Dream Gates

The passions of the soul work magic. This observation, attributed to the great Dominican scholar and magus Albertus Magnus (and loved by Jung) is eminently practical guidance for living your juiciest and most creative life.

There are two conditions for working positive magic this way.

The first is that we must choose to take the primal, pulsing energy of our strongest passions and direct it toward a creative goal. The passion that is throbbing and surging inside us may be love or lust (or both), the fierce desire to give birth or the desperate wish to end it all. The passion may be wild rage or terrible grief. Whatever its origin, the strongest passions of the soul produce the energy to remake our world — if we choose to direct that energy. Imagine a vast body of pent-up water, engorged by a pounding thunderstorm, that is going to burst through a dam with irresistible power. We can choose to harness that force, turning it into hydroelectric power that can light our city and warm our homes. Or we can let it swamp everyone and everything in its path, bringing misery and devastation.

The second requirement for letting the passions of the soul work magic is that we must seize the moment when they are running strongest and give ourselves completely to acting in the power of that moment. The time is always Now, but when the passions of the soul are at work the time is also GO. I know this as a writer. Often my best work is done when I am in a state of great turmoil, when my passions are running strong but my heart and mind are also conflicted. Such moments give us an edge. I know, from experience, that my best and most original work can come through now — if I use that edge and make myself available to the work any time it is coming through.

Adapted from The Three “Only” Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence and Imagination by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Graphic: Goddess of Uzhupis (c) Robert Moss

William Blake, “Jacob’s Ladder”

Poets, it’s said, are shamans of words. True shamans are poets of consciousness. Journeying into a deeper reality with the aid of sung and spoken poetry, they bring back energy and healing through poetic acts, shapeshifting physical systems. When we dream, we tap directly into the same creative source from which poets and shamans derive their gifts. When we create from our dreams, and enter dreamlike flow, we become poets and artists. When we act to bring the energy and imagery of dreams into physical reality, we become poets of consciousness and infuse our world with magic.

In Birth of a Poet, William Everson raised a clamorous appeal for poets to reawaken to their shamanic calling: “O Poets! Shamans of the word! When will you recover the trance-like rhythms, the subliminal imagery, the haunting sense of possession, the powerful inflection and enunciation to effect the vision? Shamanize! Shamanize!” Across the centuries, many of our greatest poets have recognized their kinship with the shaman’s way of shifting awareness and shapeshifting reality. As his name in a spiritual order, Goethe chose the name of a legendary shaman of antiquity, Abaris, who came flying out of the Northern mists on an arrow from Apollo’s bow.

Our earliest poets were shamans. Today as in the earliest times, true shamans are poets of consciousness who know the power of song and story to teach and to heal. They understand that through the play of words, sung or spoken, the magic of the Real World comes dancing into the surface world. The right words open pathways between the worlds. The poetry of consciousness delights the spirits. It draws the gods and goddesses who wish to live through us closer.

Shamans use poetry, sung or spoken, to achieve ends that go deeper than our consensual world. They create poetic songs of power to invoke spiritual help; to journey into nonordinary reality; to open and maintain a space between the worlds where interaction between humans and multidimensional beings can take place and to bring energy and healing through to the body and the physical world.

The South American paye takes flight with the help of “wing songs”. These flight songs help him to borrow the wings of the kumalak bird [a kind of kite] that is a main ally of shamans.

Among the Inuit, the strongest shamans are also the most gifted poets. One of the reasons their spirit helpers flock around them is that they are charmed and exhilarated by the angakok’s poetic improvisations. Inuit shamans have a language of their own, which is often impenetrable to other Eskimos. It is a language that is never still. It bubbles and eddies, opening a whirlpool way to the deep bosom of the Sea-goddess, or a cavernous passage into the hidden fires of Earth.

My favorite Inuit shaman-word is the one for “dream”. It looks like this: kubsaitigisak. It is pronounced “koov-sigh-teegee-shakk”, with a little click at the back of the throat when you come to the final consonant. It means “what makes me dive in headfirst.” Savor that for a moment, and all that flows with it. A dream, in Eskimo shaman-speech, is something that makes you dive in headfirst. Doesn’t this wondrously evoke the kinesthetic energy of dreaming, the sense of plunging into a deeper world? Doesn’t it also invite us to take the plunge, in the dream of life, and burst through the glass ceilings and paper barriers constructed by the daily trivial self?

Shamans know further uses for poetry. They use song and poetic speech call the soul back home, into the bodies of those who have lost vital energy through pain or trauma or heartbreak. From their own journeys, they bring back poetic imagery that can help to shapeshift the body’s energy template in the direction of health. Mainstream Western physicians agree that the body believes in images and responds to them as if they are physical events. By bringing the right images through from the dreaming, the poets of consciousness explain dis-ease in ways that help the patient get well, and interact with the body and its immune system on multiple levels without invasive surgery.

Adapted from Dreamways of the Iroquois: Honoring the Secret Wishes of the Soul by Robert Moss. Published by Destiny Books.

He could be your child’s night guardian

Young children know how to go to Magic Kingdoms without paying for tickets, because they are at home in the imagination and live close to their dreams. When she was very young, my daughter Sophie had adventures in a special place called Teddy Bear Land, where she met a special friend. I loved hearing about these travels, and encouraged her to make drawings and spin further stories from them.

One day Sophie sat down beside me and asked with great earnestness, “Daddy, would you like to know how I get to Teddy Bear Land?”

“I’d love to.”

