Making friends with death and French language through dream telepathy

I dreamed I was struggling to explain something important in my faulty French. I woke, checked online, and read a message (in French) from a friend in France. He reported that he had been trying to help a man who was struggling to understand what he describes as "an absurd experience for a Cartesian spirit like mine."

The "absurd experience" was a dream in which the skeptic met his departed father. His father was eating breakfast, wearing a beautiful blue shirt. In ordinary life, the man did not believe such an encounter was possible. Waking, the Cartesian did not believe that an encounter with the dead was possible, In the dream, he rushed to his father, gave him a big hug, and was deeply moved.

Trying to make sense of what happened, the dreamer exclaimed, " On devrait nous apprendre, quelque part, à apprivoiser nos rêves. We need to be taught how to make friends with our dreams."

Apprivoiser is a very interesting word. It is often translated as "to tame" or "make gentle". Its most famous use is in the beloved story of the Little Prince, who learns from the fox that in order to learn the secret of life he must "tame" the fox in the sense of making friends with something wild.

My friend thought that I might be able to help the man who had dreamed of his dead father. I could hardly refuse this appeal to help after seeing the word apprivoiser. I wrote a book called The Dreamer's Book of the Dead. It explains why contact with the deceased is neither weird nor even unusual, since they are alive somewhere else. They call on us and we visit them, especially in dreams. We discover that healing and forgiveness are always available, across the apparent barrier of death.

When foreign rights to The Dreamer's Book of the Dead were sold, my French publishers came up with this title for the translation: Apprivoiser la mort par le rêve.

I wrote to the Cartesian who had the "absurd" experience of a loving encounter with his father on the Other Side:

"I have seen it so many times: a man encounters his deceased father in a dream. He discovers that to die in this world is to live in another world. This transforms his understanding of what it means to dream, to live and to die."

I wrote this in my faulty French, My dream had rehearsed me for this minutes before. 

Telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance? Maybe all three. The categories we use for "supernormal" phenomena may blur. What is clear is that in dreams our perception reaches beyond our ordinary senses. We send and receive messages. We make visits and receive visitations. We are prepared for challnenges and opportunities that lie ahead. We have easy access to the departed. And any dream is likely to tell us something we do not already know, in the waking mind.

- Journal report from January 6, 2016

Drawing by Robert Moss

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

William James lost in the forest of dreams

 

He called it “the most peculiar experience of my whole life”. He said that it put him in a state of mental confusion that made his teeth chatter. The voice is that of William James, the renowned American psychologist, philosopher and psychic researcher. He was talking about dreams that had shaken him to his core, "dreams I could not remember myself to have had”.

On February 12, 1906,  James was in San Francisco, in a bed at Stanford University. He woke at breakfast time from “a quiet dream of some sort”. While gathering his thoughts, his memory of the dream “seemed suddenly to get mixed np with reminiscences of a dream of an entirely different sort, which seemed to telescope, as it were, into the first one, a dream very elaborate, of lions, and tragic”. He decided that the lion dream must have been “a previous dream of the same sleep”. However, he found the apparent mingling of two dreams to be “something very queer, which I had never before experienced” – and deeply disturbing.

The following night, he woke from heavy sleep in the middle of a dream. Thinking about the dream he became confused by the irruption of two more dreams into his memory. They “shuffled themselves abruptly in between the parts of the first dream” and he could not grasp their origin.

“Whence come these dreams? I asked. They were close to me, and fresh, as if I had just dreamed them; and yet they were far away from the first dream.” He could not find a connection between them. One had a “cockney atmosphere”, and “happened to someone in London”. The other two dreams had American locales. In one, perhaps the one from which he wakened, he was trying on a coat. The other was “a sort of nightmare and had to do with soldiers” Each dream had completely different content and a distinct emotional charge. Yet as they telescoped in and out of each other, James noted, “I seemed to myself to have been their common dreamer, they seemed quite as distinctly not to have been dreamed in succession, in that one sleep… I seemed thus to belong to three different dream-systems at once, no one of which would connect itself either with the others or with my waking life. I began to feel curiously confused and scared, and tried to wake myself up wider, but I seemed already wide-awake.”

His emotional response was amazingly strong. “Presently cold shivers of dread ran over me: am I getting into other people's dreams?” Was this telepathy, or a descent into dementia and mental confusion, even multiple personality disorder?

"Decidedly I was losing hold of my 'self,' and making acquaintance with a quality of mental distress that I had never known before, its nearest analogue being the sinking, giddying anxiety that one may have when, in the woods, one discovers that one is really lost.”

