The Twilight Road to Mythic Worlds

When I look through old journals, I am amazed, though no longer surprised, by all the adventures and conversations I have recorded from the twilight state betwen sleep and awake, or between awake and sleep. Many of these were quite spontaneous, unplanned by me, although they were lucid episodes in which, once inside the action, I had the power to choose and navigate and to experiment with changing plots and sometimes worlds.

I have been familiar with this state for as long as I can recall, since early childhood. In many ways, it is my home base. Yet this whole area of inner experience is still largely neglected or undervalued by sleep and dream experts. I have decided to start posting more of my reports and to add quick illustrations if there are none already in my journals. Here's a short narrative from six years ago:

January 2, 2019

Lucid dream in hypnagogic zone

Unraveling the Knot

As soon as I lie down, an inner voice says, Pay attention.

A book is placed in front of me. It looks like a journal bound in brown leather. The text and pattern of the cover, however, are like tree bark. The clasp has the form of a Celtic knot. To open it I must unwind a string, flawlessly, in a certain pattern. A false move will seal the book.

Very carefully I experiment. I am making a double spiral, then a triskele, then a fourfold shape that might resemble a four leaf clover. 

The book opens into a wildly beautiful scene with a castle above a gorge. I run toward the castle, wearing skins. I am armed with a bow and a sword. A great water bird rises. Surly swamp creatures seek to oppose my path. I bat them away with my sword which blazes light. I see a waterfall in the gorge and understand that this, not the castle, is my primary objective. 

I become a falcon, swooping down into the gorge. I see a red stag above. I know this place though I am coming to it a new way. There are giants above the fall, observing. For an instant I am with them. I know these great ones as ancient allies. For now my assignment is below.

I fly through the hard spray. I am cleansed and restored to a human form. I see again the mouth of the cave of the ancients. I remember the stone that opened a portal of blue light when I braved up to a nightmare of hissing black snakes - and then accepted a call to join in an ancient battle with a dark tyrant sorcerer. I will be here again.

Illustration: "With Falcon Into the Gorge" by Robert Moss

Those who attend in the Twilight Zone

 

All these people are gathered. They are like actors who have taken their places on stage and are waiting quietly for the curtain to go up. It comes to me that they are "attending", an interesting word. 
    I have the feeling they are characters who could have parts in a new book. Yet they have their own lives. None of them seems to be aware of me.
    But now a young woman slips through their ranks, to look at me directly. She is red haired, tall and slim, quite lovely. Her clothes are of an earlier time. Her gaze is deep. I cannot read her feelings, but I would like to know her. She moves away to my left, and I sense that she wants me to follow. When I go after her, however, I am interrupted by a mature woman with long black hair and very white skin who thrusts herself between us. I know she is filed with jealous hate for the redhead. 
    There is an old story here, of passion and jealousy. I sense it goes back several centuries, to the British Isles. I won't follow it now. The sunlight streaming into my bedroom round the edge of the drapes is quite bright. I reach for my French blue sleep mask (thank you Air France) and stretch out on my back, enjoying the luxury of drifting back from my twilight zone adventures into the sleep that repairs the body and allows the dream soul to go wandering without an agenda.


Often, as in this episode recorded in an old journal, I find different casts of characters waiting or popping up as I hover on the edge of sleep or linger in the twilight zone of hypnagogia. Sometimes, they appear to be quite literally on stage, or in the wings, waiting for me to show up in order to start or resume a play. More often, they seem to be characters in life dramas that are being played out in other times or in parallel worlds, dramas in which I have a lead role from which I may have been absent while attending to things in waking life.
    When I am writing, I am occasionally thrilled to discover in this way that my characters - who may or may not have been previously known to me - are assembling in this way, ready to claim their parts in my stories, or at least audition for those parts. 
    Those attending. I like this description for the people who appear on the cusp between waking and sleep, or between sleep and waking. To attend can mean to take care of or wait upon someone; in its Latin origin, in the verb attendere, it means "to stretch toward" something. Encounters with those who attend in the twilight zone can certainly help to stretch the mind. 

"Curtain Time". Dream Oracle card by Robert Moss

 

A Dreamer's Notes: Running with Tiger in the Twilight Woods

 

Running with Tiger in the Twilight Woods 

I lay down to rest in the early afternoon. There is an immediate flow of imagery. 

I am moving faster and faster, along a road without defined scenery.

I speed towards a tunnel. I’m through it almost at once, and come out in a lightly wooded landscape. I hear water nearby. I try not to interpret what is happening mentally. I chant the syllables of a power song inwardly to shut off the talker in my mind.

Soon I am airborne. This happens effortlessly; there is no need to visualize the process before it begins. I’m flying over a thickly wooded scene.

From above, I see a man running through the woods. He’s almost or completely naked apart from some kind of face covering. This may be a mask. The main feature is long whiskers, fastened to his upper lip. The face is oblong; surely it’s a mask. 

