On Leaving a Dream

When I leave a dream, I often feel that I step from one room into another. It's a "just so" feeling. I was there, and now I am here. When I exit a dream, I avoid saying "I woke up." That is such a boring way to end a dream narrative. And it's entirely possible that when I open my eyes in one reality, I have fallen asleep in another world that is no less real. When I finish recounting a dream adventure, I may say. "then I left that scene" or, “then I came back to my bedroom”. Sometimes, of course, the exit is less gentle. I return to the dormant body in the bed with a thump, feeling that I just fell to Earth or was dragged out of my dream life in chains. Sometimes the dream stays with me, and I am in both locations - the bedroom and that other room - in a state of dual consciousness after I come back to my body. I am often aware that, when I step out of a dream, the dream and its players may go on without me, leading autonomous life. I have the impression I am not wholly absent from these scenes. A second self has assumed my role - or reclaimed the role I took on for the time of the dream.

Photo: Jean-Robert Ipoustéguy, "Man Passing through Door" in Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.

Look for the hidden hand behind synchronicity

Jung described the pairing or clustering of events through meaningful coincidence as an “acausal” phenomenon. Certainly, we do not observe causation in the play of coincidence in the way that we can say the kettle boiled because we turned on the burner. A characteristic of coincidence is that it does not have a visible cause.

But this does not mean that there is no cause for coincidence. "Beyond the accidental surface effects of this world sit - as of yore - the gods," Joseph Campbell declared.

Most human cultures, across most of recorded history, have believed that there is indeed a hidden hand at work in coincidence: that it is through the play of unusual or unexpected conjunctions, and natural phenomena, that gods or angels or animate forces of nature or other dimensions send messages to humans or actively intervene in our world. Let’s not shrug this off as a “primitive” idea — it has worked, and continues to work, in highly practical ways. And let’s not classify this idea as a “metaphysical” belief.

The forces that cause meaningful coincidence may be quite physical. We miss this because we cannot observe their workings with our ordinary senses and our regular assumptions. These forces include our own thoughts and feelings, and those of others connected to us. They may include the powers that Jung called “archetypes” — as long as we remember that in Jung’s mature thought the archetypes are not structures but “habitual currents of psychic energy” and “systems of readiness for action,” and that they are as much physical as psychic. The physical forces that play with us through coincidence may include our parallel selves in parallel universes, interacting with our world in constant and complex weavings through what quantum physics has taught us to call “interference” patterns, forever shifting the balance of probabilities for any specific outcome.

 Quantum physics shows us the universe as a dynamic web of connection. Subatomic particles are not separate “things”; they have meaning and identity only through their connections with everything else. Those connections do not depend on physical proximity or causation. Particles that have once been in contact with each other remain connected through all space and time.

 Quantum physics also confirms that when we go to the heart of physical reality, there is no separation between mind and matter. Subatomic particles exist in all possible states until they are observed — at which point something definite emerges from the soup of possibilities.

 Inner and outer, subjective and objective, interweave and move together at quantum levels, on a human scale, and no doubt everywhere in the universe. We live in an energy field where everything resonates — to a greater or lesser degree — with everything else. The world we inhabit mirrors our thoughts and feelings, and vice versa.

 In the hidden order of reality, there is no distinction between mind and matter. The split between inner and outer — subjective and objective — that we experience in ordinary life is unknown in the deeper reality.

Richard Wilhelm’s account of  the Chinese rainmaker contains the essence of a worldview in which the human mind and the external world form a whole. A village has been without rain for weeks. The desperate villagers send for a rainmaker. When the old man arrives, he shuts himself up in the house provided for him, performing no ceremonies until the rains come. When asked how he brought the rain, he explains that when he arrived he noted a state of disharmony in himself, so he retired to compose himself. When he restored his own equilibrium, the rain came according to its natural pattern.

As we become more awake to what is going on, we may become personal magnets for coincidence, “strange attractors” that draw more and more interesting and unexpected encounters and events toward us. The brilliant analyst and classicist Marie-Louise von Franz, who knew both Jung and Pauli well, alluded to this: “The larger our consciousness is, and the more it develops, the more we get hold of certain aspects of the spirit of the unconscious, draw it into our own subjective sphere, and then call it our own psychic activity or our own spirit.”

Text adapted from The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence and Imagination by Robert Moss.Published by New World Library

"The Houses Are Watching". Photo of house in Sibiu, Romania by Robert Moss

Open Secrets of the Dreamtime

Here are the open secrets of the Dreamtime, insights shared by many dreaming traditions and indigenous peoples that challenge the ruling paradigms of a culture that confuses the real with the physical.

