Waking Up in the Multiverse

In physics, the hypothesis of Many Interactive Worlds suggests that we live, right now, in one of countless parallel universes that impact each other. Part of the secret logic of our lives may be that our paths constantly interweave with those of numberless parallel selves. The gifts and failings of these alternate selves may influence us, when our paths converge, in ways that we generally fail to recognize. 
     We are connected in a multidimensional drama and this may generate events in both our lives that will appear as “chance” to those who cannot find the trans-temporal pattern. The hidden hand suggested by synchronistic events may be that of another personality within our multidimensional family, reaching to us from what we normally perceive as past or future, or from a parallel or other dimension.
    When you experience déjà vu and feel certain you have been in a certain situation before, you may be close on the heels of a parallel self who got there before you. Serial dreams, in which you find yourself returning to people and places not on your current event track may also be glimpses of a continuous life your parallel self is leading in a parallel world, in which you made different choices. Physicist Brian Greene speculates that we all have "endless doppelgangers" leading parallel lives in parallel universes.
     When you wake up to the fact that serial dreams may be glimpses of continuous lives you are living in other realities, you may be ready for the good stuff: to journey as a lucid dream traveler into a parallel life to dismiss old regrets and claim gifts and knowledge from your selves who made different choices. This can effect a quantum shift in your present life.

Illustration: "Forking Paths" by Robert Moss

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:
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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.

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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

The Art of Memory

 

Dreaming, waking or in between

in any part of the multiverse

in any body, in any life

you are invited to play

a memory game.

Whatever world you are in

the trick is to remember

the other worlds you inhabit

where you are dead and more alive

and the self that is dreaming you

- "The Art of Memory". Poem and photo by Robert Moss

 

Have a Close Encounter with Death, Wake Up in a Different Life

 

I reread Philip K. Dick’s Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.  It's an engaging sci fantasy yarn about a future American police state. The protagonist, TV celebrity and alpha “Six”, Jason Taverner, is hurled out of his privileged life by a familiar plot ruse that works: he has a close brush with death and finds himself in a different reality.

 The device is used beautifully in The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You and in the BBC Wales series Life on Mars. In Kin, the protagonist wakes up in another world where he regains his humanity and sense of life’s purpose before being sent back to the reality he came from, where he has bills to pay. 

In Life on Mars, a cop is thrown back to 1973 while his body lies in a coma after a near-fatal accident. He has an identity here, close to the one he has in the present. He is again a police inspector, with transfer papers that say he was reassigned from “Hyde”. In 1973 he was (and is) four years old, and catches a glimpse of his child self. He gets engaged in cleaning up a corrupt police department and introducing methods for collecting and handling evidence that no one has heard about. From time to time – through a voice on TV or a phone call no one else can hear - he learns about his situation in the present. Will he die in 1973 as well as the present if they turn off the respirator?

 In Flow My Tears the close call is delivered by an otherwise unexplained monster from a B horror, a “cluster sponge” with fifty feeding tubes flung at him by a psychotic girlfriend. He kills the thing with whisky, but some of the feeding tubes stay in. When he comes round, he’s not in hospital but in a cheap hotel in a bad part of L.A., minus all the I.D. that makes life possible in this reality. The people he knows – agent, lawyer, official mistress – are all in this reality but they don’t know him and when he manages to check, there is no record of his birth.

The scifi elements are charmingly creaky, like old space cowboy flicks without special effects. No cell phones or internet here. When Taverner wants to phone, he drops gold dollar coins in a public phone booth. (Where do you find public phone booths these days?)

Have a close brush with death and come back to a different world. For some of us, it's not fiction. I was pronounced clinically dead under a surgeon's scalpel during an emergency appendectomy in a Melbourne hospital when I was nine years old. In the minutes I showed no vital signs, I seemed to live a whole lifetime in another world. When I came back, my "prime ' reality seemed very strange. I wrote that story in The Boy Who Died and Came Back. Philip K. Dick was no stranger to such things. 

On the Just-so-ness of certain dreams

Reflections on my travel report from my last cycle of dreams overnight.

February 27, 2022

dream

Moving back to Chatham

Talking with a group that includes a woman with a trade paperback about Iroquois festivals and a huge, overweight Onondaga elder with a protruding belly who declares himself to be a great admirer of mine. He recalls coming to a talk I gave many years ago, in Chatham. They reminisce about a storm that once tore the roof off a longhouse during a Midwinter festival. I tell him I'd like to walk with him in Johnson country. We agree to meet in Johnstown in the summer and maybe stay overnight at a motel. I bid him farewell for now in Mohawk, glad to be making an Iroquois friend.  Tekateweiarikht'ha. "I take off now beating my wings."

