Walking a Dream

 

Jung said that one of the things he liked to do with a dream was to “circumambulate” it, wander around it, considering it from many angles. He liked to do this while in physical motion, wandering around his house on the lake, through the garden, into the woods.

This is a grand way to get greater perspective on a dream. Walking with a dream for a while, you may find that more of the dream narrative returns to you. You are almost sure to get commentary of some kind from what you notice playing around you, wherever you happen to be going.

You may find that both inner and outer perceptions accomplish what a dreaming people of central Africa say we must do with a dream. Like other cultures that value dreaming, the Yansi of Zaire have special words for dreamwork practice. According to anthropologist Mubuy Mpier, the Yansi share dreams every morning, and the core of their approach to dream exploration is embodied in the term a bumi ndoey, which means to “turn a dream.” The teaching is that we need to turn a dream carefully, as we might lift a great rock, to see what is underneath, on the side that is not initially visible.

It’s not only a matter of letting the world illuminate the dream; it’s a case of letting the dream illumine the world. “We do not always have only to sit with closed eyes, moving around in our heads, to draw closer to an image. We can put it in our pocket and carry it with us throughout days and nights,” as Mary Watkins wrote in Waking Dreams, her passionate appeal for us to let images speak to us and through us. “You not only see different things, you see things differently” when you are seized by poetic imagery, poet and scholar Kathleen Raine observed.

One of the things we want to do when we are walking a dream is to notice when it starts to play out in the world around us. There might be a considerable time gap between the dream and its unfolding in the world, so patience and a decent memory — assisted by your journal! — may be required. When a dream does begin to manifest in external reality, let an alert flash on your inner control panel. In my mind, the default version is: Dream Playing Out Now.

When the dream starts playing out, you have several options. They are not mutually exclusive. If there is no sense of danger and the original dream left you feeling happy and confident, you may be content to let the dream play again and enjoy it with all of your senses. Maybe you’ll find that a sense of “rightness” comes with this: that you have made the right choice, that you are in the right place, that at last you have found the right friend or lover or teacher. If you had a darker sense of the dream — if it involved risk or danger — you will want to be poised to change the script, solve a problem, avoid that accident or that drama at the office.

As a dream plays out in exterior reality, you may notice that its symbolism is now alive in your world. This can become a whole education on how to refresh and renew our perspectives on what is a dream and what is real. We need to take dreams more literally and waking life symbolically.

A dream may be fairly literal in the sense that it reveals something that is happening or will happen in the future in the ordinary world. Yet when the dream is enacted, we see that there is symbolism in the physical event. So a literalistic dream can point to a symbolic play in the outer world. Let’s consider an example.

A man I will call Yves dreamed that his ring finger was cut off in an accident. There was blood and pain, and he saw the splintered bone, and woke with feelings of dread and fear. When he brought the dream to me, I asked very early, as is my practice, whether it was possible that he could lose a finger in a literal accident, maybe cutting or slicing something. Did his work involve such risks? Well, yes, it did. He worked part-time pruning vines on a hillside in southern France, where he lived. He agreed that he would need to be more watchful about how he handled the secateurs.

We proceeded to discuss the symbolic levels of the dream. Hard to miss the significance of losing the ring finger in terms of a relationship. He was not married, but he had a live-in partner and felt her interest had begun to stray. This brought in the Freudian bit. Did the loss of “tall man” — the middle finger — speak of a decline in sexual performance?

Yves walked with his dream. Within the week, it began to play out when he made a false move while working in the vineyard. He only narrowly managed to avoid cutting off his own finger with the pruning shears. It was the ring finger, as in the dream. The partial fulfillment of his terrible dream led him to confront the symbolic issues. He sat down with his partner. She told him, with the sexual candor for which the French can be notable, that she was dissatisfied with his sexual performance and had already taken another lover. They agreed to separate.

Text adapted from Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library. 