1. Dreams are real experiences.

There are big dreams and little dreams. In big dreams we are dealing with events, encounters, and challenges that are entirely real on their own level of reality. Our dream memories may be garbled or muddy, but the dream is a real experience whose meaning lies within the dreamscape itself. The dream experience, fully remembered, is its own interpretation. But we must do more than interpret dreams; we must manifest their energy and insight in our waking lives.

    Shamanic dreamers tend to be quite literal-minded about dreams. If you dreamed you fell off a rock-face, you’d better remember to check your safety harness if there is any chance you might go rock climbing. If you flew with the eagle, you discovered a powerful spiritual ally — and your own ability to transcend the limitations of your physical body. If you dreamed of your dead uncle, before you start asking yourself what part of you he might represent, you should consider the possibility that you had a visit with him. Is he bothering you — maybe trying to cadge a drink or a smoke — or offering you help? If you dreamed you received instruction at a mountain shrine, you should be open to twin possibilities: that you may go there someday, in physical reality; and that you may have been called in your dreams to one of the many “invisible schools” where training and initiation on the higher planes are conducted.

2. Dreams are flights of the soul.

Shamans say that in real dreams (waking or sleeping) one of two things is happening. Either you are journeying beyond your body, released from the limits of space-time and the physical senses; or you receive a visitation from a being — god, spirit, or fellow dreamer — who does not suffer from these limitations. In the language of the Makiritare, a dreaming people of Venezuela, the word for dream, adekato, means literally a “flight of the soul.”

    The open secret is that consciousness if never confined to the body and brain. We discover this in spontaneous night dreams and intuitive flashes, when our left-brain inhibitions are down. As we become active dreamers, we can hone the ability to make intentional journeys beyond the body at any time of day or night.

3. You have a dreambody as well as a physical body.

In dreams, we usually travel in a subtle energy body of greater or lesser density. If we travel great distances - especially if the journey is over water - in a relatively heavy energy body, we may come back feeling jet-lagged. In our dreambody, we know pleasure and pain. Just as it can travel beyond the physical body in dreams and astral excursions, the dreambody survives physical death.
    Czech artist František Kupka depicted the adventures of the dreambody brilliantly in his painting "Dream", in which we see lovers rising above their physical bodies in second bodies that are joined in a luminous space above them. The floating dreambodies are suffused with light rather than reflecting it; they are made to seem solid by shadows.. 

4. Dreams may be memories of the future.

We dream things before they happen in waking life. If you work with your dreams and scan them for precognitive content, you can develop a superb personal radar system that will help you to navigate in waking life. You can also learn to fold time and travel into the possible future by the methods explained in this book. For even the most active dreamers, however, the meaning of many dreams of the future may be veiled until waking events catch up with the dream.

    If dreams are memories of the future, is much of waking like the experiencing in the physical body what we have already lived in the dreambody? What would we become if we participated more consciously in this process? There is an Iroquois story of a great hunter who always scouted ahead, in conscious dream journeys, to locate the game and rehearse the kill. In one of his dream scouts, he located an elk and sought its permission to take its life to feed his extended family. He killed the elk in his dream and noted the red mark on its chest where the arrow had gone in. The following day, he walked to the place he had visited in dreaming and identified his elk by the red mark on its chest. He then replayed an event that had already taken place, by killing the elk again with a physical arrow.

5. Dreaming, we choose the events that will be manifested in our waking lives.

The fact that we dream things before they happen does not mean everything is predetermined. People who are not active dreamers can get quite confused about what is going on when they wake up to the fact that we are dreaming future events, both large and small, all the time. I think it’s like this. If you do not remember your dreams, you are condemned to live them. (If you don’t know where you’re going, you will likely end up where you are headed.) If you remember some of your dreams and screen them for messages about the future, you will find yourself able to make wiser choices. You will discover that by taking appropriate action you can often avoid the enactment of a “bad” dream or bring about the fulfillment of a happy one. As you become a conscious dreamer, you will find yourself increasingly able to choose inside the dreaming the events that will be manifested in your waking life.

     It’s not about predestination. It’s about the spiritual secrets of manifestation — and your ability to become cocreator of your life. Meister Eckhart tells us how it is the razor-sharp clarity of the practical mystic who has seen and experienced for himself: “When the soul wishes to experience something, she throws an image of the experience out before her and enters her own image.”

     It is not merely that we dream things (maybe everything) before they happen; dreams make them happen.

6. The path of the soul after death is the path of the soul in dreams.

Your dreambody does not die when your physical body loses it vital signs. You will live on in your dreambody for a shorter or greater time, according to your ruling passions and personal evolution. You will find yourself, as you do each night in dreams, in a realm where thoughts are things, and imagination, the great faculty of soul, can create whole worlds.

    You come from the Dreaming, and you are released into the Dreaming when you drop your sack of meat and bones.

