A Sufi master transfers an evil destiny from this world to a dream world

Writer and scholar Musharraf Ali Farooqi, whose works include a wonderfully spirited translation of The Adventures of Amir Hamza, alerted me to a most interesting story he discovered in an Arabic manuscript. The story involves a 12th century Persian Sufi master, Abdul Qadir Gilani, and how he is said to have saved the life of a merchant by transferring his evil destiny from this world into a dream world.
    The manuscript is a book of parables; the key passage is quoted from another book titled Behjatul Asrar or Behjatul Israr, attributed to Abdul Qadir Gilani himself.

     Musharraf Farooqi has generously shared his translation:

A merchant named Abul Muzaffar visited his friend Sheikh Hammad and informed him that he was departing to Syria with a merchant caravan, and asked for the Sheikh's prayers for his safe return. The Sheikh told him to postpone his plans for it would have dire consequences. He told him that robbers would rob and kill him.

     As the merchant was returning from the Sheikh with an uneasy mind, he crossed paths with Abdul Qadir Gilani who asked him the reason for his distraught looks. When Abul Muzaffar told him about Sheikh Hammad's prediction, Gilani told him not to worry and to depart for the journey with an easy mind. He assured him that no harm would come to him.

     The merchant followed his advice, departed for Syria as he had planned and returned after turning a good profit.
     During his return journey he misplaced his purse of gold coins when he reached Aleppo and went to sleep with a troubled mind. He dreamed that robbers had attacked the caravan and looted all his possessions and killed him.
     He awoke from the nightmare in terror and found himself safe and also remembered where he had kept the purse. When he returned to Baghdad he wondered whether he should first call on Sheikh Hammad or Abdul Qadir Gilani. Abul Muzaffar met the former in the bazaar.
     The sheikh told him that he should convey his gratitude to Gilani because God had transferred his destined fate, about which he had been warned by Sheikh Hammad, from the world of wakefulness into the world of dreams by Gilani's praying seventy times for him.

Musharraf Farooqi asked: "I wonder what you make of it and if you have read any references about such a transference of destiny from the world of wakefulness into the world of dreams."

My response: I am familiar with apotropaic procedures for averting an unwanted future event, especially one foreseen in dreams, and have actually used some of these myself. While I enjoy the way the author here speaks of sending an evil event from the physical world into a world of dreams, in today's language (as recognized in mainstream physics) we might speak of shifting an event into another parallel universe.

    In this story, what might have happened is revealed in a dream. The attack and murder seem to be taking place, in the dream, at the same time they would have unfolded in physical life, except for Abdul Qadir Gilani's intervention. I have seen dreams of this kind myself.

     However, the process that is most familiar to me is that we foresee an unwanted event in dreams and then take action to avert it. Some cultures have rituals for this. A traditional Iroquois practice was to play-act part of the content of an evil dream in the hope that this partial dramatic enactment would fulfill the dream, while containing its consequences, so it would not have to manifest completely. As described in my Dreamways of the Iroquois such play acting could be very fierce; thus a war chief who had dreamed he was taken by enemies and fire-tortured to death had himself burned with red-hot knives and hatchets.

      I have seen gentler, improvisational versions of such rituals of containment work. So we see that while the Syria-bound merchant's life was supposedly saved by the devout prayers of a saint, there are things that ordinary dreamers can do for themselves to shift a "destiny" from one event track to another.

The feat attributed to the Sufi master becomes more explicable, if no less extraordinary, when we consider current theories in physics of Many Interactive Worlds. Leading edge physicists suggest that we are living right now, in one of numberless parallel universes. They are forever splitting. However, they can also converge and influence each other. If this is how it is, then it is not so hard to imagine that an unwanted event could be deported to a parallel reality. The merchant survived, in what he thought was the real world. He died in world he may have continued to see in his dreams. We are not told what he discovered to be fundamental reality when he died and was able to see that the life just ended was also a dream. 

Illustration: Traditional portrait of Abdul Qadir Gilani, born in Persia in 1078, buried in Baghdad in 1166. Artist unknown.

Your dreams may be glimpses of continuous lives you are leading somewhere else

What is going on in your dreams doesn't necessarily stop when you wake up or switch to a different screen. The action may play on, like episodes in a television series that continue to run after you turn off the set.
It gets more interesting. In dreams, you may check in to a parallel life you are leading somewhere else.
You may be swimming with seals, or looking for the selkie skin that was hidden from you. You might still be living with your ex, doing the things you would be doing if you had never broken up. You might be marching with those warriors in leather armor under the banner of a Bear Goddess. You might be running that bordello in the French Quarter in old New Orleans. You may be up on a high roof top, looking down on your present life in the perspective of the Double on the Balcony, your eternal witness.
When you exit a scene in a life you are leading somewhere else, you may or may not remember where you were and who you are in that other world. When you do remember, you tag what lingers in your mind as a dream.
When you exit a dream that is also a visit to a parallel life, your parallel self continues on its way. While you go about your day, your other self may dream of you.
Jung struggled for clarity on this, and found it late in life. He came to believe that we lead continuous lives in our dreams. Put another way, your dream may be a glimpse of a continuous life you are living somewhere else, a life that goes on whether or not you are tuned to its channel. This is something you can dream on.
You get up in the middle of the night and go the bathroom. When you return to bed, you find the same dream is playing as you were dreaming before, but the action has moved along. A bathroom break may be the start of your awakening.
Sometimes a dream of this kind reaches to you from another realm like a giant fist, pulling you in and back. It was like that for me one night at Big Sur. I was in a bed overlooking the Pacific Ocean, my window open to catch the sea breeze and the marvelous rhythm of the waves breaking on the rocky shore.
In my dreams, I was far away, in Mongolia in a cruel winter, on the eve of World War II. I was engaged in a secret mission, to spy on a team of SS commandos who were seeking to capture the most powerful shamanic artifact in the Central Asia: the spirit banner of Genghis Khan. I stirred from this dream, thrilled and mystified. I might have made it my plan to reenter the dream to try to understand why I was in Mongolia in the 1930s while my body was on the California coast. But no effort on my part was required - unless I had wanted to resist going back.
Again and again, through the whole night, the drama played on. All my senses were engaged. Now in a dual or multiple state of consciousness, I could hear the Pacific breakers and turn my body on the bed, while fully present in the Mongolian adventure in a body that felt no less real. I could taste the blood from a horse's neck I was required to drink in order to survive that terrible winter, in a wilderness of snow. I could smell the rank fear of horses and men. I have no doubt I was there.

