Prague journal: tracking a dream itinerary in the Magic City

Prague, Czech Republic

It is dark in the part of the city where I am walking, as if there has been a blackout. I must go carefully, and be wary of shady characters in the streets.
    I arrive without incident at a gas station that is brightly illuminated. Families are gathered there with bicycles, as if about to depart on a group bike tour. Smiles and laughter, lots of happy energy. The scene feels familiar. Beyond the gas station, I must take care crossing busy roads with tram lines and converging lines of traffic.
    It is daylight when I come to a bridge. I must cross this bridge in order to get to an important meeting. I don't approach the bridge in an ordinary way, by walking a footpath or climbing up steps. I start scaling a rickety structure that seems to be part of the frame. As I climb higher, it becomes hard to find secure handholds or footholds. Metal struts are missing or hanging loose. I am now very high above a river valley, and I realize I am in real danger.
    But wait a minute. I remember that I have watched this scene on a cinema screen. I am in the middle of the action in a film in which the hero climbs a bridge in exactly this way. He gets to the top without falling. Since I am playing the hero's role, and the film is already "in the can", there is no problem. The moment I recognize this, I am across the bridge, on my way to my meeting.
    The meeting is in the offices of a film production company. The offices are rather shabby, and unfinished. In the bathroom, there is raw plaster on the walls and the sink has not yet been installed. The movie producer I am meeting seems rather coarse and vulgar, but I reflect that this is not unusual with certain types in the movie business.
    Others are there for the meeting, people who may be involved in a film we will make together. I am drawn to a handsome older woman in a blue dress. She was once a well-known singer who appeared in several films. Her glory days are over, but she is still attractive and I am intrigued by the idea that she may have a part in the film. She has a female companion, in a matching blue dress, rather plain, of the type that would be cast as a governess or housekeeper in a period English film.
    The singer opens her mouth. The jaws open wider than seems possible for a human, as wide as a big cat. Out comes an incredibly beautiful stream of sound. I am awed by this voice, and by the spectacle of the jaws opened tiger-wide. I am startled to notice that the song is not coming from the singer, but from her plain companion. There is a mystery here.

I was excited and eager to know more when I rose from this dream during my Prague workshop. I discussed it with some of my dreamers, and received helpful feedback, but the big discoveries came in a workshop session, when we formed small groups for exercises in dream reentry and tracking. This is a core technique of Active Dreaming. We take turns to share dreams we would like to explore in depth by traveling back inside the dreams, with the help of shamanic drumming. While the dreamer reenters his dream, the others in the group travel with him, providing support and gathering information.
    I shared my dream of the long journey to the film company with three Czech women. I told them I would like more details on every stage of the itinerary. I was especially interested in the strange way my dream self approached the bridge, and the mystery of the singer whose voice seemed to be another person, and in what we were doing at the film company.

I learned a lot from my own journey back through my dreamscape. It became clear to me that I was in Prague, from beginning to end, but also in an alternate reality of the kind it is very easy to access in that magical city. The gas station reminded me vividly of a period Esso gas station in a pivotal dream in my life that guided me in publishing Conscious Dreaming, my first book describing my synthesis of dreamwork and shamanism. As described in my later book Dreamgates, that dream led me to the publisher who sent me, a year later, on book tour, to a cinema in San Francisco where I found myself watching the re-release of "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg". When the male lead in the film achieves his life goal, of owning a 1950s-style Esso gas station, I recognized the key scene from my dream playing out in front of me, on the screen. So: the movie theme was clearly important. And just as important was the sense of abundant juice, and energy, available at the dream gas station. 
    One of my Czech trackers picked up on the energy theme. "The gas station is a place where you re-charge and gather energy, among a community of people who believe in your work and can carry it in all directions, each traveling in their own way, on their own vehicles."
    In my reentry, the rickety structure I was trying to climb now looked to me like a set of scribbled notes and sketches for a work-in-progress. My power to teleport over the bridge came when I realized that, on a certain level, the work has already been completed.
    The most fascinating tracking was done by the Czech woman who located my dream, stage by stage, in the geography of Prague. She described a gas station within walking distance where families and friends gather to begin group bike tours. Next, a train bridge which it would be difficult or impossible for pedestrians to walk. Then, up the hill, the offices of a Czech film company that works with many foreign film producers.

