrene, Philosopher-Bishop. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982) 148.

2.ibid 76

3. ibid 26, 32-3,citing Letter 137.

4. All quotes from De insomniis (On Dreams) unless otherwise noted are from  Augustine FitzGerald (ed) The Essays and Hymns of Synesius of Cyrene. 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930)

 5. See A.A. Nock, Conversion. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933).

6. Synesius, De providentia quoted in Bregman,op.cit., 66-72

7. Socrates Scholasticus, “The Murder of Hypatia” in Anne Fremantle (ed) A Treasury of Early Christianity. (New York: Viking, 1953) 380

 

Graphics: 

Lion at the Templeof Apollo in Cyrene

"Eye in the Sky" Journal Drawing by Robert Moss

 

 

Corvid oracles in ancient Alexandria

In my current research on Hypatia of Alexandria and her circle - notably Synesius of Cyrene - I came upon some interesting facts about the lady philosopher's father Theon, sometimes called Theon Aigyptos (335-405).. He was famous as a mathematician and astronomer. His editions of Euclid and Ptolemy have survived and were a mainstay of learning in the Mediterranean world for centuries. 

Less well known today is Theon's work in other fields, including divination, dream interpretation and theurgy ('literally, "divine working"). He looked to the stars for guidance, not unusual in a time and a city where astrology was taught in schools. He studied the play of signs and symbols in the world around him for clues to the hidden order of events, practicing the magic of the world.  He wrote commentaries on the books of Hermes Trismegistus and the hymns of Orpheus that have not survived. 

Among his other lost works, according to the Suda (a tenth-century Byzantine encyclopedia) was one with this intriguing title:

On Signs and the Examination of Birds and the Croaking of Ravens [1]

It's interesting to picture Hypatia growing up in this environment, to match her father as a mathematician and exceed him (many said) as an astronomer and philosopher. They would both have been well aware that the raven is the bird of Apollo, in whose name the most famous oracle of the Hellenic world delivered its messages. Hypatia seems to have been less interested in the old gods - as opposed to the Neoplatonic ascent to the One beyond the many - than her father, However, she too, may have heard the language of birds. Listening to ravens and crows was something of a tradition in Alexandria.

Theon and his daughter were probably familiar with the story of another famous Alexandrian Greek for whom the croaking of corvids was literally a life preserver. 

Appian of Alexandria (c.95-c.165) was a famous historian in the heyday of the Roman empire. He wrote in Greek, but was a Roman citizen and very definitely one of the ruling caste.

So when a violent rebellion broke out in Roman-ruled Egypt in the time of Trajan, Appian was one of those targeted by the rebels — Jews who believed that a new Messiah had come. He fled across the marshes of the Nile delta, with an Arab guide, heading for a ship that was waiting for him on one of the branches of the river. He had arranged for the ship to take him to safety in the port of Pelusium.

Appian and his guide traveled all night through the marshes. At dawn, a crow shrieked and the guide said, “We are lost.”

The crow squalled again, and the Arab said grimly, “We are utterly and completely lost.”

Appian, believing his life was at risk and that his pursuers were close behind, fell into despair.

The crow shrieked for a third time. The Arab’s expression turned to complete joy. “Ah, but it is such good luck that we became lost. There is a shortcut just ahead.”

Though Appian may not have understood this, he was fortunate to have a guide who knew the language of crows. In many traditions, corvids are messengers, and close attention is paid to their actions.

The Arab led the way decisively, and very soon they came to a branch of the Nile and saw a galley in full sail. However, this was not the expected meeting place nor the same ship on which Appian had arranged passage.

“Where are you going?” Appian called to the captain.

“Pelusium!” the captain called back.

Of course, Appian boarded the galley, which carried him to Pelusium safely. By his own account, his life was saved because he got lost and took the “wrong” boat. The ship that had been engaged to take him to Pelusium was captured by the rebels, and its passengers and crew were held as prisoners or killed.

This is an example of how sometimes we must get lost in order to find the right way. It helps then. more than ever, to have a crow or raven to help us with roadside assistance. 

1. Maria Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996) 74

2. The story of Appian and the crows is adapted from my book The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence and Imagination (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2009). The original source is "Fragment A: Concerning the Divination of the Arabs" in The Roman History of Appian of Alexandria trans. Horace White (London: Macmillan, 1899) vol.2, p.489.

Raven drawing by RM

To converse with stars

He lives in a world lit mostly by fire. The Roman Empire has recently been split into two. Rome, the capital of the West, will soon fall to the Goths. The barbarians are inside the gates of Constantinople, the capital of the East. His home city of Cyrene, in what is now Libya, is under constant attack by marauding tribes; he is often up on the walls, standing sentinel, or training his neighbors and retainers to fight back.