Art: René Magritte, "Faraway Looks" (1927)

You walk in many worlds

Part of the secret logic of our lives may be that our paths constantly interweave with those of numberless parallel selves, sometimes converging or even merging, sometimes diverging ever farther. The gifts and failings of these alternate selves — with all the baggage train of their separate lives — may influence us, when our paths converge, in ways that we generally fail to recognize. Yet a sudden afflux of insight or forward-moving energy may be connected with joining up with an alternate and lively self, just as a sour mood of defeat or a series of otherwise inexplicable setbacks may relate to the shadow of a different parallel self, a Sad One or a Dark One.
   It is possible that every choice we make spins off a parallel event track with different outcomes. This is becoming the mainstream view of physics, as in Many Worlds theory. In this multidimensional universe, in our multidimensional self, we are connected to many counterpart personalities living in other times, other probable realities, other dimensions. According to the choices that we make and the dramas that we live, we sometimes come closer to them, and sometimes, in a sense, we step through a portal, we step through an opening between the worlds, we step through an interdimensional membrane, and our issues and our lives and our dramas and our gifts and our karma are joined.
   Then there is our relationship to other personalities, living in the past or future, whose dramas are connected to our own and may all be going on simultaneously. I think of a Mongolian warrior shaman who appeared in a recent dream, standing at a threshold. Behind him is a vast plain—a plain of battle, a plain of struggle. He is wearing a long, heavy coat of skins and furs. His headdress is a helmet with furs. He has bronze shaman’s mirrors and metal charms all over him. I look at this man in my dream, standing in the threshold between his reality and mine. I know that he is living at least eight centuries ago, yet we are connected now. We know each other. We are connected in a multidimensional drama and this may generate events in both our lives that will appear as “chance” to those who cannot find the trans-temporal pattern.
    Such connections may be triggered by travel. You go to a new place, and you encounter the spirits of that land — including personalities that may be part of your own multidimensional story.
    Part of the secret logic of our lives is that we are all connected to counterpart personalities living in other times and other probable universes. Their gifts and challenges can become part of our current stories, not only through linear karma but through the interaction now across time and dimensions. The dramas of past, future or parallel personalities can affect us now. We can help or hinder each other.
     In the model of understanding I have developed, this family of counterpart souls is joined on a higher level by sort of hub personality, an “oversoul”, a higher self within a hierarchy of higher selves going up and up. The choices that you make, the moves that you make, can attract or repel other parts of your larger self.
    The hidden hand suggested by synchronistic events may be that of another personality within our multidimensional family, reaching to us from what we normally perceive as past or future, or from a parallel or other dimension.

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

Drawing of Mongol warrior shaman by Robert Moss

Quantum dreaming

The findings of leading-edge physics have brought us scientific confirmation of the worldview of ancient shamans, mystics and dreamers, who have always known that there is a place beyond surface reality where all things are connected, a place beyond  time where all times are accessible, and that consciousness generates worlds. The new science suggests the following:

-        *  Mind is nonlocal. Consciousness is not confined to the brain or to space and  time.

-        * You  are living, right now, in one of Many Interactive Worlds. You have parallel selves moving through life in parallel worlds.

-        * Time travel  is possible.

-        * There is no firm separation between subject and object in the universe.

-        * At quantum  levels the act of observation plucks one event into manifestation out of a soup of potentialities. This may also be true on a human and  macro scale.

-       * Humans have an innate ability to communicate and influence people and objects across a distance.

-      * Any event that occurs in the universe is immediately available anywhere as information.

-      * Our experience of reality, like our experience of linear time, is a mental construct. Change the construct, and we change our world.

How do we bring all of this together with our lived experience, our human needs, and our hopes for world peace and a gentle upward evolution of our species?

     By mastering the skills of Active Dreaming. Bring these powerful techniques together with ancient wisdom and  new science, and you are ready to practice quantum dreaming, become a full citizen of the multidimensional universe and be present at the creation of your world.

    You will find that you hold the secret of time travel. You can travel into the possible future, scouting challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. You can travel to the past and into parallel world. You will gain first-hand knowledge of the multidimensional universe that science is modeling – and you can use this to heal and  thrive in your everyday life.

     Active Dreaming is a discipline, like yoga, or archaeology, or painting with oils. It offers wild fun and great entertainment, but – like anything else worth doing really well – it requires practice, practice, practice. Active dreamers have an advantage over most people when it comes to putting in the hours required. We can do a lot of practice in our sleep! We are also doing deep practice when we learn to navigate by synchronicity are look at the everyday world around us as a set of dreamlike symbols. 

     The best place to look for the chance of a quantum leap in our contemporary lives is the place where many pioneers of the new science have found their inspiration: the secret laboratory of dreams and half-dream states.

      Wolfgang Pauli, the Nobel laureate who was one of the founders of quantum  physics, declared that dreams were his “secret laboratory”. He demonstrated  this by sharing 1,500 dreams with Carl Jung and his assistant over an 18 month period. Jung, the founder of depth psychology, wrote that all his important work was guided by dreams and that “dreams are the facts from which we must proceed.”

      The dreams you remember are your best portals for travel into the deeper reality, and your royal road to lucid dreaming. A dream is a journey; it is also a place. You went somewhere in your dream, near or far from the fields you know in your regular life. Because you have been to that place, you can find your way there again.

