Synchronicty Magnets and Ottoman Dreams

 

Synchronicity is when the universe gets personal. I am thrilled when the play of synchonicity feeds into a current project and shapes it and drives it forward.  I find that when I am giving focused attention to a certain line of study, or a creative project, coincidence comes to support me, sometimes through the agency of that benign spirit Arthur Koestler called the Library Angel, a shelf elf who makes books and documents turn up (or disappear) in highly unlikely ways. This works through the internet too.

On a certain night, I was trying to document a story about shared dreaming and war magic from the time of Suleiman the Magnificent. The story involves a "dream master" who supposedly had twelve people enter lucid dreaming together on a huge round bed to provide energy for an astral operation in which he entered the mind of a European prince and altered the fortunes of a battle. 

I first came upon this intriguing account in The Understanding of Dreams, an old anthology of cross-cultural dream narratives,edited by Raymond de Becker, an elusive and somewhat murky character. He gave his source as an earlier book by one N. de Helva titled La Science impériale des songes, published in Paris in 1935. After much hunting, I was unable to locate a copy of this book anywhere, or even identify the publisher. When I compared the de Becker version with the historical records of the campaigns and household of Suleiman, I became more and more suspicious that someone had constructed a tall tale. But I realized that my investigation would not be complete until I had probed documentary sources available only in the Turkish language.

I said to myself in the wee hours of the morning, I really need help from a Turk. The next instant, an email arrived in my inbox from a Turkish doctor in Istanbul, wanting to know about a retreat I was leading that fall. I seized the opportunity to ask her whether she could check out the story of the Ottoman "dream master" for me. Within hours, she started sending me documents and original translations from Turkish sources that not only confirmed my suspicions about de Becker's cavalier use of materials but vastly expanded my understanding of the practice of dreaming and imagination in the Ottoman empire.

People ask why some of us seem to have more frequent and more exciting experiences of synchronicity (or meaningful coincidence) than others. I think one of the facts of life is that there are periods when any of us can become a synchronicity magnet, attracting events and encounters in rich profusion according to the energy and intentions that travel with us. 

We observe synchronicity at work in the world more often when we are open to seeing it, and ready to play with the signs and symbolic pop-ups of everyday life. But there is more to it than just our willingness to pay attention. Like calls to like, and the call is stronger when our passions or curiosity are most actively engaged in a life passage or a course of study or exploration. Yeats spoke, with poetic clarity, about the "mingling of minds" that can take place when we are giving our best to a certain line of study; he noted that we draw the support like minds, including intelligences from beyond our ken and beyond our world, who share our interests.

Oh yes, the Turkish doctor came to the United States for my fall retreat.

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I recount the story of Suleiman and the Dream Master in my book  The Three "Only" Things. Though I now believe the story is not historical, one may say of it, with the Italians, si non e vero, e ben trovato. ("If it's not true, it's well found".)

Phot by RM: Ottoman History at Taksim Metro. One of a series of mosaics created by students at the School of Ceramics. 

A shelf elf throws The Dream of H.G.Wells at me

Just before I sat down to write this morning a shelf elf flung H.G.Wells’ novel The Dream at me from the top of a tall bookcase holding fiction in the room where I do much of my horizontal meditation. Of course I had to interrupt what I thought I was doing and explore the themes I had just been given. In the last pages on Wells' novel I read:

    "It was a life," said Sarnac, "and it was a dream, a dream within this life; and this life too is a dream. Dreams within dreams, dreams containing dreams, until we come at last, maybe, to the Dreamer of dreams, the Being who is all beings."

     In the novel a man living 2000 years in the future falls asleep in a ruined city and dreams he is in the body and life of a man in London in the early 20th century. The dream is presented as an entirely real experience of another life.
     Another character in the novel reports a dream of a shorter, wilder life experienced in a very different body.

    "I dreamed the other day that I was a panther that haunted a village of huts in which lived naked children and some very toothsome dogs. And how I was hunted for three years and shot at five times before I was killed. I can remember how I killed an old woman gathering sticks and hid part of her body under a tree to finish it on the morrow. It was a very vivid dream. And as I dreamed it by no means horrible. But it was not a clear and continuous dream like yours. A panther's mind is not clear and continuous, but passes from flashes of interest to interludes of apathy and utter forgetfulness."

    The theme that personal evolution involves relations between past, present and future personalities - alternate and other selves - was of consuming interest to Wells, though many of his readers have missed this aspect of his work. After The Dream, he wrote Christina Alberta's Father, a novel in which a man of modest circumstances thinks he is simultaneously, across time, King Sargon of Akkad.
    The framing device of the dream was used repeatedly by Wells (see A Dream of Armageddon). He also makes us aware that a dream of this kind is more than a literary device; it is a portal to real experiences in other times and other worlds. I have heard that Wells himself dreamed of life as Sargon, who gets a glowing report in his Outline of History.

