Wake Up and Smell the Stories

 

"I heard something scratching at my door in the middle of the night," the young man in the front row began. "When I opened the door, I found my dead cat, the one that died a couple of months ago. Then I noticed my house had four stories, which is a couple more than it ordinarily has. I was wondering what was going on in those extra stories up top. Then I heard my dad's voice. He was calling to me, 'Hurry up! You don't want to miss the music!'"-
    "How did you feel when you woke up?" I asked. It's always my first question, of any dream.
-  "Kind of nervous. My dad passed last spring, and I didn't know what he meant." -      "Have you had any previous contact with your father, since he passed?"
    "Oh sure. I feel like he's been dealing with a lot of stuff, and I've been helping."
    "How did your father sound, when he spoke about the music?"
    "He sounded real happy. Like something happy was going on."
    "If it were my dream," I said carefully, "I might think that my father's discovered something really good, and he wants to share it with me. Maybe he wants to show me that he's found his way, in his new life. If it were my dream, I might want to see if I could have a proper conversation with my dad. I want to know the rest of our story. Those extra levels to the house give me the sense of space and possibility. I might want to light a candle for dad, and put out something personal pertaining to him - like photo - and maybe something to eat or drink that he would enjoy, and see whether I can just start up a dialogue. Could you give that a try?"
    "Sure," the young man nodded. "I like the idea of getting the rest of the story."-

I looked around the group. "Would anyone else like to share a dream?" A few hands went up. This was a group of newbies, gathered for an evening program at an adult learning center. For some of them, this was the first time they had talked about a dream in their whole adult lives.
   "I dreamed I went to this very pricey restaurant," an older woman began. "I started sipping a glass of wine and the glass broke in my teeth and the shards of glass were inside my mouth, stabbing me. I was trying to tell people what had happened, and that I needed help., but they wouldn't believe me, even though there was blood everywhere."
  "How did you feel when you woke up?"
  "I couldn't understand why they wouldn't believe me."
  "Yes, and how did you feel about that?"
  "It's hard to say. Slightly disturbed."
  "But you didn't feel frightened, for example? Or disgusted."
   "Nothing that strong."
   "Well, that's interesting. That sets a little distance. Sometimes it's revealing that we don't have strong feelings around a dream. Reality check - could you go to a restaurant like that in the future?"
   "Sure."
   "Is it possible this could involve an occasion, maybe with family, when there is some conflict brewing and it's difficult to say your piece?"
   "That's entirely possible."
    "If it were my dream," I pursued, "I'd think about the broken glass in terms of emotional conflicts. I'd think about my need to express myself in such a way that others can hear me and believe me, on whatever I need to get out."
     This resonated deeply with the dreamer. After more discussion, I asked her for an action plan. She said she would start by keeping a journal and getting practice that way in saying what she needed to say.
    "Can you come up with a one-liner that moves in that direction?"
     She produced one right away, "I'm going to tell my story."
     This threw my mind back to something I had seen the previous morning in my local paper, at the bottom of the local news page. It was an ad for coffee. Across a landscape of green mountains scrolled the following text: I realized today's the day I will tell my story.
     The ability to tell our story - and in doing so, choose the stories we are living - is not only a creative gift, it is a vital survival tool. We live by stories. If we don't understand that, we are probably living inside old, unacknowledged stories that may cramp and confine us, stories passed down through families or imposed on us by others. A grand way to get into the practice of telling our own stories is to share our dreams, large and small.

Another woman in the group began, slightly diffident, to talk about a recurring dream from which she was always relieved to wake up. "I have a baby, maybe eighteen months old, and I'm supposed to take care of her. I want to get away because I don't know who she is."
      When I asked some questions, she added, "The baby is fine. I'm the one who's not fine."
      "If it were my dream, I might wonder whether what I running from was actually a part of myself. I might want to sit down quietly, at the right time, and take a closer look at that very young child and see whether she is a very young part of me that separated out for some reason but is now ready to bring her joy and energy into my life."
       This struck a chord. She was willing to give it a try. Through our dream stories, we sometimes find a part of us that was missing is calling to us, seeking a way to gain entry to our lives, to make us stronger and more whole.

 

- Notes from my road as a dream teacher. I teach at many levels. There is great joy in teaching beginners and watching the light of spirit come on in their eyes, and their excitement in finding there are ways to share dreams and personal stories that are safe and fun and socially rewarding. The simple four-step method of dream sharing I am using here is my own creation. It always leads to an action plan to embody and apply energy and guidance form the dream in everyday life. I call it the Lightning Dreamwork process, and it is explained, along with other core techniques, in my book Active Dreaming. 

Dreaming with the People of Amber

The first time I visited the Baltic, I dreamed of an ancient priestess who showed me the spiritual uses of amber. She brought me inside a chamber like the inside of an egg-shaped amber, glowing with golden light, and showed me how to use a smaller version of this amber as a place to see. She gave me words in Old Lithuanian that Lithuanians in my workshop at Nida, on the spit of land in the Baltic Sea called Nieringa, were able to translate with some difficulty.

