Yggdrasil, a Place to Stand

The red fox stands beside the tree gate.
I’m never at ease when he shows himself,
but he is flanked by the black dog,
ever watchful and reliable, a true guardian,
and there seems to be no conflict between them.
This is new. I could take the open door
down through the roots of the world tree
but I am distracted by the frisky moves
of a squirrel that is running down the trunk.

He is as big as an elephant, perfectly in scale
with the tree that rises into the clouds
and could contain cities. His presence confirms
I am at the place where a shaman-god
hung for nine days and nine nights,
sacrificing himself to himself.

Rattling his nuts, the squirrel of mischief
plunges into the Lower World ahead of me.
He is playing his old game, Wake the Dragon.
Fire and stink rise from the roots of the tree.
Earth shudders. The squirrel snickers in glee.
Ratatosk, Ratatosk, Ratatosk.
Here he comes back again.
He scurries up the tree, all the way to the top,
telling tall tales to anger the heaven bird
that keeps watch over all the worlds.

Dragon rises. Branches of the world tree
creak and groan as the eagle shakes out its wings
and comes down, talons eager for battle.
Between them, on a ledge in the tree world,
I see a man in a grey robe, with a broad-brimmed
grey wizard’s hat. There are birds on his shoulders
and a great company of birds all around him.
Lightning is with him. His eyes flash, his hands
spark white fire from the air. His form is never still.
He is the ancient of days, he is the magic man,
he is the young deer prince, antlered and horny.

As the dragon rises to join battle with the heaven bird,
he catches it by the throat with his left hand. His body
twists and buckles as he struggles to hold this power
and raise it. It is pulling him down, tearing him apart,
till he lifts his right hand, palm downward, and the eagle
lands on his wrist as the falcon returns to the falconer.

The balance is  made. The powers of above and below
are joined and turning together, evenly matched.
This is how the game of the world goes on.
The man with lightning eyes is calling me.
Come. Stand where I stand. See what I see.

I am drawn to him as the sparks fly upwards.
On his edge between the worlds,
my body stretches beyond itself,
my mind cracks open like the squirrel’s nuts.
Ratatosk, Ratatosk. There is a role for mischief.
And I have found the right place to stand.

-          October 17, 2014

From a vision while leading a group shamanic journey through the Tree Gate at the Hameau de l’Etoile, near Montpellier. We danced on the mythic edge all week, and my dreams and visions - like those of many in our gifted circle - often turned on Greek themes. But on a certain day, I was hurled deep into an indelible scene that seemed to come from the Nordic imagination.

Art "L'arbre et la brume" (c) Annick Bougerolle

Spirits Are Real: Vic Turner Betwixt and Between

I dreamed of attending a lecture by Victor Turner, a great cultural anthropologist who became famous for his studies of liminality, the "betwixt and between" state in the life of an individual or a culture when established norms are left behind and profound transformation may follow, with the challenge of reintegration looming beyond that. Vic has been dead in the world for many years but I found him to be very much alive in a betwixt and between state somewhere else.  

I loved the simplicity with which he addressed his audience. He told us, "I dedicated my life to explaining different peoples to each other." In my dream Vic Turner knows he's dead, in the sense that he's not on earth, in the Africa he loved, or in America, or Sri Lanka, or Manchester. He has had plenty of time to reflect on that life, though time works differently here.

I read in his wife Edie's memoir, Heart of Lightness (Berghahn Books, 2005) that he died relatively young in 1983. She describes the depth of their engagement with the Ndembu people of northern Zimbabwe. She gives a whizbang portrait of his personality: Vic was "a flat-out character; in a sense, he was out of control, his consciousness had escaped from him, it was flying ahead of him, like the arutam-souls of Jivaro Indians flying out ahead of their bodies over the battlefield."

Naturally he broke with the dialectcal materialism of his early Marxism and then with the British anthro penchant for reducing spirits to by-products of social structures. I did not have the pleasure of meeting Vic Turner before he passed on. I am glad to see that in his Bardo of Betwixt and Between, this passionate Scots scholar of liminality is still thinking about what his discipline needs to be - an anthropology of experience that requires the observer to become a participant and practitioner of the ways of another culture.

For more than two decades, his widow Edie upheld that cause like the milk tree the Ndembu call their flag, declaiming - after she watched a dramatic shamanic extraction - that "spirits are real".

In her memoir, Edie recalls how the Manchester set of Africanists agreed to uphold what later became for Star Trek the Prime Directive: leave the cultures you visit untouched. 

The Blob and Tooth Extraction

She went back to Kajima in Ndembu country a couple of years after Vic’s death. For many hours, she helped gather the tree parts and supplies required for an extraction healing. When the healer completed her operation, Edie saw a huge grey blob emerge from the patient’s back. Later she was shown a bloodied molar. She was told that the patient had been possessed by a spirit of the dead that was now trapped in the tooth. . 

The Ndembu call this type of operation a Tooth extraction and a bloody tooth is usually produced as evidence of success. The tooth is stuffed in the hole of a piece of antelope meat shaped like a donut and confined in a jar with cassava meal and blood. Edie did not doubt the blob was real (though she hints that the tooth may be just for show) and this this was true shamanic extraction. She made this the theme of a celebrated article affirming that spirits are real. * Truly, an anthropologist who stepped out from under the mosquito net. 

* E.B. Turner, "The Reality of Spirits: A Tabooed or Permitted Field of Study?" first published in Anthropology of Consciousness March 1993.

Illustration: "Under the Milk Tree" RM + AI

 

Personal Myths and Collective Dreams

Joseph Campbell maintained that “A dream is a personal experience of that deep dark ground that is the support of our conscious lives, and a myth is society’s dream. The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth.” I have long found this to be profoundly true.  In the ancient mind, there was rarely any doubt. In Homer's time, as in Cleopatra's or the Buddha's, dreams were nightly fields of interaction between gods, humans and others. Though we may be short on shared mythology in modern society, our dreams still bring us into mythic life. 

