Place of the Lion

The Dream

I am driving in a large open car along a once-grand avenue near the water in a city on the Black Sea. To our left are splendid buildings from the Belle Epoque that once housed department stores, hotels, restaurants. Everything has fallen into disrepair; signs are missing letters or hanging loose; some buildings look abandoned. Business is still being done though it doesn't correspond to the old signage.
     The person giving me this private tour explains that old magic is still alive in this fallen city. In particular, the ancient art of bonding with an animal familiar is practiced even in the best families, though proscribed by the church and frowned on by the state. Behind the columns of that now-shabby emporium, for example, is an establishment known to its clientele as Lion Inspiriting. Here the most awkward and tongue-tied can be learn to speak in a commanding voice, and the timid and cowardly can be infused with courage.
     I want to see how this works. Quick as thought, I am guided through a marble hall, up stairs to a half-lit parlor where I am invited to recline on a divan. I am aware that there is a stuffed lion in the room, so shabby and dusty I am sure it is an old taxidermy specimen rather than merely a prop or a toy. A black and white film starts to play. Grainy, silent. Nothing much happening for a long time except close ups of waving patterns in high glass. I am amazed at the detail. I can see every blade of glass. I realize the scene is not only on a screen. It is all around me. And it is not only black and white; There is some green and blue, and a glow of colors I can't normally see.
     Am I inside the night vision of a lion?
     The stuffed lion is no longer where I saw him before.

Feelings when I leave the dream: Excitement and delight.

Reality check: The city reminds me of Constanța, the Romanian city on the Black Sea where I led a fourt-day workshop years ago. The signs on the buildings are in the Roman alphabet, but I'm not certain they are in Romanian.

There is a villa in Constanța called the House of Lions. I don't recall seeing it when I was in the city and don't know whether it is the marbled building in my dream.

I love lions and have made a shamanic practice of connecting people with Lion spirit to claim their voice and find their courage. My original title for my book Active Dreaming was The Place of the Lion and there is a lion door knocker on the cover.

The werewolf is well-known in Romania (and is far more common than the vampire) but I have not heard of werelions here. However, I did once meet a werelynx in the Carpathian mountains. 

I find shifts between color and black and white (going either way) very significant in dreams.

I enjoy the slightly creepy Gypsy-Steampunk quality of the room where things go black-and-white. Of course Romania is famous for Romany. And in the middle of the night I was reading some hilarious chapters in Robertson Davies' novel The Rebel Angels about Gypsy magic in the heart of bourgeois Toronto.

What do I want to know?

Where does this story want to go next?

Bumper sticker

When the lion speaks everyone listens.

 Revisting the dream

When I look again to see how the story could develop, I imagine the narrator - now distinct from myself - discovering he is in the body of the taxidermy lion, which is now animated but shedding hair and bits of hide as it moves around awkwardly. To his horror, he finds that something else has taken the human body he left on the divan. It raises up and leave the premises. He is trying to track it but in this form people will flee from him or try to capture or kill him.

Dialogue with a dream character 

The Alteri

I ask the proprietess of the shapeshifting salon called Lion Inspiriting, Who are you?

She tells me, “We are Alteri”.

Does this mean alters, as in other personalities? 

Surely the lion isn’t native to these parts. She laughs at me for forgetting my history. The lions of the Hatti and of Ishtar, of Egypt and Africa. The cave lions of long ago. Her people are not captives of time or borders.

[Unedited entry form my joirnal for May 10, 2021]

Photo: House of Lions in Constanța.