 It's 12:45 pm and I'm running late for a house warming. We are moving back to Chatham. There are droves of people here that I don't know. I walk around sticking out my hand and announcing, “I'm Robert, your host.” This produces every kind of reaction. One woman says she needs five minutes of my time but gets tongue tied when I say she can have two. An old man, also named Robert, starts weeping when I ask if he knows what our name means. I tell him, “Bright in fame” and I playact performing in the floodlights. Young males who think they are hip don't seem to understand or care who I am. A flirty younger woman bops my shoulder with something to get my attention. I try to say something to people in languages corresponding to their names. “Guido.” “Molto piacere”. A sharp, hawk-nosed Israeli says his name is Avalal (?) Nehamot. I have to explain to people that we used to live just outside the village of Chatham, on a lot of land. 

Feelings: tired after all that socializing. Just so.

Reality check 

I bought a farm in the township of Chatham in 1986 because of a white oak and a red-tailed hawk. During the four years I lived on the farm I was called in dreams by ancestors of the land, into the world of Sir William Johnson, the Irish-born colonial Superintendent of Indians, and the Mohawk Iroquois clanmother and woman of power who tried to influence him. My first Iroquois friend in contemporary time was Onondaga and he came to our home in Chatham. 

Later an Onondaga elder asked me to share dreams in which I was called to fly on the wings of a hawk and to receive instruction in an archaic form of the Mohawk language. He told me matter-of-factly, "You made some visits and you received some visitations." Out of these experiences I wrote a cycle of historical novels and a book titled Dreamways of the Iroquois and embarked on my path as a dream teacher. 

I have no plans to move back to the Chatham area but I am planning a house move. It’s possible that I will be drawn back to the world of Johnson and the First Peoples he knew well.

On the Just-so-ness of certain dreams 

My most frequent journal comment on my feelings after a dream is "just so", meaning "been there, done that". Returning from dreams, I very often feel as if I am coming back from a trip. Sometimes the kind that takes you across oceans, sometimes the kind that takes you just across the street. Such dreams don’t feel symbolic except in the sense that all of life is symbolic. They invite careful inspection rather than analysis. The questions I ask are Who, What, Where, When, How?

In my last dream overnight – the one that left me tired after much socializing – I attended my own housewarming. I was moving back to an area where I used to live, not to the same house, which stood on a great deal of land, but to a house of a similar vintage on a modest lot. I knew none of the people at the party and went around sticking out my hand and introducing myself as their host, which produced every kind of response from gushing enthusiasm to cool indifference.

I am planning a house move but not to this area. I could meet some of the dream characters in the future so there may be some precog elements. However, I doubt that the dream primarily concerns a possible future. It feels more like a dream of an alternate reality where one of my parallel selves made different choices. The content also makes me think about my possible need to go back to an old field to retrieve something from an earlier time in this life. That theme  is supported by my encounter with an Onondaga elder and my interest in returning to Johnson country in an earlier scene in the same dream cycle. 

A Jungian observer might say that my very social housewarming dream could be “compensation” for my isolation in these pandemic times, when I rarely leave the house and see very few people. Since dreams can have many layers, I am willing to look at content from multiple perspectives. I am ready to ask: where am I at home or not at home? What’s going on in the house of my body or my soul? What part of me is the big-bellied Onondaga elder, the tongue-tied woman, the hip teenager or the flirt? However, my primary feeling remains, been there, done that.

Illustration: "Hawk calls" by Robert Moss

Workaday Dreams of Other Lives

 

Last night I led an advanced training for a circle of students in a spacious room with arched windows overlooking an old European city. The room and the students were familiar to me from other dreams but not from regular life. The training was successful. We had to take special care with a woman consumed by grief; a mothering nurse in the group was very helpful. Another of the women students sought private time with me to talk about her relations with the beings she called "pixies"; she proved to be a walking folktale. I came back from the dream with the sense of virtue that comes when you have completed a challenging task before other people have started their day. I also felt a bit jet-lagged as if I had just flown back in Europe. I rested in bed for an hour before walking the dog.

Dreams are social as well as individual, transpersonal as well as personal. They may be entirely real experiences in other orders of reality. I have no doubt that I led that group in an alternate reality. I am curious to see whether some or all of it plays out in ordinary reality. If that starts to happen, I will be on the lookout for the woman in grief and the pixillated lady.