 Photo by RM

Rules of Coincidence - Streamlined

 

I have formulated the rules for navigating by synchronicity several times in slightly different ways, for example in my books The Three "Only" Things and Sidewalk Oracles. Playing the game of opening old journals at random, I found a "streamlined version" I recorded in 2008 and I rather like it. Here are the ten rules, in this simple version:

1. Read the signs all around you

2. Put your question to the world

3. Get moving

4. Work with the Library Angel

5. Notice that life rhymes

6. Look for opportunity in every setback

7. Don't be afraid to get lost

8. Notice what's showing through your slip

9. Identify your personal omens

10. Follow your star (the passions of the soul work magic)

Of course I could not resist dipping again and again into that old journal. I found a passage on the joy of watching herons nesting in May, and a poem I wrote on paths taken and untaken in life:

The berries were bluer on the path ahead
but she was drawn to huckleberry red
and familiar landscapes on the more traveled road...

I found my note on Artemidorus' report of a man who dreamed that the god Serapis - a deity of death, dreams and healing - placed him inside his calathos, a crown shaped like a tall food basket, symbolizing abundance and fertility. 

I found notes I had made from Jung's correspondence with the pioneer quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli, including this New Year's declaration:

"In fact, the archetype represents nothing else that the probability of psychical events." [Jung to Paul, January 1, 1951]

I found my note I made from Bascom's Ifa Divination on the dream calling, via his father, of a Yoruba king's diviner who became the most renowned babalawo of his time. The father of Agboubou (died in 1947) told him:

"You were not made to be a farmer; you were made to be a babalawo. I have seen this many times during my dreams."

I found my dream travel reports from that spring and reports of group adventures, fueled and focused by my shamanic drumming, that I led at wonderful retreat centers - to a Blue Lake of Healing, to a scholar-city in the Imaginal Realm, to the astral realm of Luna. I harvested rich material for fresh writing and teaching, and saw some cases where waking events are just now catching up to things dreamed fourteen years ago. 

And I found index cards that were written and played in rounds of my Coincidence Card Game, including this, written in a clear hand I can't now identify:

What is the end, 
what is the beginning?
The cycle continues
Joy sparkles in the snow
while the budding branches
of the tree 
stand, long patient. 

Invoked or uninvoked, gods are present

 

