The Interview with Yama I

I


A mountain of smoking charcoal with flaming eyes

opposes my passage. No way around.
The mouth opens into hellfire,
giving me the only way. I fly into the fire,
leaving my moist soft overcoat behind,
seeking his master. Where's the boss?

Yama, we know each other.
You consented to speak with me
in the cultured voice of a maharajah
who plays polo with heads
though you would only answer my questions
when I agreed to let you place your noose
around my neck. I have seen you
in a business suit, in a robe of flame,
and in the black Tom Mix outfit
of a cowboy swinging a lasso.

Can this be you? This monstrous being
skyscraper tall, who makes your gatekeeper
look like a child's stuffed toy?
So many arms, so many appendages
that snake and spider from your terrible black core -
the devouring eyes, avid to drink breath of the living.
I have come here to purchase a life.

- from a journey on Gore Mountain, April 29, 2012

Memories of double lives

Waking, we remember (and more often forget) scenes from a life lived somewhere else. Dreaming, we do the same.
    The other night, I attended a board meeting of a society devoted to the study of parallel worlds. We were joined by members of the Baltic Section. I had to use all of my charm to warm up a dour, austere Estonian.
    Leaving the building, I ran into the local chief of police. He was wearing a bowler and a camel-colored overcoat and sported an elegant moustache. He looked rather like Hercule Poirot. I was eager to recruit his support, because I wanted information from him I could use in a book. He was reserved at the start of our conversation, but my charm worked again, and he decided to change his plan for the evening and accompany me to a coffee house or bar.
    My attention drifted for a moment, because I was receiving a call from home. It was as distinct as a telephone call, but there was no ring and no equipment. I explained to my wife that a classmate from school had died that day, after a stroke.

    This mental conversation, in which I had clear memory of events in regular life, made me aware that I was traveling in a dream. I scrutinized my surroundings with keen interest, wanting to understand exactly when and where I was, and to retain this information when I returned to default (or physical) reality. Riga. There was no doubt in my mind. I was in Riga at the end of World War I, in the time of the Bolsheviks and the famous Latvian riflemen who saved Lenin. There was cordite in the air. Tremendous forces were stirring; games of nations and cloak-and-dagger intrigues were the order of the day.
    I did not linger over my glass with the Riga police chief. I needed to return to the business of the present day, and get ready to start a workshop session. But first, I would note all the names and details I could bring back, for follow-up research; it would be wearisome to share them here, without a much fuller narrative. They could provide plot and characters for an entertainment by Eric Ambler or Graham Greene, or perhaps Alan Furst. I am not planning to write in this vein again myself, though one of my dream doubles may have different ideas.
    Let me return to the general theme. Dreaming may be traveling, and our travels can take us across a rich geography - in this world and in other worlds - and across time as well as space. We may lead continuous lives in dreams, as we seem to do for much of the time in our physical world, except when the continuity is broken by a dire event. When we awaken to all that is going on in our dream lives we will discover, as Jean Cocteau did, that life can be more than "twice as huge and twice as long" as it is for those who live in the illusion that they inhabit only one world.
    Of course, even the most active dreamer can be amnesiac in one reality about what is going on, or recently went on, in the other. It is intriguing to study how memory returns. In waking life, we may remember a forgotten dream episode under the shower, or walking the dog, or in a moment of deja vu. Dreaming, the prompt to remember details of waking life comes in many ways. One of my favorite examples: you are getting ready to have sex with a dream partner, but then remember that (in the ordinary world) you are married or in a relationship. In Riga, in a time of war and revolution around 1918, I remembered something I had learned in April, 2012 and wanted to tell my wife: I had received an email informing me that a classmate from high school had just died, the first of my classmates (to my knowledge) to cross over.
    Riga in 1918 may not be on your list of travel destinations, but you may find that your dream self is traveling to places and times you never considered, and leading a rich life in a world quite different from the one in which you are reading this post.

