My father came back decades after his death with a health warning

On this day in 2016, after surgery, I raised a glass of fine Oban whisky to toast and thank my father. He had died nearly nearly thirty years earlier, but he had turned up for me again, in the most vivid and helpful way, with a health advisory I acted upon.
    Early that month, in the liminal space between sleep and awake, I found myself on a high rooftop with sweeping views over a great city. In a corner of the rooftop terrace, standing near the edge, I saw my father.
    This was a tremendous surprise. Let me clarify. The reason for my surprise was not that my father was deceased. We had seen a lot of each other since his death. At his funeral, I felt his loving presence and his joy at being released from the confinement of an ailing body. Not long after, I was blessed by his direct intervention to make peace between family members.
    Soon he was able to present himself, in dreams and visions, in a youthful new body, resembling the one he had had as a dashing young cavalry officer, the equestrian champion of the Australian Army.
    Over several years, he often came to me in dreams and visions with specific guidance for the family, playing counselor and protector, As he moved through his transitions on the Other Side, he was able to share his experiences. As he remembered more about the multidimensional self and the relations between members of soul families across time and space, he was able to talk to me about our identities and connections in other life dramas. Eventually, he explained to me that he had graduated from his current life school on the Other Side and had made his choice about his next life experience. It was clear that we would no longer be able to see each other so frequently, if at all.
    Hence my surprise when I saw Dad on that high rooftop. I know he has been fully engaged in life adventures in another time. I did not expect to see him again this way in my own time..
    As soon as I saw him, I found myself standing in front of him, as if one or both of us had traveled without moving.
 . My father pointed a finger at my upper lip, at a spot on the right side. He said, "Go to a doctor and get that checked out."
    This was our entire exchange.
     I acted on Dad's counsel right away. I had had a spot just above my upper lip for a couple of years that did not look like a regular mole. It had started bothering me after I cut it while shaving and it took a long time to heal. However, I tend to avoid doctors and had not mentioned it to my general practitioner.
    Because of my father's intervention, I called a dermatologist when his office opened that morning. "That is something," he declared when I pointed to the spot above my lip. He did a biopsy. Wearing a Band-Aid mustache over the hole this opened in my face, I went ahead with my plan to make a personal odyssey to Yeats country in the west of Ireland. I got the results of the biopsy on the morning I caught a plane back from Dublin. The spot was what the skin doctor suspected: basal cell carcinoma.
    I was scheduled to lead two weeks of trainings, and went ahead with these, allowing my students to guess about why I was sporting a Band-Aid mustache. When I met the surgeon for a consultation, he told me that the procedure would leave a scar. We agreed that I could tell people that this was the result of a close encounter with a bear.
    The surgery was a complete success. It took a little while for the wound to heal and the sutures to come out and my lovely new "baby skin" to bloom but I felt absolutely fine.
    Problem solved, because my dead father found a way to get my attention.
    My father was a Scot by ancestry, and whisky was his preferred drink. The whisky in the glass looked like liquid sunlight.
   "Thanks, Dad!" I said aloud. "Here's to life!"

Drawing by RM

Calling in the Brownies: Robert Louis Stevenson's Dream Helpers

The novelist Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) described dreams as occurring in "that small theater of the brain which we keep brightly lighted all night long."

     Stevenson said of his now classic novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, it was "conceived, written, re-written, re-re-written, and printed inside ten weeks" in 1886. The conception came in a dream:

    "For two days I went about racking my brains for a plot of any sort; and on the second night I dreamed the scene at the window, and a scene afterward split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the powder and underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers."

     His wife related picturesquely how one night e cried out horror-stricken, how she woke him up and he protested, "Why did you waken me? I was dreaming a fine bogy-tale!" She also related how he appeared the next morning excitedly exclaiming, "I have got my schilling-shocker -- I have got my schilling-shocker!"

     Stevenson wrote extensively about how his passion for writing interacted with his remarkable dreams and said that, from an early age, his dreams were so vivid and moving that they were more entertaining to him personally than any literature. He learned early in his life that he could dream complete stories and that he could even go back to the same dreams on succeeding nights to give them a different ending. Later he trained himself to remember his dreams and to dream plots for his books.

    Stevenson described the central role of dreaming and dreamlike states in his creative process in “A Chapter on Dreams”. During his sickly childhood, he was often oppressed by night terrors and the “night hag”.  But as he grew older, he found that his dreams often became welcome adventures, in which he would travel to far-off places or engage in costume dramas among the Jacobites.