I found this excerpt in an old  journal, typed on a strip of paper I had used as a bookmark. The title of the dream was in upper case.as reproduced here:

The Big dream

IMAGES OF THE PRIMORDIAL GODS

I went through the lineage of the gods, backwards and forwards, from the anthropomorphic versions back to raw and primal images without clearly defined borders. I saw the Great Goddess. I saw Zeus streaming on the face of the waters, like an immense living island whose skin barely broke the surface. His colors were light olive and silver.
    His “hair” streamed in a deltoid pattern that could almost be mistaken for a beard, but was more reminiscent of a verdant triangle of public hair. Trying to describe his form (inside the dream) I evoked sea turtles and cuttlefish and (waking) the wings of a vast manta ray. But none of these similes contained the shape, which was too vast and too fluid to be comprehended in a single visioning.

I was excited that this dream found me again. It took me back to the era before humans had made much progress in domesticating the wild primal nature of the forces at play around them – of the elements, of land and sea, of Earth and Sky. I wrote my story "The Way to Tethys" in Mysterious Realities from another vision of this kind.
    I was curious that in the dream I call the oceanic deity Zeus rather than Poseidon, then recalled that their precincts and identities were probably not clearly demarcated in the archaic mind. Zeus is a generic term for a god as well as the name of the Big God enthroned in the Olympian pantheon (and one of the Big Three beside his brothers Poseidon and Hades). Nobody can decide whether the magnificent Artemision Bronze in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens is Zeus or Poseidon and whether what is missing from his raised fist is a trident or a thunderbolt.

The Greeks dreamed of the Egyptians who dreamed, it may be, of Atlantis. "Great stories are like dreams," Normandi Ellis takes up the big theme in Imagining the World into Existence: An Ancient Egyptian Manual of Consciousness. "The images that appear on the tomb walls and in the context of the Egyptians' sacred books are dreams...If we view the entire study of ancient consciousness and its impact on our lives as if it were a dream language, it becomes easier to peel back its layers and open to its possibilities." 

Illustration: "Eyebrows of Zeus" by Robert Moss

The Question on the Bridge

 

After midnight, I lie on my back and close my eyes. I do much of my best work in bed but not when I approach it in the spirit of work. I tell my friends who are serious meditators that my favorite spiritual practice is horizontal mediation, but I don’t say this seriously. No mantras, no breathwork by the numbers, no specified body postures, no fixed agenda. I’ll just let my body get comfy and be open to what flows in my mind and my inner senses. Relaxed attention, or attentive relaxation. That’s all I require of myself. Sometimes it enables me to maintain continuity of consciousness through all the phases of the night. 
     When images come, I may let them rise and fall, content to see what is surfacing from my subconscious or looking in from the limitless universe outside me. If no images come, I’ll be content to drift off into industrial sleep and let my body rest. I may wake up to the fact I am dreaming inside a dream, or not. I may not recall my dreams from the first sleep cycle, though I will check and pay attention to my feelings and sensations when I am missing a story. I can usually detect a dream hangover even when I have lost the dream that caused it. Most often it’s the sense of being jet lagged, or travel worn. I know where that comes from. With or without travel plans, my dreams are often excursions. I get out and about. I visit places on the other side of this world, and in parallel worlds, and in worlds where the dead and the living rub shoulders. The Society for Psychical Research called such outings psychical excursions. A Moroccan dream interpreter calls them exits of the soul.
      For now, though, I’m just lying on my back. My right leg is bent at the knee, giving me the look of the Hanged Man in the Tarot. I straighten it out and give it a good stretch. Shreds and blotches of color float by on my mental screen. There’s a wriggling something pushing in from the edge that could be a giant millipede if I let it, but I wish it to become a lovely many-leaf plant. Geometric patterns form and reform, then textures, weaving and netting, then a parade of faces – some like cartoons or kids’ drawings, many realistic, so many. For a while, it’s like rush hour at a subway station. Everything is changing and racing fast and there are constant popups and inserts. It’s hard to hold onto anything much. I remember William James saying that in ten minutes in the liminal space of hypnagogia, he saw a thousand images. That sounds about right.
      Things are still busy on my mental screen, but there are two notable changes. First, the scene is slowing and stabilizing. Second, I am in it. I’m no longer a voyeur. I’m out and about, on a bridge, with streams of pedestrians moving both ways on either side of me. I smell salt water, engine oil, and fish. The people on the bridge are mostly dark skinned. Many of the women wear hijabs and long form-concealing dresses. A few are in full burkas. A boy on a bicycle is selling round breakfast rolls. I can smell the poppy seeds.
     I am happy when my senses come alive as they are doing now. It means I’m there, in a real place I may or may not be able to name. It means I have bilocated, because while I am walking on the bridge, wishing for one of the poppyseed rolls,  I am perfectly aware that my body is in bed, and I can look in on it. I can wave to myself if I like, though that might confuse the people on the bridge. Or rather, it wouldn’t, because there is no sign that they can see me or are remotely aware of my presence.
   I know exactly where I am now. I am in suspension. I am on the Bosphorus Bridge, a steel suspension bridge that joins the continents of Europe and Asia. Before me and behind me are the two halves of the enormous world-city, Istanbul.  I see boats of all sizes on the water, monstrous container ships from the Black Sea, ferries from the Princes Islands, fishing dhows and floating restaurants.
     I'm not conscious of cars or trucks on the bridge, just the stream of pedestrians walking both ways, of varied ethnicity and dress.
      A woman steps out of the crowd. With a few steps, she is in front of me. She wears a long white silk garment, streaming to her ankles. Her matching hijab covers her face except for her dark shining eyes. In this simple Muslim garb, she is unspeakably elegant, and I know she is very beautiful. There is a faint smell of roses. She looks hard at me and asks, "Are you Turkish - or Romanian?"
     I am so surprised by the question, cadenced by the pause, that I fall out of the dream and am fully back in the body on the bed.
     Fortunately, I have some experience of revisiting dreams.
     I will myself back to the bridge, and wish the woman in white to still be there.
     There is a shimmer where she stood, then she reappears. It’s a little like watching an image emerge from a blur of pixels. But now she seems fully present. I smell roses, and the long dark hair she keeps covered. I told her I am amused by her question. I have friends in both Turkey and Romania. I taught and traveled in both countries and flew back and forth between Istanbul and Bucharest.
      She has brought me a message. She speaks for a Sufi order – she names it - that is interested in my work and would like to meet me. Will I be coming to Turkey soon?
       I would be honored to meet, I tell her.