Some psychologists might call last night's dream "compensation", in the sense that in dreams we may live parts of life we have been denied or have denied ourselves in the physical world. So the ascetic (as in a famous Théophile Gautier story) is a lecherous Don Juan in his dreams, or the invalid is climbing the Himalayas. Before the pandemic, I was traveling seven months out of twelve, leading workshops all over the world map. Since March last year, I have not been to Europe or boarded a plane to any destination. So I might accept the idea that leading that in-person training in Europe is "compensation". However, my dream is "compensation" in more than the sense of fantasy. I am quite sure I was in that space, doing that work, helping students with their issues, listening deeply to their stories. It is a workaday dream. Since I love the kind of teaching I do, having to work at it as the price of a dream getaway is a price I am happy to pay.

We lead many lives in our dreams, and we miss so much if we fail to notice this vital aspect of dreaming. People are forever asking me about the "message" a dream may have for them, or the meaning of a symbol. I find myself responding, again and again, that while a dream may indeed hold a message, it is first and last an experience playing out in another reality. We want to ask questions like Who, What, Where, When? And then: Can this play out in the future in physical reality? Is it part of a continuining life I am leading somewhere else? Is it complete in itself or is there something I now need to do, perhaps to bring a gift or a lesson from another life into this one?

Photo of Prague rooftops by RM

On leaving a dream

When I leave a dream, I often feel that I step from one room into another. It's a "just so" feeling. I was there, and now I am here.
    When I exit a dream, I avoid saying "I woke up." That is such a boring way to end a dream narrative. And it's entirely possible that when I open my eyes in one reality, I have fallen asleep in another world that is no less real. When I finish recounting a dream adventure, I may say. "then I left that scene" or, “then I came back to my bedroom”.
     Sometimes the dream stays with me, and I am in both locations - the bedroom and that other room - in a state of dual consciousness after I come back to my body.

Very early this morning, at an hour many would call the middle of the night, I came back to the body in my bed from an excursion. In my dream I was at an airport where a woman from an Islamic country needed my help to find a place where she could get halal camel meat.
     This felt like an entirely literal experience, taking place in an alternate reality. I do not rule out the possibility that I will meet that woman at an airport in the future, since I often return from a dream with  memories of the future.
    My ability to help her will be greater now that I have consulted Auntie Google about halal camel meat. I now understand that camel meat is not only halal ("allowed") for Muslims but is available in restaurants and butcher shops all over the Middle East and Central Asia. I will also reflect on the possible symbolism here. It may have something to do with taking on the strength to cross a desert while carrying your own water - quite relevant for a writer embarking on a new book project. A dream adventure can be literal, symbolic and an experience of another reality all at once.
     My gentle return from my dream outing allowed me to see the airport - a very modern one, with sweeping architectural features I did not recognize, and the strong, dark features of the woman (no headscarf, I confirmed) - as I made a note.

Other times, however, I don't so much come back from a dream as fall out of it, in a mode reminiscent of the David Bowie character in The Man Who Fell to Earth. One night I fell back into my body so hard that I thought that I had broken the bed. I made a drawing of that bumpy return. Coming back so hard and fast cost me the memories of where I had just been.

Journal drawing: "Man Who Fell to Earth" by Robert Moss

Ritual initiation inside the dream state: A story from India

Can a ritual performed in a dream be for real? In the sacred literature of India, there is no doubt. Mind you, the ritual conducted in the dream world may involve living a whole life in another reality. The remarkable story of King Lavana, as recounted in the Yogavasistha, is an example.

In the lush country of the northern Pandavas, a king called Lavana performed a complex religious ceremony in his mind. It was the sacrifice of royal consecration, which made him a true king. What he accomplished in his imagination was entirely real. But there were consequences.

   Lavana is sitting on his throne when a magician appears, bows and invites the king to watch a marvelous trick. When the magician waves his peacock-feather wand, a man enters leading a horse. The king stares at the horse, transfixed, and then begins to fall from his throne. The servants catch him, but he is completely disoriented; he does not know where he is.

   When he recovers himself, he explains that he believes he mounted the horse and galloped away hunting across a great desert and into a jungle until he was pulled out of his saddle by a creeper and left swinging in a tree. He was starving by the time he was discovered by an Untouchable girl who agreed to rescue and feed him on condition that he married her and lived with her in her village.

   He spent sixty years with her, and had children, and ate carrion in cremation grounds, and forgot he had ever been a king - until a terrible drought struck the land and, in desperation, he ordered his son to kill him and eat his flesh. He was about to throw himself on the pyre when a great shout restored him to his throne.

   As he finishes this speech, the magician vanishes. It now becomes plain that what the fellow with the wand effected was no mere conjuring trick but a "divine illusion" designed to demonstrate the nature of reality.

