Making friends with death and French language through dream telepathy

I dreamed I was struggling to explain something important in my faulty French. I woke, checked online, and read a message (in French) from a friend in France. He reported that he had been trying to help a man who was struggling to understand what he describes as "an absurd experience for a Cartesian spirit like mine."

The "absurd experience" was a dream in which the skeptic met his departed father. His father was eating breakfast, wearing a beautiful blue shirt. In ordinary life, the man did not believe such an encounter was possible. Waking, the Cartesian did not believe that an encounter with the dead was possible, In the dream, he rushed to his father, gave him a big hug, and was deeply moved.

Trying to make sense of what happened, the dreamer exclaimed, " On devrait nous apprendre, quelque part, à apprivoiser nos rêves. We need to be taught how to make friends with our dreams."

Apprivoiser is a very interesting word. It is often translated as "to tame" or "make gentle". Its most famous use is in the beloved story of the Little Prince, who learns from the fox that in order to learn the secret of life he must "tame" the fox in the sense of making friends with something wild.

My friend thought that I might be able to help the man who had dreamed of his dead father. I could hardly refuse this appeal to help after seeing the word apprivoiser. I wrote a book called The Dreamer's Book of the Dead. It explains why contact with the deceased is neither weird nor even unusual, since they are alive somewhere else. They call on us and we visit them, especially in dreams. We discover that healing and forgiveness are always available, across the apparent barrier of death.

When foreign rights to The Dreamer's Book of the Dead were sold, my French publishers came up with this title for the translation: Apprivoiser la mort par le rêve.

I wrote to the Cartesian who had the "absurd" experience of a loving encounter with his father on the Other Side:

"I have seen it so many times: a man encounters his deceased father in a dream. He discovers that to die in this world is to live in another world. This transforms his understanding of what it means to dream, to live and to die."

I wrote this in my faulty French, My dream had rehearsed me for this minutes before. 

Telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance? Maybe all three. The categories we use for "supernormal" phenomena may blur. What is clear is that in dreams our perception reaches beyond our ordinary senses. We send and receive messages. We make visits and receive visitations. We are prepared for challnenges and opportunities that lie ahead. We have easy access to the departed. And any dream is likely to tell us something we do not already know, in the waking mind.

- Journal report from January 6, 2016

Drawing by Robert Moss

"What better guide to the Other Side than a poet?"

“What better guide to the Other Side than a poet?”

     The question was put to me by a dead poet, as I embarked on writing The Dreamer's Book of the Dead. I did not know, up to that moment, that a modern poet and his efforts to envision and create a Western Book of the Dead were going to figure as the central panel in the triptych my book was to become. 

      It seems to me that the true poet has two gifts that are vital for a reliable and effective psychopomp, or guide of souls. The first is the magic of words: passwords that open gates, and the power of naming that can bind or appease gatekeepers or even bring things into being. Shamans and initiates of all traditions know that poetic speech is important.

    The second gift of the poet as Otherworld guide is that poets live by metaphor and are therefore friends of metamorphosis – inclined by their calling to shapeshift realities, averse to being penned in any routine concept of what is solid or ‘real’.

      What better guide to the Other Side than a poet? The more I think about it, the more the answer seems clear: none better.

The poet who posed the question died seven years before I was born. You know his name: William Butler Yeats.

     Our conversations took place in a space that was outside the physical world, but quite real to me and to others who have learned – and been invited – to go there. It is a place like a library, inside a complex building I have come to call the House of Time. There are fierce guardians at the gates of the building.   

     This is, of course, a magic library. You can find a book on any subject that pleases you, and – as in the children’s movie ‘The Pagemaster’ – when you open any book you may be transported into the scenes or dramas that it concerns. 

     Yes, the magic library is a ‘made-up’ place. But so is the Sears Building or the Eiffel Tower in the sense that they are products of thought and imagination. The magic library may outlast either of those physical structures. It has its own stability, now that generations of visitors have been here and contributed the energy of their own imagination and passion for study. It is a real place in the imaginal realm, which for initiates of many traditions is more real, not less real, than the physical plane. 

     Yeats was no stranger. I had always loved his poetry and have been able – since elementary school – to recite long passages from memory. I have had dreams and visions of Yeats and his circle for as long as I can remember. He was not only a marvelous poet; he was a Western magus, one of the leading figures in the Order of the Golden Dawn.I had met him many times before, in dreams and reverie.
     On one of my visits to the library of the House of Time, while I was drumming for a group and helping to hold the space for what Yeats called ‘mutual visioning’, I found myself drawn from the ground level of the library up a corkscrew staircase.  Yeats was waiting for me, lounging at a table on a mezzanine. He appeared as he might have in his prime, broad-shouldered, his hair flowing, gold-rimmed spectacles on the bridge of his patrician nose, wearing a loosely knotted silk bow tie and a three-piece light-colored suit. I sat with him at the table and we had a mental conversation – no need to speak aloud here, and anyway libraries are meant to be quiet - that ranged far and wide and gave me crucial counsel for my life as writer.

