Reclaiming the Art of Dying

In most human societies, preparation for death and the afterlife is a central part of life. The practice of the ars moriendi  -the art of dying - does not reflect some morbid preoccupation. It is actually life-affirming rather than life-denying. By coming to know Death as a friend, you release the energy you have invested in trying to bottle up your darkest fears. When you establish for yourself — through personal experience — that there is life after life, you will find you take a more relaxed and generous view of the vicissitudes of everyday life. When you examine your life from the standpoint of your death, you will surely find that there is no reason to perpetuate old quarrels and jealousies. You will wish to put things right between yourself and others, to give up petty agendas and live fully and creatively for the years allotted to you.

In postindustrial Western societies, the neglect of the art of dying has led to a vogue for spiritual practices drawn from other traditions, such as Tibetan Buddhism, which offers a detailed geography of the afterlife that may or may not be relevant to you if you are not a Tibetan Buddhist. Our general neglect is fed by both fear and denial. The denial thrives on our hurry sickness, our tendency to fill up our time with compulsive, external activities — interspersed with infusions of passive consumer entertainment, IV-fed through the TV tubes — leaving no space for the inner search. Filling our lives with a bustle of responsibilities that leaves us with “no time” to commune with soul is mockingly described by a Tibetan master as “housekeeping in a dream.” Sögyal Rinpoche asks, “Would anyone in their right mind think of laboriously redecorating their hotel room every time they booked into one?

Our fear of death is bound up with our confusion about who we are. We fear losing all the props, connections, and résumés that we confuse with identity. We are terrified of being stripped of rank and title and credit cards and cell phones and being sent naked into the next world, as Inanna must descend naked into the underworld.

Your death is a rather important subject, not just the when and how, but the question of what follows, and what it all means. On a subject this vital and this intimate, you would be ill-advised to take answers on trust from other people. But how can we know before dying what lies on the other side, and know this as personal truth? In two ways: through a visitation by a resident of the Otherworld whose information can be verified; or by soul travel, by making a personal journey to the Other Side. My book Conscious Dreaming explores dream visitations by the departed. Here I want to suggest a variety of techniques by which you can embark on conscious dream journeys to explore the conditions of the afterlife for yourself.

An art of dying adequate to our needs and yearnings today must address at least these five key areas: 

        Practice in dream travel and journeying beyond the body. By practicing the projection of consciousness beyond the physical plane, we settle any personal doubts about the soul’s survival of physical death.

       Developing a personal geography of the afterlife. Through conscious dream journeys, we can visit “ex-physicals” — and their teachers — in their own environments. We can explore a variety of transit areas and reception centers, adapted to the expectations and comfort levels of different types of people, where the recently departed are helped to adapt to their new circumstances. We can tour the “collective belief territories,” some established centuries or millennia ago, where ex-physicals participate ins hared activities and religious practices. We can examine processes of life review, reeducation, and judgment and follow the transition of spirits between different after-death states. We can also study the different fates of different vehicles of consciousness after physical death.

      Helping the dying. The application of insights and techniques gained in these explorations to helping the dying through what some hospice nurses describe as the “nearing death experience.” In many of our hospitals (where most Westerners die) death is treated as a failure, or merely the loss of vital signs, followed by a pulled-out plug, a disconnected respirator, and the disposal of the remains. As we recover the art of dying, many of us in all walks of life — not only ministers and health care professionals and hospice volunteers — will be able to play the role of companion on the deathwalk, helping the dying to approach the next life with grace and courage and to make the last seasons of this life a period of personal growth. The skills required in this area include the ability to communicate on a soul level with patients who are in coma, are unable to speak or reason clearly, or have suffered severe memory loss. A vital aspect of this work is facilitating or mediating contact between the dying and helpers on the other side — especially departed loved ones — who can give assistance through the transition. Dreamwork and meditation are invaluable tools in helping the dying to prepare for the conditions of life beyond the body.

               Helping the departed. We pray for our dead in our churches and temples, and no good intention is ever wasted. However, you may have a hard time finding a priest who is willing to take on the role of psychopomp, or guide of souls, and provide personal escort service to spirits of the departed who have lost their way and gotten stuck between the worlds, causing pain and confusion to themselves and sometimes to their survivors. Yet the living have a crucial role to play in helping to release earthbound or troubled spirits. For one thing, some of these “ex-physicals” seem to trust people who have physical bodies more than entities that do not, because there is comfort in the familiar, because they did not believe in an afterlife before passing on — or quite simply because they do not know they are dead. An art of dying for our times must include the ability to dialogue with these spirits and help them to find their right path.

              Making death your ally. Finally, we are challenged to reach into the place of our deepest fears and master them: to face our own death on its own ground and re-value our lives and our purpose from this perspective. When we “brave up” enough to confront our personal Death and receive its teaching, we forge an alliance that is a source of power and healing in every aspect of life. We may now be able to carry a sense of divine comedy that can help us weather whatever life throws at us on a given day.

