The Death's Head Dominatrix Joins Me on the Plane

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Of course, you do," I said. 

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

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

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

"You are going to tell me."

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

 "You’re going to tell me that too."

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

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

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

"This Homer," the dominatrix introduced her companion. 

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

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

"A bowling alley?"

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

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

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

Photos by RM

 

Reclaiming our essential stories

We live by stories. Our first and best teachers, in our lives and in the evolution of our kind, instruct and inspire by telling stories. Story is our shortest route to the meaning of things, and our easiest way to remember and carry the meaning we discover.  A good story lives inside and outside time, and gives us keys to a world of truth beyond the world of fact.

     Consciously or unconsciously, our lives are directed by stories. If we are not aware that we are living a story, it's likely we are stuck inside a narrow and constricted one, a story bound tight around us by other people's definitions and expectations. When we reach, consciously, for a bigger life story, we put ourselves in touch with tremendous sources of healing, creativity and courage. 

     How do we find the bigger story in our lives? The answer is easier than we might think. The First People of my native Australia say that the big stories are hunting the right people to tell them.. All we need do is put ourselves in places where we can be found.

    J.M.G. Clézio dedicated his Nobel prize for literature  to a storyteller of the rainforest of Darien, a woman who roamed from house to house spinning magic words in return for a meal or a drink. In his acceptance speech, Le Clézio painted a vivid word-picture of Elvira: “I quickly realized that she was a great artist, in the best sense of the term. The timbre of her voice, the rhythm of her hands tapping against her chest, against her heavy necklaces of silver coins, and above all the air of possession which illuminated her face and her gaze, a sort of measured, rhythmic trance, exerted a power over all those who were present. To the simple framework of her myths...she added her own story, her life of wandering, her loves, the betrayals and suffering, the intense joy of carnal love, the sting of jealousy, her fear of growing old, of dying. She was poetry in action, ancient theatre, and the most contemporary of novels all at the same time.”
   Is it too late to hope that we can bring back storytelling in our modern urban consumer society? I think not. As we practice telling our dreams and the stories of our life experiences simply and vividly we become bards and griots and storytellers without labor. The first step in the Lightning Dreamwork game requires us to encourage whoever is ready to tell a dream (or, for that matter, any life experience) to tell it simply and clearly, without background or analysis or interruption or reading from notes. We give undivided attention for the duration of the telling, and require the teller not to miss the opportunity to claim her audience.

“The world can’t end,” writes Michael Meade in The World Behind the World, “unless it runs out of stories. For this world is made of stories, each tale a part of an eternal drama being told from beginning to end over and over again. As long as all the stories don’t come to an end the world will continue.” 

   Scheherezade tells stories so she may live through another night, and tells them so well she turns a monstrous tyrant into a decent human being.
   In Healing Fictions, James Hillman explains how effective therapy is an exercise in storytelling. “Psychoanalysis is a work of imaginative tellings in the realm of poesis, which means simply “making”, and which I take to mean the making of imagination into words. Our work more specifically belongs to the rhetoric of poesis, by which I mean the persuasive power of imagining in words, an artfulness in in speaking and hearing, writing and reading.” 

    True shamans have known this for millennia.The shamans who interest me are one who heal bodies and souls, and our experience of the world, by telling better stories about them
   The Irish storyteller beautifully evoked by Ruth Sawyer in The Way of the Storyteller  tells stories so “each may find something for which his soul had cried out.” Or “to keep the heart warm in a country far from home.”

   You must know your story and tell your story and have your story received. This is a central teaching of the Sefer Yetzirah, a seminal text of Kabbalah.
    Learn to do that, and you can survive the worst nightmares of history, and bring heart and healing to others.

Text adapted from Active Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Art: "Grandfather Tells a Story" by Albert Anker (1884)

Make dream sharing a daily social activity

One of the main reasons so many in our society are suffering from a dream drought is that we are not encouraged to share dreams and often don't find the experience rewarding when we do so. The simple four-step Lightning Dreamwork process, which I invented in 2000, gives us a way of sharing dreams that is fun and fast and orients us to give helpful, non-intrusive feedback and guide each other towards action to embody the creative and healing energy of dreams and apply their guidance. Once you have mastered and internalized this technique, you can do it just about anywhere, with just about anyone.
    If you are playing dream helper, you need to lead the person who is sharing with you through these four simple steps:

1. Get the story, with a title
Encourage the person sharing to tell their experience as simply and clearly as possible, avoiding too much autobiography or self-interpretation. We claim real power when we learn to tell our stories so that others want to hear us, and sharing dream reports this way is wonderful practice. A story needs a title, and so much from a dream pops into focus and perspective when we give it one.