     He often read stories in his dreams, and as he developed the ambition to become a writer, it dawned on him that a clever way to get his material would be to transcribe what he was reading in his sleep. “When he lay down to prepare himself for sleep, he no longer sought amusement, but printable and profitable tales.” And his dream producers accommodated him. He noticed they became especially industrious when he was under a tight deadline. When “the bank begins to send letters” his “sleepless Brownies” work overtime, turning out marketable stories.

     In his “Chapter on Dreams” (written in his house on Saranac Lake in upstate New York and published in Across the Plains) RLS gave a vivid depiction of his dream helpers.

     “Who are the Little People? They are near connections of the dreamer's, beyond doubt; they share in his financial worries and have an eye to the bank-book; they share plainly in his training; they have plainly learned like him to build the scheme of a considerate story and to arrange emotion in progressive order; only I think they have more talent; and one thing is beyond doubt, they can tell him a story piece by piece, like a serial, and keep him all the while in ignorance of where they aim…

     “And for the Little People, what shall I say they are but just my Brownies, God bless them! who do one-half my work for me while I am fast asleep, and in all human likelihood, do the rest for me as well, when I am wide awake and fondly suppose I do it for myself. That part which is done while I am sleeping is the Brownies' part beyond contention; but that which is done when I am up and about is by no means necessarily mine, since all goes to show the Brownies have a hand in it even then.”

     He observed that  “my Brownies are somewhat fantastic, like their stories hot and hot, full of passion and the picturesque, alive with animating incident; and they have no prejudice against the supernatural – and have no morals at all.”

The mists at sunrise whispered his name. It is exciting for me that Stevenson wrote his "Chapter on Dreams", as well as some of his most-loved fiction, in a cottage on Saranac Lake in upstate New York. After I started dreaming of people who lived in that area - traditional Mohawk country - in the 1700s, I watched the sun burn the mist off that lake in the early morning. And I suddenly knew the meaning of the name of a Mohawk Bear Clan warrior who has featured in my dreams. He was one of the four "Indian kings" invited to London in 1710. His portrait by the court artist Verelst is on the cover of my novel The Interpreter. The colonial scribes rendered his name as Sayenqueraghta. I knew now that it means Vanishing Smoke. My vision at the lake was part of a rich and complex interaction with spirits of the land from which I wrote the most powerful chapters The Interpreter. The engagement carried me further: to find and follow the path of a dream teacher for which there was no career track in modern society,

Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson by John Singer Sargent

Dreaming with Robin Williams

Sarah Sera Sera is a wildly creative and entertaining dream teacher, performance artist and storyteller in the Portland,Oregon area. Her flair for comedy is such that it is not surprising that she attracted a dream mentor and playmate with the face and personality of Robin  Williams. When I gave an advanced group the assignment of selecting nine dreams that had made a mark in their lives and weaving a story from them, Sarah selected nine of her dreams of Robin Williams. She then produced a wonderfully funny script that I hope will be performed on stage. You can read the full narrative if you follow the link at the end of this delightful guest blog I asked Sarah to write, with Robin, to introduce their oneiric relations. She just messaged me that Robin says “Feel free to give her writing assignments as you find entertaining. But she is unlikely to follow the rules.”

Guest blog by Sara Sera Sera

I turned on my computer and started an email to Robert Moss. It’s 5:30 AM. OMG, why am I up and writing to Robert Moss at 5:30 AM?

In my mind's eye, the archetype expressed most recently and accurately by the late, great, Robin Williams appears in midair to my right.

“You okay, kid?” Robin asks.

I’m glad he’s wearing a festive long winter hat. I smile. He’s in a four poster bed in midair in my apartment. Don’t worry, it’s not creepy. He’s also wearing an old time white nightshirt.

I sink under my weighted blanket. “My chest hurts, my friend. It feels like I’ve been stabbed repeatedly.”

Robin lifts a candle. He is using the base of a candle holder I remember from my father’s family cabin when I was little. “Nice touch,” I think.

Robin shines the candle light on my bed to look at me. He yawns largely. I can see something is very awry about his hat, but the light isn’t bright enough for me to make out what’s off.

“What were you dreaming?” He asks.

I pick up my cell phone. I look at the notes to see what I’ve written.

“In my dream, I dance where comedy meets with tragedy. I see the storyline glimmering upon the surface of waters, and when I see the specific fragment I would like to know, I stretch out my hand and lift the glimmering gold line. The line wraps around my arm and I gather the song from inside the fragment and become that song.”

