Some dreamscapes appear to be film sets, or stage sets. You step into the wings and the scene is changed, or gone completely. Some are pocket realities; go outside and there is no there there.
When I become lucid, I sometimes explore the borders of these landscapes. Once I was deep in adventure in a rainforest. When I became aware I was dreaming, I marched off in a certain direction – to find that I came to a line where the jungle, and its world, simply ended. When I traveled through the forest in other directions, I found the same thing. Beyond the jungle world, on every side, there was nothing but a white void. Its color and texture resembled the drawing paper on which I proceeded to sketch this geography.
Night after night, in a certain interval of terror and beauty in my life, I was carried away to a mountain convent that was a complete world, for training and initiation by an order of priestesses. How a mountain can be a planet, except in a painting by Magritte or a story by Saint-Exupéry, is a question no dreamer needs to ask. The shape of the world mountain, when I drew it, looked like a bobbing toy, the kind you could float in a bathtub. Around it was the vastness of space, not dark or drawing-paper white, but grainy and silvery like mother-of-pearl.
One night, I was deep in magical intrigues in a vast apartment in a huge old building in an old European city. With companions, I moved from room to room, accessed by wide, long halls that turned back upon themselves, counter-clockwise, like Greek keys. Sometimes a hall would end, without explanation, at a blank wall or sealed door.
On another night, in my dream body, I walked cobbled streets, under arches, in another Old World city, perhaps Prague. I again had the sense that I was being directed, unobtrusively, to turn in a counter-clockwise spiral. Before me walked a man who was looking at me from the back of his head. It was hard to tell whether the face on his back was a mask or a double. Behind me walked a second man with two faces. Their presence was deliciously creepy, but in no way sinister or threatening for me, inside or after the dream. Though the city was dark and silent in the dream, there was a feeling of carnival, of dress-up.
The hypnagogic zone, between sleep and awake, is a wonderful place to explore how our dream producers, scriptwriters and choreographers, construct the sets where dramas we see in the night unfold.
Drawing: "Theatre of Life" from Robert Moss journals
Animals not only feature in our dreams; they may help to produce them.
I had a remarkable experience of this several years ago, staying with an older friend who owned a large rural property. He owned two German shepherds. He wanted them to be able to run on his land but he also wanted to make sure that they always came when called, especially since he had a hard time getting around. So he put electronic collars around their necks. When he wanted them back at the house, or anywhere else, he would zap them with a monitor that delivered an electric shock.
I found this barbarous, and told him so as gently as I could. He insisted that he loved his dogs, and they were content with their situation.
In the morning, at the breakfast table, my friend was troubled by a dream that lay heavy on him. I urged him to tell me.
"I was in a Nazi concentration camp," he began. "They fitted me with an electric collar. Whenever they wanted me to do something, they zapped me. They had me marching up and down like a robot."
The analogy to the situation of his dogs was screamingly obvious, at least to me. It was as if the dream had been crafted to help him understand what he was doing to his dogs. I could not fail to remember that German shepherds were favored guard dogs in the Nazi camps. "If it were my dream," I commented, "I would wonder whether my dogs asked for this dream to help me to understand their situation."
My friend did not want to hear this. I have since lost contact with him, and I wonder whether he has gone on zapping his dogs.
Dreams are infinitely various. A dream may be a visitation, an adventure in another reality, a rehearsal for the future, or the effect of the leftovers of the day before. Some dreams have the quality of productions, and it is always interesting to speculate on who and what, exactly, is involved in the making of a particular dream of this kind. I know that our dead are sometimes involved in dream production for the living.
I led a group journey to explore such things in a circle of active dreamers last night. I found myself arriving at a movie set where I had to put myself in a vintage convertible, behind shades, to be admitted by security. I was given a tour of current film projects and met directors with distinctive styles. I warmed to one "Arturo" who specialized in extravaganzas that meld Fellini and Alejandro Jodorowsky. I toured costume departments where the right outfits for dream characters are selected. I attended a design conference where a new fuzzy character - it looked like a hyperactive woodchuck - is being developed for dream movies.
I saw situations where requests for dream intervention are considered and acted upon. I learned that dreams are sometimes crafted for individuals because someone who has their best interests in mind has requested a production that will dramatize a certain issue. The request may come from a spiritual guide or another person connected to the dreamer. Among those putting in such requests are animals. There were talking animals all over the studios.
I don't doubt now that those German shepherds found a way to zap their owner back, as dream producers.
Drawing (c) Robert Moss
In the House of Time
Here is a place where I can slip between parallel lives.
I step through the door of an elevator, to find that the space within is vastly greater than seems possible from the outside and the box is not much like an elevator car. There are sliding glass doors on the far side, one set after another after another.
Only intention is required to open them. With intention, they slide apart so quickly and totally that they seem to melt away. I have come this way before, to observe parallel selves who made different choices and are leading different lives from my present self. I always find these excursions instructive. I may take comfort from the fact that I have avoided worse mistakes in my present life than in others. I may be able to borrow a gift, a lesson or a skill from a parallel self. I can remain an observer, or I can try to enter the mind and body of another self, as we often do in dreams of the night.
Doors fly open. I consider joining the Robert who is lazing by a warm beach in the South Pacific after a long swim.
But wait. There are other beings around. They seem to exist in the spaces between parallel lives. How could I have failed to see them on previous visits to the Elevators of Time?
They are in rich apparel, from different times. They could be a caravan of performers, yet each has the quality of a ringmaster, ready to preside over the entertainments. There is a huge bearded black man dressed like a grandee of the Renaissance, maybe for a production of Othello. There is a prince who has real ram's horns in his curling hair. There is a tall beauty in a bustier and glittering gauzy gown dusted with stars. There is a magician in a tall top hat and a tail coat. And others whose likenesses I fail to capture.
Ringmasters. Yes, that is the right word for the way they preen themselves. I wonder if they are also producers, helping to shape dreams of many lives.
I have often felt that a certain kind of dream is probably a dramatic production, arranged by an unseen set of scriptwriters, directors and special effects people. The dead are sometimes employed in making dream movies for the living.
Those of us who are frequent fliers in the multiverse, embarking on conscious journeys into other realities are sometimes aware that roads we follow and environments we visit are products of imagination. This does not mean that they are anything less than we real. Indeed, they may be more real than much of our ordinary reality. Perhaps I shall try to interview the Ringmasters of Time's Circus.
- Report from a recent group journey I led to various locales in the House of Time.
Postscript
Now I am looking at an image of Hermes Crioforos, Hermes "Who Takes the Lamb". Hmm, I wonder whether the fellow with ram's horns in his curling hair has an ancient and interesting pedigree.
Journal drawing (c) Robert Moss