"I was just walking Zeus,” the lady dogwalker greets me on the sidewalk. “He’s in a very good mood today.”
     This is excellent news, even (or especially) if the Zeus in question is a large black lab mix. “God” is “dog” spelled backwards. Anyone who knows anything about gods knows that they don’t stay in one form.
     The mug on my desk has the motto, Vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit. “Invoked or uninvoked, the god is present.” This is the inscription Jung carved over the entrance to his home on Lake Zurich. He found it in a text among the papers of Erasmus it is said to be a Latin version of an oracular message to the Spartans. My mug holds pens and pencils I reach for every day.
     Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous, goes that old saying. This is certainly the view of ancient and indigenous peoples, though they would prefer the plural version. The Stoics maintained that divination is possible because there are gods and they wish to communicate with humans. “If there is divination, there are gods; if there are gods, there is divination,” Cicero summarized the argument in his treatise De divinatione. [1]
     Living in the vicinity of Zurich, city of bankers and cuckoo clocks, and mentored by Freud, a self-declared atheist and skeptic, Jung invented a language of “archetypes” for public use, in place of the old talk of gods and spirits. But the old gods continued to dominate his imagination, and they even exerted a hold on Freud, who surrounded himself with an army of statuettes of deities from all over the ancient world and refused to travel without at least a platoon of these “old and grubby gods”. [2]
     When Jung speaks of archetypes as dynamic forces emerging from the collective unconscious and working effects in the mind and in the world, he is talking about powers that most human cultures have recognized as gods or spirits. In his essay "The Spirit of Psychology", Jung describes an encounter with the archetypes as an experience of the “holy”. He observes that it can be both healing and destructive and that no one who has gone through this experience remains unchanged. The archetypes are not subject to time and space.[3]
     Canadian dream teacher Nance Thacker recalls, “When I was a kid I used to think the gods, goddesses and our ancestors were playing with us, setting up the scenarios and making bets as to what we'd do. Sometimes they'd slip us a little hint about something that was to come or give us a little nudge to remind us that they were there in the form of synchronicities, déjà vu and the like (though I didn't have words for the experience at the time).”
     Perhaps we need to return to the wisdom of the child, and the ancients. While the world around us is alive and spirited, it is also the playground or boxing ring for spirits whose home is in other realities. Some have been worshipped as gods, invoked as angels or feared as demons, and still are by many. A passage in the Puranas informs us that there are forty thousand orders of beings, humanoid to human perception, that are within contact range of humans. They may be friendly, hostile or inimical to humans and human agendas.
     For the ancients, the manifestation of a god did not necessarily remove the need to do some fact-checking or at least get a second opinion. There is a most illuminating story about this in the Odyssey. The hero Odysseus has survived sea monsters and sirens and the wrath of a sea god and is at last on his home island. But he has been away for ten years since the war he went to fight, and almost everyone believes he is dead. His palace is full of brutish and lustful men, suitors vying for the hand of his wife Penelope and with it, his kingdom. Their appetites are laying waste to his livestock, his wine cellar and his female servants.
     At the prompting of his constant guide, who is no less than the goddess Athena, Odysseus has disguised himself in the rags of a beggar, with a funny traveler's hat. He is mocked and scorned by the suitors and even some of his own retainers. Nobody recognizes him. They will find it hard to recognize him even when he shows himself in a different form. His homeland seems stranger to him than the magic realms from which he has returned. He must be asking himself, Which is the dream? He may be wondering whether he is dead.
    He spends a sleepless night, tossing and turning.  The "man of many ways" is seeking a way to expel the suitors who have taken over his home. But they are many and he is one, and even if he finds the way to kill them all, their kinsmen will come to take revenge. The goddess Athena now appears to him in mortal form, "swooping down from the sky in a woman's build and hovering at his head". She wants to know why he is still awake, fretting and exhausting himself. Why does he distrust her when she assures him that he will gain victory that day? Athena promises that "even if fifty bands of mortal fighters closed around us, hot to kill us off in battle" — because she is with him.
     Athena "showered sleep across his eyes", but when Odysseus wakes, on the morning of Apollo's feast day, even the promise of a goddess is not enough. He wants further signs. He speaks to the All-Father, Zeus. "Show me a sign." In fact, Odysseus asks for two signs, "a good omen voiced by someone awake, indoors" and "another sign, outside, from Zeus himself."
     He is answered at once by a great roll of thunder, out of a clear blue sky.
     Then he hears a "lucky word" from a woman grinding grain inside the halls. Hearing thunder from a cloudless sky, the woman recognizes a sign from Zeus. She speaks aloud to the king of the gods:

Sure it's a sign you're showing someone now.
So, poor as I am, grant my prayer as well;
let this day be the last, the last these suitors
bolt their groaning feasts in King Odysseus' house! [4] 

    The twin oracles — from the sky and from overheard speech — harden Odysseus' resolve, and the scene is set for the astonishing slaughter of the suitors under the rain of arrows from the bow that none but the hero (and his son) can bend. In the Fagles version, Book 20 of the Odyssey is given the title "Portents Gather", and it is a good one. Here we see oracles speak in ways the Greeks observed closely and valued highly: through brontomancy, divination by thunder, and by listening for kledons, overheard speech or sound. 
    In the Odyssey, as in ancient Greek society, dreams and visions are the most important mode of divination. Yet our understanding of dreams may be deceptive, as Penelope explains in Book 19, when she speaks of the since-famous gates of ivory and horn. So even when blessed by a direct encounter with a goddess, the hero turns to the world around him for confirmation.
    Consciously or unconsciously, we walk on a kind of mythic edge. Just behind that gauzy veil of ordinary understanding, there are other powers, beings who live in the fifth dimension or dimensions beyond. To them, our lives may be as open as the lives of others would be to us if we could fly over the rooftops — and nobody had a roof on their house and we can look in and see it from every possible angle.
   A kairomancer [5] is always going to be willing to look for the hidden hand in the play of coincidence, and to turn to more than one kind of oracle to check on the exact nature of the game.