Flying with the Library Angel

It was probably that literate spirit Arthur Koestler called the  Library Angel who was my unseen companion on that passage in the Bardo of Air Travel. My in-flight reading was Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World, an excellent study of how Shakespeare rose from obscure origins. After I took my aisle seat, the fellow by the window asked how I was enjoying the book. Quite soon he was telling me how he was in Stratford the previous year when the news broke that a hitherto unknown portrait of Shakespeare had been identified in an Irish country house and was then on its way to the bard's birthplace.

    My literate rowmate proved to be an artist and glass-blower. He gave me his card, which included the following self-description:

Artist
pilgrim
bon vivant

This was one of the best three word self-definitions I had come across. He asked me to define my own work, and then asked me to explain the application of Active Dreaming techniques to healing. I spoke of how dreams diagnose illness and can be a factory of imagery for self-healing when symptoms develop, I recounted some personal experiences of growing and then transferring healing images to cancer patients. With deep emotion, the man told me he was flying to the West Coast to support a family member who was undergoing treatment for cancer. He jotted down the book titles I had mentioned.
      Our conversation was interrupted by the arrival of a young man who took the seat between us. More introductions ensued. The young man told us he was a vocalist who had sung with his college choir across the British Isles, and in many other places.
      I asked him whether it is true that composers tend to look down on librettists to the extent suggested in Robertson Davies' novel The Lyre of Orpheus, which I had finished the night before. He was unfamiliar with the novel, so I explained the plot, which turns on the creative pains and misadventures of an unlikely crew who set about trying to make an opera out of sketches by Hoffmann, with an entirely new libretto, while the long-dead composer watches from the limbo of composers who are waiting for someone to complete their unfinished work.
     "E.T.A. Hoffmann?" the new graduate echoed. "We studied him in my last semester." He gave me a rundown on Hoffmann's musical oeuvre, and asked about Hoffmann's second career as the author of dark fantasy stories, which were based in no small degree on his dreams and nightmares and sightings of apparitions, including several versions of the double or doppelganger.
    He spoke of a piece his choir had sung in his last concert, with lyrics from Goethe. His face fell when he added that the brilliant young composer was struggling with cancer. He had heard the tail end of my account of using dreams to develop imagery to help cancer patients, and asked me to repeat the book details.
    The bookish spirit with us on the flight was notably literate, far-traveled and caring.

Photo: Robertson Davies, marvelous Canadian novelist and sometime master of Massey College.

In praise of used bookstores

I confess: I am passionately addicted to used bookstores. I am a reluctant shopper under most circumstances, but I'll pull your arm out of its socket if you try to restrain me from going inside a store that offers old books. I find that the benign shelf elf that Arthur Koestler dubbed the Library Angel comes instantly into play when I enter a used bookstore, placing volumes I wasn't looking for - but fulfill a dream, or set the right course for new exploration - exactly where I can't miss them.

On vacation in the Champlain Islands in Vermont this week, I just had to make a run down to Burlington (on a wild, windy day when swimming conditions in the lake weren't optimal) to one of my regional favorites, The Crow. I left with only nine new/old books, which is very moderate for me. One of them was The Death of Freud, a moving study of Freud's last two years that includes an indelible account of the Gestapo calling at the great psychiatrist's apartment on Bergasse ("Hill Street") in Vienna in the immediate aftermath of the Anschluss, Hitler's annexation of Austria in March, 1938. Up to this moment - when the Nazis took his daughter Anna away for questioning - Freud did not appear to grasp that he would need to leave Vienna. Yet he told Arthur Koestler afterward, in the relative safety of London, that the spilling over of the Nazi nightmare from the darkest basements of the unconscious into the world was not surprising but "inevitable".

I'm hesitant to make a list of my favorite used bookshops, because memory is fallible, and I know I'll leave out some of the best. But I'll make a start here, confining myself (for now) to the United States, and will welcome additional suggestions from book-lovers who are following this blog:

Copperfields in Sebastopol, California (with companion new and old bookstores)

Powell's in Portland, Oregon (though I confess the "city of books" downtown scares me in its immensity; I prefer the more human-scaled Powell's on Hawthorne, where I frequently give readings and book-signings)

Twice-Sold-Tales in Seattle (especially the branch at the foot of Queen Anne Hill, where a well-fed cat is often dozing by the cash register)

Easton's in Mount Vernon, Washington (great selection of literature, history, anthropology, mythology)

The Librarium in East Chatham, New York (full of mythic literature)

G.J. Askins in New Lebanon, New York (where I acquired full sets of Conrad, The Golden Bough and - wonder of wonders - the 73 volumes of the Jesuit Relations, containing the reports of blackrobe missionaries from the time of first contact with Northeast Indians)

Dove & Hudson in Albany, New York (0ne of my current "magic bookshops", where I expect the shelf elves to be lively)

The Book Barn in Latham, New York (terrific values, best for popular titles but also a place for discovering the unexpected)

The Strand in New York City (though I am sometimes disturbed that the recipients of review copies recycle them here without seeming to draw breath).