Art: "Storm Bird Brings Me Back" by Robert Moss

 

Text adapted from Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and Life Beyond Death. by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library. Here you will find detailed practices and travel repots.

 

Hungarian Swallow

Nandor, an elderly Hungarian man, wept uncontrollably when he attempted to describe the recent loss of his son, who had died a few weeks earlier of leukemia, aged only 25. Nandor had had no contact with his son – in dreams or otherwise – since his death. Despite his terrible grief, Nandor clung to the materialist perspective that had guided him as a scientist in his native country under communism, distrusting anything that could not be experienced and tested with the physical senses. He said he never remembered dreams.

He had come reluctantly to my workshop at his wife’s insistence, expecting nothing, or less than nothing. His sadness filled me with compassion.

I stood near him during a drumming session and found his son. I found something more: a pleasant room overlooking the Danube in Budapest, a space where Nandor might be able to have direct contact with his boy. After the drumming, I sat with Nandor. He told me he had seen nothing during the drumming. I told him, “I have a dream for you” and asked his permission to share it. “Yes, yes,” he said quickly. I gave him this dream: 

I see you meeting your son in a salon overlooking the river in Budapest. You are drinking something warm – is it tea? – in glasses with silver surrounds. Your son is bookish and deeply interested in the history of Hungary, its epics and literature. He is telling you he has made exciting discoveries now that he can have direct contact with authors and heroes from the past. He has discovered something from medieval times, maybe the eleventh century. The word “Magyar” and the history of the Magyars come up again and again. You can come to this room to talk to your son any time. There is a small bird in the landscape that is connected to you and can be your dream ally. It has black and white plumage, like a magpie, but the tail is a different shape. I got the word “Zoltan” in connection with this. 

Nandor became quite excited as he listened. He told me that he had taken his son on a journey to Budapest to visit places and people that had been important in his earlier life, and that they both had a keen interest in the early history of Hungary. He announced with a broad grin that they would have been drinking “wine” rather than tea in those glasses chased with silver.

He readily agreed to try to enter the room I had described in a subsequent drumming journey, and returned with tears streaming down his cheeks. He told me he had had a vivid encounter with his son who had quoted lines from a “lost” epic of the eleventh century. In the dreamspace, he found and identified the bird I had described. It was a kind of swallow that is found in the Hungarian countryside. Its name sounds like “Zoltan”, though the word is slightly different.

“I know now there is life after death,” Nandor told me at the end of the workshop. “This changes everything.” When he gave me his card on leaving, I saw that the name of his company includes the word “Magyar.”

We can grow a dream for someone who needs a dream. It may become a passage to another world and reunion with a departed loved one. 

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

 

 

The Night When the Veil Thins

 Back in the day, I used to give a talk on the meaning of Halloween, on the night, at the New York Open Center, when it was still downtown in SoHo. We always had standing room only in the lecture room, which was partly filled by witches, ghouls and vampires dressed for the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade that would unfold just down the street right after. 

I notice, looking through old journals, that on the night of October 30, 1998, prior to taking the train to Manhattan the next day, I asked for some Halloween dreams. This is what came as soon as I closed my eyes:

I watch a beautiful woman in a flowing, gauzy white dress like a wedding dress rise from a coffin and begin to float around a dark, undefined space (like an artists' background, defined by brushstrokes rather than finished shapes). The eyes are dead. All that is there is blind appetite. She is the living dead, a hungry ghost. I avoid her.

As we approach All Hallows' Eve, a shiverish, magical, crazy night in a more than usually crazy year, I am thinking of its many meanings. It is the topsy-turvy, inside-out, upside-down time, when the past lies ahead of you and the future walks behind you, breathing on your neck. It is a night when the doors between the worlds swing open, when the dead walk among the living and the living move among the dead. As my dream of the beauty from the coffin dramatized, it is a night when you want to be able to discern who is who and what is what. 

The last night of October is the start of Samhain (which is pronounced "sow-in"), the great Celtic festival when the dead walk among the living, the fires are extinguished and rekindled, the god and the goddess come together in sacred union, and as the year turns from light to dark, the seeded earth prepares to give birth again. It's a time, when the Celts knew what they were doing, to watch yourself and watch comings and goings from the barrows and mounds that are peopled by ghosts and faeries. It's a time to honor the friendly dead, and the lordly ones of the Sidhe, and to propitiate the restless dead and remember to send them off and to set or re-set very clear boundaries between the living and the hungry ghosts. It's a time to look into the future, if you dare, because linear time is stopped when the hollow hills are opened. 

As Celtic scholar Marie-Louise Sjoestedt wrote, "This night belongs neither to one year or the other and is, as it were, free from temporal restraint. It seems that the whole supernatural force is attracted by the seam thus left at the point where the two years join, and gathers to invade the world of men." 

If you have never learned to dream or see visions or to feel the presence of the spirits who are always about - if you have never traveled beyond the gates of death or looked into the many realms of the Otherworld - this is the time when you'll see beyond the veil all the same, because the Otherworld is going to break down the walls of the little box you call a world, and its residents are coming to call on you. 