“Sometimes I take the Sun Gate. Sometimes I take the Moon Gate. Sometimes I take the Tree Gate. Sometimes I take the Rainbow Bridge. And sometimes I just punch a hole in the world.”

I’ve never heard anyone say it better. To live the larger life. we need to punch a hole in the world. This is what dreaming – sleeping or waking or hyper-awake – is really all about. On our roads to adulthood, we sometimes forget how to do it, just as older children in the Chronicles of Narnia cease to be able to see Aslan as they approach adolescence and become more and more burdened by the reality definitions of the grown-ups around them.

When we listen, truly listen, to very young children, we start to remember that the distance between us and the Magic Kingdoms is no wider than the edge of a sleep mask. True listening requires us to pay attention; to attend, in its root meaning in the Latin, is to stretch ourselves, which requires us to expand our vocabulary of understanding. We owe nothing less to the young children in our lives. When we do this, we discover that they can be our very best teachers on how to dream and what dreaming can be.

Here’s what we need to know about listening to children’s dreams and supporting their imaginations:

1. Listen up!
When a child wants to tell a dream, make room for that. Make some daily space for dream sharing. Listen to the stories and cherish them for their own sake.

2. Invite good dreams Pick the right bedtime reading or better still, tell stories. Help your child to weave a web of good dream intentions for the night – for example, by asking “What would you most like to do tonight?” Encourage children to sleep with a favorite stuffed animal (whether teddy bear or T-Rex) and make this a dream guardian.

3. Provide immediate help with the scary stuff If your child was scared by something in the night, recognize you are the ally the child needs right now. Do something right away to move out that negative energy. Get a frightened child to spit it out (literally) or draw a picture of what scared her and tear it up as violently as possible.

4. Ask good questions. When the child has told her story, ask good questions. Ask about feelings, about the color of the sky, and about exactly what T-Rex was doing. See if there’s something about the future. Say what you would think about this if this were your dream. Always come up with something fun or helpful to do with this story. Open up the crayon box, call grandma, etc.

5. Help the child to keep a dream journal. Get this started as early as possible. With a very young child, you can help with the words while they do the pictures. When your child reaches the point where she closes the journal and says, “This is my secret book and you can’t read it any more” do not peek. Give her privacy, and let her choose when she’ll let you
look in that magic book.

6. Provide tools for creative expression. Encourage the child to bring dreams come alive through art, dance, theater and games, and to draw or paint dreams. Gather friends and family for dream-inspired games and performance. Puppets and stuffed animals
can be great for acting out dreams. This can also be dress-up time. It’s such a release for kids to portray mom or dad or other grown-ups in their lives – be ready to be shocked!

7. Help construct effective action plans Dreams can show us things that require further action – for example, to avoid an unhappy future event that was previewed in the dream, or to put something right in a family situation. A child will probably need adult help with such things, starting with your help.may require adult help, starting with yours. This will eventually require you to learn more about dreaming and dreamwork (hint: you can start with my books).

8. Let your own inner child out to play As you listen to children’s dreams, let the wonderful child dreamer inside you come out and join in the play.

9. Keep it fun! When you get the hang of this, you’ll find it’s about the best home entertainment you can enjoy.

Notice two things that are not on this list, but would be at the very top of a list of what NOT to do with your children’s dreams:

1. NEVER say to a child “It’s only a dream”. Children know that dreams are for real and that scary stuff that comes out in dreams needs to be resolved, not dismissed.
2. DON’T INTERPRET a child’s dreams.You are not the expert here; the child is.

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For more on helping children with their dreams and nurturing their imaginations, please read the first chapter of my book Active Dreaming.

We know this is true of the tales that thrill us or entertain us, whether on the screen or in the pages of a book, or told to each other: unless something goes wrong, you don’t have a story. In every quest, the hero or heroine is required to face ordeals and survive perils. Misadventure, screw-ups and pratfalls are the stuff of comedy.

I want to add this statement to the list of rules for navigating by synchronicity that I first published in The Three “Only” Things. It is very helpful to keep it in mind when things go wrong on the roads of life. Often, of course, we complain like heck when our plans go awry and may even lose our sense of humor, which is a terrible thing to be missing. At such moments, I find I am sometimes able to cruise through because a signal flashes in my mind: STORY ALERT.

Here’s an example from my recent visit to Lithuania.

I led a workshop last weekend near the medieval town of Kernave. Our hotel on the lake was charming, but there was a slight problem. Without telling my coordinator, the hotel had double-booked events. A wedding reception was being held on Saturday in the same building as my workshop. While we were drumming and dreaming upstairs, recorded music, noisy toasts and general hoopla was rising our way from the wedding party. We were told all of this would be over by Sunday, and I drummed hard enough to push the wedding noise far from our thoughts as we made group journeys to explore ancient mysteries of the land and find pathways to personal and ancestral healing.

Surprise: on Sunday an even larger wedding party descended on the hotel. Fortunately the sun was shining for much of the day, allowing my group to go up on the sites of the old hill forts around Kernave and dream with the eagle and the wolf and the medieval Merlin of the Baltic who came from here in a circle on the grass, with sunlight on our faces and wind in our hair. But we needed to be inside for much of the afternoon to practice the core techniques of Active Dreaming.

I returned from the afternoon break to find a wedding procession advancing towards the door of the building where we were having our workshop. There was no way to get round the wedding party. My only way to get back into our space was to join the wedding procession. I called to the dreamers watching from the terrace, “Wave!”

Then, for the first time ever, I entered a workshop space to the strains of Here Comes the Bride.

I know, I know, it’s funny when told as a story. The point is to remember, when things go wrong, that a story may be brewing.