   Lavana sets out to revisit the landscapes of his adventure - and finds the desert and the jungle he crossed, and the tree where he hung, and the village of the Untouchables and the crone who was his mother-in-law and recalls the king who married her daughter and the drought that destroyed the rest of the family. 

We eventually learn that Lavana's sufferings as an Untouchable were not only real but were arranged by Indra, to fulfill the ritual requirement that a king who performs the sacrifice of royal consecration must endure twelve years of suffering. By effecting the whole complex ceremony of the royal consecration in his mind - through an act of imagination - Lavana had accomplished instant initiation.

Wendy O'Flaherty comments on this tale from the Yogavasistha in her excellent book Dreams, Illusion and Other Realities: "To this day, many Indian sects hold that anyone who dreams that he is initiated has in fact been initiated." This has ancient precedent. In Vedic sacrifice, one priest serves as the witness. He does nothing except think the sacrifice while others make the physical motions.

Image: Indian king (Maharaja of Patiala) in 19th century picture

In Dreams, We Scout the Roads Ahead

Our dreams are constantly coaching us for challenges and opportunities that lie ahead of us on the roads of life. It's possible that we rehearse everything that will take place in the future in our dreams, though we forget most of it. 

Across human evolution, dreaming has been a vital survival mechanism. In the days when we were naked apes without good weapons, our dream radar - our ability to scout across both space and time - often enabled us to avoid becoming breakfast for saber-toothed tigers or leathery raptors. 

A recent theory posits that dreaming prepares us for challenges by putting us through frequent workouts in threat simulation, helping us to develop the reflexes and responses that will get us through. I suspect our relationship with the future in dreams is much deeper and more important than this. In dreaming, we have access to the matrix in which the events and circumstances that will manifest in our physical lives have their origins. We can not only see future events; we can choose - to varying degrees, and according to our level of consciousness - which among many possible future events will manifest. 

It's my impression that we are dreaming the future all the time. If you adopt the practice of recording your dreams and comparing the dream data with subsequent events, it won't take long for you to notice some match-ups. The incidents you preview in your dreams may be trivial or terrifying, blah or wonderful. They may be events in your own life, or events in the future history of the world. Our dreams start preparing us for what life will give us months, years, even decades ahead of events. In dreams, we have several kinds of engagement with the future: 

Precognitive Dreams 

Through precognition, we see events and circumstances ahead of time, as they will be played out. A precognitive dream may be literal, or symbolic or both. For example, a dream of a tsunami might turn out to be both a preview of a literal disaster and advance notice of an emotional storm that will hit with the force of a tsunami. We may not understand what we have seen in a precognitive dream until a physical event catches up with that dream. It may also be difficult for us to understand what we have seen because we are looking at things from a certain angle, perhaps the perspective of a different person. But with practice, we can learn to recognize markers that a dream relates to future events, and we can then move to clarify and use the dream information.

Early Warning Dreams 

Dreams may contain early warnings of a possible future development we may not want - a crisis at work, the bust-up of a relationship, a health problem, a car accident. We may not want to focus on any of these unpleasant possibilities. But if we are willing to study what an early warning dream is telling us, we will often find that it is giving us vital information that can help us avoid a possible future problem if we take appropriate action. Sometimes we dream the future for the benefit of another person, even a great cause. What will then happen depends whether we can find an effective way to get the dream information to the person who can best act upon it. 

Early Opportunity Dreams 

Early opportunity dreams may also require action if we are going to manifest a future we'll enjoy. You dream you are in your ideal home, or doing the work that nourishes your soul and your bank account, or you are with your soulmate, who is someone you have not yet met in the regular world. These dreams may be inspiring and encouraging, but you won't want to leave them floating away from your physical life like helium balloons that have lost their strings. You'll want to figure out what practical action you can take to move decisively in the direction of that happy dream. 

Choosing Alternate Event Tracks 

Any future we can see (in dreams or through wakeful intuition) is a possible future. We can influence the odds on the manifestation of a specific future event. While it may seem impossible for an individual to change certain future events perceived in dreams - like a natural disaster or death at an advanced age - it may still be possible to work with the dream information in a useful way: for example, to alert friends not to go on vacation in the place where the dreamed hurricane will hit, or to help someone whose death is near, and the family, to meet that situation with grace and closure. 

As dreamers, we discover and inhabit the true nature of time, as it has always been known to dream travelers and is now confirmed by modern science. Linear time, as measured by clocks, and experienced in plodding sequences of one thing following another, always heading in the same direction, is an illusion of limited human awareness, at best (as Einstein said) a convenience. In dreaming, as in heightened states of consciousness, we step into a more spacious time, and we can move forwards or backwards at varying speeds. We not only travel to past and future; we travel between alternate timelines. 

