Mongol shaman's power suit

A tremendous dark figure with a helmet-hat and a long heavy flared coat of animal skins and furs, hung with metal charms and mirrors and weapons, and high fur-lined boots. He is facing me, but the sourceless light is behind him so I don’t see his features clearly. He is more of a silhouette, red-black.
    I feel a great wind stirring across distant plains. His landscape, his storm, his wind of soul. I am excited that a window between us has opened. He is looking in at me from across time and dimensions. I think of Genghis Khan, the shaman warrior who made an empire, a monster in the memory and jokes of the West, but a hero and exemplar in Mongolia.
    There is a link between me and this warrior shaman who stands at a threshold between our worlds. There are times when I have been on the other side of that opening, in a different body, and worn an outfit like that. I feel a mute invitation to join this figure now. Maybe we are both avatars of a central self. If I can join him in his world, can our energies work together in mine? What would than mean?

All these thoughts and feelings stream through me as I contemplate the figure between the worlds. It is an absolutely spontaneous vision. I did not set an intention for my night dreams, and my body was fast asleep when this figure appeared. When I woke from this dream at 1:00 a.m., after two hours sleep, I was charged with excitement.
     My mind ranged over earlier adventures in which I have found myself in the world of shamans and khans of Central Asia. When I was a boy in high school, my visions of an ancient warlord of China led me to write a whole cycle of poems. In a dream from a couple of years ago, I found myself in the body and perspective of a man in clothes like this, seated at the edge of a precipice watching a battle unfold in a great plain below, sending out his instructions mentally more than by couriers.
     The memory that rises up strongest now is from the early summer of 1988, when I was studying shamanism and trying to make sense of a series of psychospiritual storms and trans-temporal dramas that were pushing me towards reinventing my life and my work. In this dream, I visit a tailor and a fancy men's clothing store, looking for a new suit. I decide to try on a pinstriped “power suit” but as I feel the fabric I discover it is made of skins and furs, and is hung with metal charms. I look at the label and see that it reads“Shamanic”.

Action: Watch again the excellent film "Mongol", with Tadanobu Asana cast as Temudjin, the young Genghis Khan. We see the ordeals of the young Mongol's life, his shamanic relationship with the wolf, and his reverence for the sky god Tengri.
    Oh, yes. I will avoid any tendency to act like Genghis Khan! Except in showing respect for the religions of all peoples (he studied all religions and decreed religious tolerance in his empire) and for the spirits of earth and sky.

"Genghis Khan at the threshold between the worlds". Drawing by Robert Moss. January 10, 2013.

On birthing a new book

In my writer's womb the embryo
doesn't sprout an arm, a leg, a penis
all separate and sequential
like sausage links in their casings
but will be One, whole and entire
at first refusing the reduction to form
later alien enough to bring sweats
to the UFO believer in the hypnotist's chair.

It is growing all ways out from its own core,
feeding on my juices, sharing my heartbeat,
knowing the tides and toxins of my body
better than I do, since it's the one inside.

When it is ready to burst from me
I'll feel it kicking. I'll push hard.
I won't let anything distract me 
from bringing through this child of wonder
who wants to come into the world through me.


- I discovered this poem in one of the journals I am revisiting. I wrote it on January 13, 1997, when I was at work on two books, published as The Interpreter (a novel) and Dreamgates, still perhaps the most radical of my books about adventures in consciousness (until the new one is born). The line about the "UFO believer" in the hypnotist's chair was inspired by my critical reading, at that time, of John Mack's book Abduction; my response to Mack is in my chapter "Alien Encounters and Spirit Callings" in Dreamgates. The poem speaks to my current condition as a pregnant author, and to the way I feel the book inside me now is growing. 
     I just edited the original version. We need to commit poetry, afresh, every day!

My first collection of poems and stories, Here, Everything Is Dreaming, will be published by Excelsior Editions (State University of New York Press) in April.

