What's the use of dreaming?

Most human societies until relatively recently have understood that dreaming is important for three reasons above all. First, dreams give us access to sources of wisdom beyond the ordinary mind - to the God or Goddess you can talk to, to the ancestors, to the animate powers of nature, to the greater Self. "It is an age-old fact," declared the great psychologist C.G.Jung in his last major essay, "that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions." 

Second, dreams show us the future, in ways that can contribute to the well-being and survival of whole communities. They not only rehearse us for events that will happen; they show us possible futures,. If we are able to harvest and clarify the information, and then take appropriate action, we can improve the odds on manifesting a desirable future event, or avoiding an unwanted one.

Third, dreaming is medicine, in several senses. In somatic or prodromic dreams, we are shown what is happening inside the body and symptoms it could develop in the future. So dreams can be a source of vital, even life-saving, diagnosis.

When we do get sick, dreams are a factory of imagery that can help us to get well. Medical science is increasingly receptive to the fact that the body receives images as events, and responds accordingly. Where do we get the images that will persuade the body to adjust in the direction of health? The best images we can use for healing are those delivered by our own dreams. We know they are timely and they are authentic, or own material. The dream image may initially be scary, but I would insist that any image that belongs to us can be developed in the direction of wholeness and healing, if we are prepared to work with it.

Still on the theme of dreams in relation to healing, dreams put us in touch with multiple aspects of ourselves - with the shadow side we may have repressed or denied, with the magical child who may have parted company with us when the world seemed too cold and too cruel, with our animal spirits. Working these connections consciously can help us be stronger, and more. It can lead to soul recovery, which is what happens when we bring home vital parts of our energy and identity that went missing to live in our bodies and our lives. 

Dreaming is an essential human activity, as essential as sex or sleep. If we have lost contact with our dreams, the Iroquois say, we have lost a vital part of our souls. Dreams are important and useful for everyone.

Through our dream radar, we are able to see challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. This is part of our survival kit. Dreams hold up a magic mirror to our everyday attitudes and actions - sometimes in a quite shocking or humorous way - helping us to see ourselves from a higher perspective. In this way (as Dostoyevsky reminded us in Crime and Punishment) the dreams of the night can be a corrective to the delusions of the day.

And then there is the entertainment and refreshment value of dreams, whose gift may simply be a good story or a good laugh. You have access in dreams to a night cinema where the movies are screened  especially for you. You can sometimes step through the screen and become scriptwiter, director and star of your own productions. If you don't remember your dreams, you are missing out on the movies.

Dreaming you can travel without leaving home, not a small thing in the time of pandemic. You can come back with the memories of a delicious vacation. You can rendezvous with friends and loved ones far away, since dreaming is social as well as personal. 

Illustration: "Three Bands of Dreaming" by RM

Man Who Fell to Earth syndrome

 

There are mornings when I look at a tee-shirt as if I’ve never seen one before, uncertain whether to put my head or an arm through first, and I find it hard to match the buttons on my shirt to the right button holes. I don't remember which way the medicine cabinet in the bathroom opens, or which side the light switch is on, and I can’t find the question mark on the keyboard.

These may, of course, be signs of senility. I think they are symptoms of what I call The Man Who Fell to Earth syndrome. You come back to the body suddenly from the other world you were visiting in a dream, maybe because someone or something pulled you back - a car backfiring in the street, a cat jumping on your belly to demand breakfast, a drunk howling at the moon. You may land with a thud. Sometimes I feel I have fallen through the bedframe and the mattress to the floor.

When you come back to the body like that, you may find you have left part of yourself still out there, needing time to catch up - and maybe not too keen on returning to a world that is crazier than your dreams. How big a part? Many indigenous and ancient peoples, from the Iroquois to the Vikings, might say you have left behind one of your souls. I'm pretty sure the soul loss, this time, is temporary. I will let it pass, like jet lag. Already I can report that I figured out how to put on a tee-shirt and find the question mark on my keyboard. I'm working on the buttons.

"Man Who Fell to Earrh" Journal drawing (c) Robert Moss

Island of dreams

 

The island opens and veils itself
each wave brings clues and treasures
a button or a bassinet
a shift for a selkie
a love letter in a champagne bottle
a speaker phone in a conch shell
a mermaid who is dormant, not dead
undeniable evidence of Atlantis

But they are gone with the next wave
hard to catch even when
we haunt the hot sands
or leap from the lava cliffs.

Often we are called the other way
through the forest of tigers
to the Mountain of Thirty Birds
where the mists are flirty
and swallow direction and distance
as we hunt for the memory palace
and the lover we left in the Moon Café.
The island opens and veils itself again.

- Robert Moss

When your dream soul goes flying

 

From the Teachings of Island Woman:

The memory of a dream is the memory of a journey. It may have been a short visit to a neighbor's place or a date with the lover you will meet three years from now. It may have been a journey to the spirits on the moon, or into a universe inside a stone that is as big as the universe out there.

