On Swan Wings

 

The swan is a symbol of the soul in Indian literature, and a ride for Brahma the creator. In dreams, we read in the Upanishads, the soul flies back and forth from the nest of the body like a "lone swan". Paramahamsa, "Supreme Swan", is a title given to enlightened spiritual teachers. 

The swan features in moving scenes of soul remembering - recollecting other lives and connections with other members of our soul family. When they come at the right time, such memories return (says the poet Kalidasa) like flights of migrating swans. 

There is a beautiful encounter in the Bhagavata Purana between a king who has been reborn as a woman and a friend from his previous life. The friend says, "Don't you remember your old friend? You and I, my dear, were two swans who lived together in the lake of the mind, until you left me to wander on earth. I created the illusion that made you think you were a man or a woman. Our true nature is as two swans."

Photo by Romy Needham

The Cave of the Dreaming God

 

A stranger gave us directions

at the mouth of the subway.

My friend and I heard him

but we had trouble with his accent

and disagreed about what he said.

The guitar man busking quarters heard

but claimed he had been there already.

Everyone else was on cellphones

or lost in headphone land.

 

"Get down, go down, find the Gatekeeper

who will ask you for the correct time.

There's only one right answer,

here or anywhere. Don't screw this up.

Then go west of certainty, north of comfort.

Take passage over the Jell-O sea.

Study, talk politely to demons.

and you may know the dreams of Time."

 

So we went down the tunnel and told the ticket man

who bared his teeth, "The only time is now."

He growled, but let us into ferry-land

where we took the Western Line

and sailed off the maps to the slow motion sea

that moves like tree sap dreaming of amber.

 

We came at last to the island where Chronos

lies bound in sleep. It took us only thirty years

of constant study and conversation with spirits

- but noone is counting here - to win entry

to the Cave of the Dreaming God.

 

In the slipstream of Time that is no time

possible histories flicker off and on;

ifs and might-have beens and might-bes,

memories of the future, roads not taken

in one world but followed somewhere else.

 

We learned not to look too long

at what we prefer not to see -

goosestepping Nazis in London,

plump Protestant ayatollahs ruling Hollywood,

Earth infested by bog-men and hungry ghosts

or ruled by insectoid dynasties from a hungry star.

To look here is to pluck from the quantum soup

a strand that becomes a species thought

and may become an event track in the serial world.

 

"Jus' like pickin a guitar" said the busker

when we came up from the underground.

So we'll keep the Cave of the Dreaming God

well-hidden, like a fleck of pyrite in a drop of amber

on the fob of a dead poet’s pocket watch.

- Robert Moss

 

An 18th century rabbi describes the night wanderings of the dream soul

 

Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, playwright, Kabbalist and frequent astral traveler (1707-1746), also known as Ramchal, gives one of the clearest expositions in Western tradition on dreaming as soul experience. In his book Derech Hashem (The Way of God) he explains that "when we sleep, most of what happens is that our bodies rest and our brains are given the chance to sort out the thoughts of our day. However, something else occurs at the same time. The higher parts of our souls become slightly detached from our bodies. (This is why our first prayer upon awakening in the morning is thanking God for returning our souls to us (modeh ani).
    "Only the lowest part of our souls – the 'animal soul' all living creatures possess – stays with us overnight.) Once our souls depart our bodies, they are able to roam the spiritual planes of existence where they are most at home. While there, they may interact with other spiritual entities, such as angels, and may hear (or overhear) some of what the future holds in store for man." [Derech Hashem 3.1.6]
     While anthropologists following the “Swedish school” of Ernst Arbman have tracked the wanderings of the free soul, Luzzatto spoke of the freed soul, relased from the body and the lower self. In his conception in dreams "the portions of the soul from ruach (Spirit) and above them rise and sever themselves from the body. Only one portion, the nefesh, remains with the lower [animal] soul." The freed portions of the soul can then move about in the spiritual realm wherever they are allowed. They can interact and associate with such spiritual beings as the angels who oversee natural phenomena, some angels associated with prophecy, and shedim [demons].  
    While the anthropologists have been happy to use the word “image” (in the sense of the Greek eidolon rather than a representation) as a synonym for free soul, for the rabbi, the image is what the human imagination creates in an effort to bring down soul experiences on a higher level into the memory and understanding of the lower self.  What is learned by the higher soul descends to the animal soul through the imagination, which may confuse the content. So any dream apart from some special forms of prophecy is likely to contain “worthless information” as well as precious gifts.
    Once our souls depart our bodies, they are able to roam the spiritual planes of existence where they are most at home. While there, they may interact with other spiritual entities, such as angels, and may hear (or overhear) some of what the future holds in store for man. The message may be actual prophecy, or simply an omen – depending upon the level of being which communicates with the soul. That information might in turn trickle down into our consciousness and work their way into our dreams.

