I dreamed I woke up

I dreamed I woke up.

In this waking life my thoughts

are agate points and deep lagoons

that make ancient cities and heroes

and bust dakinis out of lunch boxes.

Everything is alive when I am awake.

I remember to swim in air

and fly in water, and ride moon-tigers

to the Moon Cafe, and the light in my head

is the light of the blue-white star.

I went back to sleep in a world

of fewer voices and more noise. Out here

in mossy woods, sleep life is pleasant.

It's good to watch a cedar shake her frills,

good to be surprised by lime on watermelon.

There are days I don't want to wake up.

Then there are days of pain and lost delight,

city days caught in time and trivial stories

when I forget that I am asleep

and can change the game if I awaken.

I cannot say whether the person writing this

is asleep in the world, or awake in the dream


Art: "Autoscopy" by Robert Moss

This poem is published in Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories by Robert Moss. Published by Excelsior Editions/State University of New York Press.

Empathy Dreams

 

Empathy Dreams

When you weep for all you have lost
I listen with my mouth open;
your tears fall on my tongue
and I taste your pain. 

When you were in the river of tiny fish
I splashed with you.
When you hug your swelling belly
I breathe love songs in your ear
to welcome the spirit who is coming
into this world through you. 

When they broke the child in you
something broke in me.
When you fled from the johns to the jones
I tried to crack your crystal palace
so you could visit that beautiful boy
who found refuge with Peter Pan. 

I was with you when they beat you
for sucking your thumb, and when they
beat you harder because you couldn't kill
the lovely soft bandit cornered by coon dogs.
I am with you at the white table
of the one who has shared his cup with you. 

I laugh with you when you cartwheel through life
as a circus acrobat, and when you
walk the high wire without fear
because your second self goes ahead of you
making footholds so you cannot fall. 

At the border camp. I share your terror
of returning to a country you can't remember
where killers still haunt the killing fields.
I am with the scary man with brick dust
on his skin and a claw hammer in his belt
I whisper to him, "Don't tread on wildflowers." 

I am with then hunter and the hunted.
I am Cossack and Jew, slave and slave owner.
I am the man in iron from the dragon boat.
I am the priestess whose weapons
are a mirror and the sickle moon,
who can give blood to the earth without cutting. 

I am in the blade of grass that bends
under the tremendous gray hoof, and springs back.
I am with the elephant mother who grieves
for her calf as metal rain from the poachers' gunship
turns her dreams to blood ivory. 

I am no bodhisattva, able to remember
all lives, past and present, without being overwhelmed.
I must spit out the tears I have tasted
and not go stooped under grief and pain of others. 

But I can do this: I can go to the one
with a hole in the heart, and show you
the precious child who fled from your body
when they tried to kill your dreams,
and you lost the dreamer in you. 

I can promise your child of wonder
that, despite everything, you are safe and can be fun.
I can hold you together until you know each other.
Growing beyond myself, I can go on holding you
in the fierce embrace of Great Mother Bear
until you cannot be apart, because you are one.

- Poem from Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories by Robert Moss. Published by Excelsior Editions/State University of New York Press.

Drawing by RM

Painting with Words: The Dream Poems of Marta Aarli

Guest blog by dream teacher and poet Marta Aarli, MA, LPC 

As I hover in between the worlds, my soul swimming in the realm of dreams while my mind is scrambling to reassemble itself, there is a region where image and word exist together in harmonious balance. I often find myself racing through this passage as my mind wrestles back control and puts me into human form again.
    But sometimes I can slow this process down by softening my gaze until the boundaries blur, watching as my experiences take shape into visual phrases and verbal landscapes. From this in-between place, I allow words to flow, coming from my whole being, not just the verbal part of my brain, letting myself speak in a language of the body, the heart, the senses.
    Sometimes it sounds strange, because it’s from another place, a foreign country, the motherland of poetry. Each poem becomes its own being, expressing its unique character in its own form and dialect.
    In order to understand it, the reader must also open, allowing the language to flow in and merge with their own fluid places, translating it into their own native tongue. This is the creative process of reading or listening to poetry, similar to connecting with another’s dream. In this way we meet in the universal creative field that we share with humans and all other beings. When we listen to poetry, we receive it, rather than knowing in the same way that we comprehend things on an intellectual level.         Poetry is a wonderful art form for expressing dreams, because it is by nature a surreal, visual orientation to language. Once they’ve taken verbal form, poems reconstitute through the readers’ imagination, translated into their own images which evoke, or inspire, or move something deep inside that they had forgotten a long time ago.
    As a psychotherapist, dreamer, poet, singer, dancer, and visual artist, I’m interested in how to be the fullest, most integrated beings we can be. This includes our many parts - the analytic and emotional, verbal and non-verbal, earthly and spiritual, waking and sleeping, seen and unseen, conscious and unconscious, weaving together into fluid wholeness. I see poetry as a contemplative practice, to be with what is happening now inside our being and around us in the environment. When we express our inner worlds, we connect with others, invite them in, see our common experiences. Or perhaps we find that we are already roaming the halls of these vast universal realms together, in our dreams. The poems in this collection, Dream Worlds, my third book of poetry, are all from my dream experiences, since childhood. Some are combined dreams, some weave in waking life experiences or other peoples’ dreams. 