With growing awareness, we can develop greater and greater ability to choose the event track - maybe one of infinite alternative possible event tracks - that will be followed through a certain life passage, or even the larger history of our world. 

This may be a case of the observer effect operating on a human scale. It is well understood that at quantum levels, deep within subatomic space, the act of observation causes plucks a specific phenomenon out of a bubbling cauldron of possibilities. It may be that, in the cauldron of our dreaming: through the act of observation, we select a certain event track that will begin to be manifested in the physical world. By a fresh act of observation, or re-visioning, we can then proceed to alter that event track, or switch to an entirely different one. 

Adapted from Robert Moss, The Three"Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams,

Coincidence and Imagination published by New World Library

photo by RM

When a dream won't let you go

There are dreams that won't let you go. You leave a dream in the middle of the night and go to the bathroom - and as soon as you are back in bed and close your eyes, you are back in the same dream, and the action continues. You wake up again. This time you make a definite break. You might get a snack, read or watch television, or step outside and look at the moon. You go back to bed again, and as soon as you close your eyes, you are back in the same dream.
    This happened to me overnight. Though multiple awakenings, I found myself returning, again and again, to an adventure unfolding in Japan. I don't think I was my present self. At any rate, I was much younger. A Japanese magnate and his beautiful assistant were trying to recruit me for a certain project. The technology involved was beyond anything I know about, but perhaps quite plausible. they explained it to me as "making fire from water" and demonstrated by using a few drops of fluid to fuel a heavy vehicle that raced to the top of a mountain. One of the executives confided, over dinner, that the greatest resource of the company is "imagination" and that is why they were talking to me.
     Intrigued, I made no attempt to get away from the dream. Towards the end of the night, I lay in horizontal meditation, hoping that more of the plot would be revealed, since I might have the makings of a story here, of a kind that H.G,Wells might approve.
    In one of his most masterful short stories, Wells gives a darker version of a dream that won't let you go. In  “A Dream of Armageddon”, a white faced stranger on a train – a solicitor from Liverpool – strikes up a conversation with the narrator when he notices that he has a book about dreams. 

    "Isn't there something called consecutive dreaming - that goes on night after night?"
    "I believe there is. There are cases given in most books on mental trouble."

    The stranger says that the psychologists don’t know what they are talking about. He has lived and died many years into the future, and he knows this because of consecutive dreams more real than his current life.

I dreamed that I was another man, you know, living in a different part of the world and in a different time. Night after night I woke into that other life. Fresh scenes and fresh happenings - until I came upon the last 

    He begins his story by describing himself looking at the shoulder of a beautiful woman, and over her shoulder, at a beautiful view of Capri from a loggia. The white-faced man has never been to Capri in his current life, but his interlocutor has, and is amazed by the accuracy and vividness of his description of its landscapes, of Mount Solano, of I Faraglioni: "Just below us was a rock with an arch worn through it. The blue sea-water broke to green and foam all around the rock..."

    The clarity of detail he recalls is amazing.
    Then there is his sense that the action is constantly moving forward, whether he is conscious of his dreams or not. Four days pass when he does not remember dreams, then he is back on the island of Capri, in a future world, and everything has moved forward by four days.   

I dreamed often. For three weeks of nights that dream was my life. And the worst of it was there were nights when I could not dream, when I lay tossing on a bed in this accursed life; and there - somewhere lost to me - things were happening - momentous, terrible things...I lived at nights - my days, my waking days, this life I am living now, became a faded, far-away dream...

    In dream after dream, the solicitor finds himself immersed in the life drama of a powerful man who left government in the “north” to live with his lover on Capri. He is now being urged to go back, because a dangerous demagogue has replaced him and could start a world war. To return, he would have to give up his mistress and he refuses to do this even when she begs him to follow duty and save the world from war.
    We see the first warplanes (not yet flying in Wells’ time) over the pleasure island. Eventually we see the couple flee Capri and seek safety on the peninsula. They are killed at the ruined temples at Paestum (and again the narrator confirms the description of a man who hasn’t been there in his present life). The solicitor describes dying without pain, followed by blackness and then a desperate and apparently failed attempt to rejoin his love on the Other Side - and then the conversation ends as the train stops at Euston station.
    The story, written before Kitty Hawk and World War I and moving walkways (also part of the dream of the future), has been admired for its vision of coming technology and man-made catastrophe. It’s also an extraordinary depiction of how in dreams we may inhabit a second life – in this case an unwanted one, in a different body in a different time, in the future rather than the past.
   The consecutive dreams to which we are called again and again may be full of beauty or terror, mystery or adventure. We want to record them carefully, building memory in our present reality of what is playing in others and capable - with that knowledge - of being ready for the next installment, hopefully capable of making better choices in any world we find ourselves in.