Who is the dreamer? Whose are the dreams? He repeated the question over and over, even in the published version of his notes. “Whose? whose? WHOSE? Unless I can attach them, I am swept out to sea with no horizon and no bond, getting lost. …My teeth chattered at the thought.”

His experiences increased his empathy for those diagnosed with dementia, Verwirrtheit [mental confusion] or suffering “invasions of secondary personality”. “We regard them as simply curious; but what they want in the awful drift of their being out of its customary self, is any principle of steadiness to hold on to. We ought to assure them and reassure them that we will stand by them, and recognize the true self in them to the end.”

Desperate to explain what had happened to him on those San Francisco nights, he played with the notion that it had something to do with the hour of waking. On going to bed, he normally slept heavily until after two. On the nights of multiple dreams, he had woken around midnight. He had never remembered “midnight dreams" before. Was it possible that his mind was playing catchup, bringing him dreams from midnights past that had escaped him until now? The idea gave him relief. He had been scared to let himself return to sleep and dreams. Now he lay down, fell asleep, and woke at seven with “a curious, but not alarming, confusion between two dreams.”

As things settled, James continued to be haunted by the shock of those San Francisco nights. “My confusion was foudroyante [like a lightning bolt], a state of consciousness unique and unparalleled in my 64 years of the world's experience.” 

He felt unable to rule out the possibility that his multiple dreams were produced by “a telepathic entrance into someone else's dreams” or “a doubling up of personality".

“I don't know now 'who' had those three dreams, or which one 'I' first woke up from, so quickly did they substitute themselves back and forth for each other, discontinuously…To this day I feel that those extra dreams were dreamed in reality, but when, where, and by whom, I cannot guess.”

It appears that James never settled his inquiry as to what had made his teeth chatter, though brilliantly equipped to do so. He made use of the term "multiverse" but it seems he did not apply it to his understanding of dreams: to the possibility that in nested and multiple interacting dreams we may be in multiple realities at the same time. Exploring what that means through direct experience is a royal road to fulfilling James' aim of expanding the "margins" of our fields of consciousness - and our understanding of the nature of the universe.  

 

James kept a detailed record of his experiences in his college bed in San Francisco on the nights of February 12-13, 1906 but it gives only brief and vague impressions of the content of the dreams that appalled him. He published most of these journal pages in an essay on the expansion of the field of consciousness in a scholarly journal in 1910. See William James, “A Suggestion About Mysticism” in The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods Vol. 7, No. 4 (Feb. 17, 1910) 85-92.

Photo by RM

 

 

 

 

 

Symbol migration and dream telepathy

I am rarely surprised when I hear accounts of telepathy between people who are closely connected. We sense each other's feelings (telepathy literally means "feeling at a distance'); we feel a tug in the head an know someone is calling us; we pick up sounds and smells and images relating to the other person's activities. When living across an ocean from me, one of my daughters always knew when I was cooking my fiery version of Hungarian goulash, which she detested. "Ugh, I know you were cooking that yukky stuff again." I would know when she was thinking about me, across all the miles,  because I would smell a little girl cologne she had bought in a general store.
      Dream telepathy is very interesting because it extends beyond picking up elements of what is going on in another person's mind or life. We may actually find that we are meeting each other in a dream space and sharing adventures. This happens spontaneously. It can also be done by setting a dream date, with a rendezvous place.
     I once agreed with a group of active dreamers who were on a residential retreat with me that we would seek to meet at the Jean Talon market in Montreal overnight. We agreed to meet at a cheese counter. Only one person in that group, a French Canadian, knew the market. He was later able to confirm details of our travel reports. It seemed we had not only shared some good times; we had been to a version of the market very close to the physical one. I found that all my senses were engaged, I came back with the taste of a perfect brie and a pungent roquefort on my palate.
     When dream telepathy extends to full-fledged interaction between two or more people, we may want t call it shared or mutual dreaming.
      A variant on this theme I find fascinating is what I have decided to call symbol migration. A symbol that is alive in your mind can exert powerful magnetism. It may help to generate effects in the world around you which you may notice in the play of synchronicity. It may also exert a reach that brings it into the minds of other people, whether or not this is any part of your intention An image you are thinking about and visualizing in your waking reality may enter the mind of someone connected to you in a dream.
     Jung gave us a wonderful example of symbol magnetism in his tale of repeating fish. I want to share a personal experience of symbol migration that also has significant fishy content.
      I often read deep in the night, when some of my best research is done and my best

discoveries are made. Over a weekend at a mountain lodge where we were doing deep shamanic work with the spirits of the land, my middle-of-the-night reading included a book by one of the great ethnographers of Northeast, Frank G. Speck, titled Midwinter Rites of the Cayuga Longhouse, based on his fieldwork among the Six Nations in the 1930s.