He’s running from something. What is it?

I see a magnificent Bengal tiger loping effortlessly behind him.

Now the tiger is on him.

It doesn’t pause to kill or devour. It opens its jaws and simply swallows the masked runner, whole. They are now one. I sense that this is as it should be.

I cease to be a spectator.

The tiger’s huge face looms up, close to my own. I’m not scared of him. He is splendid.

He leaps at me. We become one. Instead of devouring me, he seems to have entered me.

 - from a 1995 journal

Image: Tiger Man by RM with AI assistance

Serpent from the Mound

The liminal space between sleep and awake is prime time for sacred encounters. In this twilight zone, before dawn two years ago, I received a visitation by a Celtic priestess, red hair streaming all about her, who took me deep into the realm of Brigid, the goddess and saint of Ireland. I was thrilled with delight. I spent most of the day that unfolded in a blaze of fresh research following the leads I had been given. I crafted a new class devoted to Brigid, with three new group shamanic journeys

Drifting again in a liminal state the next morning, in a grey pre-dawn hour, I wondered if contact would be renewed. I again felt a presence in my room. It became vividly alive: an enormous green and gold serpent, so beautifully patterned that it might have been crafted by a jeweler. I felt entirely safe with it.

I wondered about the connection with Brigid - since famously there are no snakes in Ireland. Then I remembered that in Scotland Brigid is associated with snakes. There is an invocation in the Carmina Gadelica, the Scottish collection of charms and blessings, that speaks to Brigid as if she is a serpent coming of the mound at the end of winter:

On the day of Bride of the white hills,

The noble queen will come from the knoll,

I will not molest the noble queen,

Nor will the noble queen molest me.

Journal drawing by Robert Moss

Welcome to the Twilight Zone

The liminal state of hypnagogia, when you are drifting between sleep and awake, or between waking and sleep, is a marvelous launchpad for lucid dreaming. If you can train yourself to maintain a state of relaxed attention in this in-between state, you will notice that you may be receiving a whole menu of possibilities for lucid dream adventures. Images, faces, landscapes rise and fall. When you learn to hold one of them in focus, it may become the portal for a conscious journey.

    The Parade of Faces is a frequent phenomenon in this state. You may feel you are among a crowd of people, with faces and figures rushing by. Sometimes one may turn to look at you, which can be an interesting opportunity to enter a shared experience with another dream traveler you may or may not know in ordinary reality. Sometimes the images rising and falling before you look like a child’s sketches, or cartoons.    
    A frequent sighting for me, in this in-between state, is of what initially looks like the weave of a carpet or the mesh of a net. I have come to recognize this as a kind of border between states of reality and consciousness. With intention, I can part the strands and find myself in another order or reality.

    This liminal state, which I also call the twilight zone, is a good place to become aware of the ability to travel beyond the body. I often find myself lifting out of the body quite effortlessly in this state, without bumps and grinds. Sometimes, when tired, I simply rest half in and half out of my physical form. Sometimes I float up to the ceiling. In my second body, I may go through a series of simple kinesthetics before becoming airborne
    As I drift toward sleep in the twilight zone, I may notice that a second version of myself, in a different form, is waking up. One night, as I flirted with sleep, I became aware that I was lying back-to-back on the bed with a maned lion stirring from his nap as I slumbered. Quite often I go flying, like a bird, over a landscape, to places far away.

   The twilight zone of hypnagogia is a wonderful place to rendezvous with other beings and other intelligences. It is a state in which we often become aware of the psychic activity around us. We may receive visitors, and we will want to learn to screen and discern who we are letting into our space, because to be open to all comers is like opening your doors and windows in a city at night  and hanging out signs saying, “Party! Come on In! Everyone Welcome!”

    I frequently have inner dialogues in the twilight zone, with sources of knowledge I have come to trust. This is a time when I can often receive streams of counsel and information from inner guides. In Dreamgates, I record some of my conversations with the intelligence I decided to call “G2.” He carried the vocabulary and knowledge of a great Western Mystery order. I felt he was a transpersonal figure, though in no way alien to me. Many others have come to me in this liminal state. The most important of these inner guides is certainly no stranger; he is a self who observes and operates on a level of reality above the one I inhabit while living on this earth in a physical body.

    In the history of creative breakthroughs in every field, including science and technology, the hypnagogic state has been of vital importance. In this liminal zone, it is easy to make creative connections, which often involves linking things that seem to the routine mind to be unconnected. Many inventions and discoveries attributed to dreams by overhasty writers — like Kekulé’s discovery of the benzene ring — are actually gifts brought through from hypnagogia, to such an extent that I call this zone of consciousness “the solution state” in my Secret History of Dreaming.

