Riding Inside the Tiger

 

I teach and learn by sharing stories and - especially when it comes to dreaming - I don't want to hear from educators and experts who don't share their personal experiences. In this respect Namkhai Norbu does not disappoint. Especially in his book on Dzogchen, The Crystal and the Way of Light (even more than in his book on dream yoga) he shares memorable dream experiences.
     The simplest and most endearing comes from very early in his life. When he was quite small, he dreamed many times that he was riding inside the belly of a roaring beast he thought must be a tiger. In those days no motor car had ever been seen in his remote part of Tibet. When he encountered automobiles years later, he realized what his dreams had prepared him for. I am so charmed by this tale that I have turned it into a drawing. 

When the dreamer is ready, the teacher will appear 

Namkhai’s account of his dream education suggests a modification in a well-known maxim. It’s not just that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. It’s also: when the dreamer is ready, the teacher will appear.
     Aged sixteen, as a student teacher in China, Namkhai dreamed he met a very old man he knew to be a master. The master lived in a white Chinese-style cement house; the name Padmasambhava was written in Tibetan over the dor. The master chanted a mantra of Padmasambhava. Then he instructed Namkhai to go round the house to a great rock and look for the entrance to a cave. Inside the cave, he would find eight natural mandalas. The dreamer’s father appeared and chanted the Prajnaparamita sutra. Namkhai joined in chanting the sutra and they walked round the inside of the cave together. He could see the edges of the mandalas but not their full form before he woke up.
     A year later, back in Tibet, Namkhai heard a visitor talk to his father about an extraordinary old man who was living in a village of white Chinese-style houses in the region. He felt strongly this was the old man from his dream. Reminding his father of the dream, he asked if they could visit the old man in the white house. They set off on horseback and rode for four days. They came to a vialge of white concrete Chinese-style houses and knew the master’s house because mantra of Padmasambhava was over the door. The old man was Chamchun Dorje, a Dzogchen master; he became Namkhai’s primary teacher.[1]     

When you wake with a dream in your hand 

“What if you slept,” Coleridge wrote, famously, “And what if in your sleep you dreamed and what if in your dream you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower
and what if when you awoke you had that flower in your hand, ah, what then?”
     Coleridge’s question was answered for Namkhai in his early dream education. He learned that a certain kind of dream can spill over into the world. He woke with something he had dreamed in his hand.
     One of his uncles was renowned as a tertön, a "treasure revealer" of hidden texts that sometimes appeared as tiny scrolls in unusual places, apparently transmitted across generations by ancient masters. While staying with his uncle in a remote area, Namkhai dreamed he was visited by a dakini.
     She gave him a small scroll of paper containing a sacred text. She said this was very important and that on waking he should give it to his uncle. In the dream he knew he was dreaming. He gripped the scroll tightly in one fist and wrapped the other around it. It was not permitted to disturb his uncle until after his morning rituals, so he drifted off still with his fists clamped together.
     Waking at dawn, he opened his hand and found there really was a tiny scroll within it. He was too excited to wait. He woke up his uncle and presented the scroll. His uncle took it and said matter-of-factly, “Thank you, I expecting this” as if there had been a routine delivery at the door. [2]  

When you are called to travel to a deceased master 

When he was living and teaching in Italy, Namkhai’s guru, Chamchun Dorje, called him in a dream to return to Tibet. He traveled to his master in the dream. His guru told him that it was time for him to take up Todgal, a higher level of Dzogchen practice.  For this, he needed to go to another teacher, Jigmed Linba. 

I thought this was a very strange thing to say because I knew, of course, that Jigmed Linba was a great Dzogchen master of the eighteenth century who had been dead for many years. I thought perhaps I had misunderstood what my master had said so I asked him to explain, but he just said, “Jigmed Linba is up on the mountain behind the house. Go and see him right away.” [3] 

Disbelieving, Namkhai scaled a sheer cliff, noticing that the whole text of a tantra was incised on it, with the title of the text on a standing stone at the top, He found a cave where a beautiful boy with long flowing hair, dressed in a filmy blue garment, was seated. Could this really be the deceased Dzogchen master?  He clambered up on top of the rock and said to the boy, “I was told to come to you.” The boy motioned for him to sit, then took out a little scroll and began reading a Dzogchen text on the Four Lights of Todhgal.
     Look through the Tibetan Buddhist biographies in Serinity Young’s Dreaming in the Lotus and you will find that, again and again, gurus dream with their disciples and the masters appear in dreams to convey essential teachings.[4] This theme is well crystallized by Lama Choedak Yuthok: 

Some people actually gain enlightenment during dreams. Some practitioners while in the middle of dreams which they recognized as dreams, invited great lineage masters of past ages. They came and gave teachings, and some of these practitioners became enlightened as a result. There are a lot of whispered teachings like this. They are known as ‘near lineage’ teachings. Some practitioners who received these could write, teach and transmit the teachings with amazing eloquence. They did not have to bother about studying any texts. One master received three months’ worth of teachings in the course of a single three-hour dream.