It's a time for dressing up, especially if you are going out at night, although there is likely to be much less of that in this time of pandemic. The Celts put on fright masks not to extort candy but to scare away restless spirits before they scared them. Out and about ,they carried torches to light the way, and especially to guide the dead back to where they came from when the party is over. Before Europeans discovered pumpkins in America, they carried lit candles in hollowed-out niches in turnips. 

All of this was so important, and such wild, sexy, shiverish fun that the church had to do something about it. In the eighth century, Pope Gregory III decided to steal the old magic by making November 1 All Saints' Day, or All Hallows Day; so the night of Samhain became All Hallows' Eve, or Halloween for short. A century before, an earlier pope had borrowed the date of the old Roman festival to propitiate the dead - the Festival of the Lemures, or Lemuralia - and renamed that All Saints' Day. But since Roman paganism had been largely suppressed, the church fathers decided to grab the glamour of the Celts, among whom the old ways are forever smoldering, like fire under peat. 

Few people who celebrate or suffer Halloween today seem to know much about its history. For storekeepers and the greetings card business, it's a commercial opportunity. For TV programmers, it's a cue to schedule horror movie marathons. For kids, it's time to dress up as vampires or witches and extort candy from neighbors. My preferred way to spend Halloween is to rest quietly at home, sometimes with candles lit for my dead loved ones, and a basket of apples and hazelnuts beside them, tokens of the old festival that renews the world and cleanses the relations between the living and the dead. 

Text partially adapted from The Dreamer's Book of the Dead by Robert Moss (Destiny Books)

A Night with the Princes from the East

The Assignment

An old friend has asked me to lunch with a pair of foreigners, a man and a woman who are Persian or Near Eastern. We go to a restaurant where he disappears to converse with staff in the background. I join the foreign couple at a table. We seem to be the only patrons in the restaurant, which is either windowless or has the windows heavily draped. the decor is expensive but anonymous, generic hotel or airport lounge style.
     The first phase of the conversation is guarded and superficial. I decide I'm ready to go, having discharged my personal obligation.
     My friend approaches me, highly agitated, as I prepare to leave. He gestures at a set of handwritten notes and a typed memo that he slipped to me earlier but I haven't bothered to read. These papers, especially the handwritten notes, make it plain that the people I am lunching with are top priority. It is vitally important for me to pursue the conversation and draw them out, so that their words can be recorded. I have been picked to pursue this opportunity because the couple trust me.
     I yield, lingering at the table to drain glass after glass of armagnac. The man matches me, glass for glass, with cognac. The mood is increasingly jolly and intimate. I can only guess at the size of the bill for all these drinks, but I plan to present the bill to my friend. The waiter seems to be in on the plot. He refers to us as "Excellencies" and "Your Highnesses." It seems the "assignment" will be completed by the end of our session, which looks likely to continue for the rest of the afternoon.

I woke from this dream in a pool of moonlight, lying on a bed in a cabin on North Hero Island on Lake Champlain. I was excited and intensely curious, wanting to know much more about the message I was supposed to record. I needed to go back into the dream, and made it my intention to do this, lying on my back on the bed. I kept a pad and paper close to my hand. If I succeeded in resuming my conversation with the mysterious strangers, I was determined not to forget my assignment to record the proceedings.

The Prince and Princess of Fars 

I focus on the restaurant as my portal for dream reentry.. The name of the restaurant is "The Golden Cage" or "The Golden Bowl". I confirm that the restaurant, though spacious, is tightly sealed - no views of the outside. 

     I try to examine the papers my friend gave me. I find there are three documents, in a large manila envelope: handwritten notes, on several smallish pieces of high-quality bond; a typed memo; and a clipping from a newspaper. The newspaper is the Tehran Times. The headline describes a visit by "The Prince and Princess of Fars."

     I need to talk to them.

     The man shows himself. He is pleasant-looking, clean-shaven, with an oval face, black hair combed straight with the slightest suggestion of sideburns, large dark brown eyes, immaculately dressed. The woman's features, by contrast, are indistinct. She is veiled, not in Islamic style but in "High Priestess" mode of the Tarot trump.

     The man is Shams. I met him in a previous dream. He is wearing a beautiful grey-blue shirt with a narrow white banded collar under his tailored suit. He says I may know the veiled princess as Fatima. He urges me to study the typed sheet my friend gave me. I review the paper, and find it contains a list of 20 questions. The first questions give me shivers:

1. What is the nature of exile?
2. What are the conditions for the return?

As I record the questions on my pad, Shams, gives me his responses, for the record:

1. What is the nature of Exile?

To be an exile is to be separated unwillingly from your homeland. This is the condition of the soul when it comes into the body. It is the condition of the higher man when he is separated from his Higher Self.

2. What are the conditions for Return?

The return requires courage, the willingness to deny the ways of the world. It is always a journey to the Mountain. It requires cutting the cord of attachment to worldly things.
    There are many tests and obstacles along the way, also distractions and temptations. But Home reaches out to guide the returning exile. There is always a guide. The appearances of the guide are almost always unexpected. The face may be that of a familiar friend, or a stranger.