Riga
   

My double, the falcon-man and dream detective

I am deliciously sleepy, and roll on my side under the covers, in the gray pre-dawn light. As I do this, I become aware that I am not alone in the bed. I am startled, but have no sense of an intruder. I am so very sleepy that I barely manage to stir to see what is going on. I have the distinct impression of a male form on the other side of the bed, turning the other way. Now he is rising from the bed. 

     I know him by the broad shoulders and shaggy mane of white hair, though he is leaner and fitter than my regular self, toned and golden. He is my dream double, and as I let my physical body relax into dormancy, he is getting ready for adventures.
     I am curious to see where he will go this early morning. I follow him, in a state of lucid dreaming, to Snoqualmie Falls, which I visited - in my physical body - a few days before. He does not stop at the viewing platform. He dives into the spray of the falls, then spins and soars. He is flying among the peregrine falcons that nest among the cliffs, and I fly with him, reveling in the pure joy of being airborne.
     I stay with him as he skims the waterfall, plunging straight down to the boiling waters below, and then streams with the course of the channel, gathering water-power. I feel the tremendous charge.
    Now he is following a smaller stream, a tributary, up into dry country. He flies across across dusty plains until he comes down somewhere far to the East, and changes into a detective in a detective's hat. He is on a case, and he has a squad of efficient cops at his command. He moves with speed and precision to investigate a crime, clean up the crime scene, and place those responsible under restraint. The details are another story, for a longer narrative.
    The performance of my double as dream detective fills me with satisfaction. I fly back now, over the mountain pass, over the falls, to my resting body.


- Mosswood Hollow, April 21, 2012

Because

Snoqualmie Falls, photo by R.M.

She says, "I am here because
I got stuck in a garden hose."
He says, "I am here to free my ancestors
from the stories that bind them."
She says, "I am here to find my home star."
He says, "I am here because you showed me paradise
and then told me I could not stay with you forever."
I am here because peregrine falcons
love to live on the edge in the spray of the falls.


There are dreams you should not follow;
there are pictures you should let slip from your wall.
There are memories of the future you can change.
There is one dream you must follow
so you can say to your Death, next time he calls,
"I did not leave that undone.
I did not let my courage fail me.
I did not obstruct water when it should flow."


Time rushes towards you from the future
through the teeth of a savage god.
Don't freeze in the pie-shaped office,
don't leave your body in the pizza oven.
Jump down the hole to the secret of life
before the lion comes. Find an answering flame,
play with the young girls on the pier,
keep the lively dead on speed dial,
carry Midwest mermaids to water.
Mail love apples, juggle the twelve lights,
smell the burning when rain falls through red cedars.


- Mosswood Hollow, April 2012

Dreamers build cities without engineers

Marge Nelk, "Possible Worlds"

I am interested in how worlds are made. Dreaming, we are constantly present at the creation of cities, pleasure palaces and freak shows. Consciously or unconsciously, our dreams may become the building blocks of worlds that will outlive what made them.  We design our homes in the afterlife from these materials.

     To grasp the mechanics of this kind of reality construction, we need poetic consciousness. Let's start with an excerpt from a poem titled "Dreams" by the great Polish poet Wisława Szymborska. 

Dreams

Despite the geologists’ knowledge and craft,

mocking magnets, graphs, and maps—

in a split second the dream

piles before us mountains as stony

as real life.

And since mountains, then valleys, plains

with perfect infrastructures.

Without engineers, contractors, workers,

bulldozers, diggers, or supplies—

raging highways, instant bridges,

thickly populated pop-up cities.

Without directors, megaphones, and cameramen—

crowds knowing exactly when to frighten us

and when to vanish.

Without architects deft in their craft,

without carpenters, bricklayers, concrete pourers—

on the path a sudden house just like a toy,

and in it vast halls that echo with our steps

and walls constructed out of solid air.

Not just the scale, it’s also the precision—

a specific watch, an entire fly,

on the table a cloth with cross-stitched flowers,

a bitten apple with teeth marks.