 

References 

1. Namkhai Norbu Crystal and the Way of Light: Sutra, Tantra and Dzogchen ed. John Shank (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987) pp.9-10.
2. ibid pp. 51-52.
3. ibid p.102.
4. Serinity Young , Dreaming in the Lotus: Buddhist Dream Narrative, Imagery, & Practice (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1999).
5. Lama Choedak Yuthok ed. Pauline Westwood, Lamdre: Dawn of Enlightenment. (Gorum Publications, 1997).

 

Illustration: “Riding Inside the Tiger” by Robert Moss

 

 

When Your Dead Friend Brings You a Song That Sniffs You

Bob Weir, Grateful Dead singer and rhythm guitarist, told the Los Angeles Times that his long-time bandmate, Jerry Garcia, visited him in a dream 27 years after his death.

“He wanted to introduce me to a song,” Weir reported. “He invited the song into the room and it had the look and feel of an English sheepdog. It was about the size of the room. It was enormous, but you could see through it.

“The song came up and sniffed me. We got to know each other and be friends. Then, as it turns out, it was a jazz ballad that Jerry and I were going to sing, and it was a duet.”

The ballad, however, was incomplete, lacking a melody and chords. Weir said, "I’m going to have another installment on that dream, I think.” Time to learn the practice of dream reentry!

The form the song took in the dream is interesting. Many indigenous peoples believe that the best gift of a dream is the right song or story and that these have their own lives, whether or not they come introduced by a dead fiend.

The Aborigines of my native Australia say that the big stories are hunting the right people to tell them, like predators in the bush or a shark in the water. In South America, shamanic dreaming traditions speak of "word souls", special words of power - sung more than spoken - that have their own life and can be transferred by a dream practitioner to someone in need of an energy boost.

It's not only Jerry Garcia who can work this dream magic but he sets a great example.

Source for Bob Weir dream: interview with Joe Hagan in The Los Angeles Times, February 10, 2022.

Photo: American Kennel Club

Why the Dead Come Calling

 

Handsome Lake, the Seneca Iroquois prophet, said that the distance between the living and the dead is exactly as wide as the edge of a leaf of the maple tree. There may be not distance at all, just variable receptivity.

In dreams, the departed come calling. They call us on the phone, they email, they show up at the door, they appear right inside our bedrooms, or meet us in a familiar or unfamiliar space. Let's look at some of the main reasons for these visitations.

 

The Dead Come to Seek or Extend Forgiveness

One of the most important things we need to understand in our relations with the deceased is that healing and forgiveness are possible across the apparent barrier of death. This can be the key for people on both sides to heal and get on with their growing. 

It sometimes seems as if one of the assignments our departed set for themselves - or have prescribed for them by their coaches and counselors on the Other Side - is to reach back to survivors not only to seek forgiveness and closure but to achieve understanding and balancing. When this succeeds, it can break the family curse of abusive or destructive behaviors passed on from generation to generation.  

 

The Dead Come to Settle Unfinished Business

Brian's deceased friend appeared in a dream and said with fierce clarity, "Where is that book you took from my library?"  

What is "unfinished business" for one of our deceased may extend to achieving a lucid understanding of what happened in the life they have just left, preparatory to moving on to new life experiences. Yeats suggested that in an early and important phase of the afterlife transitions, the dead engage in "Dreaming Back", revisiting the scenes of their previous life, essentially to get the story straight and understand what is really going on. During the Dreaming Back, they interact with the living, in shared or overlapping dreams.

 

The Dead Bring a Warning or Health Advisory

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. 

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.

 

The Dead Return as Guides and Family Angels.

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 arranged 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 sees them all the time, glorious flashes of bright red among the greens.

 

The Dead Come to Prepare Us for Death

One of the most important reasons our dead visit us in dreams is to prepare us for our own crossings. It is very reassuring to know that we have friends and escorts on the Other Side. These death guides may include beloved animals, as well as humans, who have shared our lives. Valerie was sitting in her family home, exhausted from taking care of her very ill mother. She was dozing when she felt a presence. She looked up and saw her father, who had died years before. He said nothing, smiled a beautiful radiant smile and held out his hand. Then she saw her mother standing in front of him. Her mother took her father's hand, and they vanished. When the nursing home called to tell her that her mother had passed, she discovered that he mother had died at the same time she had seen her father come for her in the dream.  

