In 2005 I went to the International Association for the Study of Dreams conference in Berkeley. It was a good excuse to visit the USA for the first time, and the conference itself was fantastic—an inspiring mix of solid dream research and the grassroots enthusiasm that characterizes much contemporary interest in dreams.

Since then, I think all of the IASD conferences have also been in the States. Not very “international”. But next year, they’re coming to Europe: to Rolduc, a former medieval monastery in Kerkrade, the Netherlands. Looks like an interesting venue, and I’m sure being in Europe will ensure a healthy blend of delegates.

I’ve not decided to go yet, but I’m very tempted. Check it out.

Patrick Harpur, the essential guide to Hermeticism and alchemy, author of Daimonic Reality, Mercurius and The Philosopher’s Secret Fire, is breaking his customary seclusion with a series of courses next year to be held in the heart of West Dorset.

Together with Jules Cashford (co-author of the excellent The Myth of the Goddess) and others, Patrick will host talks, discussions, films and field trips exploring soul, magic, Forteana, folklore, mythology, dreams, and other byways of the imagination. Full details can be found at The Mythic Imagination website.

Asklepius visits a dreamer. Epidauros, Greece.

by Gyrus

The realm of dreams is perhaps the most ubiquitous, fertile, and alluring place that we look to for inspiration. Whether we’re craving new creative ideas or insight into ourselves, our night-time excursions to this mercurial land of multiple meanings, shifting landscapes and beguiling mysteries seem to dangle endless fresh possibilities before us. What if we were able to discover techniques that allowed us to easily reach out and grab these possibilities? What if tools were available that could haul this submerged inspiration out onto our all-too-dry land, ripe and ready to refresh our vision?

This kind of hope is the fuel for most of the prolific literature on “using” dreams, some of which is hugely important and powerful. In particular, lucid dreaming (a state in which you become aware that you are dreaming while you are dreaming) can exponentially increase the access you have to the dream state’s treasures.

However, just as individual dreams are never of simple significance, and only yield their true nature through multiple perspectives, our general interaction with dreams is hampered if we maintain a singular overall attitude towards them. Here I wish to dwell on an approach to dreams that—for obvious if not always good reasons—is rarely voiced. It has more to do with attending to dreams than using dreams. It is tricky (certainly not to be captured in a short essay like this), and vexes the results-hungry ego.

It is most forcefully expressed in The Dream and the Underworld by James Hillman, a brilliant and provocative psychologist whose work has endeavoured to revive the classical Greek sense of “soul” (psyche). Not the personal atom of spiritual being that our Christian heritage has left us with, but a liminal, polytheistic, metaphor-loving aspect of our being, which we dwell within as much as it dwells within us, and which resists all attempts to pin it down for service to pragmatism. Hillman calls soul “a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself.” (Re-Visioning Psychology)

This perspective, Hillman argues, is expressed most accurately in dreams. Freud famously claimed that dreams are the “royal road to the unconscious”. Hillman shares Freud’s high estimation of dreams, but differs subtly and crucially in his approach to them. Freud may have talked of a road to the unconscious, but his avowed project was for traffic to move the other way—and to be disarmed of its irrational power en route by the process of interpretation. Freud wanted to move the contents of the unconscious into the realms of the rational ego, on the ego’s own terms. His landmark work The Interpretation of Dreams contains much respect for the dream, and is essential reading; but in the end his allegiance was to the rational project. “Where id was, there shall ego be.” Where exactly this process might stop isn’t made clear. However, a quick contemplation of handing over the control of bodily functions such as the heartbeat and cell repair to the ego should give you a good biological example of the limits of consciousness, which can trigger a sense of how vital unconscious processes might be for the psyche, too.

Hillman sees dreams less as a road to the unconscious than as the unconscious itself, “the psyche speaking to itself in its own language”. He resists the urge to interpret, to translate the psyche’s language into the ego’s language, with a characteristic lack of compromise:

[T]his dayworld style of thinking—literal realities, natural comparisons, contrary opposites, processional steps—[...] must be set aside in order to pursue the dream into its home territory. There thinking moves in images, resemblances, correspondences. To go in this direction, we must sever the link with the dayworld, foregoing all ideas that originate there—translation, reclamation, compensation. We must go over the bridge and let it fall behind us, and if it will not fall, then let it burn.

