Flying Books and Nights of Healing

Boulder, Colorado

I was at another of my favorite independent bookshops, the Boulder Bookstore, to talk up Dreamgates last night. As soon as I stepped across the threshold, the image of two nuzzling deer jumped out at me from a bookshelf devoted to staff picks. The deer are on the jacket of a new book by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, the author of a wonderful book about dogs, The Hidden Life of Dogs and a marvelous novel about an ancient people who live very close to animals, Reindeer Moon. The new one is The Hidden Life of Deer and - in the wake of extraordinary shared experiences of healing and transformation last weekend on a mountain where the Deer spirit is and has long been primary - I had to get it.

     I was reminded that it was in the Boulder Bookstore, many years ago, that a visitor from the Midwest looking for something else was struck in the third eye by my book Conscious Dreaming - flying off a shelf for no apparent reason - soon after its publication in 1996. He bought the book, got in touch with me, and arranged to host my first Active Dreaming workshop in Madison, Wisconsin. There are magic bookstores, and flying books.

    We drew a lively crowd for my talk and afterwards a woman in line at the booksigning asked if she could tell me a dream. When the line had thinned a little, and I could give her full attention, she told me: "I dreamed I was on the beach with my ex, though we divorced 20 years ago. He was flicking sand and grit at me from a towel, like a bullying brat. After a while I stood up to him. I grabbed the towel away from him and told him I wouldn't put up with this any more, Everything was going to change. After that he morphed into Bill Cosby, looking sweet and a little sheepish. I woke up feeling really good."
   The story got better. The dream was confirmed by a coincidence: "The following night I turned on the Larry King show on TV. The guest was Bill Cosby. He was talking about bullying and how to stop it."

    We agreed this felt like a wink from the universe. The dreamer was sure that profound work of emotional clearing and healing was accomplished on the "night shift". Many other dreamers - including this one - had have deep experiences of emotional healing similar to that of stopping the bully. The ancients knew that extraordinary healing, on many levels, becomes available in the night, and they made a practice of preparing for that and asking for it nicely. The shrinks we've been discussing in the comments on my last post ("From brainless to mindless?") would do well to invest some time in learning about this.

From brainless to mindless?

Leon Eisenberg, a pioneer in psychopharmacology at Harvard, observed that “in the first half of the 20th century, American psychiatry was virtually ‘brainless.’ . . . In the second half of the 20th century, psychiatry became virtually ‘mindless.’ ” The brainless period, in his view, was the when psychiatry centered on psychoanalysis; the mindless period, is our current state of affairs, where pills are offered more often than therapy.

Unhinged: the Trouble With Psychiatry by Daniel Carlat M.D. is the partial confessional of a pill-pusher. With admirable candor, Carlat, a psychopharmacologist who is now a professor at Tufts University School of Medicine, describes many years in which a typical client session consisted of deciding - through rapid-fire questioning over 15 minutes - which of the labels from DSM-IV, the manual of American psychiatry, best applied to a patient, and then writing a prescription for the drugs recommended for that condition. "Psychiatry, for me and many of my colleagues, had become a process of corralling patients’ symptoms into labels and finding a drug to match."
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While drugs relieved the symptoms of depression in 40 percent of patients, he notes that placebos lift depression in nearly as many - 30 percent. Carlat came to realize that he knew almost nothing about most of his patients. He was shocked into starting to look at his patients as moe than DSM tags when one of them asked him whether it was possible that her childhood experiences had something to do with her current mental and emotional suffering. Carlat's recommendations are modest: let's have some talk, as well as the pills. Let's try to put the patient's symptoms in a context and offer some emotional support and help with problem-solving.
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Carlat brings out something we need to know, in the thick of the current debate over health insurance options. "Insurance companies typically encourage short medication visits by paying nearly as much for a 20-minute medication visit as for 50 minutes of therapy." For both the insurance companies and uninformed patients, quick-fix meds may seem preferable to a series of therapy sessions. But as Carlat came to appreciate, "the majority of patients need more."
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Medication may be essential to contain a crisis situation, threatening suicide or a psychotic outbreak. But the reflexive move to suppress the symptoms of dis-ease by medication misses a vital avenue of healing. Through the creative imagination, we can work with any image - even the most terrifying - towards wholeness and integration. When we reach for a bottle of pills to drive a troubled person's images (be they fantasies, dreams or nightmares) out of their conscious minds, we may be smothering their own source of authentic healing. Through the practice of Active Dreaming, we learn to go into the forests of the mind and confront and resolve whatever terrors wait for us there. We discover that very often the deepest healing comes through the wound. Therapists can learn to use these techniques to guide others to safe clearings. But that will require more than 15 minutes and a prescription pad.

Catnaps are better when you dream

I love it when the guys in white coats come up with data confirming what dreamers and creators already know, and it's even better when a savvy reporter carries the story through the major media. The news from a recent study published in Current Biology and reported on CNN is that our ability to process and store information is greatly enhanced when we take an afternoon nap, and is ten times better when we dream during that nap.