Text adapted from Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Picture: Athena counsels Odysseus. From red-figure pelike c.450 B.C. in Staatliche Museen, Berlin.

References

1. Cicero, Cicero on Divination: De Divinatione, Book 1 trans. David Wardle (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 2006) 108.

2. Janine Burke, The Gods of Freud; Sigmund Freud’s Art Collection. (Milford Point NSW: Knopf Australia, 2006)

3. C.G. Jung, "The Spirit of Psychology". English translation of Der Geist der Psychologie in Joseph Campbell (ed) Spirit and Nature: Eranos Yearbook 1954 (Princeton NJ: Princeton Universty Press, 1954). 

4. Odyssey Book 20, lines 128-131 trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Books, 1997)

5. A kairomancer [my coinage] is someone skilled in divination by special Kairos moments of opportunity and synchronicity.

 

Of Friday 13th, practical superstitions, and the other kind

Quick, repeat after me the following word: paraskevidekatriaphobia. This is the learned name for fear of Friday 13th. It doesn't trip off the tongue quite as lightly as triskaidekaphobia, which means fear of the number 13.
    The longer tongue-twister is derived from the Greek words for "Friday", "thirteen", and "fear". But don't blame the ancient Greeks, The term was made up just a century ago, when scientists and psychologists still knew Greek and Latin.

     If you're nervous about Friday 13th, here's my suggested remedy. Try to memorize and repeat 13 times (without looking) the word paraskevidekatriaphobia. By the time you get this right, Friday 13th will be over.

     Friday 13th is one of my favorite days in the calendar, but then I think black cats on my path are a good sign. I am in favor of personal and practical superstitions, ones that are road-tested rather than received as hand-me-downs.  I know that for me, for example, a red-tailed hawk is a reliable messenger and that if it is flying my way or feeding well, things will go well that day.  Friday 13th has been a lucky day for me in the past. But if things  turn out otherwise, I am ready to revise my opinion; I want oracles that deliver.
    It's worth recalling that the Latin word superstitionem  literally means "a standing over." The stem, superstare, means to  "stand over" or "survive." There is a clue here, that in the original sense, superstition might be a survival mechanism. It is an etymological mystery how this root meaning evolves into the modern sense of  “irrational belief”.
    Practical superstitions include personal omens that are road-tested. You can rely on them because you have observed many times that (for example) something good or bad follows an encounter with a friendly black dog, or a red-tailed hawk, or a singing mailman.

    You may notice that some old superstitions and nostrums work for you, maybe because that unseen hand that makes things appear and disappear in the world around us chooses to work with your vocabulary of understanding. This is exactly what goes on in dreams and visions. Our dream producers, and greater powers, give us pictures and puns, dramas and deceptions, according to how we are able to perceive and receive.
     In my book Sidewalk Oracles I offer the following guidance on developing a list of personal omens that work for you:

1.Start by checking on superstitions you may have inherited or picked up from others. For example, that walking under a ladder or having a black cat walk in front or you is bad luck, or that having a bird poop on your head or your car might mean money is coming. Have any of these supposed omens worked for you the way they are supposed to? If so, keep them on your personal list of practical omens. If not, scratch them.

2. Check recurring images or incidents that catch your attention. Some people have strong feelings about numbers, both a repeated digit in one number (11:11, 2.22 etc) and the recurrence of a certain number in many different places and situations in a finite time period. 

3. Keep track of what happens after sightings of this kind. Does a certain kind of incident follow? Does the day turn out well, or badly? Does the repeated number or similar sighting seem only to be saying: Listen up, pay attention.

4. Make a short list of your personal omens, the ones that seem to work, and pay attention to what follows your next sightings.

Don't let superstition wreck the rug

Let's note that superstition isn’t practical if you just get spooked. Here's a cautionary tale, from the life of a great writer. Victor Hugo did not like the number thirteen, especially after what happened to him and his family in what he called “The Terrible Year”, 1871. He left Paris on February 13^th and found himself with thirteen people in a carriage on the train. When he got to Bordeaux, the address of the apartment where his son Charles and his daughter were lodged was 13, Rue de la Corse. In the morning, the bill for the family breakfast at a restaurant was 13 francs. Not long after, his son died, at age 44, of a massive heart attack.

