Death rhymes en route to Madison

I am catching an early flight on Thursday to keep my date as Death in Madison, Wisconsin, where I am leading a weekend workshop titled "Making Death Your Ally." I pause for a cup of coffee at the cafe near the A gates at my local airport. The old guy behind the counter has been working there forever, and always seemd happy to see me. But today he freezes before greeting me. "They're calling my dad" he explains, referring to an airport announcement I missed. "Steven Noble. That's my dad's name. Of course, he's dead."

"Maybe your dad is being called to a better place," I suggest as he works the coffee urn.

The announcement is repeated. "Passenger Steven Noble, please return to the security check."

"Or maybe your dad left something behind," I amend my suggestion.

"Maybe what he left behind was ME," says the guy behind the counter, thoughtfully, as he hands me my coffee.

On the first leg of my trip, I open a selection of William James's writings, acquired the day before, to an introductory chapter titled, "A Conversational Encounter with William James." The young woman in the seat naext to me gapes at the page, wide-eyed.
"That's my dad's name," she tells me. "William James." Another rhyming theme for the day is asserting itself; the first two people I encounter on the road recognize their fathers' names.

Changing planes at Chicago's O'Hare airport, I go to use a rest room on the F concourse. The scene inside the men's room is rather strange. Men are standing about motionless, all watching the maneuvers of a maintenance man who is down on the floor on his back, wriggling his large body so as to get his head and torso under the locked door of a stall. He sputters with shock or disgust as he gets far enough to unlock the door from the inside. Another janitor moves to block our view of whatever is inside the stall. After a muffled conference, one of them takes off in a hurry, pulling out a walkie-talkie. "Is there a problem?" I ask as he hurried by. "No problem," he responds, with a trace of dry humor. I don't need to ask anything more, because I get it. Death stopped by that rest room just before I did.


Now I'm on my second flight of the day, on the little puddle-jumper that will take me from Chicago to Madison. There's a hold-up. A woman airline staffer with a manifest explains, "We have an extra body on board." It seems there is one more passenger on the plane than is identified on her chart. She goes through the plane row by row, asking all of us for our names and our boarding passes. I notice that the woman across the aisle from me is readiing a mystery novel with a bookmark that says "Booked for Murder". The man next to me gives his name, when asked, as "Flatland." I turn to him and observe, "That's an unusal name." He explains that his family took the name from the district in Norway from which they emigrated. I tell him about the parable of Flatland devised by Edward Abbott to help us imagine what it would be like to see and operate from the fifth dimension instead of merely the 3D reality (plus time) we ordinarily inhabit. Abbott's Flatland is a 2D world in which everything is completely exposed to a citizen of 3D reality who can materialize and dematerialze and move things around in a godlike (or ET) fashion incomprehensible to inhabitats of the horizontal universe.

In the midst of this conversation, the mystery of the extra body is resolved. An infant has been assigned a seat in the manifest, though not a boarding pass. We are airborne, soon looking down on the dairy farms of Wisconsin cheese country.

At Madison's Dane County Airport, my friend Karen McKean, who is coordinating my Death workshop for me, is waiting next to a display case that features a curious composite sculpture with a skeletal figure with a Death's head at its center.

Death hasn't finished rhyming. When I arrive at the CBS studios for an interview with "Live at Five" I am given coffee in a black mug with the logo of a (Winnipeg) taxidermy company, "a family tradition." When I go on from the interview to have drinks with a friend before a bookstore event, she tells me she just dreamed her husband died, or a heart attack.

I've declared (in "The Three 'Only' Things) that "life rhymes." I've been reminded that Death rhymes too.


The photo of the Death sculpture at Dane County Airport is by Karen McKean, who leads Active Dreaming classes at her studio near Madison WI in addition to coordinating my area workshops.

Played by Death

"Something happened when [Claudio] Abbado had his tangle with stomach cancer eight years ago. Now, it's as if his musicians sit on the brink of the abyss with him, wanting every note to matter so much that if the world ended tomorrow, nobody would care."

