The dream holds true in half the total universe

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James observed that "The founders of every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine."

   That “direct personal communion" has been conducted through dreams and visions and interior dialogue and observation of signs and marvels in the natural world, all facets of dreaming in the broader sense understood by our ancestors and by active dreamers in all cultures. James reminds us that religion without dreaming is divorced from its very origins.
   In a letter to Henry Rankin on June 16, 1901, he put it this way: "The mother sea and fountainhead of all religions lie in the mystical experiences of the individual, taking the word mystical in a very wide sense. All theologies and ecclesiasticisms are secondary growths superimposed."  Borrowing from his friend, the great British psychic researcher and scholar, Frederic Myers, James explained that "mystical consciousness" is related to the existence of an "extended subliminal self, with a thin partition through which messages make irruption."
   For most of us, it is through dreams that the subliminal self most frequently irrupts through that "thin partition" into everyday awareness.
   In Principles of Psychology, James offers these interesting reflections on the orders of reality we may enter in dreams, and why dreaming is our mode of experiencing half the "total universe":

The world of dreams is our real world whilst we are sleeping, because our attention then lapses from the sensible world. Conversely, when we wake the attention usually lapses from the dream-world and that becomes unreal. But if a dream haunts us and compels our attention during the day it is very apt to remain figuring in our consciousness as a sort of sub-universe alongside of the waking world. Most people have probably had dreams which it is hard to imagine not to have been glimpses into an actually existing region of being, perhaps a corner of the spiritual world.

And dreams have accordingly in all ages been regarded as revelations, and have played a large part in furnishing forth mythologies and creating themes for faith to lay hold upon. The 'larger universe,' here, which helps us to believe both in the dream and in the waking reality which is its immediate reductive, is the total universe, of Nature plus the Super-natural. The dream holds true, namely, in one half of that universe; the waking perceptions in the other half. 

Dwell with that last statement for a moment.  The dream "holds true" in half the "total" universe, and is our way to access and experience this reality. If James is correct, then if we have divorced ourselves from dreaming, we are only halflings, only half present in the universe.

What causes dream drought

You hear it everywhere. "I don't remember my dreams", or even "I don't dream" (which only means "I don't remember" or, "I don't want to remember" since everyone dreams in three or four cycles, at a minimum, every night). You hear it from people who have no inner practice. You also hear it from people who may spend many hours a week in meditation, yoga or shamanic journeying but have no current relationship with the spontaneous gifts of the night, which can be deep and rich and a corrective to the control freak in the ego.
    A dream drought is recognized by dreaming peoples as a serious condition, for an individual or a community. The Iroquois say that if you have lost your dreams, it is because you have lost a vital part of your soul, the dreamer in you. A society that has lost its dreams risks falling into the Dark Times, because it has lost its primary connection with the spirit world, and is in danger of forgetting the origins and purpose of human life.
    There are four main reasons for the dream drought in many modern lives:

1. Bad habits.

The rhythms and routines of a typical urban life simply don’t support dream recall. Too often, we are jolted awake by alarm clocks – or bed mates, or kids who need to get to school – and stumble out into the world, fueled with caffeine, to try to get through our rounds of deadlines and obligations.

2. Fear and regret. 

We run away from our dreams because we think they might be telling us something we don’t want to hear – about the dark side of ourselves, or trouble or illness ahead – missing advisories that could help us do better,
Alternatively, we dream of something wonderful .But when we wake up we tell ourselves we can’t manifest what we enjoyed in our dreams. So we kiss off the dreams, forgetting that if we dream it we may be able to do it.

3. Artificial sleep cycles. 

Very often our concept of a good night’s sleep is at odds with our dreams. We are told we need to spend seven or eight hours each night in uninterrupted sleep. This idea would have amazed our ancestors. Before the advent of artificial lighting most humans experienced “segmented sleep” divided into at least two distinct cycles “Consolidated sleep”, as we experience it today, isn’t natural and does not support dreaming.

4. Lack of social rewards and encouragement.

Until recently, we have lacked a method of dream sharing that encourages people to remember and tell their dreams. The Lightning Dreamwork process, a signature technique of Active Dreaming that I first made public in 2000, gives us what has been lacking: a way to share dreams that is fast and fun, generates helpful and non-authoritarian feedback, and encourages the dreamer to take action to embody creative and healing energy and navigational guidance from the dream. Wherever this is practiced, people have positive incentives to bring a dream to the breakfast table, the coffee shop, or a quiet corner of the workplace. They feel rewarded and celebrated, and they don't want to miss out on the fun!

How to break a dream drought: Start here.

Image: Photo by Thomas Castelazo via Wikipedia Commons

What is your rescue story?

A rescue story is one that can buck you up and give you strength and courage, or simply warm smiles, when you need those things.  It's a story that can get you out from under a black cloud of despair, and move you beyond the belief that you're not good enough, or worthy enough, or that the world is cold and cruel.