3. What is the Source?

The Source is the bottomless well of remembering. You may see it as a passage or a bore-hole, leading to inexhaustible reserves. Do not confuse the bore-hole with what lies beyond it. From a certain viewpoint, the bore-hole is also the birth canal. You may learn to swim back, into the Water of life, into the womb of the Ancient Mother.

4. Who is the Guide?

The guide is the emissary of the level of Intelligence - the level of the Real - that you are able to work with at this time. The guide takes the form you are ready to recognize.

5. What is the Kingdom?

The kingdom is this world. But a true crown is earned only through the blessing of the Other World. the true crown is Xvarnah.

6. Is there eternal conflict between good and evil?

There are competing forces in the cosmos. Humans interact with the battles and struggles of races beyond the human. The conflicts of this world are related to those of subtler kingdoms.
In dealing with problems of good and evil, humans must know that
- In the universe, humans interact and have intercourse with beings other-than-human that are friendly, neutral, hostile or inimical to men.
- Demons are real, often generated by human thought and emotion.
- There are "criminal souls".
- The principle of "active evil" is also a real phenomenon.
- In the world of duality, it is necessary to take sides. Embodied beings, in a world of duality, cannot evade this choice.

7. What is the work of the Invisible Schools?

You are born (which is to say, re-born) within a spiritual tradition or lineage. You are called in dreams and visionary states to resume contact with teachers of your Order. You may be invited to attend other schools but you are born with one primary connection.


8. What are the conditions for soul travel?

The keys to the practice are in meditation, concentration, the presence of the guide, courage for the journey. Also a trustworthy map and a password. Above all, the traveler's robe.
It is not only a matter of leaving the physical body, but of putting on the heavenly body.
This has to be earned, to be grown (or rather, re-grown).
     The celestial body, the true Body of Light, is required for the high experience of soul travel.

I broke contact for a moment to tiptoe into the bathroom. When I returned, I was given some personal information, and was then able to return to the questions. The ninth question involved the nature of the soul. We got through 13 of the 20 questions, but the quality of my reception began to waver, and we agreed to reserve the completion of the dialogue for another time. I dated my journal report as I always do. August 1, 1998.
     I pulled on shirt and shorts and walked down to the lake. In the twilight before dawn, I lay out on the floating dock and watched the changing light on the lake. A silver streak near the horizon gradually increased in size. 

      A rosy blush spread over it, cloudlike against the silver, until the water looked more like the sky than the sky itself. A field of bright, clear blue, shaped like an elongated triangle, emerged within the rosy "clouds". I seemed to be looking into a lake in the sky, into an Otherworld landscape. Fish broke the surface. The black silhouettes of nightbirds and early fishers glided above the lake, to plunge after fish. I saw a kingfisher, mighty in head and chest, take possession of the far shore.

Drawing by Robert Moss: "The Princes from the East"

Does your phone work in your dreams?

I like to spend quiet time with my journals studying how a certain symbol or dream situation recurs and evolves over time. This can amount to constructing the biography of a dream symbol. Recently I have been looking at how my phone functions - or fails to function - in dreams.

My phone camera usually seems to work in my dreams but the pictures aren't in my camera roll when I return. I have received phone calls from the departed over the years but it is far more common for me to visit them in their current environments. I usually can't make calls on my cell phone in dreams and the screen becomes very strange, which is sometimes a lucidity trigger.. Sometimes my cell phone morphs into an amazing multidimensional device.

Here is a sampling of reports I pulled up from the past dozen years. No analysis here, and few complete dream reports; just a glimpse of variations on a recurring theme. 

Interdimensional Phone and the Instant Pool 

I am traveling in a far land, where I do not expect my cell phone to work. The phone looks like a longish silver TV monitor. A male companion encourages me to try the phone any way. I hit a button at the bottom right and to my surprise a woman's voice answers immediately. I am so startled I hang up.
    She calls back immediately and I recognize her as a woman who lives with a psychologist friend. She tells me he wants me to come over that same evening. I explain that I am very far away. She's insistent. She explains that the psychologist is busy digging a pool with a backhoe since he knows I like to swim. The pool will be ready by the time I get there. I say I'll get there if I can.
   I'm aware, in the dream, that the "far land" from which I am calling is not of this world, but a country in the imaginal realm, and that my phone is more than in ordinary reality. It works to open communication between different mental planes. 4/5/09

Different Phone, Different Self

Traveling in Europe, I can't find my way to a house where I am expected. I reach for my cell phone to call my hosts. I'm surprised to see there are three or four little windows on the screen displaying maps. When I try to use the phone function, I discover the switches are different - this is not my phone, and I don't know how to work it.
     Now lucid, I make a further discovery. I am not my regular self. My hair is a mass of lustrous black curls. I appear to be in my twenties, almost absurdly pretty for a man, though well built and strong, my muscles stretching the fabric of my suit jacket. 9/25/10