Dreams meet under lion's blue eyes at Amsterdam airport

Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam en route to Bucharest

I embarked on the long journey from my little home airport in upstate New York to Bucharest on Monday. Thanks to a flight cancellation, I was following a quite different itinerary than the one I had booked long ago. It would give me a layover at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport instead of at Paris Charles de Gaulle. The unexpected Amsterdam connection was tagged by delicious poetic synchronicity, as I noted in my last article in this space.
    So now my antennae are all quivering, because when your plans get screwed up, the Trickster comes into play. There is a kind of tilt to the day. Chance encounters may be fascinating, if you are open to them. You are aware that you are traveling paths that were not on your maps, beyond the settled lands of Planning and Calculation.
    I enjoy my conversations with the first fellow-travelers I meet. They are both men who love beer and have a seemingly endless supply of factoids about craft brewing, alcohol content, hops and more - and have clearly both looked in a beer mug or two when it was brown. I like beer, so I was happy to chime in with some preferences and stories of my own.
    The sharp edge of both conversations emerged through this froth. Both men had well-paid jobs that did more than pay the bills but seemed to leave them gasping for air. I expressed my view that the trick in life is to do what you love and let the universe find a way to support that. Soon we were talking about what this would mean, in practice, for each of these increasingly conscious travelers. I led them through what I call the Juggling Act.
   "List the things you most love - it's okay to include beer! - and picture yourself holding these things in your left hand. Now list the skills, resources and connections you have, and see yourself balancing these in your right hand."
   We talked about how to shuffle together these two sets, of love objects and skills. No immediate business plans or flashes of divine lightning came through, but the exercise is fun and engaging.
    Now my plane is coming down through grey sea-mists over Amsterdam, a city below sea level. I have arrived a few minutes early, but there is still no time to be lost getting across the vast, bustling airport to my new departure gate, D54. I find a crowd of travelers waiting at the gate for the security check. A pretty younger woman glances at my boarding pass. "You are Flying Blue Silver," she telle me. "You don't have to wait with us. You can go to the front."
    I tell her I'll stay where I am in the line. There's no rush. She's Romanian, I guess. Correct. She's going back to Cluj to continue her studies as a medical student. She loves to travel the world and she especially likes Amsterdam.
    The conversation quickly takes off. When she completes her medical training, she wants to be an oncologist. Soon we are talking about the role of imagery in healing cancer. The importance of imaginal healing is now well-recognized in oncology, the field she has chosen. "If you can help a cancer patient to see and sense and believe in an ally who can help them fight the disease inside their body, they do better." Under questioning, I explain that this is the kind of thing I train people to do.
    She wants to know about my trainings, and my books. I mention my book Active

Dreaming. She whips out her smartphone to find the American edition online. She wants to read in in English. She gasps when she sees the cover - a fierce lion door knocker that is really in your face, hinting that if you want to get to the good stuff, you need to brave up.
   "Last night, I dreamed of a lion with blue eyes and a white mane, in a swimming pool."
   I don't comment that I am have loved lions all my life and that I am a big cat who loves to swim. I do tell her that my working title for this book was The Place of the Lion, and that it contains my story of a big dream in which a lion advised me on how to approach life.
   I show her the cover of my spiritual memoir The Boy Who Died and Came Back, which has beautiful endorsements from two exceptional M.D.s who are helping us to remember and grow the spirit-body connection: Raymond Moody and Larry Dossey.
    Her eyes widen. "This conversation is a gift to me," she tells me. "I've been thinking a lot about death, and what happens after death." She explains that a good friend died, with his girlfriend, in the Malaysian Airlines plane that was shot down over eastern Ukraine. I ask if she has had a sense of his presence.
    "I've been dreaming of him almost every night."
    "How is he doing?"
    "He's fine. Last time I saw him, he was leading me up a ladder. I was behind him, and his girlfriend was behind me. The ladder was not an ordinary ladder. It was an oak tree. I don't know where we were going, but this felt important, and wonderful."
     I told her that the very first time I taught in Eastern Europe, I guided a group of fifty people to journey with the aid of shamanic drumming through the portal of an oak tree. For shamans, I explained, any tree can be a ladder between the worlds, an axis mundi. However, for many of us of European ancestry, the oak has special importance. Druids, for example, were called oak seers.
     Truth comes with boosebumps. Synchronicity is the spice of travel, and a way of knowing that you are on the right path even when the daily trivial mind might try to tell you that you are off schedule or off track.  
    

Lion around

The rhythm of many drums and vibrating instruments being played by members of my workshop is deep and thrilling. It is carrying everyone smoothly and easily into rich group experience in deeper levels of consciousness and reality. As I move from room to room where many people are stretched out for shamanic journeying, I realize I can seize the opportunity to stretch out myself.
    I hand my drum to a friend, signaling that she should carry on. I enjoy the feel of the lion skin I am wearing. I look out through the eyes of the lion head into pleasant gardens. I call to my friend that she should take my picture. The flash goes off like an old-camera.

I rose happy from this lion dream during a nap on this steamy July 4th afternoon.

I shared the dream with my friend. She told me she was napping around the same time and sent me this report of her own experiences:

In my dreams I was talking with you. Nearby hung two of my bear costumes, one brown and one white. I am telling you that I was not wearing either one of them. I explain that I was just dressed as I am in regular street clothes. I am showing you a photograph of a lion and happily explaining to you that I put my arms around him and leaned my head against him so that I could hear his heartbeat. I told you, "I heard the rhythm of the lion's heartbeat."

Dreaming is social as well as individual. I love this simple example of interactive dreaming, with the lion.

P.S. I suppose this dream could also be placed in the Dream Wardrobe Department, which I wrote about recently here.