 

The next day, I receive an invitation from a friend to return to Turkey to lead a workshop. Does my friend know the Sufi order that was mentioned on the bridge? Yes. It is famous for accepting women as equals with men, and for incorporating some shamanic methods for shifting consciousness.
      There are dreams that spill into the world.

Illustration: "Are You Turkish or Romanian?" RM + AI

Looking for Muirthemne

 

First, the dream. Then, the half-dream and the poet speech.

May 7, 2025

dream
Looking for Muirthemne

I'm in a familiar, frustrating dream situation: I have set off from a certain location but now I can't find my way back, because my rambles have taken me into strange territory. Sometimes I find I have forgotten the address and the name of the place where I am staying. Not so this time. Seeking direction, I tell people, "I am going to Muirthemne." They don't understand me. Am I saying "Miercoles", Spanish for Wednesday?

When I return from my dream outing, I recognize the Irish word and my mind goes to Lady Gregory's translation of the old legends of a warrior hero. The book was published in 1902 as Cuchulain of Muirthemne and was in the advance guard of the Irish literary revival. Augusta Gregory described how her friend and protege W.B. Yeats instructed her to take on this task: "I dreamed that I had been writing some article & that W.B.Y. said 'It's not your business to write – Your business is to make an atmosphere'". [1]

Yeats was not faint in his praise for the book he inspired in a dream. He began his Preface to Cuchulain of Muirthemne with these lines: "I think this book is the best that has come out of Ireland in my time. Perhaps I should say that it is the best book that has ever come out of Ireland; for the stories which it tells are a chief part of Ireland’s gift to the imagination of the world - and it tells them perfectly for the first time." 2]

In a Note in the text on the conversation of Cuchulain and Emer he salutes the “poet speech” of early Irish literature that "everywhere brings the odor of the wild woods into our nostrils." He hints that poet speech can lift the veil between the worlds.

So I lay down again, letting my body relax towards the half-dream state, and sang in my mind a poem that came to me long ago in a dream. I knew it to be a wing song when it came, a song that lifts you and gives you the power of flight beyond the body and beyond the world, and may entertain friendly spirits as well. When I first woke with the song, I phoned two musical friends to ask them to record the notes so they were not lost. My friends were out so I sang into their voicemail. I managed to retain the tune, and to record several verses, although one is enough for flight.

On my back in bed this morning, with early light seeping through the drapes, I sang We are sleeping till we're dreaming We are dreaming for awakening We're awakening for our homecoming into the La-and I had vivid sensations of lifting effortlessly from my body in the bed. I felt great wings extend outward and upward from my shoulders. I revelled in the power of ascent. I felt like a sea bird, perhaps a swan. I sported with the winds. I enjoyed the skirl of landscapes and waterscapes far below, and then islands in mist, and long blue ragged hills and at last a broad green plain with tiny tufts of wool that must be grazing sheep and a dolmen arch worthy of a bard or a tribal king or one of the shining ones.

References

1. Judith Hill. Lady Gregory: An Irish Life. Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2005.p.150

2. W. B. Yeats, Preface to Cuchulain of Muirthemne: The History of the Men of the Red Branch of Ulster, arranged and put into English by Lady Gregory. London: John Murray, 1902.

3. Cuchulain of Muirthemne p.23. 

Illustration at Top: "Looking for Muirthemne" RM + AI

Silver Wolf invites me to see how past life memories are selected

I am back in old journals, harvesting, collating, illustrating. This entry relates to a perennial question about the workings of anamnesis: how and why do memories of other lives surface in our present lives?

August 16, 2012

dream

Silver Wolf invites me to see how past life memories are selected

I am in a village of terraced houses, in Ireland or Britain a few centuries ago. I have come here to investigate my possible past life connections with a friend. This may be one of a number of excursions I have made overnight, to different landscapes in different times.
    I leave my friend in the village and walk a path towards the woods beyond the fields. The woods are lovely, deep and dark and inviting. But at the edge of the wildwood, something is moving. It is a black snake, slithering across the path, from right to left, at a diagonal. This snake is huge. When its head reaches the other side of the path, it straightens the body to move parallel to the path. I can now see at least twenty feet of its body, and more is coming.
   I hesitate. Though I don't think this snake is venomous, I'm not sure I want to get any closer. I am ready to turn back, when I see the head of a silver wolf among the shadows of the forest. The wolf is staring intently at me. I recognize a friend, and know it is safe, and maybe essential, to go forward.
   I step over the snake, as if it is merely a garden hose.
   At the instant I do this, I am transported to another level.
   The scene changes completely. I am now in some kind of vessel, like a spaceship or orbiting observation platform. Two men are working the control panels, under huge windows. One remains at his work. The other stands up quickly, to see who has entered their space. He is clearly very surprised to find me here, but also friendly and welcoming.
    I know, before words are exchanged, that this vessel is a "relay station" and that the work of its controllers is to supervise and help to select the past life memories that become accessible to people living on the Earth plane. I understand, in this moment, that it is very important that past life memories are meted out carefully, so that we are not overwhelmed by a rush of information and emotion that could bind or distract us in our present lives.

Feelings after the dream: Excited and full of active curiosity.

Reality check: I have again been studying our relations with personalities and dramas in other times, and how these can provide a context of meaning for current relationships and challenges. Silver Wolf is a name I gave to a native shaman who can appear as man or wolf and gave me indelible instruction on the nature of various aspects of the soul and what happens to them after death. Black snakes have sometimes featured in my dreams as important dwellers at the threshold, between different worlds as well as different states of consciousness. To gain entry to an earlier time and fulfill an assignment in Celtic lands that once seemed urgently important to me (in a lucid dream followed by a shamanic journey) I once had to move beyond a seething mass of black snakes.

Illustration: RM + AI

Calling the Storm God: Private Myths, Collective Dreams

I run into storm gods quite often: Zeus and Perkunas, Shango and the Thunderers.. In a dream report I disinterred from my 2020 journals, I am reconstructing a ritual to call on the power of a storm god feared and revered in the ancient Near East. As so often, the dream set me the task Jung called "amplification": tracking correspondences in mythology and literature. 