On my second visit to Lithuania, I dreamed again of the People of Amber. Here is the report I wrote in my journal at the tme:

October 6. 2009. Suvalkija district, Lithuania

I am out in the woods, in the rural part of western Lithuania where I am staying. I come to some wide, shallow steps, just packed earth with wood at the edges. I notice two snakeskins, tied in knots that resemble figures of 8, then a larger one, tied in a slightly more complex knot, on a higher step, and know these were left as signs and also that the snakes were not venomous.
    Now I see vivid, brightly colored scenes of ancient battles - of Teutonic Knights who invaded these lands, and Lithuanian Grand Dukes with their knights and men at arms, struggling against great odds to force them back. This living history unfolds into times where local people took to the forests and the mud to carry on their resistance against invaders. I see people who lived with wolves and bears and tried to call on their energies in the fight. I see huge mystery beasts in the woods that look like elephants and wonder whether these are the shades of extinct prehistoric creatures, or entities created by the country''s defenders in an effort to equalize a conflict through psychic means of attack.
    I wander deeper into the woods. I am conscious that sticky mud is everywhere, and getting deeper, just as I found it roaming fields and ancient hill forts the previous day. I come to the house of a ragana - a witch - on one of the sloppy forest trails. It is just a hut among the roots of a crooked tree. I see the face of the witch before she scuttles away into hiding. She has painted the upper part of her face, from the hairline to the cheekbones, chalk-white so it looks like part of a death's head, or perhaps a venomous spider. While she avoids me, nasty slithering things rise from the mud.
    I'm willing to fight her allies, if need be, and am glad to see that an enormous Bear is with me, as a bodyguard. Yet I'm thinking that the witch is merely defending herself; I have wandered into her territory, and she has reason to fear intruders. Instead of starting a fight, I call down Light, and a bright shaft of amber light immediately descends.
    I am happily surprised to find that it serves as a tractor beam. It pulls me straight up into the air, far above the mud and the dark woods. I find myself inside what seems to be an egg-shaped amber, with female presences who remind me of ancient priestesses of this land I have met in previous dreams and journeys.
    The leader tells me, "You must understand that there are the Mud People and the Amber People, and here you belong to the People of Amber. Your duty - and that of those you train here - is to build bridges and wooden pathways so people can get across the mud safely. You must avoid allowing yourself to be sucked down into the mud. You must remember to call on the power of Light Amber to heal and to guide, and on the power of Dark Amber to remove the darkness."

I titled this dream "The Mud People and the Amber People". 

As I surfaced from this mostly lucid dream, the moon shone bright in my face for a moment, like a spotlight. Then a cloud blew above the apple trees and mountain ash outside my window, and I lay back in the gentle dark, savoring my latest encounter with the "understory" of the Baltic lands where I was traveling.
    I was staying at the country place of a "good witch" in the Suvalkija distrct in Lithuania. After attending my workshop in Vilnius, she invited me here to learn practices of healing and divination handed down in her family from mother to daughter and never written down (until I took notes, with her permission). She had burned amber in a ritual the evening before my dream. In the morning, after hearing the dream, she continued my instruction. She demonstrated how to move light amber over the body in a spiraling motion to heal. Then she showed me how she uses a dark amber (also called "vampire amber" here when used in this way) in a different pattern to extract disease and "strangers" in the body.
     Over a breakfast of dark, nutty "grandmother's bread", homemade cheese and butter and coffee chewy with grounds, we talked about the significant of "Mud People" in the literal history of Lithuania, whose name means "Rain Country". Lithuania has no real natural borders. Its main defense against invaders and occupiers, across the centuries, has been the mud. When the cities fell to enemies, people "went into the mud".

My dreams of the People of Amber offer light in more than one landscape. I have invited groups near and far to enter that amber space of sanctuary and healing.One of those groiups met with me in a forest of dark green pines and silver birches at Kurzeme on the Bay of Riga in neighboring Latvia . Fueld by shamanic drumming, we journeyed tigether therough the dark woods of histiry and personal struggle into the amber light.In Riga, I found the egg-shaped amber in the photo. It fitted my palm, and my dream.

I recount furher adventures in Lithuania, including an encounter with a Merlin of the Baltic and dream archaeology at a working site in Kernave, in The Boy Who Died and Came Back. 

Architects of the Imaginal Realm

                                                                   

"You are a space architect,"one of my students told me. "You create tents of vision and bring us inside for shared adventures."

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

Everyday Dream Archaeology: Imhotep and the Bears

 

Dreams can introduce us to cultures and spiritual connections we might not otherwise know about. A woman in one of my courses received the name Imhotep in a dream. She knew it was Egyptian but knew nothing about Imhotep himself. She accepted the research assignment and discovered that in ancient Egypt, Imhotep, whose name means "comes in peace,” became associated with medicine and healing. In the late period, Cleopatra's time, the shrines of Imhotep were sites of dream incubation for healing in the style of the Asklepian temples of the Greco-Roman world. The dreamer’s curiosity deepened. Why was she dreaming of Imhotep? And what did an Egyptian god have to do with the other characters in her dream, in which she found herself in a happy family of black bears, gamboling with them and perfectly at home?