Flip-Top Phone with Cartwheeling Dwarf

I have trouble with my cell phone. It's one of those old flip-top models. It has a little plastic receptacle on the upper left hand side. As I handle the phone, this comes off and falls to the ground. Other things now go wrong with the phone; the screen goes blank. It will still work as a phone, but I can’t access the address book or other functions. I could now miss an important phone interview becuse I don't recall the number and can’t look it up.
    This is unresolved as uncanny elements emerge, notably a cartwheeling dwarf. 7/8/12

Departed Family Member Calls from Embassy Party

We usually meet in person at one of her places on the Other Side, but she is calling me on my cell phone on an urgent family matter. She says she is at an embassy party with a new boyfriend. There is lots of static on the line and I hear snatches of Spanish and Portuguese. I get the message. 1/17/19

Photo Odyssey in Wild North

I take a long wak through a wildly beautiful northern landscape, along a river. A young woman experienced in seidr tells us that when she invokes the spirits she starts by calling on Polar Bear. I am eager to photograph extraordinary scenes. The river now seems to be a deep fjord. Across the water I see what may be an ancient bridge or palace facade, with zigzag patterns of green and purple and many arches.
    I take many, many pictures on my cell phone camera. As I return to the body I parked in the bed, I am disappointed to realize that these photos will not be in the camera roll on my phone. I check anyway. Hey, you never know.4/34/21

Survey says

In the midst of my search, I conducted an informal survey of some 200 dreamers who follow my work, asking the question, "Does your phone work in your dreams?" The responses fell into three roughly equal-sized cateories:(1) I never dream of a phone;(2) my dream phone doesn't work; (3) my dream phone usually works.
     Those of a certain age reported that they could typically make and receive calls in their dreams only on rotary dial phones; they had trouble with mobile phones.               Many dreamers reported receiving phone calls from the deceased, and sometimes from friends at a distance. 
     Sometimes issues with dream phone seem to relate to problems with communication in ordinary reality, or the need to get some help. 
     Many dreamers report that problems with the dream phone provide a lucidity trigger, an alert that they are dreaming. For some,a call coming through on the dream phone flags the message as important: listen up! Sometimes the dream call seems to reflect dream clairsentience or precognition. You talk to someone on the phone in your dream and then they call you or show up in ordinary reality.
     A few active dreamers say they try to stay off-grid in their dreams, and use free-floating intuition or bird allies to send and receive messages.

Explain Your Cell Phone to a Space Alien

I want to play the Space Alien Game for a moment. Suppose you had to explain a phone - specifically, a so-called smart phone - to a visitor from  a far galaxy who understands little about humans and Earth conditions What would you say? I might say:

A cell phone is or may be

a mobile communications device

a way to send and receive messages

a camera and recorder

a search engine

a way to send and receive money

a home entertainment system

a geo-locator

an alarm clock

a calendar

ID

a portal to the world-wide web

No doubt you can add to the list and decide what are the most important features for you. So an issue with your mobile phone in your dream might reflect issues on any of those fronts. It might also alert you to the fact that you are not in ordnary reality and have extraordinary access to the multiverse and the quantum information field, according to your lucidity and ability to pursue an unfolding adventure and bring back gifts.

Back to my personal journals. Here's my report of an experience that opened me to the fuller possibiities that may be on offer when your dream phone starts working differently.

April 23, 2019

THE AMAZING STATE OF MY PHONE

My phone isn't working properly. It seems to have lost its keyboard. There is a beautiful but unfamiliar picture on the homescreen,which seems have lost its icons.

I realize that the picture is a loose leaf drawing pinned at the top of the device. I remove it, expecting that this will reveal my keyboard and familiar homescreen. Instead I find another drawing and another. There are many.

I ask a pleasant young woman - an Eng Lit type, I think - if she knows about cellphones. She's willing to help but is soon marveling with delight over the pictures falling from my phone. As I unpin the pictures money falls out - greenbacks in all denominations and dozens of quarters. And other things.

When I remove the last picture the shell of the phone gleams silver. It is tilted and narrows at the top so it looks like a vessel, a miniature starship from Star Trek or Star Wars.

Dream reentry

I stay with the dream after waking. I try to study the pictures. The first one looks something like a lilac tree and something like a waterfall. When I look more closely I see the shape of a great tree that is rooted in the sky rather than the earth.

The second picture is of a dacha in the snow, maybe in Russia, and a wolf. Another shows a belle of ancien regime France in full regalia. Another shows a royal Egyptian couple enthroned. Other pictures are blurry or abstract. I understand that they are portals or storyboards through which it is possible to communicate with these personalities and even enter their lives.

I understand the symbolism of all that change that fell from among the pictures. I am being invited to change my mode of communication and perception.