     Conscious dreaming is excellent preparation, not only for the challenges that lie before you on the roads in this life, but for the challenges of the journey you will make after physical death. How do you know for sure? By doing it.

Text adapted from Dreamgates: Exploring the worlds of Soul, Imagination and Life Beyond Death by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Art: František Kupka,"Dream" (1909)

Celtic metamophoses

Your gatekeeper is a horned god
who stands back to back with a second self. 
You enter a field of metamorphoses.
You may turn into the curl of a wave
or a waterbird in flight or a wild bull.
You may sprout leaves or tusks or antlers.

Fish becomes man, dog becomes dragon.
You reach for a flagon of unmixed wine.
When your hand closes on the handle,
it becomes the hound that is chasing a duck
that swims into your mouth on a red river.  

Long-beaked bird-headed men spring from a cross.
Gold and silver and bronze glint at the throats
and on the forearms of queens and heroes.
Everything is in connected, everything in flux,
vital energies change form and surge beyond form. 

Here art is a technology of enchantment;
it can seize your mind and bind it like ivy.
Obscure shapes become tendrils, endlessly looping,
making knots without end or beginning,
with no strings you could pull.  

The boar runs before you and around you.
Be careful. You pause to hear the hot howl of war
from the throat of a boar-headed carnyx.
Swords and shields, iron and oak, ash and bronze.
Shields with hidden powers, serpents coiled at the grip. 

   

You find your end in the great silver cauldron from the bog,
when you brave the stare of all those gods you cannot name.
You swim in bull's blood down to the mystery at the base,
where a naked woman warrior exults, sword in hand,
over the body of a dying bull. His potency will be transferred,
with the rush of his blood, to those who willed this ritual.

Image: Base of the Gundestrup cauldron. This richly decorated silver vessel, thought to date from the 2nd or 1st century bce, was found in a bog near Gundestrup in Denmark.

How did I get here?

You set off from home and find yourself on a high mountain top, or another country, with no idea how you got here.

You close your eyes in a dream and wake up somewhere else.

You're in one place and then suddenly in another, without any recollection of how you got from A to B.

These are common experiences in dreams.

If we are too quick, on waking, to flatten our adventures into a single linear narrative, without pausing to reflect on the unexplained transits, we can miss a very important opportunity to learn more about what goes on in dreaming - and about the nature of reality itself.

When you jump from one scene to another, you may have stepped from one dream into another, as you might step from an outer to an inner courtyard.

Make it your game to ask, while dreaming, "How did I get here?" when a sudden scene shift takes place. This may cause you to wake up to the fact that you are dreaming.

Stay with your experience, and you may find yourself embarked on a full-fledged lucid dream adventure.

Look deeper, and you may find you are traveling between different realities, no less real than the one where your body is lying dormant in bed. You have not only switched dreams; you have changed worlds.

Drawing: "In the Dream Cinema" (c) Robert Moss

IN THE DREAM CINEMA

It's 3 in the morning. I don't feel like sleep so I go to the Dream Cinema. Lion is with me. I'm not surprised; I felt him stirring beside me in bed. Like the neighborhood the cinema is dark but the lights come on as we approach

"You can't bring a lion in here," says the ticket person.

"Nonsense. This is MY cinema."

We take comfortable seats in the screening room but no movie comes on. Maybe this is punishment for bringing the lion. I feel relaxed and close my eyes

When I open them I see an amazing complex of stone arches and structures, some natural and some shaped by hand, in a desert landscape. There is hidden danger here. An adventure is about to unfold

A man in bush clothes steps into the middle of the screen. He is dressed like Indiana Jones. No wait. He is wearing a leather hat with a crocodile skin band, one I brought back from Australia a quarter century ago. I am looking at a screen version of myself

The lion pads ahead of him, ready for trouble. So the Dream Cinema is screening a movie for me after all.

I step into the screen, with the lion, and we take on our starring roles

- the opening scene in a thrilling series of cinematic dream adventures between 3 am and 7 am on April 25th.

Where is your body now?

Wherever spirituality is alive, conscious or lucid dreaming is recognized as the most important source of instruction on the soul’s survival of death and its condition in the afterlife.   Even St. Augustine – who had problems with dreams when he abandoned his lover for the church and decided that sex was disgusting – recommended paying the closest attention to dreams in which the dreamer is conscious he is outside his body. In a letter he wrote when he was working on The City of God, Augustine quoted the experience of one Gennadius, “a physician of Carthage”. 