    There are days in our lives when all of us need to be rescued by a story of this kind.  I asked members of one of my Active Dreaming circles to identify their own rescue stories. Among those offered:

- My first boyfriend kissing me so hard he put hickeys all over my neck and then sat with me for an hour with an ice-pack trying to make them go away so my mom wouldn't notice.

- leaning into the breeze on a cliff above the sea in Hawaii

- giving birth to my first child

- holding a humming bird in the palm of my hand

- seeing the sun shine at midnight, in a dream of healing and initiation

- with Grandpa in a laundromat when he magicked a gold ring out of one of the machines and gave it to me

- having a close-up encounter with my own Death, and coming back with the knowledge that Death is my teacher, not my enemy

Sometimes we can borrow a story others have told, and find courage or laughter within it. When things seem really bad, I often think of Viktor Frankl, reduced to a walking skeleton at Auschwitz, growing a dream of a future world where Hitler was a nightmare of the past, in which - liberated and respected - he saw himself giving lectures on the psychology of the concentration camps. 
    As he recounts in Man's Search for Meaning, one of the essential books of the 20th century, Frankl grew that dream so strong in his imagination, in the midst of constant terror, that he found the strength to survive and was eventually able to manifest his vision. That's a rescue story.

Art: "The Rescue" by Honoré Daumier

There is one direction in which space is open to us

Champlain Islands, Vermont

The sun rises from behind the mountains, and golden light bursts over the lake. Though the analogy is too pedestrian for the glory of this moment, it seems to me that an immense light bulb has come on, impossible to miss yet difficult to look at head-on. 

    The moment before I walked barefoot across the wet grass to wait for the sun by the shore, I was rereading lines from Emerson that give exact shape to the sense of illumination and direction that is now with me: 

Each man has his own vocation. The talent is the call. There is one direction in which all space is open to him. He has faculties silently inviting him thither to endless exertion. He is like a ship in a river; he runs against obstructions on every side but one; on that side all obstruction is taken away, and he sweeps serenely over a deepening channel into an infinite sea. 

    This talent and this call depend on his organization, or the mode in which the general soul incarnates itself in him. He inclines to do something which is easy to him, and good when it is done, but which no other man can do. He has no rival. For the more truly he consults his own powers, the more difference will his work exhibit from the work of any other. His ambition is exactly proportioned to his powers. The height of the pinnacle is determined by the breadth of the base. Every man has this call of the power to do somewhat unique, and no man has any other call.

This passage, from Emerson's Spiritual Laws, gives vital navigational guidance for our life journeys. Every word is as precise as a compass bearing. To read this passage deeply and take it to heart is to turn on the light in a darkened room, or put the sun in the sky.

    The talent is the call. When we follow our soul's calling, and give ourselves to the work, the life Work that is ours and no other's, our gifts are multiplied, because we draw to us supporting powers from the unseen, starting with our own creative genius. 

    There is one direction in which space is open to us. This explains why, when we are unsure of or uncommitted to our calling, we find blocks and opposition placed in our paths, doors slammed in our faces, savage reversals of fortune or of health that compel us to ask what we are doing in our lives. Such obstruction isn't random, and it's about more than toughening us up. Dead ends and adversity, repeated often enough, can make us aware that we've been following the wrong charts. Knowing that we have been misdirected gives us the chance to find our true direction. 

    On that side all obstruction is taken away. When we follow the soul's direction, the way ahead is open, and wind and water flow with us. We "sweep serenely over a deepening channel into an infinite sea." We draw new allies, events and resources to us. Chance encounters and benign coincidence support us and ease our passage in ways that are inexplicable to those from whom the spiritual laws of human existence are hidden.

    What we now deliver in our world is unique, yet it springs from the mode in which the general soul incarnates in us. We draw from "that age-long memoried self that shapes the elaborate shell of the mollusc and the child in the womb, that teaches the birds to make their nest", as Yeats wrote, thrillingly, in The Trembling of the Veil. The poet added that "genius is a crisis that joins that buried self for certain moments to our trivial daily mind.." Yes, but Emerson arouses us to the understanding that the flash of genius can become a steady beacon for a voyage in which the mixed crew of personalities that compose the self are willing to work the ropes together, because the helmsman is unerring.

     We have no rival when we follow our one direction and live as creators. To be a creator is to bring something new into the world, the thing only we can give.

     Each of us has all of the power to do something unique, and no one has any other call. Ah.
     As I write this line, releasing it from gender to become fully the property of all, the sun calls me, laying a path of light clear across the inland sea and through my window, so it shines before me. My pencil, on the table, glows in this brilliant morning light silently inviting me to endless exertion with the talent I am given, the kind of exertion that is no sweat because it is the soul's delight.

