Smell the synchronizing

This starts out about as mundane as you can get. I run out to the supermarket for essential supplies in between posting today's blog essay and returning to larger writing and editing assignments. I'm in the checkout aisle with my loaded cart, which includes two bags of French Roast coffee beans, which seem to dematerialize fast in my household. There are people ahead of me but the belt starts moving and I unload one item, then a second - at which point the checkout cashier in the next aisle calls out cheerily, "Sir? I can help you over here." My instinct is to stay where I am, but the person ahead of me looks like they will need some time and I don't want the smiling cashier in the next aisle to feel rebuffed. So I repack the items I have unloaded and gently coach the old boy behind me to move his cart back far enough to let me go round. At which point, the nice cashier in the next aisle is calling out "Sir? You may as well stay where you are" - because a woman has just pushed an overloaded cart into the spot intended for me.

There's really nothing to do except go forward at this point, since the old boy who let me out has taken my place in line for the first register. The woman in the second line is sweet. She offers to let me in ahead of her, but I can't accept. "It's fine. It's one of those silly little life situations that offer a teaching lesson."

She's curious. "What is the lesson?"

"I think the lesson is: trust your instinct and check on the situation without immediately going where people ask you to go, even when you know they mean you the best. And keep your sense of humor."

The checkout guy and the packer are following this. The packer - an elderly woman retiree working part-time - says, "Life is what you make it."

"You are a wise woman," I tell her.

The cashier, Nick, is the shift boss and he processes my groceries at flawless speed. When he hands me the receipt he says, "I comped you for one of those bags of coffee beans because you were so nice."

The one-liners I derive from this very small incident are also rules for navigating by coincidence:

- For every setback, look for a gift

- Always check other people's directions.

Eastern realms of enchantment

I am pursuing my research into Eastern realms of enchantment. This has taken me into the immense fantasy realm of a storytelling tradition that begins in Persia and flowers into its lushest growth in the Urdu language in northern India and Pakistan. The best of this material is only recently becoming available in English translation, thanks in part to a dream.

The translator, Urdu scholar and novelist Musharraf Ali Farooqi (who grew up on this stuff on hot afternoons in Hyderabad) dreamed he was visited by mythic creatures who came galloping right out of The Adventures of Amir Hamza, the name given to the main story cycle. In giving us the first accessible English translation of The Adventures of Amir Hamza (published by the Modern Library in a 900-page edition) Farooqi has made an enormous contribution to the common fund of world literature.

Turning these wonder tales into English was long thought to be an impossible task. They are the transitions of oral narratives, and you hear the voices of the many tellers, ranging from courtly Persian to bawdy, street vendors’ Hindustani. You get detail piled on detail. It won’t do to have an army ride into a city without naming a hundred kinds of weapons. In one passage we even get the itemization of seventy kinds of rice pilaf. The Urdu-language editors were quite unable to harmonize the variant plots of the numberless dastangos (storytellers) who contributed to these adventures. Yet Musharraf Farooqi has performed a marvel, serving a feast of delights as rich as the Arabian Nights and often absolutely fresh to the Western reader.

A Persian emperor sees his crown carried away by a crow that is killed by a hawk that restores it. The dream is interpreted by his vizier to foreshadow the coming of a hero, Amir Hamza, who will be born in Mecca. The vizier is despatched to Mecca to wait for the coming child (whose name is known to history as that of the martial uncle of the Prophet Muhammad). In the realm of fairies and jinn - the empire of Qaf - another royal dream of annunciation predicts the coming of the same Amir Hamza as the human champion who will overthrow a monstrous usurper.

What unfolds is a magnificent saga of danger, trickery and romance, in which raucous interludes of low comedy interweave with moments of mystical encounter. Every prince is accompanied by a "trickster" (ayyar) who uses disguise and deception and magical props in the neverending battles with sorcerers and demons. The trickster who accompanies the protagonist, Amar Ayyar, gains his bag of tricks through a dream on a holy mountain in which he meets the "prophets". He is given a zambil, a bag that is bigger inside than outside - so big it can contain a whole world.

In The Adventures of Amir Hamza we travel through a wondrous imaginal geography that includes contructed realities known as tilisms. These are realms of enchantment created by sorcerers. You may fall into one for various reasons and then find it very hard to get out.

Any world may prove to be a tilism, a realm of enchantment created by sorcerers in defiance of “the laws of God and of nature”. We learn a great deal more about the conditions of such realms in a giant offshoot of The Adventures of Amir Hamza, the immense fantasy epic known as the Tilism-e Hoshruba. The tilism of Hoshruba is the realm of Afrasiyab, the Emperor of Enchantment. Its geography is more various and complex than that of the ordinary world. There are tilisms within tilisms, nested worlds created by magic and imagination. Humans live in such places but do not see where they are. It is much easier to fall into a tilism than to get out.

