The school of Mother Soul

There is a sudden stillness in the classroom. One by one, those who are ready rise from their bodies and gather in the corner where a hearth fire is now burning.
    The fire is extraordinary. It is electric blue. The flames stream and dance like shimmering blue silk. It is lovely and beckoning. Yet it is fire, and what is beyond it is unknown. So there is hesitation, and some fear.
    One who has passed this way before enters the fire like a dancer, becomes a figure of bright flame, and is gone. The others join the dance, and move through the blue fire. There is no pain. The pain was on the other side.
    Loving arms receive them. The angels have familiar faces. They are going to a new school, a pleasant place on a green hill, among beds of flowers and flowering trees. The course selection is amazing. Whatever they have learned already will be put to use, and their classes and assignments will be built around their curiosity, passion and imagination.
    They will want to communicate with those they left behind, to try to ease their grief by letting them know that there truly is a better place, beyond the pain of the world, where learning and growth continue, and where fun and adventure are encouraged, and where the most important skill is the ability to make things up.
    Every experience is different, here even more than in the previous world. They are cheered by watching a graduating class, gathered on the green hill in front of an ivy-wrapped, warm brick building. They are dressed in simple white smocks. Their voices are achingly beautiful. Their songs are not hymns from church, or what used to play on headphones.

Sunrise, sunset, evening star
What cannot be seen in the dream
cannot be seen in its glory

     I walk and talk with some of the faculty. A donnish, tweedy man with a mustache reminds me of my favorite teacher in high school, eons ago, a British professor of ancient history who decided to come out of retirement to share his passion with hormonal boys in a burned landscape in Australia. What is the name of this school? Alma Mater, of course, Mother Soul.

I discovered this school of Mother Soul when I started teaching public dream classes, more than 20 years ago. I asked, in the night, to see what I most needed to teach and found myself leading a class through that blue fire. Since then, I have visited this Alma Mater many times, and have found that its offerings are ever-growing. Some students study communications, learning and inventing techniques to facilitate helpful contact between people on this side and those left behind in the physical world. There is great compassion, among the faculty, for the grief of the survivors, and great eagerness, among the students, to alleviate that pain by reaching back to offer love and direct knowledge of life beyond life.
     I do not know where the victims of the Newtown horror are going, but I know that there are beautiful schools, for students on all levels, on the Other Side, and guides to show the way, and I am certain that the souls of the innocent are held in the arms of angels.

The science of mirrors

Mirrors are talismans, soul catchers, psychic shields, places of encounter with beings from other worlds, and sometimes portals for crossings between the worlds.
    The great Turkish poet Asaf Halet Çelebi (1907-1958), who was at home in the mirror worlds, gives us a shiverish lesson in how this works. What follows is my own free translation; Çelebi awaits an adequate translator and little of his work is available in any version in English.

Mirror

by Asaf Halet Çelebi.

An image rose before me in a mirror
something other than myself
I don’t know where she came from
this beautiful stranger,
maybe from China or beyond

I asked her, “Who are you?”

and she laughed at me.
“I am the daughter
of the Emperor of China
and I have loved you for a long time.”

I said, “Come, come from the mirror
beautiful thief of my reflection.
I don’t care if I have no image
as long as my hands can touch you
and prove you are real.”

The Emperor’s daughter said,
“I can’t come. But one day
I will swim your image
into the depths of this mirror
and we will vanish together.”

-          - Free translation by Robert Moss

     Ottoman intarsia hand mirror 17th century

"I went to the graveyard to check that my father is dead"