Quotations are from "A Dream of Armageddon" by H.G. Wells, first published in Black and White Budget, May-June 1901.

Photo: I Faraglioni, Capri

How to know when the god is present

I am explaining to a large group of students how to read the signs that announce the advent of the god Apollo at his oracle, and confirm that true messages will be delivered by his priestess.
    We are inside the scene. We feel the coming of the god right now. The sacrificial goat starts shaking from the hooves up when the holy water is poured over it. Everything in the environment begins to tremble as if stirred by an unseen wind.
    The priestess called Pythia, who has been drinking from the sacred spring, sees movement in the bowl of spring water she holds in her lap as she sits on the tripod among the fumes rising from the deep chasm.

Inside the dream, I feel educated pleasure. Some awe, but no fear. When I leave the dream, I have a deep sense of satisfaction. Also the strong feeling I have been in an entirely real situation, in another time and/or a separate reality.

Dreams set us assignments. It is agreeable for the ancient history professor in me to reopen books about the oracle of Apollo at Delphi. I am reminded that in preparing to become the oracle, the Pythia bathes in the sacred spring. She inhales pungent incense. She invokes all the deities associated with Delphi by name, starting with Themis and Phoebe, daughters of the Earth goddess Gaia, and continuing through Zeus, Poseidon, Dionysus and Apollo, who she hopes will speak through her.
   She makes burned offering of laurel leaves and barley meal on an altar of the temple. She enters the adyton (sacred chamber) and mounts the golden tripod that serves as her throne. In one hand she holds a laurel branch, in the other a shallow bowl.
   She sits quietly until the laurel leaves start to quiver. The trembling seizes her hand, moves up her arm to her shoulders and chest. Her whole body starts shaking violently as if it has been seized by giant hands. This is confirmation that the god is present and that his speaker is in the necessary state of enthousiasmos to deliver true messages. 
    The philosopher-historian Plutarch, also a priest of Apollo, wrote that at Delphi the god makes his thoughts known “through the associated medium of a mortal body and a soul that is unable to keep quiet, or, as it yields itself to the One that moves it, to remain of itself unmoved and tranquil, but, as though tossed amid billows and enmeshed in the stirrings and emotions within itself, it makes itself more and more restless.” [Plutarch, de pythiae oraculis in Moralia V]
    So the saying that truth comes with goosebumps comes with a mythic pedigree. I may have forgotten that, but my dream self clearly did not. Once again, I find myself racing to catch up with him.

Art: John William Waterhouse

Your dream may be a glimpse of a continuous life you are leading elsewhere

What is going on in your dreams doesn't necessarily stop when you wake up or switch to a different screen. The action may play on, like episodes in a television series that continue to run after you turn off the set.

It gets more interesting. In dreams, you may check in to a parallel life you are leading somewhere else.

You may be swimming with seals, or looking for the selkie skin that was hidden from you. You might still be living with your ex, doing the things you would be doing if you had never broken up. You might be marching with those warriors in leather armor under the banner of a Bear Goddess. You might be running that bordello in the French Quarter in old New Orleans. You may be up on a high roof top, looking down on your present life in the perspective of the Double on the Balcony, your eternal witness.

When you exit a scene in a life you are leading somewhere else, you may or may not remember where you were and who you are in that other world. When you do remember, you tag what lingers in your mind as a dream.

When you exit a dream that is also a visit to a parallel life, your parallel self continues on its way. While you go about your day, your other self may dream of you.

Jung struggled for clarity on this, and found it late in life. He came to believe that we lead continuous lives in our dreams. Put another way, your dream may be a glimpse of a continuous life you are living somewhere else, a life that goes on whether or not you are tuned to its channel. This is something you can dream on.

You get up in the middle of the night and go the bathroom. When you return to bed, you find the same dream is playing as you were dreaming before, but the action has moved along. A bathroom break may be the start of your awakening.

Sometimes a dream of this kind reaches to you from another realm like a giant fist, pulling you in and back. It was like that for me one night at Big Sur. I was in a bed overlooking the Pacific Ocean, my window open to catch the sea breeze and the marvelous rhythm of the waves breaking on the rocky shore.