When your dreamsoul goes flying, it visits the future and brings back memories of things that haven’t happened yet in the Shadow World. Sometimes you can stop those things from coming to pass. Sometimes you just have to live them out. Sometimes you can tame a future you don’t want by acting out a little piece of it, enough to contain the event that is trying to come through.
   Life is full of crossroads. Often you don’t even notice them until they are behind you, unless you know how to dream. Through dreaming, you can scout out the different trails you might follow and see where they lead. Through dreaming, you are already choosing the events that will take place in your waking life.

There is limitless power and beauty and healing available to us in the dreamworlds. To keep body and soul together in the surface world – and to live from the purposes of the soul – we need to bring that dream energy through. This requires action in the Shadow World.
    The first part of that action may be speech, but not the chatter of idle birds or village gossips. The speech required is an act that brings something new into a world. Dreaming gives us the songs and the magic words that can bring something up from a soupy ocean of possibilities to take root in the earth. That is why real men and women of power are poets, singers, storytellers, performers. With skeins of song and dancing needles of magic words, they reweave the fabric of reality.
   When we do this, we know that we are entertaining the spirits: our own vital spirits, the spirits of the ancestors, the great ones who reach to us from beyond space and time, the ancient and shining ones.

Nothing happens until it is dreamed. When we bring something good from the dreamworld into the surface world, we do the work of the Creator. We join in dancing a world into being, as Sky Woman danced on Turtle’s back.

-

"Island Woman" is the name I gave to an indigenous arendiwanen ("woman of power") who was born Huron and raised Mohawk some 300 years ago. She became Mother of the Wolf Clan of the Kanienkehaka, or Mohawk people, and a revered healer and dream shaman. She called me in lucid dreams in the late 1980s, after I moved to a farm on the edge of traditional Mohawk country and I had to study the Huron and Mohawk languages to understand and record her teachings. For her fuller teachings and my discoveries about her in historical records, see my book Dreamways of the Iroquois

Drawing: "Island Woman" by Robert Moss

Dreams as Sunshine in the Night

 

The word dMamud, which signifies “Dream (deity)”, is listed in the divine genealogies as the daughter of the Sun God. Since dreams usually occur at night, the close genealogical connection between the god of dreams and the Sun God may seem puzzling. The riddle may be solved, however, by considering that dreamers see a world which is just as bright as the day. [1]

I am a wild cross-reader, forever with my nose in a dozen books in as many genres at the same time. One of the pleasures is to notice things that resemble each other over great distances. A recent example. I have long been strongly drawn to ancient Mesopotamia, so when a Sumerian goddess (Mamu) associated with dreams popped up in a scholarly essay by a German Assyriologist online I paid attention. Mamu [2] is depicted as the daughter of the sun god Utu. The author noted that the family connection between a dream goddess and a sun god may seem puzzling and suggested a plausible and rather charming explanation, that dreamers enter a world as bright as day.

I am often reading and dreaming into the world of the Victorian ghost hunters and psychic researchers. The question from Sumer jogged my memory of a passage I read in a wonderful little book by the Victorian radical reformer and Theosophist Anna Bonus Kingsford:

"The priceless insights and illuminations I have acquired by means of my dreams have gone far to elucidate for me many difficulties and enigmas of life which might have otherwise remained dark to me, and to throw upon the events and vicissitudes of a career filled with bewildering situations, a light which, like sunshine, has penetrated to the very causes and springs of circumstance." [3]

A solution from Victorian England to a Sumerian mystery: Dreams are sunshine in the night.

[1] Annette Zgoll, “Dreams as Gods and Gods in Dreams. Dream-Realities in Ancient Mesopotamia from the 3rd to the 1st Millennium B.C.” Leonhard Sassmannshausen (ed) He Has Opened Nisaba’s House of Learning Studies in Honor of Åke Waldemar Sjöberg (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014) p.305

[2] Mamu for short. Ancient Mesopotamia has many dream gods and goddesses. The Sumerian lady mentioned here is called dMamud by the scholarly translators. This means, “Dream (deity)”. Sumerian has two words for “dream”: ma-mu.d and maš-ĝi6.k. Only the first term, transcribed as ma-mu.d can be written with the divine determinative diĝir (d). A word tagged with this sign is the name of a deity. The word ma-mu.d also denotes a meaningful dream which has the power to influence the future. By contrast,  maš-ĝi6.k, refers to all types of dreams, including confused and deceptive ones. Thanks to all the spadework of cuneiformists in decoding the ancient texts, we see that a connection between dreams and the gods is built into what may be the earliest of all written languages. See S.A.L. Butler, Mesopotamian Conceptions of Dreams and Dream Rituals (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 1998)  pp.73-77

[3] Anna Bonus Kingsford, Preface to Dreams and Dream-Stories (New York: Scribner & Welford ,1889).  Interesting that a reprint has been published by Nabu Press. Nabu was an ancient Mesopotamian god of writing and flow. I have a figurine of Nabu, a copy of a statue in the Oriental Institute (as it used to be called) in Chicago on my desk.