Historically, Imhotep was famous as an architect before he became a god. He is said to have designed the step pyramid of Djoser in the 27th century bce. It was only 2,200 years later that he started to be recognized as a physician. That probably came in because of people's dreams. Maybe they dreamed of a physician by that name. Imhotep was celebrated in Cleopatra's time as a physician whose sanctuaries were places where dreams healed. At Saqqara, on the west side of the Nile from the ancient Egyptian city of Memphis, there was a temple of Imhotep where people went to dream or have their dreams interpreted by professionals. In Karnak, in a vanished temple of Imhotep, at one time there were no fewer than fifty priests responsible for dream rituals and interpretation. There are records of a very knowledgeable dreamer whose name was Hor. He was actually a priest of Thoth and used to dream amongst the mummified ibis birds in the temple of Thoth. But when it came to reading an important but confusing dream, the priest of Thoth went to "a magician of Imhotep” to get a definitive reading. [1]

So a modern American woman dreams of an Egyptian deity and a family of black bears. She learns that Imhotep was at the center of a cult of dream healing at a time when ordinary people are gaining access to sites and practices once reserved for royalty and closed priesthoods. What’s with the bears? Their appearance in a dream of an ancient god was both thrilling and strangely familiar for me. 

In the first years when I was leading public workshops in Active Dreaming, I often placed a statue of Asclepius on the altar at the center of the circle. These gatherings usually started with the group singing a song to call the Bear as healer and protector. During one of these workshops, as I circled the room, beating my drum to power a journey to a place of healing, I asked about the possible connection between the Bear – the great medicine animal of North America – and an Old World deity of dream healing. Suddenly I saw the energy form of the bear joining what had become the living statue of the god. The two fused and came together. In my vision I saw that in the New World, the Medicine Bear is a counterpart for what Asklepios and maybe Imhotep meant in the ancient world of the Greeks and the Egyptians. I think this perception would have delighted the ancient mind because the ancient mind was forever shuffling things together, making hybrid deities, melding different traditions, borrowing power and “breathing images” from many cultures.

“You are a natural at this,” I told the woman who dreamed the name of an Egyptian god while dancing with bears. She said that when she needed help in healing, she now knew just who to call. 

1. One one ostrakon, Hor, a native Egyptian, left this invocation: I call upon thee  in heaven, in earth, Imhotep…come for a dream, come forth." O.Hor 18, verso, 1–3, 18 trans. J.D. Ray inThe Archive of Hor: Excavations at North Saqqara (London: Egypt Exploration Society, 1976), 2 vols.

 

 

Snapshots from a dream of Tallinn

 

I plucked this report of a visit to Estonia from an old journal. Its content seems uneasily relevant to the current situation in Europe; see the last quotation in particular. 

Tallinn, Estonia
April 21. 2011 

I walked past Fat Margaret, the massive medieval tower that guards the north gate of the Old City, and down Pikk Street. Just before 9 AM, it was nearly deserted; while the word "Suletud" on the doors of shops and restaurants and museum simply means "Closed" in Estonian, I was able to enjoy blissful solitude, in the more familiar sense, instead of tourist crowds . 

I walked up to the pink palace that houses Estonia's parliament, then down Toompea Street to a great unhewn block of stone that has been turned into a monument. On August 20, 1991, the day of an attempted coup in Moscow, the Supreme Council of Estonia declared independence. This was one of the rocks that nonviolent independence fighters hauled to block the roads to the citadel against Soviet tanks that (for once) never came. 

At the foot of the hill, I turned west to visit Freedom Square, where a man-made monument greeted me. It is a Victory Tower constructed entirely of glass, honoring Estonia's earlier struggle for independence in 1918-1920, when Estonians, supported by a British fleet and international volunteers, had to fight on two fronts - against the Red Army and against the German Iron Guard, in league with the Baltic German Landswehr. The glass tower, surmounted by the Cross of Liberty, Estonia's military medal, resembles an ice sculpture, suggesting both the difficulty of building a free society, and its fragility in a country whose geographic misfortune is to be situated in the "Bloodlands" between Germany and Russia. 

I walked up the Hill of the Hartu Gates, above the glass tower. A group of Russians were rough-housing with a Samoyed. I heard angelic singing behind me, as I stood under an ancient linden, and turned to find a troop of school girls chorusing a folk song. 

I arrived at the Museum of Occupations at opening time. This was at the top of my "must-see" list because I felt a strong need to understand the long nightmare of the 20th century from which the Estonians emerged, singing. I saw old suitcases piled everywhere, a mute tribute to all the Estonians forced to flee their homes or their country. A sinister inner gateway loomed in front of the exhibits. It looks like a cross between a tank and a border checkpoint, embellished on one side by the red star and on the other by the swastika, emblems of the twin evils that invaded and oppressed Estonia in World War II.  

Beside this iron gate, the museum's statement of intent included these words: 

The loss of memory and gaps in memory are dangerous for a people. 

Yes. And it takes remarkable bravery to own the memories of a history in which so many were not only brutalized or murdered, but compelled to fight in the uniforms of foreign armies commanded by psychopathic despots. The exhibits are understated: a collection of every-shifting identity cards, an NKVD trooper's body armor, a bottle of homemade vodka, a photo of Forest Brethren - who took to the woods to resist the Soviets - smoking cigarettes under a tree. The testimonials of survivors, speaking in documentaries running on monitors above the display cases, are more graphic. A woman speaks of the "smell of burned meat" after the Soviets arrived to "liberate" her district. 

