The Boy Who Died and Came Back, page 13
What my parallel Robert might recall as an odd dream was a quite literal, physical event for me. On a dream archaeology expedition in Romania in October 2012, I set off with local friends to see the Sphinx of Bucegi, a celebrated natural rock formation regarded as a major energy spot, near a cave associated with an ancient shaman-god of the Dacians and the mystical White Wolf, said to watch over this land.
We walked through the woods from the pleasant pensiune we had booked for my workshop, facing the Caraiman monastery, whose construction was inspired by a priest who dreamed of a church that needed to be built around a fir tree at this site. We intended to ride up the mountain to the Sphinx by cable car, but a road cowboy with four-wheel drive persuaded us to hire him. This proved to be the wildest ride of my life, up a steep, narrow road with hairpin bends and no railings at the edge of dizzying cliffs. The road was often partly blocked by construction or landslides, and we frequently encountered cars and trucks rushing down in the middle of the road as if bent on a head-on collision.
The road cowboy drove as if possessed, but I assumed this was local custom and he knew what he was doing. I could not follow his conversation with my Romanian friends, but I was struck by his hand-waving animation as he recounted a story at a point where the road was only dirt and craters and lumps of rock. Soon after, the driver made a wild swerve to the right to get around a protruding boulder, taking us to the edge of the cliff — and then partway over. We were now stuck in the dirt, hanging over the cliff, as the driver gunned the car back and forth, succeeding only in getting us deeper into the dirt, while the Jeep leaned, little by little, farther over the cliff.
“Time to get out of the car,” I said quietly.
We left the driver with the vehicle, phoning for help, and walked for twenty minutes down the winding road to a cabină — a rustic inn and restaurant — to recover with Ursus beer and spicy sausages. On the walk, my friends told me that just before he nearly took all of us over the cliff, the driver had been boasting about how he had killed a fox on that section of mountain road and then decapitated the fox to mount its head on a wall as a trophy.
It seemed we had traveled that day with a man under a fox’s curse. Through it all, I felt oddly detached, and never in real danger, as if we had been under the protection of an unseen hand. Perhaps it was the man who had taken the fox’s head who was under the real danger on that high and stony road.
My parallel Robert, remembering this as a dream, might discuss it as a set of symbols or dismiss it as the effect of something he ate, missing the fact that it was an experience in a physical world other than his own. Of course, the physical sequence is rich in symbolism, and I am a symbolist about everything.
Our regular lives, in our physical world, are the stuff of dreams to our parallel selves in their own realities. Among those parallel selves are versions of ourselves who are already dead, in the sense that they do not have physical bodies anymore. I know how that feels, and not only from childhood. I have entered the postmortem situation of a Robert who is enjoying himself enormously. He is on the faculty of an intriguing school of higher education, teaching and pursuing his favorite research interests. He is able to look in on personalities living in many different times and dimensions and offer them some guidance on their paths, weaving threads of connection between them. His special delight is to reach to the minds of creative writers, giving them inspiration and feeding them really good material. He loves this game of cocreation and revels in the fact that from his position, he can help bring through wonderful books without having to pick up a pen or put his fingers on the keyboard. I wouldn’t mind having his job when I check out of my present life.
What is the point of thinking about all these parallel selves, in their many worlds? There is a highly practical reason. As we grow greater awareness of our possible selves on parallel event tracks, we can choose to draw lessons, gifts, and even specific skills from their life experiences into our own, and vice versa. We can observe how, when we make certain choices in our current lives, we may come closer to a parallel self from whom we parted company long ago but whose life karma — good, bad, or mixed — now becomes part of our current story.
Since the time is always Now, we can slip in and out of linear time, at least on the level of mind. This may be essential to our survival as well as to our understanding of the multiverse and the multidimensional self. I suspect that all of us are time travelers every night, in our dreams, whether or not we bring back any recollection of our forays into past or future.
When we wake up to the fact that the time is always Now, we are ready to become conscious time travelers. We can learn to do more than simply visit the past and the future. We can seek to establish mental communication with personalities in the possible past and the possible future. We can seek to rise above the perspective of these personalities to that of a Self on a higher level who can read the patterns of connection and help reweave them for the better.
26. WE ARE SLEEPING till WE’RE DREAMING
A song comes bursting through me, from a sleep dream. The music is with me as I rise into the day. I go on humming and singing it as I walk the dog. I write down the first verse, then call a couple of friends, anxious that I might lose the tune. The first friend is not in, so I sing the song to her voice mail, so I’ll have an audio record. My second friend is married to a musician. She puts him on the line so he can jot down the notes and reproduce the tune on the piano. By now, I have the words for the last verse:
We are sleeping till we’re dreaming
We are dreaming till awakening
We’re awakening for our homecoming into the Land
This song is what some shamans call a wing song, providing energy for journeys into the deeper reality. I have used it before sleep and have found myself lifting effortlessly beyond the body into lucid dream adventures. I have sung it with whole circles and offered it to power group journeys.