     So we might say that Hugo had reason for fear of the number thirteen, for which the scholarly name, as you now remember, is triskadeiphobia. But the superstition later proved impractical, or at least to have an expiration date. When Hugo moved back to Paris, to a splendid apartment on the Rue de Clichy in Paris (number 11) that became a famous address, the number of the guests for dinner one evening was thirteen. This would not do. So a cab driver was invited to join the party. No doubt unused to all the rich food and drink, the cab driver spoiled the scene by throwing up copiously on an expensive carpet. 

Kaspar the 14th dinner guest

The photo above is of Kaspar, the celebrated black cat of the Savoy Hotel in London. If a dinner party at the hotel turns out to be 13 in number, and there is uneasiness about that, Kaspar is seated at the table as the fourteenth guest and served each course at the same time as the other guests.

Text partly adapted from Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Anubis in the backyard

Thirty years ago, because of a white oak and a red-tailed hawk, I moved to a farm in upstate New York on the edge of traditional Mohawk country. I brought with me my two beloved black dogs, "Sag Harbor mutts" - part Labrador, part German shepherd, larger than either breed. When Kipling's ears stood up, I joked that he looked like Anubis.
     On the night before Halloween that year, he got out on the road and was killed by a passing car. Shaking with grief, I wrapped his huge body in an old blanket, got him in the back of the battered Jeep - where he loved to ride - and drove, with a spade and mattock, up to the top of the hill on the north side of the house. I had often come here with Kipling to watch the rising of the moon. Sobbing, I dug a grave for my boy dog just outside the bounds of the human burial ground where the headstones of the first white settlers leaned at crazy angles.
   I felt that something had been cut out of my heart.
   However, I soon noticed that though Kipling's body was in the ground, he was very much still with us. Driving in the Jeep he loved, I once looked in the rearview mirror and saw him standing up, eager to see where we were. "Sit down, Kipling," I growled, before I realized that, in physical terms, my dog could not be there.
    Others saw him too. His presence was so palpable that when my elderly mother-in-law moved to a downtown street-level apartment, I asked Kipling to watch over her for the first few days, until we were able to get her a watchdog of her own. Late the first night, she heard people she considered to be ne'er-do-wells on the sidewalk in front of her door. Then she heard a dog's deep-chested growl, rising to booming barks. Someone outside said, "Forget it, there's a dog." The curious thing, according to Mary, was that the barking seemed to come from inside her apartment.
    My black dog's energy was with me in other ways, too, long after his death. I finally realized I needed to tell him it was okay to move on. I did this with an impromptu ceremony, barbecuing a steak for him on the deck, near the old loganberry tree. When I spoke words of love and releasing, the wind turned as quick as a kid on Rollerblades, and it sent the smoke skirring straight up the hill to Kipling's burial place.
    Then my black dog started coming in my dreams. He appeared to me, running and hunting as he loved to do, on a mysterious island across a river, When I called to him, he turned but appeared not to be able to see me, as if he and his world were covered by some kind of shrink-wrap that was translucent only from my side.
    Things moved along. His role in my dreams became one of a guide and ally, showing me things I needed to see but might not have noticed without his keen senses. Sometime he came out of a hollow tree, slicked with something sticky, like honey or amniotic fluid or liquid amber. He escorted me on journeys across perilous country, sometimes into realms of the human dead.
   I began to understand why the Egyptians chose a black dog or jackal as a psychopomp, or guide of the soul on the roads between the worlds. Garbed in black, he moves easily through the dark places. His keen senses make him an excellent tracker and enable him to sniff out, and dispose of, dead meat and dead energy that the spirit is meant to leave behind. And of all animals the canids are those that are friendliest to humans.
    After Kipling's sister Brandy died peacefully several years later, I dreamed that they were reunited in their spirit bodies and became one. When a black dog appears in my dreams and shamanic journeys now, I always pay very close attention, because I know I am dealing with Anubis in the Backyard. In the ordinary world, the appearance of a friendly back dog, especially under unusual circumstances, is a very good omen for me, road-tested over decades.