How to do this? Hillman’s key framework is psychotherapy. Although he is often harshly critical of the practice (one of his books is called We’ve Had A Hundred Years Of Psychotherapy And The World’s Getting Worse), it is his long-standing, embittered but loyal ally. He envisions it as an alchemical process, the classic 50-minute session acting as an enclosing container for the psyche, an alembic stretching through the weeks to hold and slowly refine the soul’s processes. Importantly, the finitude, that often annoying awareness that the clock’s ticking away, constellates death.

Hillman takes the dreamworld as the underworld—Hades. Not the literal underground into which the bodies of the dead slowly dissolve, the dark and earthy realm of fertile, composted death that the earth goddesses rule over; rather, Hades is the spectral realm of metaphorical death. Death as psychological depth. Not death as a literal biological event, but the death of the ego’s rational solid grasp of “hard facts”—the death of simple, singular vision.

It is not bodies that dissolve here, but mental constructs. Hillman takes interpretation as a colonial act of the dayworld ego, but analysis (from the Greek for “breaking up” or “loosening up”) he sees—despite our association of it with the rational intellect—as the natural movement of the psyche in Hades. In therapy, the constituent elements of the psyche, which are expediently joined together for effective action in the world of the reality principle, are separated out, revealing the multivalent (Hillman would say polytheistic) nature of the psyche. Dreams directly show us the manifold substructures that govern us; therapy, in teasing them apart, hopes to give each aspect of the psyche enough definition and confidence to make healthier pacts and accords with other aspects than were previously possible in the cramped and often hastily arranged space of the “personality”. The falsely unified persona of everyday life dies to the truth of the masque of death, the parade of numinous shadow figures that constitute the psyche’s depths.

Obviously here isn’t the place for outlining the actual techniques and craft of therapy. But how might this approach be applied in our lives, to serve our creativity, to enrich and inspire us? I’m returning to this question—”What to do?”—partly because the form of this type of essay gravitates in this direction, but also deliberately, to foreground this movement. And then, to undermine it. Specific practices are copiously documented in any number of dreamwork books or websites. But here, I’m trying to follow Hillman by initiating our approach to the dream with an attitude that, firstly, pays homage to the dream. Rather than be lead by the dayworld urge to get something practical, literal and utilitarian underway, perhaps we can try starting with the dreamworld, and cultivate a love for it that refuses expectations.

The most crucial element in approaching dreams is attention. We must attend to dreams closely; sustained attention brings sustenance. Keeping a dream journal is an essential discipline, but perhaps not a discipline to be “pushed”, like jogging. The muscular effort of exercise, as an attitude, is a great way to repel the images of the dreamworld; they appreciate less strained and direct effort. Indeed, an attitude of service rather than discipline is more appropriate. “Therapy” is derived from the Greek for “to wait on, attend”; the priests or attendants at the ancient Greek dream incubation temples, where the healing god Asklepius worked his wonders, were called therapeutes. This Greek root in turn stems from the root dher, which means “to support”. Psychotherapy, then, is to wait on, or attend to the soul. Both the therapist and the patient (who must be patient) are, in their dialogue, actually waiting for the impersonal soul to reveal itself through their interaction.

Paying attention to dreams can be fuelled by doing certain things, doing dreamwork. But the real trick is to slowly, with patience and persistence, cultivate a caring love for dreams, alert to their textures, movements and details for their own sake. I don’t see this as some kind of flat phenomenology, which cautiously sticks purely to the surface impressions given by dreams. The very nature of the impressions created by dreams, if examined closely enough, elicits a dynamic process of associative thought. As discussed previously, avoiding interpretation does not preclude analysis; dreams welcome a caring dissolution of any apparent coherence into multiple perspectives and trajectories. Indeed, as “a dream”, phenomenologically speaking, may just be our waking mind’s memory of a dream, perhaps this process of carefully mulling over the dream, not wrenching its secrets out on the rack of rationality but letting its structure unfold its ever-deeper recesses, is the basis for returning to “the dream itself”—whatever that may be.