Robin blinks at me. He twists his face in a strange expression, slightly dazed.

“I’m going to need a lot of coffee for that one,” he says. “Is it time to get up? I guess I’m up now.”

I don’t move, it’s still not even 6am yet.

“OK. I request paid assistants from the universe,” I reply.

“What do you think I am?” Robin asks. “You think the universe sends me to just anybody?”

“Yes,” I say. “And now that I’ve begun to channel you, you once again get to bring new life to people in new ways. So, yes, I do think anyone can invoke you. But… I get to be your favorite story teller for the next little bit of our journey.” I wink at him.

Robin must have got bored with my monologue, he is looking at a room service menu. I don’t know where he gets these ideas, I don’t have room service here. Oh wait – that’s genius. I’ll put in a request to the universe. The universe loves me. “Excellent idea, my friend! Ahem… Universe? I want room service options, here, on site.”

Robin looks at me over his reading glasses. “You could easily make your own coffee and flavor it with good intentions”.

Robin chuckles. Now he’s reading a newspaper. I’m glad he keeps the old school traditions alive. Its so nostalgic to read a paper.

“Alright. What are you planning to work on before you make coffee?” Robin asks.

“I haven’t committed to getting up yet.” But now I’m thinking about coffee and that may be the best course of action. Robin is a wise guide after all.

“Alexa,” I say, and stop short. I just heard a dolphin squeak when I said Alexa. Oh that’s right, I have a bad cold. Perhaps that’s the explanation for why my chest feels like I’ve been repeatedly stabbed.

I try again, pressing on thru the inhuman squeaking that should be my voice. “Alexa, play Xanadu Soundtrack.”

Robin groans and falls back on his bed holding a pillow tightly over his head.

Olivia begins to sing, “Come take my hand, you should know me, I’ve always been in your mind… You know I will be kind, I’ll be guiding you.”

“How does this replace your other submission, ‘9 dreams and Robin Williams’?” Robin asks.

Olivia continues singing over Robin as if she doesn’t know he is speaking. “Building your dream, has to start now, there’s no other road to take.”

“Simple. I’ll post that essay on “I Am Always Dreaming”. This is submission becomes a teaser. It’s long enough to intrigue the fans of your school in Anamnesis and the department of “Comedy from Tragedy”, but it’s not so long that people pare inspired to send ‘TL;DNR’ comments to Robert. I’m polite that way.” I pause as I feel a wave of déjà vu, and realize it’s actually déjà reve. “I think I’ve dreamt this conversation before.”

“You have to believe we are magic…” Olivia is on a roll and unstopable! I start to sing along, but quickly stop when I realize the voice of the dolphins isn’t fond of singing in English.

But Olivia didn’t stop. When I recover from my coughing fit, I hear her sing, “I’ll bring all your dreams alive, for you.”

Read the original “9 dreams and Robin Williams” over at https://iamalwaysdreaming.com/blog/f/9-dreams-and-robin-williams.

Dream Brownies May be Authors...or Engineers

The novelist Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) described dreams as occurring in "that small theater of the brain which we keep brightly lighted all night long."
    Stevenson said of his now classic novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, it was "conceived, written, re-written, re-re-written, and printed inside ten weeks" in 1886. The conception came in a dream:

"For two days I went about racking my brains for a plot of any sort; and on the second night I dreamed the scene at the window, and a scene afterward split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the powder and underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers."

His wife related picturesquely how one night Louis cried out horror-stricken, how she woke him up and he protested, "Why did you waken me? I was dreaming a fine bogy-tale!" She also related how he appeared the next morning excitedly exclaiming, "I have got my schilling-shocker -- I have got my schilling-shocker!"
    Stevenson wrote extensively about how his passion for writing interacted with his remarkable dreams and said that, from an early age, his dreams were so vivid and moving that they were more entertaining to him personally than any literature. He learned early in his life that he could dream complete stories and that he could even go back to the same dreams on succeeding nights to give them a different ending. Later he trained himself to remember his dreams and to dream plots for his books.
    Stevenson described the central role of dreaming and dreamlike states in his creative process in “A Chapter on Dreams”. During his sickly childhood, he was often oppressed by night terrors and the “night hag”.  But as he grew older, he found that his dreams often became welcome adventures, in which he would travel to far-off places or engage in costume dramas among the Jacobites.
    He often read stories in his dreams, and as he developed the ambition to become a writer, it dawned on him that a clever way to get his material would be to transcribe what he was reading in his sleep. “When he lay down to prepare himself for sleep, he no longer sought amusement, but printable and profitable tales.” And his dream producers accommodated him. He noticed they became especially industrious when he was under a tight deadline. When “the bank begins to send letters” his “sleepless Brownies” work overtime, turning out marketable stories.
    In his “Chapter on Dreams” (written in his house on Saranac Lake in upstate New York and published in Across the Plains) RLS gave a vivid depiction of his dream helpers.

