The Google choice: glimpsing a parallel life

Rhinebeck, New York

"Suppose you could go back in time and be present to a younger self in his or her own Now time. You could provide counsel and mentoring in a time of confusion and vulnerability. You could be the invisible friend for that lonely kid. You could go to that wounded younger self who was shamed or violated and assure her, You'll make it through. You'll survive. I promise.
   "You could caution a younger adult self on life choices, since you know far more about the consequences, for yourself and others." 

I am talking to a group of intrepid dream travelers who are preparing to make a journey across time, with the aid of shamanic drumming, into the mind and circumstances of one or more younger selves. I know it is possible to do this. I am quite certain that my sick and lonely boy Robert - the one who had double pneumonia twelve times between the ages of three and eleven - would have had an even harder time making it through without the active support and companionship of a forty-something Robert who learned to fold time in order to be present to him when he most needed a friend. I have described how this worked in The Boy Who Died and Came Back.
    I am getting the group ready to journey upstream, over the rivers of their lives, to one or more points where the intervention of an older self in the mind of a younger self may be helpful, even essential.
    I can't refrain from joking about less enlightened things we might try to do. "You could try to slip your younger self the name of a winning horse. Or tell your younger self to buy Google stock at the IPO, lots of it."
    Most people chuckle, but a very gifted and sensitive dreamer shoots me a look of serious concern. It's okay, I want to tell her. We're not really going to go back in time to push Google stock when the company is going public.

Now I'm drumming, and conscious of our travelers plunging back through time to enter the minds of their younger selves. I sense one of them leaping the waterfall, into the space before birth, to enter the amniotic lake.
    This is going well. I check in on a couple of versions of my younger self. Then I decide, for the heck of it, to get together with my younger adults self on the eve of the Google IPO. I find him on a pleasant beach in the Pacific Northwest. He's aware of the Google offering, and is even talking to a friend about it.
    I find myself pushing him to get in on the IPO. Find out how to order stock - the Google offering is different from most - buy a lot, and keep on buying over the next year. Google is going public at $85 a share. People think that's a high price, but ten years later the stock will be trading at over $550. Take out a home equity loan. Buy lots.
    Uh-oh. I suddenly realize that this suggestion has just caused a split in my personal universe. I see, like a movie running fast-forward, what my life becomes after I buy thousands of shares of Google. I have tons of money and three houses. But all this quick cash has encouraged me to make some disastrous personal choices, and it has seriously deflected me from my calling. I make lots of donations to good causes, but my own sense of a cause has lapsed, and this makes me profoundly discontent, since I am not much good unless I feel I am serving a cause.
    I am still drumming for the group, but I feel reality shimmer. In the post-Google universe, I am not here, in the Pavilion at the Omega Institute, drumming for the group while the rain falls in the green landscape around us. And I don't want that rich but hollow parallel life.
    I will myself fully back to where I have chosen to be, in my present life. When I sound the recall and tell people to move around, wiggle their bodies, and find themselves fully back in physical focus, Now, I do this myself with special vehemence.
    I know, of course, that there really is a post-Google IPO universe where one of my countless parallel selves is living the consequences I saw. That universe no doubt existed before I made my journey back to a point of decision. I am glad that, on my present event track, I made the choice I made then, and again.
    
Now I am walking the dog in early sunlight. There are worse things to do than walk a little dog around a city park. I am not doing this in that post-Google world.

Catching the Blue Butterfly

"There's a blue butterfly!" someone yells. It is enormous and beautiful, with pale blue wings. It flits around our space, which is a greenhouse or glass-enclosed porch with many green plants.
    I run to catch it, and find there is a cord trailing from its body. When I clasp the cord, gently, not wanting to harm the butterfly, there is an upwards tug. I amazed to find this butterfly may be strong enough to lift my body off the ground.
    Later, I manage to catch it inside an upturned basket. What a find!

Feelings on waking: happy

Reality check: (1) I dreamed this while my suitcase - with a huge light blue name tag - was still missing after my return from my last trip to Europe. I woke to find my bag had been delivered overnight. (2) The butterfly is a favorite symbol for the soul, and is on the cover of my recent book Dreaming the Soul Back Home. (3) When I sat down to dinner on the deck of the dining hall at the Omega Institute during my workshop this past week, one of the participants was eager to show me a (dark) blue butterfly she had in a paper cup. Alas, that butterfly was dead and I said gently that I would rather not have it on the table. 

Getting my wings out of the left luggage

Omega Institute, Rhinebeck N.Y

"Where is the rest of me?"
    I offered this question to the group at my Omega workshop as the theme for a high-octane meditation, fueled by shamanic drumming, during our first evening session. I then suggested that we put the scene to the night, before going to sleep, to see how our dream producers would respond.
    From the first moment I arrived at the Omega campus, walking in light rain over fallen and falling leaves, I felt my batteries recharging. I was back in the neighborhood where an ancient Native shaman, the mother of the Wolf clan of the Mohawk people, called me in dreams and visions 25 years ago, leading me to change my life and follow the path of a dream teacher.
    Here the trees and the animal spirits are intimate familiars. Hawk speaks to me, Bear comes to heal and protect, the Deer offers the gift of regeneration, White Wolf teaches me to gentle the wolf in man, and carries me to the heart of the Peacemaker.
    As I settled in bed in my cabin before midnight, I repeated the question I had given the group:
    Where is the rest of me?
    I slipped into this dream:

I am at an airport. A friendly agent shows me magical passes. They are simple, and powerful. One makes me think of the raking motion of a bear bringing his paws down, but there is no hint of violence in it. Another pass is a scooping motion.
    I find my way to an area where there is a great pile of left luggage.
    I find a suitcase that belongs to me in the heap, and open it to check the contents. I see fresh white linens inside the bag. Surprised, I unfold the linens and see that they are a pair of huge, shining white wings, like angel's wings. My heart is filled with joy.
    Below the wings, in the body of the suitcase, I see toys and games: a ball and bat, children's books, toy soldiers, art supplies a badminton racket. I am happy that the energy of my boy selves is here too.

I woke fully charged with vital, bounding energy. On my walk to the dining room, my first three observations keyed me to think about another, ancestral, aspect to the question, Where is the rest of me? The mist lay deep over the green campus, and I thought about how, for my Celtic ancestors, the mist was a preferred portal to the Otherworld. In the mist, I now saw a man striding along in a kilt, and felt the Scot in me stirring. In the dining hall, the first food I saw on offer at the buffet was steel-cut oatmeal, a favorite of my Celtic ancestors. I carried it out onto the deck and ate it, with sea salt, as I watched the sun slowly parting the mist.
     This was a perfect cure for the fatigue and temporary soul-loss occasioned by my grueling recent travel experiences, including those described in my recent post, "The Ghost at Chopin Airport." As I rose from my dreams this morning, my inner soundtrack was playing "In the Arms of the Angel".