We must bear in mind that when patients at Asklepian temples were cured, the visit that the god paid to them during their slumber wasn’t made in order to give them something to do, something in the waking world to obtain or pursue in order to be cured. The dream itself was the cure. What we do with the dream in waking life (if anything) should be a careful extension of the principles of the dream itself; any slip into the habits of translation or principally pragmatic exploitation could banish the mysterious power of our brush with this imaginal underworld. In attending to dreams, we need to cultivate the waking life traditions that share close affinity with dream logic—art, ritual, some psychotherapies. Only in these activities can we find containment that is sensitive and strong enough to accept the powers that dreams bestow.

Over many years, a prolonged devotion to these peculiar dips into the psyche’s native land does indeed transform your life, creating subtle and inexpressible currents of mental, emotional and spiritual nourishment. A certain stability—still mutable, but more coherent within the context of the dream—may arise in particular dream landscapes or characters that populate that world; the dream grows more assured and trusting in your presence. Patterns can span months, years or decades, and mature into a form of personal mythology; the dream is pleased with your patience, and rewards you with a more sophisticated knowledge of your depths. Terrifying encounters can open to reveal an indestructible concern for our well-being, and images or situations that seem intensely personal can give way to a much wider sense of the world beyond us.

We sense that dreams mean well for us, back us up and urge us on, understand us more deeply than we understand ourselves, expand our sensuousness and spirit, continually make up new things to give us … It is like the love of an old man, the usual personal content of love voided by coming death, yet still intense, playful, and tenderly, carefully close.

— James Hillman, The Dream And The Underworld

Palaeontologists in a vast desert. Large crested ridges of ancient red sand and rock formations… They remove the top layers, and reveal the skeleton of a giant snake beneath. No thicker than a man’s torso, but miles and miles long… stretching along the crest of the ridge… Sections of the remains are exposed intermittently

That was a dream I had once. It had an electric thrill about it, as if even the skeleton of this fantastic beast enlivened the dream landscape with seething energy.

I felt a surge of that reading a report about Titanoboa cerrejonesis, the name given to the recently discovered skeleton of the biggest snake known to have lived. From the steaming tropics of 60 million years ago, this beast was at least 13 meters long, “longer than a city bus … and heavier than a car”.

Link via Reality Sandwich. Creative Commons licensed photo by Doc Searls.

by Gyrus

Most of the writings in this book were written during a very strange, obsessive and fruitful time in my life. I was, as ever, experimenting with various ways of altering consciousness and interacting with the environment in magical ways. My own trip, the various complexes that I’d become aware of in my psyche, seemed to resonate uncannily with certain aspects of the prehistoric landscapes I was exploring—for the most part, Ilkley Moor and the Avebury monuments. As I dug deeper into their histories and associations, it sometimes felt like I was unearthing buried contents of my own mind.

There’s no certain outcome from getting into stuff like this. You can go off the rails a bit; you can publish some very dubious theories that say more about you than prehistory. My own approach was to keep my critical mind alert, but to embrace the fact that there’s a grey area between digging into your own unconscious and unearthing the realities of prehistoric life. How could it be otherwise, if we shake off the modern illusion of individual isolation, and accept that all our roots tangle together in the deep past?

There’s a long tradition of overlap between psychology and the study of the past. Carl Jung wanted to study archaeology, but his family couldn’t afford to send him to a university that taught the subject. So, he ended up doing medicine, which led him to psychiatry. The metaphor of archaeology remained with him, though. The crucial dream of 1909 that led to his theory of the collective unconscious involved him descending into the lowest level of the basement underneath a house, passing through a Roman level before encountering scattered bones. “This must be a prehistoric cave!” he exclaimed before waking up.

Oddly enough, my own plunge into the past was largely triggered by something above, in the sky. I had a nasty experience with chemicals at Glastonbury Festival—as you do—where I saw a vortex in the sky that threatened to drag me into it, to my death. The image of the vortex haunted me for years.

Looking back, with a playful eye for the movements of fate, I wonder… What led me after that experience to move to Leeds, a short bus ride from Ilkley Moor? And what led me to Ilkley Moor, where I was gobsmacked to find oodles of prehistoric rock art, the type of exotic and mysterious creations that part of me assumed were confined to caves in the Australian desert?