 

The Dead Want to Pass on a Message through Us

The dead may call on us to pass on a message to someone who is disconnected - a person who is not picking up his or her own messages. This is frequently the case when an emergency is impending, and a dead well-wisher urgently wants to get an advisory through to someone who won't pick up the phone or answer the door. The dead caller will turn to someone else in the neighborhood who is more receptive and may be willing to pass the message along, directly or indirectly. This is likely to work best if the "sensitive" is family or a friend of one or both parties.

But if the message is really urgent, and nobody else is available, the dead caller may try to communicate through someone who is a relative outsider. A great many people approaching death try to blank out their awareness of what is coming, instead of using the last stages of life as an opportunity to get ready for a grand adventure that opens new vistas of growth and learning. The elderly may actively refuse to communicate with departed family and friends, because there is bad blood or, quite simply, because they are trying to avoid their appointment with death.

 

The Dead Come to Show Us their Realm

One of the most familiar and important reasons the departed appear in our dreams is as guides to the realms beyond physical life. A departed loved one - including a beloved former pet - may be the soul-guide, or psychopomp, who makes it easy for us to approach the big journey beyond physical death with courage and grace. 

I have heard many, many accounts of this, and have been blessed to help introduce many dying people to guides with familiar faces from the other side. Here is one: "My father visited my mother looking like he did when he was courting her. She was grieving and he told her he wanted to describe the beautiful valley she would first see. He showed her in a dream a vale filled with wildflowers, birds singing, and a small brook running through. He told her he could not present it the way it really looked, that it was more beautiful than anything she could ever imagine."

 

The Dead Come as Guardians and Guides

The ancients believed that the illustrious dead may intervene as daimons or demigods to strengthen and support the living. Plutarch located the base for helpful daimons who were formerly humans in the astral realm of the moon.

 

The Dead Need Guidance from Us

The dead come calling in our dreams because they need help or guidance from us - often because they are lost or lonely or stuck somewhere not very far away. They of course have guides available on the Other Side, but they may have remained so physically oriented, enmeshed in their dense energy bodies, that they are inclined to trust someone who has a physical body more than a being who does not. Or they may simply be shy about getting to know new people.

Yeats observed, with poetic insight, that "the living have the ability to assist the imaginations of the dead". I know this to be true, since I have been called on many times to help survivors to assist departed family members to move beyond stuck places by growing their imaginations and becoming more aware of new real estate options and life possibilities on the Other Side.

 Jung described a dream in which he found himself at "an assemblage of distinguished spirits". He was asked some complex questions, but the conversation was in Latin and he was embarrassed that his command of this language was not sufficient for him to respond. The dream spurred him to abandon his holiday and rush home on the train to work on an answer to the question. He later concluded that the question had been put to him by "spiritual forefathers in the hope and expectation that they would learn what they had not been able to find out during their time on earth, since the answer had first to be created in the centuries that followed."  [1]

Jung subsequently speculated that "the souls of the dead 'know' only what they knew at the moment of death, and nothing beyond that" - contrary to the "traditional views" that the dead possess great knowledge. [2] 

I think it is certainly entirely possible that after death people try to attain an awareness that may have escaped them during life. But there are other possible explanations for Jung's experiences. One is that he was actually communicating across time - speaking to people from early periods not in their postmortem state but as they are in their own now time. Frederic Myers trembled on the edge of recognizing this possibility, when he floated the idea of "the permanence or simultaneity of all phenomena in a timeless Universal Soul". [3]. 

 

References

1 C.G.Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Ed. Aniela Jaffé. New York : Vintage, 1965, 307. 
2. ibid 308
3. F.W.H .Myers, Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death. Volume 2 London: Longmans, Green, 1903, 76

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

Photo: Cemetery in Ann Arbor by RM

The Death's Head Dominatrix Joins Me on the Plane

 

I had been leading a creative writing retreat at magical Mosswood Hollow, a private retreat center in a red cedar forest eats of Seattle where I have led adventures for many years. Too goose myself to do deliver some fresh pages myself, I started writing a bunch of stories within a frame story. The frame story was that a writer has made a deal with Death according to which he will be allowed to live only as long as he goes on producing stories that entertain Death. Familiar? Certainly. It's the story of Scheherazade and I felt I had been living it for many years. 

Within the frame story I started banging out tales that now came to me. One of them featured a Roman centurion in the time just after the crucifixion. His girlfriend was a Phoenician witch who was good with dreams. 