He comes from a noble family that can trace its lineage back to the founders of Sparta. He has the best education of his day; he studied with Hypatia, the great woman philosopher and scientist of Alexandria. In brief seasons of peace, he enjoys riding around his estates, sampling the olive oil and the honey from his bees and the milk from his goats. His great loves are books - in an age where nearly everyone is illiterate - hunting and dreaming. His name is Synesius of Cyrene, and we should know it better, because around 404 he wrote a treatise On Dreams that is (in my opinion) the most helpful book on the practice of dreamwork to appear in the West until very recent times.

In an era when the great oracles of the ancient world are being overthrown, Synesius reminds us that dreams provide us with "a personal oracle" that goes with us everywhere. All we need do is pray for a dream, wash our hands, and set our heads on a pillow. Dreaming matters because it shows us the future, provides creative inspiration, reveals different aspects of who and what we are, offers guidance on all the business of life - and above all, because it "uplifts the soul", raising us from our everyday confusion towards the level of Mind.

As a writer and orator, Synesius reports on how dreams corrected his literary style and gave him ideas for speeches that allowed him to catch the ear of an emperor. He observes, correctly, that recording and telling dreams is great preparation for public speaking, because it gives us training in telling our stories well. Some of that story material is of course extraordinary and challenges us to expand our ways of expression: "It is no mean achievement to pass on to another something of a strange nature that has stirred in one's own soul."

As everyday practice, Synesius urges us to practice dream incubation (asking our dreams for guidance), to study personal markers or "forerunners" in dreams that clue us in to whether those dreams may reveal future events, and above all to journal our experiences. He advises us to keep both a "book of the night" for dreams and a "book of the day" for our observations of signs and symbols in the world around us. By the universal law of sympatheia "all things are signs appearing through all things" and "the sage is one who understands the relationship of the parts of the universe."

For active dreamers, the very best incitement to go dreaming that Synesius offers may be this soaring passage in which he encourages us to embark on an adventure that will take us far beyond the laws of our physical universe:

There is nothing that forbids the sleeper from rising from earth and soaring above eagles, to reach a point above the loftiest spheres themselves. He may look down on the earth from far above, and explore lands that are not visible even from the moon. It is in the power of the dreamer to converse with the stars and to meet the hidden powers of the universe. [my adaptation of the 1930 translation of On Dreams by Augustine Fitzgerald]

In 410, the formidable Patriarch of Alexandria, Theophilus, persuaded Synesius to become bishop of Ptolemais. He was allowed to continue to live openly with his wife, to pursue his love of the poets who celebrated the old gods, and to practice and write about philosophy in the way of Plotinus. In the Hymns he wrote in his last years, we see Synesius making a marriage between the Christian revelation and Neoplatonist metaphysics, in verses that are sometimes very beautiful (but still await adequate translation). So we can call Synesius, at least retrospectively, the Bishop of Dreams. It is heartening to know that the early Church, in a time of violent contention, could make room for a philosopher who taught that we can become citizens of the deeper world by dreaming, and should allow no one to come between us and the sacred source that opens to us in dreams.

Image: Ruins of Ptolemais

Keep Books of Night and Day and be your own dream interpreter

We have direct access to sacred knowledge, in our dreams. Our dreams are a personal oracle that reveals the future and helps us prepare for it. We must not let anyone tell us what our dreams mean or stand between us and the direct experience of the sacred that is available in dreaming. We want to pay attention to signs from the world around us in the knowledge that everything in the universe is interconnected and constantly interweaving. We need to journal both our dreams and our waking experiences in our Books of Night and Day.

     These insights come from a fifth-century bishop of Ptolemais (in what is now Libya), Synesius of Cyrene. His treatise On Dreams is one of the wisest books ever written on how to work with dreams and synchronicity. He wrote that "Dream divination is available to all, the good genius to everyone" and that is no wonder that dreams show us the future, because dreams are experiences of soul and "the soul holds the forms of things that come into being".

      Synesius used dreams for practical navigation; he describes how dreams alerted him to plots by his enemies, counseled him on his literary style and (as a young man) on the hunt, and helped him win the ear of a Roman emperor with the right oration. He also observed, correctly, that the energy derived from dreams can be more valuable than their content; through dreams God "makes us fruitful with his own courage."

It is written, 'Others even in their dreams He made fruitful with his courage.' Do you see? One man learns while awake, another while asleep. But in the waking state man is the teacher, while it is God who makes the dreamer fruitful with His own courage, so that learning and attaining are one and the same. Now to make fruitful is even more than to teach.

He despised dream dictionaries, as popular in his time as in ours: "I laugh at all those books and think them of little use." He strongly counseled that we must not assign the interpretation of dreams to "experts" other than the dreamer: "It would be shameful for those who have lived ten years beyond adolescence to stand in need of any other diviner."