and as they danced 

and as they danced 
the women waved their arms 
threw their hair swirling
their black veils 
into the air 

hands touched 
in flowering gestures 
around their hips and shoulders 
their skin grew warm 
their breath deep 

and as they danced
 the snake wound around their feet 
intertwined at the ankles 
slowly binding them 
all together 


mother’s veins 

tributaries of 
mother’s veins 
flow together 
following our guide 
with the snake around his neck 

down river down path
island beach lined with boats 
dead loved-ones gathered 
singing and dancing 
at the crossing place

her mountain range breasts 
and rolling meadow hips 
upon which we gather
feather and bone ceremony 
around the fire
prepares us for journeying


through the fangs 

We drum for the journey 
because we are not from around here. 
We fast for the darkness 
for the daemons 
for the human heart. 
Unless sick, or too old
or too young, and then 
we are carried 
by the strong. 

And as we travel 
we see each other 
across other realms, 
not always recognizable 
often not what we seem.
Look closer 
and listen to the nightmares 
to the biting 
and the possibility 
of receiving medicine 
through the fangs.


also our angels 

they come to us 
each one its own animal 
ready to bite or sting 
wrestle us to the ground
 or devour us whole 
they come in need of sustenance
or understanding 
or union 

they come to love us 
wake us out of our slumber 
to get our attention 
by any means necessary 
with a kissing or a killing
 by delighting or disgusting
 pummeling us with storms 
or fire, earthquakes, tsunamis 

monsters so horrible 
only we can imagine them 
because they know us our fears, 
our worst enemies 
our hidden demons 
to conjure and thrust 
and also our angels 
our guides and our gifts

Dream Worlds: Poems is available from the author, Marta Aarli. You can also visit her psychology website

Colors that call souls

“Notice the colors that call souls,”

the poet says to me in the space of a dream.
I see the green of fresh shoots and
the purple of royalty and young grapes.
Because we are in a Celtic mood
I am thinking there must be three.
I see a triad of colors of a ripened field,
of corn and wheat and orange poppies.
The colors have substance but I cannot say
whether they are garments or vessels.
I know they clothe spirits and lead them
though memory and desire into soul-houses.

- January 9, 2017, from a morning dream

Art: "Yeats in the Magic Cottage" by Robert Moss

Note: I cannot say that the file, the poet seer of my new dream, is Yeats, my companion in dreaming and mutual visioning over many years, but I recall now that Yeats made many experiments with flashing colors according to the Golden Dawn system. I rose with his glorious poem of soul and its transfigurations - "The Song of Wandering Aengus" - streaming in my mind like a salmon run. The body, in the Carmina Gadelica, is the coich anama, or "soul-shrine". 

Mosswood dreaming

Here, if you tread very softly among the cedars,
you may hear the low midday snores
of the soft secret race of big-footed beings
who grow pink hibiscus in their dreams.

You can't miss the tree that is the portal
to the three worlds because it is more real
than the others. This is the One Tree
that knows you before you know it.

When hungry spiders skitter over your bed
you forget to be scared because you are hungrier
than they are. You gobble them up fast
and burp out webs of shining possibility.

With your toothbrush in front of the mirror
you see a giant boa rises to rhyme with you
wrapping itself around the tube of your body
squeezing the old dead stuff out.

You see that people have fire slumbering
in their bellies even when they are cold
and muddled and living on ashes.
You turn on the pilot lights in their souls.

You walk through wild orchards to a wild shore
where sea turtle resumes your lessons.
You'll wear armor on your back but leave your soft bits
 exposed, so you can't hide from life in a hard shell.

When you ask, "Where's the rest of me?",
you create a conga line where you are joined
by the belly dancer and the golden child,
the red horse, the Empress and the Fool.

Here, when you let love spill through your eyes
every blade of grass is in love with you.
You lie in the creek bed like a pebble
and the water rounds your sharp edges.

In pilgrim hands you are carried to a stony place
as an offering. You rest in a cairn for a thousand years
until you spread wings and fly to your truest lover
and let the Earth have you under the warm sun.

The fire has been built for you, and in you.
You become cloves and cinnamon.
Rising again, you spread yourself wide.
As aurora, you color the world.

Here myths spill into the day
like ripe fruit falling into your hand.
You dive into the pool of dreams
and meet the salmon that fed the first shaman.