I became quite excited, since when I returned to the film company in my own reentry, it seemed that I was at a place where a movie was being developed from my work, centering on a location in the imaginal realm that I call the House of Time. I have described some of the group shamanic journeys I lead to this most interesting place in Dreamgates and in The Dreamer's Book of the Dead I report on conversations I have had there with "my" W.B.Yeats. If there is an ideal shooting location for the House of Time in ordinary reality, it may well be Prague, the city of magicians.
    The singer and her separated voice? All my Czech trackers saw a theme of soul loss and soul recovery here, and they may be right. I had thought about how a central part of my work is helping people - especially women - to claim their voice. In my reentry, I found that the women in blue dresses were auditioning for roles in the film, with many other actors waiting in other rooms. A story to be continued....

top photo: Vysehrad through the girders of the Výtoň iron bridge (c) Robert Moss

Prague journal: The case of the headless bear

Prague, Czech Republic

A thoughtful man in my Prague workshop wanted to understand the illness of a family member. This was on his mind as he left our first evening session. I had suggested to everyone in our lively group that they should experiment with "putting a question to the world". This meant carrying a clearly stated theme on which they wanted guidance, and then being open to receiving the first unusual, unexpected thing that turned up in their field of perception tn the world around them as a possible response from the oracle of the world.
     Our dreamer walked down the snowy street and turned left into Old Town Hall Square. He saw an amazing scene unfolding in front of him. A headless bear was being pursued across the square by a pack of animals of various kind. The headless bear was a man in a bear outfit, missing the head. As he tried to grasp the nature of this astonishing theater, he saw a fox being chased by a second pack of animals.
      When he shared the episode with us in our morning session, we all felt that the world had staged a special production, a dream theater, just for him. There was a fine run of coincidence at work. On my first evening in Prague, I had taken a table at a restaurant in front of the astrological clock in the Old Town Hall, waiting for six o'clock to chime and the procession of sainted figures to emerge from behind their shutters. I heard these words in English wafting from a nearby table: "It was the time when the fox drank water with the bears." Though tempted to get up ad ask the speaker for the context, I was content to let the mystery words hover in the air. They had the quality of an enchanted children's story, full of wonder, and also gave me a sense of confirmation the animal powers would be very active with my workshop group in Prague, in harmonious ways, as indeed proved to be the case.
     During my first drumming on the first evening of the Prague workshop, I saw Bear and Fox standing on either side of a great tree, urging me to invite the group to enter the tree without delay, through a door, among the roots, to seek consultation with the animal doctors in the way that had proved wonderfully successful in my workshop in Utrecht the previous weekend
     Now I proceeded to discuss what the theater of the headless bear and the running fox would mean to me, if I were seeking guidance on someone's illness and the way to healing. I suggested that our dreamer might want to help his sick relative to find ways to connect with Bear and Fox, perhaps by growing a story for him that would carry the energy. We talked about the Bear as a great medicine animal, and about the cleverness of Fox, as an animal that must be able both to hunt and to hide and has been - for me - an impeccable guide to ancestral matters, which can carry the code for contemporary complaints, and also their cure. I have noticed that people who are attacking bears in their dreams, or running away from them, are often avoiding their personal medicine.
     Lewis Carroll provides a great further commentary on the Case of the Headless Bear:
     .
He thought he saw a Coach-and-Four
That stood beside his bed.
He looked again, and found it was
A bear without a head.
"Poor thing,' he said, "Poor silly thing!
It's waiting to be fed!"

It's always time to feed the Bear (says the Bear).