The only way to pierce the veils of illusion and overthrow a tilism is to find the tablet that holds the secrets of the tilism, including the conditions for its destruction and the name of the person who will destroy it. The tablet could be concealed anywhere, often inside the tilism itself.

Musharraf Farooqi has just published the first volume of a projected 24-volume translation of Hoshruba: The Land and the Tilism (Urdu Project, 2009) - a heroic enterprise that draws my admiration, and expands our knowledge of the mythic imagination.

Of zephyrs and islands

I woke in the early hours today with just a wisp of a dream, the trace of a zephyr blowing through in the night. I recalled that in the dream, I am traveling to meet a French writer. We are coming from different places. One of his flights will take him from Monte Carlo to Mauritius. We have important things to explore together, some concerning Africa.

I was excited and intrigued. I knew very little about Mauritius, but it did not take me more than a few minutes googling to identify one most interesting French writer with strong ties to that island democracy between Africa and India. He is JMG Le Clézio, the 2008 Nobel Laureate for literature. (Monte Carlo, famed for its casino, could be a dream code for winning BIG.) His family has been connected to Mauritius since 1798, when one of his ancestors left France in order to avoid being compelled to cut his long hair - following the regulations of the French Revolutionary Army - and settled on the island. Le Clézio's novel The Prospector is set in Mauritius, and evokes the beauty of the island and the rich medley of different cultures and ethnicities - African, Indian, European.

I read Le Clézio's Nobel acceptance speech, a passionate defense of books and the power of storytelling, in which he goes deep into the roots of his own creative inspiration. He speaks in very personal ways about what drives him to write, since his boyhood productions, which included a tale told by a seagull and the biography of an imaginary king. These were encouraged by long hours of solitude, by a grandmother’s flair for telling long stories, always set in a forest – and her dictionaries, that took the place of story books.

I was excited to find a strong African connection, a possible clue to a key element in my dream. Le Clezio recalls that after he spend part of his childhood in Nigeria with his father, an English bush doctor, he emerged with a "second personality". He says this second self, “a daydreamer who was fascinated with reality at the same time” has stayed with him all his life. It has constituted "a contradictory dimension, a strangeness in myself that at times has been a source of suffering” – and, it seems, of creativity. “It has taken me the better part of my existence to understand the significance of this contradiction.”

I have long been fascinated by the sacred psychology of the Yoruba, a people of Nigeria, according to which each of us has a second self - a "double in heaven" - who watches us as we progress through the "marketplace" of this world. From one life to another (the Yoruba say) we swap places. I don't know whether this has anything to do with Le Clezio's experience of the "second personality" that emerged from a boyhood encounter with Africa, but clearly we are on fertile ground, for the creative mind and the life explorer. Other writers have written from a struggle with a second self, including Mark Twain, who described more than one form of the double and speculated about the operations of a "spiritualized self" that may travel independently from the regular personality. Mark Twain also visited Mauritius, and reported that opinions were divided as to whether Mauritius was modelled on paradise, or paradise was modelled on Mauritius.

Dreams set us research assignments, and my research on Mauritius and the French writer continues. Dreams also suggest directions and intineraries. I don't know whether I will buy a plane ticket to Mauritius to follow my dream, but I am thinking about it - and the swimmer in me is delighted by images of all those spectacular beaches.

The merest "wisp" of a dream can be a gift. That came out again in a conversation involving another island a few hours later this morning. I was recording a radio interview with Lovell Dyett, the veteran broadcaster for WBZ newsradio in Boston. He mentioned that his family is from the island of Montserrat in the Lesser Antilles, and that his aunt was renowned as a dreamer. If any issue came up, she would say, "I'll dream on that" - and the next day she generally had the solution. Lovell lamented that fact that despite his efforts to develop dream recall, he never seemed to remember his night dreams - except that on the morning of our interview, he remembered just a tiny part of a dream from the night before. I asked if he would share. "Someone was asking me for my phone number, and I gave it. It was my regular phone number. We checked that the numbers were right."

If it were my dream, I suggested, I would be open to the possibility that someone was trying to contact me. It might be someone I hadn't realize was available to communicate - someone like that long-deceased aunt from Montserrat who would make a fabulous mentor on dreams. "Or my mother," Lovell chipped in. I got shivers. I'm not sure whether they came when I was talking about Lovell's aunt, or when he mentioned his departed mother, but I know that for me truth comes with goosebumps.

In one vocabulary of dreaming (that of ancient Assyria) a word for dream literally means "zephyr". A dream or zephyr is a gentle breeze that can blow through a chink at your door, or in your mind, and bring you a message worth hearing.