Adapted from Active Dreaming: Journeying beyond Self-Limitation to a Life of Wild Freedom by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Photo: Sunrise on Lake Champlain by RM

Making Big Magic: Re-reading Elizabeth Gilbert

What a deliciously good book is Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic. Her insistence that ideas are out there looking for the right people to carry and create with them matches the ancient wisdom of Aborigines that the Big stories are hunting the people who will tell them. I love her account of how, when she put aside the idea for a Brazilian "jungle book", it jumped, with specific characters and plot themes, to another wonderful writer, the novelist Ann Patchett, who brought it through in State of Wonder.
    I especially like her recognition that genius is not something a person is, but a greater creative spirit who will infuse and inspire us when we are available. That is the whole theme of the last chapter of my own ConsciousDreaming, and to operate with this awareness is to enter the heart of creative action. We miss the real meaning of genius. The Romans never said that a person was a genius. They said that a person had a genius, a tutelary spirit that brought them greater creative gifts. The Latin word "genius" is related to gignere, which means to engender or "beget". It implies reproductive energy, the power of inseminating new life. The Romans believed that a person's genius rejoices in good living, in laughter, in healthy sex, in having fun. Forget to play, and you are not working with your genius, for whom play is the only thing in mortal affairs worth taking seriously.
    Gilbert reminds us that for the Greeks the highest state of bliss is eudaimonia, being “good-daemoned”.
    Later she makes practical use of Einstein’s practice of “combinatory play”. To release your best in your primary field, play around in a lesser (for you) field where consequences are unimportant. On is way to a discovery, Einstein would pick up his violin and play a sonata or two.
    When it comes to negative thoughts, Gilbert recommends, act like a hostage negotiator. “Speak to your darkest and most negative interior voices the way a hostage negotiator speaks to a violent psychopath: calmly, but firmly. Most of all, never back down…The life you are negotiating to save, after all, is your own.”
     She borrows wonderful advice from W.C. Fields: “It ain’t what you’re called, it’s what you answer to.”
     She invites us to choose the trickster in each of us over the martyr.
     And then there is her story of the poet Ruth Stone, who wrote

Poems came to me
As if from far away.
I would feel them coming,
I would rush into the house,
Looking for paper and pencil.
It had to be quick,
For they passed through me
And were gone forever.

- Ruth Stone, "Fragrance",in her last collection What Love Comes To

As a poet myself, I feel for Ruth Stone, because thanks to Elizabeth Gilbert, Stone's mode of chasing poems like runaway horses is now famous, but few have read the poet herself or even remember her name. It's well worth seeking out her work and noticing, along the way, how she rose above a dark river of grief and pain, especially after her second husband (also a poet) hanged himself from a door in the family home.
    There are delicious further revelations in Gilbert's account of how Stone caught her poems. When a poem got away from her, she felt it galloping away, "searching for another poet". Then sometimes she would manage to grab an escaping poem by the tail, and would feel herself pulling it back. "In these instances, the poem would appear on the page from the last word to the first - backward, but otherwise intact."
    Many of us dreamers know exactly how that works, as we pull back dreams by the tail as they run away. How many of the dreams that escape go searching for another dreamer?

Top image: Winged genius in the Louvre

Praise and Serve the Mother and Re-enchant the World

I am walking in deep, springy grass, humming a little hum, a bit like Winnie-the-Pooh.. Ahead of me, near a fine lake, is a great tree, and I know that important things are waiting for me if only I can open a door among the roots of this tree. In fact, I need to do this very much, because people are looking to me for direction I can only find if I go down to a world below the great tree. I can see their faces - the faces of decent family people in ordinary situations, all over. They are doing their best, but they need something more. 

     I understand that I can only gain access to the place where the guidance they need can be found by putting words to my hum. By finding the song that will be the key.

I wake from this dream with the hum in my mind, but not much more, beyond a sense of urgency. 

     I call a dear friend, Carol, who has companioned me in many adventures in dream travel and dream teaching. I ask her to come over and drum for me while I attempt to reenter my dream and find the song key.

     Soon we are together. I am stretched out on the rug, eyes closed, humming the hum I recall. As Carol gently taps the drum, words begin to come:

I am walking on the Mother
I am sailing on her skin

"Sailing" on her skin? A critical, editing part of my mind natters that this can hardly be correct. I ask that part of me to wait outside while I go on with this. Let me have this adventure and I'll talk to you later. (This, in my experience, is the best way to deal with the skeptic in the left brain, who has his place but must be reminded where that its.) As Carol  continues to drum, the first stanza becomes whole:

I am walking on the Mother
I am sailing on her skin
I become her child and lover
from the outside enter in

Now the flow is coming stronger, unstoppable:

I will praise the sky above her
I will praise her in the deep
I am dreaming of the Mother
she awakens me from sleep

Walk lightly on the Mother
and let her grace unfold

Praise and serve the Mother

and re-enchant the world

Oh, I need to hear those last lines again:

Praise and serve the Mother

and re-enchant the world

Now, in my lucid wide-awake dream, I am approaching the roots of the great tree. An opening appears, like a door, and I go through it without hesitation. I go down into a velvety, breathing dark. Then a great shape, formed of the Earth itself, takes form and embraces me. I am enfolded within the body of the Great Mother. She holds me and nurses me like a baby, and I feel love and healing coursing through every part of my body.