Prague journal: Approaching Kafka's Castle

Prague, Czech Republic

Chyak, chyak. The raven's caw startled me as I leaned over an old photograph of a big, burly, overbearing man with a mustache in a prosperous merchant's suit. No, not a raven. A jackdaw, a smaller member of the corvid family. There is was, on Hermann Kafka's letterhead, and on the front of his fancy goods store. The jackdaw was the logo of the man who scared and obsessed his son, known to readers today as Franz, but on his gravestone in the New Jewish Cemetery in Prague as Amschel. [*]
     The Kafka Museum, on the bank of the Vltava river in Mala Strana, is an extraordinary and deeply disturbing experience, starting with the family photos under the shadow of the jackdaws. Soon you are in front of brilliantly doctored black and white film clips of the Old Town of Kafka's childhood, when he clung to the walls as the stern family cook escorted him from the family flat in the Minuta building (beside the Old Town Hall) to the German school in the Meat Market. The famously beautiful buildings sway and menace, as if about to fall or devour. Then the saints and angels of the Charles Bridge appear, shapeshifting into demons of wind and fire with streaming hair and snaking beards.
     You go down steep wooden stairs, lit by a hellish red light, where there is a sinister sound of gnawing. You are entering the first of a series of topographies of Kafka's imagination, created as installation art. This one is inspired by his story "The Burrow", the ultimate nightmare of any claustrophobic.
     You walk on, into an endless office, walled with dark metal file cabinets that fill corridor after corridor, evoking Kafka's loathing of the conditions of his Brotberuft ("bread-job") working in the "dens of bureaucracy" in the closing years of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
    You enter a passage in which strange scenes unfold on multiple screens around you. You step forward and there you are, projected into the mysterious drama as a figure in silhouette. The castle ahead of you is just a sketch that vanishes. Then it appears as the burred profile of the Prague castle. Then you come to barriers spiked with barbed wire. Then a darker, more solid castle rises above you, rearing dark towers and battlements. Will you be allowed in? If admitted, will you ever get out?
     Now you are in the fantastic world of Kafka's unfinished novel The Castle. There is no relief, no resolution here for any of the Angst and alienation we find in his works - rather, a sudden and jaw-dropping fall into his imaginal world and the elements of his life that fed his imagination and were ultimately devoured by it. 


You leave the world of The Castle and  look at photos of the women in Kafka's life, none of whom he married. You wince at the model of the torture machine in his story "The Penal Colony", and squirm at the account of what happened when he read this gruesome piece to an audience in Munich in the only reading he ever gave outside his own country; three women fainted and the critics went for his blood.
    You feel how his nightmares of suffocation and of being throttled came home to roost in his body as he slowly starved to death, unable to eat, to drink or to speak after his tuberculosis swelled his larynx. They had not yet discovered how to keep patients alive on an IV feed. And you wonder about the extent to which Kafka may be a negative role model - and an important one - in understanding how the imagination rules the body.
    On the one hand, his fiction mirrored and anticipated his physical complaints, as well as the oppression he encountered within his family, his work and his society. On the other hand, by investing so much creative power in images of confinement, asphyxiation and impotence, he may, tragically, have brought his body into a corresponding pattern of behavior. He even wrote a story titled "The Hunger Artist", about a performer who deliberately starves himself until he is close to death.
     

We need to be alert to how we use our imaginations, which can heal or destroy our bodies and take us to a place of freedom or suffocating confinement. I have put a recent biography of Kafka, and his collected stories on my bedside table, to pursue this thread, and others. Haunted by his life and his visions, I walked the night streets of the Old Town many hours after my visit to the museum and came to the extraordinary statue of Kafa that stands next to the Spanish Synagogue. Almost unpublished in his lifetime, little known in his native country until after the fall of communism, Kafka rides in  posthumous fame on a remarkable mount. Is that a golem that is carrying him?

[*] In Czech, the jackdaw is kavka. Like other Jewish families compelled to adopt Gentile names under the laws of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Kafkas took the name of a bird or animal. 

Utrecht journal: Dumbledore's scar and Dutch treats

Utrecht, Netherlands

Participants in the lively playshop I led in Utrecht last weekend had been invited to incubate dreams on our gathering before we met. I enjoyed hearing some of these as we came together in a pleasant space below street level, right on the bank of the Oudegracht. My favorite: a dream in which I appeared as a combination of Professor Dumbledore and Catweazle, a preposterous time-traveling 11th century wizard from an old British television series, who mistakes technology for magic. I was glad to be reassured that my dream self appeared better educated and more competent than Catweazle, and did not go about in the company of a toad!
    I was tickled by the reference to the headmaster of Hogwarts, especially after a personal experience in the last session of the day. I suggested to our dreamers that they could travel, with the aid of the drumming, to a Secret Library where they could gain information and inspiration on any subject that stirred their passion and curiosity, and meet a mentor in any field. I found myself drawn to a Map Room in my personal version of the Secret Library. The maps that compelled my attention this time looked like subway maps. Examined more closely, they proved to be maps of a deeper geography than the underground. The lines defined life trajectories in parallel realities, and they were never fixed. The map showed, with great clarity, what happens when a life path converges with, or veers away from, that of a parallel personality in another reality.