For me, that simple verse encapsulates the heart of dreaming as a life practice. Dreaming is not fundamentally about what happens during sleep. It is about waking up to a deeper order of reality and finding ourselves at home in the multiverse.
Dreaming is the most common alternative state of consciousness among humans, and it does not require drugs or equipment. To get really good at it, however, requires practice, practice, practice. It has been said that to develop excellence in any field requires ten thousand hours of practice. Dreamers have an obvious advantage if this is true, since they can do much of their practice while the body is asleep or resting — and much of the rest on the roads of regular life, by paying attention to the dreamlike play of symbols and synchronicity in the everyday world.
I value the scout who goes out every night, in dreaming, to identify challenges and opportunities that lie ahead of me and to explore the consequences of making different choices at certain crossroads that are still in my future. Every morning, he brings me memories of the future. He not only shows me things that will happen; he shows me things that may or may not happen, depending on whether I pay attention to his travel reports and take proper action. To my certain knowledge, he has enabled me to escape probable death on the road on at least three occasions.
He traveled two weeks ahead of me one night, driving on up a hill on Route 2 in Troy, New York, not far from the house where I was then living. He came to a fork in the road, across from a gas station, where everything stopped. He was hurled through a dark tunnel into a series of surreal scenes. I woke from this dream with his memories, vividly aware that when the car stopped, he was thrown into a series of bardo experiences, in transitional states in an afterlife into which he had been projected involuntarily. When we become active dreamers and follow our practice for long enough, we come to recognize our personal markers for what is going on in our dreams. By this point in my life, it had become clear to me that this kind of involuntary entry into a bardo zone was a warning that physical death was a distinct possibility. My feelings confirmed this. My action was to harvest specific data from my dream scout in order to avoid death on Route 2. I noted the exact location where the action stopped: that fork in the road, with the gas station on the other side. Two weeks later, I was driving on that road, up the hill. A big UPS truck had stopped on a double yellow line on the right side, obscuring the view where the road curved to the right. Under normal circumstances, I would have pulled out to pass the UPS truck. But because this was the place where the action stopped in the dream, I slowed my car until it was almost stationary. This is how I escaped a head-on collision with an eighteen-wheeler rushing down the road at 60 mph in a 30 mph zone.
The dream scout not only glimpses what lies just around the corner; he travels across years or decades, bringing back memories of distant, as well as imminent, futures. How to keep track of all this information?
My practice involves keeping a journal in which I record, as often as possible, all my dream experiences, large and small, thrilling or mundane, delightful or unwanted. I give each report a title. I note my feelings immediately after the experience. I jot down some “reality check” notes on what I recognize from the dream — is that Berkeley Square in London or Belgrave Square? — and whether it is remotely possible that any part of the dream could manifest in ordinary life in the future. As I make my reports, I try to debrief my dream self. Where did you go last night? Who were you with?
Dreams require action. My practice includes taking action to bring healing, creative energy, and guidance from my night dreams into daily life. I may turn a dream into a story, a poem, a drawing, or a song. I may allow a dream to set research assignments, seeking to translate that funny word in another language or to run down that address or that episode from history or mythology. The action required may be to turn the dream into a specific advisory or imperative, as with my dream of the Esso gas station: You’re overcharging: back up and use some finesse.
The action needed may be to go back inside the dreamscape, through conscious dream reentry, one of the core techniques of the method of Active Dreaming that I developed and now teach all over the world. I may need to reenter a dream to clarify details, explore a mystery, move beyond a fear, or have a conversation with a dream character who may prove to be an aspect of myself or a transpersonal figure, or both. A dream is its own interpretation when we are able to reclaim the full experience of the dream, as opposed to the often fragmentary or incomplete dream report. Any dream can also be a personal gateway to the multiverse. As the Aborigines taught me, our personal dreams can be our doors to the Dreamtime, the All-at-Once.
My practice includes setting an intention for the night. I may state this as a quite specific request for dream guidance: “I would like help in healing X.” Or: “I would like guidance on getting my book published.” But very often, I simply say, “Show me what I need to see.”
If I have set an intention for the night, and harvest dreams, the game is to link the dream material to the intention. The link may be far from obvious, and the perspective of others can be very helpful.
My practice includes sharing dreams and dreamlike experiences with others by a fun, fast technique I invented that I call the Lightning Dreamwork Game because it is meant to be quick, like lightning, and to harness energy, like a lightning bolt. I first test-flew this method of dream sharing with my frequent flyers at a spring gathering up on Gore Mountain in 2000 and then introduced it to a world audience at a conference that summer. I have been teaching and using it ever since, and it is a core process for Active Dreaming circles all over the world. It can be performed in minutes. The process has four steps. First, the dreamer is encouraged to tell his story simply and clearly, leaving out background details and avoiding self-interpretation. Next, the partner asks a few essential questions. The first is always about feelings; first feelings after a dream are often excellent guidance on where to go with a dream. The partner then offers suggestions and associations in a way that empowers the dreamer as author of meaning for his own dreams and his own life, by opening comments with the phrase “If it were my dream…” The last step in the process is always to help the dreamer come up with an action plan, to honor the dream and act on its guidance. The game is fully explained in my books The Three “Only” Things and Active Dreaming.