August 9, 2020

dream

Calling the Storm God 

I am holding an extraordinary stone. It is dark reddish and may be a meteorite. There is the hint of a figure or scene, maybe its natural contours. Its shape reminds me, oddly, of the foreleg of a bull. I want to set it up in its ancient stand. I examine some bits of metal that were used to anchor it. I ask two lovely young priestesses who are assisting me to bring me some wire, figuring that I can bind the object in place. Before they return I have worked out how to get it securely into its bronze base. Power will be generated when the right words are spoken and the right powers evoked.

I have found an ancient text - Mesopotamian or Hittite - of a hymn to the storm god. I have written a free version of the scholarly translations and feel it has real power to move things for the benefit of communities as well as individuals. I share this with the priestesses and they are excited. I am going to read my work aloud for the first time to them.

I consider how to explain my hymn to a broader audience. One of the priestesses has a collection of my previous writings including an essay titled "Words from Ur". Perhaps somethng in this vein.

Now I have the stone standing securely on its plinth, I decide where I will deliver the prayer. There are three doors in the wall before me. I open the middle door. There is a tremendous surge of energy, seeking form, in the sky. 

 

Feelings: keenly interested, excited

Amplification: I knew that a storm god (Hurrian Teshub, Hittite Tarhan) was very important for the Hittites. I was soon reading up on Iškur (Sumerian) or Adad (Akkadian), a Mesopotamian storm god. Adad’s name is said to be derived from the Canaanite Hadad. The root meaning of both names is "Thunderer". He was also called Rammanu, Thunderer, in Akkadian. A text dating from the reign of Ur-Ninurta characterizes Adad/Iškur as both threatening in his stormy rage and generally life-giving and benevolent [1]. 
     I would imagine that meteorites and thunderstones were widely regarded as symbols of the storm gods. Early Hittite inscriptions speak of them as “stars falling from the sky” and the Hittites supposedly worshipped sacred stones set up at many places. A Hittite king sent a meteorite dagger to Tutankhamun. 
    The Opening of the Mouth ceremony was performed in Egypt to reanimate the spirit of the dead. A distinctive tool was used – an adze with a bent handle resembling the foreleg of a bull. It has been suggested that the actual foreleg of a freshly sacrificed bull may have been used to pump blood to revive a deceased pharaoh. The Egyptians called Ursa Major Msḫtjw, the Foreleg of the Bull .[2]
    It seems that statue magic throughout the ancient Near East involved similar arts, to import the spirit of a deity or ancestor into a statue or stone and then bring it alive.
    I looked for hymns to the Near Eastern storm gods and copied phrases that might be part of an invocation:

Thunderer 

Owner of the House of Abundance
and the House Where Prayers are Answered

Bull Rider|
who leashes and unleashes the Lion Dragon

Guardian of the Tablets

Lord of Divination

Bringer of rain from heaven and floods from underground [3]

By the Old Babylonian period Iškur/Adad was one of the great gods of the Babylonian pantheon with sanctuaries in many cities  He is "the bringer of plenty" in Enki and the World Order . In Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta he causes a storm that makes wheat grow on a barren mountainside  Elsewhere his violence is featured. In the Old Babylonian version of the creation epic Atrahasis, "Adad was roaring in the clouds" as the Flood began. The deluge "bellowed like a bull" and the wind screamed like an eagle. 

Five years on: I note that the priestesses in my dream were modern Americans, perhaps an alert that storm gods will be heard again. 

Notes

1. Alberto Green writes that "On a tablet among the adab compositions from the time of Ur-Ninurta of Isin, Iskur is metaphorically described as a howling tempest with flashing bolts of lightning, a butting storm, and a great lion who makes all his enemies tremble, yet he is simultaneously revered as a benevolent lord and warden of heaven and earth who gives life to the land...In this important series of liturgical incantations dated to Ur III, Iskur is the son of Enlil. In addition to being called a lion, he is also represented as an enormous bull-cloud, booming his name across the sky. Here the Storm-god rains destructive hail rather than life-giving showers. He is lauded as the august bull and the great lion, mounting the seven storms like donkeys; he is also the roaring storm, thunder, and lightning. The mythic picture is that of the Storm-god Iskur galloping in his frightful war-chariot, drawn by his steeds, the lion, and the bull." - Alberto R. W. Green, The Storm God in the Ancient Near East (Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 2003.) p.54.

2. Gábor W. Nemes, “The mythological importance of the constellation Msḫtjw in mortuary representations until the end of the New Kingdom” Égypte Nilotique et Méditerranéenn vol. 13 (2020) pp. 1-61.

3. Benjamin R. Foster, Before the Muses: an Anthology of Akkadian Literature. 3rd edition. (Bethesda, MD: CDL Press. 2005) p.784

4. ibid., p249.

Illustration: RM+AI

The Traveler

 

I can only keep up with him by becoming him. When I come home from our travels, I am not quite myself and no longer him. When we part company, I am left to pore over scraps of memory like the things I find in my pockets and on my phone after a regular plane trip: a boarding pass, a bus ticket, a foreign banknote, a scribbled love note, random photos of far-away cities and beaches and train stations.

It is now one of my ongoing undertakings to track the Traveler through my journal reports. Here he seems to be very like my present self, just two days ahead of me, on my present probable event track. Sometimes he is much further ahead, or on a different – mildly or radically – event track, or he is in another body in another time or another world.

Is the traveler sometimes in a different body in this world, like the kids in the Japanese film Your Name? Perhaps. I think back to the body swapping dream of many years ago when the Traveler tries on at least three different bodies – of a black athlete, a rich Republican country club type, and finally an older, eccentric scholar whose legs don’t work well, much like my current self.