       In dreams, we are time travelers. Released from Newtonian physics and our consensual hallucinations, the dream self travels into past time, future time, and alternate realities. As quantum dreamers using the skills of shamanic journeying and lucid dreaming, we can travel consciously across time to scout the future for ourselves and others, and grow a better future. We draw confidence from the knowledge that the new physics confirms that in the limitless field of nonlocal mind the time is always Now. All probable event tracks – past, future or parallel - are accessible in this moment and may be revised for the better.

       Every night, your dream self goes ahead of your waking self, scouting out challenges and opportunities that lie on the roads ahead. This is part of our human survival kit. Once you wake up to the fact that you dream events before they happen in regular life, you can graduate to the good stuff, which is changing your possible future for the better and becoming co-creator of your reality.

      You are a natural psychic of a high order in your dreams, when you let down your left-brain inhibitions and just do it. You routinely practice precognition, clairvoyance, telepathy. Such powers are sometimes described as examples of ESP. Today scientists are reviving a better term invented by the great Victorian scientist of the unseen, Frederick Myers: supernormal. Scientists like Dean Radin maintain that quantum entanglement means that supernormal phenomena are inevitable. Laboratory research confirms that supernormal abilities are for real, and that the spectrum of possibility extends to retrocausation; reaching back across time to influence events in the past.

       Your dreams may also be glimpses of a continuous life your parallel self is leading in a parallel world, in which you made different choices. Physicist Brian Greene speculates that we all have "endless doppelgangers" leading parallel lives in parallel universes. When we develop the skills of Active Dreaming, you can explore this experientially - and learn how to bring gifts and lessons from a parallel world into this one. Through these excursions, you will grow a personal geography of the multiverse and accumulate first-hand data on the reality of parallel worlds

       Medical science confirms that thoughts are things and living cells respond to consciousness. It gets better, and stranger. Laboratory experiments demonstrate that the nervous system responds to physical events before they take place. If future events can influence the current state of the body, it follows that we may be able to reach back into the “past” to improve our body’s history and performance. This is one of many exciting avenues for quantum healing

       As a time traveler, you can journey to a younger self in her own Now time. As a voice in her mind, you can provide the encouragement and counsel she may need at a time of unbearable pain or challenge. You can be the friend and protector she lacked when her need was great. From this can flow tremendous healing for both of you, for you in your present time and for her in her own time

     The immense body of data on near-death experiences (NDEs) is scientific evidence of the survival of consciousness after the physical body has closed down. If you are now awakened to your own supernormal abilities to step outside time and space, you know that awareness is not confined to the body and brain, and therefore is able to survive death. You are ready to learn that healing and forgiveness are always available across the apparent barrier of death, and to develop your personal geography of the afterlife.

     What happens after death is far too important for us to rely on hand-me-down beliefs and second-hand accounts. We need first-hand knowledge. We get that by visiting places where the dead are alive, and by receiving visitations from those who have departed this world. Both ways of knowing are opened, easily and naturally, in dreams.

     Inner and outer, subjective and objective, interweave and move together at quantum levels, on a human scale, and no doubt everywhere in the universe. We live in an energy field where everything resonates — to a greater or lesser degree — with everything else. The world we inhabit mirrors our thoughts and feelings, and vice versa.

     The physicist and the dream shaman agree: we live in a conscious universe where everything is alive and connected, and mind and matter interweave. To live most fully in this universe, we must learn to navigate by synchronicity, poised to recognize and act in those special Kairos moments when the universe gets personal.

     A kairomancer is someone who is ready to recognize the special moments when synchronicity is at work – and to seize on the revelation or opportunity that is now available. To be a kairomancer, you must be open to new experience, willing to set aside plans, grateful for secret handshakes and surprises, and ready to honor your special moments of revelation by taking appropriate action.

     In the creation story of the Wayuu, the world begins when a god becomes conscious that he is dreaming and is made aware by a spirit of awareness that he can choose what to pluck from a matrix of potentialities to make an earth and the beings that will inhabit it. This is a mythic analog for the observer effect in quantum physics. As quantum dreamers, we can go consciously into the matrix, observe the pulse of possibility, and choose what we will bring into manifestation. 

    As a active dreamer, you can step outside time and move towards the source of the events and circumstances that will be played out in your lives. You can stir the quantum soup of possibilities, and select what will emerge into form and manifestation.

Graphic: Quantum entanglement may operate at human as well as microcosmic levels.

Endless doppelgangers in the multiverse

What would it mean if we could seize hold of the understanding that we are living, right now, in one of many worlds with endless doppelgangers in all the others - and might be on a convergence or collision path with some of them? A physicist and a fantasy writer introduce the theme. It is active dreamers who will contribute most to understanding how we can confirm and apply this model of reality on experiential, not merely speculative, levels.
    Physicist Brian Greene's book The Hidden Reality delivers a scientific model for the idea that we may all have "endless doppelgangers" leading parallel lives in parallel universes. When we develop the skills of Active Dreaming, we are able to explore this experientially - and to learn how to bring gifts and lessons from a parallel world into this one.
     Greene makes frequent use of the term "multiverse." It's worth noting that this term was used - and probably coined - a century ago by the great American philosopher, psychologist and psychic researcher William James. James wrote:

The cosmos is not a closed and harmonious system; it is a battleground of cross-currents and conflicting purposes; it shows itself, with pathetic obviousness, as not a uni- but a multi-verse.