2. Ask three essential questions
The first is about feelings, especially first feelings after the dream, which are the first and often the best indicators of whether the material is urgent or not, negative or positive, personal or less so. The second question is the reality check and it has two aspects. Ask what the dreamer recognizes from the dream in the rest of their life (including the life of imagination) and also whether it is possible the the dream will manifest in the future in some way, literally or symbolically. Next, ask the dreamer: What do you want to know?

3. Play the "If it were my dream" game
Now you are ready to offer feedback. It's very important that you should do this the right way. Your purpose is not to presume to tell another person what their dream (or their life) means. Your role is ti help the dreamer become author of meaning for their own dream, and their own life. You are free to offer any associations you like - including episodes from your own dreams and your own life that come to mind in the presence of the new dream that is being shared. You can take a Freudian view, or a Jungian view, or a transpersonal or shamanic view. However, you will offer your feedback by saying "if it were my dream", owning your own projections. 

4. Get an action plan
Dreams require action! If we don't do something with our dreams we do not dream well. The appropriate action may range from shamanic shopping - getting the red shoes or the stuffed giraffe featured in a dream - to doing prep for the job interview rehearsed in a dream, to writing, drawing or crafting from a dream, to going back inside a dream (through the dream reentry technique) to gather more information and possibly dream the dream onward to healing and resolution. A dream may of course require much tending. You may find yourself walking with a certain dream for days or years before it yields all of its meaning in the light of subsequent events and discoveries. However, the time is always Now, and it's good to do something with a dream right away. For temporary closure in dream sharing, you can ask the dreamer to come up with a bumper sticker, a slogan or banner that harvests something from the dream as a forward-moving statement.

But what do you do if you are dealing with a person - maybe yourself - who maintains that they don't remember dreams, from the night before or from the last three decades? You can start by suggesting, gently but firmly, that it's simply not true that they have nothing from the night. Their dreams may have left a wisp or a crumb, a sense of color, a snatch of a song. Even when no content whatsoever is recalled, there are thoughts, feelings, sensations that linger. We all have dream hangovers even when we don't recall what caused them. Such elements may give you the seeds of a conversation in which you'll find yourself playing the Lightning game.
    Another approach with the dream amnesiac is to ask them to pull up the last dream they remember, maybe from many years before, even as far back as early childhood, when something may have scared them so much in the night that - in the absence of adult support and understanding - they scared their dreams away. Recalling, tending and reentering an "old" dream of this kind can amount to trans-temporal healing, and result in soul recovery: the recovery of the magical child, the beautiful bright dreamer who went missing from a life when the world seemed too scary.
     Of course, even prolific dream recallers have dry spells. When I sit down to breakfast with a circle of dreamers, as is often the case at residential retreats, people are made to realize, very quickly, that a story is expected of them. Saying "I got nuttin" is just not acceptable. If you do not have a dream, you can bring a story anyway - from your life memories or your imagination.
     I think of Graham Greene, who became one of England's best-loved and most prolific novelists and literary entertainers. His appetite for dreams and stories was trained over the three months he was required to spend, at age 16, in the home of one of the first shrinks in London. Graham had suffered a nervous breakdown at the fancy boys' school where his father was headmaster, and had to be removed from view while he recovered. His treatment was simply this: the shrink required Graham to appear in his study at 11 a.m. every day, ready to deliver a dream report. There were days when Graham did not remember a dream, so he developed the ruse of making something up that sounded like a dream. So he acquired the gift of story, which can be the gift of making worlds.
     So we come to my plea for action, the kind of action through which we contribute to the rebirth of a dreaming society, person by person.
     Make it your practice to find someone with whom you can share a dream or story by our Lightning process every day. If you can't do this face to face, do it by phone, by Skype, by email or text, or within a private social media forum like the "secret" Facebook pages where members of my trainings and online courses are having the best time sharing dreams and life experiences.
     Your dreams are social as well as individual, personal as well as transpersonal. When you make sharing dreams a regular social activity, you'll find you bring joy and juice to any day, grow wonderful deepening friendships, and harvest essential guidance for soul and survival, for navigating your life roads in this world and the many worlds.


For much more on the Lightning Dreamwork game, see my book Active Dreaming. For the application of this process to experiences from everyday life, see Sidewalk Oracles. On trans-temporal healing with the child self, see Dreaming the Soul Back Home. For a full account of Graham Greene's dream life, see The Secret History of Dreaming.

Photo by RM:  "A wonderful nine-yer-old dreamer shares a dream with our dreaming family on Gore Mountain".