“Who are the Little People? They are near connections of the dreamer's, beyond doubt; they share in his financial worries and have an eye to the bank-book; they share plainly in his training; they have plainly learned like him to build the scheme of a considerate story and to arrange emotion in progressive order; only I think they have more talent; and one thing is beyond doubt, they can tell him a story piece by piece, like a serial, and keep him all the while in ignorance of where they aim…
“And for the Little People, what shall I say they are but just my Brownies, God bless them! who do one-half my work for me while I am fast asleep, and in all human likelihood, do the rest for me as well, when I am wide awake and fondly suppose I do it for myself. That part which is done while I am sleeping is the Brownies' part beyond contention; but that which is done when I am up and about is by no means necessarily mine, since all goes to show the Brownies have a hand in it even then.”

He observed that  “my Brownies are somewhat fantastic, like their stories hot and hot, full of passion and the picturesque, alive with animating incident; and they have no prejudice against the supernatural.” – and have no morals at all.”

 A Railroad Baron’s Brownies

We may nod our heads over this and say, Well, there you go – that’s a writer’s imagination. Yet similar sources of inspiration are at work in the lives of innovators who might seem far removed from literature. 

    A case in point is one of the great financiers and railroad barons of nineteenth century America, one Arthur Stilwell. He made a fortune and lost it, but his name – as in Stilwell Financial - is still associated with Janus Mutual funds and the Kansas City Southern Railroad. And with a city he founded in Texas, Port Arthur, as a result of dream encounters with beings that, like Stevenson, he called Brownies. It took the city fathers of Port Arthur well over a century from incorporation (1898) to admit its origins. At the time of writing, the official city website contained the following statement:

The inspiration for Port Arthur's founding was novel; railroad pioneer Arthur E. Stilwell, who established the town, later wrote that the ideas for his railways and the location of his namesake city came from "brownies" who spoke to him.

   Stilwell himself kept quiet about these things until the end of his business career, concerned that his respectable investors would consider him a “nut” if he revealed that he was laying railroad track according to plans that were being given to him in his dreams.
   In 1921, Stilwell confessed that he had been visited in his sleep throughout his heyday by guides that (like Stevenson) he called Brownies. In dreams these beings gave him the plans for his railroads, the location and layout of the city of Port Arthur, and the spur to embark on many other business ventures, as well as ideas for books. Stilwell wrote: “There is no doubt in my mind that these messages come from the spirit world, and that this circle of spirits that communicates with me by this rare method is comprised of engineers, poets, and authors.”

    There’s that “committee of sleep” that Steinbeck invoked. In any life, we are likely to find it most lively when we are engaged in a creative task that fresh and risky, especially when that task is all but impossible. Greater challenges draw greater helpers, in and out of the dreamworlds.

The note on Arthur Stilwell is adapted from The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence and Imagination by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Dreaming with Einstein

The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking that created them.

- Albert Einstein

 While leading a workshop in Chicago, I recorded the following dream:

 Einstein tutors me on time travel

I enter a landscape that can be folded like a map, or crumpled so that points that would normally appear distant in time and space are next to each other. I see a beaming Einstein figure sailing across the vista. He seems to be gliding in midair, but may be traveling across the surface of an invisible screen.

      Einstein wants to talk to me, and begins to speak in a thick German accent. I am amazed, delighted and skeptical. Who would a great scientist wish to communicate with a scientific ignoramus like me?

      Einstein explains that there are two reasons. First, from his current vantage point he has an even greater appreciation of the value of dreams and the central role of dreaming in our future science. Second, he reminds me that he was always a dreamer, and that his greatest discoveries were the fruit of his dreaming. “Dreaming was central to my lifelong work, from my vision at sixteen of riding a beam of light.”

     Einstein tells me that dreaming will help to unlock the secrets of time travel – which could, however, be a mixed blessing. He continues to insist on the physical impossibility of human travel backwards through time. On the other hand, according to “my” Einstein, it is possible to enter the past and interact with beings and situations in the past in other ways – for example, by materializing a body at an earlier time or by occupying the body and awareness of a person living in that time.