Planning to Rebirth a Soul Family in the Space Between Lives

 

Have you ever sensed that you belong to a soul family: that your present life experience is intimately connected to those of people living in different times and different dimensions? You may be fortunate enough to find soul family who are living in your present reality. Sometimes soul families arrange reunions at an agreed rendezvous in space and time. 

A California woman learned about this through a remarkable dream. In this dream, she was an observer. She was certain she knew the people whose stories were being played out. But she could not identify them (not at that time, anyway) in waking life.

In the dream, she watches members of a family of souls who have agreed to reincarnate together and are working out the details.  They are resolved to live their entire lives together in the same place, a midsized town in New England.

As they find prospective parents, the returning souls appear to their mothers-to-be in dreams. One of them says: “I am the soul of your unborn child. I am returning at this time with others. I expect you to raise me in the town where you are living. Then you may retire to Florida if you wish, but I am not to be removed from this town.” The gist of the other dream messages is similar.

One soul appears in his mother’s dream as a distinguished grey-haired man. He identifies himself as her unborn child. He tells her, “I was a doctor in my last life. I will be a doctor again in this one. I will expect you and Dad to put me through medical school.”

He gives her a health advisory. Living inside her, he has detected an anomaly in her heartbeat. It could easily be treated, but unless it is taken care of, it could result in difficulties during delivery. (He clearly has a vested interest in this matter!) He describes the test she should undergo and reassures her that her doctor will know just what to do.

The scene shifts to south Florida. The soul family appear as a group in the dream of an elderly woman. A successful mystery writer, she lives in a luxurious condo on the bay in Miami. In the writer’s dream, the members of the soul family explain what they are doing. They tell her she will be joining them in the New England town during a “second wave” of reincarnations.

The elderly writer is far from pleased. Obviously she will have to die to come back in a new body. She complains that she has worked hard to get where she is now. She enjoys her life as it is and does not want to give it up.

Her dream visitors tell her she will enjoy her next life even more. They show her the town they have selected and tell her that her future mother has already been chosen. The prospective mother is an artist who has already gained some recognition locally. Her paintings are selling well in the largest gallery in town. The artist lives in a big house on a salt pond, and the boathouse is her studio. In her dream, the Miami writer inspects a room that is filled with “water light.”

In the last part of her dream, the dreamer watches the writer wake up in her Miami condo, struggling to remember and make sense of her experiences during the night. The writer recalls the name of the New England town she was shown in her dream and checks maps to see if it really exists. When she locates the town in her atlas, she books a flight to the Northeast.

The dreamer watches as the Miami writer collects a rental car at the airport, drives to her dream town, and cruises the streets until she find the art gallery. The writer scans the paintings on display until she finds a canvas and a name that correspond to her dream memories of her prospective mother. The gallery owner gives her the artist’s home number. “I love your work!” the writer gushes on the phone. She is invited to visit the artist’s studio.

She finds herself in a scene from her dream: in the boathouse on the salt pond. Future Mom, flattered by the interest of a well-known author, thinks she has made a sale. But the writer has another agenda.

Now convinced that she “dreamed true,” the writer flies back to Miami and visits her lawyer’s office. She changes her will, leaving everything to the New England artist who may be her future mother.

“May I can take it with me,” she reflects. 

This thrilling and richly layered dream report could be an episode from a superior sci fantasy series. 

But it felt like more than entertainment to the dreamer. She was sure she was watching “actual happenings, perhaps some way in the future.”

This dream may reveal the kinds of arrangements that are actually made between members of "soul clusters" in the space between lives. It suggests a process by which souls are introduced to their prospective biological parents. It raises the stunning possibility that a second consciousness inside the body — that associated with the fetus in the womb — can offer a pregnant woman practical guidance on health and delivery (and should be approached as an active participant in the whole process). It suggests that we are born into a spiritual family, as well as a biological family.

The dreamer was not sure why this dream had come to her, but felt that she might be connected with the “soul family,” or that one if its members would one day appear in her waking life. She was living in California, but speculated she might one day be drawn to that New England town and would know it from the dream.

Text adapted from Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and Life Beyond Death by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Art: "Many Selves" by Robert Moss

Sweet, spicy, umami? What is the taste of your dreams?

 

Do your taste buds come alive in your dreams? Leif P. Haley, a psychology professor from Binghamton NY, put that question to a database that collects many thousands of dream reports from people of all ages and all walks of life. Using a search tool known as regex word strings, he plucked sixty-four dream series from a total of 28,003 reports and scanned them for evidence of gustatory experience.[1]

He started out with several hypotheses including the notion that there would be more "bad" tastes in dreams than good, perhaps in the service of a "vigilance" function that alerts us to possible unpleasantness ahead.  He also posited that the incidence of taste sensations would be small, occurring in no more than 1 perc cent of dreams. That second assumption proved correct. In fact, only 0.7 percent of the dream reports surveyed mentioned taste, although nearly 6 percent described eating.