Luzzatto was variously celebrated as the leader of a kabbalistic-messianic confraternity in Padua, condemned as a deviant threat by rabbis in Venice and central and eastern Europe, and accepted by Portuguese Jews when he moved to Amsterdam, where they had found sanctuary. He faced recurring perseciution by conservative rabbis who arranged the destructionof his papers and forebade him to practice kabbalah. 
    Controversy started swirling around him early when, at age twenty – beardless and unmarried -  he claimed to have visions of a magid. The magid  or “speaker” is a spitritual teacher who may be an angel, a prophet or a divinely inspired individual, living or deceased. Luzzatto had no doubt he was in  contact with the angelic realms. These visions encouraged messianic aspirations and fed the idea that Luzzatto and his close associate Moshe Valle might be reincarnations of great figures from Jewish history. They formed a Holy Society of young enthusaists at the University pf Padua to discuss these revelations. This bred suspicion that they were reviving the kind of messianic movement that had roiled Jewish communities across Europe in the previous century under the leadership of Shabat Zvi, a self-proclaimed messiah who utmately betrayed his followers by converting to Islam under threat from the Ottoman Sultan.
    Moshe Valle’s mystical diary, discovered by Isaiah Tishby in the vaults of the British Museum, was recorded in the margins of his Bible commentaries. Entries often started with recorded dreams.

 

See Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, The Way of God trans. and ed. Aryeh Kaplan. Jerusalem and New York: Feldheim Publishers. Sixth edition, 1998. 

Illustration: Text-generated picture by RM with AI of the beardless 20-year-old Luzzatto having a vision of a magid in the Jewish ghetto of Padua. 

Not Only by Broomstick

 

The Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi arrived in a Circassian village at the end of April, 1666. He learned from the locals that it was the night of battles with the Kara-Kondjolos (vampire witches). Çelebi went out with eighty members of his party and observed a fantastic battle in the sky. 

The sorcerers of the Abkhaz - his mother's people - rose into the sky mounted on uprooted trees, terracotta pots, axes, shovels, cartwheels, rugs and more. Circassian shamans took to the air to oppose them, sailing in fishing boats or riding horses, bulls or camels. The battle lasted six hours and was partly waged on the ground when witches and sorcerers fell from the sky. 

When roosters crowded the contenders became invisible. Çelebi said he had never believed stories of such night battles until he and thousands around him witnessed this one.

He included this episode in book VI of his Book of Travels, the Seyahatname, an enormous ten-volume work that  he compiled after forty years of travel all over the Ottoman empire, and to bordering lands. 


Illustration RM + AI

Wake Up and Smell the Stories

 

"I heard something scratching at my door in the middle of the night," the young man in the front row began. "When I opened the door, I found my dead cat, the one that died a couple of months ago. Then I noticed my house had four stories, which is a couple more than it ordinarily has. I was wondering what was going on in those extra stories up top. Then I heard my dad's voice. He was calling to me, 'Hurry up! You don't want to miss the music!'"-
    "How did you feel when you woke up?" I asked. It's always my first question, of any dream.
-  "Kind of nervous. My dad passed last spring, and I didn't know what he meant." -      "Have you had any previous contact with your father, since he passed?"
    "Oh sure. I feel like he's been dealing with a lot of stuff, and I've been helping."
    "How did your father sound, when he spoke about the music?"
    "He sounded real happy. Like something happy was going on."
    "If it were my dream," I said carefully, "I might think that my father's discovered something really good, and he wants to share it with me. Maybe he wants to show me that he's found his way, in his new life. If it were my dream, I might want to see if I could have a proper conversation with my dad. I want to know the rest of our story. Those extra levels to the house give me the sense of space and possibility. I might want to light a candle for dad, and put out something personal pertaining to him - like photo - and maybe something to eat or drink that he would enjoy, and see whether I can just start up a dialogue. Could you give that a try?"
    "Sure," the young man nodded. "I like the idea of getting the rest of the story."-