After closing the retreat, I boarded a plane at Seattle airport to fly home. As always, I was curious to see what unfolded in the Bardo of air travel.  A plane is not a bad place to talk to strangers and to chance an encounter. You have a somewhat protected situation. It’s limited in terms of time and space. You can talk to someone and never see them again. You can cut off a conversation if you don’t like it. It's a contained environment. On this particular plane ride, however, the chance encounter did not feel like chance and was not safe at all. , 

When I took my aisle set the two seats between me and the window were vacant. Then a very tell woman came strutting down the aisle. She was made taller by her high-heeled black boots and her top hat. She wore black leather over a bustier. When she sat down next to me, after parking a pudgy little man by the window, I saw her gloves. They had the fingers cut out and huge death's heads on their backs. 

She ordered crème de menthe. Told by the flight attendant that the airline did not carry that, she ordered  a double vodka. She craned her head, inspected the cabin, and introduced herself to me by saying. "I like this flight. All the seats are full. Actuarially, if the plane is going to crash, twenty percent of the seats will be empty."

She sucked her vodka. I said, "You look like a magician." 

"I can make magic." she told me. "You could say that spankings are my friends."

I got the hint. The lady with the death's head gloves was dominatrix. Not my scene. The conversation that followed was staccato, sudden gusts followed by long pauses.

She leaned into me and asked, "Do you think the dead appear to us in our dreams?" 

I had told her nothing about myself. I said, "Absolutely."

"Oh, good. My dead husband showed up in my dreams last week. He was shot in the face in a diner in Seattle last year. He was in the papers. He was a musician. He turned up by my bedside and he said, ‘I’ve got a really cool job.’ He said, 'I’ve got a job doing music and special effects for dreams that are being produced for people living in this world.' What do you think of that?" 

"I think it's entirely possible." And a fascinating story.  

Conversation lagged for a bit. She ordered more vodka. Then she stared at me and said, "I would love to read a story from the point of view of Jezebel." 

This came with no context. I was trying to remember what the Bible says about Jezebel when she added, "Those Phoenician witches were very good with dreams."

I was astounded. She spoke as if she knew what I had been writing earlier that day, in the spirit of Scheherazade. Was her dead husband whispering in her ear?

Conversation continued like this, billowing and lulling, until she addressed me as follows: "I like crows and ravens." 

"Of course, you do," I said. 

"Yeah. Do you know what the collective noun for a group of crows or ravens is?" 

"Well, it’s a murder of crows and an unkindness of ravens." I was pleased with myself for knowing both terms.

She sniffed. "Everybody knows that. There’s another collective noun for both groups of birds. Do you know what it is?"

"You are going to tell me."

"Yes I am. It’s a storytelling of crows or a storytelling of ravens. Do you know why?"

 "You’re going to tell me that too."

 "I saw this once. I saw a gathering of crows, a storytelling of crows gathered around a storyteller crow. He was doing his best but he was an unsatisfactory storyteller because when he was finished they pecked him to death." 

Did I want a little edge for my writing efforts? I got it on that flight. I later expanded this episode into the lead story in my collection Mysterious Realities. This is the simple, unvarnished account of what happened on that night flight from Seattle to Chicago.

I left out of the longer version, "A Storytelling of Crows", the final incident on that flight. As we landed, the little man who had been parked in the window seat roused from his long nap. 

"This Homer," the dominatrix introduced her companion. 

I could not resist saying, "Enjoy your odyssey, Homer."

Homer rubbed his eyes and said, "All I want is a bowling alley."

"A bowling alley?"

"Yep, a one-lane bowling alley. Something to do when you get old."

As scary, in its way, as the storytelling of crows. 

You can read the expanded version of this episode, "A Storytelling of Crows" in Mysterious Realities: Tales of a Dream Traveler in the Imaginal Realm by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Photos by RM

 

I'll read it in my dreams

 I am always surprised when people tell me that they cannot read in dreams. They may look at text or inscriptions, but then find that they cannot stabilize or recall what they were viewing. There are research studies supporting the notion that reading is not an oneiric ability.

    Such reports and studies bemuse me, because I read even more in dreams than in regular life, and often manage to bring back a good deal. Sometimes I am assisted by an inner voice that speaks the words as I read them. To recover more than a few scraps of a text, I am often required to go back inside a dream and re-read the whole thing. I typically do this in a state of relaxed attention, lying on the bed with a pad and pencil in hand, jotting down what I read as I go through the pages or panels in a state of conscious or lucid dreaming.
    I have difficulty with languages that I do not know, or do not know well, but again that inner voice is there to assist me. Once I read a ribbon-like scroll in Hebrew and was given the inner translation:

Fear is falling down, awe is standing up, in the presence of the powers.