However, the dreams examined turned out to be tastier - and notably sweeter - than expected. Good tastes beat out bad by more than 7 percent.. "Sweet" beat out all other categories by an overwhelming margin. Haley assigns dream tastes to the four classic varieties - sweet, sour, bitter, salty – and then adds metallic, umami and undefined. One of his ratings systems marks 32.21 percent of dream taste reports as "sweet", more than all other categories combined except for "undefined". Likely this reflects waking preferences. 

Haley concedes that it's hard to assign many reports that evoke complex flavors and combinations to a few fixed categories. Also, how do you tag a description of a certain flavor as "weird" or funny"? Good or bad? Sweet or salty?

As so often with content analysis, we miss the juicy sensory quality of the dream experiences themselves, and the context from individual lives and personalities. There's a hint of what we are missing in one respondent's description of  a sandwich of bread, pickles, peanut butter, and grapes. "I could taste each thing separately, although they were all together." 

My taste buds often come vividly alive in my dreams, and generally the experience is pleasurable, sometimes wildly so. I sometimes wake with the taste of food or drink in my mouth - of wine or coffee or pilsner, of a perfect baguette, of scaloppine al limone, of wild raspberries, of Colman's English mustard. I am quite social in my dreams, and eat at many restaurants and private dinner tables, and usually taste each dish. My dreams are not as sweet as Haley's sampling, because my tastes run to salty and savory. I don't eat cake or candy anywhere. My tastes in dreams are similar to ordinary reality. You won't find me eating mussels or crème brûlée in a dream restaurant.

I do eat "weird" and "funny" things in my dreams. I have eaten scrolls and even a whole book in big dreams that have left me bursting with ideas for new writing projects of my own. The taste of the scrolls reminds me of popadoms in Indian restaurants. Then there are the dreams in which I seem to shapeshift into animal form and eat what the beast eats. 

In a dream this morning, just before I discovered Haley's article, I was roaming around a kitchen in half-light, sipping a red wine I found thin and disappointing. I decided it would taste better with food and opened a small can I found on a shelf. I thought it was tuna. As I spooned a little of the conents into my mouth, I found the flavor and texture were not what I expected. Not a bad taste, but not something I wanted to eat. I realized that in the dark, I must have opened a can of Fancy Feast, our kitties' preferred breakfast, by mistake.

I got out of bed, with the taste still in my mouth, to find Lucy, our magical tabby cat, eyeing me expectantly. Is it possible she projected her breakfast intentions into my dream? I would not put it past her. Good dream? Bad dream? Good for Lucy, since Fancy Feast was soon in her dish. Good for me, because it gave me an amusing story and nudged me to read Haley's article when the title popped up, in the way of synchronicity, during an unrelated search.

The larger subject of how the full sensorium comes alive in dreams leads us to think about what we are, and how we get around, in our several vehicles of consciousness. In our dream experiences, we are not usually disembodied thought forms. Typically, we are getting around in a subtle body that is often called the astral body. It is also, in the spiritual anatomy popularized by the Theosophists, the kama-rupa or body of desire. Some say that it is the source of our experience of pleasure and pain. Certainly, in this vehicle we know the full gamut of feelings, perhaps more intensely than in the physical body, and this is highly relevant to how we will experience our transitions when we leave the physical body behind. 

Monitor the play of the senses in dreams and you may put yourself on the path to understanding the spiritual anatomy that counts - especially the nature and operations of the astral body. Oh yes, and you'll want to check whether you are eating the cat's breakfast.

1. Leif P. Haley, “Analysis of taste in dreams: A defined and large-scale investigation of dreamt gustatory experiences” in International Journal of Dream Research Volume 16, No. 2 (2023) 125-134.

Journal drawing by Robert Moss: "Unlikely appetizer". Spicy cocktail frankfurters as a starter in a grand hotel restaurant? Well the knowing waiter from Budapest recommended them and they were good with the pilsner.[February 26, 2021]

Which is the dream?

A dream world is real. It has its own physics. For someone living in a dream world, or even just passing through, it is the regular world that seems hazy, fleeting or hallucinated.

When I leave a dream, I often feel that I step from one room into another. It's a "just so" feeling. I was there, and now I am here.

When I exit a dream, I avoid saying "I woke up." That is such a boring way to end a dream narrative. And it's entirely possible that when I open my eyes in one reality, I have fallen asleep in another world that is no less real. When I finish recounting a dream adventure, I may say. "then I left that scene" or, “then I came back to my bedroom”.

Sometimes the dream stays with me, and I am in both locations - the bedroom and that other room - in a state of dual consciousness after I come back to my body.

"In and Out" drawing by Robert Moss

The Dream Holds True in [at Least] Half the Universe

 

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James (1842-1910) observed that "The founders of every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine."

That “direct personal communion" has been conducted through dreams, visions and interior dialogue and observation of signs and marvels in the natural world, all facets of dreaming in the broader sense understood by our ancestors and by active dreamers in all cultures. James reminds us that religion without dreaming is divorced from its very origins.

