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

The Art of Memory

 

Dreaming, waking or in between

in any part of the multiverse

in any body, in any life

you are invited to play

a memory game.

Whatever world you are in

the trick is to remember

the other worlds you inhabit

where you are dead and more alive

and the self that is dreaming you

- "The Art of Memory". Poem and photo by Robert Moss

 

The Art of Memory

Dreaming, waking or in between
in any part of the multiverse
in any body, in any life
you are invited to play
a memory game.

Whatever world you are in
the trick is to remember
the other worlds you inhabit
where you are dead and more alive
and the self that is dreaming you.

- Robert  Moss,  “The Art of Memory”

Photo of trees at the Palais-Royal (c) Robert Moss

The Art of Memory

Dreaming, waking or in between

in any part of the multiverse
in any body, in any life
you are invited to play
a memory game.

Whatever world you are in
the trick is to remember
the other worlds you inhabit
where you are dead and more alive
and the self that is dreaming you.

Image: "Artemis Dreaming" by Warxpro

The Art of Memory

Dreaming, waking or in between
in any part of the multiverse
in any body, in any life
you are invited to play
a memory game.

Whatever world you are in
the trick is to remember
the other worlds you inhabit
where you are dead and more alive
and the self that is dreaming you.

Drawing: "Return from Earth Mountain" by R.M. Oil crayons.

Hit or Miss: One More Day in the Air

On my first flight of the day, my rowmate was an off-duty flight attendant. I asked her to tell me the best story from her 16 years in service to the airline we were on. To my mild surprise, she launched into a litany of complaints about her employer. The airline was losing money hand over fist, missing opportunities, buying the wrong equipment.I did not feel this boded well for the trip, and was quite relieved when she arranged herself in a state of suspended animation, donning lined gloves as well as a sleep mask and several blankets.
   Changing planes at Chicago's O'Hare airport, I was fascinated by the behavior of a woman in front of me in the line for my connecting flight. She laid her roller bag flat on the floor, stomped on it, then walked up and down on it. I assumed she was trying to flatten the dumpy bag in order to meet the size restrictions for carry on baggage. This proved to be correct. "It's my stuff!" she asserted, stomping again. "I know what it can take." I remarked that I was glad I had not heard anything squealing or even crunching inside that martyred bag. The symbolism of the incident was rich. May of us try to deal with life's excess baggage in a similar way.
   On my second flight, bound to Seattle, my rowmates were a pleasant mother and daughter traveling to the Pacific Northwest for the first on a mix of business and pleasure. We talked about the Pike Place Market (one of the world's great synchronicity magnets), the Sci-Fi museum, whale watching, ferries to the islands.
   Before we left the gate, the captain spoke on the intercom telling us there was a problem at the ramp. His next announcement was brusque. All passengers would deplane immediately and were asked to stay in the boarding area while the ground staff looked for a replacement plane.
   They found another plane, and as we were boarding I heard the captain explaining what had gone wrong with our original aircraft. As he told it, the operator of a fueling platform wasn't paying attention as he raised the platform. He caught the underside of the fuselage with a corner of the platform and punched a hole in the bottom of the plane.I was glad to have this vivid account, which had the makings of a story. All we had been told officially was that there was a "maintenance issue" with the original aircraft.
    "Did you hear what happened to our first plane?"I asked the flight attendants as I boarded the replacement plane. "Yes,"one said, "but you're not supposed to know about that."
   "It's hard to keep me away from a good story," I riposted.
   We took off ninety minutes late. The man in front of me tried to pay for a drink with an airline credit card which the same airline's credit card reader refused to process. The same thing happened to me. The flight attendant shrugged and said, "This airline is always buying things that don't work."
   I read a little of a novel, then dozed for a bit until the slap of cards being shuffled and dealt carried me on a wave of memory, back to an earlier life, within this life. I was a reporter again, basically under house arrest in the midst of a civil war in an African country. I was playing poker with an assortment of partners who included three very tough French mercenaries. I kept winning. I had won over $4,000 when a British friend whispered to me, "You'd better learn how to lose a few hands or they are going to kill you." I took his advice.
   I thought about how a sound, or a smell, or a taste can take us back to an earlier time, with all of our senses, like Proust's madeleine or the glint of silica in the steps of the Paris metro.
   I turned to my left to see what was going on with cards on this flight. The daughter was playing a kind of solitaire. She explained that it's called Hit or Miss, a game she played again and again on road trips as a kid.
    We shared a little of our lives with each other. She explained that she was an electrical engineer, a specialist in "failure analysis" who did hands-on inspection of faulty microchips (for example) to identify what had gone wrong. She liked the detective element, the forensics, in this line of work. She had recently been laid off, but clearly had skills that were marketable in many places. One sector where she would not look for a job, she said firmly, was the aviation industry. She would prefer not to know any more than she did about what can go wrong on planes.

