The dream questioner in ancient Mesopotamia

Our earliest records of the work of a dream interpreter come from ancient Mesopotamia. Here the person you asked for help with your dream was called the “questioner”. On clay tablets from Assur and Nineveh, the “questioner” is usually a woman. The title suggests that she will put questions to the dreamer, but also, more fundamentally, to the dream itself.
     Who or what was speaking in the dream? Is the dreamer’s recollection reliable? Where did the dream experience take place? What part of the dreamer — a higher part of soul or a lower one — was active in the dream? Is the female entity “as high as the sky and as wide as the earth” who appeared to that young man in Kish truly the great goddess?  What was the context of the dream? For example, was the dreamer sleeping in a special hut, built from reeds, that was used for dream incubation after ritual purification? Or was he sleeping off a bender?   
    A Mesopotamian term for an obscure or mysterious dream is “a closed archive basket of the gods”. Picture a woven basket used for carrying a set of clay tablets. The role of the questioner is to lift the lid and help read what is in there. One technique she might use in doing this, suggests cuneiform decoder Scott Noegel, is to record the dream and look for visual as well as auditory puns in the patterns that emerge as she scores the clay with a reed or wooden stylus. That image, from five thousand years ago, seems strangely modern: the dream as text, the dream reader looking and listening for puns.   
    But we are in a different world from modern analysts. Literacy is still a rare skill, and the questioner will use the magic of writing. But she will bring other tools to bear. She may seek a second opinion through one of many systems of divination, which range from reading the stars to examining the entrails of a sacrificial animal to noticing what is coming into view in the landscape in a given moment — the cry of the boatman, the wind bending the reeds.
    In Mesopotamia, as in most human cultures, dreaming was understood to be close kin to divination. The famous Assyrian dream book in the library of King Ashurbanipal — brought to Nineveh in 647 bce from the house of an exorcist of Nippur — was filed with the omen tablets, the largest category in the royal collection. Among ordinary folk as well as in royal palaces, across most of history, dreamwork has never been separated from other ways of reading the sign language of life.   
    In Ur or Uruk, the questioner may decide to go beyond the dreamer’s imperfect recollection of a dream into the fuller dream experience, by transporting herself to the place where the dream action unfolded and asking questions inside that space. What would that mean? There's a clue in a tablet that describes the questioner as “one who lies at a person's head.” An Oxford scholar suggests “the method was to lie beside the sleeper in the hope of intercepting or sharing the dream as it entered his head”.
     We have a hint here that ancient dream specialists may have used a core technique of Active Dreaming that we call tracking. With permission, a practiced dreamer can make a shamanic journey through the portal of another person's dream to bring back a clear account of what is going on in the dreamspace, to solve a mystery or resolve a problem.

Text adapted from The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Image: Gypsum statuette from Mesopotamia c 2400 bce.

In my next online course for The Shift Network, "Dreaming into the Dreamtime", we harvest wisdom and practice from seven world traditions of dreaming. Classes start on May 3.

From Bear Man to Sun Falcon: healing through group shamanic dreaming

Niskayuna, New York

I am the beneficiary of an extraordinary group experience of healing and initiation achieved through a shamanic journey through the portal of a personal dream. The dream was shared last night by a member of one of my circles of active dreamers.
    The night before our gathering, the dreamer found herself in a cave with intriguing paintings on the walls: of fire, sun and moon, stars. All these images seemed alive. A being rose from the depths of the cave. She could not tell whether he was human or animal. He was entirely covered in fur. He looked more like a bear than anything else. He said, "Are you ready?" She replied, without hesitation, "I am". She knew that he was talking about a portal that had opened behind him. She saw a waterfall, and a vivid green landscape, and a unicorn. The bear man stepped aside, inviting her to go through.
   But she woke before going through the portal. She was excited, but also disappointed that the adventure remained unfinished.
   "Wouldn't you like to go back inside the dream and carry on the adventure now?" I asked, after she told us the dream.
    She was eager to do this. She was familiar with our process of making shamanic journeys, with the aid of drumming, through the gateway of a personal dream. The idea is simple: if you have been some place in a dream, you can go there again, just as you can return to a place you have visited in ordinary life.
    "When you are back inside the dream," I said, "what are you going to do?"
    She told us she wanted to talk to the caveman, inspect the paintings on the cave walls, go out through the waterfall, find the unicorn - and let the rest unfold.
     "Do we have your permission to come with you?"
     "Absolutely."
     We were now almost ready for a group adventure through a dream portal that excited and intrigued all of us in the circle. We made time for people to ask a few questions - traveler's questions, not analytic ones. "Could you see the sky above the waterfall from inside the cave?" "Was the cave man wearing his own fur, or something he had put on?" The answer to that one was unclear. We agreed that this was one of many things for our trackers to check out, an idea that brought plenty of chuckles from the women in the circle.
     We closed the curtains against the gloaming and stretched out - all except me, since I was the drummer.
    With the first tap of the drum, we were there, all together, inside the cave. I saw a whole soul history in the cave paintings, and saw others checking them out. Some of the symbols, especially a lake of fire, were familiar to me from images on the walls of Egyptian temple tombs.
     I monitored the dreamer's fresh encounter with the bear man. I noticed that he could appear as more or less bear, or more or less human, at his choosing, and that whatever he was wearing (or not wearing was his own). He was potent and well-equipped, but the space he opened was about more than sex.
    "You are in the cave of your heart," he told the dreamer. "This portal is open only to those who follow the heart."
   I watched her plunge straight into the waterfall. I followed suit. I enjoyed the shock of the water beating down on my head, pummeling my body. I felt deep cleansing, and staying in the falls far longer that I had expected - maybe an hour of ordinary time - in the few minutes my physical body was drumming for the group.
   Then I was out above the falls, grabbing salmon out of the river, feasting on the fish and offering them to my family of bears.
   When I remembered to check on the dreamer, I saw she was safely off, on the back of the white unicorn, surely headed for a fresh personal adventure and initiation.
    I thought about my own need for bodily healing. I had had a rough few days, with flu-like symptoms and other irritations, whose source was not yet clear. I saw a huge, bat-like thing flapping across the sky to my left. Was this a form of my affliction, or its source? I asked for help to deal with it.
    A giant falcon appeared, flying straight from the sun. The red-tailed hawk is a special friend of mine, but I will call his cousin here a falcon, because of what evolved. Sun-bright, the falcon pursued the dark thing across the sky, seized it with his talons, grappled with it in mid-air and forced it down and down and down to a hole in the earth. When I looked in the hole, I saw a ravening maw, edged by countless irregular snapping teeth, as long as knives.
    The sun falcon was fiercely intent on ending whatever story the black thing embodied. He forced it down into the toothed hole, which snapped shut over it. I found myself exultant, rising to my feet as I drummed. Now I felt the wings of the falcon against the sides of my face, of my head. He held me and shared his power and his knowing. I knew who was with me. Horus, divine warrior, eternal opponent of darkness and dark forces, healer and protector.
    I stayed in full Egyptian mode for the next phases of the journeyer. I experienced a series of kheperu - becomings or transforming - familiar to me from long-ago journeys and far memory of ancient lives. I meet the lion, pass through its skin, and claim the fullness of its power and roam with my pride.
    I am aware of my duty to the group. Many of us now seem to be in a sacred wood where gatekeepers native to this land where we are living and drumming stand guard. The guardians are friendly.
    I return from the cave of the heart, and my Egypt of the heart, and sound the recall.
    After we take times to record our experiences, the travel reports are rich. One tracker is suprised that she found herself among falcons and lions. I reassure her that she was in the realm of shared experience.
    The original cave dreamer told us, with awe, that the unicorn flew her to a place of encounter with an ancient medicine teacher. Her discoveries continued in dreams of the night. She told me this morning:    
   "I went back into that cave and met the bear man again. You were there and we were looking at the pictures on the wall. It was a story of an ancient civilization and the bear man said that in the future dreamers, healers and teachers were needed to build a community of one heart."
     Dreamers, healers and teachers are needed to build a community of one heart. Yes indeed. Some of us are working on that, night and day, day and night.