In my dreams, I was far away, in Mongolia in a cruel winter, on the eve of World War II. I was engaged in a secret mission, to spy on a team of SS commandos who were seeking to capture the most powerful shamanic artifact in the Central Asia: the spirit banner of Genghis Khan. I stirred from this dream, thrilled and mystified. I might have made it my plan to reenter the dream to try to understand why I was in Mongolia in the 1930s while my body was on the California coast. But no effort on my part was required - unless I had wanted to resist going back.

Again and again, through the whole night, the drama played on. All my senses were engaged. Now in a dual or multiple state of consciousness, I could hear the Pacific breakers and turn my body on the bed, while fully present in the Mongolian adventure in a body that felt no less real. I could taste the blood from a horse's neck I was required to drink in order to survive that terrible winter, in a wilderness of snow. I could smell the rank fear of horses and men. I have no doubt I was there.

Art: René Magritte, "Faraway Looks" (1927)

Message board

The words on the eraser board
vanish faster than I can get them down.
If I can catch them I will have the code
to free the prisoner in the border jail
and remember what the divine wants of me.

While I worry about this
a fish is slipping through the yard
and the lion in my living room
tells me that she is the part of me
that is on fire with love for the world.

Mornings are all like this.
I return from a room next door
with messages from another world
that slip through my fingers like slippery fish.
I see what the art of memory requires.

I train myself to step through the door
between the worlds. In my second body
I write on the message board
while my ordinary hand scratches on a pad.
This is my writer's way.

- Robert Moss, Mosswood Hollow, July 23, 2015.

Tree Dreaming at Mosswood Hollow. Photo by Robert Moss.

Dream roads into parallel universes

A sunny, sloping street. People in bright, sunny clothes. I recognize a fair-haired woman with whom I had a passionate (though possibly unconsummated) love relationship when we were both in our late teens. She’s still very attractive, dressed in loose, flowing clothes. I try to guess the age of her slim, beautiful fair-haired daughter, who may be 9, 10 or 11. 

    When we catch each other’s eyes, there is absolutely no recognition on her part, not even when I identify myself by name and describe our encounters many years before. It hits me that she’s not feigning amnesia, and has not, in fact, forgotten. In her present reality, we have never met before.
    I become very excited at the realization that I am in an alternate reality, and comment on this to my companions. The fair-haired woman and her friends clearly think we’re weird.

Waking, I think of two fair-haired women on whom I had crushes in my late teens. Then I realize the woman in my dream is not either of them. She is, in fact, a stranger to me in my waking reality.

   The plot thickens.

   I am a stranger to this woman, in her reality (the one I visited in my dream).

   She is a stranger to me, in my waking reality.

   This suggests there is a third reality in which we know each other intimately.

   And perhaps any number of realities in which we are strangers to each other.

This report is from my journal for March 7, 2000, part of my overflowing file on dream experiences of alternate realities. When I re-entered the dream, I was able to get the woman's name. Thirteen years later, I have still not run into her, and am certainly not looking for her.
    During my conscious dream reentry, I had a conversation with a second dream character, a big man in a related scene who made it clear he was an aspect of myself. 

    I asked if I was actually involved with the woman in the dream.

    "You loved each other, and in some realities you still do."

     "Does she exist in my present reality?"

     "Oh, yes."

     "Will I encounter her as I did in the dream?"

     "It’s entirely possible."

     "Will I recognize her?"

     "Your soul will know her."

Still unrecognized by many analysts, the most interesting dreams are often experiences of alternate realities. And Active Dreaming, as a conscious practice, is our best way to gain experiential understanding of parallel universes.

 René Magritte, "Le mal du pays" (1940)

Test Vote Dummies and Beth Airlines: Monitoring a Strange Election Campaign

I am in the audience, waiting for a female presidential candidate to arrive for a speech in an American town, somewhere in the middle of the continent. The whole thing is being televised, including a song-and-dance act onstage that is a commercial for Beth Airlines. The performers are dressed in old-fashioned Western style – check shirts, bandannas, boots – as if for “Oklahoma”. The song is outrageously commercial, with the date of a sales event. I think, as I observe this, that it really may be true that corporations run American politics and that an election is a choice between corporate advertising strategies.
    I observe two test voters. These are dummies with featureless facers that can be molded like clay. They are called “pannequins”, evidently a play on “mannequins”. Behind the apple pie-sweetness the stage show is meant to project, there is clearly a very cynical, controlling agenda. This is confirmed when I sit with some of the party strategists. I am appalled by the racist views of one of the men; he speaks of almost every ethnic group with foul-mouthed contempt. I call him to order, telling him he is talking like “a racist redneck Jew”. This doesn’t faze him.
    My role here is entirely that of an observer – though I lose my objectivity when disgusted by the commercialism and the racism at play in this scene. I feel, inside the dream, as if I have been landed here not only from another time (there’s a 1950s feel to the scene) but from another world.

