When the world is your body

In one of my workshops, a woman I'll call Lara shared a dream titled “War”. She was very agitated and upset as she retold it.

I am on patrol with six women dressed in green uniforms. We are all riding motorcycles. The stars seem very close. I don’t want to look at them. I don’t know where we are to begin with, then I realize we are near my home town. Enemy missiles are coming in. Our people are firing missiles to stop them, but their aim is all wrong. I keep yelling to warn them they are missing their targets, but they don’t hear or don’t act. An enemy missile hits the place where I was born and I know it has been obliterated.

Lara connected this dream with a series of “end of the world” dreams, but found this one the scariest. In our early discussion of her dream, she did not tell us that she had been undergoing medical treatment and has been worried about her doctors. This came out only at the end of the process, and we did not ask for details.

After some hesitation, Lara agreed to my suggestion that she should try to go back inside her dream through our Dream Reentry technique. She also agreed to allow all the other dreams in the workshop - a circle of 35 - to make a group journey into her dreamspace, where we would support her and gather further information for her as dream trackers.

I asked her to set a clear intention for Dream Reentry. She stated that her intention was to “heal the dream” by preventing the enemy missiles from getting through. I then started drumming to give the group fuel and focus for the group expedition.

In her Dream Reentry, Lara made interesting discoveries. She found the dream cities full of “pink houses” that she had not seen or remembered before. The stars, once again, were ominously close and she did not want to look at them. She was unable to fulfill her intention to "heal the dream". Something more remained to be done.

In tracking for Lara, my first aim was to establish whether her dream related to a literal threat of war or terrorism. It soon became clear to me that it did not. I looked for the women in green that Lara had described and found they were wearing nurses’ hospital scrubs. These nurses are aware of alternative approaches and can help to temper the allopathic approach.

I called on my dream allies to support Lara and I saw the Bear come through and wrapped her in healing energy. It seemed to me that the world of Lara's dream was the world of her body, and that all the war was raging within her body. I saw the menacing stars as cancer cells, threatening to metastasize. The “pink houses” were Lara's cellular system. The missiles being fired off were her doctors’ efforts to come up with the right mix of chemicals to treat her condition. The threat of missing or misfiring reflected the danger that the doctors would get the treatment wrong.

I tried to assist Lara in her intention to “heal the dream”, experimenting with setting up shields. I saw the missile fired at her birthplace deflected so that it landed in the river and was washed out to the sea.

I had the strong feeling that Lara could work with her dream imagery in the direction of healing, that it might even be possible to re-weave the pattern of the stars.

When we shared travel reports at the end of the group journey, I was cautious in telling Lara what I had seen, not wanting to project any negative images or scenarios. "In my dream of your dream," I began, She accepted what I brought quickly and gratefully, telling us immediately that there was a very real danger that what her doctors were doing – or might try to do – would misfire. She resolved to carry the dream warning as an advisory and to look for help from the “warrior nurses”.

Other members of the group reported that in their own journeys, they had seen the Bear embrace Lara and surround her with its healing and protective energy.

This adventure in group dreaming brought into sharp focus the need to determine whether the world of our dreams is the world out there, or our personal world, or the world inside the body, in which dramas and battles are also playing out. Because dreams work and speak on many levels, an individual dream may relate to all three of these worlds, and to a world beyond the ones we know.

For a full explanation of Dream Reentry and tracking, core techniques of Active Dreaming, please read my books Conscious Dreaming and The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence and Imagination.

Night battle via Future Invention Gallery

The revolt of the imagination under the Soviets

“The world smelled of heated copper and wilted carnations.”

The Line (Putnam: A Marian Wood Book) a new novel by Russian-American writer Olga Grushin, is full of such marvelous word pictures, that excite the inner senses. Under the dead weight of Soviet bureaucracy, time congeals “like a vat of frozen concrete.”

The tuba-player who aches for release from this sterile environment dreams of a street that resembles one he knows, but opens into magic, where an old man looks at him with mirror eyes and “satin women play cheerful little songs on ripened grapes.”

I am awed by Olga Grushin’s ability to write so well in a second language. Like Joseph Conrad, while she uses her adopted language better than most native speakers, she gives a little spin to the words that makes them fresh.

I loved her previous novel, The Dream Life of Sukhanov. Also set in the Soviet era, it brilliantly depicts the revolt of the imagination against the totalitarian project of total control over a subject population. The protagonist here is a promising Surrealist painter who betrays his ,use in order to get a fat paycheck and a big apartment and a chauffeured car while working as an art bureaucrat. His suppressed imagination comes after him, spawning dreamlike anomalies in his everyday world, until that world — and the false values it instilled in him — falls apart.

Healing at Hell's Gate

I'm glancing at a directory of "25 places with healing powers" at an excellent nurse practitioners' website. My eye slides over the familiar and over-touristed places (Stonehenge, Macchu Picchu etc) but pauses at "Hell's Gate." Now that's an intriguing name for a place of reputed healing!

I slip over to the Hells' Gate site and discover that this is a geothermal park in New Zealand, run by a Maori tribe, with the hottest waterfall in the Southern Hemisphere. It was given its name by George Bernard Shaw, the English playwright and wit, who - though an atheist - speculated that the steaming hot falls could be the gate to the Inferno. The Maori name for those falls is more original, and no less cautionary, than Hell's Gate: they are called O Te Mimi O Te Kakahi, which means The Urine of Kakahi, a legendary warrior who came here to heal his wounds, renew his energy and look into the future.

The hot pool of Hurutini derives its name from a more sinister story. Hurutini was a Maori princess who killed herself by throwing herself into the boiling waters after being shamed and abused by her husband, a local chief. The Maori name for the whole park - Tikitere, meaning Precious One - is derived from her mother's lament.