Francis Ford Coppola, struck by Romanian lightning

Here is a great statement about starting anew:

"The film would have to be about many things - time, memory, second chances, the illusion of the new man, European history, love and using the one we love, language - and I knew that the only sensible way to deal with this dilemma was to become young again, to forget everything I knew and to try to have the mind of a student. To reinvent myself by forgetting I even had any film career at all and instead to dream about having one." 

The voice is that of filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola. He is talking about what was required for him to turn Mircea Eliade's novella Youth Without Youth into a 2007 film with the same title. I am intrigued by how closely Coppola identified with Eliade's semi-autobiographical protagonist. In Youth Without Youth, Dominic Matei is a scholar in his later 60s who is ready to kill himself because he thinks he will never complete his life work, a book on the origin of language. He leaves the provincial town where he lives and teaches Latin and Italian for the capital, Bucharest, with a blue envelope filled with strychnine. Before he can take the poison, he is struck by lightning. The effect is a medical miracle. As he recovers, he has the body of a vigorous young man and is even able to grow a a full set of new teeth. His mental acuity is greatly increased; he absorbs books in a flash.
    When he came on this story, Coppola had not made a film in a decade and was about the same age as Dominic Matei. He took Eliade's story, which fills less than 140 pages but is intricate and complex and brought it to the screen with remarkable fidelity. Themes central to Eliade's life and imagination are limned with great care.
    There is the yearning to escape from linear time. There is the fascination with a second self, depicted as a double, neither dark nor light. 

"The double. He always answers the questions I'm ready to ask him. Like a true guardian angel."

There is Eliade's love of his native Romania, shadowed by the horror of its history in the mid-twentieth century and the horrible choices many Romanians (including the young Eliade) were driven to make. There is the dream of a car that augurs a troubling event in the future. There are perennial issues of love and betrayal.
    There are such small questions as these: What is the price for being given a second life? What happens if you jump from one body to another, through metempsychosis? Is the dreamworld more real than the physical world?
    After another lightning strike, a young Swiss woman named Veronica starts speaking fluent Sanskrit. She seems to be hosting the spirit of a certain Rupini, a seventh-century female ascetic from Central India. A Sanskrit scholar called from Rome to examine her offers the Rupini personality this explanation of how she comes to find herself in a different time and a different world from the one she remembers:

[This world] is not, properly speaking, a dream...but it participates in the illusory nature of dreaming because it is a matter of the future, therefore of time; now, time is par excellence unreal.

    "I'd be interested to know what my chances are now," says Dominic Matei as his lightning-gifted powers reveal their full strength.
    "What kind of chances?" asks the professor who is monitoring him at a secure facility.
    "My chances for continuing the life I recently began, without the risk of reintegrating it into my previous biography." 

     Read Eliade's Portugal Journal from 1941-1945, the only unedited and largely unexpurgated of his many published journals, and you will understand his deep desire, reflected in the words of his character, to escape a "previous biography."
     Eliade died in 1986, two years before the first American edition of Youth Without Youth. The translator was the tireless Mac Linscott Ricketts, whose dedication has brought many of Eliade's books to anglophone readers, including his long novel The Forbidden Forest (where a dream car is a major plot element) and most recently the Portugal Journal (in an edition from one of my own publishers, SUNY Press).
   Coppola's film of "Youth Without Youth" received mixed reviews. But I think Mircea Eliade would be pleased by what Coppola made, and by Tim Roth's brilliant performance as his alter ego and his double. Above all, Eliade would surely applaud Coppola's courage in choosing to reinvent himself in this cause: to set aside his previous career and accomplishments and dream something new into being.

Flitcraft again?

Watching the film version of "Youth Without Youth" again last night, I spotted a possible allusion to the Flitcraft Shift I recently discussed here. When Matei and his lover escape to Malta, she asks what kind of bird she is watching from the terrace. "A Maltese falcon." Of course. This exchange is in the movie, but not in the book.

Quotations are from Mircea Eliade, Youth Without Youth translated by Mac Linscott Ricketts with a Foreword by Francis Ford Coppola. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.