Text adapted from Dreamways of the Iroquois: Honoring the Secret Wishes of the Soul by Robert Moss. Published by Destiny Books. 

Photo: with Kipling and his sister Brandy at the farm in 1986.

Black dog gives me a sign

Prague

I was in high spirits, swinging my black dog stick, as I walked down the cobbled winding street for the first session in the four-day series of adventures in Active Dreaming I am leading at Maitrea in Prague. My spirits rose higher when I saw there was a friendly black dog out for his evening walk right in front of me. I am in favor of personal omens, and for many years the appearance of a friendly black dog has been a happy omen for me. On Týnská ulička, the black dog squatted in front of me and proceeded to pump out a prodigious quantity of poop on the sidewalk,right at my feet. Hmm, did this mean my evening was going to be crappy? I decided to cleave to the traditional belief that shit, as a dream symbol, is auspicious, boding abundance and fortune. In the Greco-Roman world, the belief was related the fact that excrement goes into underworld, from which we get gold and silver. A name for the Lord of the Underworld is Pluto, meaning the Wealthy (not the Disney dog, though there is another canine connection) from which we derive the word "plutocrat." My choice of symbolic frames of reference worked out well. I opened the evening workshop with my fresh story. Czechs have a great, often very earthy, sense of humor, and the sixty people packed into our space loved my dog story. "That touched my poetic intestine," one of them laughed, using a wonderful Czech tongue-in-cheek expression. We received an abundance of gifts as we proceeded to play my Coincidence Card Game, turning a simple deck of index cards into an impromptu oracle that delivered amazingly specific and arousing responses to the questions we posed on life issues. The black dog dump gave me a great way to ensure that we all had our sense of humor in good working order at the start of play. The general title of my series in Prague is "On Wings of Dreams". The black dog episode, and the funny story it gave us, will make it likely that we bring all our discoveries and heady adventures in flying between the worlds back down to solid ground by the close of play.

We spent some time in the class that followed this sidewalk oracle discussing how you come to recognize personal omens, and how - if they are to be practical, rather than "mere" superstitions - you are going to want to watch closely what follows after one of them turns up on the roads of life. I provide guidance on this in my book Sidewalk Oracles, from which I excerpt the following:

Game Rules for Recognizing Personal Omens

1. Start by checking on superstitions you may have inherited or picked up from others. For example,that walking under a ladder or having a black cat walk in front of you is bad luck, or that having a bird poop on your head or your car might mean money is coming. Have any of these supposed omens worked for you the way they are supposed to? If so, keep them on your personal list of practical omens. If not, scratch them.

2. Check recurring images or incidents that catch your attention.

3. Keep track of what happens after sightings of this kind. Does a certain kind of incident follow? Does the day turn out well or badly? Does the repeated number or similar sighting seem only to be saying, “Listen up, pay attention”?

4. Make a short list of your personal omens, the ones that seem to work, and pay attention to what follows your next sightings of them.

In praise of black dogs

In Praise of Black Dogs

I am in favor of personal superstitions.

Not the kind Granma mumbles

Or the stuff of fright-night movies

But the ones that grow on you

When you notice which incidents in a day

Are shadows cast by something ahead

And get to know which clues from the world

Are reliable road signs.

I think a black dog, if friendly,

Is always a good omen

And could be a god traveling in disguise.

Some days you don’t have to figure this out.

At the door of possibility on San Francisco Bay

A black dog crossed my path.

His walker, a ruddy man in a red pixie hat,

Told me the dog’s name is Pollo,

Short for Apollo.

I have a black dog of my own.

His name is Nubie, short for Anubis.

He lives in my dreams

And takes on many bodies in the world.

- from my collection Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories. Published by Excelsior/State University of New York Press

 Photo: with my beloved black dogs, at the farm, in 1986.