I read this dream text in the midst of one of my shamanic retreats. A member of the gathering, who is both a physician and a Kabbalist, explained to me, when he heard my report, that in Hebrew the word yira [יראה] can mean either "fear" or "awe".
    Similarly, an inner voice will translate walls of hieroglyphs, tablets in cuneiform, parchments in Latin or Old English.
   The most profound spiritual dialogue of my life began when I re-entered a dream from which I had awakened, in cool moonlight, in a cabin by a lake in Vermont. In the dream, I had been lunching with a mysterious and elegant couple. As I left the scene, an old friend rushed up to remind me that I needed to record everything, and should look inside a large manila envelope for instructions.
   Lying on my bed, I sent my second self back into the restaurant. I opened the envelope and read a newsapaper cutting that announced that "The Prince and Princess of Fars Are Traveling Abroad". With the clipping was a list of 20 questions I was supposed to put to these visitors from the land of Rumi and Suhrawardi.
   I sat my second self down at the table and read the questions one by one. They were all about soul and its peregrinations. "What is the nature of exile?" I read. Next question: "What are the conditions for return?" The answers fill many pages of my journal.
    On another occasion, I dreamed I had received a telegram from my favorite dead professor. I brought back a couple of sentences. These were enough to take me back inside the dream, in my dream reentry, to capture the rest. The full contents of the telegram gave me beautiful postmortem reflections in a familiar voice on afterlife possibilities and the connections between personalities living in different times.
    Sometimes, in dreams, I read books by authors I know. Some of these are books that have been published in the regular world; others appear to be books that exist in another reality. I especially enjoy reading books of my own that I have not yet completed, or even embarked on, in ordinary reality. It's a grand trick for a writer, to be able to bring through pages of a book that already exists, in the Dream Library, and turn it into something that others can read, in the ordinary world.

Digital art: "Dream Library" by RM

In My Forgotten Library

It happens every few months. I pull aside a screen, or open a curtain, or reach into an obscure corner of a room, and open the door to a library wing of my house that is not so much secret as forgotten. This library is immense, with bookcases that rise to the ceiling, suffused with light that seems natural, though I see no windows. The nearest bookshelves at my left hand are filled with European history. I recall that last time I was here, I dipped into some books about John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough.

In the early hours this morning, I step into the library room again. It is as I remember it. However, the room from which I enter is different. With its deep green wallpaper, I think it belongs to my next residence, which we are currently renovating, rather than my present house. Lucid inside the dream, it strikes me that I have not gone to the far end of the library wing and should explore what is there. I am surprised to find several people working at a large table.

When one of them turns, I see he is my favorite dead professor. I had many encounters with him over the years since his death, often in a very special research institution. I am skeptical about whether he is really here now, in this time and place. He laughs and peels off a mask. As the goatee and bald pate and glinting spectacles are removed, I see that my helper has been wearing a familiar face. I’m not sure, but I suspect he is the young historian inside my own psyche. A large, comfy lady at the table seems quite solid. In her shapeless print dress, she’s not putting on any façade. Her name is Maureen, and she is available for research assignments. The third figure, male, is not introduced.

“What are you working on?”

“Parallel lives.”

Of course. A perennial theme. When I met my dead professor at a research institute twenty years ago, he showed me this was his main work. Not simply Parallel Lives as Plutarch wrote them, coupling biographies of prominent Greeks and Romans, but a branch of Metahistory: the study of how the dramas or people living in different times and places can turn on each other, shifting each other’s lives. Back them, my dead professor was studying the interaction between the lives of Lenin and an ancient tyrant. Dionysius of Syracuse. I wonder who will most reward my study now? Maybe Maureen can tell me.

- Unedited journal report, June 8, 2022

 

 