The big man is rattling the French doors to my library, where I am engaged. before breakfast, in unpacking books from the movers' boxes and placing them on my shelves. I go to him with some apprehension, because he is the size of a tall refrigerator.
    "I just came from the graveyard," he announces hoarsely. I can smell beer on his breath.
    "And you are?"
    "Oh." He hastens to apologize. He introduces himself as my neighbor, pointing to a white colonial house with gray shutters beyond the creek at the edge of our property. He has heard something about my work, and thinks I can help him.
    I invite him inside, and his bulk fills my reading chair.
    He explains that his father came to visit him during the night. "For real," he insists. "Dad was there, in the bedroom, shaking me to make me wake up. But Dad died years ago. I had to go to the graveyard to check that my father is dead. I needed to make sure that he's still in the ground."
    I am tender with the big man now. So few of us, in our society, receive any guidance on communication with the dead. Yet our dead are often with us, because they stay around, close to the living, or because they come visiting. Or because we journey, in dreams or astral journeys, into their realm.
    We talk about what the big man's father may want to share with him. Maybe just a beer and a sense of continuing connection. Maybe he wants an update on the family. Maybe he has some counsel for his son, or needs help from the living because he is lost or confused, and has found that the afterlife is nothing like what he may have heard in his church.
    I suggest a simple ritual by which he can open conversation with his dead father. He agrees he'll light a candle, pull out some old photos, pour a second glass for his dad. He'll assume his father is present, seen or unseen, and say the things he needs to say, hopefully offering love and forgiveness. He'll be open to hearing what his father needs him to hear.
    He came to me later, tears in his eyes, to tell me that he had had a great talk with his father. "He put me straight on some things, and he had some information on a business situation that may have saved my ass. Funny how it's easier to talk to him now he's dead than when he was alive."
    I have been working for more than twenty years to help people understand that there is nothing weird about contact with the dead, who are alive in a world next door to us, whose borders are highly permeable. I have written books to facilitate timely and helpful communication with the deceased, including Dreamgates and my Dreamer's Book of the Dead.
    Recently I had the pleasure of reading and lending my blessing to a wonderful new book on this theme, The Last Frontier by Julia Assante, who melds a scholar's mind and extensive research with the first-hand experience of a practical mystic. I remembered the scene of the big man at the door of my library, from my first days at my previous home, as I re-read Julia's book, which explains - passionately and eloquently - why we need to "normalize" relations with those who are living in the afterworld, for mutual benefit.
Julia Assante will be my guest on my Way of the Dreamer radio show today. You can listen to the show live from 9:00-10:00 a.m. Pacific (12:00-1:00 p.m. EST) or download from the archive at http://www.healthylife.net/

Photo by the great Czech photographer Václav Chochola (1923-2005)

From the Field of Dreams

I often ask members of my playshops and trainings to bring a creative offering to our final session, in any genre that they choose - a story, a poem, an artwork, a script for a playlet or script, a song or a dance. The only condition is that what is shared should come fresh from our adventures together.
    At the close of the five-day adventure I led at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur in November, Karen Muller gifted us with a wonderful poem evoking the experiences of the whole group, including the evening when we shared close encounters with Death. She has given me permission to share it here:

From The Field of Dreams
by Karen Muller

From the field of dreams to a treehouse built with Dad
From herding cats to spider woman's web
We explored other worlds and re-imagined this one.

Weaving our own webs and admiring one another's
We traveled from our humble village, flying
east of the sun and west of the moon
On the wings of a tiger to a beautiful distant star
Only to find it a cold, soulless land of robot people.
If only we can get to the great Oz, maybe he can help us
Because now we understand that
More answers than we imagined are back in Kansas.

Then came the great reckoning
We each carried Death on our left shoulders,
Then found ourselves at death's door
But Cerberus the three headed gatekeeper
Told us about our many errors and the need for reparations
None of us has even come close to using our talents.
Like Icarus, our wax wings melted and we fell into the sea.
We have more to do here in the valley of the shadow of death
Before we meet our rewards.

And now away we go, back from the worlds behind the world
Back to Kansas
Holding fast to the visions of what we need to be and do
We face a new day
Hoping that next time we meet Death
We can say that yes, we had more courage,
Repaired some damage, forgave
Accomplished more of what we came here to do.

Photo: My Esalen balcony by R.M.

"When I am dreaming, it's being written inside"

I am savoring some recollections of the role of dreaming in a writer's life in the last long interview that Julio Cortazar, an Argentine master of magical realism and the short story form, gave before his death. He describes how an early story that earned him fame was inspired by a nightmare. "One of my first and most popular stories, “House Taken Over” [Casa Tomada], is a nightmare I had. I got up immediately and wrote it."
    More usually, before he began to write, Cortazar would have felt a story "turning around in me a long time, sometimes for weeks...During this gestation period my dreams are full of references and allusions to what is going to be in the story. Sometimes the whole story is in a dream... But in general, what comes out of the dreams are fragments of references. That is, my subconscious is in the process of working through a story—when I am dreaming, it’s being written inside there." 