My practice includes surveying the many reports that stream in every day from people who say they have been dreaming of me. It is not unusual for me to receive twenty quite specific reports of this kind over the internet on any given day, in addition to dreams shared in person by friends and people in my workshops. My default response, to people I don’t know personally who report dream appearances by me, is to suggest that the dreamer might want to ask what part of her resembles Dream Robert in some way (for example, as dreamer, teacher, writer, traveler, large person with white hair). Yet I also know that dreaming is social as well as individual, and I am aware that I lead adventures in the dream lands as well as in the physical world.
Some weeks after leading one of my five-day adventures at the Esalen Institute, I received a note from one of the participants, a highly intelligent, spirited lady, a person with two PhDs who had explored consciousness in many ways. “I want to thank you for that wonderful lecture you gave last night.”
I checked the date. I had not given a lecture that evening anywhere in consensus reality. I had already intuited what she was telling me. She had attended a lecture I gave in one of her dreams. The woman from Esalen reported that in my lecture, I had listed, “very clearly and elegantly,” five reasons why we misinterpret dreams about the future. I had written them on a whiteboard in view of the group.
This gave me shivers. On that very day, I was laboring over a chapter in a book that was later published as Dreaming True. The chapter was titled “When Dreams Seem False,” and on the first page, I was developing a list of the five most common reasons why we misinterpret dream messages about the future. I was satisfied with my statement about the first reason we get these messages wrong. But I was not yet content with my formulation of the other four reasons or sure of the order in which they should appear on the page.
I emailed the woman from Esalen. I asked her, “Any chance you kept notes from my lecture or could reconstruct what I wrote on the whiteboard?” She responded within a couple of hours, sending me her version of Dream Robert’s five points. They were expressed with admirable brevity, very much in my own style. Borrowing from my dream student’s notes, I was able to compose the opening section of that chapter with almost no editing.
I often play the role of teacher in my own dreams, with many different audiences: with people I recognize, with people I will meet in the future, with people in countries I have not yet visited, with people in other orders of reality, including the afterlife. I have preserved hundreds of reports from people who say they have attended a workshop, a lecture, a ritual, or some other type of training with me in dreams. I have learned to pay close attention to reports about Dream Robert’s teaching activities because sometimes I find that he is more than a few steps ahead of me. It’s a rare student of mine who brings detailed notes back from the dreaming, but I am open to more. Let me hasten to add that if you dream of me and enjoy the experience, I am happy to accept the credit; if the experience wasn’t great, don’t blame it on me!
Nested dreams are of huge importance for growing our knowledge of the multiverse. When we move from an outer dream to an inner dream, we may not only be shifting levels of perception; we may be changing worlds.
Stepping from one level of dreaming into another sometimes triggers dream lucidity in the narrow sense of becoming aware that you are dreaming inside a dream. Sometimes it brings the ability to navigate and draw knowledge from multiple realities in whatever state of reality and consciousness we happen to be in.
Back in 1994, I dreamed that a sea eagle was wrestling with me on a beach for possession of the Australian hat I used to wear in those days. The struggle felt altogether physical. I reported the dream to a large audience in an auditorium at a conference of the Association for the Study of Dreams (ASD). Then I woke up in my bed, several months before that conference took place. The tussle with the sea eagle helped prepare me for a very important life transition that was going to require my return to Australia. The scene where I told the dream, within a second dream, had more than entertainment value (though I never underrate that).
When I recorded the dream, I noted that I was speaking in an auditorium with chairs bolted to the floor in tilted rows under sterile lighting. This was quite the wrong environment for the workshop I had agreed to lead at the ASD conference, in which I planned to have people choose partners and journey together with the aid of shamanic drumming. I called one of the ASD organizers and learned than the scheduled location for my workshop was identical to the auditorium in my dream. It was now time to tell the dream in which I was telling a dream to someone in the dream of waking life. By doing that, I was able to have my workshop venue changed to a dreamier space.
In the fall of 1995, I am being piloted by an elderly professor in a small seaplane over a mountain range. As we dip low, over the reddish peaks, I say, “This reminds me of a dream in which I was flying in a similar plane over a cordillera. This kind of plane has always appealed to my sense of romance and adventure.”
We swoop low over a body of water. The sensations of flight and movement are wonderfully vivid. “This is like a dream!” I exclaim in delight.
When I wake up in my usual bedroom, I smile at the realization that my flight was like a dream because it was a dream. And so is life.