 

Photo and Journal Drawing by Robert Moss

 

 

The matriarch on the golf cart: welcomed to the future by the deceased

I always pay close attention to dreams that unfold around the turning of the year. They may give a feel for the quality of the year ahead and sometimes contain clear glimpses of the possible future. In the early hours of January 2 this year, I entered the following report in my dream journal:

2020 1.2 New Year's Night

dream

Invited to a Famous Women's Retreat

I am invited to lead a program at a famous women's retreat center in the rural Midwest. The legendary founder - an aged and immense matriarch - drives up in a golf cart while I am being given a tour of the rural property. She greets me warmly and I treat her with appropriate respect 

Feeling/reality check. I welcomed this dream as both a glimpse of a possible coming event and as lovely confirmation, as a mere man, that my work is of service to women.

Action: The dream had sufficient energy for me to draw the matriarch on her golf cart. I resolved to be ready to receive a corresponding invitation.  

I included a summary of the dream in a selection of "Dreams of Epiphany" (reported over the week before January 6) in my new book Growing Big Dreams

When the pandemic shut down all my travel plans,I mentally filed my dream of the matriarch on the golf cart as a glimpse of a possible future that had been rendered inactive.Clearly I would not be traveling to that rural campus this year. 

Then my friend Normandi Ellis -renowned for transporting us into the mind of ancient Egypt - approached me to sound out whether I would be willing to give presentations for at the annual conference of a Spiritualist association. Normally their gatherings take place at a center inIndiana, but this year the conference would be conducted remotely, via zoom. I said I would be honored, and my calendar was open for their October dates because I can no longer jump on airplanes to foreign destinations.. 

I did not fully grasp the connection to my dream until I received the contract from the association this week. The address of the association is  "Historic Camp Chesterfield". I promptly sent my January 2 journal report and drawing to Normandi, who fired back this response:

Ha! Yes, it was about Camp Chesterfield! Mabel Riffle who ran this place for 50 years was known to tour the grounds in her golf cart to see how everything was going. There is even a portrait of her in the Art Gallery here. I'll send it when I find it. BTW. I live in Mabel's house.  

When Normandi found the portrait I was amazed and delighted to see that it shows Mabel (on the right) standing by an old-fashioned golf cart with her mother.  

Normandi noted that Mabel Riffle presided over Camp Chesterfield with great authority and presence for half a century. We agreed it would be most appropriate for the leader of a Spiritualist association to welcome me, in spirit, to a conference where I will be speaking about dreaming with the departed and opening paths for for personal journeys to the Other Side. 

Sometimes little stories are instructive about big things. This happy little tale of dream manifestation confirms several big things about dreaming that are deeply relevant to all our lives in these troubled times: 

* We have natural contact with the deceased in our dreams.
* We dream the possible future, scouting challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.
* Dreaming, we can travel without leaving home

 

Dreaming with the animal powers

When shamans go dreaming, characteristically they operate under the protection and guidance of animal guardians. Forging a close relationship with one or more "power animals" is central to developing the arts of shamanic dream travel and tracking. It is invaluable in maintaining healthy boundaries and defending psychic space. A conscious connection with the animal guardians shows us how to follow the natural paths of our energy. A strong working connection with the animal powers brings the ability to shapeshift the energy body and project energy forms that can operate at a distance from the physical body. 

Our ancestors believed that we are born with a connection with a particular totem animal; this was the raison d'être of the clan system. Some Australian Aborigines believe, up to the present day, that when a human is born, its "bush soul" is born in the form of an animal or bird. We may feel that we have a lifelong connection with a certain animal or bird. Others may observe this in our body type, our life styles, our modes of responding to challenges. 

But in the course of a lifetime, we may develop many animal connections. Some of these may stem from our relations with the animals who share our homes and habitats, from the family pets to wild animals encountered in nature and in our travels. Animals we have met in the physical world may reappear in our dreams, as allies and helpers. 

Here are two personal examples, one involving a dog who had shared our home, the other a bird who had shared our habitat: After a black dog I had loved was killed on the road, he appeared again and again as a family protector. His presence, for a time, was all but physical. Driving the Jeep he had loved to ride in, a family member saw him in the rearview mirror and told him firmly to "Sit down!" The dog had died, but he was still very much around, watching over the family he had loved fiercely. After a time, I performed a ceremony to release his spirit. 

After this, he appeared in a different way. A larger intelligence began to work through his form, and I found a black dog - who sometimes walked upright and even drove an automobile - appearing as a guide and bodyguard in my dreams and journeys. He showed me passages into the afterlife. He played guide and escort for me on a powerful and challenging journey that finally resolved a past-life issue that had shadowed my current life in many ways. I believe that, in the year after his death, I was dealing with the individual spirit of the dog I had loved. I feel that in later years, the form of my beloved dog has fused with a larger transpersonal source of guidance, linked to the precinct of Anubis, the "Opener of the Ways". 

On the same land where I lived with my black dog, I had a series of physical encounters with a red-tailed hawk who spoke to me in a language I felt I could understand - if I only spoke hawk. In a spontaneous vision one night, when I was drifting between waking and sleep, the hawk lent me her wings, and I found myself drawn to a cabin in the woods, north of Lake Champlain, where I had the first of a series of life-changing visits with an ancient Iroquois "woman of power." I have written about this at length in my book Dreamways of the Iroquois. The hawk has appeared again and again over the years, to offer confirmation or warning in its flight patterns over the roads of everyday life, and to lend me her wings in dreams and visions.

