Theater of soul recovery

Berkeley, California

Dream theater has long been one of my favorite things in the playshops I lead. We turn dream stories into performance very quickly, encouraging the dreamer to be director, scriptwriter and star. I will help her to pick members of the workshop to play all the key roles in the dream, human, animal and other. She can interact with her dream characters and ask them to tell her what they can say from the roles they are playing. Sometimes a dream is really asking to be dreamed onward, to continue an adventure, move beyond a fear, claim a power or resolve a mystery. In dream theater, it is remarkable how quickly we can facilitate this process. This is the pinnacle of improv, is profoundly energizing and bonding for a whole group, and often both wildly funny and deeply healing.
    I was awed by how fast and deep we were able to go, through spontaneous dream theater, on the first morning of the workshop I am currently leading in Berkeley, California. A woman narrated a dream in which she was shocked to see that her ex-husband was pregnant. She became distracted by the busy-ness of life, work, schedules, cleaning routines. Then in a moment of revelation she realized, inside the dream, that he ex was pregnant because he had stolen her egg,. Tremendous emotions were surging as she narrated the dream.   I suggested that she might want to cast people to play the key roles, starting with her ex and the egg, and the moment of revelation.
     As the drama unfolded, completely alive in the room, I proposed that she also cast people to play sources of inner guidance for both herself and her ex. Watched her confront her ex, reclaim something precious that she felt had been taken from her, and then come together with him, inside the embrace of the guides available to them both, for the well-being of the family. She told us she would be able to take this emotional healing and carry it through life, and the depth of the shared experience left us in no doubt this would happen.
     A second dream narrative also called for immediate performance. In her dream, another woman met a young girl, maybe four years old, she recognized as a very young version of herself who had gone missing at that age through bad things in the family. She tried to approach the child, but the girl would not engage with her, curling up in a corner and sucking her thumb. We quickly cast all the key elements in the dream, including the strange house and the rising flood waters in the landscape. The player who embodied the lost child brilliantly presented the challenge of reclaiming a part of our vital soul that may have gone missing in early life: we have to convince her that we are safe and we are fun. 
    The player in the role of the lost child refused to accept the assurances from the adult dreamer that she would be protected and would enjoy life with her grown-up self. It took intervention of a shamanic kind to clear this. I approached the child and asked her whether she would trust the Bear or the Tiger. "Tiger," she said without hesitation. So I entered the second theater. Tigers are beautiful and fierce and young children usually love them. The lost child came home to the adult, riding the tiger. They embraced, and were joined, We were all delighted by the fine visual synchronicity that the woman portraying the lost child was wearing a beautiful scarf featuring huge, brightly colored butterflies. The butterfly is a near-universal symbol for soul; in Greek the same word (psyche) means "soul" and "butterfly".
    The third dream shared on Saturday morning also invited immediate dream theater. In his dream, a man was scared by a huge standing bear that stood in his way. The bear had a chain attached to one of its legs. He avoided the bear, got distracted by a party scene, and then encountered two more bears. He lay down, trying to make himself small and invisible. The bears lay down on either side of him and went to sleep, leaving him unable to move or relax until eventually he left the dream, feeling that something vitally important had been left unresolved. In the dream theater, he was able to separate from the distractions of the party scene, and eventually to free the bear from the leg iron. In the conversation with the dream characters that ensued, the bear told the dreamer, "I am your own power" and the chain was especially eloquent. "I enabled you to contain that power until you were ready to claim it."
     It is extraordinary how this kind of performance can bring all the elements of a dream - far beyond the initial dream report - richly alive in a space and at the same time offer a path to closure and healing, all within minutes. The play-acting can become a true theater of soul recovery, as a spirited and intentional family emerges to support the recovery of vital energy that went missing in cruel passages of life, and to bring in more of the bright spirit of a larger Self. The child in us loves all this performance and creativity, and the child selves we may have lost are drawn to us because we are fun.