"Horus Resolution" (c) Robert Moss. June 11, 2014. 

Sun Stealer

RAVEN EYE: Sun Stealer

They say you stole the sun.
This is inexact.
You hid the light in darkness
where the light-killers could not find it
so the sun could shine brighter than before.


They say you are black
because you are evil and unkind.
They do not say you swallowed
your own shadow and mastered it
at the price of wearing its colors.


Shivering, they call you death-knell,
Death-eater, bad omen, flying banshee
because you feed on death that feeds on men.
You strip what rots from what remains.
You give us the purity of the bones.


Trickster, they call you.
Oh yes, you'll do your wickedest
to ensure our way is never routine
and we are forced to improvise and transform.
You won't let us swap our souls for a plan.


At least they don't accuse you
of minor crimes.
I praise and claim your gifts
of putting on darkness to come and go safely
in the darkest places, joking with Death.


COMMENT: The kindness of ravens. Our collective noun for a group of crows is "murder". The word for a group of ravens is even crueler; those who know it speak of an "unkindness" of ravens. Yet I have found the raven to be an impeccable ally in seeing into dark places, and in training frequent flyers in the arts of the dream seer, I often call in the ravenous eye. Be it noted that in working with Raven this way, it is vastly desirable to call in a pair, as Odin knew when he sent off his twin ravens, Thought and Memory, to scout for him. I wrote this poem for Raven at the end of a marvelous adventure in group dreaming, when many of us were able to see true with the help of that raven eye. I am posting it today because of further excellent adventures in tracking with the help of the Two Ravens in my recent workshop in Frankfurt.

This tribute to Raven is included in my new collection of poems and stories, Here,

Everything Is Dreaming, published by Exclesior Editions, an imprint of State University of New York Press.







Raven shaman: drawing by Robert Moss

When crow calls back

So what does this literary crow want me to write about?

How about this:

Crows are marvelous messengers. And like their larger cousin, the raven, they can be impeccable allies in shamanic lucid dreaming and tracking. We know this from legend and folklore.

In the Iroquois story of the real Hiawatha, a force is gathering to challenge the dark power of the tyrant-sorcerer, Tododaho. They need scouts to report on his defenses. The scouts who perform this task, unerringly, are Crow People, shamanic dreamers who take on the form of crows, fly to the tyrant's redoubt, and return to Hiawatha with accurate intelligence. I recount this story in full detail in my book Dreamways of the Iroquois.

Raven has an even larger history as a seer. Odin, who was a shaman before he became a god, works with two ravens, who are found perched on his shoulders when they are not out and about gathering information for him. Their names are Huninn and Muninn, Thought and Memory. When I teach the arts of seership, I often encourage members of my workshops to borrow the wings and the sharp sight of Thought and Memory as they go out on assignment - powered by shamanic drumming - to collect information for a partner. Sometimes the assignment involves traveling a certain distance into the future to scout out a possible future situation or event. Sometimes it requires opening a path for healing, or breaking the terror of a nightmare left unresolved.

We worked this way in my last Active Dreaming workshop in southern France. I noticed that there was an especially gifted shamanic tracker in the group named Anne, who came with a previous connection with the crows, and used it to deliver excellent results.

When we call on an ally, it sometimes calls back. Anne's friend, Jean-Alain, sent me these photos of some recent close encounters.