Journal Times

The quiet time of midwinter invites us to go within and go deep, and this is a grand time to look in the mirror of old journals to see where we have come from and what we are becoming. I open an old journal at random and find the sketch posted here, together with this brief report:

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IT'S BIGGER THAN THEY KNOW

A narrow sandy beach, sheltered by headlands. The water is heron blue. I'm looking for a way through the crowd to the water. My perspective shifts, and I'm looking at the whole scene from a great height, like a sea bird. Out to sea, unseen as yet by the crowd, something is rising, mountain-high, from the deep. A sea-god, or sea-monster. I am charged with excitement. [August 22, 2003]

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Here are some games I play with my journals that you may find rewarding:
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BIBLIOMANCY
Open an old journal at random and make the first entry that you see your message (or maybe your one-liner) for the day.

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NOTE RECURRING THEMES
Notice where you find yourself in similar situations again and again in your dreams. Is there somethig here you need to understand and/or take action about?

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MAKE YOUR PERSONAL DICTIONARY OF DREAM SYMBOLS
This is the only one that matters! Single out important dream symbols - the snake, the tornado, the train station - and notice how they evolve in successive dreams.

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NOTICE HOW WAKING EVENTS CATCH UP WITH DREAMS
Be open to discovering that an event in an "old" dream is starting to manifest only now - months or years later - and be ready (beyond the "wow" response) to harvesting guidance from the old report on the current situation. When you see a match-up between an "old" dream and a later event, forage around the individual report; look at other dreams from around the same time and see if there are further clues there to the new situation.

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TRACK YOUR DREAM SELF
Study how your dream self behaves and responds to challenges, and compare this to your waking self.

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LOOK FOR CLUES TO YOUR MULTIDIMENSIONAL SELF
Are you leading a separate life in your dreams - maybe one that is playing out in dozens of dream installments? Do you find yourself in the perspective, life situation and (apparently) the bodies of other people in dreams?

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PLAY THE INDEX CARD GAME
You may find it helpful to sake a series of lengthy dream narratives and condense each one - even several - into a text that would literally fit on a small index card. Standing apart from the profusiion of detail, you may now be able to discern the broad lines.

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REOPEN YOUR COLD CASE FILES

Dreams give us clues that require sleuthing, but sometimes our best attempts to follow up these leads don't get far and we move on to other things, leaving a mounting pile of "cold case" files. I pick up a lot of unfamiliar names, foreign words, and curious phrases in dreams and - especially - in the twilight state of hypnagogia, and I have found it extraordinarily revealing to track these verbal clues. In the era of googling, this is much easier than it was over most of the decades I've been keeping a journal, so I am now reopening dream files I had closed and making some exciting discoveries. One of those funny words, from a 1994 dream, has led me to an archeological site in Nigeria where the human remains date from 10,000 BCE. Another is guiding me, in the most practical way, on professional decisions I'll be making over the next couple of months.

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These games become more fun and more profitable when you've been keeping a dream journal for many years. When journaling, you want to tag each report with the date and also a title, and then save your reports in chronological folders. You'll then have a running index of dreams. When you have enough material, you can pluck out recurring themes and group relevant reports in thematic folders as well. My theme folders range from "Bear" and "Black Dog" to "Precog" and "Parallel Worlds", from "Dream Doubles" to "Mystery Words".

Solstice Poem

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Eyes of the Goddess

From a journey to Newgrange

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The poet waits for me in his countryman’s cape
And shows me the map in the gateway stone:
Twin spirals to get you in, and out, of the place of bone;
Wave paths to swim you from shadow to dreamscape;
A stairway of stars for when you are done with earthing.
I am here to practice the art of rebirthing.

She calls me, into the belly of the land that is She.
But I play, like the poet, with the shapes of time:
I am a swimming swan on the River Boyne;
I am a salmon, full with the knowing of the hazel tree;
I wander with Angus, and know the girl I have visioned
in gold at the throat of a white swan, beating pinions.

Drawn by the old perfume of burned bones, I go down
and doze until solstice fire, bright and bountiful
quickens me for the return of the Lady, lithe and beautiful
In the form she has taken, flowing as liquid bronze.
Her face is veiled, so the man-boy called to her side
like the red deer in season will not die in her eyes.

I see beyond the veil, for I come from the Other.
Oh, I yearn for the smell of earth and the kiss of rain!
I leap with her on the hallowed bed, coming again.
She knows the deer-king, as I am child and lover
Her eyes are spiral paths; the gyre of creation whirls
And sends me in green beauty to marry the worlds.