I leave the Museum of Occupations with all the material in English I can find and walk up to Town Hall Square to drink a local beer - A. Le Coq - at a sidewalk table in the sun. Suddenly a large group at two long tables behind me burst into song, quite beautiful song. When I thank them, they tell me they are Swedes, a choir arrived for a singing competition at the Concert Hall. At my request, they proceed to sing a "summer hymn". And I wish that all international conflicts could be resolved in a singing contest. 

My walk brings me back to Fat Margaret, once a prison. Now the thick-walled stone tower houses a maritime museum. I wander inside and contemplate images of Neolithic Estonians in skin boats, of fish-factory ships, of the salvage from warships sunk in the Baltic. There's a copper deep-sea diving suit from the 1920s, worthy of Jules Verne. It's hard to image anyone in that kind of armor surfacing again from the deep; the commentary notes it was never used. Just above the right shoulder of the deep-sea suicide suit is the first painting in special exhibition of seascapes by an Estonian artist, Rein Mägar. It's dated 2011, and shows a wild spray of blue and white. The title? Unistus. "Dream." Perfect. Another nudge to keep on doing what I have come here to do.  

Leaving Fat Margaret, I look at the interesting building across the street, which pays distant homage to the Tudors. Now a children's library, this building at 73 Pikk was formerly the Tallinn headquarters of the Soviet KGB. A nice progression. At the Museum of Occupations, I watched the former deputy head of the KGB in Tallinn, Vladimir Pool, recalling on camera his experiences when he was trying to monitor the growth of the Singing Revolution in 1988, three years before the popular movement in the Baltic countries helped trigger the collapse of the Sovet Union. The KGB boss had his agents phoning in estimated numbers of Estonians arriving for a songfest that had been shaped as a cry for freedom from Soviet rule. Pool was astounded as his agents reported ever-growing numbers of people. He lost contact with one of his agents. The man called in. "Fifty thousand now," he reported. (The number was to get much larger). Then the agent added, "Soviet power has just gone down the toilet."

 In the evening, I walk along Soo Street, northwest of the Old City, to a studio in an old wooden building where I open the first session of my Active Dreaming workshop. People are excited; some have read Conscious Dreaming in its Estonian edition. 

As we go round the circle, making our introductions, I feel that a grand communal adventure is beginning. 

A young Estonian man tells us, "I am here because I feel an ache in my belly when I have to come back to the body from my dreams." 

An older woman says, "I am here because your book gave words for how I have dreamed all my life." 

A computer programmer says, "I'm here because my dreams have returned after years of amnesia but I'm clueless." 

A beautiful woman announces, "In my dream, I saw Russians driving around crazily on a monster, aggressive lawnmower in front of my dream home and I want them off my grass."

Photo of Tallinn Sky by RM

 

Dreaming with the Departed: First Responder

Drumming for a group to call up dreams of the departed, I found my mind going back to the produce section of a supermarket where I met Fireman Tom six months after he had come to a one-day shamanic workshop with me. He came to that class because he was hungry for contact with his departed wife. He had spent two years visiting psychic mediums and others and had received lots of messages but that wasn’t good enough. He needed direct contact. He was a one-woman guy who had married his high school sweetheart. No, he had not dreamed of her and rarely remembered dreams. I assured him that when we had set a clear intention and opened the right kind of portal, he would ride to his deceased wife on the shamanic drumming I would provide.

He came back from that journey beaming. He met a guide he thought was Gabriel but didn’t want to get too grand so they agreed Tom would call him “Gabe”. He escorted Tom to a pleasant green field where tables had been set up to welcome and process new arrivals. Tom recognized Mary working at one of the tables. She did not look up when he first approached her. When he got her attention she still seemed distracted by the papers in front of her.

“Don’t you love me anymore?”

“Of course I do. But I’ve got a lot of work to do here – work I love – and you have lots of years ahead of you down their Tom. Please go back and enjoy them”

When Tom shared his journey report in my workshop, he concluded, with a shy grin, “So I guess it would be okay to ask that girl from the church out now.”

The “girl” was sixty-five. They had both felt some chemistry but Tom thought he would be disloyal to his wife if he went with another woman – until he met Mary on the Other Side. He really was a one-woman man.

When I met him in the supermarket thirty years ago, Tom was tanned and fit, not only looking fifty pounds lighter but fifteen years younger,

I asked, “What happened to you?”.

“I just came back from my honeymoon in Jamaica. I married that girl from the church.”

Warm memories from that exchange, in front of the oranges and tangerines, washed through me as I listened in class to the sounds of bubbling spring water. I had asked everyone to allow a story or image to come from the well of dreams and memory, Was it only a wonderful memory that was coming to me now, or was there more of the story to be reveled?

I knew in that moment that Tom had died since I last saw him. His honeymoon was thirty years ago and he was in his late sixties at the time. How was he getting on now?

Immediately, I found myself looking in on another scene. Its vividness scared away any doubt that this was absolutely real.