Enter the brilliant and prolific fantasy writer Michael Moorcock, who dropped the hyphen and brough the term "multiverse" into popular usage.In his second Eternal Champion novel, The Sundered Worlds, Moorcock used the word “to describe the idea of the near infinity of co-existing space-time continua each fractionally different, in which certain struggles and stories are played out through eternity, on a vast number of planes of existence.” (I am quoting his introduction to the 1996 omnibus edition of the Eternal Champions series).
      In the very first novel in the series, Moorcock referred to "Ghost Worlds" rather than to the multiverse. Later in his writing career, Moorcock described the original Eternal Champion novel as “the shout of a young man who finds the world a more complicated place and feels, therefore, betrayed.” He also pronounces it “central” to his work, the jumping-off point for many books that followed.
     Despite the flaws in this early work, it has one feature that will appeal to dream travelers. The Eternal Champion opens in the liminal state between waking and sleeping, when “we have most of us had the illusion of hearing voices.”
     In a cold winter bed looking through the window at the moon, the protagonist John Daker, starts hearing a repeated word that sounds like gibberish: Erekosë, Erekosë, Erekosë. Each night he increases his effort to concentrate on this mystery word, his “hallucinations” grow stronger, and then “it seemed I broke free of my body altogether.” As he hangs in darkness, many other names stream through his mind, and the original strange word becomes part of a call: “Erekosë the Champion, where are you?”
     As the adventure unfolds, we come to understand that the hero has received a call from across time and dimensions, to play his part in a drama in the multiverse. The way that the call comes in the twilight state of hypnagogia will ring true for conscious dreamers.
      In the sixth novel in Moorcock's Elric series, Elric: Swords and Roses, the hero risks losing his mind in the complexity of competing timelines:

Now Elric was caught up in a kind of intradimensional hurricane, in which a thousand reverses occurred within his brain at once and he became a thousand other creatures for an instant, and where he lived through more than ten other lives; a fate only minimally different from the one that was familiar to him; and so vast did the multiverse become, so unthinkable, that he began to go mad as he attempted to make sense of just a fraction of what laid siege to his sanity.

But the vision of a seer reassures him, and us, that awakening to the nature of the multiverse can also be the source of great power for the good:

It is our firm belief that we shall one day learn the plan of the entire multiverse and travel at will from Sphere to Sphere, from realm to realm, from world to world, travel through the great clouds of shifting, multicolored stars, the tumbling planets in all their millions, through galaxies that swarm like gnats in a summer garden, and rivers of light--glory beyond glory--pathways of moonbeams between the roaming stars.

Want to know more? Read Brian Greene to satisfy that science-oriented skeptic and speculative thinker inside you. Read Moorcock to enter a fictive multiverse of possibilities. Read my chapter "Soul in the Multiverse" in Dreaming the Soul Back Home for a human model of what it means to live in the many worlds and how dreams can provide first-hand evidence that we are leading continuous lives in other realities. Above all, go dreaming and spend more time - conscious and dreaming - in the twilight zone between sleep and awake, by the techniques you'll find explained in my book Dreamgates.

Image: The Eternal Champion of Michael Moorcock's multiverse, by Gerald Brom.

Soul in the multiverse: serial dreamers and quantum jumpers

Serial dreams, in which we find ourselves returning, again and again, to a life that is not our waking life offer an invitation to gather first-hand data on the possibility that we are leading parallel lives in alternate realities that may also be parallel worlds.

    Some serial dreams may reflect that fact that one or more of our soul-selves is “out there”, leading its own life in an alternate reality that is separated from that or our dominant personality. But serial dreams of this type open windows into even more spacious possibilities.
    While you are living your present life, on your present timeline, co-walkers are walking beside you, near or far, along their own paths, which branched off when they made different choices or took a different turning. There is the parallel self who stayed with your former lover, the white shadow that still works in the old job. If parallel universes are infinite, as some physicists believe, you have a parallel self who chose pancakes instead of eggs for breakfast, and another that has not opened this book.
     When it comes to studying parallel selves who took a radically different life path, developing different skills and relationships and incurring different karma, it is fascinating to consider what happens when two paths start to converge again. Before you are remotely aware that this is happening, you may feel a certain tilt to the day, and notice that you are drawing events and encounters in an unusual way. People praise you or put you down in ways you can't fathom unless you awaken to how you are loaded now with karma a parallel self incurred in adventures you can't know about unless you are following the dream tracks of your multitudinous self.        
     What if it were possible to reach to some of these alternate selves, and share gifts and life experiences with them in mutually supportive ways? We can attempt that through dream reentry. We can also seek to journey back to a crossroads on our previous life road, and seek to locate and then track the  parallel self that made a different choice from what put us where we are now. We can choose to follow the life of this alternate self from that moment of choice all the way up to the present time, make an inventory of what went wrong or right on that other path and then - most importantly - to harvest lessons and gifts from the alternate life trajectory

-   Part of the secret logic of our lives may be that our paths constantly interweave with those of numberless parallel selves, sometimes converging or even merging, sometimes diverging ever farther. The gifts and failings of these alternate selves - with all the baggage train of their separate lives - may influence us, when our paths converge, in ways that we generally fail to recognize. Yet a sudden afflux of insight or forward-moving energy may be connected with joining up with an alternate and lively self, just as a sour mood of defeat or a series of otherwise inexplicable setbacks may relate to the shadow of a different parallel self, a Sad One or a Dark One.

Adapted from Dreaming the Soul Back Home by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

In the dream fitting room, clues to parallel lives

It's happened again. There I was last night, strolling down Jermyn Street in London in a very smart double-breasted gray suit. I haven't worn clothes like these in decades. I haven't put on a tie since my daughter's wedding years ago, and my idea of dress-up is chinos with black sneakers. Yet in the dream, I am my present age, leading the life I might have lived if I had never moved to upstate New York, never started dreaming in the Mohawk language, never become a dream teacher - and remained a bestselling novelist.
    The other Robert's life ain't shabby. He has grown as a writer, specializing in literate spy novels set in the darkest years of the mid-20th century, somewhat akin to Alan Furst. He is a time traveler with a special agenda, using active imagination, along with good research, to enter the lives of people in the era of Hitler and Stalin.
    I have no wish to swap lives with him, but I'm glad to see he is thriving in his own way. If ever I feel a twinge of regret for a path not taken, I can console myself with the knowledge that in another reality the path was taken. 
    I've long been fascinated by dream experiences of parallel lives. These can take many forms. We find ourselves in the situation of a person living in a different time. We seem to be enjoying - or not enjoying - a continuous life in another reality. We slip into the perspective and apparently the bodies of other people (including even members of other species) who may be living in our present world, but are not ourselves.