      He wrote that dreams carry us into higher worlds, and put us in direct contact with the God we can talk to. He hinted that the road of dreams is the road of the soul, on both sides of death, noting that "the soul's way of life in another world is similar to the imaginings of the dream condition."

       He was a great proponent of navigating by synchronicity, though the word he used was "sympathy". The wisest of humans are those who navigate life by reading the sign language of the world. We should keep a "day book" for our observations of signs and synchronicities as well as a "night book" for dreams.

"All things are signs appearing through all things...they are brothers in a single living creature, the cosmos...they are written in characters of every kind". 

The deepest scholarship lies in reading the sign language of the world; the true sage is a person "who understands the relationship of the parts of the universe".

     We can learn from Synesius how to practice dreamwork as real church, and track coincidence as "God's way of remaining anonymous". He deserves to be much better remembered, as a great dream teacher from the world of the early Church, one who spoke eloquently against those who seek to stand between people and the direct experience of the sacred. He wrote about dreams not on the authority of his excellent education (he studied under Hypatia in Alexandria), nor his contacts with the great, nor any high office that he held, but on the authority of his prolific first-hand experience.
     Synesius speaks to us across the centuries with the authority of experience, understanding - as do all true dreamers - that the best guides to dreaming are frequent flyers who do a lot of it.

-

Partly because I keep unusual hours, and am often embarked on my best creative work long before dawn, I don't separate my night journal from my day journal. All the material goes into one book — a leather-bound travel journal, when I am on the road. I try to type up my entries before my handwriting becomes illegible and put the printouts in big ring-back binders. I save each entry with a date and a title in my data files, so I automatically have a running index.

For more on Synesius of Cyrene, see my book The Secret History of Dreaming.

Art: Fresco from Pompeii showing a young woman with a wax tablet and stylus, cerca 50 c.e. We don't know her name. Her hair net of gold threads, as well as her literacy, suggest an upper-crust family. Today the fresco is maintained by the National Archaeological Museum of Naples (Inventory number 9084).

On the heel of Achilles, OMG

En route to Boulder, today

Before I embarked on my journey to Boulder today, I found myself again deeply immersed in the Greek epics, especially the Odyssey and the Argonautica. So I chuckled when Colorado friends informed me yesterday that I would be arriving on the heels of a winter snow storm that had been named - in some comic elemental wordplay - Achilles.
    At my home airport, I paused to admire and puzzle over a great red balloon, shaped like a dialog bubble in a comic strip, that shouted OMG. This felt like a happy cosmic shout out. I had to stop to take a happy snap. An elderly woman with the sharp, quizzical features of a bird paused so as not to get between my lens and the great OMG balloon.
    On the plane, I found the same lady sitting next to me. When I greeted her, I was surprised and delighted when she replied in an accent almost identical to mine. I would call that accent Anglo-Australian. It is nothing like the Strine of Crocodile Dundee, more like BBC English, yet with a kind of informality and with definitely no effort to sound either "posh" or "common." We started sharing notes. She was born in Sydney ten years before I was born in Melbourne. Her maiden name was the same as my mother's.
    We had to pause in our now very lively conversation because a younger man was standing over us. "You are in my seat," he told my neighbor, brandishing his boarding pass. "But I was led to my seat," my rowmate protested. "The flight attendant brought me here." When we checked her boarding pass, we saw there had been some confusion. She was supposed to be sitting two rows back. She offered to swap seats with the man who was supposed to be sitting next to me, and he agreed. "Things could get really good now," I remarked. "When seats get mixed up and plans get screwed up, the Trickster comes into play."
    She recounted some of passages of her life, with remarkable verve and humor. She had lived in Montpellier in southern France, where I have taught for several years and where I am traveling again later this month. "Now I am Helen of Troy," she laughed. "Have you heard of Troy, New York?" Had I heard of it! I lived there for ten years as a result of a remarkable series of dreams and coincidences described in the introduction to my book Conscious Dreaming.
    "My middle name is Hypatia. Do you know about her?" Indeed I do know about the great woman philosopher and scientist of Alexandria in the fourth century. She was the mentor of Synesius of Cyrene, the philosopher and early bishop of the church whose treatise on dreams is my favorite book on the subject before the modern era; I devote many pages to him and his correspondence with Hypatia in The Secret History of Dreaming.
    The list of parallels between our lives grew and grew. She told a wildly funny story 0f how she spoke in Italian at a laboratory in northern Italy named in honor of her father, a pioneer of radio transmissions. Over-confident of her command of the language, she thanked her audience for their "jockstraps" instead of their "support". I matched this with a hilariously embarrassing episode in Paris in which I was casting roles for an impromptu dream theater and had my host play the role of a seal that had come out of the water in a woman's dream. Quite oblivious to the fact that I did not know the French word for "seal", I kept calling him by another word until his wife jumped up and down and said, "Robert, the word for seal is 'phoque'. You've been using an old word for  piece of excrement. Stop calling him a piece of sh-t and call him a phoque."
     Our conversation was getting livelier by the minute, and the match-ups continued to multiply. We talked about our experiences as Australians living in North America. I remarked, "Sometimes it's useful to be Australian. Once, after 9/11, I was allowed to get away with leaving a knife with a nine inch blade in my carry-ons because the TSA guys understood thanks to Crocodile Dundee that Aussies have to have their knives. I was made to take it back to the check in and have them put it in my suitcase." (I can't do justice to this story here, but you can find it elsewhere.) Not to be bested, Helen of Troy told me, "Four years ago I packed a sharp knife in my grandchildren's carry-ons, along with their sandwiches, so they could use it on a picnic. They found it in the scanners at Bradley airport and let me take it home without a reprimand." One thing more we had in common: getting away with inadvertently trying to take knives through airport security, because we were Australians.
     More important than all these amazing match-ups was the way she was functioning, as the conversation continued and deepened on the two-hour flight to O'Hare, as a reviver of memory. She reminded me of very specific places and elements in the Australian landscape that I have been seeking as I work on a book that involves the challenging experiences of my Australian boyhood. Her delight in language, and languages, brought alive my own lifelong engagement with foreign phrases that have made foreign mindsets native to me. And she reminded me of Sirius, which she called the Dog Star. She was an astronomer by profession, and she spoke brilliantly of the formation of star systems. We spoke of constellations that I saw in boyhood but can't see where I now live, and of Sirius, which she called the Dog Star, which has always been part of my dreaming.
    Where was she going today? To Colorado Springs, to take part in an Olympic-level springboard diving meet. At 76, and using a cane? Absolutely. The vital energy of Helen Hypatia was amazing. She seemed to have more of that than all the people on the plane put together and I told her so.
     We had broached the subject of dreams more than once by now. The picture of her standing straight on the high board before flying into the air reminded me of a song that came bursting through me last week.