I saw Tom in an old brick firehouse, in his blue fireman’s uniform. The siren had just sounded, and he sprang into action. He wrapped his legs round the pole and slid down to the ground floor where the engines were waiting. He looked as he had done as a young man, hearty and strong, maybe thirty years old. Tom was a first responder again.

I saw him rush to the scene of an accident. A man’s body lay on the road. Above it, half-formed of smoke-like substance, was a second body, leaving him from the abdomen. His consciousness was in the second body but blurry. He had no idea what had happened. There was a real risk that as he settled into his dense etheric body, he would confuse it with his physical body and fail to understand his situation. Those who have died suddenly, without preparation for conditions after death, often get lost or confused in this way.

Tom acted decisively, as first responder for a victim of sudden death. I observed him comforting and steadying the spirit of the man who had been killed on the road. I knew he would soon lead him to the guides who would escort him on the next stage stage of his journey to his new life. I wondered whether Tom would still call one of them Gabe.

Drawing: "First Responder" by Robert Moss

Night of the Blue Bird

Sometimes all we need from our dreams is one simple image, bringing clarity and direction. In the midst of leading a soul recovery training in France, I set the intention of dreaming on behalf of the group. 

     In the middle of the night, my upstairs room in an old stone house at the Hameau de l’Etoile was filled with blue light. In the spectrum of blues, I would say that the color was azure. Amazed, I found the source of this light in a great blue bird suspended in mid air. The light shone from within it, as if from the heart of a crystal. In that light, I knew that all would be well and that great gifts would come to those who had made the journey to this little village of hope, in the Midi.

    The quality of this blue light reminded me of figures who have appeared to me in other visions of the night, especially one I call simply the Blue Lady, who has attended and prepared me for grand adventures between the worlds. I thought, also, of the blue-skinned deities of Egypt and India. My bird visitor had a crest on its head, bringing an unassertive sense of royalty and grace.

    I carried the wonderful energy of this vision with me as I went down for coffee in the refectory in the morning. “Good morning to your waking soul,” a member of my training greeted me, with a line from Robbie Burns. I shared my simple dream image by the hearth, and we fanned the ashes from the fire ceremony we had shared the previous night into new life. 

Art: Marc Chagall, "The Blue Bird" (1952)

Hungarian Swallow

Nandor, an elderly Hungarian man, wept uncontrollably when he attempted to describe the recent loss of his son, who had died a few weeks earlier of leukemia, aged only 25. Nandor had had no contact with his son – in dreams or otherwise – since his death. Despite his terrible grief, Nandor clung to the materialist perspective that had guided him as a scientist in his native country under communism, distrusting anything that could not be experienced and tested with the physical senses. He said he never remembered dreams.

He had come reluctantly to my workshop at his wife’s insistence, expecting nothing, or less than nothing. His sadness filled me with compassion.

I stood near him during a drumming session and found his son. I found something more: a pleasant room overlooking the Danube in Budapest, a space where Nandor might be able to have direct contact with his boy. After the drumming, I sat with Nandor. He told me he had seen nothing during the drumming. I told him, “I have a dream for you” and asked his permission to share it. “Yes, yes,” he said quickly. I gave him this dream: 

I see you meeting your son in a salon overlooking the river in Budapest. You are drinking something warm – is it tea? – in glasses with silver surrounds. Your son is bookish and deeply interested in the history of Hungary, its epics and literature. He is telling you he has made exciting discoveries now that he can have direct contact with authors and heroes from the past. He has discovered something from medieval times, maybe the eleventh century. The word “Magyar” and the history of the Magyars come up again and again. You can come to this room to talk to your son any time. There is a small bird in the landscape that is connected to you and can be your dream ally. It has black and white plumage, like a magpie, but the tail is a different shape. I got the word “Zoltan” in connection with this. 

Nandor became quite excited as he listened. He told me that he had taken his son on a journey to Budapest to visit places and people that had been important in his earlier life, and that they both had a keen interest in the early history of Hungary. He announced with a broad grin that they would have been drinking “wine” rather than tea in those glasses chased with silver.

He readily agreed to try to enter the room I had described in a subsequent drumming journey, and returned with tears streaming down his cheeks. He told me he had had a vivid encounter with his son who had quoted lines from a “lost” epic of the eleventh century. In the dreamspace, he found and identified the bird I had described. It was a kind of swallow that is found in the Hungarian countryside. Its name sounds like “Zoltan”, though the word is slightly different.

“I know now there is life after death,” Nandor told me at the end of the workshop. “This changes everything.” When he gave me his card on leaving, I saw that the name of his company includes the word “Magyar.”

We can grow a dream for someone who needs a dream. It may become a passage to another world and reunion with a departed loved one. 

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

 

 

The Paths All Taken

Instead of thinking about paths not taken in this life, we might reflect on the possibility that, in our greater self, we have experienced all possible paths, and can tap into that, embracing the gifts and lessons of many possible lives.

This was the working conclusion of a group of frequent fliers I led in an experiment in tracking an alternate self. I asked each member of the group to start by traveling back along the road of their earlier life and finding a crossroads where they had made a significant decision but might have chosen differently. This crossroads would become the point of departure for a longer journey, powered by shamanic drumming. I gave the following instructions for the larger journey:
-

When the journey begins, you will find yourself approaching that crossroads you remember from your earlier life. This time, you will take a different road. You will follow your alternate self along that alternate life path, all the way to the present moment in time.