    The parallel life experiences that intrigue me most are those in which we seem to find ourselves traveling - in an alternate reality - along paths we abandoned in this lifetime, because of choices we made. Contemporary science speculates about the existence of (possibly infinite) parallel universes. In our dreams, we have the ability to gain experiential knowledge of this fascinating field.

    In dreams like the one of the fancy suit, I quite frequently find myself living in a city or a country where I used to live, doing the things I might well be doing had I stayed in a former line of work and a certain life situation. In these dreams, I am my current age, but my life has followed a different track from the one I have taken in my waking reality. There is a "just-so" feeling about these dreams. I return from them thinking, "Well, that's how things might be if I had made a different choice." Sometimes I'm quite relieved that I made the choices I did; sometimes I feel a little tristesse for something or someone left on the "ghost trail" I've seen in my dream ; but most often my feelings are entirely non-judgmental.

    This theme is nicely explored in a novel titled The Post-Birthday World, by Lionel Shriver. Through alternating chapters, we follow alternate event tracks in the life of the heroine, depending on whether she did or did not kiss a man other than her partner on the night of his birthday. That night, her world split. We follow her double life, through those alternating chapters, and the dual narrative is beautifully wrought. At the end of the twin tellings, it's hard to make a value judgment between the alternate life paths. You can't really say that one is better or worse than the other; they are simply different.

    Through a chance encounter that was the product of a missed airline connection, I once met a woman who told me she was living a double life of this kind every night (or every day, depending on your perspective). Every night, she went home to her husband at their comfortable house on an island off the North Carolina coast. They might go to their favorite restaurant, or to the mall or the country club. In the morning, they went off on their separate ways to work. The shocker was this. The man she went to every night in her dreams was a different husband, in a different house in a different island. "Whenever I close my eyes," as she told it, "I'm in a different world. It's the same as this world, but everything is different."
     Under the Many Worlds hypothesis now widely entertained by physicists, it's possible that every choice we make results in the creation of two or more new universes.

     In Parallel Universes theoretical physicist Michio Kaku suggests that another universe may be floating just a millimeter away on a "brane" (membrane) parallel to our own. He explains that we can't see inside it because it exists in hyperspace, beyond the four dimensions of our everyday reality. But in fact, we can and do go there - in dreaming and in the imagination.

    Synchronistic encounters and moments of déjà vu can help to awaken us to the reality of parallel worlds, as explained in my book Sidewalk Oracles. Imaginative fiction helps open our minds to what is possible. In Borges' 1941 novella "The Garden of Forking Paths" a sinologist discovers a manuscript by a Chinese writer where the same tale is recounted in several ways, often contradictory. Time is conceived here as a "garden of forking paths", where things happen in parallel in infinitely branching ways. Borges conveys how all possible outcomes of a given event may take place simultaneously, each one opening a new array of possibilities.

    It's fascinating to speculate on what may happen if parallel selves, and their parallel worlds, bump up against each other. Could we combine the gifts of different life experiences, or would we compete with each other? One approach to this theme is a creaky old Roger Moore movie titled "The Man Who Haunted Himself", hilarious to watch now because of its silly, jingly circa-1970 musical score. An arrogant, power-mad, womanizing s.o.b. finds enlightenment, and becomes softer and kinder to the point where his family, his office and his girlfriend can't figure him out. When his other self - the s.o.b. in the Savile Row pinstripes - turns up, everyone accepts him as the true Roger Moore character, and Mr. Softer and Kinder is shut out of his home and his office.

    Leading-edge physicists recently renamed the Many Worlds hypothesis. They now talk of Many Interactive Worlds, exerting mutual influence that usually escapes human perception. As I walk the streets that parallel Robert is walking, is it possible that our lives begin to converge? Is he dreaming more? Am I more drawn to the period and the themes that fascinate him, and to his genre?

    I take a sideways look at that smartly dressed fellow in London, through the window my dream opened. He's decided to buy a new dress shirt, and is stepping into Turnbull & Asser, no less, with this intention. Price tags are immaterial to him. I'll leave him to it, as I pack old jeans and polo shirts for my trip today, to places in Europe he also visits, on his own track. However, I pop Night Soldiers, a  beautifully written spy novel by Alan Furst, set in eastern Europe in 1934, into my carry-on bag.

Life replays, dreams and parallel timelines

I just devoured a superior novel about time loops, Replay, by Ken Grimwood. Don’t know how I missed this when it was published in 1986. 

[SPOILER ALERT: some plot twists in Replay are disclosed in the next paragraphs.]

Jeff Winston, a radio journalist stuck in a lifeless marriage dies of a heart attack at 43. He finds himself in the body and life of his 18-year-old self in a college dorm, with full memory of the twenty-five years he lived in the freshman’s future. He remembers the horse that won the Kentucky Derby that year – Chateaugay – and makes a killing by betting on it at 11:1. Then he bets his winnings on the Dodgers to shut out the Yankees in all four games of the World Series, at 100:1. A precocious multi-millionaire, he drops out of school and founds a financial empire, investing based on his memories of startups and economic trends. And his life becomes more and more hollow, after he marries a suitable, sterile wife from money – until he reaches 43 and dies again.
    Once again, he’s back in the 18-year-old body, with slight time displacement: he’s now on a movie date with his college girlfriend. He makes different choices, has a happy marriage, cashes in on future knowledge more cautiously – then dies again at 43, this time with the anguish of losing the kids he had.    
    Next, he’s 18 again, once more with some time displacement. This happens again and again. He places different bets, makes different choices, ends up with - or without - different women. Sometimes he tries to stone himself out of awareness of what is going on. Sometimes he tries to save the world, with mixed results.
     Every time he is hurled back to a younger self, he retains full memory of what will happen over the years up to his fatal heart attack, and of the choices he made in his previous time loops. Though the evocation of America in the 1960s and 1970s is brilliant, this repetition could get tedious until there is a major game changer. Jeff meets another "replayer", someone who is experiencing the same time loops. This happens when he is persuaded to go see a movie called Starsea, a box office hit that he realizes could not have been made except by someone who was familiar with movies and cinematic techniques that are still in the future (Star Wars, 2001 etc). He seeks out the writer/producer, Pamela Phillips, and finds his time mate.
    So now the plot thickens as the two replayers fall in love and agree to find each other again in the next time loop, when she’ll be 14 when he becomes 18 again….and then in the time loop after that...until something happens I won't reveal here.
    One of the things they notice is that the parallel lives they are living, in this linear sequence, aren't so much better or worse than each other as simply...different.