Dreaming of the Other Side

I am receiving many reports of encounters with the deceased in dreams and the liminal space of hypnagogia. The dead appear as they are - that is to say, alive in another reality. I love how Ava's departed mother started up conversation by saying, with a chuckle, "Remember when we both thought I was dead?" Often the deceased have adjusted their appearance to look much younger and healthier than when last seen by their survivors. Sometimes they come visiting, sometimes the dreamer finds herself traveling to their realms. Many recent dream reports provide a glimpse of the living arrangements the departed have created for themselves on the Other Side. In some of these dreams the departed seem to be engaged in arranging comfortable living quarters for friends or family members who will be joining them. One dreamer's deceased mother gave her a house tour of a palatial residence she has constructed for herself. Another dreamer was delighted to find she has a place in a community of scholars - with gourmet tastes and a fine sense of humor - who have been growing a delightful village over many years of linear time. In recent dream of my own, I observed a departed friend renovating cottages and apartments on a country estate that is not on any map of this world for family members who are still living on the physical plane.      Instead of being scared by these dreams, most of those reporting emerge calm and confident, assured that life goes on in one world another.. "Crossing to the Other Side" is a prominent theme in current dream reports, including from those who were not much open to recalling or sharing dreams before. One such dreamer reports making a crossing by water under the care of a mysterious ferryman, an element very familiar in mythic geographies. Interesting that people are dreaming in this ancient mode when so many in our world,unfortunately,will be making the crossing sooner than they expected, and may need a ferryman. I have also been studying recent reports in which dreamers find themselves exploring their lifestyle options on the Other Side, and are shown possible exit ramps from physical life. I have recorded many personal experiences of this kind since I died and came back as a boy. These things are too important for us to rely on hard-me-down beliefs. We need first hand experience and this requires us to become, in our own unique ways, shamans of consciousness. Our dreams will show us those ways. Dreaming is the best preparation for dying. We routinely travel beyond the body in our dreams, and we can learn to make this a conscious practice and embark on wide-awake dream journeys at our choosing. Developing this practice is the best preparation for dying because (as the Lakota say) the path of the soul after death is the path of the soul in dreams. This practice is not only about rehearsing for death. It is about remembering what life is all about, reclaiming the knowledge of the soul, and moving beyond fear and self-limiting beliefs. Our dreams also give us the easiest way to communicate with the dead. Here's an open secret: we don't need a go-between to talk to the departed. We can have direct communication with our departed, in timely and helpful ways, if we are willing to pay attention to our dreams. As the spate of recent reports suggests, we meet our departed loved ones in our dreams. Sometimes they come to offer us guidance or assurance of life beyond death; sometimes they need help from us because they are lost or confused, or need forgiveness and closure. Our dreams of the departed help us confirm that consciousness survives the death of the body and allow us to gain first-hand knowledge of what happens after physical death. I welcome the objectivity of spontaneous sleep dreams, ones we do not or cannot control - but may learn to navigate - and may bring us awake to realities hidden from the daily trivial mind. Over decades, I have noticed that the #1 reason why people who were previously unwilling to acknowledge or talk about dreams start to open up is that they have dreamed of someone close to them has died, and know the experience is altogether real. I must add that prime time for extended conversation and astral excursions with the departed may be the twilight zone between sleep and awake. This is a great space in which to stay with a dream that is still fresh in your mind and make it your plan to let the action continue to unfold or ask the questions you need to ask, or simply bring back more of the full experience. Photo: "Night Palms 2" by Robert Moss

Why the dead come calling

In dreams, the departed come calling. They call us on the phone, they email, they show up at the door, they appear right inside our bedrooms, or meet us in a familiar or unfamiliar space. Let's look at some of the main reasons for these visitations.

The Dead Come to Seek or Extend Forgiveness

One of the most important things we need to understand in our relations with the deceased is that healing and forgiveness are possible across the apparent barrier of death. This can be the key for people on both sides to heal and get on with their growing.

It sometimes seems as if one of the assignments our departed set for themselves - or have prescribed for them by their coaches and counselors on the Other Side - is to reach back to survivors not only to seek forgiveness and closure but to achieve understanding and balancing. When this succeeds, it can break the family curse of abusive or destructive behaviors passed on from generation to generation.  

The Dead Come to Settle Unfinished Business

Brian's deceased friend appeared in a dream and said with fierce clarity, "Where is that book you took from my library?" 

What is "unfinished business" for one of our deceased may extend to achieving a lucid understanding of what happened in the life they have just left, preparatory to moving on to new life experiences. Yeats suggested that in an early and important phase of the afterlife transitions, the dead engage in "Dreaming Back", revisiting the scenes of their previous life, essentially to get the story straight and understand what is really going on. During the Dreaming Back, they interact with the living, in shared or overlapping dreams.

The Dead Bring a Warning or Health Advisory

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.

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.

The Dead Return as Guides and Family Angels.

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 arranged 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 sees them all the time, glorious flashes of bright red among the greens.

The Dead Come to Prepare Us for Death

One of the most important reasons our dead visit us in dreams is to prepare us for our own crossings. It is very reassuring to know that we have friends and escorts on the Other Side. These death guides may include beloved animals, as well as humans, who have shared our lives. Valerie was sitting in her family home, exhausted from taking care of her very ill mother. She was dozing when she felt a presence. She looked up and saw her father, who had died years before. He said nothing, smiled a beautiful radiant smile and held out his hand. Then she saw her mother standing in front of him. Her mother took her father's hand, and they vanished. When the nursing home called to tell her that her mother had passed, she discovered that he mother had died at the same time she had seen her father come for her in the dream.  