-

We used live shamanic drumming to fuel and focus the journey.

One traveler pursued an alternate event track on which, instead of marrying and having kids early, she pursued career and higher education, becoming a U.N. interpreter and eventually founding her own successful business. She saw herself giving speeches in no fewer than five languages. She had some romance and excitement on this trail, but found herself - at her present age - living alone and feeling lonely, amid the trappings of success and affluence that surrounded her. She told us this experience left her glad she made the choice that she made, and also glad she could now feel she had not missed out on that alternate life as the international career woman. "Now I really feel I've lived both lives."

Asked whether she could bring gifts of her alternate self into her present life, she said she'd get on with working with some French language tapes, with the aim of making herself fully bilingual, as her parallel self had succeeded in doing decades earlier. She felt that her language skills might grow faster now that there was some conscious convergence with that other self, the globe-trotting linguist.
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Another traveler who had never married or become a mother found herself going back to a crossroads she reached in her teens, when - in the life she remembered - she decided not to go back to the boyfriend who was waiting for her in California after spending the holidays with her family on the East Coast.

Following her alternate self who did go back to the boyfriend, she found herself participating, very vividly, in a life that included going to grad school with him, getting married and having kids, running a psychology practice, and then finally breaking up after her husband developed a "roving eye." She reported, with calm certainty, "I've done that now, and I don't need to carry on having any regrets." She thought she would try to bring some of her parallel self's gifts in research and writing into a new phase of her present creative life.

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A woman who made a commitment to service in ministry and chose not to marry, returned to a time when she might have responded to the invitation of a colleague to pursue a romantic relationship. On the alternate life path she chose to track, she made a different choice, pursued the relationship and entered into a loving marriage. She gave birth to a girl and later to a boy. She developed a professional career in counseling on a university campus. She experienced wrenching grief when her husband died leaving her widowed in her mid-forties. She had a sense of the loving care of this man that reached from the other side to her on both life paths. 

This traveler returned with a deep sense of peace and satisfaction. The alternate life and the one she now inhabited both required courage to navigate challenges. She spoke about a sense of both lives being lived well, and of both offering service and love to others. "Both paths are of great value," she said. "Knowing that, I feel deep peace and satisfaction."

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Not all the experiences that were reported brought calm and closure. Bravely, one of our travelers returned to the night when she had gone out on a motorbike and suffered a terrible accident that put her in hospital for a long time and left her scarred. What if she had not gone out that night? She found that, on the alternate track that avoided the accident, her marriage still collapsed, and this released her from some of her second-guessing. 

She also met another self, a double who had made the same choice to go out on the bike but had never gotten herself together after the accident. "I call her the Sad One. She's the one who carries her disability through life as her permanent excuse for not trying and not really living. I thought I'd parted company with her but she's still around and I want to send her away."

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Part of the secret logic of our lives may be that our paths constantly interweave with those of numberless parallel selves, sometimes converging or even merging, sometimes diverging ever farther. The gifts and failings of these alternate selves - with all the baggage train of their separate lives - may influence us, when our paths converge, in ways that we generally fail to recognize. Yet a sudden afflux of insight or forward-moving energy may be connected with joining up with an alternate and lively self, just as a sour mood of defeat or a series of otherwise inexplicable setbacks may relate to the shadow of a different parallel self, a Sad One or a Dark One.

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Alternate reality tracking of the kind I have reported here may become alternate reality therapy - worthy of the acronym ART - if we can rise to greater consciousness of who is stepping where in our life gardens of forking paths.

Illustration: "Forking Paths" (c) Robert Moss

Where's the rest of me?

I am looking for the rest of me
the one who goes barefoot in lush grass
the one who’s been off-planet most of my life
the one who is living in an old TV series
and needs a cowboy with a big lasso to get her out
the one who was buried under old archives
growing mold in a dirt floored basement
the one who is dancing with a fox
the one who won’t put on an asbestos necklace
the one who is hiding behind the sun
the one who lives in the beauty of flowers and plants
the one who jumps through the pictographs
on the walls of a deep cave, with a white rabbit
the one who might be at the end of a golden tunnel
I’m scared to enter
the one who’s in the room with the No Entry sign
the one who is right here, waiting for me to see her
and hug her and play with her
the one who whispers in dreams you can't quite forget,
“When you are your true self, I’ll be there”

Hey! The flag is up on the magic mailbox
where the dirt road ends in a field

Let’s try again. You open the box

when you answer the question,
“Where is the rest of you?”

“I thought you asked, ‘Where is the restroom key?’
I’ll have to get back to you.”

How about now?

I’ve been riding a rocking horse since I was three
I am trying to block my family ghosts
with a dream catcher made in China
I am shamanic shopping for the Golden Fleece
I am looking for a Thai restaurant that isn’t open
I am reading an email from a dead friend

I am in an enchanted apple orchard with my fairy lover
I am dancing on the dark side of the Moon

I am in my mind, which is everywhere
I am trying to go home to a blue star
I am stuck in a book only I can write my way out of.