Dreams get us through

I just did an interview on Wisconsin Public Radio in which the callers produced a fresh harvest of personal examples of how dreams help us to get through life.

A songwriter described how he has woken in the middle of the night with new songs playing in his mind. Sometimes they are complete, with words and music. Sometimes he has to work on them for a bit. He is in a long tradition of songwriters and composers who have plucked new pieces from their dreams. I was reminded on John Lennon's statement that "the best songs are the ones that come to you in the middle of the night and you have to get up and write them down so you can go back to sleep."

As we discussed diagnostic dreams, the host, Veronica Rueckert, recalled the case of a man who dreamed a rat was gnawing on his throat. Shaken by the dream, he sought medical assistance, and went from one physician to another until his throat cancer was detected and treatment began that he credited with saving his life.

David, an IT professional, recounted a situation in which his office was preparing to install a new system. The day before, his supervisor told him to go home and get some sleep. He took a nap and saw himself in a workaday situation. He saw and recognized the code he would be applying. Suddenly the screen in his dream went fuzzy and a voice said firmly, "NO. It should be like this." The code changed. When he went into the office the next day, he checked and found that the code they were working with was wrong. He made the necessary changes, as had been done in the dream. "Good thing you caught that," his supervisor told him. At this point, David explained that he had dreamed the correction. "Never heard of anything like that," the supervisor shook his head. "Maybe I should have my analysts do a lot more sleeping."

A woman caller spoke of a recurring dream theme whose full significance became clear to her only at the end of a long relationship. She dreamed again and again that her partner was missing. She couldn't find him or couldn't get through to him on the phone. Sometimes she felt he was hiding from her. By the time of the break-up, she had been compelled to recognize a long pattern of deception, and that in fundamental ways, her partner had been "missing" for much of the time they had been together. We discussed what is going on when a dream theme repeats over and over. I suggested that it's either because we need to get the message or because we need to take action on that message. We may have a notion what a recurring dream is about, but can't bring ourselves to do what is necessary - which would be very understandable if we dream our partner is missing. Like a helpful (and well-informed) friend who is looking out for us, the dream theme will come again and again until we do something about it.

At the end of the show, the host asked me to share a "big" dream of my own. How to pick one, out of so many? Yet I knew at once which dream I would tell, because earlier in the program - when asked to explain how dreaming can help to move us beyond hatred and war - I had quoted a phrase in the Mohawk Indian language. The phrase is tohsa sasa nikon'hren. It literally means, "Do not let your mind fall". We fall into Dark Times, in the traditional Mohawk cosmology, when we forget the higher world - the Earth-in-the-Sky - from which we come. Our ability to heal our enmities and grow as a life form depend on not-forgetting a higher source of wisdom and a higher order of reality. Dreaming is the main link between our ordinary minds and that higher spiritual plane, a way of not letting our minds fall.
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So I told a watershed dream from my life some twenty years ago, in which I entered a space where a circle of people who lived very close to the earth were singing and drumming. I hestitated at the entrance of their longhouse, fearing I was intruding. But they welcomed me into a place they had waiting for me. At a certain point, I lay by the firepit, at the center of the circle. One by one, the dream people came to me. They took red-hot coals from the fire and placed them over my ears and my eyes, and on my tongue, and over my heart. They sang in their own language, which I could now understand: "We do this to open your ears, that you may hear clearly. We do this to open your eyes, that you may see clearly. We do this to open your mouth, so you will speak only truth. And we do this -" placing the coal over the heart "-so that henceforth you will speak and act only from the heart."

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I did no analysis with that dream. Vitally energized, I jumped in my car and drove to a lake in a state park east of my home. I promised to the lake and the trees and the red-tailed hawk that came knifing through the clouds, "Henceforth I will speak and act only from the heart."

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On the darkest days, a dream like this can be a hearthfire and a homing beacon. Charging us with the power of a deeper drama, inciting us not to let our minds fall - these may be the biggest ways that dreaming helps us through.

The desk in the mountains

I am walking from room to room in my house with books and papers, trying to find the right place to settle in order to embark on important new work. I realize the solution is very simple: I'll go back to my desk. It's a huge desk, but it's usually covered with stuff. When I sit down now, however, much of the surface is clear. I notice a little black Moleskine notebook that vanished many months ago.

     I feel extraordinarily comfortable, yet also ready for adventure, almost as if the desk is the control panel of a starship and we are about to take off. I look up and gasp with amazement and delight. In front of me, the wall of the room has vanished. I am looking into a marvelous vista of forested hills and mountains. Everything is green and verdant, full of the juice of spring. I am right there, in the midst of the mountains, as if my desk is on an overhang.