Top photo: Mircea Eliade as an aging professor, in the snow.

Don't have a dream? Make something up

Almost every day, I am asked for guidance by people who have been missing their dreams. "How can I improve my dream recall?" one man asked. "I feel I've been missing the movies?"
    There are many remedies for dream amnesia that are worth a try. They start with making more room for dreams in your life. This means giving yourself time to wake up naturally, and staying in bed for a bit to see what images from the night may come back to you.
    You may want to experiment with personal rituals for dream incubation, which may be as simple as placing an image that speaks of your intention close to your bed or even under your pillow: a postcard of Paris, a beach stone, a photo of a loved one, a written statement about what you would like to dream. And then being ready to record whatever is in your mind whenever you stir from sleep.
     Whether you are a prolific dreamer or a dream amnesiac, you need to be kind to fragments. Maybe all you remember from the night is a sense of color, or a funny word, or a tiny cameo, or the song playing in your head as you woke. Don't blow these fragments a way. Your associations around them may be very revealing. You may be able to use a wisp from an otherwise forgotten dream like the end of a line, to pull back something much bigger that hid from the light of day.
    It will be of great help to you to remember that dreaming is not fundamentally about what happens during sleep. It is about waking up. And you don't have to go to sleep in order to dream. Many of the most important visionary experiences of my life have taken place in the twilight zone of hypnagogia, in "the Place Between Sleep and Awake". Look for the images and adventures you have been missing there, too.
    The world around you will speak to you in the manner of dreams, through the play of synchronicity and pop-up symbols in everyday life, if you will pay attention. And when we make more room for the play of meaningful coincidence, we sometimes manage to renew our connection with the dream source on the other side of the obvious world.
    Persistent cases of dream amnesia are often a symptom of the condition that shamans call soul loss. We are missing our dreams because we have lost a vital part of our soul, a younger self who is the dreamer. In my book Dreaming the Soul Back Home, I offer guidance on how to locate and bring back those lost boys and girls, with all their joy and energy and imagination.
    Having at least one trusted person with whom you can share dreams and personal stories in the right way on any day is a great incentive for dream recall, especially when you make a regular date to meet, whether in person or on the phone or through the shared dream of the internet.
    Even when dreams have flown, needing to bring something like a dream to the breakfast table, the coffee shop - or the workshop - is a tremendous spur to story making.
    In my workshops, I give people a standard homeplay assignment: Set an intention for the night and bring us juicy fresh material in the morning. I will often add this instruction: If you don't remember a dream, bring us a story of some kind, from any part of your life. If necessary, make something up.
    It is wonderful how this works, and grows the practice of imagination, which is at the beating heart of my work, as teacher and as creator.    

   I have long been inspired by the example of Graham Greene, who became one of England's most prolific and engaging novelists. At sixteen, he had a complete nervous breakdown. He ran away from the posh boys school where his father was headmaster, potentially a dreadful scandal. His family packed him off to London to seek a cure by living in the home of one of the first practicing psychoanalysts in Britain.
    Fortunately this proto-shrink had a relaxed and eclectic attitude. For almost three month, the main assignment he gave young Greene was this: Come to my study at 11:00 o'clock every morning and tell me a dream. When Graham did this, he was not given any interpretation; he was merely encouraged to make a series of free-form associations.
    There were days when the adolescent Greene had no dream recall, or no dreams he was willing to tell. On those days, he would make up a story and tell it as a dream. In this way, he gave him imagination a regular workout, and laid the foundation for his long and almost incredible life as a maker and teller of stories.
    So, if you don't have a dream, make something up, and share that in some way, if "only" with your journal. I put he "only" in quotes because your journal may be the very most important place for this kind of sharing.
    Similarly, if you are stumped by any other life situation, make something up.
    I once asked a group of dreamers in a week-long adventure I was leading at the Esalen Institute in California to make a shamanic journey, powered by drumming, with the aim of finding and bringing back a power song. Some people came back with ancient chants in various language. One traveler came back with "Yellow Submarine". A woman from the Midwest came back with a fresh song that became a kind of hymn to the imagination for many of our subsequent groups:

Make it up as you go along
Make it up as you go along
Make it up
Make it up
The way will show the way.

Resources: I offer many games and tricks that will help you to break a dream drought in my book Active Dreaming. I tell the full story of dreaming in Greeneland in The Secret History of Dreaming. I lead many playshops around the world where the practice of imagination is the heart of what we do; please see the events calendar at my website.

Image: René Magritte, "The Lovers"