In a letter to Henry Rankin on June 16, 1901, he put it this way: "The mother sea and fountainhead of all religions lie in the mystical experiences of the individual, taking the word mystical in a very wide sense. All theologies and ecclesiasticisms are secondary growths superimposed."  Borrowing from his friend, the great British psychic researcher and scholar, Frederic Myers, James explained that "mystical consciousness" is related to the existence of an "extended subliminal self, with a thin partition through which messages make irruption."

For most of us, it is through dreams that the subliminal self most frequently irrupts through that "thin partition" into everyday awareness.

In The Principles of Psychology (1890), James offers these interesting reflections on the orders of reality we may enter in dreams, and why dreaming is our mode of experiencing half the "total universe":

 "The world of dreams is our real world whilst we are sleeping, because our attention then lapses from the sensible world. Conversely, when we wake the attention usually lapses from the dream-world and that becomes unreal. But if a dream haunts us and compels our attention during the day it is very apt to remain figuring in our consciousness as a sort of sub-universe alongside of the waking world. Most people have probably had dreams which it is hard to imagine not to have been glimpses into an actually existing region of being, perhaps a corner of the spiritual world. 

"And dreams have accordingly in all ages been regarded as revelations, and have played a large part in furnishing forth mythologies and creating themes for faith to lay hold upon. The 'larger universe,' here, which helps us to believe both in the dream and in the waking reality which is its immediate reductive, is the total universe, of Nature plus the Super-natural. The dream holds true, namely, in one half of that universe; the waking perceptions in the other half." 

Dwell with that last statement for a moment.  The dream "holds true" in half the "total" universe, and is our way to access and experience this reality. If James is correct, then if we have divorced ourselves from dreaming, we are only halflings, only half present in the universe.

So it is a mystery why he chose not to include a chapter on dreams in The Varieties of Religious Experience, a book that continues to exert enormous influence in the field of religious studies and beyond that. 

During his life on Earth, William James seems to have invested less effort in recording and exploring his own dreams than in sitting with psychic mediums and seeking verification of paranormal phenomena according to the protocols of the Society for Psychical Research. He did record some powerful dreams, including a series of nocturnal adventures he had while sleeping at Stanford University in February 1906. His San Francisco nights that shocked him into the realization that in dreams we may be in several places - or worlds - at the same time.

If William James is truly the speaker in Jane Roberts' channeled book The Afterlife Journal of an American Philosopher, his understanding of the importance of dreamwork grew measurably on the Other Side. If he had his life over, he declared, he would pay more attention to "how soul operates in life". For this the study of dreams is essential. 

He observes that dreams may be “test patterns” for waking events. "Dream images and imaginative acts prepare the way for physical ones, impressing large areas in general, preshapes which are later ‘filled in’. It is as if the mind makes preliminary test patterns that are projections in space-time, but in a ghostly fashion. These dream images, however, are laid upon initial fields of probabilities which are characteristic of the physical medium itself.” If this is correct. as I believe it is, then dreams hold true in more than half the universe. 

 

"Your dreams say more than anything you can tell me"

 

You greet someone by asking what they dreamed. If you want news of someone you care about at a distance, you ask how they have been dreaming. You see the future in your dreams and you talk to the dead.

This is how it is in the family of Colombian American writer Ingrid Rojas Contreras. Her dead Nono - her grandfather - appeared to her in a dream and showed her a river, a river she needed to know about. He appeared in dreams the same night to her mother, Mami, and two of her aunts, telling them all that he needed to be disinterred. He couldn’t bear to stay longer in the place where he was buried. His daughters did not understand why, but they knew the dream required action.

This is a shared dream, and shared dreams are gospel, because unlike dreams you experience on your own, shared dreams have the validity of being peer-reviewed.

At some danger and expense, the women of the family acted on his wishes. They traveled to Bucaramanga, the town where he was buried, and raised money to have his body exhumed. They found the reason for his discomfort. People had smuggled encargos – demands for Nono’s help - inside his casket, burdening him in the afterlife with their needs and desires. A typical encargo, scrawled on a piece of paper, might read, “You will have no rest until I get a new house.”

So the family took the remains of Nono’s body, in his white suit, and had them burned. They made their way eventually to the river from Ingrid’s dream and released the ashes to the waters there. “My dream gave us the river.”

Nono was a curandero, a healer and seer, both an illiterate rogue and a person of real gifts he called “secrets,” like the ability to talk to move clouds (and so change the weather) foresee events, or negotiate with the dead.

When Nono was treating an illness, he asked his dreams to guide him to the herbs he needed, and when he roused from sleep, he hiked until the landscape matched his vision, and there he gathered the medicine

His daughter Sojaila, “Mami”, Ingrid’s mother, had similar gifts, though women were not supposed to be curanderos. Her gifts burgeoned after a dreadful incident when she was eight, in which she fell down a well and remained amnesiac for eight months. After that, as well as knowing “secrets”, she had the ability to bilocate: to project a double visible to other people. This often happened when her regular body was in deep sleep or she was tossing in fever. Ingrid saw Mami’s double reading tarot cards at the kitchen table while her body lay in bed. Mami would often go to visit her husband in her second body – which she called her “clone” - when he was working in another country. He would see her doing his housekeeping, sweeping the floor, scrubbing the walls and leaving them wet.