Stuffed with hazelnuts, it gives itself to you
and explodes on your palate
and feeds the whole company with magic
in a new miracle of filberts and fishes.

From the Field of Dreams

I often ask members of my playshops and trainings to bring a creative offering to our final session, in any genre that they choose - a story, a poem, an artwork, a script for a playlet or script, a song or a dance. The only condition is that what is shared should come fresh from our adventures together.
    At the close of the five-day adventure I led at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur in November, Karen Muller gifted us with a wonderful poem evoking the experiences of the whole group, including the evening when we shared close encounters with Death. She has given me permission to share it here:

From The Field of Dreams
by Karen Muller

From the field of dreams to a treehouse built with Dad
From herding cats to spider woman's web
We explored other worlds and re-imagined this one.

Weaving our own webs and admiring one another's
We traveled from our humble village, flying
east of the sun and west of the moon
On the wings of a tiger to a beautiful distant star
Only to find it a cold, soulless land of robot people.
If only we can get to the great Oz, maybe he can help us
Because now we understand that
More answers than we imagined are back in Kansas.

Then came the great reckoning
We each carried Death on our left shoulders,
Then found ourselves at death's door
But Cerberus the three headed gatekeeper
Told us about our many errors and the need for reparations
None of us has even come close to using our talents.
Like Icarus, our wax wings melted and we fell into the sea.
We have more to do here in the valley of the shadow of death
Before we meet our rewards.

And now away we go, back from the worlds behind the world
Back to Kansas
Holding fast to the visions of what we need to be and do
We face a new day
Hoping that next time we meet Death
We can say that yes, we had more courage,
Repaired some damage, forgave
Accomplished more of what we came here to do.

Photo: My Esalen balcony by R.M.

Laissez-passer

I’m far from confident in the French language, in ordinary reality. Yet in my dreams and in half-dream states, I often compose or receive poems in the French. Here’s one I rediscovered today that carries a thrill for me:

Par ce qu’il visitait la lune au fond de la mer
Par ce qu’il se consolait avec le char de l’ abîme
Par ce qu’il se montrait dans les couleurs de ses rêves
Parce ce qu’il fit sauter les coeurs des filles dormantes

Laissez-passer
entre le monde mondaine
et le monde-montagne

The first four lines appeared, one by one, as captions under four small images set like postage stamps on a piece of paper under the silhouette of the pyramids at Giza. As I studied the document, I realized it was a laissez-passer (safe-conduct, travel permit) of a special kind, a license to travel between worlds.

I came upon this most interesting document when two young men appeared in a dream to escort me to a private showing of an exhibition. They spoke of this exhibition as a revolutionary event, one that was going to shake up people’s understanding of reality.

The exhibition included surrealist machines – for example, an old-fashioned gramophone with the stiletto heel of a woman’s shoe as the stylus – serial pictures developing certain themes, little sepia pictures and black-and-white photographs with poetic captions.

My excitement was only fully roused when I realized what the laissez-passer contained. Then I observed a lovely little faerie flying about the space on butterfly wings, and knew her name was Marquisite.

A rough translation of the poetic text of my dream laissez-passer:

Because he visited the moon at the bottom of the sea
Because he consoled himself with the chariot of the abyss
Because he showed himself in the colors of his dreams
Because he made the hearts of sleeping girls leap

ALLOWED TO PASS
between the worldly world
and the world-mountain

Salvador Dali, Aphrodisiac Telephone (1936)

Night calls

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The wind came over last night
and hugged me so hard
my cabin lifted off its foundations
and whirled me west, over moonlit waves,
to the Dream Kin who call me out of time
into the All-at-Once. Eucalyptus people
took off their clothes and danced with delight.

Nature is very personal here.
Wind and wave, moon and stars,
the feigned death of a monarch butterfly
lying still as a fallen leaf, waiting for the sun
to warm it back to drink milkweed,
and the owl who called me three times

and then, not content with my quality of attention,
thirty times more, around midnight
when the glow at my skylight was exactly the blue
of the launch chamber of an Egyptian star traveler.

So many night calls, that when I go for my mail
I remember a box I had long forgotten.
Not the letter drop at my door, or a metal drawer
at the post office, but an old-time box on a post
at the edge of the Street of Dreams.
How could I have forgotten this?
I open it, and find it stuffed with unread night mail
including letters and cards and legal documents
and business papers from a woman I loved and lost
who left the world of pain, shockingly, before me.
I know I will need to travel to her return address
from the place where fresh water joins the salt
when the moon lays a path across the waves.