The dreamer who sent me her notes from the lecture I gave in her dream

Some weeks after leading one of my 5-day adventures at the Esalen Institute, I received a note from one of the participants, a highly intelligent, spirited lady, a person with two PhDs who had explored consciousness in many ways. "I want to thank you for that wonderful lecture you gave last night."
    I checked the date. I had not given a lecture that evening anywhere in consensus reality. I had already intuited what she was telling me. She had attended a lecture I gave in one of her dreams. The woman from Esalen reported that in my lecture, I had listed, "very clearly and elegantly", five reasons why we misinterpret dreams about the future. I had written them on a whiteboard in view of the group.
    This gave me shivers. On that very day, I was laboring over a chapter in a book that was later published as Dreaming True. The chapter was titled "When Dreams Seem False" and on the first page I was developing a list of the five most common reasons why we misinterpret dream messages about the future. I was satisfied with my statement about the first reason we get these messages wrong. But I was not yet content with my formulation of the other four reasons, or the order in which they should appear on the page.
     I emailed the woman from Esalen. I asked her, "Any chance you kept notes from my lecture, or could reconstruct what I wrote on the whiteboard?"
     She responded within a couple of hours, sending me her version of Dream Robert's five points. They were expressed with admirable brevity, very much in my own style. Borrowing from my dream student's notes, I was able to compose the opening section of that chapter with almost no editing. Here's how it reads:

The five most common reasons why we misinterpret dream message about the future are:

1. We mistake a literal event for a symbolic one, or vice versa.
2. We misidentify people and places.
3. We fail to figure out how far in the future the dreamed event might be.
4. We see future events from a certain angle, that may not reveal the whole picture.
5. We confuse realities, confounding a dream that relates to external reality with dreams that are real experiences in other orders of reality.

Now, I am well aware that very often I am playing the role of teacher in my own dreams, with many difference audiences: with people I recognize, with people I will meet in the future, with people in countries I have not yet visited, with people in other orders of reality, including the afterlife  and what I like to call the imaginal realm. 
    I have received hundreds of reports from people who say they have attended a workshop, a lecture, a ritual or some other type of training with me in dreams. I have learned to pay close attention to reports about Dream Robert's teaching activities, because sometimes I find that he is more than a few steps ahead of me. It's a rare student of mine who brings detailed notes back from the dreaming, but I am open to more!

Photo "Under the Bean" (c) Robert Moss
   

The book on time travel with a doll inside

I have two well-read, elegantly dressed male visitors, perhaps from Buenos Aires. Among the books they have with them is a blue-jacketed volume titled H.G.Wells on Time Travel. I realize I have this on my own shelves, though I haven't looked at it in a long time and possibly never read it closely.
     I get down my copy, and find curious things interleaved with the pages. A tiny dress, folded into a neat triangle. The dress is lacy and pretty. Does it belong to a very small girl, or to the doll I also find pressed among the pages? The doll has long curly fair hair and is wearing a different dress. Where did these come from? I set them out on a child-sized writing table.      

Feelings: Curious and excited. Also annoyed that noises from the street ripped me from my dreams before I had completed my adventures.

Reality: I last read Wells' The Time Machine in 2006 or 2007, when researching a chapter about Churchill for my Secret History of Dreaming. Wells wrote other things about time travel, including the early story "The Chronic Argonauts" from which he developed The Time Machine as a serial novel. Despite their political differences, Churchill was a great admirer of Wells and valued the prescience of his science fiction stories, which frequently previewed future events and technologies. He especially liked The Time Machine and told his physician in 1947 (when he was very ill and conscious of his own mortality) that he would take a copy of the novel with him into Purgatory.
     Are the tiny dress and the tiny doll connected with the tiny, elegant but terminally effete Eloi in the future world Wells' Time Traveler visits? Or with a different trans-temporal story, maybe one of my own? Is the doll a part of soul, or a clue to soul identity that will be discovered and reclaimed in a journey across time?.
     The bookish visitors from Buenos Aires make me think of Borges and his friend and collaborator Adolfo Bioy Casares, another great Argentine writer of fantastic tales. Borges' interest in time travel extended to exploring parallel event tracks in parallel universes, as in "The Garden of Forking Paths" and he read and appreciated H.G. Wells; he credited Wells for inspiring his own celebrated short story "The Aleph".
     I am leading an adventurous new workshop titled "Time Travel and Reality Creation" near Seattle next weekend, so my dream is rather timely.

Action: Dreams set us research assignments! Look for a book like the one on my dream, which is an anthology and may contain essays on Wells as well as selections from his own writings. See if I can reenter the dream, identify the little girl whose things are inside the book, and interview the visitors from Buenos Aires.