Animal dreams may be the doorway to developing strong working relations with the animal guardians. These dreams may hold up a mirror to our health or habits. They may show us how we need to feed and attend to our bodies. They may reveal a potential we have not yet developed. They may tell a story about our lives or relationships like one of Aesop's fables. They may be the place of encounter between our dream self and a spiritual ally or guardian. 

Our true spiritual teachers come looking for us in our dreams, and often they come in unexpected forms.The cat in your dreams may be the kitty you remember from childhood, or an aspect of your self that needs to be pampered or walk by night or play hunter, or a guide that has assumed a familiar face.

Drawing: "Calico Tiger" by Robert Moss.  As she approached death, I dreamed that my beloved elderly calico cat had a giant version of herself waiting to receive her on the Other Side. After she died, I saw them fuse and become one.

Dreaming with the deceased

I am often among the dead in my dreams. They are always alive. Sometimes I remember that they died on an event track we shared, other times I don't. Sometimes they come calling. My father has come many times since his death with helpful advisories for me and the family. 

    Sometimes my dream travels take me to new environments on the Other Side were the dead are enjoying new lives. They show me around and I learn first-hand in this way about lifestyle and real estate options available after death. Then there are the dream encounters in which I am with someone who died on the event track we shared in in this world but seems to be alive in a physical body on an alternate event track, in a parallel world.
     Contact with the deceased, especially in dreams, isn’t weird or unusual or even truly supernatural. It comes about for three reasons: the dead are still with us, or they come visiting, or we travel to the realms where they are now living. The number one reason why people who are not accustomed to sharing dreams decide to tell one is that they have dreamed of a close friend or family member who died but is very much alive in the dream.
    One of the most interesting things I have learned is that the living may be called upon to play guides and counselors for the dead. “The Silent Lovers”, in my new book Mysterious Realities, is a just-so story – shocking to me as it unfolded – about how I was called to play advocate for a dead man, otherwise a stranger, going through his life review on the Other Side. I can confirm that Yeats was absolutely right when he said, with poetic clarity, that the living have the ability to assist the imaginations of the dead.

Image by Claire Perkins

"Pick up, Sunshine": when our dead become family angels

Once they are free of their physical bodies and physically-oriented assumptions about the rules of reality, our dead can become extremely helpful and reliable psychic advisers, since they can see across space and time quite easily. We have this ability too, but while we are encased in physical bodies and self-limiting beliefs about physical laws and linear time, we often forget to use our ability to see beyond these things.
      Departed friends and loved ones very frequently turn up in dreams to pass on health advisories. They are especially sensitive to health problems that tend to run in families. I have heard hundreds of reports of dreams in which deceased family members have given specific health warnings, some of which have almost certainly saved lives. I have had this experience myself.

      Our dead may come to us in dreams with warnings and advisories of any kind. The Chinese Book of Zuo relates that the dead father of a general called Han Jue appeared to him on the eve of battle and told him that in the fighting the next day he should avoid veering to either right or left and lead always from the center. The general was victorious in battle, but the enemies' arrows killed all the men immediately to the right and left of his chariot.

       There is a fascinating episode from the history of American show business in which a dceased friend becomes an everyday angel. Lucille Ball was devastated when her good friend Carole Lombard died in a plane crash in January 1942. But their friendship continued after Carole's death. Lucille's decision to take the risk of launching the "I Love Lucy" show on television was guided by her dead friend. Carole Lombard turned up in a very smart suit and said, "Take a chance, honey. Give it a whirl!" Lucille Ball recalled that "After that, I knew for certain that we were doing the right thing." Later, at a party, she told Clark Gable (who had been married to Carole Lombard) that his long-deceased wife kept turning up in her dreams to offer helpful advice. Clark Gable reportedly "stared, gulped, and plowed off in a daze." 

       A young woman I'll call Kirsty lost her grandmother - a proud, creative, take-charge kind of woman - around the same time she developed a rare and serious illness. She then received a dream visitation from her grandmother, who told her, "I've arrange to be around for two more years. You and I have lots of work to do together, Sunshine."
      When Kirsty enrolled for an expensive series of therapy sessions, she dreamed that she heard her grandmother's voice on her answering machine. She did not want to pick up for fear that her grandmother would not really be there. "Pick up, Sunshine," her grandmother's voice encouraged her. When Kirsty did so, her grandmother said, "You can save a bunch on those therapy sessions if you meditate on your nickname. You are Sunshine, right? Be Sunshine! Let it stream through every cell in your body!"

      With the words, Kirsty felt waves of healing light and energy rolling through her body. She proceeded to make it a practice to sit with the sun and invoke a flow of inner sunlight every day, and this felt profoundly healing. In another dream, Kirsty's grandmother called to say she was going to help her arrange a move from her apartment in Manhattan to a house with a garden, and trees, and sunlight.