A one-liner a day keeps verbal diarrhea away

I have been asked for guidance, yet again, on keeping it simple. "How can I eliminate superfluous clutter and say what I need to say in fewer and better words?"
    If it is a matter of getting your story together in speaking to others, our Lightning (or Lightening) process is excellent practice. You take turns with a friend or a group to tell personal experiences, which may be dreams or anything else that has story value. If it is your turn to speak, you make it your game to tell your story as simply and clearly as possible. You leave out unnecessary background. You give your story a title. You are conscious of your need to hold the attention of your listeners, and they accept their need to listen closely and then to offer helpful feedback.
    When it comes to writing, here are a couple of daily games I play that you may find helpful.

     Compress the essence of anything you wish to say so it will fit on one side of a small (3"x 5") index card. We do this very often in my workshops and it is amazing what focus it brings. As  a sample of what is possible through the "index card" process, consider this account of how we harvested remarkable tales in miniature from a deep group journey in a workshop I led in the mountains of Romania. Everything here, apart from my introduction, is a selection of narratives written on one side of a small index card.

      Keep a journal and on any day you can, harvest a one-liner from your experiences, reflections and reading. I do this all the time. I re-write some of my one liners on index cards and keep them in a box I use as a personal oracle, dipping in to pull out a thought for the day. I did this just now, for purposes of illustration, and pulled out the following one-liners:

Don't pray against, pray for.

Creating is healing,

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say and say it hot.

I borrowed that last one from D.H. Lawrence. It is exquisitely relevant to our theme here.

Hone the craft of creating your own one-liners, and you may become an aphorist, a maker of aphorisms, those witty, pithy one-liners that distill something of the human condition. Mark Twain is the American master of this art, forever crackling with snappers and astonishers. I celebrate the art of making aphorisms here.

     Coming up with a one-liner can help you to draw the moral from a life experience, or a message for action. In dreamwork, producing a bumper sticker or action phrase from a dream narrative and any subsequent exploration gives you a way to carry energy and direction from the dream.
     Play like this and you have a chance to entertain the spirits. The Inuits say we need to entertain the spirits by offering them "fresh words", which is grand advice.

    The heart of the matter is this:

The more you need to say, the more need to say it in fewer words.

Let me say that again, in fresh words:

A one-liner a day keeps verbal diarrhea away.

You don't give a haircut to a lion

I spent the whole night, while my body slept, helping people to find and shape stories. With some, this meant helping them to find their voice, to speak in front of others, free of text, and to release their stories from the clutter of biography and explanation. First the adventure, later the discussion. With others, it meant getting the right words to line up together on a page. So many pages! Some beautiful creamy art paper, others veined like parchment, some ruled in composition books, others quite unruly.
    Some of the stories came from dreams. Some grew from the slightest wisp, the merest snippet from the night. Some were necklace stories, strung like bright beads on a string of incidents from the speaking land: the caw of that crow, the fall of that card, the vanity plate that read Camelot. Some were the work of literary privateers, given permission to steal a little from others. Some were inspired by shelf elves who arranged for a certain book to turn up or vanish at a creative moment.
   The unstoppable stories were the ones that had been seeking the teller for years, even a whole lifetime. I helped people shape these wild ones too, but only a little. You don’t give a haircut to a lion.

When I left my bed to walk my dog in the morning sunlight, I felt deeply satisfied, with the kind of satisfaction that comes when you have done a job that you chose to do as well as you can. Helping people find their best stories, and tell them so well that others want to hear them, is one of my greatest pleasures. And one of the greatest gifts of the Active Dreaming methods I have created is that we are forever encouraging each other to become both storytellers and story makers.

Lion Man on brown bag (c) Robert Moss

Living by story

Australian Aborigines say that the Big stories are hunting the right people to tell them, like predators stalking in the bush. The trick is to put ourselves in a place where the Big stories can find us.

All of us are living a story. If we don't know what it is, it is likely to be a little story, a limiting one, woven from past disappointments and stitched tight by the people who are forever telling us who we are and what we can and cannot accomplish. If we fail to define ourselves, we let ourselves be defined by others.

As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre observes in After Virtue, "We are story-telling animals who must ask ourselves, "of what story or stories do I find myself a part?' in order to answer the question, 'what am I to do?'"

When we are seized by the Big story, we step beyond limiting definitions and beliefs. Great healing becomes available because we can now draw on the immense energy that becomes available when we know we are serving a larger purpose. We gain courage and stamina to get through the ups and downs of everyday life, aware that we are acting in a deeper drama.

This summer, I'll lead a weekend workshop devoted to "The Healing Power of Story" in a marvelous octagon building in the midst of blueberry fields in Ashton, Maryland. We'll explore and perform some of the Big stories from myth and literature that can heal and empower: the Japanese story of the sun goddess who hid her light because she was abused, and how she was coaxed back; the Gnostic story of the forgetful envoy who was sent into this world on a vital mission but forgot what it was; Dante's story of how we approach our truest life teacher by knocking on the heart. From dreams and shared journeys, spontaneous theater and entertainments, we'll harvest personal stories, charged with energy and meaning, in order to become the authors of our own life scripts.