     The place between sleep and awake can also be the very best place to go on with a dream or go back inside one. You may want to practice dream reentry to clarify information from a dream, or get to its full meaning, or continue a conversation with a dream character. You may need to reenter a dream because there are terrors to be overcome, or a mystery to be explored, or simply because you were having fun and adventure and would like to have more. Or because Tinker Bell is waiting for you.

     Often, I find different casts of characters waiting or popping up as I hover on the edge of sleep or linger in the twilight zone after waking. Sometimes, they appear to be quite literally on stage, or in the wings, waiting for me to show up in order to start or resume a play. More often, they seem to be characters in life dramas that are being played out in other times or in parallel worlds, dramas in which I have a lead role from which I may have been absent while attending to things in my default reality.

Text adapted from The Boy Who Died and Came Back: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Art: With Lion at the Night Cinema. Drawing by Robert Moss from adventures in the twilight state

The Bardo of Air Travel

I lead group shamanic journeys to an airport that won't be found on any ordinary map. They leave their bags, check in, go through security and board a plane that will take them to a destination where the dead are alive. Instructions for this crossing to the Other Side are in my book The Dreamer's Book of the Dead. During my air travels over the weekend, I sometimes felt that I had stepped into my own dream scenario, or that it had spilled into my world - or that, at least, I had been cast in a new episode of The Twilight Zone.

1

The Shakespeare Seat in the Twilight Zone

There is a woman in front of me at the airline desk where I am waiting to check in for my flight to Atlanta on Friday morning. The airline agent who is checking her in says to me, “You two are traveling together, right?”

    I tell her No but she doesn’t believe me. “He’s kidding,” she says to the woman passenger. “You two are together, yes?”
    “Sorry," I amplify. "This lady seems very nice but we don’t know each other.”
    “I was sure you were together.”
     “Are you looking for a career as a matchmaker? My wife won’t like it.”
     “Neither will my husband,” smiles the woman passenger.
     A male airline agent intervenes to take my bag and issue my boarding pass. "You got the Shakespeare seat," he congratulates me. I don’t get it until he says my seat number out loud. "2B."  
     I catch up to the stranger the other agent wanted to make my wife. She has a broad, open face and sensible shoes. She looks ready for a genteel country walk, or to give a tutorial.
    "I need to know who you are," I tell her. "The airline agent was so keen to play matchmaker that there must be some connection."
     "I'm a vertebrate paleontologist," the stranger tells me brightly. She helps me out by adding, "I study dinosaurs."
   "So we have something in common. I tell my psychology friends that I am a Paleolithic psychologist."
    I check my cellphone and a cartoon pops up on my Facebook news feed. It shows two dinosaurs in bed. One of them is saying, “I had a nightmare that I was small, frail, covered in feathers and fluttering through the air.”
    I show this to the Vertebrate Paleontologist and we exchange our website information. I distantly recall an episode of the old TV series "The Twilight Zone" in which the people on an airplane are thrown back across time. As I recall, the episode ends with a glimpse of a grazing sauropod dinosaur, and no resolution. You never know when you might need expert advice on a dinosaur situation.

In the line for the security check, I notice a key on the floor, just the one key. I wave it at a TSA agent, “Someone dropped a key.”
    The young man in front of me whips around and gapes. “That’s mine.” When I hand it to him he says, “That’s the key to my girlfriend’s apartment. You just saved my life, man.”
     The airport public address system is busy this morning, with announcements about other things left at the security check. In ascending order of strangeness: a jacket, a belt, a cell phone, a driver's license, a passport, a purple cane and one shoe. How do you leave behind one shoe? This only records the visible things missing from people in my airport Bardo today.

After I take my Shakespeare seat on the plane, the airline agent who tried to marry me to the Vertebrate Paleontologist rushes down the aisle and spills two pens in my lap. Certainly I can write two things at once.

   While they de-ice the plane, I ponder what it means to me today to be in what the airline guy called the Shakespeare seat. These lines from Polonius in Hamlet return to me:

This above all - to thine own self be true:

And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

2B or not 2B, sure. How about 2C? When I look across the aisle from my Shakespeare seat, the fellow in 2C is doing amazing things with a salad in a clear round plastic container he has brought on board. He spins it between his palms like a wheel, he shakes it, he spins it a different way. I get that he's trying to get the dressing nicely mixed with the leaves but this goes on for ten minutes. It seems this is his version of spinning a Tibetan prayer wheel or doing asanas.
    I wait until we are landing before asking him what was in the salad dressing. "I've never seen Salad Yoga before." He tells me it's a Thai dressing from Panera, an "intense" experience. Evidently.