    “Higher entities are capable of direct intervention in any time,” says my dream Einstein, who proceeds to tutor me on the existence and nature of five-dimensional (and higher-dimensional) beings who are not confined to the rules of the universe, even the relative universe. 

 This is one of a series of dreams and visions in which “Einstein” has appeared to mentor me on the structures of multidimensional reality. He gave me a very interesting working model of synchronicity described in my book Sidewalk Oracles. Some of his dream transmissions are extremely complex. I have shared some of my reports with scientist friends who can compare this material with their own explorations in string theory, particle physics and the nature of time. Sometimes we journey together, into a shared dreamscape – like the scene in which a landscape is folded like a map, or the courtyard beyond a Chinese gate where Einstein introduced me to Fu Tsi, the legendary creator of the I Ching, and explained why the I Ching is an accurate model of the universe and its patterns of manifestation.

    Whether “my” Einstein is an aspect of myself, or a fantasy figure, or a holographic legacy of a great mind, or the scientist himself, making a visit from his research center on the other side, this ongoing dream series is provocative and thrilling, and gets me thinking about what dreamers and scientists have to offer each other.

In the wake of the Einstein revolution of 1905, physics became a science of uncertainty, improvisation and wonder. It revealed that behind the seemingly solid surface of things is an incredible dance of energy, or pure consciousness. It showed us that time and space, as we experience them on the way to the office or to pick up the kids from school, are not conditions for any other kind of life in the universe, merely human conveniences (although they often seem more like inconveniences). 

   Today, popular hypotheses in physics suggest the following:

* Time travel into the future is possible.

* Time travel into the past may be possible. (Einstein, in his time and in my dreamtime, maintains that it is not a physical possibility for a human body – but allows, in the dream version, that it could be accomplished in other ways.)

* There is no firm separation between subject and object in the universe. The observer and the “outside world” he thinks he is observing are enmeshed together. Indeed, at subatomic levels, it is the act of observation that plucks events from a soup of possibilities.

* Humans have an innate ability to communicate and influence people and objects across a distance.

* The mind is nonlocal. Consciousness acts outside the brain and outside spacetime.

* Any event that occurs in the universe is immediately available anywhere as information.

* Our experience of reality, like our experience of linear time, is a mental construct. Change the construct, and we change our world.

The new physics shows us a universe that baffles common sense, a universe that operates along utterly different lines from one in which the commuter train   leaves at 6:05 (if we’re lucky). Yet the findings of leading-edge physics have brought us scientific confirmation of the worldview of shamans, mystics and dreamers, who have always known that there is a place beyond surface reality where all things are connected, a place beyond time where all times are accessible, and that consciousness generates worlds

    How do we bring all of this together with our lived experience, our human needs, and our hopes for world peace and a gentle upward evolution of our species?

    Through dreaming.

    Dreaming, we swim in the quantum soup of possibilities, where the act of looking brings things into being. Dreaming, we discover the existence of alternate realities and parallel worlds – including dimensions that escape human conceptions of form – and can actively explore them.
     Dreaming, we confirm that consciousness is never confined to the body and that we can reach people and objects at a distance. Dreaming, we are time jumpers, able to visit (and possibly influence) both past and future. Dreaming, we can experience the six (or seven) “hidden” dimensions of physical reality, separated from our everyday sensory perception at the time of the Big Bang, that are posited by string theory.

     As dreamers, we can achieve experiential understanding of the multidimensional universe that science is modeling.

     As active dreamers and researchers inside multidimensional reality, we can contribute in important ways to what will be – if we are lucky – the foremost contribution of the twenty-first century to science and evolution: the emergence of a true science of consciousness.

Part of this text is adapted from Dreaming True by Robert Moss. Published by Pocket Books.