     Since I was in the Netherlands, I was not surprised to see that one of the moving maps showed convergence with the event track of a personality linked to me who was in Holland during World War II. Our proximity in space seemed to have mobilized a convergence of certain dramas, gifts and challenges between his time and mine. 
     I remembered that Albus Dumbledore has a scar on his left knee that is described as a perfect map of the London Underground. When asked to explain this, his creator, J.K. Rowling, was taciturn. But I know what a certain kind of subway map means to me.

Wonderful, questing spirits in our circle in Utrecht, with that earthy Dutch humor and instinct for survival. We moved effortlessly from sharing dreams to moving with their energy, using them as scripts for theatrical performance, and as doorways for shamanic journeys.
     I often reflected, during the active days and at our early, copious group dinner at La Connaisseur, on my sense of a very long connection with the Netherlands. This dates back to my childhood memories of the life of a Royal Air Force pilot who was shot down over Holland in World War II. It was requickened by a big dream, in mid-life, in which I found myself exploring the house of a magus, on a canal in a Dutch city. I roamed from room to room, fascinated by his magical equipment, his vast and eccentric library, and by a Persian carpet that lay, waiting for use, on his bed. When I reentered this dream, I found that the house was my own, that the magical machines still worked, and that the rug was most certainly on the flying kind.
     Then, too, the Netherlands has played a very important role in my work as a dream teacher. I first introduced the core techniques of my synthesis of shamanic journeying and dreamwork to a world audience at a conference of the Association for the Study of Dreams at the University of Leiden in 1994. And the first foreign edition of my first book on these matters, Conscious Dreaming, was published in Dutch, as Droom Bewust. 
     During the night between our two days of group adventures in Utrecht, I felt blessed by a dream and a vision that deepened my sense of connection with the Dutch people and the spirits of land and sea in this part of the world. I dreamed of a tall, strong and beautiful young woman who had been used by men but retained an amazing quality of grace, innocence and majesty. In a waking vision, I saw her again as beyond age, accompanied by a dog. Her eyes were windows that opened into a sea crossing that I knew to be a portal to the Other Side. I felt I had been granted insight into the enduring strength of Dutch women, and that I was granted a glimpse of  Nehelennia, the ancient Celtic-Germanic goddess of the North Sea, patron of travelers on both the ocean and the astral seas.

Barcelona cannot be found on the internet

Barcelona, Spain

I came to Barcelona in the company of Carlos Ruiz Zafón, one of its native sons. More precisely, my in-flight reading was La Sombra del Viento, which opens in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a nonlinear literary necropolis where books that no longer have readers are preserved against the day when someone will bring them back from the dead. I love the author's insistence that "every book has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived it and dreamed with it." I devoured this superior modern Gothic novel when I found the American edition (The Shadow of the Wind) in the Crow bookstore in Burlington, Vermont. I returned to it, in the original language, in hopes of bringing my Spanish up to speed for a ramble among Barcelona's haunted and haunting landscapes in between leading workshops in Frankfurt and Utrecht.     