Since I grew up on Homer and Virgil and struggled to read Dante in medieval Italian when I was a student, I was aware that poets are extraordinary guides to the Other Side.  All the same, I was shocked when my Yeats made a spontaneous appearance, and proposed that I should let him be my guide to the Other Side. He suggested that my fieldwork should include interviewing quite a few dead people previously unknown to me – but not, perhaps, to him – on their post mortem experiences.

      I was on the Connecticut shore on a blustery day in mid-November when Yeats made his proposal. I was leading an advanced group of dream travelers, by common agreement, on a group journey to the Library of the House of Time. I was drumming for the circle and watching over the group both physically and psychically, allowing myself to enter the astral locale quite deeply, but with no fixed personal agenda. I checked on our dream travelers. Some were meeting a favorite author, or consulting the librarian, or opening books and travelling into the worlds of knowledge and memory and adventure that each one contained. A couple of brave souls were inspecting the books of their own lives, looking in to the future or to things beyond time – for knowledge of the soul’s purpose, and the connectedness of one life in time to other lives in other times, and to personalities beyond time. Everything seemed to be going well. No need for me to intervene to help someone overcome their fears or open the vision gates wider.

      So: my body is circling the room, my arm working the beater against the drum. My mind is tracking inside the dreamspace. And in that space, I feel the tug of a transpersonal intention. It is not coming from another member of our circle of thirty dream travelers. It is coming, quite specifically, from the figure who appears at the top of the spiral staircase that leads to an upper level of the library. It is Yeats, inviting me to join him up there, where he had called me in previous encounters. It is here that he makes his astonishing proposal: “Virgil was Dante’s guide to the Underworld, and I am willing to be yours.”

      The poet’s manner is quite brisk. He sounds rather like a tour guide announcing the schedule we’ll follow before a pub lunch. Next time we meet, Yeats advises me, we’ll visit the place of an ancient king. Later, we may delve ‘into the realm of Maeve’. Most certainly, I will need to interview quite a variety of people on their experiences of the afterlife, because these vary so greatly.

     Yeats insists on the need for me to understand the importance of Ben Bulben, the ‘bare’ mountain under which he had wanted to be buried – in Drumcliff churchyard – with the following inscription carved on his tombstone:

Cast a cold eye

On life, on death

Horseman, pass by

     Those lines had been with me since childhood, so I was a little wary of what I was receiving. I have a vivid imagination, and it seemed rather likely that it was weaving from half-buried memories. The idea that Yeats could play the role for me that Virgil played for Dante was absolutely thrilling, but was this anything more than a pleasant fantasy?

      The creator’s answer moved through me: Just let it play. Enter the game, and let the results be judged on their own merits. Whether you are talking to the actual Yeats, or the part of yourself that so loves him, or some daimon or essence of personality that is using the mask of the poet is of secondary interest. What is primary is what you bring through.

      Need I say that this offer was quite impossible to refuse?

      No sooner had I accepted the offer than synchronicity came into play, as may be counted upon when emotions are running high and bold ventures are unfurling their sails.

       I drove home from Connecticut and found a message waiting for me from a friend who had traveled in Yeats country in the west of Ireland the previous year. She had decided, for no obvious reason, to share with me her feeling that the barrows and faery mounds of Ireland had been used across the centuries as sites of shamanic initiation and interdimensional communication – even as launchpads for star travelers, coming or going.

     I shivered with excitement as I recognized the link with Yeats’s inaugural itinerary, involving two ancient tumuli in his own landscape. I hurried to research the names that Yeats had given me. My excitement deepened when I found that ‘Queen Maeve’s Tomb’ – a huge cairn that has never been opened – is right opposite Ben Bulben, at whose foot is Drumcliff churchyard where Yeats wished to be buried.

     In Yeats’s early book The Celtic Twilight, I found a passage in which he says that there is a gate to the Otherworld in the side of Ben Bulben, “famous for hawks” – “the mountain in whose side the square white door swings open at nightfall to loose the faery riders on the world.”

      I called the friend who had sent me the message, out of the blue, about the cairns of Ireland. She described how, as she drove by Ben Bulben, her Irish guide had pointed out a strange shadow moving across the side of the mountain and declared that Yeats believed that this marked a door to the Otherworld of the Sidhe and the ancestors.

      My encounters with Yeats have guided me to travel to ancient sites in the west of Ireland that were places of vision for him and portals to the realms of the ancestors and the Sidhe. 