Quotations are from an interview by Jason Weiss in The Paris Review (Fall 1984, No. 93)

Picture: Julio Cortazar, Casa Tomada

Practicing Death under a Double Rainbow

Hameau de l'Etoile, St Martin de Londres, Languedoc

All night long, one of the moody winds of the Midi played with me, rattling all the doors and windows in my room, stirring the drawers in the cabinets, like an ardent lover who would not allow me to sleep.  I felt happy and regenerated as I watched the light rise above the mountains from the balcony of the Pigionnier, my room at the top of a stone farmhouse.
     On my way to coffee and baguettes in the restaurant below, I met a sweest black labrador on the cobbled path, an excellent sign for the day, since one of my personal superstitions is that a friendly black dog is a good omen. The black lab sat at my feet, invited me to pet, and as I scratched his ears I reflected that in many traditions the black dog is a guide of souls, and a guardian of the gates to the afterlife.
    As we gathered in the Bergerie, the restored farm building that was our workshop space, a double rainbow made a complete arch over the mountains. It was in plain few through the great rounded windows opposite my own place in our circle of forty dreamers who had come from near and far - from Arizona and Hanover, from Bucharest and Hanover - to practice death in one of my favorite workshops, Making Death Your Ally.
    "Three times makes the charm," I recalled. I felt we had all received a triple blessing, from the animate and amorous wind, the friendly black dog, the double rainbow. This proved to be simple truth. We shared a rich and remarkable long day's journey to Death.
    We practiced crossing to the Other Side - for our own eventual journeys, and for passages we might guide for others. In our initial round of dream sharing, a lovely man whose wife was in hospital, considered to be terminal, shared a dream from the previous night. He had asked to see how he could companion his wife on her tremendous journey into the afterlife. In his dream, he found himself at the edge of a river. To cross it, he was required to wade deep into the water, until he submerged himself, and to keep walking until he reached a pleasant house on the far shore where a couple were waiting for him. There was a quality of light and beauty and agelessness about that couple, unknown to him in ordinary reality. He felt they were the owners of a safe house where he and his wife could be welcomed on the Other Side, and where they could meet when one or both took up residence there. He wondered if the beautiful couple could be himself and his wife as they might be when they leave sickness and the weight of years behind, in life after life. This powerful and moving dream prompted me to make a crossing by water the map for the first group journey to practice the transition to the next world.
     Later we made another group journey with a modern script. I instructed the group to journey to an airport. This might at first resemble an airport that was familiar to them, Charles de Gaulle or JFK or Heathrow. But it would soon prove to be a nonordinary location. They would become vividly aware of that when they noticed what happened to their luggage. Instead of being carried on board the plane, their bags - which might represent their physical bodies after death - would be destroyed. They would choose their own airlines, and they would find that the choice was very different from Air France or United or Lufthansa. Some of these airlines operated according to collective belief systems and flew to destinations promised by different religions. Thus Shambhala Air, or Paradise, or Valhalla. Some flew into a realm where travelers learn to construct their own afterlife environments, according to their imagination, their knowledge and their passions.
     Both these group journeys were wonderfully successful. I suggested to our voyagers that they would want to check out various locations on the Other Side, such as a welcoming center, a place of higher education, a place of life review, or a communications center where the deceased come to try to get through to the living. The detailed travelers' reports that were shared grew our geography of the afterlife. While drumming for the group, I was able to tour the many options for communication between the departed and people on Earth offered by an Interworld Cafe. I was able to audit a class in Reality Creation in a college where students are taught how to work with subtle stuff known as "ideoplastics" to build whole environments.
     As the light fell, late in the afternoon session, we prepared for the close-up encounter with Death. This was an indelible experience, in which the members of circle were required - as they rose from their shrouds after submitting to a soul-wrenching interrogarion by a personal Death - to write the terms of a contract for a life extension, and have these contracts formally witnessed by others. This was a new twist I was inspired to make in this workshop, long one of my favorites. Acting as his agent, I felt that Death was very satisfied with the contracts he extracted.