I looked around the group. "Would anyone else like to share a dream?" A few hands went up. This was a group of newbies, gathered for an evening program at an adult learning center. For some of them, this was the first time they had talked about a dream in their whole adult lives.
   "I dreamed I went to this very pricey restaurant," an older woman began. "I started sipping a glass of wine and the glass broke in my teeth and the shards of glass were inside my mouth, stabbing me. I was trying to tell people what had happened, and that I needed help., but they wouldn't believe me, even though there was blood everywhere."
  "How did you feel when you woke up?"
  "I couldn't understand why they wouldn't believe me."
  "Yes, and how did you feel about that?"
  "It's hard to say. Slightly disturbed."
  "But you didn't feel frightened, for example? Or disgusted."
   "Nothing that strong."
   "Well, that's interesting. That sets a little distance. Sometimes it's revealing that we don't have strong feelings around a dream. Reality check - could you go to a restaurant like that in the future?"
   "Sure."
   "Is it possible this could involve an occasion, maybe with family, when there is some conflict brewing and it's difficult to say your piece?"
   "That's entirely possible."
    "If it were my dream," I pursued, "I'd think about the broken glass in terms of emotional conflicts. I'd think about my need to express myself in such a way that others can hear me and believe me, on whatever I need to get out."
     This resonated deeply with the dreamer. After more discussion, I asked her for an action plan. She said she would start by keeping a journal and getting practice that way in saying what she needed to say.
    "Can you come up with a one-liner that moves in that direction?"
     She produced one right away, "I'm going to tell my story."
     This threw my mind back to something I had seen the previous morning in my local paper, at the bottom of the local news page. It was an ad for coffee. Across a landscape of green mountains scrolled the following text: I realized today's the day I will tell my story.
     The ability to tell our story - and in doing so, choose the stories we are living - is not only a creative gift, it is a vital survival tool. We live by stories. If we don't understand that, we are probably living inside old, unacknowledged stories that may cramp and confine us, stories passed down through families or imposed on us by others. A grand way to get into the practice of telling our own stories is to share our dreams, large and small.

Another woman in the group began, slightly diffident, to talk about a recurring dream from which she was always relieved to wake up. "I have a baby, maybe eighteen months old, and I'm supposed to take care of her. I want to get away because I don't know who she is."
      When I asked some questions, she added, "The baby is fine. I'm the one who's not fine."
      "If it were my dream, I might wonder whether what I running from was actually a part of myself. I might want to sit down quietly, at the right time, and take a closer look at that very young child and see whether she is a very young part of me that separated out for some reason but is now ready to bring her joy and energy into my life."
       This struck a chord. She was willing to give it a try. Through our dream stories, we sometimes find a part of us that was missing is calling to us, seeking a way to gain entry to our lives, to make us stronger and more whole.

 

- Notes from my road as a dream teacher. I teach at many levels. There is great joy in teaching beginners and watching the light of spirit come on in their eyes, and their excitement in finding there are ways to share dreams and personal stories that are safe and fun and socially rewarding. The simple four-step method of dream sharing I am using here is my own creation. It always leads to an action plan to embody and apply energy and guidance form the dream in everyday life. I call it the Lightning Dreamwork process, and it is explained, along with other core techniques, in my book Active Dreaming. 

The Master of Deadlines

 

He is there again, by the fire. He does not warm his hands, which are always cool. His clothes are immaculate His hair and mustache are glossy with pomade. His eyes are black holes.

 “I hope you have not forgotten our arrangement.” His words fall like cards on green baize. His accent is perfect Oxbridge, a little dated, the kind a maharajah might have spoken at Royal Ascot or the tennis club before the fall of the Raj. “You haven’t brought me a fresh story since yesterday, even though we have agreed that you will continue to live in your present body only as long as you tell stories that entertain me.”

I protest that his demand is unreasonable. A fresh story a day is hard to deliver. Worse, the bargain reeks of plagiarism. “I am not Scheherazade,” I point out.

“And I am not a minor monarch in an Arabian fairytale, my dear. Nonetheless, a story a day is the requirement. You used to say that you like impossible deadlines. I am the master of deadlines.”

I tell him, “I am not afraid of you.”

For an instant, he lets his gentleman’s guise shimmer. I see through it, to the terrible, mountainous form he is given in temples that rise from steaming jungles and peeling tenements in the East. I bind him with my will to the playboy maharajah guise. If I cannot choose where I will meet Death, I can still insist that he wears the costume I choose. No lolling, multiple ayes and arms, no tusks or butcher’s knives, no bouncing skulls.

He opens his dinner jacket to reveal the noose that is swinging from his cummerbund.

“I just delivered a story,” I shift my approach. “It is a story about you. It helped her.” I indicated the sleeping form of the lady in the window seat of the airplane. “She is going to Bangalore because the doctors told her that her mother is dying. I told her that you can be a great healer and teacher. I made you sound like the mentor they make you out to be in the Katha Upanishad, the giver of the Nachiketas fire.”

The flames around him flare up. None of the dormant passengers in the cabin notice. The flight attendants in the galley go on snacking and gossiping.

 “I came because I heard my name. But you did not tell it to my face. Begin again. And make sure you come up with fresh words.”

I have written many stories about my encounters with Yama, most of which will remain in my journals. You will find a longer and memorable one, "A Storytelling of Crows" in my book Mysterious Realities. 