     Perhaps my literary selection helped to script my odd journey from the airport to the Eixample, the Gaudi-era district of Barcelona outside the Old City. My taxi driver was no novice. Elderly and formal, he carried himself stiffly, as if any slip from punctilio would scatter him to wind and shadows. He wore a triangular Velazquez beard, his speech was pure and courtly Castilian. I was not surprised when he denied all knowledge of my small hotel. I had printed out the details and read the address. My taxi driver declared that the street address I had printed from the hotel’s own website was a fiction. "There is no number 286 on the Carrer de Provença."
    He was not interested in the printout. He produced an ancient street guide, immensely fat and brightly colored, with loose pages that threatened to blow out the windows as we drove up the Rambla de Catalunya. "See," he pointed a pontifical finger. "There is no number 286 on that street." I thrust my printout of driving directions from the hotel website in front of him at a stop light. He glanced at it, then showed me, in cool triumph, that the directions led to number 249, not number 286. Odd, not even, and further down the street. I looked at the directions again. He was right.
    "Barcelona cannot be found on the internet," my driver declaimed. It took a mix of firmness and diplomacy to get him to make the necessary loop to come down Provença from the other side. Ah, there was Gaudi's Pedrera on the corner, an unplanned gift. Yes, there was a number 286. No external evidence that the grand bourgeois building housed a hotel, but a doorman hiding in a booth inside the entrance court allowed himself to be stirred from his esoteric studies to concede that there was, in fact, a hotel on the floor above. He escorted me up marble stairs to one of those cozy European elevators that give you the choice of sending your bags up alone or sacrificing your manhood.
    “Thank you for initiating me into the Barcelona of shadows and mysteries,” I greeted the charming girl at the hotel reception.  “Yes, we did direct you to the wrong building,” she agreed when she looked at my printout. “I don’t know why that happened.”  But I did. I could feel a story building. Entering neo-Gothic Barcelona in a style worthy of Shadow of the Wind, I was primed for adventures, though perhaps not for the battle that I was required to fight on my second night in Barcelona. 

This is the missing first page from my Barcelona journal, as posted on this blog. The way in is the way out.

Barcelona journal: Building a City of Life and Death

Barcelona, Spain

On Wednesday morning, after the Battle of the Barbican, I walked in the sun and took the metro to see Gaudi's unfinished cathedral, La Sagrada Familia. In the park opposite this amazing pile, I met a headless man, impeccably dressed. He came alive enough to whistle for a tip when I took his picture. Keeping one’s head can be quite a trick in Barcelona, but there are those who manage to get by without one.
      In the afternoon, I was buried alive. 

I have been buried alive. I agreed for this to be done as some kind of experiment that I myself may have initiated. I am lying now in a coffin-sized chamber of hardened earth. I tap on the roof above me when I decide I've been in here long enough. No one responds. Can they really not hear me? The earth above me is only a few inches thick. I am going to cry out, nervous now. Instead, I find a way to get myself out, maybe just by pushing really hard.

I woke feeling cheerful, even triumphant, and greatly restored in my body. I smiled at the mirror function of the dream. I recognize that I have a tendency to get myself into some holes without checking how to get out!

For most of the night that followed, in the default reality of my dreaming mind, I am writing while listening to an inner voice narrating the kind of book you can live inside. As the narrative goes on, and I continue to create in concert with my inner voice, a great city takes form all around me, its architecture stranger than Gaudi's.
     In this City of Life and Death, travelers step back and forth easily between different dimensions. There are doors through which veteran travelers can step back and forth between life and death, whenever they like. There are clothing stores with impossible price tags, or no prices at all, where those who make an arrangement with a private shopper can change into different bodies as easily as regular people change clothes.Like the living statues of Barcelona, they can shift without warning from suspended animation to elegant acrobatics.

Let the universe tap you

"Don't ask what you already know," was the counsel of a babalawo, a high divination priest of Ifa, the Yoruba oracle. I think he was correct. We annoy the spirits, and confuse our own ways, by constantly asking questions when the answers are already with us.

    I have many friends who start the day by putting questions to some personal system of divination, from Tarot to tea leaves.  And many more who put a question to their dreams every night.
    I am in favor of seeking guidance from sources beyond the ordinary mind. But I have mixed feelings about asking all these questions, especially if the questions are on the same theme.

    There are questions that have to be lived, not merely answered. And it is often better to hear the questions the world is putting to us, rather than constantly putting our personal questions to the world.
    Spontaneous night dreams and the play of synchronicity in everyday

life will tell us what we need to know, if we are ready to hear. By attending to dreams, especially dreams we did not ask for and may or may not want, and  to the voices of the Speaking Land (as Aborigines call it) we escape the trap of constantly moving among projections of our wishes and fears. Spontaneous night dreams and synchronicity speak with an objectivity the ordinary mind often lacks.
     We can tap to awaken the spirits, as the reader of Ifa does with his divination tapper. But it is more interesting to let the universe and the spirits tap us.

For some fun synchronicity games, including ways of allowing the universe to put its questions to you, please read The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence and Imagination (New World Library).

Ifa divination tray