   In a dream, Gennadius encountered a radiant young man who led him to an otherworldly city where he heard singing “so exquisitely sweet as to surpass anything he had ever heard”. Waking, the doctor dismissed his experience as “only a dream”. His radiant visitor returned the following night and asked Gennadius whether he had been asleep or awake when they had met before. 
   At this point, the doctor became aware that he was dreaming. When his guide asked him, “Where is your body now?” he became aware that he was also having an out-of-body experience. This was the preliminary to a teaching session in which he learned that the soul’s condition after death is similar to its condition in dreams, and he lost his doubts about life after life.
    The story of Gennadius finds echoes in the experiences of conscious dreamers today. Since the publication of Raymond Moody's Life after Life (1975), there have been a flock of accounts of visionary journeys reported during "near-death experience" (NDE). It is not necessary to suffer life-threatening illness to make a conscious journey to explore the conditions of the soul after death.
    In a dream that was the gateway to many further explorations, I found myself in a large room where people in a circle were waiting for me. An electric blue fire burned in an alcove. A radiant guide indicated that I was to lead them through it. As we danced into the fire, my guide asked, "Where is your body?"
    Now aware that I was dreaming and out of the body, I was briefly tempted to rush back to check on the inert form on the bed. But I managed to stay with the dream and was shown a number of places of teaching for people who seemed to have passed on. At one of these teaching facilities, students of all ages joined their voices in songs of extraordinary beauty. The chorus of one of these songs stirs in me now:

What cannot be seen in the dream
cannot be seen in its glory

Behind the singers rose the buildings of a beautiful university. I have been able to visit this wonderful place of higher learning, meet some of its faculty, and audit some of its classes. For me it is the true Alma Mater, the school of Mother Soul. 

    None of this is beyond your abilities!

    You are born to fly and in dreams you remember the soul has wings!

Text adapted from Conscious Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by Three Rivers Press.


Drawing: "Carried by Storm Bird" by Robert Moss

The Practice of Dream Archaeology

Marija Gimbutas declared with urgent clarity in The Civilization of the Goddess:  “We must refocus our collective memory. The necessity of this has never been greater as we discover that the path of ‘progress’ is extinguishing the very conditions for life on earth."
    The emerging discipline of dream archaeology provides powerful tools for refocusing collective memory, exactly as the great Lithuanian scholar of the Goddess proposed. Dreams guide us to the necessary past, to the history we need to know and use. Dreams may also trigger and direct specific lines of research. Dreaming, we have direct access to the realm of the ancestors. Sometimes they reach to us, in dreams, as an ancient priest of Nippur appeared to the Assyriologist Herman Hilprecht when he was puzzling over the meaning of two fragments of agate or as an ancient atetshents (“dreamer”) of the Mohawk people called me to work that required me to study her language and reconstruct the shamanic dream practices of her tradition. We can choose to reach to the ancestors through dream incubation and by developing the skills of shamanic dreaming.
    The practice of dream archaeology involves reclaiming authentic knowledge of ancestral traditions, including those that may have been buried or suppressed in the course of history, through a combination of careful research, active dreamwork and shamanic journeying across time and between dimensions. The dream archaeologist combines the skills of the shaman, the scholar and the detective.
    We let dreams set us assignments. Secrets of the past, of which the waking mind may know nothing or very little, come to us in dreams because we are ready for them, and because the ancestors speak to us. As dream archaeologists, we work with such dreams through focused investigation, tracking that strange word, looking again at the fragments of that figurine.
    We also carry our exploration into the dream space, by learning to go back inside a dream, wide awake and conscious, as an archaeological team may penetrate to previously hidden levels of a site, or the inner caves where the great revelations are to be found. I call this technique dream reentry. It is practiced wide awake and conscious, and may be a joint venture by a whole group of active dreamers. We use shamanic drumming to fuel and focus our expeditions, using a dream image as a doorway to harvest more information, open direct dialogue with the ancestors, and go to the deeper levels of reality where the meaning of things can be found.
    We travel to ancient sites and dream with the land, opening communication with the ancestors. In The Boy Who Died and Came Back I describe what happened when we made group shamanic journeys at Kernave, an ancient capital of Lithuania, and I found myself in contact with a legendary shaman-priest, a veritable Merlin of the Baltic.
    We are open to the phenomenon that Yeats, with poetic insight, called the “mingling of minds”. This means that when we give our best efforts and passion to our chosen work or study, we draw the support of intelligences beyond the everyday world, including those of past masters in the same field. After her death, Marija Gimbutas appeared to her friend and biographer Joan Marler in a powerful dream. Marija said fiercely, “You must remember us.” Joan understood that the great Lithuanian scholar of the Goddess was speaking from the realm of the ancestors, “a place of collective memory and wisdom”.

Image: This mysterious figure, dubbed the  "Idol of Pomos" was found in a Cypriot village and dates from the Chalcolithic period. It is an inviting subject for dream archaeology.