-          - Robert Moss 

     This could be called a community poem. I wove it from the dreams and memories that came from members of my Soul Recovery Training at Mosswood Hollow when I suggested they journey on the question, "Where's the rest of me?"

      Photo: Hedge Gate at Mosswood Hollow by RM

P

The First Latvian Moon Landing

THE LATVIANS HAVE SUCCEEDED IN LANDING ON THE MOON!

This was the headline and basic content of one of my dreams on the first night of my residential workshop on shamanic lucid dreaming at a pleasant center on a rocky beach near Roja, on the Bay of Riga, over the Easter weekend. I took it as a wink from my dream producers, indicating that we would succeed in our efforts to bring back the dreaming here.  

     After all, the Moon not only has great attraction for dreamers; it was widely believed by the ancients to be the source of much interesting dream activity. In his treatise On the Face That Appears in the Orb of the Moon, Plutarch - the great biographer, initiate and priest of Apollo, who knew what he was talking about - suggested that the spirits of the Moon visit humans in their dreams, and that the souls of humans travel to the astral realm of the Moon in dreams and transit this realm on the way to birth and again after death.

     Many of the Latvians in my group are passionately engaged in reviving the knowledge and practice of the authentic ancient traditions of their country, dating back to before the invasions began in the 12th century. A folklorist and wonderful singer named Aina gifted us with dainas - traditional folk songs that celebrate oak and sun, stone and sea. The morning after my dream of the Moon landing, I asked her to help open our circle with a song of the oak tree:

I found in a field
a tall oak tree of spirit
his feet go into the earth
his head touches the sky

Oak tree, oak tree
how wide you are
the bee flies for three days
and can't get around you

In the last stanza, this song of oak teaches us to give a little in a strong wind, to avoid being broken.

The big storm boasted
"I'll break the oak."
Oak tree, stand strong
but let the wind shake your branches.

For the first time, I introduced a circle in Latvia to the core techniques of active dreaming: how to open a safe space to share dreams and guide each other towards action to honor our dreams; how to reenter a dream in order to go beyond a fear, dialog with a dream character, penetrate a mystery, or have more fun exploring the multiverse.

    In a moving dream reentry, one of the Latvian women succeeded in going back inside a recurring dream that had previously filled her with shame and dread. In the original dream, she found herself (again and again) approaching the shack where her great-aunt had lived and died in extreme poverty in the harsh times of Soviet rule. She had loved this great-aunt and had always felt bad that the family had not been able to do more for her. In the dream reentry, she entered the shack and had a loving reunion with her great-aunt, who gave her blessings and specific personal information she could immediately use in her life.

    On Sunday, the day of requickening, we moved swiftly through a series of excellent journeys: through the gates of remembered dreams and on to a Dream Library where travelers could gain knowledge on any subject, meet a master teacher and even look at the book of their own lives; and a Magic Market where the discovery of a favorite object from childhood released the spirit horse of vital energy and provided a way to reclaim the energy and imagination of a younger self.

     The fog rolling in from the sea inspired me to offered the sea-mist as the gate for a journey to the Other Side with the dual objective of timely and helpful communication with a departed loved one or ancestor, and of gaining first-hand knowledge of the geography of the afterlife. All of these journeys succeeded beyond my wildest expectations, if not beyond my dreams.
    My own visions, during all these lucid shamanic dream adventures, powered by drumming, became a deepening adventure in dream archaeology, giving me direct access to the world of Baltic mythology and the history and spirits of the land. In a walled garden, I experienced the meaning of ancient Baltic symbols in the forms of shaped flower beds, turning in certain patterns. On a flying horse, I was called east, to a black mountain in Russia, to understand one of the long shadows over Latvia. Through an amber tunnel, I found my way to the current residence of a deceased scholar of Baltic mythology who wants me to make his work known in English.
    In the last workshop session, I helped people to open their hearts and grow a waking vision of the fulfillment of their hearts' desires, a vision so strong that it wants to take root in the world. Then I had them identify three key problems in the way of fulfilling that vision - and journey again, with the drum, for guidance on how to overcome those challenges. This produced very practical guidance, as well as the energy that comes when we carry a vision we can hold not only in the mind but in the inner senses.
     We closed the circle, arms around each other, swaying a little like the great oak in the big wind. As people continued, in high excitement, to share their experiences, I felt that the dream of the Latvian Moon landing was fulfilled.

Article first posted in April 2011

Photo: Sunrise on the Bay of Riga (c) Robert Moss

Feeding Tiger, Meeting Puma

The wheeling of the stars is not infinite
And the tiger is one of the forms that returns.
- Jorge Luis Borges