   The loopers seek a scientific model of understanding for what is happening to them, and never get one, which may be a good thing for the reader. Dreams are not mentioned in the novel, and I don't know whether Ken Grimwood (who died of a heart attack at 59) was influenced by his own dreams.
    Yet active dreamers may find many familiar elements in this fictional scenario. In dreams, we sometimes find ourselves in scenes from our younger lives, back in the old place, with the old crowd, doing the old things. There may be anomalies. The "old place" is slightly different. The main players in our lives are shifting places. We are striking out in somewhat different directions than we remember.
    It is my impression that in dreams of this kind, we are sometimes walking paths not taken on our current timeline. We are entering the experience of parallel selves as they make different choices in what is "past" time for us but current time for them. We may follow these trails into what is "future" for us but is again current time for these other selves.
    When I took a nap in the midst of reading Replay, I found myself about thirty years younger. In the dream, I discovered a box containing power objects belonging to a notorious English black magician of the early twentieth century. I decided I needed to bury these so they could never be used again, and set off to an Egyptian museum - and then an archaeological site - to accomplish this. Despite sinister elements in the dream, I woke happy and exultant, relishing the adventure I had just had.
    The dream (of which this is only a bald summary) could be approached from many angles, but the one that interests me here is the possibility that I stepped into a life my parallel self is leading thirty years in my past, which is right now for him. Time moves differently in different realities.
    Maybe this is less like "replay" than like new play. It is certainly deep play.

The Google choice: glimpsing a parallel life

Rhinebeck, New York

"Suppose you could go back in time and be present to a younger self in his or her own Now time. You could provide counsel and mentoring in a time of confusion and vulnerability. You could be the invisible friend for that lonely kid. You could go to that wounded younger self who was shamed or violated and assure her, You'll make it through. You'll survive. I promise.
   "You could caution a younger adult self on life choices, since you know far more about the consequences, for yourself and others." 

I am talking to a group of intrepid dream travelers who are preparing to make a journey across time, with the aid of shamanic drumming, into the mind and circumstances of one or more younger selves. I know it is possible to do this. I am quite certain that my sick and lonely boy Robert - the one who had double pneumonia twelve times between the ages of three and eleven - would have had an even harder time making it through without the active support and companionship of a forty-something Robert who learned to fold time in order to be present to him when he most needed a friend. I have described how this worked in The Boy Who Died and Came Back.
    I am getting the group ready to journey upstream, over the rivers of their lives, to one or more points where the intervention of an older self in the mind of a younger self may be helpful, even essential.
    I can't refrain from joking about less enlightened things we might try to do. "You could try to slip your younger self the name of a winning horse. Or tell your younger self to buy Google stock at the IPO, lots of it."
    Most people chuckle, but a very gifted and sensitive dreamer shoots me a look of serious concern. It's okay, I want to tell her. We're not really going to go back in time to push Google stock when the company is going public.

Now I'm drumming, and conscious of our travelers plunging back through time to enter the minds of their younger selves. I sense one of them leaping the waterfall, into the space before birth, to enter the amniotic lake.
    This is going well. I check in on a couple of versions of my younger self. Then I decide, for the heck of it, to get together with my younger adults self on the eve of the Google IPO. I find him on a pleasant beach in the Pacific Northwest. He's aware of the Google offering, and is even talking to a friend about it.
    I find myself pushing him to get in on the IPO. Find out how to order stock - the Google offering is different from most - buy a lot, and keep on buying over the next year. Google is going public at $85 a share. People think that's a high price, but ten years later the stock will be trading at over $550. Take out a home equity loan. Buy lots.
    Uh-oh. I suddenly realize that this suggestion has just caused a split in my personal universe. I see, like a movie running fast-forward, what my life becomes after I buy thousands of shares of Google. I have tons of money and three houses. But all this quick cash has encouraged me to make some disastrous personal choices, and it has seriously deflected me from my calling. I make lots of donations to good causes, but my own sense of a cause has lapsed, and this makes me profoundly discontent, since I am not much good unless I feel I am serving a cause.
    I am still drumming for the group, but I feel reality shimmer. In the post-Google universe, I am not here, in the Pavilion at the Omega Institute, drumming for the group while the rain falls in the green landscape around us. And I don't want that rich but hollow parallel life.
    I will myself fully back to where I have chosen to be, in my present life. When I sound the recall and tell people to move around, wiggle their bodies, and find themselves fully back in physical focus, Now, I do this myself with special vehemence.
    I know, of course, that there really is a post-Google IPO universe where one of my countless parallel selves is living the consequences I saw. That universe no doubt existed before I made my journey back to a point of decision. I am glad that, on my present event track, I made the choice I made then, and again.
    
Now I am walking the dog in early sunlight. There are worse things to do than walk a little dog around a city park. I am not doing this in that post-Google world.

Dreaming the Many Worlds

Physics tells us that it is probable that all of us are living, in this moment, in one of a possibly infinite number of parallel universes, that every move we make (or fail to make) causes our world to split, though we rarely, if ever, notice.