Towards a History of Dreaming

 

Dreaming is vital to the human story, central to our survival and evolution, to creative endeavors in every field and, quite simply, to getting us through.
     It may be that just as babies rehearse for walking and talking in dreams before they have developed the corresponding physical abilities, humanity rehearses for new phases in its development through dreaming. We are on the edge of grasping what this might mean when we talk about ideas that are “in the air”. We see one facet of it when we learn that artists and science fiction writers have frequently anticipated new technologies by decades or centuries.
     We are learning to talk in English the imaginal realm, a dimension beyond the physical that is the precinct and playground of true imagination, a creative realm that may be the seed-bed of our great discoveries and innovations, and even the origin of events and situations that are manifested in the surface world. Indigenous peoples call it the Dreamtime, or the dream world. We go there when we go dreaming, which may or may not involve going to sleep.
      In modern western societies, we think of dreams as sleep experiences. But for many cultures, dreaming is fundamentally about waking up. In the language of ancient Egypt, the word for “dream” is rswt, which means “awakening”. The implication is that in much of ordinary life, we are in the condition of sleepwalkers, following programs and routines. In dreams, we wake up. This may happen during sleep, or in a twilight state of reverie, or in a vision or meditation or shamanic journey, or through the dreamlike play of coincidence and symbolic “pop-ups” in the midst of everyday life — all of which may be viewed as modes of dreaming and may provide experiences that can be reviewed and honored in the manner of dreams.
     To uncover the real history of dreaming, we need to read scenes from other times with the patience and intuition of a forensic scientist. We need to flag and tag as evidence all sorts of clues and sources that may not previously have been recognized as relevant. We need to situate dreaming activity in its social and cultural context. Above all, we need to be able to imagine ourselves inside the scene, as vividly as basketball great Bill Russell was able to replay games inside his head — and then go beyond the mental replay into a deeper play.
     Dream archaeologist is my name for the kind of investigator who is able to read all the clues from a scene in another time, enter that scene and then bring back new discoveries that will stand up to cross-examination.
     While “archaeology” is often understood to be the science of unearthing and studying antiquities, the root meaning of the word takes us deeper: it is the study of the arche, the first and primal, chief and essential things.
      There are three essential requirements for the dream archaeologist. The first is mastery of a panoply of sources, and the ability to read between the lines and make connections that have gone unnoticed by specialists who were looking for something else.
      Second, the dream archaeologist requires the ability to locate dreaming in its context - physical, social and cultural. For example, to understand the dream practices of the Mayoruna Indians of Amazonia (known as Cat People), we need to know that the typical sleeping arrangement is that you climb into a hammock woven from vines, tied at one end to the center pole of the communal hut, along with all the other hammocks in there. If you go to bed alone, you’ll pull down the center pole and all the other hammocks. You have to agree with at least one other person that you’ll go to bed at the same time. So sleep and dreaming are shared experiences from the moment you decide to go to bed.
     We need to understand the imaginal space, as well as the physical space, within which dreaming experiences take place. Certain cultures instruct or even command dream travelers to journey within a fixed imaginal geography. For example, in his fieldwork among a Nahuat-speaking people in Mexico, anthropologist Timothy Knab was encouraged by his mentors to locate his remembered dream experiences within an Otherworld, or Underworld, known as Talocan. If there’s a lot of water in a certain scene, that means he traveled to a Water World on the east side of Talocan. If there are mostly women that meant he went to the House of Women in the west of Talocan. From outside observer, the anthropologist found his way inside the dreamworld of his hosts.
     Third, the dream archaeologist must develop the ability to enter a different reality and experience it from inside. “One cannot conduct fieldwork in another person’s dream,” says anthropologist Roger Ivar Lohmann. While this may seem to be common sense, it is a view that dream archaeologists are going to test.
    Through the arts of conscious dream travel, active imagination and “mutual visioning”, we can enter other times and gain first-hand knowledge of conditions there that we can proceed to research and verify — and may assist both scholars and practitioners to go beyond what was previously understood. We can reclaim the best of ancient traditions and rituals in authentic, helpful and timely ways.
      As we enter deeper levels of past and future history, we may be able to re-vision the linear sequence of events from the standpoint of metahistory, an understanding that transcends linear time.
     We can enter the life situations of personalities in the past or future who may be related to us in various ways — as ancestors or descendants, as members of our larger spiritual families, as embodied aspects of ourselves or as counterpart selves actually living in other places and times. And we can experiment with direct communication with personalities living in other times, for mutual benefit, in their “now” time as well as the spacious Now of the Dreamtime.

Text adapted from The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library. 


Dream journal drawing by Robert Moss