In the early days of my public teaching, many people said they came to my workshops because they had dreamed of tigers. One woman dreamed again and again that she was searching in a forest for a white tiger. A man arrived at the arts center where I was then teaching and froze in the doorway, staring at the artifact I had placed at the center of our space. It was the carved head of a tiger, open-jawed, set atop a wooden staff hung with bone rattles. An artist in Colorado had started carving the head shortly before he met me, guided by a dream. After he met me, he dreamed he should set the head on a rattle-staff and give it to me. The man in the doorway at the arts center exclaimed, “I know I’m in the right place! This is my dream.”
     “For more than a year,” he explained, “I was hunted by a tiger in my dreams. I kept running away, and usually woke myself up, still terrified, trying to convince myself this was only a dream. Then the tiger was on me, snarling and snapping, and I could not get out of the dream. He drove me down a dark forest trail. I saw things there that scared me, huge snakes hanging from the trees, savage eyes in the shadows, but nothing was as scary as the tiger. He kept on me, tearing my clothes and flesh.  I was bleeding when he forced me to the edge of clearing in the jungle, where he licked my wounds. I saw he had brought me to a place where jet fighter pilots were being trained. They had been waiting for me for a long time. I went through the training and got my wings, all before breakfast back at home. I felt really good, and empowered to do stuff to help and protect other people. That’s why I came to you.”
     I loved this dream resolution. I know, as young children know, that the tiger is power that can indeed help and protect. In soul recovery work, the tiger – as well as the bear – has often been my ally in persuading lost boys and lost girls to return to an adult self from whom they separated because of pain or abuse or trauma in early life. Those child selves often trust the tiger more than the adult, to keep them safe and to make life crazy fun.
     The tiger must be gentled to purposes of this kind. The tiger must also be fed. For six weeks, in the late 1990s, I decided to go vegetarian. Towards the end of this experiment, I visited a zoo south of Montreal with my family. I was edgy as we neared the big cat enclosures. Though the zoo was well laid out, with space for the animals to roam, big cats do not belong in confinement.
I glanced through the bars at a group of Sumatran tigers dozing in the sun.
    “Look, Dad!” my youngest daughter exclaimed. “That one is looking at you.” I looked again and saw that a male tiger had sat up and was staring at me. Suddenly he bounded from the slope where he had been napping to press his face against the bars, still staring at me. I returned his stare, wondering if he felt – as I did – that we were kin.
     He sniffed me, gave a kind of shrug, and loped back up the hill to resume his nap. I got the message. He may have considered the possibility that we were related, but one whiff on my body scent had assured him we were not. Tigers are not vegetarians.
     I returned to eating meat – starting with bacon, of course, the vegetarians’ favorite kind – and one night the tiger returned to me. Reclaiming his power was not easy. I learned again that night that there is a price for gaining and maintaining a relationship with a true animal power. The tiger irrupted into my space that night as an energy form that was entirely real, more real than the darkened room around us. He made me fight with him, hand to claw. Few, if any men, could hold their own in a wrestling match with a tiger, and I was certainly not one of them. He made me fight long and hard, until I was bloodied and torn. Then, relenting, he gave me a harder assignment than combat. He told me I must eat his heart. He opened his chest, and I took out his steaming, beating heart, dripping blood. Half-gagging, I forced myself to eat the tiger’s heart. This felt exactly like eating the living organ.
     From that time, the tiger was with me again, available whenever  I needed his help. He was ready to yield pride of place to other allies, like the bear, when their talents were needed, and even to introduce new helpers. When I landed at Cuzco in Peru in 1999, I was cautioned to be careful to avoid altitude sickness. Our guidance was to take this slowly, and relax in the hotel lobby for an hour with some coca leaf tea. It was stressed that the tea would calm and strengthen us but was unlikely to have hallucinogenic effects because the coca content was so small.

I did not regard what I saw in that hotel lobby, beyond the comings and goings of tourists and staff, as a hallucination. I saw the tiger, moving in front of the desk and a wall covered with murals with Incan themes. He was a translucent form. He signaled to me that I was going to need help up here in the Andes, and that he would send the right helper to my room that night. I should make myself ready.

    Near midnight, in my hotel room, I lay on my back on my bed, looking out the window at a night full of stars in constellations whose names I did not know, or recalled only vaguely from my childhood in the Southern hemisphere. I felt an urge to go flying up among those stars, and to bring back their names, and something like a grid opened in my perception, inviting me to go through it. My body started to vibrate and I heard the kind of humming I had long associated with the run-up to conscious astral projection. An instinct of caution was still with me. Was it really safe to leave my body in an environment I had not yet tested, without defenses?

      My thought flow was interrupted by the very palpable sense of another presence in the room. I sat up in bed and saw the energy form of a big cat approaching me. As my senses adjusted, I saw it was a puma. I was certain that this was the ally the tiger had promised to send. The puma pressed its face against mind. It spoke to me, mind to mind, in words I can transliterate like this:
      “Big cats are not intended to live at these altitudes. We took millennia to adapt, following the game animals up the mountains. You have just arrived and have not time to make the necessary adaptations. So what you need to do is this. You need to open yourself at your solar plexus and let me in. I will help adjust your body systems so you will be at home in the Andes, as we are.”

      I did what the puma suggested without hesitation, since this new helper had come with the right introduction. I felt the energy of the mountain cat streaming through my blood, toning my muscles, flexing my sinews. Over the ten days that followed – though I am not athletic and do not work out – I was the fittest member of our party. I had no difficulty with the altitude,  no fear of heights, no shortage of breath.
     Tiger is not only a fierce but reliable friend. He is willing to share his whole tribe.

Text adapted from The Boy Who Died and Came Back: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Drawings (c) Robert Moss