Yellow House Books in Great Barrington, Massachusetts (great for psychology, mythology and children's books)

Barely Used Books in Mystic, Connecticut (shelf elves very active, during my visits, producing - for example - a book of bawdy Scottish ballads at the precise moment I was humming "Oh you take the high road/and I'll take the low road..")

The Frugal Muse in Madison, Wisconsin (I would give it first prize for the best bookstore name that has come to my attention except that I have to award that to Malaprops in Asheville, NC, one of the truly great independents)

To be continued...

Synchronicity Tales: Library Angels on the Plane

Portland, Oregon

I boarded the plane bound from Minneapolis to Portland with my in-flight reading in hand: Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World, an excellent study of how Shakespeare rose from obscure origins to become the greatest writer in the English language. When I found my aisle seat, the fellow by the window asked how I was enjoying the book. Quite soon he was telling me how he was in Statford last year when the news broke that a hitherto unknown portrait of Shakespeare had been identified in an Irish country house and was then on its way to the bard's birthplace.
    My literate rowmate proved to be an artist and glass-blower. He gave me his card, which bears the following inscription:

MARSHALL HYDE
artist
pilgrim
bon vivant


I am a keen student of how people define themselves, and I told Marshall that this was one of the best three word self-definitions I had come across.
    Asked to define my own work, I spoke about how I help people to use dreams as a source of guidance and imagery for self-healing, and as the royal road to identifying our essential stories, the ones we want to remember and enact.
    He wanted to know more about the application of dreamwork to healing. I told him a little of the story of my friend Wanda Burch, a twenty year survivor of breast cancer who gives her own account of her use of Active Dreaming techniques in her brave and beautiful book She Who Dreams. Marshall took note of the title, explaining that he was on his way to Portland to support a family member who was recovering from cancer.
    Our conversation was interrupted by the arrival of a young man who took the seat between us. More introductions ensued. The young man told us he recently graduated from St Olof's with a degree in music. He is a vocalist who sang with the St Olof's choir all over the British Isles, and in many other places.
     I asked him whether it is true that composers tend to look down on librettists to the extent suggested in Robertson Davies' novel The Lyre of Orpheus, which I had finished the night before. He was unfamiliar with the novel, so I explained the plot, which turns on the creative pains and misadventures of an unlikely crew who set about trying to make an opera out of sketches by Hoffmann, with an entirely new libretto, while the long-dead composer watches from the limbo of composers who are waiting for someone to complete their unfinished work.
     "E.T.A. Hoffmann?" the new graduate echoed. "We studied him in my last semester." He gave me a rundown on Hoffmann's musical oeuvre, and asked about Hoffmann's second career as the author of dark fantasy stories, which were based in no small degree on his dreams and nightmares and sightings of apparitions, including several versions of the double or doppelganger.
    He spoke of a piece his choir had sung in his last concert, with lyrics from Goethe. His face fell when he added that the brilliant young composer was struggling with cancer. He had heard the tale end of my account of Wanda's use of dream imagery in helping to heal cancer, and asked me to repeat the details of her book.
    I think we were accompanied on that flight by angels who were both literate and caring.

Shelf elves and printer's devils

Arthur Koestler spoke of the Library Angel - that bookish spirit that makes texts appear at just the right time. I wish to speak now of a lesser, but highly active, spirit of stacks that we may call the Shelf Elf. His number is larger than the Dewey system. He not only makes books turn up in unexpected ways; he can hide them or even make them disappear. He may have been at work in the strange behavior of files and papers described in my previous post ("Rule of Three").

-   He is often at play in my preferred bookshops, which tend to be quirky independents and havens of twice-sold tales. One of these shelf-elf-haunted establishments is just down the street from my home, which is a mixed blessing because in the course of a year a significant portion of this bookshop's stock migrates up the street into my house.

-  It was in this bookshop that I found the meaning of a funny dream word (chantepleure) in a book placed at eye level from my point of vision at the door, so I could not fail to see it, and was thereby drawn into trans-temporal intrigues involving a poet-prince of Orleans in whose name Joan of Arc went to war.