"When you dream, your brain is trying to look at connections that you might not think of or notice when awake," suggests the lead author of the study, Robert Stickgold, the director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in Boston, Massachusetts. "In the dream, the brain tries to figure out what's important and what it should keep or dump because it's of no value."

For the study, Stickgold's team directed 99 college students to memorize a complex maze they were shown on a computer screen. The researchers then placed the students inside a virtual, 3-D version of the maze and asked them to navigate to another spot within it. After taking this test a few times, half the participants took a 90-minute nap while the other half remained awake.

When the students were given the same test five hours later, those who had taken a nap did notably better than those who had stayed awake. The more interesting finding is that the nappers who dreamed about the maze performed ten times better than the nap-takers who didn't dream (or didn't remember dreaming). Many of the dreamers had not done too well in the initial test, which may have given their dreaming minds a spur to work on it until they got it right.

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The results of this study would be no surprise to many creative people, at any point in history. So next time you have a tough assignment, take a nap - and catch your dreams as you come out of it.

Source: “Naps boost memory, but only if you dream” by Denise Mann. Reported by CNN April 23, 2010.

To the Deer of the Mountain

Gore Mountain, New York

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Over the past weekend, I shared extraordinary experiences of healing and transformation with a group of frequent flyers on a mountain in the Adirondacks where I have been leading very special gatherings in the spring and fall over fourteen years. This is a place where the Deer energy is very strong. In our very first gathering, as described in my book Dreamgates, the Deer spirit became available for healing for a woman who had been told she had an incurable disease. What unfolded last weekend was even more remarkable and I hope to write about it at the right time.
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At the beginning and at the end of our retreat, in a circle of joined hands and streaming energy, I found myself impelled to recite a poem that I wrote many years ago to celebrate the Deer of this mountain. I want to share this now:
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To the Deer of the Mountain

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Deepheart, mountain guardian
who harries the hunter
and knows what belongs to us
and what does not,
give us your speed,
your ability to read the land,
to see what is behind us and around us.
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May we grow with the seasons
into your branching wisdom
putting up antlers as taproots into the sky

to draw down the power of heaven,
reaching into the wounded places
to heal and make whole,
walking as living candelabra,
crowned with light,
crowning each other with light.

Dreaming at Malaprops

Asheville, North Carolina

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"I'm a dreamer," Emoke B'racz, the owner of Malaprops bookstore in Asheville, greets me when I slip through the door behind the three wild sculpted ladies on the sidewalk. I respond that it seems to me that everyone who has the passion and fortitude to run an independent bookstore in current economic conditions is a dreamer. "Maybe so," she agrees, "but I learned to dream with my grandmother in a village in Hungary. She learned from her grandmother. And we've dreamed together long-distance." She recounts, with a wistful smile, a dream from many years ago in which she was trying to find her grandmother and give her a bathrobe. She had a great sense of blessing and relief when she succeeded. Later she learned that at the time of her dream, her grandmother had been in a hospital and was feared to be close to death. After the dream, she recovered and was allowed to return home.

Emoke's mother named her after the favorite concubine of Attila the Hun, and she has wonderful fight in her. When she came to Asheville in the early 1980s and opened Malaprops on downtown Hayward Street, there wasn't much going on around the store. Emoke's vision coincided with a cultural and economic resurgence in this lovely little city nestled among the mountains.

We had a large and lively turnout for my talk at Malaprops that night. When someone asked about how to break a dream drought, I was able to recall an incident from my first visit to Asheville, back in 1997. I gave a lecture at the local campus of the University of North Carolina. Afterwards, a distinguished professor in his mid-60s approached me and said graciously, "You are a wonderful speaker. I could listen to you all night. However, I have no direct evidence that I can trust anything you say because I have never remembered a dream in my life. So I have no personal proof that dreaming exists."

"That changed tonight," I told him. "You spent the evening with more than a hundred people who are all passionate about dreams. This kind of enthusiasm is viral. It's gotten into you and tonight you'll go home and dream up a storm."

The professor left with his eyebrows crawling toward his hairline. But in the morning, he reappeared at the door of my workshop. "I've got money," he cried, waving a check. "You have to let me in. I don't know how you did it, but I had a doozy of a dream last night and I've got to share it." That workshop was fully booked, but of course we magicked up space for the professor who had remembered a dream for the first time in his life.

I asked him to tell us his dream, like a story, and he took us on a magic mystery tour that began with the professor riding in the back of a long black limousine driven by a chauffeur named Spirit. They stop for gas at a service station where he recognizes everyone he knows who has died. They proceed to a strange multi-level building that proves to be a ferry boat with a mysterious pilot on top that is preparing for a crossing.

