The Baltic city built on a dream

Vilnius, Lithuania


In front of the cathedral in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, is a statue of its founder, the Grand Duke Gediminas. Carved in the plinth that supports his towering figure is a howling wolf. This recalls the dream that led directly to the foundation of Vilnius.
    In a military camp on a hill, Gediminas dreamed of an iron wolf that opened its jaws and howled. For guidance on the meaning of his dream, he sought out a shaman-priest named Lizdeika. According to tradition, Lizdeika was born in an eagle's nest on a conical hill at Kernave. Lizdeika lived closed to wolves, and was reputed to be able to shapeshift into their form.
    When the grand duke dreamed of the iron wolf, Lizdeika was recognized in Lithuania as the krivu krivaitis, or high priest of the old religion. Lizdeika told the grand duke he should build a fortified city on the hill where he had been sleeping. Vilnius is a city founded on a dream, and over the past week it was a grand place to be dreaming with a spirited circle of Lithuanians.

Awakening to dreams in Portland

Portland, Oregon

Dreaming is not fundamentally about sleep, though I greatly value the sleep dreams that come spontaneously and offer us an objective view of ourselves and our place in the worlds. Dreaming is essentially about waking up to a larger reality and a secret logic of events that are often hidden from the everyday conscious mind. So it seems fitting that my Active Dreaming workshop in Portland this weekend is unfolding in a lovely center called Awakenings. The sun smiled on us all Saturday, which is already a dreamlike event in this rainy city.

I asked the dreamers who joined our circle to introduce themsleves by sharing their intention for the weekend, and the title of a dream or image, which enabled us gto taste the flavor of each other's imaginations right at the start. I noted some of the intention:

"I want to learn how to bring the energy of my dreams into 3D reality."

"I want to make closer links between my dreaming and my writing."

"I'm here to deepen my practice of dreaming."

"I want to use dreaming to integrate my inner child into my adult world."

"I'm here to acquire tools to re-vision education for children, to help them and their families bring back soul and to make them safe with their dreams."

"I'm here to move beyond getting weireded out when my dreams turn into real events in waking life."

"I'm here to find new direction for my painting, and my life."

These generous statements of intention gave us a vivid sense of expanding horisons of possibility. I demonstrated our quick, high-energy dream sharing process - Lightning Dreamwork - with three volunteers who undertook the assignment to tell us a dream as a story, and to hold the attention of the audience. One of the gifts of dream sharing is that, when we do it right, we find our voice and develop our skills as storytellers. An even greater gift, especially for newcomers, is that when we are heard with deep attention and given the right kind of feedback, we receive vital validation of our inner lives and our soul quests.

Stephani told us a dream of being back in her former home, trying to sort out old clothersm when a pirate ship appeared on a body of water at her door that doesn't exist in the regular world.

Jaya's dream took us into deep ancestral territory. She found herself riding in the back of a van by a river. She witnessed a mysterious ritual in which seven people clad in wolfskins performed a sacred dance around the bodies of dead wolves. As they danced, light rose from them, forming a cone shape that then opened out and produced the head of a wolf among the stars. The dreamer urgently wanted to stop the van and see more, but was unable to influence the driver. She woke with a profound sense of longing. She leaped at the suggestion that she might be able to reenter the dream, with the help of shamanic drumming, and get out of the van and ask the wolf people for permission to learn the nature of their ritual and of their connection with the Wolf Star.

In a dream of equal mythic power, a man stepped into a river carrying a sword. In the water, his sword became a chalice. On the far side of the river, he saw a family of bears. He became alarmed when they stared at him fiercely, and he turned away though he felt the object of his quest lay beyond the bears. "I feel the bears are gatekeepers, and that I need to face them and go beyond them." He welcomed the idea that he too, could reenter his dream, wide awake and conscious, and confront the bears and seek to discover what lay beyond them.

So here we had two excellent plans for dream reentry and group dreaming - for an exercise in what could be termed shamanic lucid dreaming. The wolf dreamer and the bear dreamer gave permission for the whole group to travel with them, back into their dreams and to explore beyond the remembered scenes and carry the action forward. In two group journeys powered by shamanic drumming, we shared extraordinarily powerful and moving adventures.