    As a brilliant Princeton postgrad student, Hugh Everett dreamed up the Many Worlds hypothesis. He aspired to reconcile quantum mechanics and classical physics. The basic question he posed was: If an atom can be two places at once, why can’t we? In the quantum field, it seems that a particle can be any number of places at the same time – until the act of observation fixes one quantum event out of a multitude of probable events.
    But our normal experience of physical reality, on the human or macro scale, is quite different. Hugh Everett’s bold proposition was that quantum effects are at work in every part of the universe, on every scale, all the time. We don’t notice this because our universe is constantly splitting. Any move we make, and breathe we take, generates a new universe. In the moment we observe such things – in the quantum field or in a city street – we generate a parallel universe in which a parallel observer is either not looking or looking in a different way. “We live in an infinite number of continually interacting universes,” Everett proposed. “All possible futures really happen.”

     While Everett’s hypothesis was largely ignored in his own time, the Many Worlds theory is approaching a consensus view among many leading-edge physicists today. We find confirmation for it in dreaming., when we wake up to the possibility that dreams in which seem to be leading continuous lives in a different reality may indeed be glimpse of parallel lives we are living in parallel worlds. I help people to explore this consciously. We can sometimes move beyond regret over the past – over people we lost, things we did not do – as we awaken to the possibility that we may be walking all of our possible life roads, right now.
    We can learn to do more. We can learn to reach to our parallel selves and bring gifts and lessons from their lives into our present one. We discover that we can open doors between worlds without need of a subtle knife. This is central to my current work in teaching people to explore multidimensional reality through the techniques of Active Dreaming.
    In a recent workshop, I helped a group to open a portal through which we could journey, with the help of shamanic drumming and focused intention, to explore the situation of parallel selves who made different life choices. I was able to observe parallel Roberts on five distinct event tracks. I returned from my journey feeling profoundly grateful that the choices I made have kept me off three of those roads in my present life.
    Two of the other parallel lives are exciting and rewarding. In one of them, I am a popular author of superior historical spy novels, traveling all over the world in the course of my research and readings, writing better and better. In another life, I am a babalawo of Ifa, a high divination priest of the Yoruba tradition, living in the northeast of Brazil.
    I recognize that I slip in and out of these lives, and many more, in dreams. Our dreams are sometimes memories of continuous lives lived in parallel realities.
    When we shared travel reports in that workshop, we found that nearly everyone had brought back important gifts. One of them was often a sense of closure, through the understanding that making a different life choice would not have resulted in a happier or more desirable outcome. Another gift was the understanding that we can reach to our parallel selves and borrow their knowledge and their skill sets. Then there was the vivid awareness that we don't need to let ourselves be consumed by regrets over lives we might have lived when our parallel selves are leading all of those lives, right now, on the countless roads of the multiverse.

photos (c) Robert Moss

Losing the Kafe Kolonial

Prague

It's happened again. I have lost the Kafe Kolonial. I can't believe it. I have been to this genial establishment at least a dozen times. I was there for lunch today. The place is only seven or eight blocks from the room in the Old Town where I am staying, and it is just across ŠirokáStreet from one of Prague's most famous and saddest landmarks, the Old Jewish Cemetery. The decor is all bicycles, including penny farthings and other curiosities from an earlier era. The specialities of the house are all fine accompaniments for Czech pilsner.
    When my friends suggested a walk and a nightcap after dinner, it seemed easy and natural to come here. Yet as I led them down ritzy Paris Street, where the Devil not only wears Prada but Jimmy Choo, Dior, Hermes and a dozen other fancy labels, I became uneasily aware that I was once again about to lose the Kafe Kolonial. I realized I had turned a block too early and tried to make a course correction. And was soon hopelessly confused about where to go.
   With a woman's decisive willingness to see directions, my friend Ana strode into another restaurant to seek guidance while her husband ans I loitered outside. I was puzzled to see the restaurant hostess summon one waiter, then another to confer with her. Why all this discussion? Surely the Kafe was only a couple of blocks from here and anyone in the restaurant trade would know it.
   Ana came out wearing a deep frown. "They say the Kafe Kolonial doesn't exist."
   "That's ridiculous. I had lunch there today. They put more food than I though possible on a skewer."
   I went inside to confront the waiters.
   "You told my friend there is no Kafe Kolonial."
   "That is correct," said a very tall, solemn waiter.
   "But I had lunch there today."
   "That is impossible."   
 

  "I can show you a picture." I fumbled to open the photo archive on my smartphone to find the photo I took of that skewer.
   "The Kafe Kolonial closed five years ago. I used to work there."
   He was not interested in a picture of my lunch.
   "Then perhaps you can tell me where the Kafe Kolonial used to be."
   He began to turn away, then the other waiter raised an eyebrow and he turned back. He looked ready to spit.
   "Turn right at the corner and go straight ahead," he snapped. "But you will not find the Kafe Kolonial. What is there is the Kolonial and it is nothing like the Kafe Kolonial. You should avoid that place."
    My friends and I had distinctly eerie sensations as we followed these hard-to-extract directions.
    There, visible from the corner through light rain, was the sign Kolonial.
    I felt the shiver that sometimes comes when you sense that you are switching worlds. i could swear that on all my previous visits the sign carried two words, Kafe Kolonial.
    Had I just jumped from one parallel universe to another? Did I dream lunch at the Kafe Kolonial, or was I dreaming now? Was I dead at lunch - I was certainly given enough food to lay you flat - or in the afterlife now?
    We took a table in the smoky side of the Kolonial. My friend Costin looked at the penny farthing bicycle in the window behind him and said, "Big wheel, little wheel. It is my dream from last night.