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

Photo: Ben Bulben from Yeats' gravesite by Wanda Burch

Drawing: "Yeats in the Magic Cottage" by Robert Moss
Photo: Swan on the Door of St Columba's, Drumcliffe by RM

The price of Fox's secret

The Little Prince is sad. He has left his planet and the rose he cared for. Now on Earth, he is devastated to find there are thousands of roses, when he thought his was unique.
    He meets a strange, pretty animal that greets him from under an apple tree. It is a fox.
    The Little Prince asks the fox to play with him. Fox tells him, "I cannot play with you because I have not been tamed."
    The Little Prince does not know the meaning of this word "tamed".
    He has to ask three times before the fox tells him that "to be tamed" is "to establish ties."
    How is that done? It takes time, the fox instructs. If the Little Prince wishes to tame him, he must meet him in the meadow at a certain time every day and sit at a certain distance. Each day, the Little Prince may move a little closer. In this way, the fox is eventually tamed and is able to reveal the secret of life.

It's a lovely story, from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's beloved fable The Little Prince, known to most of us from childhood. The secret the fox is about to give is one of the great moments of clear and simple revelation in world literature. But he can only give it when he has been "tamed".
     Now it seems improbable that any fox would ask to be tamed in the sense of being house-broken or put on a leash or made to obey commands. The critical word "tamed" is a correct, but imperfect, translation of Saint-Exupéry's original term apprivoisé. In French, “to tame” an animal (or person) in the sense of making them submissive is dompter; to turn something wild into a domesticated being is domestiquer.
     Apprivoiser has a different lilt. In early medieval French usage, it means to make something  less savage (but not domesticated), to make something alien more familiar. For the poet-prince Charles d’Orléans, apprivoiser is to make someone gentler, softer, more tractable. The fox tells the Little Prince that the way to bring this about is créer liens, to make links or ties.

      Synonyms for apprivoisier might include “to gentle” or “to befriend”. As the fox uses the word, it is about establishing the kind of connection that will make your relationship unique.  Once gentled (apprivoisé) the fox is no longer one of a thousand foxes that hunt chickens and are pursued by hunters; he is your special friend. Once a rose has befriended you, it is no longer one of a hundred thousand roses; it is your rose.

     “Here is my secret,” the fox, befriended, says to the Little Prince. “It is very simple. You can only see clearly with the heart. The essential is invisible to the eyes."
     Fox has two more secrets, all of them things that humans have forgotten.
    “It is the time you lost for the sake of the rose that made the rose so important.”
    Then, never to be forgotten: Tu deviens responsible pour toujours de ce que tu as apprivoisé. “You are responsible, forever, for everything you have gentled. You are responsible for your rose.”

I think of an old white oak, a tree that I know that knows me. Its image shines in my mind as the Little Prince’s rose shines in his. When I need to know whether other thoughts or visions are to be trusted, I sometimes let the oak rise and rustle in my inner senses, to confirm or caution.
    I think of the red-tailed hawk who dropped from the sky to guide me and, as I came to know, to do something more: to befriend me and, in its own wildness, to gentle me. Elle m’a apprivoisé.    
    I think of how Death has come to me, over and over, in personal guise, sometimes as a Hindu god who speaks in the accent of an Oxbidge-educated maharajah. In gentling me, Death has found it amusing to play the gentleman. Now I see the brilliance of the French translators of The Dreamer’s Book of the Dead in devising the title Apprivoiser la Mort par le Rêve for my book. “To Gentle Death through Dreaming.”  

Available from Éditions AdA

Graphic: Watercolor by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry from Le Petit Prince

Immrama: Celtic voyages to the West

For the Celts, the road to the Land of the Living, the Islands of the Blessed, runs ever westward, across the sea. The immrama, or “voyage tales”, contain vital keys to the ancient European craft of dying. Despite flawed and faulty transcription, and gaping lacunae, and editing and censoring by pious monks, the Celtic voyage tales still hold the memory of shamanic explorations of the Other Side, and of a deep practice for rehearsing the dying and guiding the departed along the roads of the otherworld. As Caitlin Matthews says wisely in The Celtic Book of the Dead, “The function of the immram is to teach the craft of dying, to pilot the departing soul over a sea of perils and wonders.”
    The earliest of the immrama is the Voyage of Bran mac Febal, transcribed in seventh century. His journey begins when he is alone – unearthly music sends him into deep sleep. He wakes to find a silver branch beside him, blossoming with crystal flowers. A beautiful woman of the Otherworld appears to him in the locked house and sings of the glories of the land from which she has come. In one of the loveliest invitations to a journey in all of world literature, she urges Bran to cross the sea and seek the original Avalon, the Island of Apples:

The Invitation to Avalon

I bring a branch of the apple tree from Emain, from the far island ringed by the shining sea-horses of Manannan mac Lir. A joy to the eyes is the White Silver Plain where the hosts play their games, racing chariot against curragh….
    There is an ancient tree there in fruit and flower, and birds calling from it; every color is shining there, delight is common and the music sweet.
    There is no mourning or betrayal there...
    To be without grief, without sorrow, without death, without any sickness or weakness – this is the sign of Emain, and no common wonder this is.
    Its mists are magical, the sea caresses the shore, brightness falls from the air.
    There are treasures of every hue in the Gentle Land, the Bountiful Land, the sweetest music and the best of wine…
    Marigold horses on the strand, crimson horses, sky-blue horses.
    It is a land of constant weather. Silver is dropping on the land, a pure white cliff on the edge of the sea, warmed by the sand…
    There are three times fifty far islands in the ocean to the west, and every one of them twice or three times more than the land you know.
    It is not to all that I am speaking, though I have made these wonders known to all who hear me. Let you who are ready listen from the crowd of the world to the wisdom falling from my song.
    Do not fall upon a bed of sloth. Do not be overcome by drunkenness. Set out on your voyage over the clear sea, and you may chance to come to the Land of the Living, the Land of Women, the Island of Apples.[1]

Who could refuse such an invitation? Bran sets sail with three companies of nine men. They meet Manannan mac Lir – lord of the sea and the underworld. They reach the Land of Women but after a year they leave because one of the men is homesick. When they return to Ireland they find that centuries have passed and they are remembered only as figures of legend. When the homesick man stumbles ashore he crumbles into dust. Bran and his men cross the waters again and do not return – and yet, in another telling, the head of Bran, the man who went to the Otherworld and returned, becomes a true oracle from generation to generation.

1. Adapted from The Voyage of Bran Son of Febal translated by Kuno Meyer and Alfred Nutt (London: David Nutt, 1895).

Photo: Landing at Staffa (c) Robert Moss

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

"I went to the graveyard to check that my father is dead"

The big man is rattling the French doors to my library, where I am engaged. before breakfast, in unpacking books from the movers' boxes and placing them on my shelves. I go to him with some apprehension, because he is the size of a tall refrigerator.
    "I just came from the graveyard," he announces hoarsely. I can smell beer on his breath.
    "And you are?"
    "Oh." He hastens to apologize. He introduces himself as my neighbor, pointing to a white colonial house with gray shutters beyond the creek at the edge of our property. He has heard something about my work, and thinks I can help him.
    I invite him inside, and his bulk fills my reading chair.
    He explains that his father came to visit him during the night. "For real," he insists. "Dad was there, in the bedroom, shaking me to make me wake up. But Dad died years ago. I had to go to the graveyard to check that my father is dead. I needed to make sure that he's still in the ground."
    I am tender with the big man now. So few of us, in our society, receive any guidance on communication with the dead. Yet our dead are often with us, because they stay around, close to the living, or because they come visiting. Or because we journey, in dreams or astral journeys, into their realm.
    We talk about what the big man's father may want to share with him. Maybe just a beer and a sense of continuing connection. Maybe he wants an update on the family. Maybe he has some counsel for his son, or needs help from the living because he is lost or confused, and has found that the afterlife is nothing like what he may have heard in his church.
    I suggest a simple ritual by which he can open conversation with his dead father. He agrees he'll light a candle, pull out some old photos, pour a second glass for his dad. He'll assume his father is present, seen or unseen, and say the things he needs to say, hopefully offering love and forgiveness. He'll be open to hearing what his father needs him to hear.
    He came to me later, tears in his eyes, to tell me that he had had a great talk with his father. "He put me straight on some things, and he had some information on a business situation that may have saved my ass. Funny how it's easier to talk to him now he's dead than when he was alive."
    I have been working for more than twenty years to help people understand that there is nothing weird about contact with the dead, who are alive in a world next door to us, whose borders are highly permeable. I have written books to facilitate timely and helpful communication with the deceased, including Dreamgates and my Dreamer's Book of the Dead.
    Recently I had the pleasure of reading and lending my blessing to a wonderful new book on this theme, The Last Frontier by Julia Assante, who melds a scholar's mind and extensive research with the first-hand experience of a practical mystic. I remembered the scene of the big man at the door of my library, from my first days at my previous home, as I re-read Julia's book, which explains - passionately and eloquently - why we need to "normalize" relations with those who are living in the afterworld, for mutual benefit.
Julia Assante will be my guest on my Way of the Dreamer radio show today. You can listen to the show live from 9:00-10:00 a.m. Pacific (12:00-1:00 p.m. EST) or download from the archive at http://www.healthylife.net/

Photo by the great Czech photographer Václav Chochola (1923-2005)