I quote this from a wonderful review by Sheila Apthorp of an evening of French music with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, when under Abbado's baton the dreams of Berlioz, Debussy and Ravel came alive.[http://www.abbadiani.it/guppy/articles.php?lng=en&pg=648] It is marvelous what clarity and creative passion a close acquaintance with Death can bring.

I've felt a close connection with Death throughout my life as a result of my boyhood experiences of "dying and coming back" (as an Australian doctor put it in those pre-NDE days). Whenever I get too blase about this - or just too idle - Death pops up in wonderfully shiverish ways to restore my clarity and fire.

Last week in a gathering in Connecticut I led a journey to a place of healing. I had many very powerful experiences of my own, while drumming for the group and watching over them (doing this kind of work is very good for the practice of maintaining multiple levels of consciousness). The climactic sequence came when, after many other adventures, I came to a quiet pool inside a temple-like precinct, with wide, creamy, shallow steps leading down on three sides. I knew in that moment that this pool was the Eternal Bethesda, the one that was there long before Jesus told the lame man to get up and walk. This is the exact address of the Angel That Troubles the Waters, the lord of Death who may also be a lord of healing.

I felt a stirring beneath the waters. Then a whirlpool began to form near the wall of the enclosure, on the only side without direct access. The whirlpool span stronger and stronger, opening wider to reveal a great form of black granite rushing up from the depths. Its shape suggested a throne sized for a giant. The upper part of the throne rose twenty feet above the surface of the pool. Its lower part seemed to reach down incalculably deep, all the way to the Underworld. While the waters boiled around the dark throne, I felt absolute stillness there, in the place of Death. I received the message again, streaming through the fibres of my soul, that for me the right path will always involve approaching every significant choice by looking at it from the standpoint of Death.

I have an appointment as Death in the Midwest this week, when I lead my workshop titled "Making Death Your Ally" which involves guiding participants through a close encounter with their personal Death into a tour of possible afterlife transitions and then a renegitiation of their life contracts.

Many years ago, when I led this workshop at a site near the Gettysburg battlefield, we shared some indelible experiences. Perhaps it is not surprising that many of us were conscious of the nearby presence of men in blue and gray who had not moved on. I spoke to their superior officers and told them they were welcome to audit the workshop - and that I hoped they would find it helpful - but that they should remain at a discreet distance outside our circle. They listened with respect and followed these rules with military discipline. On the night our travelers returned from the abyss, having met Death and made their personal agreements on how they would now seek to live, we turned on all the lights and danced to wild tango music.

Poetry comes from flooding

Stefania Pandolfo’s beautiful, polyphonic Impasse of the Angels: Scenes from a Moroccan Space of Memory (University of Chicago Press) evokes the landscapes – imaginal more than physical – of rural Moroccan villagers for whom dreaming and poetry are vitally important, and always interweaving.

“Poetry is always the result of flooding”, a younger poet tells her. A real poem bursts from an emotion that is inundating, overwhelming – until it finds creative release.

The most respected poet in the area, one Sheikh Mohammed, was alien to poetry until he dreamed of a flood. The dream came at a time of personal trauma when he was close to despair. Previously a violent man of action, he had managed to blow off his right hand in a gun accident.

He dreamed the river was coming down in flood, its front like a mountain, carrying everything it encountered in its path, trees and carrion and debris. Instead of fleeing, he stood there in the dry riverbed, watching and waiting. Then he opened his mouth and swallowed the flood and everything borne along by it.

“Upon waking he recounted the dream to his mother: ‘The river in flood entered my mouth and I swallowed it.’; and she told him that he had become a poet. He who had never recited a verse or cared for poetry, he who had even ridiculed poets in his previous life, began to ‘speak’, to utter poetical ‘words.”

I am reminded of a personal dream of a flood that was a watershed in my creative life. I dreamed I was watching a tremendous wall of water rushing towards where I stood with an animal friend. Instead of fleeing, I prepared myself to catch the wave and ride it. I woke charged with creative energy. I still regard that dream – which I titled “Inundation” – as one of the most powerful creative experiences of my life, and in group visioning in my workshops I have adapted it as a portal through which others can find their own creative power.

Stefania Pandolfo demonstrates that if we plunge deep enough into the specifics of a remote culture (in this case into a world of vernacular Arab poetry unknown to most people even in the Arabic-speaking world) we find themes and processes that are part of our common humanity.

