A Dreamer's Notes: Under the Threshold

Less can be more. I am going to start sharing brief notes from my commonplace book (aka my journal) on this blog, ranging from current movie reviews to snippets of ancient philosophy.

 Soul in Slumberland 

The movie Slumberland, available on Netflix, is getting rave reviews and deserves them. It's deeply moving and visually stunning, sad and scary at times but relieved by flashes of wild humor and with a deeply satisfying ending. We travel through many dream doors and learn how it might be possible to enter the dreams of others. We see that loving contact with the departed is possible in dreams. We learn what can be gained when we brave up to nightmare fears. We are drawn to think about whether there are dream producers and dream regulators who try to give us the dreams they think we need and apply certain rules.

Most exciting, for me, is the vivid depiction of what can happen if we lose a vital part of ourselves - the beautiful bright dreamer - through soul loss and it goes off to live in another world, leaving us bereft of dreams and their magic in regular life. And what it means to get that dreaming self back in the body.

Beneath the Threshold

"Out of slumber proceeds each fresh arousal and initiation of waking activities....To some extent at least the abeyance of the supraliminal must be the liberation of the subliminal. To some extent the obscuration of the noonday glare of man's waking consciousness must reveal the far-reaching faint corona of his unexpected and impalpable powers."

- Frederic W.H. Myers, in his masterwork Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death. Myers, a classical scholar and poet as well as one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research, is using language he invented. In the Glossary at the start of Human Personality, he defines "subliminal" as follows: "Of thoughts, feelings, &c,, lying beneath the ordinary threshold (limen) of consciousness, as opposed to supraliminal, lying above the threshold...The threshold (Schwelle) must be regarded as a level above which waves may rise - like a slab washed by the sea - rather than as the entrance to a chamber."

“She walks into a dream like you walk into another room."

A few lines from a fantasy novel by a popular author who understands dream travel:

“They go journeying by dream all the time. She can't understand why I make such a fuss about it."

"So you dream of your woman?"

"She is not my woman. Never talk about a woman [of her people] that way. And I don't dream about her. She comes into my dreams."

"What's the difference?"

"In the world you and I grew up in, nothing at all. In her world, she walks into a dream like you walk into another room."

- This passage is from Forest Mage, the second novel in Robin Hobb's Soldier Son trilogy. She gives us clear, simple insight into the nature of dream travel, as experienced by ancient and indigenous shamans and Active Dreamers today: the essential dimension missing from any number of psychology and sleep research books.

Stoic Divination through Sympathy and Soul Travel 

The Stoics had an optimistic belief in divine pronoia: that the gods sent forewarning to humans out of benevolence. They defined divination as “the foreknowledge and foretelling of things that happen fortuitously” (Cicero De Divinatione2.13). The future that cane be foreseen for them is not predetermined.

Two modes of divination described by the far-traveled philosopher Posidonius are observation of the "affinity of al things" and the close study of dreams. He spent time with druids in Gaul and wrote five books on divination, of which only fragments survive, mostly in the pages of De Divinatione, a philosophical dialogue by Cicero. The concept of sympatheia - the  "affinity of all things” (συμπάθεια τον όλον) – presents the world, including the gods, as a unified organism with mutually interrelated parts that turn on each other. Everything is part of a cosmic body. Just as your whole body may respond to the lightest touch on your little toe, what happens to any part of the cosmos may resonate with the whole and generate an event far away. 

Posidonius taught that the soul travels free from the body during sleep. “Divination finds a positive support in nature, which teaches us how great is the power of the soul when it is divorced from the bodily senses as it is especially in sleep and in times of frenzy or inspiration: (Cicero de div 1.129). The Stoics held that dream divination is open to all, a view resoundingly espoused by Synesius of Cyrene in his wonderful little book On Dreams around the year 404.