The sadness of the man of Many Worlds

I am thinking about the sadness of Hugh Everett III. As a brilliant Princeton postgrad student, he dreamed up the Many Worlds hypothesis, with the help of “a few sloshes of sherry” and brainy joshing from his contemporaries. He aspired to reconcile quantum mechanics and classical physics. The basic question he posed was: If an atom can be two places at once, why can’t we?
    In the quantum field, it seems that a particle can be any number of places at the same time – until the act of observation fixes one quantum event out of a multitude of probable events. But our normal experience of physical reality, on the human or macro scale, is quite different. Hugh Everett’s bold proposition was that quantum effects are at work in every part of the universe, on every scale, all the time. We don’t notice this because our universe is constantly splitting. Any move we make, any breath we take, generates a new universe. In the moment we observe such things – in the quantum field or in a city street – we generate a parallel universe in which a parallel observer is either not looking or looking in a different way.
    “We live in an infinite number of continually interacting universes,” Everett proposed. “All possible futures really happen.”
     His 1957 dissertation, advancing this thesis through very hard mathematics, was a huge challenge to the greatest minds in physics. Niels Bohr dismissed it. Many top scientists in that era were reluctant to entertain the idea that quantum weirdness might be going on everywhere, and in every aspect of our lives.
    Finding himself rejected, Everett applied his talents to work on advance weapons targeting for the Pentagon and then to making some money as a defense contractor. He was subject to deep recurring bouts of depression. He smoked three packs of cigarettes a day, drank like a fish, and died from a heart attack at 51. In a NOVA television program, his son Mark – the lead singer for the rock group the Eels – goes in search of his emotionally distant, almost unknown father, and we feel the full sadness of a beautiful mind that allowed its essential work to be interrupted by rejection.
    The first time Mark could recall ever touching his father – he said on camera – was when he found him dead in bed. Hugh Everett was an atheist who did not believe in the survival of the soul, though he did believe that you can die in any number of parallel universes and go on living in any number of other parallel universes, a kind of quantum longevity, if not immortality. He directed that his remains should be thrown on the trash. After keeping his ashes in a file cabinet for a few years, his widow followed his instructions.
     His sadness, and his burial wishes, were communicable. After several attempts at suicide, his daughter Elizabeth succeeded in killing herself with an overdose of sleeping pills fifteen year after his death. She said in her suicide note that she wished her ashes to be thrown out with the garbage so that she might "end up in the correct parallel universe to meet up w[ith] Daddy".
     Today, the Many Worlds theory has a huge following in the scientific community, and talk of parallel universes endlessly splitting from each other is commonplace. Chances are you’ll find a television documentary on this on some channel any given night.
    Hugh Everett III, the founder of the theory, fell victim to a yawning gap between theory and practice. He saw the multiverse as a fantastic garden of endlessly forking paths, but appears never to have explored the possibility that we can move from one path to another. The concept of jumping between parallel worlds has been popularized in recent films and television series, and in fiction. Would your life be altogether different is you missed – or caught – that subway train? That is brilliantly explored in the movie “Sliding Doors.” Could intentional travel between parallel universes threaten the survival of one or both? That is one of the questions dramatized in the excellent scifi series “Fringe”. Can quantum leaps, on the human scale, take you across time as well as space, and are there enforcers who try to limit this kind of thing and keep the world oblivious to it? These are themes that are brilliantly explored in Ian McDonald’s novel Brasyl, set in Brazil in the present, in the 1700s, in the 2030s and in spaces in between.
    I am still thinking about the sadness of that beautiful mind known as Hugh Everett.
    In one or many of the parallel universes he envisioned, he was not struck down by drink and depression at 51. He found ways to recruit the supporters he needed to spur him to go forward with his work on the Many Worlds. He experimented with ways to slip between parallel life tracks and bring together his own best qualities, as developed in other universes. And that changed everything, again and again and again.
    A couple of nights ago, I lay down with such thoughts in my mind. I made it my intention to reach to one of more parallel selves who were not suffering the severe cold symptoms and fatigue I had been experiencing since rushing to England and back in three days over New Years for the funeral of a close friend.
    I woke a couple of hours later, full of juice, with memories of exciting travels across Central Europe, from Rusava in the Czech Republic all the way to Ufa, deep in Russia. I traveled across time as well as space. I met characters from the era of World War II. I came back charged with energy and excitement.
    I have not been to any of these places in my current universe, though I do teach and travel in Eastern Europe, including the Czech Republic. I did once write an historical spy novel, Carnival of Spies, involving the Comintern and intrigues (in Germany and Brazil) in the 1930s. I planned to write a sequel involving secret operations during World War II – but then I made radical changes in my life, and that scenario, and much else, was consigned to parallel realities.
    I was curious to understand what exactly Parallel Robert was doing in Ufa? Was that

really Joe Stalin at the big wooden table in the restaurant, talking about meat and bread? Dreams give us research assignments. I discovered things about Ufa I did not need to know, such as that today it is the capital of the Republic of Bashkortostan, a new word for me. Then I noticed that in 1941, Ufa became the headquarters of the Comintern after its staff was evacuated from Moscow by train. So it is a place that Parallel Robert, the Globetrotting Spy Novelist, might well have considered for a scene in a book.
     I think my intention for dreaming was answered, exactly though unexpectedly. I entered the parallel life and imagination of a Robert who remained a bestselling novelist, researching and writing a series of pretty good historical espionage novels. He seemed to be really enjoying himself doing that stuff, and some of his excitement stayed with me, making a bright start to the day.
    I wish Hugh Everett had learned this trick, rather than accepting that when a parallel universe splits off, it is no longer accessible. But then, in who knows how many parallel universes, he is not only a quantum mechanic, but a quantum pilot.

-
In this multidimensional universe, we are connected to many counterpart personalities living in other times, other probable realities, other dimensions. According to the choices that we make and the dramas that we live, we sometimes come closer to them. Sometimes we step through an opening between the worlds, an interdimensional membrane, and our parallel lives, with their issues and their gifts and their karma, are joined.
    Active Dreaming gives us tools to explore these themes experientially and bring gifts and lessons from parallel realities to help us in our everyday lives.