I can't vouch for the claimed benefits of the mud baths and hot sulphurous waters of this place. But I'm reminded of an undoubted place of ancient healing with close ties to the powers of the Underworld: the pool at Bethesda, where Jesus told the lame man to get up and walk. I write about the long association of Bethesda with deities of the Underworld, especially Serapis, in the chapter titled "The Angel That Troubles the Waters" in my Secret History of Dreaming.

Kahaki falls, Tikirere geothermal park, New Zealand

On a state of almost indescribable busy-ness

When people ask me, "How are you?" I am more and more inclined to include this truthful phrase in my answer: "I am almost indescribably busy."

Playing witness to myself, let me observe what I am doing here - and was doing long before I became fully aware I was doing it.

Since I am a writer and love to play with words, I cannot truthfully state that I am unable to describe how busy I am. I might say, that on my "day off" today, after leading three back-to-back workshops right after doing the Coast to Coast AM radio show live from 3-5 AM on Friday, I am:

- writing and editing a book that I must deliver before the end of August
- walking the dog
- working actively towards publication of two new works of fiction
- arranging publication of my first collection of poetry
- paying bills
- writing 4 articles for my two blogs (this one and my Dream Gates blog at Beliefnet)
- journaling
- buying groceries
- bringing myself back up to speed on my e-course for Spirituality & Health which has a global interactive forum that never sleeps
- playing travel agent and conference planner and hotel reservations clerk for several upcoming trips and programs
- fielding a few hundred email and FB messages
- doing my Synchronicity Walk, when I gather pop-up symbols and messages from the world around me
- reading several books at once
- having 8-9 conversations with the builders who are working on new steps for my house
- doing online research
- making sure I have at least one good deep uninterrupted conversation with my brilliant. deep-thinking daughter who is home for the summer
- getting ready to lead future seminars and trainings that sometimes require me to spend 12-14 contact hours a day with my students

ENOUGH!

The point is that once you start making an inventory of your busy-ness, you give up time and energy and can succeed in laying yourself and your unfortunate listeners flat. .

I will probably never inflict a list of this kind on myself, let alone readers or listeners, again.

Which leads me back to the virtue of being almost indescribably busy.

On any day but this - when I am breaking my general rule to deliver a cautionary tale - I could always tell you in how many ways I am busy, but I won't do it.

Haven't you noticed how people who aren't doing all that much can never seem to find time or energy to do just one thing more? By contrast, people who are truly busy can always manage to do one thing more - as long as they don't slow down to tell you how busy they are...

The bridge

I am the bridge between the tame land and the wild.
I was made by your hands but I am
the making and unmaking of your kind.

If you fear the crossing I narrow and heave..
If you seek to avoid what is on the other side
I will meet you halfway, in the form you most fear.

- Great Hollow CT, July 25, 2010

The badger and the poet

Thanks to American poet Jennifer Moxley, I've added a word to my vocabulary for what can go on inside and around the process of making poetry. The word, in French, is blaireau, and its literal translation is "badger", which immediately brings to mind that fierce and tenacious creature that lives under hedges and won't let go of something it has in its teeth and claws - which could be useful qualities in literary composition, if not overdone.
     But in the usage of the French poet Emmanuel Hocquart, as explained by Moxley in a postscript to her vividly aphoristic Fragments of a Broken Poetics, "badger" has a special and intriguing meaning:

"It is a way to designate those activities in D.I.Y. poetic circles of doing and making things that are not obviously valuable. The name badger" comes from an analogously useless activity: cutting off of all the hairs on a man's shaving brush (traditionally made of badger hair), and then, one by one, gluing them back on. In his book Ma haie [My Hedge], Hocquard has termed this method of poetry and bookmaking "la méthode Robinson" ("the Crusoe method")—that is, an activity, a result, or a concept, all of which look—to any outsider, non-poet type—"ridiculously useless," "private and solitary," and "outrageously speculative and experimental."*

Come to think of it, as I've been bringing together a collection of my own poetry and contemplating fonts and papers and graphic designs, I've had moments of crazy and random delight when the process has felt a little like pulling the hairs off the badger brush and then gluing them back on, though I doubt that this analogy that would have occurred to me spontaneously, outside a dream.

*Jennifer Moxley, "Fragments of a Broken Poetics" Chicago Review Spring 2010

Dreaming by the Book

My in-flight reading on a recent trip to California included Dreaming by the Book by Elaine Scarry, a professor of aesthetics at Harvard. It’s an inquiry into the magic of narrative and poetry that draws the reader into a vivid multisensory experience through the agency of little black marks on a white page. For example, she analyzes how certain writers conjure belief in the solidity of a wall by streaming fleeting or filmy shapes across it. Locke says that in the everyday operations of perception, the notion of solidity “hinders our further sinking downward” – so we are confident of the floor or sidewalk we are walking on.

Some kinds of reading alter the way we see. I looked out the window of my taxiing plane and saw the sun hammer the window of a control tower into a shaman's bronze mirror, flashing light. As the plane came down, its shadow ran beneath us on the tarmac far below, tiny at first but growing fast as we dropped. We flew into our shadow, like lovers rushing into each other's embrace. When we paused for breath, the shadow of our wing erased the yellow line on the landing strip. Beyond the shadow, there were no boundaries.

On the edge of San Francisco Bay that weekend, the legacy of the storm erased solid ground and constructed buildings in the sky. Great puddles of water, shallow but wide and silver-bright, lay on the cement of the Fort Mason docks. They opened windows into a mirror world. Brick by brick, the buildings were meticulously reconstructed, rising towards scudding clouds in a blue sky far below. I was walking at the edge of a limitless drop. One inch to the right, and I would be falling into the sky.