- Big Sur, February 11, 2011

Le rêve a laissé son manteau

On my last night at l'Hameau de l'Etoile, the refurbished 17th century village in the south of France where I have been leading new adventures in Active Dreaming, I dreamed I was leading the group on a spiral dance through stables where powerful horses stamped and snorted their approval. As we danced, I improvised the words of a song with alternating verses in French and English. As I woke, the title of this dream was with me: "Le chanson des écuries du rêve" - "The Song of the Dream Stables."

I sat down with a cup of coffee to write with the energy of this dream. What came streaming through me was not exactly the Song of the Dream Stables but rather a poem in the rhythms of Charles d'Orléans, the poet-prince of medieval France who has featured in my dreams for manyyears. It was a sequence of dreams, visions and synchronicity - extraordinary even by my standards - that brought me to France in 2005 to lead a previous workshop at a chateau near Blois, the city Charles most loved, and where his body lies under the protection of the most fearsome gargoyles I have ever seen. The repeating line in my poem is borrowed from one of Charle's lyrical poems. Le temps a laissé son manteau.

Here is the poem as I delivered it to the group, in French, the day before I flew home for Thanksgiving:

Le rêve a laissé son manteau
de brume, de soie et du regret
Je marche entre la terre et l’eau
pour nettoyer à castanet

La lune m’a donné sa pleine face
J’encontre esprits de là-haut
Je dois assigner chacun à sa place
Le rêve a laissé son manteau

Les vents racontes légendes d’or
je glisse comme grue, je mange taureau
Je vive entre la mort et l’amour
Le rêve a laissé son manteau

A rough translation:

      The dream has dropped its mantle of mist, of silk and of regret I walk between earth and water to cleanse with their percussive beat

      The moon has given me her full face I have met spirits that come from there I must assign each to its rightful place The dream has dropped it mantleT

      The winds narrate golden legends I glide as the crane, I eat the bull I live between love and Death The dream has dropped its mantle.

     "Eating the bull" is no bull. Taureau is a preferred dish of the gardian, the cowboy of the Camargue, and I ate steak de taureau au fleur de sel in a restaurant named the House of the Moon Bull (Casa Toro Luna) on the square in the medieval town of Aigues Mortes.

      Graphic: Illumination from an early collection of poems of Charles d'Orléans, depicting his time as a hostage in the Tower of London.

Place of the sonnet, and the lion

In Madeleine L'Engle's luminous novel A Wrinkle in Time, Mrs Whatsit instructs the children that a human life, lived well, is like a sonnet. A sonnet (if we need reminding) is a strict poetic form that imposes demands of rhythm (iambic pentameter), rhyme, and length (14 lines). Depart from the form, and you may have something but you will not have a sonnet. In life, says Mrs Whatsit, "You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you."

This elegant analogy was in my mind last Sunday, since I had been re-reading A Wrinkle in Time in the middle of the night, prodded by a sequence of dreams and synchronicity I don't need to report here. The following afternoon, when the members of my circle at Mosswood Hollow shared the fruits of their homeplay assignment - which was to produce a creative act of self-definition - I was delighted when Lisa shared a sonnet she had composed in this cause:

With sleep come mystr'ies, dramas of the head
In language secret: diamond-laden code
Their stories unfold nightly in my bed
Their meanings caref'ly to the darkness sewed
The inner universe reveals such powers:
I fly, create, am rich beyond compare
O'er every enemy my presence towers
To my beloved I appear most fair
But what's the deeper meaning of these tales
That overflow my nights with filmhouse art?
The language of the daytime constant fails
I must relearn the language of the heart
The guide of dreaming points me toward the soul
And in the living of it, I am whole

- Lisa Fraser, Mosswood Hollow, November 15, 2009

Mrs Whatsit would most certainly have approved of this marvelous verse!

For my own contribution to our group essay in self-definition, I had decided to turn a big dream of my own into a mini-theatre, and I had no doubt now that Lisa should play the lion in this dramatic production. This is how I introduced the dream story to the group before we acted it out:

THE PLACE OF THE LION

You are at a zoo on a Sunday afternoon. People are wandering about, snacking and chatting as they inspect the animals and birds. As you approach the big cat enclosures, you are uneasy because you know that big cats don't belong in confinement.

When you come to the lion pen, you are disgusted because people are mocking the great beast, pulling faces - until someone screams that the gate is open and the lion could get them. Now all the people are running away.

Instead of fleeing, you step through the open gate, into the place of the lion. The great beast runs towards you and leaps up...and his great paws are on your shoulders...and he licks your face like a friendly dog. He wills you to turn around and look at the scene in the zoo in order to understand what is really going on here.

When you look back, you see that it is the humans that are living in cages. In the comfort of their suburban houses and malls and supermarkets they have failed to notice that they have walled themselves in places of confinement. When you look beyond the lion, you see there are no walls, only an open horizon of wild freedom and possibility. The lion says to you, in his gravel-ly lion voice, "You see, my dear, humans are the only animals that choose to live in cages."