Bear cub fountain on The Circle in Berkeley (c) Robert Moss

Swimmer's soul and the Emperor's New Swim Trunks

Walnut Creek, California

"Where is the rest of me?"
    This is a question I like to ask myself, to check what aspects of my energy and identity may be lacking at a given time in my life, and which are abundantly present. It's a question I often ask people to journey on in my soul recovery workshops. What comes up often guides them - and me - to a younger self, or a greater self, or a parallel self, or a creative or animal spirit that we can now seek to lure back into our lives to provide more juice and more joy,
   It was no surprise to notice, recently, that the swimmer in me has been disaffected, because I have not been making enough time to get myself in the water where my body loves to be. I need my swimmer with me, because he can really go the distance. I can still swim 3 miles without pausing, doing the kind of freestyle we called the Australian crawl when I was a boy, staying very close to the water, minimizing resistance, turning the head no more than is necessary to take in air, loving the water and streaming with it. The poet William Stafford wrote a pretty good essay titled "Writing the Australian Crawl" and I most enjoy writing when it is like this way of moving with the element of water, which I have always known to be my primary element.
   So this morning, staying in a pleasant place in Walnut Creek CA where there are two pools bordered by palms, I got up early to swim. I was amazed and dismayed to find that I had not packed my swim trunks. I went through my suitcase three times. This was incomprehensible. I had taken my swim trunks everywhere all year long, to many, many places where I did not have the chance to swim or failed to make that happen - to Frankfurt and Barcelona, to Wisconsin and Lithuania, to Seattle and Ann Arbor. How could I have left my swim trunks at home, coming to sunny California?
    No worries. I had a pair of ocean-blue boxers that might pass for swim trunks if not inspected too closely by others. They even had a button in a strategic place to stop me flapping around, visibly, getting in or out of the pool.
    I chose the smaller and quieter of the two pools and swam for an hour before other people appeared in the enclosure. I stretched out on a recliner to catch some California sun. The pool lady moved closer and closer, hosing plants along the edges of the pool area. I noticed, to my horror, that I had failed to button my boxers at that strategic point. Any move to close the gap now might merely succeed in drawing attention to my aberrant swimwear.
    What to do? I chose the Emperor's New Swim Trunks approach, willing that nobody should notice there was anything amiss, not the lady with the toy dog who now appeared, not the building janitor, not the pool lady with the menacing hose. In due course, I wrapped a towel around my middle and made a dignified exit. I did not miss the metaphor. My missing swim trunks flagged the fact that I let a rather important soul part - that swimmer in me - go missing for far too long. Action plan: buy a new swim suit today so I don't have to cringe or clutch myself when getting my swimmer back into the water.

Return of the ancient deer

I know I am dreaming. I decide to rest my dream body in a high place overlooking a vast rolling landscape of rivers and wooded hills. People may look in on me, but only if they are able to ascend to this level.
    I close my dream eyes for sleep, and at once the landscape comes alive in a new way. Ancient deer are everywhere. Their spreading antlers are immense. They are like a walking forest.
    From my vantage point, I can see that the ancient deer are returning, all over the world. They are even in the cities, though few people are remotely aware that they have come again. This gives me tremendous hope. I am awed by the return of ancient and primal powers of the Earth. They are needed.

I am thinking now about the resemblance between antlers and the branches of trees. In French, the word for antlers is bois; they speak of the "wood" of the deer. As I follow the troubling news from Turkey, I notice that the protests began as a campaign to save the trees of Gezi Park, and I recall that the symbol of Ankara features a deer with tremendous antlers, dominating two bulls.
    May the wisdom of the ancient antlered ones, connected to the trees and to the power of regeneration, prevail over the bull-headed ones today.

P.S. In sketches for my personal tarot deck, I have drawn the Empress as Ancient Mother, seated under a tree whose branches rise like antlers, and the Emperor as a Deer King whose antlered crown resembles the tree and confirms his dedication to the Great Mother.

Tarot card drawings (c) Robert Moss. All rights reserved.

What's birthing in Berkeley Square

I am in an elegant Georgian square in London. The garden area at the center of the square has been covered by an immense tarp. It is rising as whatever is beneath it swells and steams. What is this? An immense heap of manure?
    The smell is loamy and rich. This may be the mother of all piles of crap, but I am sure that something wonderful is about to happen. It feels like the Earth herself is in process of giving birth, within this defined and mannerly space. I picture a natural spring that becomes a jetting fountain, surrounded by lush beds of flowers and flowering trees.

Feelings on waking before dawn today: cheerful, positive. Sure I can get my new book together.

Reality check: I think the location was Berkeley Square. I am going to another Berkeley, in California, this week. The book I am currently completing includes an account of my adventures and misadventures when I was engaged in researching and writing historical novels set in the Georgian era. Fictional characters who were given homes on Berkeley Square include Bertie Wooster and Flashman (a distant model for the narrator of my novel Fire Along the Sky). 

Defining the space: As I think about what is birthing in my dream, my eye falls on a quote from Reshad Feild, sent to me in an old letter: "In alchemy it is stated that whenever we define the space for which we are responsible, everything is given us within that space. It is as if the whole universe comes down and sits at our feet...ready to be used for God's plan on earth."

Catching the Blue Butterfly

"There's a blue butterfly!" someone yells. It is enormous and beautiful, with pale blue wings. It flits around our space, which is a greenhouse or glass-enclosed porch with many green plants.
    I run to catch it, and find there is a cord trailing from its body. When I clasp the cord, gently, not wanting to harm the butterfly, there is an upwards tug. I amazed to find this butterfly may be strong enough to lift my body off the ground.
    Later, I manage to catch it inside an upturned basket. What a find!

Feelings on waking: happy

Reality check: (1) I dreamed this while my suitcase - with a huge light blue name tag - was still missing after my return from my last trip to Europe. I woke to find my bag had been delivered overnight. (2) The butterfly is a favorite symbol for the soul, and is on the cover of my recent book Dreaming the Soul Back Home. (3) When I sat down to dinner on the deck of the dining hall at the Omega Institute during my workshop this past week, one of the participants was eager to show me a (dark) blue butterfly she had in a paper cup. Alas, that butterfly was dead and I said gently that I would rather not have it on the table. 

