Those
who write from true imagination can take us where historical data cannot, into
the Magic Library. To my mind, one of the most intriguing – and ironically, most
reliable – published sources on the Egyptian way of dreaming is a book that was delivered to the world in the guise of fiction. 

Joan
Grant’s book Winged Pharaoh (first published in 1938) takes us into the
possible reality of the First Dynasty and the dream training of a king’s
daughter who becomes co-ruler of Egypt. As she explains in a memoir (Far
Memory), the book came to Joan through “far memory” of a possible past
life. After a short visit to Egypt,
she was shown a collection of Egyptian scarabs in London. When she took the oldest in her hand,
she saw vivid scenes of the time and place from which it had come, and then
began talking as Sekeeta, the dreaming princess of her story.

We
are dealing here with a visionary narrative that transcends the categories of
fiction and nonfiction. The best word to describe it is the Greek term mythistorema,
which could be translated as “mythic history” but which I would prefer to
render as mythistory – in other words, a true history of something that
may or may not have happened but always is.

 The
most fascinating element in Joan Grant’s mythistory is the description
of a dream school that operates within the temple of Anubis.When
she is a small child, Sekeeta’s mother gives her a tiny statue of Anubis -
represented as a black hunting dog – and a little painted house for it to live
in, and tells her that Anubis is the bringer of dreams to small children.

When
she is a few years older, Sekeeta meets her dream teacher Ney-sey-ra, the
priest of Anubis. Her training begins in the dreamspace, when he shows her an
open lotus flower and tells her that just as the lotus opens its petals to the
sun, she must learn to open the gateway of soul memory to reflect the light.
When the scene is played out in waking life the next day, she recalls her
dream, which is confirmation to both that she is ready to begin her training.

She learns to go scouting in dreams to find lost
objects, look into the future, observe things happening at a distance, and
discover what is going on behind the scenes. Suspicious of a foreign ruler who
is visiting the court, she embarks on a dream journey to his country – flying
to her target like a bird – and brings back a very detailed and disturbing
report that she shares with Pharaoh, her father.

At the age of twelve, she becomes a full-time
student at the dream school, taking up residence in the temple of Anubis.
She sleeps on a bed with Anubis heads carved at head and foot. Beside the bed
she keeps a wax tablet, and her first task each morning is to record her
dreams. Every morning she goes to the priest of Anubis and tells him what she
has recorded. Some days she must also carry out assignments he gave her
inside a dream – for example to bring him a certain flower, or bird
feather, or colored bead. Through practice her memory is trained and sharpened.

After three years, she undergoes advanced training.
On the night of each full moon, she sleeps in total darkness in a room that has
been psychically shielded. She undertakes many assignments, visiting distant
places and bringing guidance and healing to people on both sides of death. She
recounts her dream travelogues to her teacher and he confirms her experiences,
adding further details and sometimes suggesting follow-up missions. When she
finds herself blocked by a monstrous crocodile, for example, her teacher tells
her that this thing was “a creation of the evil one” designed to scare her back
into her body and sabotage her work. Next time she must go on, and if the
adversary is too strong, she must call to the priest for help.

Frequently, in her dream travels, she encounters
people who have died and are confused about there condition. She meets a man
who had been murdered in a wine-shop in Crete,
and refused to believe he was dead. Her teacher encourages her to go to the
dead man again, gently help to awaken him to his condition, and guide him in
the right direction on the paths of the afterlife.

At this point we come fully alive to the intimate
connection between dreaming and dying well, and the reason why Anubis is such
an appropriate patron of dream travel. As every school child knows, Anubis -
most often portrayed as a human figure with the head of a jackal or black dog -
is a guardian of the Otherworld, who watches over tombs and mummies and guides
souls of the departed to the Hall of Osiris. But Anubis’ significance goes much
deeper. As psychopomp, or guide of souls, he is the patron of journeys beyond
the body (which is why he is invoked to guard those who have left their bodies
under trauma or anesthesia) and everyone journeys beyond the body in
death and dreaming, with or without instruction.

The dreamer as psychopomp

 As Sekeeta’s training in the dream
school deepens, she takes on more and more work as a psychomp. One of the most
movingly realized scenes in the book is one in which Sekeeta helps a grieving widow
who has been crushed by the drowning deaths of her husband and son. Sekeeta
advises the woman that she can meet her loved ones in dreams. The woman insists
that she does not dream. (How often have we heard this from people we know?)
Sekeeta gently insists that, nonetheless, she would like the woman to be open
to a dream experience with her loved ones. That night, Sekeeta goes out – as a
conscious dream traveler – to reintroduce the grieving woman to her husband and
son. She enters the woman’s dream space, and finds herself sobbing over the
dead bodies of her loved ones, frozen in a past scene of trauma. With the power
of her focused intention, Sekeeta bathes the widow in light and lifts the
“cloak of grayness” that is preventing her from seeing her husband and son as
they now are. There is a loving reunion, and Sekeeta skillfully guides them to
a beautiful park-like setting where they can share happy times together.

This episode is a wonderful glimpse of what
compassionate psychopomp work is all about. It seems entirely plausible to me
that advanced spirits in ancient Egypt did it this way. I know that
gifted dreamers are doing the work in very similar ways today, because many
have shared comparable experiences with me during training in our contemporary
dream school.

As entertainment, Winged Pharaoh is wonderful
fun. But when you read it as an active dreamer, you’ll find that it suggests a
whole curriculum of study. The exercises Sekeeta’s dream teacher gives her are
ones you can practice with a partner. 

A goddess reaches for a queen in winged headdress: Hathor and Nefertari in a wall painting in the second chamber of Queen Nefertari’s tomb