In Dreamland

In Dreamland, when a decision is required on a matter of community importance, the people must come together in the Big House and make a web.
----In the first years of Dreamland, when the community was small, there was only one Big House, built of very simple materials around a great tree that rose through the roof like a ladder into the sky. Now Dreamland has many Big Houses, but the making of a dreaming web is essentially the same. Standing in a great circle at nightfall as they sing songs of Earth, the weavers raise the Mother’s energy into the tjurni and share it hand to hand, giving and receiving. When the energy is flowing strong between them, they each project ropelike energy cords to a common center and began to weave and shape the web. The cords flash with many colors, but as they interweave they glow sparkling white. When the chief weavers are satisfied that the web is strong enough to serve the group intention, the dreamers lie down in a cartwheel on the floor.
---Lying together in the dark, with their web of dreaming glowing above and around them, the dreamers sing their group intention, over and over. As they sing, the web grows. It will grow until it has brought within it everything the dreamers need to see and know. As the energy filaments stretch, they may encompass the whole planet. All times are accessible. Years or centuries may slip by, like blown leaves, in the group perception. While the group visions together within the web, individual Dreamers move along its strands, agile as human spiders, and drop down on scenes they choose to see close-up.
---At daybreak, the Dreamers share their perceptions, and the necessary decision becomes clear. They say there is no need to count heads when hearts are joined and connected to the heart of the Mother.

Excerpt from DREAMLAND: A Vision of the Possible Future. For a selection of documents from a dream commonwealth of the future, transmitted back to the 21st century through oneiric channels, visit www.mossdreams.com. Comments welcome on this thread.

Graphic: The cover art for the revised second edition of Dreamgates, to be published by New World Library in April 2010, now available for pre-order. This work is required reading in all faculties of the university of Anamnesis, as well as for the Corps of Watchers and the College of Flying Doctors, in the commonwealth of dreamers.

The People beyond the Garden Gate

Though mostly skeptical of reported sightings of the Little People, I’ve had some personal encounters – wide awake and dreaming in the animate world of nature – that have quelled my inner naysayer. Here’s a brief account of one such episode, when I stepped through a garden gate in Gloucestershire, into the greenwood:

I walk by the redwood - a newcomer to this English landscape,　and a link to a place of my heart - above the cow pastures, and past an ancient sycamore that leans over a softly bubbling spring. I am drawn to a path that leads up to the kitchen garden on a rise behind the stone manor house. The far end of the garden is aglow with pink and peachy roses, rambling and climbing over trellises, forming a bower.
　　 Beyond the roses is a gate in the high, old brick wall that separates the garden from the woods beyond. In the arch is a weathered gray door, secured by a simple wooden latch. The woods are bottle green, dark as an inkpot above the top of the door. I open the gate and step through, onto a trail part covered by ground ivy.
　　　As I walk the path, a breeze picks up, and soon the woods are alive with whispers. The stir is most active beneath and around me, where the wind does not reach. I have the vivid sense of small creatures running and hiding. I am amazed by the thought that they are trying to hide from me. I can't see them, not yet. But I sense them quite distinctly. They are Little Ones.
　　 There's no need to be afraid, I tell them. I'm not going to hurt you.
　　　For a moment, the woods seem very still.
　　 Then a small country voice says, from among the roots of a tree, We thought you were one of the Lords.
　　 Oh, I don't think so. Who are the Lords? Do you mean the Normans? Or the Courts of the Fairies?
　　 Sshhhh. We don't talk about Them.
　　 This leaves me quite uncertain about the identity of the Lords they fear.
　　　Wait, they tell me. We'll get the Centaur.
　　　It seems that this creature is the Big Man in the society of the Little Ones. I am tremendously excited by the prospect of meeting a centaur. When he gallops up, I am amazed. He is certainly a Big Man, in this company, with a massive torso, a curling black beard, two stumpy horns - and a phallus like a club. But he is about six inches in length, from his chin to his tail. And his body below the waist is that of a billy goat, not a horse, although he does indeed stand on four legs rather than two.
-----The Goat-man tries to act bold in front of the Little Ones, but is plainly terrified. From his perspective, I am a giant, and of entirely unknown intentions.
-----I can see the whole company more distinctly now. The Little Ones are the size of elm leaves. I have no wish to disturb their society, or make their centaur lose face. I bid them good day, and follow the track deeper into the woods.

-----It does not surprise me that when I stroke the smooth bark of a beech, the tree responds. I absorb a deep knowing from within the beech, and have the impression of a feminine figure whose eyes are leaf-green, without pupil or irises. She instructs me on natural remedies for various bodily complaints; when I check them out later, they work brilliantly.

This is an excerpt from the travel journal I kept while leading a five-day summer adventure in “Reclaiming the Ancient Dreamways” at Hawkwood College in Gloucestershire, at the invitation of Celtic scholar and shaman Caitlin Matthews.
　

Eater of bad dreams

I was once in the marvelous Field Museum in Chicago, chatting to one of the curators, when he said brightly, "Maybe you can help with a question a visitor left in the box this week." He produced the inquiry, which ran as follows: "I was given an antique dream catcher. Ever since it's been in the house, I've had the feeling that something's just not right and I can't get any good sleep. Maybe I should cleanse the dream catcher or something like that?"