I think of the dream in which I am dressing up in a blue satin ballgown, excited by the prospect of turning on my boyfriend. I wake wondering whether I have been in a woman’s body. This doesn’t feel quite right. My excitement in the dream is surely male arousal, within a man’s anatomy. Confused, I look out the window and see a tall black transvestite, gorgeously attired in a long blue satin ballgown, teetering down the steps on stiletto heels on the arm of her boyfriend

The moment of lucidity, in a sleep dream, may be the moment when the self that has been dormant in bed – or somewhere else altogether – catches up with the Traveler. It may be a moment of self-possession, of taking control of a vehicle that has been traveling under the direction of an autonomous self, like the captain of a ship coming back on board and taking over from a junior officer or crew member. However, the person in the wheelhouse may decline to give over control, and a sudden rebuff may result in falling out of the dream (for the person who wakes in the bed) and the Traveler’s disappearance from radar. So it could be like a horse bucking a would-be rider.

As I seek to track the Traveler, I watch the person who is writing these lines. I see him fumbling with his nautical analogy. I like the bucking horse analogy better, though we lose the notion that there may be a second rider. I am not going to play editor or critic. The writer’s attempt to model and understand what is happening in his many lives is part of his story, the one on which I will put the name we use in the ordinary world.

The Traveler is a multilingual word player. I play with words in English. The Traveler plays with words in many languages. One morning I was left with an unlikely phrase in French, on acccable par les hochements. This could be a newly-minted saying with the sense of “yessing someone to death”, or a commentary on the storm surge of Hurricane Irma, or both. Now I remember the Traveler’s effort to find the right words to greet Stalin at lunch in Ufa in the midst of World War II. He sought an edge of humor while trying to avoid getting his throat cut. He managed, in the Georgian language.

When I am the Traveler the journey often begins at a certain threshold, a gap between the worlds, in a twilight of the mind. I may find myself floating upwards. I roll over and as I do so I feel something pulling loose from my physical body. Lights flash at the top of my head and I find myself being drawn up into a cone of light, like a pyramid with an opening at the top. 

There are days when, flat on my back under a tree, I fall upwards into the bowl of the sky, like Rumi. There are nights when I feel I am about to blast off like a rocket, or be blown from the mouth of a cannon, through circles of red within black. Or I find myself stripping off, shedding the body like a snake skin, dropping it like an old overcoat. When the travels begin, I often find myself looking at geometric pattern. It may be a glowing energy grid. It may resemble the weave of a carpet, or the strands of a net.

 

You know when he tells you it's a redingote

 

I am often asked, of scenes that develop in lucid dreams and visions, "How do I know I'm not making it up?" Well of course I am in favor of making things up, of engaging in reality creation with the aid of imagination, that great faculty of soul. Nonetheless, I recognize that the skeptic in the cognitive brain needs to be appeased. Sometimes a bit of information unfamiliar to the dreamer that can later be verified serves that purpose, providing a sense of objectivity.

Early yesterday morning, in a half-dream state between sleep and awake, I found myself observing a fascinating series of events. I saw what at first looked like a giant golf ball rolling over sea mist towards the shore, where I stood on a sandy beach with dense jungle behind me.  As the ball got nearer, I saw it was a very small moon, with people singing as they rode it towards a reunion in the jungle. Intensely curious, I ran through the jungle, trying to get to the place where the moon riders would come down.

I came up behind a strapping man with a curling red beard, with a cane topped by a crystal ball, a top hat, and what I labeled in my journal a "frock coat". I knew he was a magus and that the meeting he was headed for was of huge importance. Soon he and his servant - who had a blue parrot on his shoulder - were whizzing over the undergrowth on their own magical transportation. I managed to get close enough to the magus to start picking up his thoughts. I stayed lucid and entirely resent to this adventure - while also aware of my body in bed - until the cats pulled me out by demanding breakfast yowls and thumps. 

Very early today, lying on my back in bed, I decided to reenter the scene, and seek the identity of the man in the frock coat, and see whether I could look in on the meeting with moon riders. I learned many things, including his name. At the point where I might have asked, "Am I making this up?" the word "redingote" came to me, in a clipped accent. Redingote? I wasn’t certain till I looked it up.

 

A redingote and a frock coat are both long coats worn by men in the nineteenth century, but differ in style, cut, and purpose. The word "redingote" derives from the English "riding coat." Fitted at the waist with a long, flared skirt, it could be double-breasted or single-breasted. It was worn for both riding or formal occasions. The frock coat, the mainstay of Victorian men's formal wear, usually double breasted and worn with a vest, was shorter (knee-length) also fitted but less waited and flared.

So, he wants me to know he is wearing a redingote, like a frock coat but not the same. Exquisite detail to which I do not normally have access soothes the skeptic in me, though it does not silence him. He hisses, “You must have read that word in Thackeray when you were a student”. Perhaps. But it was long gone from memory if so, and I am pretty sure that the voice that gave it to me was not speaking from the bargain basement of my personal subconscious. After identifying and speaking with some of them, I am certain that the people in that moon-assisted gathering are not part of me at all except in the sense of the old Latin tag attributed to Terence: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto, "I am a human being, nothing human is alien to me"

Dream bilocation

 

Do you experience being in two (or more) dreams at the same time? I am not talking about the experience of dream-within-dream (though that is no less interesting) but about being conscious that you are involved in two (or more) unfolding and distinct dream situations at the same time. You may or may not be aware of your dormant body in the bed while engaged in these other realities.

We may find it hard to sustain dual (or multiple) consciousness in dreamtime. As we leave the dreams, our waking editor - who likes linear order - may try to turn them into a single narrative, blurring our memory and understanding of what was going on.

The phenomenon is important. Growing the ability to sustain consciousness in two or more dream situations at the same time is excellent practice for becoming a conscious citizen of the multiverse.

I had an indelible experience of this when I was teaching at the Esalen Institute in California., which I titled “Mysteries of Ulan Bator”. I was caught up in twin adventures in Mongolia, one in the 1930s (involving a race to locate the spirit banner of Genghis Khan), the other in a possible or parallel future, where I am arriving in the Mongolian capital to take part in a conference on shamanism. At the same time, I am aware of my body in the bed and the roll of the Pacific breakers under my windows in the Big House.

This was a case, at the least, of trilocation.  I was in three different times and at two different places. And while seesawing between my room at Big Sur and Mongolia in the past and possible future, I was sometimes able to observe all three situations. 