   I was struck by the following elements in his account: 

1. Fever Mask. Speck includes a photo of a "Fever Mask" for catching and controlling a fever spirit, and writes about how Indians can handle red-hot coals in an altered state.

2. Dreams of Angry Fish. He discusses dreams regarded as "persecution by animals". According to his native informants, animals that have suffered from humans and want redress may haunt those who killed or tormented them in dreams. Speck listened to a number of disturbing dream reports involving fish. These were taken very seriously. A dreamer afflicted by unpleasant dreams of fish was thought to required cleansing and ritual propitiation of the fish spirits. Speck reported that among the Cayuga at that time, if you had a troubling dream about fish, the first thing people should do for you is to splash water on you to reassure the fish that you will honor their element.

3. Whirlwind Mask. In the book Speck discusses the Iroquois belief that disease as well as mayhem are carried by Whirlwind Mask, and has photos of a mask representing the Whirlwind spirit that only a powerful shaman can wear. I was stirred by the idea that the greatest healer in this tradition may be one who can take on and contain the forces of chaos and disease and transmute them within their own being.

The next morning, I was excited to discover that key elements from my reading appeared to have slipped into dreams of our group through symbol migration.  

The first people to share dreams with me at the breakfast table reported the following: 

1. Fever dreams. "I dreamed of a a man whose skin was on fire." (Later a second dreamer reported, "I dreamed my husband had a fever")

2. Dream of angry fish. "I dreamed that the fish were mad at me. They stripped me to the bones, like a filleted fish. Them men wrapped me in skins and took me out into the water to grow me a new body."

3. Dream of Whirlwind Mask. "I dreamed I should make a mask of the Whirlwind and then put it into the fire to contain that power." This dreamer, an artist, had already constructed an amazing whirlwind mask, using birch bark fallen from trees in the woods around us.

We are porous to the thoughts and feelings of those connected with us. Within a loving and supportive community, this offers seeds for growth and healing and deepening understanding. It may also remind us to check our boundaries and may sure we are not open to the migration of unwanted images or preoccupations. In my groups we always take care to set up effective psychic screens and shields, not least by invoking the Gatekeeper, that entity that opens and closes our roads between the worlds.

Art: René Magritte, Les merveilles de la nature (The Wonders of Nature), 1953.

Dream Telepathy on Running a Writing Retreat

Here’s example of long-range telepathy at work between a dreaming and a waking mind that involves the writing process.
   I kept vampire hours that night, mining old journals for material for new writing. I paused from time to time to look at plans for my writing retreat, “Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming”.
    I was ready to go to bed when I received an email from my friend Ana Maria Stefanescu, who hosts my workshops in the mountains of Romania. She reported that she had just awakened from a dream in which I gave her ideas and exercises she could use in a creative writing workshop she was planning to lead in Romania the following month. She woke up very excited, but still tired. Certain that she would be able to remember what she had learned, she allowed herself to drift back to sleep, then woke again to find that most of the content was gone.
     She requested me to show up in her dreams again and repeat the instructions!
     I countered with the following suggestion: "Maybe you can go back inside your dream and get Dream Robert to give you those ideas and exercises again!"
     Ana Maria agreed to try. An hour later, she reported her conversation with Dream Robert. “You gave me a wonderful exercise. You told me to take participants in my writing workshop on a journey to the place from which their truest words come.”
     Unknown to Ana Maria, I had actually led an exercise along these lines in my own writing retreats and had been looking over notes about that while she was dreaming. Such exploration inspired my poem, “A Place to Write From (Red Ink)”.

Write from the place that is raw
from the night when you lost your skin.

The episode reminded me of Mark Twain's experience of what he called "mental telegraphy" in the case The Great Bonanza book.

One afternoon, he was seized with the passionate conviction that a great book could be written about the silver bonanza in Nevada. He felt his old newspaper colleague William Wright (better known under his pen-name “Dan De Quille”) was the man to do it. But Mark Twain was so possessed by the idea that he roughed out a book outline and sample chapters to get his old friend started, in a blue haze of cigar smoke in the billiard room of his Hartford house. He was preparing to mail all this material to Wright when he received a package in the mail. Before opening the package, Mark Twain told the people with him that he was going to deliver a "prophecy"; he declared that the package contained a letter from his old friend Dan De Quille, with his drafts for a book on the Great Bonanza. And so it did.