This was all too rich for us to sit around merely analyzing it. "Let's turn it into dream theatre," I proposed. The professor, naturally, had no idea what this meant. I explained that I would help him to cast the members of our workshop in the roles of every character and element in his dream - including the gas pumps and trash bins at the service station, the wheels of the limo, and the "beefy" friend who had died. Soon the man who had never recollected a dream was watching with delight as 45 workshop participants brought his dream alive, in every detail, all around him. He got to interview his dream characters, and clarified the nature of the crossing and the way in which the dream might be preparing him - in a generous and inspiriting way - for a big journey that lay in his future, into life beyond this life. The whole experience filled him with courage and joy. He wrote to me afterwards that this was one of the greatest experiences of his life.

Cheered by this tale, the person who had complained of a dream drought at Malaprops left - with a couple of my signed books in hand - promising to ask for a juicy dream that night. I know she succeeded, since she turned up at my subsequent workshop, eager to tell the dream that had come.

A (very) adult Pippi Longstocking

I rarely read crime novels, but I've made an exception for the "Millennium" trilogy by Swedish author Stieg Larsson. I got the first one - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - to see what all the excitement was about, and because I thought its characters and settings might be good preparation for my first visit to Sweden last month. Initially dismayed by the proliferation of detail on the genealogy of a complex industrial dynasty with skeletons in every closet, I was hooked when Larsson slipped a remarkable heroine in through a side door. Lisbeth Salander is a tiny tattooed Goth type mistaken for a homeless kid, a low-rent hooker and a psychotic retard. Though lacking in social graces, Salander is a world-class investigator with a photographic memory, the problem-solving skills of a math prodigy, and the martial arts prowess to leave a gang of local Hell's Angels in the dirt. With brain and fists and hacking skills and tasers, she fights men who hate and abuse women until you want to get up and cheer.

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As I eagerly followed this fiery waif through her further adventures in The Girl who Played with Fire (in which she takes on white slavers in edgy alliance with the author's journalistic alter ego Mikael Blomkvist) it hit me that Larsson has produced a Pippi Longstocking ("the strongest girl in the world") for mature audiences. There are in-your-face clues scattered throughout Larsson's books, including a cover name Salander borrows from the name of Pippi's house in the woods (Villekulla Cottage). When I visited Stockholm, I discovered that Salander's fictional address on Lundagatan is just down the street from the actual home of Pippi's creator, Astrid Lindgren, overlooking the park that now bears Astrid's name.

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The Girl who Played with Fire is so much better than The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - the plot more tightly woven, the characters more deeply and sharply defined - that I couldn't wait for the US edition of the third novel in the trilogy (The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest) to be published so I'm now reading the UK edition, which I had shipped from across the big pond.

The publishing history of a trilogy that has now sold over 25 million copies is as strange as anything in the novels. Stieg Larsson died of a huge heart attack, aged only 50, in 2004. He had received death threats from neo-Nazi groups he had made it his business, as a journalist, to expose, and was mixed up in extreme-left politics, so naturally conspiracy theories have flourished, though no evidence of foul play had turned up. He had completed three novels out of a projected series of ten when he died, but had only recently made contact with a Swedish publisher. He said he wrote when he couldn't sleep and to get his mind off his worries. Everything about him is now contested except the success of his fiction. A Swedish biographer who claims to have known him well maintains that he couldn't be the author of the novels because he was a lousy writer, a claim angrily rejected by Larsson's legions of admirers. Larsson's long-term girlfriend has been denied any share in his estate because he left no valid will.

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PS: Halfway through The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest anyone who has managed to miss the Pippi Longstocking connection will finally "get" it.

No time for Whoopi

As I approach the bank tellers in a local branch, one is saying to another: "What did Whoopi say? 'He's stuck somewhere...stuck between the somethings?''"

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"I don't have time for no whoopee," says a blue-collar customer doing some routine business at the far left end of the counter. "I gotta work."
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"You got no soul," his teller informs him.

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"Are you talking about Whoopi Goldberg?" I ask the first teller.

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"Sure am."

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"In the movie Ghost." I make a flying guess.
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"That's it."

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"Where she says that someone is stuck between the worlds."

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"Hear that?" she calls to the other tellers. "Whoopi says he's stuck between the worlds."
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"Like you, Stan," the teller at the end challenges the customer who doesn't have time for no Whoopi. He looks foggy, but concerned.

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"Stan," she pursues him. "Where is your soul?"

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"I dunno." He turns a shade paler. "I guess I'm kinda hoping it's still in my body."

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As I finish my business, I congratulate everyone at the bank counter. "This has been grand entertainment. Not what you generally hear in a bank."

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"You never know what a day may bring," says the middle teller, silent until now.

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"Ain't that the truth," says my teller. "You might even get kicked out of that stuck-between place into another world."

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"Stan," his teller isn't done with him. Her Whoopi impression is pitch-perfect. "You in danger, boy."