In his notes in The Unknown Reality (a Seth book) Rob Butts, Jane Roberts' husband and amanuensis, writes that he was amazed when he first found himself in two dream situations simultaneously. His astonishment deepened when he discovered that his experience  were trumped by those of others in their circle, notably Sue Watkins, who claimed to be able to sustain consciousness of many personalities and their dramas at the same time, in dreaming.

When you become aware that you are dreaming, inside a dream, you may find that you are practicing a simple form of bilocation, at least while you remain lucid. Your dream self is out there, near or far, while you are also aware of your dormant body, alive and breathing, and its physical environment.

I know that bilocation can be accomplished in states of waking dream. I think of the evening when I was drumming for a shamanic circle on a mountain in the Adirondacks when a hawk that was visible and palpable only to me slapped my shoulder. The hawk encouraged me to leave my body, traveling with part of my consciousness, for a reunion with an important mentor, an arendiwanen or woman of power who was Mother of the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk people centuries ago. While I traveled to meet her. enough of my mind remained with my body in the room for me to be able to continue to drum for the group and to watch over its physical and psychic wellbeing.

Journal drawing by Robert Moss

 

Place of the Lion

The Dream

I am driving in a large open car along a once-grand avenue near the water in a city on the Black Sea. To our left are splendid buildings from the Belle Epoque that once housed department stores, hotels, restaurants. Everything has fallen into disrepair; signs are missing letters or hanging loose; some buildings look abandoned. Business is still being done though it doesn't correspond to the old signage.
     The person giving me this private tour explains that old magic is still alive in this fallen city. In particular, the ancient art of bonding with an animal familiar is practiced even in the best families, though proscribed by the church and frowned on by the state. Behind the columns of that now-shabby emporium, for example, is an establishment known to its clientele as Lion Inspiriting. Here the most awkward and tongue-tied can be learn to speak in a commanding voice, and the timid and cowardly can be infused with courage.
     I want to see how this works. Quick as thought, I am guided through a marble hall, up stairs to a half-lit parlor where I am invited to recline on a divan. I am aware that there is a stuffed lion in the room, so shabby and dusty I am sure it is an old taxidermy specimen rather than merely a prop or a toy. A black and white film starts to play. Grainy, silent. Nothing much happening for a long time except close ups of waving patterns in high glass. I am amazed at the detail. I can see every blade of glass. I realize the scene is not only on a screen. It is all around me. And it is not only black and white; There is some green and blue, and a glow of colors I can't normally see.
     Am I inside the night vision of a lion?
     The stuffed lion is no longer where I saw him before.

Feelings when I leave the dream: Excitement and delight.

Reality check: The city reminds me of Constanța, the Romanian city on the Black Sea where I led a fourt-day workshop years ago. The signs on the buildings are in the Roman alphabet, but I'm not certain they are in Romanian.

There is a villa in Constanța called the House of Lions. I don't recall seeing it when I was in the city and don't know whether it is the marbled building in my dream.

I love lions and have made a shamanic practice of connecting people with Lion spirit to claim their voice and find their courage. My original title for my book Active Dreaming was The Place of the Lion and there is a lion door knocker on the cover.

The werewolf is well-known in Romania (and is far more common than the vampire) but I have not heard of werelions here. However, I did once meet a werelynx in the Carpathian mountains. 

I find shifts between color and black and white (going either way) very significant in dreams.

I enjoy the slightly creepy Gypsy-Steampunk quality of the room where things go black-and-white. Of course Romania is famous for Romany. And in the middle of the night I was reading some hilarious chapters in Robertson Davies' novel The Rebel Angels about Gypsy magic in the heart of bourgeois Toronto.

What do I want to know?

Where does this story want to go next?

Bumper sticker

When the lion speaks everyone listens.

 Revisting the dream

When I look again to see how the story could develop, I imagine the narrator - now distinct from myself - discovering he is in the body of the taxidermy lion, which is now animated but shedding hair and bits of hide as it moves around awkwardly. To his horror, he finds that something else has taken the human body he left on the divan. It raises up and leave the premises. He is trying to track it but in this form people will flee from him or try to capture or kill him.

Dialogue with a dream character 

The Alteri

I ask the proprietess of the shapeshifting salon called Lion Inspiriting, Who are you?

She tells me, “We are Alteri”.

Does this mean alters, as in other personalities? 

Surely the lion isn’t native to these parts. She laughs at me for forgetting my history. The lions of the Hatti and of Ishtar, of Egypt and Africa. The cave lions of long ago. Her people are not captives of time or borders.

[Unedited entry form my joirnal for May 10, 2021]

Photo: House of Lions in Constanța.

Adventures through the Dream Gates: Meeting Great Turtle

 

This is a story about what you may gain if you stay with a dream after waking and let a fuller story unfold. I rediscovered it while engaged in a favorite pastime: opening an old journal at random and seeing what an experience I recorded years or decades ago may say to me now. Sometimes old mysteries remain unsolved. I often notice recurring themes and situations that help me to become more aware of my attitudes and behavior, providing a necessary witness perspective on my life roads.        
      Sometimes a dream I did not understand at the time has meaning and application for me today because subsequent events have provided a context. I notice again and again that I dreamed events long before they played out – hard evidence, of the only form relevant here, of long-range precognition.  I discover that I missed warnings or advisories that could have smoothed my path and try to learn from my lapses how to get better at discerning and acting on oneiric clues to the possible future.
      Sometimes a dream I recorded looks like a dramatic production, maybe an instalment of a streaming tv series, staged by a personal film crew behind the curtain of the world. Very often - and this is most interesting for me - my dream reports seem to contain memories of events in another reality: a real life world that is running on a different time continuum or in an alternate universe near or far from the ordinary one.
     The report that follows appears to belong to the latter category.The action is played out in another reality, starting with an alternate version of a country where I used to live. When I stay with the dream, something irrupts from the mythic depth, a great power of Earth and of deeper knowing acknowledged by the First Peoples of the land where I now live. The gift of connection with Great Turtle is a blessing in the ordinary world today, as it was eight years ago. 