Make dreaming together part of the fabric of family life

Dream teacher Valerie McCarney has shared a dream that inspires us to make dreaming together part of the fabric of family life - within both our biological families, our communities of friends, and our intentional families. In the dream, she met a remarkable guide after she decided to dream on the mysterious tragedy of the missing Malaysian Airlines flight 370 that has moved so many of us over all the weeks the families of the passengers have been hoping and praying for some definitive word.
    Here is Valerie's narrative:

I was watching tv and the Smithsonian station had a documentary on the missing Malaysian Airline flight. I thought I am not taking all that sadness to sleep with me and turned it off. Then I thought, I will set an intention to see if I can find out where the airline has gone. I dreamed:

Surrounded by the fabric of life,  she speaks

I am in a bazaar some place. I am in an area filled with colorful fabrics hanging all over . They are beautiful and I am walking through looking and touching some. I come to one area and there is a woman standing there. I smile at her and she watches me touch the fabrics on her table. She is Asian, maybe Malaysian. She speaks to me.
   She says, "I want to tell you that you need to teach dreaming to families. Teach them to share their dreams with each other, the simple dreams , the silly dreams , the big dreams. They need to get comfortable doing this. So when there is trouble they can help each other through the dreaming process. If the people on the Malaysian airlines flight did this, by now some of their relatives would have shown up in their dreams . They would have told them where they are and what happened. It would give the families much comfort . In turn they could share the information with the other families who have lost a loved one."
    She said this quickly in a matter of fact way without changing the expression on her face. I just listened. When she was done speaking she turned and started to fold fabric. 

    I started to leave and she said, "Oh wait a minute, tell Hillary Clinton to be careful when speaking to large crowds."

I awoke surprised that I got so much good information.The last bit about Hillary Clinton mystified me. What was that about?

    My first action was to honor the dream by painting the woman among all those fabrics.

    The following week, I heard that Mrs. Clinton was speaking to a crowd and got a shoe thrown at her. I paid attention. This seemed like confirmation that the woman in my dream knows what she is talking about. I took the incident as a strong signal to so what I was being advised to do, where I am able to make a difference.
    My next action will be to get my own family dreaming together on May 10th, the World Day of Active Dreaming. I will be with my extended family on vacation that day.Many members of my family, especially but not only the women, are vivid dreamers who are no shy about sharing what they dream.
     I will set up a group intention for us to meet some place we all know and visit with family members that have passed on . I am very familiar with doing this but most of my family is not . We will set the intention at the beginning of the week and watch our dreams.  Then on May 10th we will see what we have.  Since some of the other dreamers will not be there with us I will email them and ask them to see what dreams come up during that time as well.

    By doing this I believe I will be honoring the wisdom of the dream guide, weaving an even stronger family fabric, and maybe seeing what is going on behind the veils of ordinary understanding.

Art (c) Valerie McCarney

Entertaining our spirits

We must entertain our spirits, including the spirit of pure entertainment.
     I received a lesson about this when I was working on my first book on dreaming and shamanism, which was published as Conscious Dreaming. One night I set a serious intention for my dreams, in the following language; "I would like guidance on how to bring the gifts of dreaming to many more people in our society."
    I was soon deep in dream land. Though not fully lucid, I remembered my intention, inside the dream, as I looked around a new landscape. I saw hundreds, maybe thousands of people sitting on bleachers, laughing and happy. Lots of families. This seemed very promising, in terms of my hope of finding a way to reach many more people.
    Perhaps I would find a guide here. As I tried to get my bearings, I noticed that the crowd was gathered for a three-ring circus, under the big tent. There were circus acts - a walking bear, someone walking a tightrope, clowns and a pretty girl on a trapeze. The figure who drew my attention was an unlikely gymnast, dressed in a loud plaid suit and puffing on a large and stinky cigar. He did impossible stunts, bouncing all the way up to the top of the tent, and down again.
    Then he jumped from the ring into the stands and started cuddling and smoothing with attractive women. I found that I knew his name. "Marty." Something told me that Marty was the guide I was looking for.
    I was incredulous. This cheap show-off from some oneiric Comedy Central was my guide on bringing dreaming to the people?
    Marty gave me a big wink as he squeezed the ladies. Leering around his stogie, he said to me, "It's about entertainment, kid. It's about entertainment."
    Marty was right, I realized when I came back from my dream excursion. If we want to reach people, we must entertain in the sense of holding their attention. In its original meaning, an "entertainment" is something that maintains people in a certain frame of mind. Later it is used to mean something you offer to look after your guests. Today, we think of entertainment primarily as amusement, but all the layers of meaning are relevant to the message from Marty.
     Our guides appeared dressed for their parts, in the ways that can reach us and hold our

attention. I know that Marty was the right guide for me that night, and I'll hope to keep him entertained in my current and future writing. I don't know whether he works for Thalia, the muse of comedy, but I'll hope to earn her patronage as well. It's a thought worth entertaining.

Thalia, muse of comedy, by Jean-Marc Nattier (1739)