On the Night Shift

I am interested in those nights of dreaming from which we surface quite certain that we accomplished something valuable, with the sense that this was a real event, completed inside the dreamspace. Dreams of this kind do not require analysis, though we may look for verification in various ways - for example, by checking our subsequent state of health (in the case of a dream of healing) or observing incidents in the ordinary world that seem to follow from what was done in the dream.

In the ancient temples of dream healing, seekers came in hopes that a complete healing might be transacted during the night and (to judge by the Asklepian testimonies conveniently gathered in the Edelstein's massive compilation) many wen home entirely satisfied. My friend Wanda Burch, author of She Who Dreams reports a recent personal experience of this kind. Troubled by a suspect mole that had appeared on the sole of one of her feet, she made an appointment for a medical inspection. Before going to the doctor, she asked for dream help. In her night dream, she saw a disembodied hand draw a line around the mole. In the morning, the mole had completely disappeared. Grateful but incredulous, she had to summon her husband to confirm that no trace was left.

My friend Louisa, a music lover, attends complete concerts in her dreams. On a recent night, she reports, "I dreamed of a grand gala performed by a superb orchestra, huge, Mahler-sized, with that distinct 'breath' that all great orchestras have. I was just a disembodied presence, but I could see and especially hear very well. The sound was direct and rounded, with distinct sound from each player, as though I was floating right above the stage."

I dream very frequently that I am conducting classes and giving lectures, as I do in waking life. Sometimes such dreams preview classes I subsequently lead in the ordinary world; sometimes they seem to be programs of the "Night School" sufficient unto themselves. I often hear from dreamers who claim they have attended some of these programs. When I was writing my book Dreaming True I received an email from a very wise woman (a double PhD, inter alia) who had attended one of my waking-world courses at Esalen. She wanted to thank me for "the lecture you gave last night". I had given no such lecture in ordinary reality, but I had vague recollections of lecturing in my own dreams that night. My interest was piqued because she mentioned the "lucidity" with which I had summarized certain points, writing a list on a whiteboard. Since these points related directly to the book I was then working on, I asked her if she would be good enough to send me her notes form my lecture. She obliged, and I was able to incorporate the five points she had recorded from the lecture I had given in her dream, virtually unedited, in my book.

Sometimes the work of the night shift is emotional healing and the mending of relationships. I want to share a profound experience of this kind.

Many years ago, I felt that a powerful dream closed the book on a bitter conflict. For years before this dream, I had been locked in an ongoing battle with a man I then regarded as my worst enemy.

In the dream, I met him in a men's room. When he saw me, his features distorted and he inflated like a balloon, until he resembled a demonic entity more than a human.

Instead of doing battle, I looked at him calmly, reached deep into my heart, and said to him, from the heart, "I love you."

This sent him in whirling confusion. He deflated to regular size, and the darkness around him fell away. He went on shrinking until he resembled a pink and innocent baby.

I now bent over the sink and purged. When I inspected the clear bile I had heaved up, I saw it contained scores of rusty nails. I was astonished to realize that these had been inside me, and could now understand that they were the effect of the hateful thoughts and feelings that had been projected by my adversary.

I woke in wonderful spirits, feeling light and energized - and also that the old feud had now, really and truly, been ended.

I believe the work of that night shift was profound closure. My dream self, wiser and more generous that I may have been at that time in my life, was able to accomplish a healing that I doubt that my ordinary self could have undertaken then.. I did not encounter that old adversary again, either in regular life or in dreams, and he has since passed on. But I was able to think of him with compassion, remembering the sweet and innocent child that had been revealed, and I never again felt any harmful thoughts coming my way from him.

When waking events catch up with a dream

FROM ROBERT'S MAILBAG

Belinda writes:

I often have dreams that did not appear obviously predictive at first, but at later glance, I realize that it was, and that I had missed a crucial opportunity. I often feel that some of these dreams can be circular in one's life (as in the opportunity may come back around again). How can I work with a dream which I think its time has already passed? Is there a way to re-open a similar opportunity in the future?