The doubling theme is central to the book. Ingrid, too, suffered amnesia (for eight weeks) after an accident in Chicago in her early twenties, and the gift she found in the wound is a remarkable story in itself.  And she is a dead ringer for her mother, causing endless confusion among Mami’s relatives and former lovers.

Enter the world of The Man Who Could Move Clouds and you will find yourself in a landscape teaming with the wild fauna of magical realism. You may need to shake yourself to remember this isn’t just magical realism: it’s magical reality. You are in a realm full of ghosts. The ghosts may be restless spirits of the dead, or conditions that Western doctors label complexes or disorders, or  energy doubles, or the product of leaving a part of yourself behind when you make a sudden or wrenching life choice. Listen to this:

We have a hand in creating our own ghosts. We think we are done with a place , or a person, and wrest ourselves away. But when leaving happens in a wave of distress, when we leave what we still love, we conjure our own ghost walks into being.

And this:

A circle is a straight line haunted by something living at its middle – a ghost that causes it to bend and bend,

Ingrid Rojas Contreras showed us her astonishing power with words in a novel titled Fruit of the Drunken Tree, which brings vividly alive the struggle of women and girls for survival in the era of constant war between guerillas, paramilitaries, drug dealers and police.  The violence is always there, in the offing, in the memoir, along with heartbreak, deception and the brutality of men towards women. Yet there is a dancing spirit that sashays us through, the fascination of local customs – sleep with a mirror under your pillow in order to remember, watch for the glow in the earth where a guaca (haunted treasure) is buried - and all the everyday magic.

Maladies and misfortunes are caused by “stories that have not healed inside you.” The heart of healing is changing your life story for the better. Mami heals people by mumbling incantations over a bottle of tap water and giving them a story as they drink it. She tells fortunes the same way. "You have to tell a story that will allow the client to experience the truth without your ever having to name it."

In the world of Ingrid's family in three mountain towns in Santander department, we see what it means to live in a family where everyone dreams and therefore everyone is a little bit of a shaman. Ingrid’s Papi dreams of death under a piece of falling machinery on a walkway at the site where he is employed as an engineer. He’s arguing with a worker when this happens. Later, in ordinary life, he starts arguing with a worker on that walkway. He recognizes that the dream is starting to play out and steps back – escaping the death he dreamed when a piece of machinery fell at the exact spot where he was standing.

The boundary between dreaming and waking, like that between the living and the dead, is porous, if frailer than the ratty shower curtain Nono was gripping when he fell and died in the bathroom. Things bleed through. On the night of Nono's death, Nona - his estranged wife - dreams she has passionate sex with him. Bit when he asks her forgiveness, she won't give it. She wakes to find she is covered in mud and there are clods of earth on the bed. She knows this is because she threw their marriage bed away in the woods, leaving it to mud and muck. 

In my family, we study dreams and seek to decode their architecture. 

Waking life was a constant state of confusion "but our dreams were grounding”. 

Mami says, “Your dreams say more than anything you can tell me.”

 

 

Dreams Are Not On Our Case, They’re On Our Side

 

Our dreams show us things we may prefer not to think about -- which is a major reason why many of us slam that door shut on our dreams and try to keep it closed. Those things may include future life problems, or parts of ourselves we tend to ignore or repress, or the larger values and issues involved in a situation we are approaching from a limited point of view. We may prefer not to think about these matters, but if they are in our dreams, it is because our wiser Self is telling us we need to think about them. 

When our dreams show us future problems, they are also offering tools to avoid or contain those problems -- if we will only heed the messages and take appropriate action. 

When our dreams reveal aspects of ourselves we tend to deny, they invite us to reclaim the energy we waste in denial and to integrate and work with all the aspects of our energy. When dreams reflect the bigger issues involved in a current situation, they offer us an inner compass and a corrective to decisions driven by ego or other people's expectations. When we see things in night dreams we don't like, we need to pay careful attention, because we are being shown elements in our life situation that require understanding and action. The scarier the dream, the more urgent the need to receive its message and figure out what needs to be done. 

Here's one of my personal mantras: 

Dreams are not on our case, they are on our side. 

We need to stop running away from what our dreams are showing us and learn to stand our ground and confront the issue or the monster in the space where it first presents itself. If we fail to resolve a challenge in our dreams then - as Jung discovered - it is likely to come after us in the waking world, perhaps with even more scary consequences. 

A nightmare, in my lexicon, isn't just a scary dream; it is and interrupted or aborted dream. We tried to escape from the dream, leaving it broken and unresolved, because we were too frightened to deal with what confronted us. 

We want to learn to go back inside an interrupted dream of this kind, when we can muster the strength and resources to do that, and dream it onward to healing and resolution. We can do this through the Dream Reentry technique explained in several of my books, including The Three "Only" Things and Active Dreaming. 

We can ask a friend to go along with us as family support in conscious shared dreaming. We can write a satisfactory ending for the broken dream, which can be a fabulous exercise in creativity. 