As a lunchbreak assignment, I asked everyone to be alert for anything striking or unusual that entered their field of perception as they roamed the town - to be open to receiving symbolic popups from the world. Waiting for coffee on my way back from lunch, I noticed Stephani, who had dreamed of pirates, standing in front of a corner bar, a block away from our workshop site, talking on her cell phone. The sign above her head, apparently unnoticed until now, read "The Jolly Roger". Life rhymes, and there are dresms that want to come into the surface world, some singing pirate songs.

With Bear and Wolf in Dracula Country

Bucharest


On the main road from the airport to downtown Bucharest is a statue of Romulus and Remus with the she-wolf. This is the foundation story of Romania as well as Rome. Romania was once the Roman province of Dacia. Romanians claim Romulus and Remus were theirs before they were Rome's, since R&R were actually Thracians and the borders of Romania encompass ancient Thrace, renowned for its shamans - not to mention that fact that wolves still range the hill country here. Thracian or Dacian, the Wolf is big around here. Strabo reported that the original name of the Dacians was derived from daos, meaning "wolf". Warrior Dacians vaunted their wolf connection; their standard featured a wolf head on a dragon body.


Nonetheless, we'll be singing my Bear song when we open my first program in Bucharest tonight. This is actually a song I borrowed from the Mohawk Indians and turned into English. Traditionally, it is a lullaby to comfort children and call a protector to watch over them in the night. It is also a shaman song that calls in one of the great medicine animals of North America. I find that it travels well, and facilitates powerful connections will all the animal spirits.
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Don't cry little one
Don't cry little one
The Bear is coming to dance for you
The Bear is coming to dance for you
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In Romanian, the Bear song looks like this: -

Nu plange micutule
Nu plange micutule
Ursul danseze pentru tine
Ursul danseze pentru tine -

My host tells me there is a tribe of gypsies in Romania called the Ursari, or Bear People. They go from village to village dancing with trained bears at fairs. -

I learned just now that the Bear may also be at the heart of the ancient mystery religion of these parts. Herodotus and other ancient Greek writers mention a mysterious god of the Getae named Zalmoxis. Most likely (the etymology is disputed) this name means "Bear Skin" or "He Who Wears the Bear Skin", deriving from the tradition that the infant Zalmoxis was wrapped in a bear hide (zalmon, in Getic).
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On a deeper level, the Bear connection involves the Underworld journey. Zalmoxis is one of the god-men who dies and is reborn. He goes down into the Underworld as the bear goes down into its cave, to hibernate. Zalmoxis reappears after three years to impart the "knowledge of the skies" to humans. Central to his teachings was the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, and the idea that we cannot heal the body without healing the soul. In some versions, he is the teacher of Pythagoras though in others, the relationship is the other way round and Zalmoxis is a slave who was manumitted by the sage Pythagoras and acquired great wealth and wisdom of his own. Mircea Eliade wrote a monograph about Zalmoxis, "the vanishing god", that I read years ago but found the least accessible of that great mythographer's works.
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To know Zalmoxis, perhaps, we have to dream him. Romania seems ripe for more adventures in dream archeology, in which we use the techniques of Active Dreaming to open direct channels to ancient knowledge, and then use the best of modern science and scholarship to confirm our leads. -


Road Notes: I have not yet spotted a vampire, though a U.S. girls' sports team at Prague airport were very excited that they were being matched against a team here called the Vampires.I struck up a conversation with the young woman who was my rowmate on the plane when I noticed she was reading Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage. It turns out that she is a Romanian novelist, whose second novel was titled Men and who is now seeking a publisher for her third, Dava. I remarked that it seemed auspicious that we were flying in to Bucharest on the day it was announced that a Romanian-born author had won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
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Bear report: We sang the Bear song in Romanian at the start of tonight's program, and it was wildly popular. Prior to this, socializing in the garden before the workshop began, I told everyone I met that I planned to learn Romanian in one day, and would each of them please give me an interesting word in their own language. Words volunteered (in chronological succession) included:
- iubire (love)
- vis (dream)
- daruire (giving yourself)
- suflet (soul)
- dor (longing)
- vasc (mistletoe)
- doina (folk song)
- pescarus (seagull)
- luna (moon, of course)
-frumesete (beauty)
- reveria (reverie, daydream)
- efervescenta (effervescence)

No lack of effervescence in the wonderfully high-energy opening session!