Robert responds

I often find that when life catches up with a dream event - one I may have dreamed years or even decades before - I can often use the detailed information from the "old" dream (if I have retained it in my journal) as navigational guidance. I may have missed the original prediction, but when dream event and waking event meet up, I find I have a very useful counselor at my elbow.

Recognizing this kind of thing also makes me more alert to scanning all dream material for possible clues to the future, especially since (as you may have noticed) the futures we can preview are not necessarily "set" and can sometimes be altered in creative ways. In my experience and observation, we are constantly scouting the paths ahead of us in dreams, which also show us the likely consequences of current attitudes and behaviors and looming choices.

Events throw a shadow before them. Even when we miss the shape of what is to come until it is all over us, the "old" dream has rehearsed us. When we re-examine the "old" dream in the new situation, we can learn from how our dream selves handled or mishandled the breaking news. We may have missed an opportunity to reshape a coming event, but we can still choose our response(both inner and outer) to that event, and here again the dream can play counselor.

Sea of Faces and Dream Flashbacks

FROM ROBERT'S MAILBAG

Sea of Faces

Sally writes:

I want to ask about how people receive their images as they close their eyes and allow the mind to empty so that spontaneous pictures and sensory impressions can be received.

About a year and a half ago I first began seeing very vivid visions on the screen behind my closed eyes. They have a holographic quality in that they are three dimensional and completely realistic. They present themselves by emerging from a deep place of darkness. The design patterns are intensely creative as the human faces grow, recede, morph into new ones. There is energy and expressiveness, especially in the eyes, very soulful eyes. In one sighting of a large group of brown-eyed people there was a face that bore a striking likeness to Coretta Scott King. Recently, early in the morning before rising. In fact, I can summon this sea of faces, if I am very relaxed.

Have you ever had anyone speak to you of something similar to my experience? Do you have any thoughts on how I might chart my way through this sea of humanity that insists upon showing up?

Robert responds

Your "sea of faces" experience is familiar to me, and to others who hang out in relaxed states, especially the "twilight zone" of hypnagogia, between waking and sleep, or between sleep and waking.

I find the cast is constantly shifting. Sometimes I seem to be looking through the veil (of ordinary perception) into activity on a level of reality fairly close to the physical. This may broaden out into perceptions of vast numbers of human or humanoid characters, mostly quite unfamiliar. It may turn to scanning of passing parades in the ordinary world (or a counterpart reality so close to it as to be indistinguishable) or branch out into explorations on other planes altogether.

It's often startling when someone in the parade of faces proves to be looking at me. Such experiences can be the prelude to conscious dream adventures and conversations. I don't often seek to talk to strangers that I perceive in this way, but if I thought I could communicate with Coretta Scott King I might have a go at that.


Flashbacks to Old Dreams

Victoria B. writes:

In my waking life I seem to get 'flashbacks' of dreams that I have had previously, sometimes from when I was a child. Just snippets of dreams that I know were from a long time ago. Is this a common thing and what does it mean?

Robert responds:

I am always intrigued by the surfacing of those "old" dreams. Sometimes our waking lives are catching up with events and situations we dreamed long before. Sometimes the "flashbacks" are invitations and opportunities to reclaim a connection with a younger self, with her energy and her gifts. Sometimes we are becoming aware of an ongoing story that has been playing out in another order of reality, maybe over all of our present life.

Starting the Day in Dreamland

Another document from a future society known as Dreamland has come into my possession. On February 10, we posted a report on "Doctors in Dreamland" that appears to have been the work of someone engaged in the healthcare industry a century or more ahead of our time. The new document, by contrast, appears to have been written by a child. It would be a good guess that the author is a sixth-grader, in our terms (although school terminology may be different in Dreamland). He reports, perhaps for a school project, on the daily customs of dream-sharing in his family. His just-so, colloquial account of how you start the day right in a dreaming culture has a charming insouciance. It is also highly provocative. It may lead us to reflect on how deeply adrift our mainstream society has become - in its estrangement from dreams - not only from the ways of our ancestors of the past, but from the ways of our enlightened descendents. The Lightning Dreamwork Game is apparently standard daily practice in the future society known as Dreamland.