We may find we've been running away from an advisory than can help save our job or our relationship, or can enable us to avoid a road accident or an illness. Sometimes we find that what we've been running away from is our own power. 

When we manage to brave up and face the beast or the alien, we may discover that what was most alien to us was our own larger Self, or that the wild animal we feared is an invitation to move beyond self-limitation into a life of wild freedom. 

Part of text adapted from The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence and Imagination by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

"Fear Not" Art in RM collection

The dream calling of a Neoplatonist philosopher

Proclus (412-485) , one of the greatest of the Neoplatonist philosophers, taught that the true philosopher should become "a priest of the entire universe", honoring all forms of the divine. He was an immensely prolific author, whose collected works - many of which were destroyed by religious book burners - were longer than those of Plato and Aristotle combined. He instructed that there are two basic aspects of soul in each human being: the "fallen" terrestrial soul, focused in physical reality, and the "celestial" soul or "true self" that transcends time and space and is the source of creativity and spiritual wisdom. As a teacher, he sought to guide his students into ever-closer alignment with this higher self, or "good daimon". 

According to Marinus, his student and biographer, Proclus was called to his vocation in dreams. It was not an easy calling, since it connected him with gods and goddesses the triumphant Church was seeking to proscribe. But he believed that his dreams put him in contact with a lineage of teachers - the "hermetic chain" - who were able to communicate with each other across time and space.

The goddess Athena "appeared to him in a dream inducing him to follow philosophy". Proclus was born in Constantinople, but spent his early years at his family home in Lycia, the country of Homer's hero Sarpedon, beloved of Zeus. He had moved on to the great university city of Alexandria and was embarked on a promising career as a rhetorician when he accepted a friend's invitation to accompany him on a trip back to Constantinople. When Proclus reached his native city, the goddess Athena appeared to him in a dream in the form in which she was traditionally worshipped in the eastern capital. She instructed him to devote himself to philosophy and prepare himself for admission to the great school of Plato in Athens.

He had already received the gift of dream healing. When he was suffering from a serious illness as a child, a radiant boy appeared above his head. Leaning over Proclus' bed, his visitor announced his name - Telesphoros - and touched the child's head, releasing him from his sickness. 

On his return to Alexandria from Constantinople, Proclus applied himself to the study of philosophy and mathematics under new teachers. Later he followed his dreams of the goddess to Athens, and studied with Plutarch, Syriacus, and other renowned philosophers. When he had completed his apprenticeship, he applied himself to seeking to understand the mythologies and Mystery traditions of both East and West through direct visionary experience. Much of his creative work flowed directly from meditative states, conscious dreaming and the twilight zone of hypnagogia. Long before he rose to greet the sun, "alone, in his bed, he composed hymns, and examined certain theories, and searched for ideas, which he later committed to writing at the coming of the day." [1]

Proclus continued to be guided by Plutarch after his teacher's death. In dreams, Plutarch gave him advice on the commentaries Proclus was writing on the Chaldean Oracles - and on the probable length of his own life. His later teacher, Syriacus, with whom he had disagreed over the interpretation of Orphic materials, appeared in a second cycle of dreams that deterred him from continuing with his work in this area. [2]

In other dreams, Proclus communed with earlier philosophers and received training in the school of Pythagoras. These powerful dreams convinced him that he had experienced a previous incarnation as a member of Pythagoras' circle.

Through dream travel, he experienced dimensions beyond the physical and evolved a personal model of the subtle bodies as vehicles of consciousness. At the age of 42, he returned from one of his dream excursions shouting these lines:

I am possessed by a spirit that breathes into me the forms of fire, which, enfolding and entrancing my spirit in a whirl of flame, flies towards the aether, and with its immortal vibrations reaches in the starry vaults. [3]

In his later years, racked by arthritis, severe headaches and bouts of depression - partly induced by Church attempts to suppress the cult of the old gods and Plato's Academy - Proclus again received the gift of dream healing. His headaches and his despair were lifted when a serpent sacred to Asklepios wrapped itself around his head. When he asked for a healing dream to relieve extreme pains in his legs, he was rewarded by a dream in which "someone returning from Epidaurus" (the most famous temple of Asklepios) kissed his knees. He woke free of pain and reportedly did not suffer "even a twinge" of arthritis throughout the rest of his life.

When he traveled, Proclus asked his dreams to guide him. He especially sought dream guidance on the spirits of the land: on the names, rites and sacred sites of the guardian spirits of each place. In Lydia, the gods or daimons of a defunct shrine revealed lost rituals to him through a dream.

Proclus even allowed dreams to dictate the manner of his burial. His old teacher Syriacus appeared in a dream to remind him that though they had had disagreements, they had once lived together as family and had agreed to share a double grave. Proclus gave the appropriate instructions and their remains were interred together in a double sepulchre. 

While Proclus' major life choices and most enduring work were inspired by dreams, his biographer notes that he did not allow himself much conventional sleep, regarding long periods of sleep as a symptom of "psychic laziness". His most powerful experiences appear to have unfolded in hypnagogia - the fertile space between sleep and awake - and in conscious dream excursions beyond the body.