I woke from this dream this morning feeling wonderful, ready to plunge into new projects. But first, I needed to honor the dream on a literal level by clearing space on my desk. As I moved things around my writing Cave, I unearthed the little Moleskine notebook, and with it a box of "floppy" disks that had been missing for even longer, and had evaded my periodic - and sometimes urgent - archeological digs. The retrieval of the floppies was a great find, since they contain journal entries and story drafts I had not saved on my current hard drive or flash drive.

     Our dream adventures may be grand narrative roller coasters, or long-running sitcoms, or multi-storeyed houses of the psyche; some of my dream reports run for pages and pages of single-spaced type. Yet sometimes the most helpful dreams come through as a vignette, a fragment, or just a single word or phrase. Less can be more, in this as in other things. A simple image may provide a vital clue, and when it stands alone there is less risk of blurring the focus. If we want more, we can use even the tiniest fragment as a fisherman uses a rod, to reel in larger creatures from the dream sea. More than any specific content, the great gift of certain dreams is the energy they can convey. My dream of the desk in the mountains left me full of juice, ready to work and create - and even to clean up my office!

     I am reminded of an observation by my favorite writer on dreams before the modern era, who just happened to be a bishop of the early church. In his tractate "On dreams" (De insomniis), written on his estate in North Africa around 405, Synesius wrote that in dreams God makes us "fruitful with his own courage." Yes. Dreaming helps us to bear fruit, with vital strength from a deeper source.

Saving the woman at the glass door

In one of my advanced circles last night a woman recounted a dream in which she was menaced by men who were ringing doorbells on her street peddling something. She watched their activity through a glass door, and becamse very sure that what they were offering was bogus. When one of the men - who reminded her of a "hippie" - came to her door, she refused to open it. The lock wasn't properly secured. He came through the door and forced her into her living room. When he unzipped his pants, she realized he intended to rape her. She saw the face of the second hustler, with short, stubbly hair, behind him. She mobilized her will and her craft. She pulled on the zipper of her jeans yelling, "Just try it! I've been raped before and I have AIDS!" This was a lie, but it had the desired effect. Her attackers backed off in a hurry and fled the house. She proceeded to call the police with their descriptions.

She woke from this dream feeling completely detached. She described her mood as "nonchalant". She was puzzled as to how she could have so little affect after a dream involving so much danger.

As we discussed the dream, it became clear that nothing in the dream locale belonged to her regular life. The house with the glass door was nothing like her own house. The street and the neighborhood were completely unfamiliar, as were the men.

We asked, "Were you your present self?" She thought that she was, in terms of the way her mind worked. But she was unsure whether she was in her ordinary body.

I was struck by the dreamer's emotional detachment on surfacing from an experience charged with drama and danger. No racing pulse, not even a sense of relief or satisfaction over having outwitted the assailants.

When I find myself detached in this way, after a dream drama, I begin to suspect that the dream action does not involve my life situation, but may concern that of someone else.

My thoughts flew to this idea: Was it possible that the dreamer picked up a psychic distress signal from a woman under threat, in the house with the glass door? Could the dreamer have joined that joined that person, mentally, to help her deal with her attackers?

I believe such things are entirely possible, in the web of dreaming.

The Art of Heronry

I am studying the art of heronry.

You are a master of patience.
You can wait on one leg,
A spearman poised and immobile,
Longer than I can wait on two (or three).
Your standing stillness cons the fish
Into disregarding you, as a dead branch
Or a boring relic from an old shipwreck.

You don’t need anyone to tell you
When the time is GO.
In that instant, you strike without delay,
Your purpose straight and swift and clean
As a stabbing spear, taking your prey.

I am relieved that even you
Have to work to get airborne,
Flapping and beating your great gray-blue wings.
When you are up, and stretch out your body,
You exhibit the whole history of flight.
You show yourself as the Feathered Serpent,
The one that grew wise enough
To make a home in another dimension.

I love the way you practice love.
You put on a gaudy show for your intended
Sprouting twin mating plumes.
When your gallantry prospers,
You are willing to work in intimate partnership.
I have seen you, ferrying twigs in your beak
To your mate in the frame of your nest in the trees.

High-flying bird of the heart,
I like your business arrangement
With the busy engineer of canals and dams;
Where the beaver builds, you build too.

Humans, who fly only in dreams and machines,
Know you as an ancient ally and exemplar.
You brought First Woman from the Earth in the Sky
Breaking her fall on wings spread like magic carpets
To dance a new Earth into being.

Egypt knows you, and the mystery of your rise
From the sexy serpent of Earth
To the master of air and of water.
Egypt calls you the ever living, the phoenix bird
Born again and again from the ashes of the old life,
Endlessly birthing your winged and shining self.


photo by Chris Harshaw