     Now I am allowed to go deeper, into a kind of Creative Cave in a world below our world of appearances. Here I find powerful guidance and direction, to be shared with those who have been waiting.

     When I signal for Carol to end the drumming, I have the song, and the directions. I recall that in the Mohawk language (which I was obliged to learn because of my dreams) the word for "song" - ka'renna - literally means, "I am putting forth my power."

I have shared the song of the Mother gathering of active dreamers in special places. When we sing the chorus together, we know we are on our way, to "re-enchant the world." I shared it in my last class for my current online"Quantum Dreaming" course for The Shift Network, and saw the doors to the deeper world opening again.

 Art: "Tree Crossroads of Worlds" by Annick Bougerolle

The worlds behind the dream door

The best way to grasp the meaning of a dream, and to determine what action the dream requires, is to go back inside the dream and recover more of the story. We should never confuse a dream report - what we remember and can say about a dream - with the full experience of the dream itself. Even a very copious and detailed dream report is missing much of what went on during the night, including deeper levels of dreaming in which the dream self may have traveled not only through different locations, but through different orders of reality.

     Why would we want to go back inside a dream? Our motive might be simply to have more fun and adventure. We were with a dream lover in a tropical paradise, but were roused by the alarm clock or the kids jumping on the bed. We'd like to revisit that delicious scene, and enjoy it for longer.

     We may want to talk more with a dream visitor. A deceased grandparent, or a friend on the other side of the world, or a famous writer of the past we admire turned up in a dream, as if they sat down in the living room or leaned over the bed, and we'd like to know why they came and what we need to share. By putting ourselves back inside the dream scene, we can initiate a conversation.

     Maybe we've been running away from something in dreams, or trying to hide from it. This is an urgent reason for learning to reenter a dream. When a fear or a challenge arises in dreams, we want to learn to confront it on its own ground. If we keep running away from something in our dreams, chances are that the underlying issue will pursue us in waking life.

What we are hiding from in dreams may be our own power. I learned this early in my time in North America, when I dreamed, repeatedly, that an enormous bear was in my space. I made it my intention to go back inside the most recent version of the dream, confront the bear, and understand why it was showing up in my house. I closed the blinds, turned off the phone, slouched back in an easy chair and used the edge of fear as power to take me back inside the dream scene.

    I was there right away: the bear was in front of me, huge and wild, showing its claws. It took a real effort of will to brave up and approach it as it towered over me on its hind legs. When the bear wrapped its great arms around me, I feared it would crush my ribs. Instead, I found myself inside a warm and loving hug. Later the bear wanted me to look at my heart. I looked, and was amazed to see their was a thick cord between my heart and that of the bear, something like a thick umbilical, pumping life juice. I understood, in that moment, that the bear and I were joined at the heart. Bear's message, moving through my senses and slowly translating into human speech, was Call on me, and I will show you what people need to be healed. Since then, whenever I open a healing circle, we call in the Bear through song and dance.

    You may find, as I do, that an aspect of your own power and healing is waiting for you behind a dream door, if you will reopen it. There are further reasons for learning the technique of dream reentry, which is explained in depth in several of my books, including Active Dreaming and The Three "Only" Things. I have become convinced, through long experience, that any image that belongs to us - even the most terrifying - can be worked with in the direction of healing and resolution. Our dreams, if we will use them, are factories of fresh and spontaneous images that the body believes because it belongs to us and comes hand-crafted from our personal dream producers.

     Then, too, a dream may be an invitation to become whole by reclaiming aspects of ourselves that went missing when life became too cruel or too complex. Dreams show us parts of ourselves that go unrecognized by the daily mind, and may have been absent for years or decades through the conditions that shamans call soul-loss. When we learn to go back inside a certain kind of dream - the dream of the childhood place, for example, or of a childhood self - we are on our way to a soul reunion with a younger self that can bring fresh vitality, joy and imagination into our present lives.

     Dream reentry is the royal road to becoming a conscious or lucid dreamer. In my workshops, we use shamanic drumming to fuel and focus our adventures in dream reentry and tracking - which means entering someone else's dream space, with permission, to get information for them or support them. For home use,  Wings for the Journey, my recording of shamanic drumming for dream travelers, is available from Psyche Productions.

Art: "Dancing with the Bear" by RM.