Image: "Subliminal" by RM with AI assistance

The man who invented telepathy

F.W.H. Myers, poet, classical scholar and psychic researcher of the Victorian era, knew the power of naming things. He valued words so highly that he chose to start, rather than merely end, his magnum opus Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death with a glossary, which is studded with his own coinages. This essential work sits on a shelf at my right hand, its home for many years.
    Every time I open these pages, another word jumps out that was invented by Myers. Some are part of our common vocabulary, like telepathy. Myers defined telepathy as the communication of impressions of any kind from one mind to another, independently of the recognized channels of sense.” The term literally means “feeling at a distance”; he chose to emphasize the emotional tone, the importance of feelings in telling you that a message is coming through. This takes us to the wisdom of the body and the emotional charge between people who are connected and/or in crisis.
     Many of Myers’ coinages have not entered common English or even the technical lexicons of parapsychology; many will almost certainly never do so. Yet there is inspiration here for whole books:

           Psychorragy – bursting through of psychic phenomena. 

Cosmopathic – Open to the access of supernormal knowledge or emotion, apparently from the transcendental world, but whose precise source we have no way of knowing.

Methectic – of communications between one stratum of a man’s intelligence and another; as when he writes message whose origin is in his own subliminal self.

Sometimes his verbal brilliance consists in repointing or combining more familiar words to give us a way to discuss things we could not easily express before.

Subliminal – Of thoughts, feelings, &c, lying beneath the ordinary threshold (limen) of consciousness, as opposed to supraliminal, lying above the threshold.

Supernormal – Of a faculty or phenomenon which goes beyond the level of ordinary experience, in the direction of evolution, or as pertaining to a transcendental world.

Myers goes on to explain that the word “supernatural” is often misapplied to phenomena which are part of nature though beyond the norms of common observation or experience:

The word supernatural is subject to grave objections; it assumes that there is something outside nature, and it has become associated with arbitrary interference with law. Now there is no reason to suppose that the psychical phenomena with which we deal are less a part of nature, or less subject to fixed and definite law, than any other phenomena. Some of them appear to indicate a higher evolutionary level than the mass of men have yet attained, and some of them appear to be governed by laws of such a kind that they may hold good in a transcendental world as fully as in the world of sense. In either case they are above the norm of man rather than outside his nature.

I confess to a great sense of affinity with Frederic William Henry Myers (1843-1901) and his lifelong quest to demonstrate that human consciousness can operate outside the body and survives it. In his privately printed Fragments of Inner Life (1893) he declared that “It has been my lot to be concerned in a work more important and more successful than anything in my own capacity or character could have led me to expect. I have been one of the central group concerned in a great endeavor; the endeavor to pierce, by scientific methods, the world-old, never-penetrated veil.” He is referring to his work with the Society for Psychical Research, of his he was a founder and remained a moving spirit throughout his life.
    His quest to find evidence that consciousness survives the body deepened after the suicide of a woman he loved but could never have. He carried it with him to the Other Side. Before his death he promised that he would seek ways to send back reports of his experiences in the afterlife. He appears to have kept that promise in remarkable narratives recorded in sessions with the remarkable Irish medium Geraldine Cummins.
     I dreamed a decade ago that I discovered a rich trove of materials from Myers. The materials were both manuscripts and recordings. Some of the transcriptions were faulty and needed to be revised; some of the recordings sounded as if the speaker had a cleft palate. But there were riches here quite unknown to the informed public. Walking and talking with a friend about how I would honor the dream, I played with the idea that I could reenter the dream space, bring back materials and produce corrected and finished versions. I sensed a stir of supernormal activity around me as I talked, of spirits fluttering like birds or bats. There was nothing sinister about these lively shades; their presence added to my enthusiasm for my project. However, this is one of many ventures that are still in my pending box.
     I do honor Myers by trying to come up with new words to describe interesting supernormal phenomena One of my recent coinages is kairomancy, the art of divination by special moments, or navigating by synchronicity.

Portrait of Frederic William Henry Myers by William Clarke Wontner exhibited 1896; in  National Portrait Gallery. London