January 3, 2017

Dream and lucid dream reentry

I save a turtle, Great Turtle saves me

My youngest daughter is driving. We are in London. I tell her to head for Green Park so I can walk the dog there. I wave in the general direction. However, she drives us into a very narrow, twisting street in an area I don’t recognize. It’s very dangerous. Cars and trucks keep rushing at us from around blind corners, in the middle of the road, which has narrowed so only one vehicle can pass at a time. We come to a stop at what is virtually a hairpin bend, and just avoid a collision with a car that shoots out from behind it. My daughter is quite upset. I persuade her to stay in the car while I walk the dog.
    The dog and I are now in a shopping area. Time has changed. It seems that shops in a colonnade at my left hand are just opening. We walk behind two short squat women. One turns into a shop; she may be going to open it. They bid each other goodbye and the second lady walks on with a dog with silky hair that hangs to the ground.
    My dog and I pass them. Unusually, he takes no interest in the long-haired dog. He is after something up ahead. I glimpse it under a lamppost. It looks like a pigeon that has gotten hold of a paper plate. My dog rushes at it, with me hurrying behind. It jumps up onto my left shoulder. I am surprised to see that it is a little turtle. The “paper plate” is its shell.
     I experiment with removing the turtle. It clings to me with determination. Since I have not figured out what to do with it – beyond keeping it away from my dog – this is okay.

My body is stirring in the bed. Grey light is spilling through the bedroom curtains. I am fully lucid. I am in London and in bed in upstate New York. I could leave the dream now, but I want to stay in it. I want to take care of the little turtle that is still clutching my shoulder. My sensations in my dream body are more acute than those of the dormant bdy in bed. 
    I walk with a protective hand over the turtle while I keep my dog on a short leash with my other hand. I look for a safe place to set down the turtle. There is a large garden on the next corner. Behind an ornamental iron fence, I see steps leading down to a pond. There is a sculpture garden and there are statues of animals – including a turtle – there. This seems like a good place to release my little refugee.
    I open the gate and walk down the steps. I tie the dog up while I set down the turtle near the pond. It seems fine now.
    But there is a tremendous stir in the waters. They fountain upwards. With a great roar an immense being rises from the water. Its great head looms over me. I look up at the leathery skin, the lures of the tongue, the ancient, heavy-lidded eyes. I know in this moment I am looking at Great Turtle, A’nonwara, the Teacher of the Deep. In its gaze, I remember the story of the Real People: how the Light Twin descended to the deep realm of Great Turtle, to learn how to wage the eternal battle with the Dark Twin.   
    Great Turtle wants me to descend to his realm. I let myself drop. I am on my back in the water, falling, falling. I have no problem breathing. I go through utter dark to a place of light. There is a world of light own here, in the depths of water. Here Turtle adjusts its form and becomes humanoid (nothing like the Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles, however). Knowledge streams into me, of how life came from another world to the world that was danced into being on Turtle's back.
    Tosa sasa nikon'hren. "Do not let your mind fall." Do not forget the higher world, Earhth-in-the -Sky, that contains the origin and purpose of life on Earth. When humans let their minds fall, they bring down the Dark Times. 

I returned from this adventure feeling blessed.

I ran a reality check on the contents of my dream. I know Green Park and often walked there when I lived in London. I am certain I will never walk my little dog there. I have been in London with my daughter and we could make a future trip but it is most unlikely she would be driving. I don't think the dream anticipates a literal future situation, but rather an alternate reality which becoems the stage for a deeper - indeed a mythic - drama. 
    I live on what Native Americans call Turtle Island. I have great respect for the snapping turtle (the kind in the dream) and its cousin the sea turtle. They can’t retreat into their shells. Their underbellies are not armored apart from a tiny shield piece called a plastron. I have studied the cosmology of the Iroquois (the Onkwehonwe, or “Real People”) in which Great Turtle not only offers its back as a home for Sky Woman but becomes a form of the Great Teacher of the Deep. I have swum with sea turtles. 

I immediately made a drawing of Great Turtle. His fierce appearance reflects my original nervousness as this huge creature exploded from the water. His intentions, however, were wholly benign.

When I went back through my journal, tracking all my turlte sightings in both worlds over several decades, I rediscovered a poem I wrote to honor Great Turtle in 2012, five years before our unexpected encounter in Green Park:

A'nonwara (Turtle Dreaming) 

I am the turtle that does not hide.
I wear the armor of a knight, not a skulker.
My vulnerable belly says, Get me if you can;
I stick my neck out.

You call me slow, but on water
I am faster than you, and fast on land.
Deep down, I am the teacher you need
to show you how to fight the Dark One.

I am the broad back you live on.
Ignore me for too long,
go on harming my other children
and I will shake you off my back.

Journal drawing: "Great Turtle Rises" by Robert Moss

The Twilight Road to Mythic Worlds

When I look through old journals, I am amazed, though no longer surprised, by all the adventures and conversations I have recorded from the twilight state betwen sleep and awake, or between awake and sleep. Many of these were quite spontaneous, unplanned by me, although they were lucid episodes in which, once inside the action, I had the power to choose and navigate and to experiment with changing plots and sometimes worlds.

I have been familiar with this state for as long as I can recall, since early childhood. In many ways, it is my home base. Yet this whole area of inner experience is still largely neglected or undervalued by sleep and dream experts. I have decided to start posting more of my reports and to add quick illustrations if there are none already in my journals. Here's a short narrative from six years ago:

January 2, 2019

Lucid dream in hypnagogic zone

Unraveling the Knot

As soon as I lie down, an inner voice says, Pay attention.

A book is placed in front of me. It looks like a journal bound in brown leather. The text and pattern of the cover, however, are like tree bark. The clasp has the form of a Celtic knot. To open it I must unwind a string, flawlessly, in a certain pattern. A false move will seal the book.

Very carefully I experiment. I am making a double spiral, then a triskele, then a fourfold shape that might resemble a four leaf clover. 

The book opens into a wildly beautiful scene with a castle above a gorge. I run toward the castle, wearing skins. I am armed with a bow and a sword. A great water bird rises. Surly swamp creatures seek to oppose my path. I bat them away with my sword which blazes light. I see a waterfall in the gorge and understand that this, not the castle, is my primary objective. 