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For more on Making Death Your Ally, please read Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and Life Beyond Death. For opportunities to take this depth training in North America and other locations, please visit my website.

View from the window of our workshop space on December 4, 2012. Photo by R.M.

The Cinema of Lost Dreams

What happens to the dreams we don't remember? I've asked myself that question on several mornings, when I've awoken with little or no dream recall, while feeling that the night had been active.

     On one such morning, I decided to linger in bed and see whether I could find a place where I could recover lost dreams. I found myself approaching an old-time cinema, that reminded me of a movie theater where I used to go, as a boy, to watch Saturday matinees. I was amazed and delighted to find that, this time, the movie titles on the marquee and the images on the posters in the lobby all throbbed with significance in my present life.
     Waking the Sleeping King was blazoned in lights.

     One of the posters showed a boy riding a monster of the deep through a stormy ocean. Another depicted a steamy romance.

     The girl at the ticket kiosk smiled and gestured for me to go through. Soon I was settled in a comfy padded velvet seat in a private screening room. As dream images filled the screen, I realized I had a choice. I could remain a comfortable observer, or I could enter the fray.

      On another morning, after coffee, I decided to try the same method again. This time, instead of going back to the movie house, I found myself drawn to the kind of video store that is almost defunct, thanks to our new instant delivery systems. This video store was vast, with its products arranged on many levels, On the first floor, dreams were arranged like DVDs on shelves, according to familiar categories - Drama, Comedy, Family, and so on, There was a large Adult section most of whose content was quite unfamiliar to me. I realized that a block had been placed on some of this material, so that it did not reach my conscious mind, or - in cases where the film had been rated I (for Intrusion) was not allowed through during the night.

     I discovered sections devoted to my dreams of individual people. I had only to focus on a name or title,and the movie began to play all around me, so I could enter it at will.

On a lower level of the dream video store, I discovered that I could explore dream adventures I may have shared with other people, but had not remembered. I found an immense archive of shared dreams involving each of these people. One was as large as a Gothic cathedral, with shelves rising to the high roof many stories above.
     I watched several dream movies in each location.They took me deeply and vividly into scenes of other lives and other times - of leopard people in Africa, of Celtic voyagers in a coracle on a cold northern sea, of a turning castle in a high desert landscape where everything is the color of sand except for the pretty star-shaped flowers, blue and purple, on a terrace. The dream movies revealed a hidden order of connection in all these relationships, transcending our present lives.

     On yet another day, when I felt impelled to go searching for lost dreams, I was drawn to a building like an old-fashioned post office. It resembled the post office in the rust-belt city of Troy, New York, where I once lived. When I arrived in front of it, in my conscious dream, the sky turned dark. I mounted the high steps, and walked past the mail boxes towards the counters. Most of the steel shutters were down and locked for the night, but one was still half-open. Behind it, I saw letters spilling from pigeon holes and heaps of giant mail bags and packages. A little black women in  a blue uniform hurried to the desk and handed me a letter. I was moved to tears when I opened it and found a message from a beloved family member, long deceased.

    When I turned to thank the postal clerk, I realized that I knew her. I had glimpsed her, in half-forgotten dreams, slipping mail through a letter drop in the door of my house, a letter drop that is not in the physical door. She strongly resembles a figure from history I was called to study by dreams I did remember - Harriet Tubman, a world-class dreamer who used her visions as maps to guide escaping slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad before the American Civil War.

     I suspect there are back rooms in my dream post office where there is more to discover. Maybe one of them is like the Cabinet Noir in the old French post offices, where mail judged suspect by the authorities was held for inspection, and often never delivered to the addressee.

     All of which leads to this suggestion: if you are missing your dreams (and your dreams are missing you) try taking a little quiet time, when you won't be disturbed, and announce this as your intention:

I would like to go to a place where I can find my lost dreams

Maybe this will take you to a movie theater, a video store, or a post office, or another place entirely, constructed from your own life memories and suited to your imagination. In whatever form it appears, you will be entering the Cinema of Lost Dreams.

Screenshot from Le Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon) (1902)