I smiled at the idea of an "antique" dream catcher. The original purpose of a dream catcher is to catch bad stuff you don't want in your psychic space. It looks like a spider web because that's exactly what the first dream catchers were. An Onondaga Indian friend of mine hung a literal spider web from a hoop, in the old way, over his son's face when he was a little baby. You do not want a hand-me-down dream catcher. More than likely, its web will contain traces of other people's "bugs" and psychic pests. "There's no way to cleanse something like that," I told the curator. "If it were mine, I would burn it."

In the understanding that dreaming is social as well as individual, most human cultures have come up with methods to deter unwanted intrusions or visitations during the night. There's a dream guardian in Japan who is rather livelier than a spider web. Here's how it is described in the opening of a folk tale about a girl named Little Silver who feared she would meet ghosts and demons in her dreams:

The old nurse told her to draw pictures of a tapir on the sheet of white paper which was wrapped around her tiny pillow... The nurse told her what many old folks believe,—that if you have a picture of a tapir under the bed, or on the paper pillow-case, you will not have unpleasant dreams, as the tapir is said to eat them. So strongly do some people believe this that they sleep under quilts figured with the device of this long-snouted beast. If in spite of this precaution one should have a bad dream, he must cry out on awaking, "Tapir, come eat, tapir, come eat!" Then the tapir will swallow the dream, and no evil results will happen to the dreamer.

In the story, this has mixed results. Little Silver's dreams take her on a fantastic voyage among ghosts and drunks whose excesses feed demons. At the end, she is terrified by the impending wreck of the ship in which she is sailing. As she wakes, she remembers to cry out "Tapir, come eat, tapir come eat!" This lifts the bad feelings around the dream, but she retains the memory of her adventures and can draw important lessons, including the consequences of to much saki. The narrator observes that it was a good thing she did not actually see the tapir, since it would have scared her more than the ghosts.[1]

The tapir in this story is not the long-snouted pig-like mammal of the natural world. It is a baku a composite beast originally borrowed from Chinese folklore. In early Japanese depictions, this eater of bad dreams is portrayed with an elephant’s trunk and tusks, plus horns and tiger’s claws. Today the baku is also known as yumekui ("dream catcher") - perhaps a borrowing from North America - and in manga and anime it takes many forms. In Satoshi Kon’s animated film Paprika, a young woman is a baku who devours a dream villain in the climactic scene.

The idea of the baku, in a sense, puts the spider into the web of the dream catcher. I rather like the idea of a dream guardian who will eat bad energy from a dream without depriving us of the memory of the dream experience.

[1] "Little Silver" in William E. Griffis, Fairy Tales of Old Japan (London: Harrap, 1911).

Graphic: Baku byKatsushika Hokusai.

Don't look back too soon

In my dream: I am dreaming together with a group of people, including a family in which a man has been expected to die in his middle years. In our group experience, we are able to change probabilities; the man survives and enters a new creative phase of life, and other things change for the better. In order to accomplish this, we all need to remain focused on the reality we have been dreaming until it is fully embodied in the physical world. If any one of us lets our focus - and belief - waver too soon, the physical outcome will revert to what it was before. This attempt is a great success.

But when we try again, one or two of our group can't sustain focus after the collective dreaming. They may want to celebrate too soon. So on the second attempt we lose the fruits of our dreaming. However, we can try again.

I remark to the group that experiences like ours may be the source of the legends in which the hero fails because he looks back too soon. Orpheus charms Hades with his music and wins the release of Eurydice from the Underworld, on condition that he must not look back until they have both returned to the realm of the living. But when he reaches the sunlit world, Orpheus forgets and looks back at his wife before she is safely out; so she must return to the dead. I tell the group we don't have to go on making the same mistake.
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I woke from this dream excited and intrigued. I have been actively exploring the possibility of looking in on parallel lives and switching between them. This has been the focus of several recent experiments in group journeying in my advanced workshops and of several posts at this blog over the past couple of months. Could we stage a group experiment along the lines of the one in my dream in the future? Why not?

Proteus

Proteus

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I am in many forms before I am bound.

I am the starwalker who won't come down.

I am the pond dweller who won't come up.

I am a hawk on a hill.

I am a bear in a berry wood.

I am the giant of the deep

who walked the Earth for ten thousand years

before he went back to the sea.

I am the sleeping king

who mated with the Earth

and dropped his horns in due season

and grew them back

I am the blasted oak that drew the lightning

I am the man in the Moon

I am the Hanged Man, and the Emperor, and the Fool.

I am medicine and I am poison.

I am the springing tiger and the quaking goat.

I am the one who makes a prison of the world

I am the one who makes the world his playground.

I am the death lord on his dark throne

I am a humming bird courting a flower.

I am the heaven bird in the World Tree

and the dragon coiled at its roots

and the squirrel that makes mischief between them.

I am a shard from a mirror

that was broken in transit from a blue star.

To release me, you must tie me down.

- Portland, Oregon, December 6, 2009