      Though Grandma was not visible in the flurry of real estate moves that followed, she had been very adept at this kind of thing, and Kirsty was buoyed by the feeling that she was active behind the scenes. It took less than a week to sell her condo, and she managed the house purchase in just one day. Magic.
      Grandma called again to say she wanted to support Kirsty in developing a new relationship. Nothing controlling, just a blessing. Kirsty was thrilled to find herself entering a warm and loving new relationship with a man who was not afraid of commitment. Kirsty's grandmother loved to paint cardinals. At her new house, Kirsty saw them all the time, glorious flashes of bright red among the greens.

Art: Marc Chagall, "Three Angels Visit Moses"

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

The dead are alive in our dreams

There I go again. I am with someone who was very close to me, many years ago. We are holding a dinner party together, and I am proud of the elegant dining set I purchased. The table can seat twenty people quite comfortably, and cheerful guests are taking their seats.
    I want to tell the group how I came to buy this table. I ask if anyone knows the story.
    Patricia Garfield, a famous dream author, raises her hand, turning from her place at the table.
    I am going to tell my story anyway. It involves a visit to a "cheap" Sotheby's auction in London, not one of the grand auctions. My purchase of this table marked a turning point in my life. I now believe that without the table - and its promise of engagement with large, convivial groups in a social setting - my life would have taken a different course, and I would not have remained close to the woman who is responsible for tonight's party.
    When I step outside the house for a moment, into bright sunlight, I realize that in the reality where my body is asleep in bed, the woman I am with is dead. She died many years ago.
    So I am in a dream.
    I look back at the house. It is a row house in London, like houses I lived in long ago. The scene is entirely real, and solid - the portly taxi pulling up near the steps, the couple with a baby in a perambulator, the sounds from the house.
    Is the Robert in bed in upstate New York dreaming me, or am I dreaming him?
    I am in a place where someone who died in one world is alive in another.
    This feels less like an afterlife situation than like a parallel reality, an alternate world, where she is alive and I made radically different life choices.

I woke from this dream excursion feeling calm and reflective, saddened by memories of the loss of a wonderful woman who died tragically young, cheered by the idea that she may be enjoying a happy life in another reality, and maybe in many alternate realities.
    It's a common, perhaps even universal experience to find that the dead are alive in our dreams.
    Often an encounter with the dead, in a dream, becomes a prompt to dream lucidity. As we begin to realize that someone we are with has died (in our default reality), an inner voice may say, I am dreaming. 
    The presence of Patricia Garfield*, the dream author, may have been a prompt to the Robert at that dinner table to say to himself, I am dreaming.   
    There are things of huge importance afoot.
     Encounters with the dead, especially in dreams, have been a primary source of human knowledge of the afterlife throughout the whole odyssey of our kind on the planet. More than this, we may come to understand that in dreams and visions, we are at home in the realities where those who died in this world are at home. We don't need to puzzle over what happens in the afterlife once we realize that we are already in it.
     As I write this, I am back in a world that I know is real through the evidence of my

senses. My left instep hurts a bit, the legacy of excessive hill walking in recent travels. I hear the Bluetooth-ed mailman talking to unseen persons as he walks the street.I sense my fierce bad kitten trying to sneak into my study to turn it into a toy room.
     Yet my senses were no less alive when I was welcoming guests at the enormous dining table. I could smell the aromas of cooking from the kitchen, and of the flower arrangements on the table. I could feel sun on my face when I stepped outside.
    I muse over the many ways in which the Robert who is at home in that scene is different from my present self. He is highly social, very willing to entertain twenty or more people in his own home. By contrast, the Robert who is writing now is fiercely private at home and avoids social scenes, except in the context of his chosen work. (I often sit down to dinner with twenty people when I am leading residential retreats.)
      Yes, the dinner scene where someone dead was alive is a dream. And it is entirely real. Like life. Here and there, now and then.
      The experience of parallel worlds and alternate realities is probably the most important feature of my dreaming, and has been as far back as I can remember.


*Patricia Garfield's book Creative Dreaming marked a watershed in our understanding and discussion of what goes on in dreaming. Before I met her, and before I started leading public classes around 1990, I dreamed that there was tremendous excitement in the small city where I was living because Patricia Garfield had moved to town and was teaching people about the importance of dreams. When I shared the dream with a friend, she shot me between the eyes by saying "YOU are the famous author who moved to this town and you are the one who should lead dream classes." (We did not yet use the "if it were my dream" protocol!) The next day, I received a call from a local arts center asking if I would lead some classes. They had creative writing classes in mind but were thrilled when I proposed dream classes - because of my dream of Patricia Garfield and my conversation about it. I enjoyed telling Patricia this story when I met her for the first time, 20 years ago. It is in my new book, The Boy Who Died and Came Back.

I have written at length about dream encounters with the dead, and dream travels in worlds where the dead are alive, in several of my books, especially Conscious Dreaming, Dreamgates and The Dreamer's Book of the Dead. 

Photos of tombstone at Vyšehrad  (c) Robert Moss