The Dead Want to Pass on a Message through Us

The dead may call on us to pass on a message to someone who is disconnected - a person who is not picking up his or her own messages. This is frequently the case when an emergency is impending, and a dead well-wisher urgently wants to get an advisory through to someone who won't pick up the phone or answer the door. The dead caller will turn to someone else in the neighborhood who is more receptive and may be willing to pass the message along, directly or indirectly. This is likely to work best if the "sensitive" is family or a friend of one or both parties.

But if the message is really urgent, and nobody else is available, the dead caller may try to communicate through someone who is a relative outsider. A great many people approaching death try to blank out their awareness of what is coming, instead of using the last stages of life as an opportunity to get ready for a grand adventure that opens new vistas of growth and learning. The elderly may actively refuse to communicate with departed family and friends, because there is bad blood or, quite simply, because they are trying to avoid their appointment with death.

The Dead Come to Show Us their Realm

One of the most familiar and important reasons the departed appear in our dreams is as guides to the realms beyond physical life. A departed loved one - including a beloved former pet - may be the soul-guide, or psychopomp, who makes it easy for us to approach the big journey beyond physical death with courage and grace.

I have heard many, many accounts of this, and have been blessed to help introduce many dying people to guides with familiar faces from the other side. Here is one: "My father visited my mother looking like he did when he was courting her. She was grieving and he told her he wanted to describe the beautiful valley she would first see. He showed her in a dream a vale filled with wildflowers, birds singing, and a small brook running through. He told her he could not present it the way it really looked, that it was more beautiful than anything she could ever imagine."

The Dead Come as Guardians and Guides

The ancients believed that the illustrious dead may intervene as daimons or demigods to strengthen and support the living. Plutarch located the base for helpful daimons who were formerly humans in the astral realm of the moon.

The Dead Need Guidance from Us

The dead come calling in our dreams because they need help or guidance from us - often because they are lost or lonely or stuck somewhere not very far away. They of course have guides available on the Other Side, but they may have remained so physically oriented, enmeshed in their dense energy bodies, that they are inclined to trust someone who has a physical body more than a being who does not. Or they may simply be shy about getting to know new people.

Yeats observed, with poetic insight, that "the living have the ability to assist the imaginations of the dead". I know this to be true, since I have been called on many times to help survivors to assist departed family members to move beyond stuck places by growing their imaginations and becoming more aware of new real estate options and life possibilities on the Other Side.

Jung described a dream in which he found himself at "an assemblage of distinguished spirits". He was asked some complex questions, but the conversation was in Latin and he was embarrassed that his command of this language was not sufficient for him to respond. The dream spurred him to abandon his holiday and rush home on the train to work on an answer to the question. He later concluded that the question had been put to him by "spiritual forefathers in the hope and expectation that they would learn what they had not been able to find out during their time on earth, since the answer had first to be created in the centuries that followed."  [1]

Jung subsequently speculated that "the souls of the dead 'know' only what they knew at the moment of death, and nothing beyond that" - contrary to the "traditional views" that the dead possess great knowledge. [2]

I think it is certainly entirely possible that after death people try to attain an awareness that may have escaped them during life. But there are other possible explanations for Jung's experiences. One is that he was actually communicating across time - speaking to people from early periods not in their postmortem state but as they are in their own now time. Frederic Myers trembled on the edge of recognizing this possibility, when he floated the idea of "the permanence or simultaneity of all phenomena in a timeless Universal Soul". [3]. 

References

1 C.G.Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Ed. Aniela Jaffé. New York : Vintage, 1965, 307.
2. ibid 308
3. F.W.H .Myers, Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death. Volume 2 London: Longmans, Green, 1903, 76

For much more on this subject, please see The Dreamer's Book of the Dead. Dreaming with the departed is a major theme in my new online course Active Dreaming: The Essential Training, which starts on April 18.

Photo: "Rendezvous at Thirteenth Lake"by RM

Dreaming with the departed

The number one reason men talk about dreams, in my experience, is that they have dreamed of someone who has died and the experience seemed so real that they desperately need help in understanding what is going on. I'm not talking about the brave men who come to dream classes and share their inner lives with a mixed group. I'm talking about the guy in the neighborhood pub or on the bleachers, the cop in the all-night diner, the commuter on the train.