This incident convinced Mark Twain not only that mental telegraphy is real, but that it can be strong enough to transport the complete content of a book across a continent. When he studied the exact chronology of the crossed letters, Mark Twain concluded that “mesmeric currents” had streamed from west to east. “It was your mesmeric current that flowed across the mountains & deserts three thousand miles & acted upon me.”

     Minds resonate with each other, and in doing this transfer ideas and messages, back and forth. When we send out our best thoughts,the results can be wonderfully creative, whichever way the currents are blowing. 

-

Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming is one of my favorite workshops, I am leading this five-day residential adventure at two locations this year: at magical Mosswood Hollow,in a red cedar forest 45 minutes from Seattle in May, and on a beautiful country estate at Ryzmburk near Česká Skalice in northern Bohemia, where I took the photo above, in August. Ana Maria is hosting a new four day workshop for me on magical dreaming and kairomancy at a lovely villa near Bran in Romania.

For a full account of Mark Twain's experiments in mental telegraphy, please see The Secret History of Dreaming.

Feeling for Brussels: presentiment and prayer

I've been hearing from people who seem to have dreamed the horror in Brussels at the time of the tragedy, or before it. F.W.H. Myers, the Victorian researcher who coined the word "telepathy", defined it as "fellow-feeling at a distance". As humans, we are connected to all things human and it is natural that some of us will dream and sense what others are suffering, even half a world away, especially if we have a personal connection to the places and people involved. Mass events throw a shadow before them that touches many, in dreams and in other ways.   
      Since the news of the terrible events in Brussels, I have been reflecting on my own strange experiences at Brussels airport last month, when I was changing planes. I was overwhelmed by horrible feelings of dread. As I walked to my departure gate, I started sweating more violently than ever before in my life. I told a friend afterwards that I was "sweating bullets". I slumped into a seat feeling that the world was about to end.I found my imagination lurching into a vivid fantasy of what it would mean to die here, in transit and in a state of confusion, and what it might take to make the right connection after death.   
     I am not a nervous flyer, and I catch many planes every month, generally relaxed and open to what the adventures may bring. I am now inclined to think that my terrible feelings and sensations at Brussels airport were an example of presentiment - of knowing something in the body before the event takes place that might cause those somatic conditions. And that my fantasy may have been advance knowledge of the immediate after-death condition of some of those who suffered untimely deaths. I will pray for them to find the right guides and the right paths on the Other Side.

Dream telepathy and writing assignments

I'm chuckling over a fresh example of long-range telepathy at work between a dreaming and a waking mind. Not the first, in my experience, that involves the writing process.
   I kept vampire hours tonight, mining old journals for material for new writing. I paused from time to time to look at ideas and exercises for creative writing that I have sketched out over the years, both for my personal use and as plans for one of my favorite workshops, "Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming."
    Just as I was thinking of continuing my dreaming in bed, I received an email message from my friend Ana Maria Stefanescu n Romania, who hosted a marvelous workshop for me in the Bucegi mountains last month. She reported that - while I was reading and making notes - she dreamed that I gave her a series of ideas and exercises for a creative writing workshop she is planning to lead in Romania in December. She commented that she woke up very excited, but still tired. Certain that she would be able to remember what she had learned, she allowed herself to drift back to sleep, then woke again to find that most of the content was gone.
     She requested me to show up in her dreams again and repeat the instructions!
     I recalled that on a previous occasion, someone who dreamed they received tuition from me was not only able to recall the whole session in exact detail, but to help me fill a page in a book I was writing. Back in the period when I was working on my book Dreaming True, I received a message from a woman in California who had attended one of my programs. She wanted to thank me for the lecture I had given overnight, in her dream, in which (she said) I had summarized part of my argument very cogently in five points that I wrote on a whiteboard.
     Unknown to her, except for her dream, I had reached a stage in my book draft when I wanted to sum up part of my thesis in five points, but had only formulated the first to my satisfaction. I shot back a message to the California dreamer asking if she could retrieve her lecture notes and send them to me.  
     Right away, she sent me the five points Dream Robert had made in his lecture. They filled in, exactly, the missing bits in my book draft.  And I put them in the book with almost no editing!
     My response to my friend who lost the details of what Dream Robert was telling her about crafting a creative writing workshop? "Maybe you can go back inside your dream and get Dream Robert to give you those ideas and exercises again!"
     Ana Maria said she will try this. It took her only an hour or so to came back to me that she now recalls that Dream Robert's first exercise was to encourage writers to go to the place from which their truest words come. This was further good telepathy, and dream tracking, since (unknown to Ana Maria) I have led an exercise along these lines. I wrote a poem of my own ("A Place to Write From") on this very theme, on where I find my truest and most passionate words:

Write from the place that is raw
from the night when you lost your skin.