“Who has a dream?” That’s the question that starts our day, at the breakfast table or earlier, when the dream won’t wait.

The dream might be something that happened during the night, when you went traveling or received a visit, or got chased by monsters or chased them back. The dream might be a memory of the future. It might be something the world gave you, something you heard in the voice of a bird or the whistle of the wind in the leaves.

My dreamwork teacher says that dreaming isn’t really about sleeping. It’s about waking up to the things you need to know. Dreaming is traveling. You do that in your sleep, but you can do it by stepping inside the world of a tree, or walking the path of moonlight on water or – as my little sister says – by just punching a hole in the world. When we go dreaming, we step through the curtain of the world into the world-behind-the-world. Out there are beings who are dreaming about us. Sometimes they come poking or tickling through the curtain of our world to help us wake up. This is called coincidence, and if you want to get good at dreaming, you watch it the way a cat watches a bird.

In our house, when there’s breakfast on the table, we take turns to tell dreams and coincidences. Whoever has the strongest feelings gets to go first.

Every game requires rules, and we have rules for dream telling. The first rule is about time. When we start a dream telling we set the egg timer (ours looks like a bear) for ten minutes. You get five minutes to tell your dream, and then everyone gets five minutes more to talk it over with you and help you figure out what to do. Then the egg timer goes off and everything stops, or else the bear gets really really mad. We go on to the next story, or we head off to work and school.

We set the timer even on lazy days when we could take hours and hours to hang out with a dream. We might do lots of things with a dream after a telling, like making a picture or logging on the meta-library to check out a funny word, or letting a neighbor know how to avoid an accident next Tuesday, or traveling back inside the dreamspace to play with a friend or deal with an enemy or get the words of a song. But we want to do the first sharing fast, because it’s fun and that way you don’t lose the energy. “Like lightning!” my dreamwork teacher says, sawing his hand down like a lightning bolt. “Do it fast and feel the power!”

A big rule is that we must tell our dream as a story and everyone present must listen up. It’s okay to act the dream out as you tell it, slithering around the floor or turning pirouettes of fire. You want to give your dream a name; stories need titles.

When you’ve told your dream, the other people get to ask you a few – just a few – questions. The first question is always, “What did you feel when you woke up?” What you feel about a dream in your heart or your tummy is the best guide to whether the dream is good or bad and whether it’s about something in this world, or another world, or one of the messages coded in symbols that bring the worlds together.
Another question we always ask is, “Could anything in the dream happen in the future in some way?” We search every dream for clues to the future, because in dreams we are time travelers who can scout out the roads ahead for ourselves and others. When a dream opens a door on the future, we want to figure whether out the event on the other side is fixed or squidgy. A squidgy future is one we can push or pull like play-dough, so things will come out better.

After the questions, everyone who is playing the Lightning Dreamwork Game gets to say anything they like about the dream as long as they say it politely. To do this, we begin by saying “if this were my dream” and then add whatever pops into our heads.
We’re watching the egg timer, because we’re not done until we get to the Action Plan. Dreams require action.

Lucy (she’s my sister, and she’s four) is jumping up and down now, so I have to let her speak. I hope she’ll be quick.

Lucy (aged four): I want to tell them what we do with S-C-A-R-Y dreams.
Me: OK.
Lucy: You spit out the bad stuff right away, on the ground or down the toilet. If there’s something in your dream that was chasing you, you go back inside and you chase it back.
Me: But what if it’s too scary?
Lucy (holding up a teddy bear as big as she is): Then you take a special friend with you – we call it an ally – who can scare it back. When you brave up to what was scaring you, sometimes it becomes a new friend.
Me: Anything else you want to tell us about scary dreams?
Lucy: They show you bad stuff that can’t be stopped unless you tell Mommy or Daddy and they make it right. Like when I dreamed the crash.
Me: Right.
Lucy: And I told Mommy and we didn’t go on the red shuttle that went BOOM.
Me: Thank you, Lucy.
Lucy: No, wait. Tell them if you’re falling you should stop flapping and start flying.

That was Lucy. She’s taken up all the time I had left. I have to prepare for my Prevision final at school. I dreamed the questions last night, of course, but I have to go over my notes.