Settled into my seat, I am rereading the Bhagavad Gita while sipping a gin and tonic. I am distracted by what is going on in the row in front of me. Sarah Sanders is sitting in the window seat. A hyena-like younger man is chatting her up. Their conversation gets louder as they toss back free drinks. Now they're talking about online dating and what lies it's okay to tell intimate partners before and after dumping said partners.
   Am I dreaming? No. But I realize this is not the Sarah of the briefing room but a lookalike of her possible future self, ten years older and thirty pounds heavier.
    As we get ready to disembark, I say to her, "Thanks for the entertainment."
    She blushes to the roots of her hair. "You mean you could hear us?"
   "Every word. But I decided not to record you this time."
  

2

Night Flight from Atlanta

I look behind me and there she is again, the mountainous woman in the Zulu hat, coming down the ramp. I step on board the plane and the flight attendant takes my coat, as he did before.

    "Sorry to bother you again," says the man who needs me to stand up so he can sit in the window seat. He fires up his computer and starts watching the same old movie he was watching before.

    The man who is going to sit behind me fumbles with stuff in the overhead compartment and I brace myself in case he lets something fall on my shoulder as he did before. But he catches it this time, pats my shoulder and says, "Good thing I knew what was going to happen."

    "We've met before," the man across the aisle says to the woman next to him. She says, "In your dreams."

    These are vignettes from the Bardo of my air travel during my trip home from Atlanta on Monday night. The first plane broke. They found us another plane, unbroken but otherwise identical, where we took the same seats we had before. It was deja vu all over again. People were blurry, taking off after midnight, 2 1/2 hours late. Hard not to feel we were in a Twilight Zone episode in which things go on repeating until you wake up to the fact that you are dreaming, or dead, or both.

Photo: William Shattner in the 1963 Twilight Zone episode, "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet"

Breath Slippers are So Wild

It can be delicious to loiter with intent in that liminal zone that Tinker Bell recommended to Peter Pan: the place between sleep and awake.
   I love to do this in the morning when I don't have to rush off into the world right away, and and my dog allows me (when I am home) to delay his first walk for a bit. If I have the memory of a dream that intrigues me, I will stay with it, and let more of the adventure unfold.
   Sometimes I simply lay open to the rise and fall of images. When I make it my practice to remain an observer as the images come and go, I joke that I am doing horizontal meditation. But I am often poised to be more than an observer, by entering a scene that interests me and becoming a lucid traveler within its territory, and often beyond that.
   This morning, I woke early with the clear light of a chill autumn morning, dappled by the trees outside my house, slipping through the blinds. I remembered that I had been in London in my last dream, and decided to stay in bed, close to the dream scene, and see whether I could simply move back into it.
    Immediately the scene became vividly alive. All my senses were engaged as I walked towards an elegant restaurant under a colonnade, on my way to lunch. The area seemed very quiet. I wondered whether the restaurant was open. However, when I stepped inside with my companion, I saw that many of the tables were already occupied. I was slightly irritated when we were ushered to a table that was pushed right up against a smaller table where another couple were seated. It seemed quite impossible to have a private conversation under these circumstances.
     But my feelings changed as we started talking to the other couple. They were quite charming. The man was French, the woman English, and our conversation proceeded in alternate bursts of both languages. Another couple, at a table on the other side, joined in, in the same fashion. I was pleased to discover that my French was better, under these impromptu circumstances, than I usually give myself credit for. We talked about Montpellier, and the adventures I lead at a center near Montpellier,
    This was all entirely realistic. I can taste the butter served at the table, and feel the fizz of the sparkling water on my tongue. Soon I was traveling to various locations in London and Paris at the invitation of the new friends met at the table. I felt the joy of new friendship and of the meeting of minds as we discussed topics ranging from the Existentialists to how leaves change color in the fall.
    As I sped from one site to another, I noted that I was not using any obvious form of transportation other than my own two feet. I seemed to have developed the abilities of a human hovercraft. If I took a step, I would glide forward as far as it pleased me, across the English Channel, or from the Gare du Nord to Montparnasse. I had the impression - always at least vaguely aware that I had a body in the bed - that my giant steps were powered by my breath.
    I am wearing breath slippers! I laughed inwardly. This seemed all the more funny to me given the fact that I never wear ordinary slippers. I thought of Mercury with his winged sandals.
 

  
At no point did I try to control my experiences over the couple of hours I spent in this state. I did make it my intention - successfully - to look in on a special friend, and to walk again through the colonnade of lime (or linden) trees in the garden of the Palais Royal in Paris. However, for the most part I simply followed the flow of the encounters and opportunities that were presented to me, exercising choice without trying to control events by imposing any agenda - other than to relax and have fun.
    

I wrote here recently about a simple method for lucid dream induction that I call SO WILD. You go to Sleep, remaining Open to whatever may come. You Wake and then, when you are ready, you set an Intention to embark on Lucid Dreaming. We will be experimenting with this new technique in my next course for The Shift Network, "Active Dreaming: The Essential Training." Classes start on December 10.

Drawing by RM
Photo of trees at the Palais Royal by RM