I woke from this dream at 3:33 a.m.

Feelings: Neutral, curious.

Reality: I have never heard of “Beth Airlines”. I know a few women named Beth, but none of them is likely to run for high office. Maybe the name of the airline is a clue to the identity of the woman running for president in the dream. I heard her name in the dream but it is gone now; I don’t think the candidate is Hilary Clinton.
    I'm not sure of the location. Oklahoma is possible. I was there once, decades ago.
    There is a period feel to everything here, as if we are in the 1950s. But I suppose things could be staged – or simply unfold – in this style anywhere in the United States between the right coast and the left coast. The creepy “pannequins” (dummy voters) are creepy, especially if they reflect emerging technologies of control.
     In regular life, I am unlikely to be monitoring an election campaign, though this would certainly have been possible during my “past life” as a journalist. Have I stepped into another alternate reality?

Questions:
Was it another of my parallel selves who was monitoring that strange election campaign? Many campaigns try to treat voters as dummies, but are those "test vote dummies" also a creepy technological possibility? Who is behind Beth Airlines? Why am I in this dream on the first full night home after nearly two weeks in the U.K.? Is it some kind of homecoming?

Wait, my dog isn't a girl & I can turn cartwheels (& other clues to alternate realities)

Oskar in the morning. RM sketch

I am snuggling with my little black dog. She is so silky and soft and sweet. I make a comment about how her puppies would be adorable if she were able to be a mother.
    Then I return to two projects in which I am engaged. One is a house move; we have stripped the rooms in our home to a few sticks of furniture and a lot of books and papers that I will need to sort out, because we can't take all of them. At the same time, I have taken delivery of a crate of investigative reports on corruption and intrigue in the corporate world. I read through these reports at high speed, absorbing the information.
    Next, I am watching a TV series or documentary in which the corporate drama is brought to life. The story line centers on rivalry between two men who knew each other as boys. I am impressed by how strongly the boy actors on the screen resemble the adult versions. Perhaps they are not actors; this could be documentary footage of the corporate players themselves.
   Now I have stepped right inside the world of corporate intrigue. I am perhaps in my mid-thirties, in a beautifully fitted summer-weight suit, moving easily in a world of powerful men. I have adversaries here, rivals for room at the top and a man I have publicly scolded for bullying his juniors and harassing women. As I exit the building with a bunch of suits, I trip on a step. Instead of falling, I turn a perfect cartwheel. I feel this in every part of my body; it is quite thrilling. However, when I land on my feet I am a bit wobbly. I would like someone to give me some support. Since no one does, I turn another cartwheel, then another, until I find solid footing.


This is a summary of some of my dream activity last night. I'm sharing it because it leads me to reflect on dream transits in which we shift from one reality - and sometimes from one body or identity - to another, and on clues to these shifts that may be a trigger for dream lucidity.

    In the first scene, I have a female black Schnauzer. In ordinary reality, I have her brother. When I met the litter, I fell in love with Oskar's sister, but did not bring her home because I had insisted that the next dog would be a boy and also that we could not accommodate two puppies in our house. So the fact that my dream dog is a girl is a clue that I am in a separate reality. My home in this scene is not my present home, and although a future house move is always a possibility, the particular move we are making here is quite unlikely. Yes, I could (with groans) thin out my books and papers. No, I am not likely to pursue detailed research into corporate crime, though when I think about it I am quite angry about how financial criminals have undermined the economy and wrecked lives of ordinary people.
    Then we shift to a drama observed on a screen like a TV series.
    Then it seems my dream self has stepped through the screen, and entered the situation - and seemingly, the body - of another person, a younger corporate American male who can turn cartwheels, something I have never managed to do, and operates in a kind of "Mad Men" environment (though not necessarily in the 1950s).
    He could of course be a part of me, but I don't think so. There could be an element of what Jung called the "compensation" factor. My life choices are very remote from business calculations; I live in a world of women much more than men; and worldly power and money don't rank anywhere in my personal scale of values. The dream - like dreams in which I am leading warriors or engaged in secret operations in various times - may "compensate" for what is absent from the gentler way I have chosen as a dream teacher and healer.
     Yet I have the strong feeling that when I went through the screen, I entered another man's world. Why was I drawn to his life? To clarify that, I tried to reenter the dream to get more information, and succeeded in gathering certain names and details I can now research. I will track whether the dream may relate to other people connected with me, now or in the past or (especially) the future, and I will be alert to future discoveries that may provide more of a context.
    I'll add this report to my bulging file of cases of dream entry into alternate realities, and other lives.