Where to meet Tinker Bell

"You know that place between sleep and awake, the place where you can still remember dreaming? That's where I'll always love you. That's where I'll be waiting."
    This is Tinker Bell's advice to Peter Pan in a movie version of J.M.Barrie's beloved story. [1] I recommend following these fairy directions.
    The liminal state of hypnagogia, when you are drifting between sleep and awake, or between waking and sleep, is a marvelous launch-pad for conscious dreaming. I am surprised it is not featured more in all those books on "lucid" dreaming, because the easiest way to become a lucid or conscious dreamer is to start out conscious and stay that way.
    If you can train yourself to maintain a state of relaxed attention in this in-between state, you will notice that you may be receiving a whole menu of possibilities for lucid dream adventures. Imaged, faces, landscapes rise and fall. When you learn to hold one of them in focus, it may become the portal for a conscious journey.
    The Parade of Faces is a frequent phenomenon in this state. You may feel you are among a crowd of people, with faces and figures rushing by. Sometimes one may turn to look at you, which can be an interesting opportunity to enter a shared experience with another dream traveler you may or may not know in ordinary reality.
    Sometimes the images rising and falling before you look like a child's sketches, or cartoons.
    A frequent sighting for me, in this in-between state, is of what initially looks like the weave of a carpet or the mesh of a net. I have come to recognize this as a kind of border between states of reality and consciousness. With intention, I can part the strands and find myself in another order or reality.
    The liminal state of hypnagogia, which I call the Twilight Zone in my book Dreamgates, is a good place to become aware of your ability to travel beyond the body. I often find myself lifting out of the body quite effortlessly in this state, without bumps and grinds. Sometimes, when tired, I simply rest half in, half out, of my physical form. Sometimes I float up to the ceiling. Quite often I go flying, like a bird, over my sleeping city and to places far away.
    As Tinker Bell counseled, the Place Between Sleep and Awake is, above all, a wonderful place to rendezvous with other beings and other intelligences. It is a state in which we often become aware of the psychic activity around us. We may receive visitors, and we will want to learn to screen and discern who we are letting into our space, because to be open to all comers is like opening your doors and windows in a night city, hanging out signs saying, "Party! Come On In! Everyone Welcome!"
     I frequently have inner dialogues in the Place Between Sleep and Awake, with sources of knowledge I have come to trust. This is a time when I can often receive streams of counsel and information from inner guides. In Dreamgates, I record some of my conversations with the intelligence I decided to call "G2". He carried the vocabulary and knowledge of a great Western Mystery order. I felt he was a transpersonal figure, though in no way alien to me. Many others have come to me in this liminal state. The most important of these inner guides is certainly no stranger; he is a self who observes and operates on a level of reality above the one I inhabit while living on this Earth in a physical body.
    In  the history of creative breakthroughs in every field, including science and technology, the hypnagogic state has been of vital importance. In this liminal zone it is easy to make creative connections, which often involves linking things that seem to the routine mind to be unconnected. Many inventions and discoveries attributed to dreams by over-hasty writers - like Kekule's discovery of the benzene ring - are actually gifts brought through from hypnagogia, to such an extent that I call this zone of consciousness "the solution state" in my Secret History of Dreaming.
    The Place Between Sleep and Wake can also be the very best place to go on with a dream or go back inside one. You may want to practice dream reentry to clarify information from a dream, or get to its full meaning, or continue a conversation with a dream character. You may need to reenter a dream because there are terrors to be overcome, or a mystery to be explored, or simply because you were having fun and adventure and would like to have more. Or because Tinker Bell is waiting for you. 

1. These lovely words are spoken by Tinker Bell (played by Julia Roberts) to the grown-up Peter Pan (played by Robin Williams) in Steven Spielberg’s 1991 movie “Hook”, written by James V. Hart. Alas, they are not in J.M.Barrie’s novel, Peter and Wendy, or in his play, Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up.

Illustration by Roy Best from the 1931 edition of Peter Pan.

Writing as enfleurage

Today trying to compress thousands of pages of journals, sketches and notes into one 50-page section of my new book feels a bit like trying to pack the contents of a house, or perhaps a whole forest, in a carry-on bag.  
    It helps me to shift the simile to the making of perfume or essential oils. I see myself putting the petals of many flowers in the alembic that will produce the fragrance. The most delicate blossoms, like jasmine, require the the older, slower way of cold enfleurage, developed in southern France in the nineteenth century.
    I bring the plants and flowers I have gathered to the chassis, a framed sheet of glass. There is a layer of wax or tallow inside the frame. I gently press my blossoms into this medium. When all of their essence has been absorbed, I replace them with fresh flowers, and repeat this process until I am satisfied that the medium is saturated with the aromatic essence, which will now be released by alcohol. Yes, this can work...