Feedback: Early feedback on this dream is giving me further interesting leads. A dear friend recalls 1940s-style paper dolls she used to dress and play with as a small girl and how she would use them and their paper clothes as bookmarks. Being a boy, I may not have recognized exactly what I was looking at.
    After mentioning the paper dolls, she dug up some papers I had sent to her while working on The Secret History of Dreaming. These include detailed reports on the importance of dreams in the writings of H.G.Wells, and how he moved beyond the linear technology-based model of The Time Machine to describe in later stories (like "A Dream of Armageddon") how dreaming is the key to time travel and gives half-awakened individuals the ambivalent power to make choices about where in time they will place their focus and their identity. I had quite forgotten that I wrote these papers. I did not draw from them in my Secret History. So, as in my dream, I was guided to something I had in my personal library, something on "H.G.Wells on Time Travel" written by none other than myself. 

When I open the tap

"When I open the tap, what comes out of my pipes is pure fire." I make up this line at a literary gathering in a big city where a woman writer has asked everyone to come up with a new line on the spur of the moment. While others have clearly prepared or are quoting something already written, my line is fresh and unexpected. It generates a stir of almost sexual excitement in the room.
    The only person who does not seem turned on is a cerebral man sitting to my right. He's a regular in this group, and seems to feel threatened by my presence and performance. He tries to improvise from my lead, but this falls flat. As the game moves on, he mutters something about needing to head off colds, or the cold. I realize he has a pretty bad cold as he dabs his nose and mouth with a wad of tissues. 

This is a scene from my dreams overnight. I woke cheerful and confident at 4:00 a.m, ready to go back to work on my new book.
    Reality check: in the current cold spell, the pipes in my house are more at risk of ending in ice than fire. But I don't think the dream is about that. Yes, I know Freudians would have a field day with this dream, especially if I included a pendant scene in which I am kissing a beautiful young woman in a department store. There is certainly a sexual charge to the dream, but then creativity and real magic ride on sexual energy.
   I'll be speaking to new groups this year with readings for my new collection of poems and stories, Here, Everything Is Dreaming and it is certainly possible I'll run into someone like the man with the cold, and I'll try to make sure that people like this - in the world or inside me - don't dampen my creative fire!
    I love improv, and winging it. I lead many games like the one we are playing in the group in this dream, and often I'll have everyone sing a song that has become our hymn to spontaneity: "Make It Up as You Go Along".

My bumper sticker (also my action plan): Open the tap and let it all out!

"When I open the tap" drawings (c) Robert Moss

Pregnant Author - Allow Space

No, this is not the effect of holiday cheer. I am pregnant, with a book.
    For those of you who are unfamiliar with this condition, or have never suffered its effects on a person close to you, let me offer the following counsel.
    An author with a book that is still inside him is a lot like a pregnant mother - mood swings, odd cravings, bouts of morning sickness. I have never thought that authors merit undue respect, let alone reverence, but those near them need to exercise some care. 
    Give the author space when he needs it. Don't take his flare-ups or silences too personally. Above all, don't ask him how things are going or whether he met his quota today; let him tell you if he chooses.

Pregnant author sketch (c) Robert Moss

What's your habit?

In last night's dreams:

I would like to go swimming, but the day is too cold (I think) to swim in an outdoor pool or in the nearby ocean. I am surprised that two nuns are swimming. One is dressed in a regular (conservative) swimsuit, the other in a gray habit, complete with the headpiece. I’m amazed to see the nun in the habit swimming steady laps, up and down. She looks quite lovely, young and lively and strong, capable of going great distances.

Feelings: amused.

Reality: A dear friend, a Dominican Sister of Peace, was with us on New Year's Eve. She does not wear a habit. Though the dream may partly reflect things from her life, my main thought is that it is speaking to me about salutary habits as I embark on my new book project.

Bumper sticker: Slow and steady and modest can be a good habit.

Further thoughts: Swimming is also a good habit, and I have compared the process of writing a book to swimming the Australian crawl, staying low in the water, minimizing resistance. After first making this analogy, I was delighted to find that the American poet William Stafford developed the same theme in an essay titled "Writing the Australian Crawl."