I become a falcon, swooping down into the gorge. I see a red stag above. I know this place though I am coming to it a new way. There are giants above the fall, observing. For an instant I am with them. I know these great ones as ancient allies. For now my assignment is below.

I fly through the hard spray. I am cleansed and restored to a human form. I see again the mouth of the cave of the ancients. I remember the stone that opened a portal of blue light when I braved up to a nightmare of hissing black snakes - and then accepted a call to join in an ancient battle with a dark tyrant sorcerer. I will be here again.

Illustration: "With Falcon Into the Gorge" by Robert Moss

Man Who Fell to Earth syndrome

 

There are mornings when I look at a tee-shirt as if I’ve never seen one before, uncertain whether to put my head or an arm through first, and I find it hard to match the buttons on my shirt to the right button holes. I don't remember which way the medicine cabinet in the bathroom opens, or which side the light switch is on, and I can’t find the question mark on the keyboard.

These may, of course, be signs of senility. I think they are symptoms of what I call The Man Who Fell to Earth syndrome. You come back to the body suddenly from the other world you were visiting in a dream, maybe because someone or something pulled you back - a car backfiring in the street, a cat jumping on your belly to demand breakfast, a drunk howling at the moon. You may land with a thud. Sometimes I feel I have fallen through the bedframe and the mattress to the floor.

When you come back to the body like that, you may find you have left part of yourself still out there, needing time to catch up - and maybe not too keen on returning to a world that is crazier than your dreams. How big a part? Many indigenous and ancient peoples, from the Iroquois to the Vikings, might say you have left behind one of your souls. I'm pretty sure the soul loss, this time, is temporary. I will let it pass, like jet lag. Already I can report that I figured out how to put on a tee-shirt and find the question mark on my keyboard. I'm working on the buttons.

"Man Who Fell to Earrh" Journal drawing (c) Robert Moss

When you don't know you're dreaming until the dream spills into the street

Dreams offer many clues that we are not in ordinary reality. We can fly, or breathe underwater, or find ourselves inside different bodies. We have the powers of superheroes. We can talk to animals and ride dragons. We meet people who died in the regular world but are very much alive here.

    Even humdrum dreams offer many lucidity triggers: prompts to wake up to the fact that we are dreaming. We are naked in public or engage in other anomalous behavior. The scene shifts inexplicably from one location to another, as if we have teleported. There is odd repetition; the same scene plays out several times, like the black cat walking across the room in the movie The Matrix. People we know are notably older or younger than in regular life.
    When a lucidity trigger awakens us to the fact that we are dreaming, we are sometimes so startled that we are jolted out of the whole experience, back into the dormant body on the bed. When we can stay in the dream, conscious that we are not in ordinary reality, we may be on our way to grand adventures, to romance or healing, to solving a mystery or vanquishing a fear.
     To recognize that you are dreaming is not the same as telling yourself This isn't real. Dreams are real experiences. The realities in which they unfold may be as real, less real, or more real than the physical world. In a certain kind of dream experience, the reason you may not pause to say to yourself I'm dreaming is that you are conscious, in an even deeper sense, that you are in another reality, for example a world where the dead are alive, where you will join them on a full-time basis when you leave your own body behind at physical death.
     You can fail to notice you are dreaming during sleep and then wake up to the dreamlike character of everyday life. I missed several lucidity triggers in a dream, and then found elements from my dream spilling into the street, quite literally, as I took my dog on the first walk of the day.
    In my dream:

I'm at a retreat center in California, wearing a wild tropical shirt I think looks great on me. Next I am giving directions to a group of my students on how to take a train from a London station - I specify Victoria or Euston - on certain assignments. There's an air of adventure, as if I am asking them to play detectives.
    As soon as I name the stations, I am transported to a train station. I go back and forth between a pleasant waiting room and a platform. I notice a shower head near the door, outside the waiting room, and decide to take a quick shower. The flow isn't strong, and I catch water in my cupped hands and sprinkle it over myself. I find this quite enjoyable.
    I'm still naked when I hear a station announcement that the train is coming. I look along the platform and see a bus. Can this be right? Behind it, a train or tram is coming.
    A attractive lady in a dark blue uniform - a station official - smiles at me. I tell her I probably shouldn't get on the train naked. Will she hold it for me until I get dressed?
   There's a small problem. I can't find my clothes. Eventually I discover a crisp white short-sleeved shirt on a hook and a pair of boxers. This wasn't the shirt I was wearing earlier (one with a wild tropical design) but it will serve.
    I'm barefoot and pantless and missing not only my carry-on bag but my wallet and ID. Who can I call? I think of a dear friend but I am not sure he can help. 

I felt some concern towards the end of the dream, but relaxed - and fairly soon amused - on waking.
    My little dream report contains several classic examples of lucidity triggers that I missed. 

* Instant change of scene. I am whisked from California to London, quick as thought.
* Naked in public. One of the most common dream themes, and a lucidity prompt for that reason alone.
* Anomalous behavior. I take a shower in an unlikely place, fully exposed to public view. The lady station official acts in a very non-official way.
*  Repetition and recurring dream situations. Trains and train stations often feature in my dreams and I was talking about their symbology in a recent class. Naked in public, losing ID or valuables, and quick change scenes are also recurring situations here, as in many people's dreams.
* The dead are alive. I don't call my friend but it does not occur to me that, in ordinary reality, he died several years ago.

Maybe you'll want to make a list of your own lucidity triggers, including any of the ones I missed that are relevant to you.
    The entertainment value of this little episode was enhanced by what happened when I walked the dream, along with the dog, before coffee in the morning. A couple of blocks from my house, a woman was packing her car. She called to her boyfriend, at the door of an apartment, "Hey, is my wallet in there?" He responded, "I don't know."
    There was the theme of misplaced or lost ID, spilling from the dream into the street.
    It got better (or worse) when we returned to my house. On the sidewalk, I noticed a discarded pair of men's briefs. Not the kind of underwear I had in the dream (or would choose in regular life) but there was the theme of naked in public, dropped right where I live.

1916 photo of female train conductor in London. Photographer unidentfied.