-  The complete version of this poem by the Polish poet and Nobel laureate, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak, appeared in the September 2010 issue of Poetry magazine

Dialogue between the Sleeper and the Awakened

René Magritte, "The Eye"

Your mind on my purpose
my purpose on your mind


I am with you everywhere
I see when you are in darkness
I am awake when you are asleep


When our energies are harmonized
everything is possible


I am the mountain you seek to ascend


- from an inner dialogue in my 1988 journals

Wait, my dog isn't a girl & I can turn cartwheels (& other clues to alternate realities)

Oskar in the morning. RM sketch

I am snuggling with my little black dog. She is so silky and soft and sweet. I make a comment about how her puppies would be adorable if she were able to be a mother.
    Then I return to two projects in which I am engaged. One is a house move; we have stripped the rooms in our home to a few sticks of furniture and a lot of books and papers that I will need to sort out, because we can't take all of them. At the same time, I have taken delivery of a crate of investigative reports on corruption and intrigue in the corporate world. I read through these reports at high speed, absorbing the information.
    Next, I am watching a TV series or documentary in which the corporate drama is brought to life. The story line centers on rivalry between two men who knew each other as boys. I am impressed by how strongly the boy actors on the screen resemble the adult versions. Perhaps they are not actors; this could be documentary footage of the corporate players themselves.
   Now I have stepped right inside the world of corporate intrigue. I am perhaps in my mid-thirties, in a beautifully fitted summer-weight suit, moving easily in a world of powerful men. I have adversaries here, rivals for room at the top and a man I have publicly scolded for bullying his juniors and harassing women. As I exit the building with a bunch of suits, I trip on a step. Instead of falling, I turn a perfect cartwheel. I feel this in every part of my body; it is quite thrilling. However, when I land on my feet I am a bit wobbly. I would like someone to give me some support. Since no one does, I turn another cartwheel, then another, until I find solid footing.


This is a summary of some of my dream activity last night. I'm sharing it because it leads me to reflect on dream transits in which we shift from one reality - and sometimes from one body or identity - to another, and on clues to these shifts that may be a trigger for dream lucidity.

    In the first scene, I have a female black Schnauzer. In ordinary reality, I have her brother. When I met the litter, I fell in love with Oskar's sister, but did not bring her home because I had insisted that the next dog would be a boy and also that we could not accommodate two puppies in our house. So the fact that my dream dog is a girl is a clue that I am in a separate reality. My home in this scene is not my present home, and although a future house move is always a possibility, the particular move we are making here is quite unlikely. Yes, I could (with groans) thin out my books and papers. No, I am not likely to pursue detailed research into corporate crime, though when I think about it I am quite angry about how financial criminals have undermined the economy and wrecked lives of ordinary people.
    Then we shift to a drama observed on a screen like a TV series.
    Then it seems my dream self has stepped through the screen, and entered the situation - and seemingly, the body - of another person, a younger corporate American male who can turn cartwheels, something I have never managed to do, and operates in a kind of "Mad Men" environment (though not necessarily in the 1950s).
    He could of course be a part of me, but I don't think so. There could be an element of what Jung called the "compensation" factor. My life choices are very remote from business calculations; I live in a world of women much more than men; and worldly power and money don't rank anywhere in my personal scale of values. The dream - like dreams in which I am leading warriors or engaged in secret operations in various times - may "compensate" for what is absent from the gentler way I have chosen as a dream teacher and healer.
     Yet I have the strong feeling that when I went through the screen, I entered another man's world. Why was I drawn to his life? To clarify that, I tried to reenter the dream to get more information, and succeeded in gathering certain names and details I can now research. I will track whether the dream may relate to other people connected with me, now or in the past or (especially) the future, and I will be alert to future discoveries that may provide more of a context.
    I'll add this report to my bulging file of cases of dream entry into alternate realities, and other lives.