We are singing till we're flying
We are flying till we're swimming

Then I remembered something else. In the language of Inuit shamans, there is a word for "dream" that translates literally as "that which makes me dive in headfirst." Helen Hypatia loved this. She said she would make it her meditation on the springboard the next day.

On my next flight, my rowmate was a nurse practitioner busily preparing for a conference in Denver on wound healing. We talked about the role of the mind and of imagery in accelerating healing, and I delivered a paean of praise for nurses, such spirited and practical people - and over the past 20 years, the #1 occupational group represented in my workshops. I couldn't help making a semi-learned joke about Achilles' heel to the nurse going to the conference on healing wounds. "You know, we are coming in on the heel of Achilles, the part of him which, when wounded, can never heal."

At Denver airport, I gathered my bags and boarded a shuttle for Boulder. The heel-marks of Achilles, in the shape of melting snow and ice, got more and more noticeable as we followed the Tollway towards Boulder. The man next to me loved Tokien and had been to New Zealand, so we were soon deep in conversation about how Peter Jackson seems to have the NZ government at his beck and call; its tourism promotion strategy is to represent that green and mountainous country of mists as Middle Earth. Our talk was interrupted by a very loud crack. Not a blowout. A rifle bullet? OMG. A very large stone had hit the windshield right in front of our driver's face. It had made a pattern of concentric rings, but the windshield had not shattered. The driver kept her cool and managed very well. It was a puzzle to her where the stone had come from. We were a good distance from other cars, and she was sure it was not a bit of gravel thrown up from the slurry that the road maintenance people lay down for traction in snowstorms. The stone was over two inches in diameter, "like a river stone."
    I felt a sense of blessing. What is an epic without danger? In those old Greek epics, greater dangers draw the help of greater powers, and when the wayfarer is most at risk a god or goddess who favors him places a hand over him. I felt that hidden hand today. OMG, it felt good...
    By the way, Helen Hypatia and I agreed that OMG means O My Goddess. I'm a goddess kind of guy.

Postcript: The epic theme continues. When I arrived at the Boulder bookstore, I was greeted at the upstairs desk by a young woman employee named Athena. I promptly said, "Where's Odysseus?" A manager responded, "He's in the store. I'll call him." In a couple of minutes, Odysseus appeared, with suitably long Achaean hair and beard. I greeted him with the opening line of the Odyssey: "Sing in me, O Muse, of the man of many ways."
    I asked how he came by the name of the most famous wayfarer in Western literature. "My parents named me Odysseus. They lived in Greece for a while."
    I made a point of reading some of the poems in Here, Everything Is Dreaming that were inspired by encounters with the mythistory of the Greeks, poems like "Birth of Apollo."