-  It was here, over the holidays, that I repaired with the feeling that there was something of Jorge Luis Borges that I urgently needed to read that day, Newly arrived, casually dropped on top of a short stack in the literature section, was an English translation of The Book of Sand which I naturally purchased. I opened this collection of Borges' later stories and was immediately engrossed in a tale ("The Other".) in which Borges meets a much younger self on a bench. Borges tells his younger self what life will bring him over the forty years that divide them. The young Borges, who believes he is dreaming, will forget the information he has received from his older self, letting it fade like a dream. Thjs tale weaves together two of my favorite themes, the many varieties of the double and the relativity of time, and I was grateful to the shelf elf that put it in front of me.

-   The shelf elf has allies. One of them is the printer's devil, a term that I am using here in a different sense from what it meant for the young Sam Clemens, laboring over trays of type in print shops in Hannibal, Missouri or Keokuk, Iowa, before he became Mark Twain.

-

Last weekend, I detected fresh collusion between the shelf elf and the printer's devil. I had decided to return to my studies of the history and mythology of the Baltic, in preparation for new adventures in dream archeology in Lithuania in March. Settled in my favorite reading chair, I opened the Penguin edition of a book called The Northern Crusades, by Eric Christiansen. I had been reliably informed that this is the only accessible book in English on the last crusades authorized by the Vatican, which were directed not against Muslims, but against European pagans, in Lithuania and neighboring areas.

-   When I opened the cover, I found myself looking at one of those standard Penguin author bios that are printed at the front, not the back, of their editions. The odd thing was that this micro-biography was not of Christiansen but of Charlotte Bronte.

-

Mystified, I turned quickly to the title page, and read:

-Charlotte Bronte
THE PROFESSOR
-

I kept turning pages. Next came a scholarly essay on Charlotte Bronte's least-known (and by the admission of the scholar, least memorable) novel, followed by the author's own preface and the first pages of The Professor itself. The text of The Professor stops in midsentence at the bottom of page 48, but is continued quite grammatically by the text at the top of page 23 of The Northern Crusades so we read "My brother was/between kinship groups". From here until the end of the book, we are off into the narrative of unholy wars fought under the sign of the cross.

-   This is not the first time the the production department of a publishing house has screwed up. Just a coincidence, you say? Certainly coincidence, but the kind that feels both meaningful and personal. The title of Charlotte Bronte's novel spoke to me. My middle daughter, now a professor, was with us for Christmas. I myself am now a professor again - a visiting professor for the School of Consciousness Studies at John F. Kennedy University in California, where I'll teach a class on "Synchronicity: When the Universe Gets Personal".

-    As I read the excellent introduction to the Bronte by Heather Glen (now that sounds like a fine Scots name) my interest quickened. I learned that even after her novel Jane Eyre became a bestseller, Charlotte Bronte could not get The Professor published; it came out posthumously. So there's a story about a famous author's struggle to bring something to the public she believes in but the publishers don't "get". That speaks to metoo

-- Heather Glen discusses The Professor as a fictional cousin of the self-help books coming into vogue in England in the mid-19th century. The big bestseller in this emerging genre, that gave the genre its name, was Self-Help (1859) whose author had the wondrous name of Samuel Smiles and had been encouraged by previous publications in a series titled with equal felicity the Library of Entertaining Knowledge. This again piqued my interest; one of the new books I have in the works will probably be published under the "self-help" rubric, which I had previously believed to be an American invention.

-   Due diligence. I went back to the magic bookshop and asked if they had a copy of The Professor. They did. I carried home the old 1900 Harper & Row edition, its pages still uncut, and sat in my reading chair, knife in hand, slicing my way through. The first hundred pages gripped me in their account of tight-laced, caste-bound English society, and a young man setting off to make his own way as an English language teacher in Brussels. After that, the novel becomes dull and motionless, offensive in the chauvinist opinions of its narrator on the superiority of the English. Charlotte's male alter ego, whose preposterous name ("Crimsworth") is rendered even more so in the accents of Brussels ("Creemsvort") is notably prejudiced against the Flemish, and in this, no doubt, we may read something of Ms. Bronte's own disappointments as a teacher at a pensionnat in Brussels.

-    If there's a message here, it's not in the full text of The Professor but rather, I suspect, in the theme of two books bound in one set of covers. When we leave The Professor in the two-headed Penguin, we are in the mind of a young Englisman on a mill-owner's estate in the early 19th century. Then we are flung at once - in the second half of a sentence - into the situation of a king of Sweden in the high Middle Ages, facing jeers and stones from a violent and unruly assembly. Catapulted from one life into another by a printer's devil. Borges, knowing the magic and the deviltry of words on a page, as well as the inconstancy of time, would have enjoyed this.