When I was moving into a former home, I was startled by banging on the French doors of the study in which I was shelving books. I opened the doors and a huge, wild-eyed man introduced himself as a neighbor. He was a former basketball pro. "I've just come from the graveyard," he explained, breathing heavily. "My dad showed up in my bedroom last night and I had to go prove to myself that he's still in the ground." The cemetery was half a block away, not a long hike at all.

But in fact the distance between the living and the dead may be much shorter. It is exactly as wide as the edge of a maple leaf, said Handsome Lake, the Seneca Indian prophet.

Many of us yearn for contact with departed loved ones. We miss them; we ache for forgiveness or closure; we yearn for confirmation that there is life beyond physical death. This is one of the main reasons why people go to psychic readers.

Here's an open secret: we don't need a go-between to talk to the departed. We can have direct communication with our departed, in timely and helpful ways, if we are willing to pay attention to our dreams. We meet our departed loved ones in our dreams. Sometimes they come to offer us guidance or assurance of life beyond death; sometimes they need help from us because they are lost or confused, or need forgiveness and closure.

Dreams of the departed help us gain first-hand knowledge of what happens after physical death. One of the cruelest things that mainstream Western culture has done is to suggest that communication with the departed is either impossible or unnatural. There is nothing spooky or "supernatural" involved, though these experiences take us into realms beyond physical reality.

The easiest way for the departed to communicate with the living is through dreams -though sometimes the departed, as well as the living, fail to realize this. For once, Hollywood got this right. In the movie The Sixth Sense a psychically gifted young boy can see and speak with the departed. He plays counselor to a man who has died, is initially confused about his situation, and then dismayed that he cannot talk to his wife. The boy instructs the dead man, "Speak to her in her dreams, only then will she hear you".

In most dreams, the departed appear to be living, and very often the dreamer is unaware that the person he or she encounters is "dead" until after waking. The reason is that the departed are indeed alive, though no longer in the physical realm. The departed may appear as the dreamer remembers them from their last days of physical life, especially in the first dream encounters. But over time, it is quite common for the departed to alter their appearance, to shrug off signs of age and bodily ailments, and to present themselves as healthy and attractive. People who died in later years frequently reappear looking around 30 years old.

After my father's death, he appeared repeatedly in my dreams to offer counsel to the family, bringing specific and practical information to which I did not have access in waking life. For example, he gave me the name of the real estate broker on the other side of the Pacific - someone otherwise unknown to me - who moved with great speed and humanity (once we contacted him because of the dream) to help my mother sell her home and resettle in a community where she spent some of the happiest years of her life. My father also made a happy dream visit to one of my daughters, who bitterly regretted never having known him in physical life; he showed himself as a handsome horseman, about 30 years old, and took her riding. Through many dream encounters with my father, I was vividly reminded that a departed loved one can truly play "family angel".

I have been dreaming with departed people all my life, and have worked with thousands of dreams of the departed shared with me by others. While the departed person in some of these dreams may be an aspect of the dreamer's own personality or genetic inheritance - or a mask for a messenger from the deeper Self - the great majority of these dreams appear to involve transpersonal encounters.

There are three main reasons why dreams of the dead (and other forms of interaction with them) are entirely natural experiences:

1. The deceased are still with us because they have not yet moved on for reasons that may be good, bad or mixed.
2. The deceased come visiting for all the reasons we call on each other in everyday life, and then some.
3. In dreams, we travel to the Other Side and find ourselves in territories where the dead are alive.

Notice I speak of dreaming with the departed rather than dreaming of them. We are talking about interactive, transpersonal, social encounters that may be initiated by either party. They visit us and we call on them. Sometimes they turn up, in dreams or liminal space, to invite us to travel with them to see where and how they are living now. 

In The Dreamer's Book of the Dead, I discuss thirteen reasons the dead come calling. They may have messages for us, or need help from us. They may come seeking healing and forgiveness. When we engage with them with open hearts we find that healing and forgiveness are always available, across the apparent barrier of death.

Across the whole course of the human odyssey on the planet, the principal reason for the age-old conviction that consciousness survives physical death is that we receive visitations from the departed, especially in dreams, and that in dreams and journeys we find ourselves in realms where the dead are alive. What happens after death is too important for us to rely on hand-me-down belief systems. We need first-hand experience. It is available to us any night, through the portal of dreams.

- Dreaming with the Departed is a theme in my new online course for The Shift Network, "Active Dreaming: The Essential Training"; it starts on April 18.

Image: Victorian ghost comes through mirror. Provenance unknown. I could not resist the graphic. But let's notice that there is nothing spooky about most encounters with the deceased.