The image is of the torchlit path to the meeting yurt at one of my favorite retreat centers, Mosswood Hollow in Duvall WA (think Wind in the Willows in the midst of the evergreen forests of the Pacific Northwest). I am leading my Dream Teacher Training here in July and a weekend of Imaginal Healing in October.

Wake up and smell the stories

"I heard something scratching at my door in the middle of the night," the young man in the front row began. "When I opened the door, I found my dead cat, the one that died a couple of months ago. Then I noticed my house had four stories, which is a couple more than it ordinarily has. I was wondering what was going on in those extra stories up top. Then I heard my dad's voice. He was calling to me, 'Hurry up! You don't want to miss the music!'"
-

"How did you feel when you woke up?" I asked. It's always my first question, of any dream.
-

"Kind of nervous. My dad passed last spring, and I didn't know what he meant."

-

"Have you had any previous contact with your father, since he passed?"
-

"Oh sure. I feel like he's been dealing with a lot of stuff, and I've been helping."
-

"How did your father sound, when he spoke about the music?"
-

"He sounded real happy. Like something happy was going on."

-

"If it were my dream, I said carefully, I might think that my father's discovered something really good, and he wants to share it with me. Maybe he wants to show me that he's found his way, in his new life. If it were my dream, I might want to see if I could have a proper conversation with my dad. I want to know the rest of our story. Those extra levels to the house give me the sense of space and possibility. I might want to light a candle for dad, and put out something personal pertaining to him - like photo - and maybe something to eat or drink that he would enjoy, and see whether I can just start up a dialogue. Could you give that a try?"
-

"Sure," the young man nodded. "I like the idea of getting the rest of the story."
-

I looked around the group. "Would anyone else like to share a dream?" A few hands went up. This was a group of newbies, gathered for an evening program at an adult learning center. For many of them, this was the first time they had told a dream in front of a group. For some of them, this was the first time they had talked about a dream in their whole adult lives.
-

"I dreamed I went to this very pricey restaurant," an older woman began. "I started sipping a glass of wine and the glass broke in my teeth and the shards of glass were inside my mouth, stabbing me. I was trying to tell people what had happened, and that I needed help., but they wouldn't believe me, even though there was blood everywhere."
-

"How did you feel when you woke up?"
-

"I couldn't understand why they wouldn't believe me."
-

"Yes, and how did you feel about that?"
-

"It's hard to say. Slightly disturbed."
-

"But you didn't feel frightened, for example? Or disgusted."

-

"Nothing that strong."
-

"Well, that's interesting. That sets a little distance. Sometimes it's revealing that we don't have strong feelings around a dream. Reality check - could you go to a restaurant like that in the future?" "Sure." "Is it possible this could involve an occasion, maybe with family, when there is some conflict brewing and it's difficult to say your piece?" "That's entirely possible."

"If it were my dream," I pursued, "I'd think about the broken glass in terms of emotional conflicts. I'd think about my need to express myself in such a way that others can hear me and believe me, on whatever I need to get out."
-

This resonated deeply with the dreamer. After more discussion, I asked her for an action plan. She said she would start by keeping a journal and getting practice that way in saying what she needed to say. "Can you come up with a one-liner that moves in that direction?" She produced one right away, "I'm going to tell my story."

This threw my mind back to something I had seen yesterday morning in my local paper, at the bottom of the local news page. It was an ad for coffee. Across a landscape of green mountains scrolled the following text: "I realized today's the day I will tell my story."

The ability to tell our story - and in doing so, choose the stories we are living - is not only a creative gift, it is a vital survival tool. We live by stories. If we don't undertand that, we are probably living inside old, unacknowledged stories that may cramp and confine us, stories passed down through families or imposed on us by others. A grand way to get into the practice of telling our own stories is to share our dreams, large and small.

-

Another woman in the group began, slightly diffident, to talk about a recurring dream from which she was always relieved to wake up. "I have a baby, maybe eighteen months old, and I'm supposed to take care of her. I want to get away because I don't know who she is."

-

When I asked some questions, she added, "The baby is fine. I'm the one who's not fine."

-

"If it were my dream, I might wonder whether what I running from was actually a part of myself. I might want to sit down quietly, at the right time, and take a closer look at that very young child and see whether she is a very young part of me that separated out for some reason but is now ready to bring her joy and energy into my life."

-

This struck a chord. She was willing to give it a try. Through our dream stories, we sometimes find a part of us that was missing is calling to us, seeking a way to gain entry to our lives, to make us stronger and more whole.