In his commentary on Plato's Timaeus and in other surviving works, Proclus left us a precise anatomy of soul and spirit, a Western counterpart to descriptions of subtle bodies or "sheathes of soul" in Eastern literature. Proclus may have been the first writer to use the term "astral body" though its meaning for him was different from its common usage today. For Proclus, the astral or "starry" body (astroeides) is a vehicle in which the soul descends from higher planes to animate a physical body, and also a vehicle in which it ascends after death or in transcendent experiences. 

In its descent towards physical incarnation, the soul takes on various garments (chitones) or vehicles (ochemata). These are material, as the body of flesh and bone is material, but woven of finer stuff. Among them is a subtle body associated with the breath (soma pneumatikon) that is also a vehicle of appetite and desire. It survives physical death but will decompose, in the natural course of thigs, when the soul has moved higher in its "starry" form. In this view, what follows physical death is a kind of spiritual striptease: an ascending soul casts off garments one by one, to rise higher in its vehicle of light. [4]

Proclus' insights are not the product of abstract speculation. He seeks to describe what he has experienced through direct vision, especially in the most natural form of altered consciousness: dreams and half-dream states. His language is difficult, but it is well worth the effort too recover the essence of his teachings. He is one of the lost teachers who can help us relate our contemporary adventures in the multiverse to ancient Mystery traditions and the kind of philosophy that is truly the love of Sophia. 

References

1. Marinus of Samaria, The Life of Proclus trans. Kenneth S. Guthrie (Grand Rapids MI: Phanes Press, 1986) 41.

2. ibid 43-44.

3. ibid 45

4. cf. E.R. Dodds, "The Astral Body in Neoplatonism". Appendix 2 to Proclus, Elements of Theology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. For a pioneer attempt to restore these teachings, see G.R.S. Mead, The Doctrine of the Subtle Body in the Western Tradition (London: John M. Watkins, 1919).

NINE KEYS TO UNDERSTANDING YOUR DREAMS

 

1.  Trust Your Feelings

 

Always pay attention to how you feel when you wake from a dream. Your feelings and bodily sensations may be your best guide to the relative urgency and importance of a dream, and its positive or negative implications.

 

2.  First Associations

 

In keeping a dream journal, you will want to get into the habit of jotting down your first associations with the dreams you record. What floats to the surface of your consciousness in the first minutes after waking may come from layers of the dream that have eluded, or from deeper levels of dreaming 

3.  Reality Check

 

Compare what is going on in the dream to the rest of your life, including the life of your imagination. Always ask whether it is possible that any part of the dream will manifest, literally or symbolically, in physical reality. Though dreams are inner experiences, they often contain accurate information about external reality. In both subtle and unsubtle ways, dreams incorporate signals from the outside environments.

 

4.  Dream Reentry

 

Dreams are real experiences, and a fully remembered dream is its own interpretation. The meaning of a dream is inside the dream itself. By learning how to re-enter dreams, you will develop the ability to clarify messages about future events, resume contact with inner teachers, and resolve unfinished business.

 

5.  Dialogue with Dream Characters

 

One of the best ways to work out what your dream characters are telling you is to ask them. You can do this through dream reentry or simply by sitting down with a pad and pen, imagining that the dream figure is in front of you, and opening a conversation.

 

6.  Tracking Your Dream Self

 

Who are you in your dreams? Are you the protagonist or simply an observer? Are you younger or older? Male or female? How does the situation and behavior of our dream self compare with that of your waking self? The character who appears in all of your dreams, even if only as a witness, is you.

 

7.  Symbol Exploration

 

Although the dream source tries to communicate with us as clearly as possible, it must often speak in symbols in order to carry us beyond the limitations of the everyday mind.  Symbols take us from what we know to what we do not yet know. You'll be inspired to track your symbols far and wide, and may discover that your personal dreams embody timeless myths from many traditions. Always remember that the best encyclopedia of dream symbols is your own journal, kept over time.*

8.  "What Part of Me?"

 

Dreams make us whole. They show us the many aspects of ourselves and help us to bring them under one roof. This is why it is often useful to ask "what part of me" different characters and elements in a dream might represent. However,this approach is rarely sufficient since dreams are transpersonal as well as personal. If you meet a tribal shaman in a dream, that may be an aspect of yourself and an actual shaman. If you meet your departed grandmother, that is more likely to be Granma trying to communicate than merely a part of you that is like her.

 

9.  Dream Enactment

 

Dreams require action! You may take creative action, turning a dream into a story, a picture a collage.You may do some shamanic shopping, to get shoes or earrings your dream self was wearing or a sculpture of a deity you saw in a dream. You may use the dream as GPS on your life roads. You may accept dream assignments, seeking to translate that strange word or find that obscure place on a map of this world or another world. At the least, you can harvest a bumper sticker or action phrase from the dream that will help to move its energy into life. 

Text adapted from Robert Moss, Conscious Dreaming. Published by Three Rivers Press

 

Photo by RM