The poem is in my collection, Here, Everything Is Dreaming that will be published in April 2013.
     I couldn't help joking that this fine flow of telepathy may have been aided by the fact that my friend is in Romania, while I was keeping vampire hours!       

I will be leading my five-day creative writing adventure, "Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming" at magical Mosswood Hollow, near Duvall, Washington, from May 6-10, 1013.      

Dreaming each other's lives, across time

Over much of my life, I have seen - in waking dreams and dreams that awaken - an ancient man whose eyes are closed in meditation. He is of the East, but of the Near East rather than the Far East. He is not a yogi, or a lama. He may be a priest-king.
     I know he is dreaming my life. I wonder what will happen if he opens his eyes.
    Then I realize that, as I look at him, my eyes are also closed.


Odilon Redon, "The Silver Tiara" (1911)

Dream legacy from a Victorian psychic researcher

Dreams give us assignments. In my first cycle of sleep, I dreamed I discovered a rich trove of materials from Frederic (F.W.H.) Myers, the great Victorian researcher of the paranormal. 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 public. Walking a familiar city street,  I announced to a friend, with high excitement, that I intended to produce a corrected version and make them known. I sensed a stir of spirits around me as I talked, fluttering like birds or bats. There was nothing sinister about these lively shades; their presence added to my enthusiasm for my project.
     This dream will drive me back to my study of Myers; I wrote a little about him in my Dreamer's Book of the Dead. The quest that drove him was to provide evidence of the soul's survival of physical death, evidence that would pass muster with the scientists of his time. "To prove that man survives death would be to transform and transfigure his whole life here now," he wrote in Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. That masterwork was unfinished at the time of his death and was published posthumously.
     Some believe that Myers continued his work on the Other Side, and fulfilled his promise to his colleagues in the Society for Psychical Research in England to supply first-hand information once he got there by dictating a series of new works via psychic mediums in the years after he passed over. The most interesting of these channeled works, received via Geraldine Cummins, are titled The Road to Immortality and Beyond Human Personality, and describe a series of transition zones after physical death.
     I have long felt an affinity for Myers not only because of his quest, but because of his love of words and of wordplay. A poet and classical scholar, he tried to give us a fresh vocabulary to describe interactions of mind and matter, levels of consciousness, and transits of spirit. His love of words and his sense of the importance of how we name things was so great that he inserted a glossary at the beginning, rather than at the end, of his magnum opus Human Personality. It is studded with terms that are his own invention. Some of his coinages, like "telepathy" have become household words. Some will probably never enter common English or even the technical lexicons of parapsychology, but stimulate all sorts of ideas, as with:

           Psychorragy – a 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.

     So, dream-directed, I return to what Myers has left us, in his own hand or through the hands of others. My eye falls on a passage in Beyond Human Personality, the second of the works received by Geraldine Cummins, in which he speaks of how we create our after-death environments according to our imagination. Speaking from the Other Side, Myers declares that it is through the imagination (or lack thereof) that man approaches paradise or falls into situations far short of that:

Imagination plays an important part in his conceptions of paradise. If it has become perverted through his deeds and thoughts when he was a man, it may create sinister surroundings for him, or perhaps, kindle the old fires of hate till they blaze again and continue to flame until their folly becomes apparent and thus, in time, he wearies of the sameness, of the monotony, of this particular kind of experience. Love, on the other hand, will draw about the soul the conditions necessary for its fulfilment. And in this world beyond death, very beautiful surroundings may be built up by the imaginations of those who truly love. These latter are not, however, as numerous as is commonly believed. If there be any soil or stain, any weakness in their love, the picture which they have created as their background will in some way be faulty, and, though it furnish temporary satisfaction, be far from the ideal of the seeker of Heaven.

All good stuff, but the style is inferior to the best of Myers' writings when he was still on the earthly plane. Maybe, as in my dream, there is need for a better transcription.

Illustration: "Fred" Myers. Drawing by Robert Moss with digital effects