I had already written most of my essay The Devil & The Goddess, which takes ancient snake goddesses as a central theme, when I discovered by chance that a Romano-Celtic snake goddess—Verbeia—was worshipped as an embodiment of the River Wharfe, which runs past the moors and through Ilkley. I delved deep into etymology, and found that both “Verbeia” and “Wharfe” had potential roots in words referring to turning, swirling, and vortices. I quickly made connections with the turning, swirling Swastika Stone carving on the moor, and the vortex-like concentric circles of the common cup-and-ring marks carved onto many of the moor’s stones. Endless details, myriad connections, all gave me the vertiginous sense that I had psychically meshed with the local landscape and its history. My own association of the vortex with death and altered states permeated my reading of the rock carvings. I railed against the narrow-mindedness of academia (without having actually read much academic research, of course), and proffered my own visionary interpretations in the small press.

Before long, I was reading Richard Bradley’s book on the predominantly cup-and-ring rock art of Atlantic Europe. This was around 1997. Almost a decade before, David Lewis-Williams and Thomas Dowson had caused a storm in archaeological circles with their paper, ‘The Signs of All Times’, which proposed that much Palaeolithic art was inspired by shamanic trance states. Drawing on their ideas about geometric shapes—grids, spirals, dots, and so on—representing the hallucinations from the early stages of trance, archaeologists like Bradley started to speculate about the Neolithic and Bronze Age cup-and-rings. Could they represent these early parts of the shamanic altered state? Lab tests had shown that vortex-like imagery was common as people were drawn into the deeper levels of trance. And entry into the Otherworld was frequently associated with death by shamanic cultures. Could the occurrence of spirals and cup-and-rings at the entrances to Irish passage graves be explained by this connection?

Well, of course it could. I’m all for keeping an open mind about prehistory, this vast period that we’ll never be certain about. But the logic and coherence of the “shamanic trance” theory of rock art, while it obviously can’t be applied anywhere and everywhere, means to me that it has to be placed in the foreground of our collection of possible models for the origins of this art.

Now, I’m really interested in how I managed to come to this conclusion independently, after a few years of messing around with strange drugs and staggering about West Yorkshire’s moors, when earnest academics had taken most of their careers of diligent study to get there. Does this mean that we can throw all our books away and get to the truth of the past by wrenching the lids off our minds? Sadly not. However, I’m not entirely convinced that it was blind luck that led me to this theory that academia has now validated. There really is something to be said for getting down to the basic structures of the psyche through experimentation, and using the data gathered from this first-hand experience to speculate about that period when these basic structures were being laid down—and, for the first time, expressed in material artifacts. It’ll never be an exact science, but it can function as an extremely valuable adjunct to scientific exploration. Some common-sense participation in the ways of magic, animism and altered states could, I believe, help ground abstract theories in the realities of the human body and the many qualities of the human mind that persist through changing historical circumstances. Anthropologists often go a bit native and live their subject’s life a little; why not archaeologists too?

If personal experience can contribute to the study of the past, what can the past contribute to our experience now? For me, history was always my worst subject at school. I’m still pretty patchy on all that stuff that happened between the Romans and the 20th century. My route into the past was Terence McKenna’s theories about the role of psychedelic mushrooms in the origins of human consciousness. Suddenly, someone was drawing compelling links between the direct experiences in my life that fascinated and inspired me, and the grander, often bewildering sweep of human history.

Recently, Andy Letcher’s book Shroom has taken this type of theory to task, heavily criticizing modern psychedelic culture for projecting its own agendas back onto the past. And many pagans, lead by Ronald Hutton, who was a big inspiration for Letcher, have for a while been taking apart the historical fantasies of Wiccans and others who believe themselves to be continuing a genuine lineage of magical practice. Why should we need validation for our current activities so much that we’re prepared to delude ourselves about history?

I do value the hard information and refreshing cynicism of Letcher and Hutton’s work—it’s priceless among subcultures that often succumb to insular illusions. But I think their views can be seen as the flip-side to the fantasies of historical validation that they try to demolish. To polarize things a bit: one side is so blindly in need of validation, that they are prepared to be certain about things that are up in the air; but the other side seems to carry itself with a kind of modern intellectual machismo that believes this need for validation from the past can be disposed of entirely. Science is the watchword, and despite the archaeological cliché that “absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence”, if hard proof isn’t forthcoming, we have to turn away. This seems to be as modern as Wiccan revivalism, and at least as damaging as they believe any uncritical reconstruction of past beliefs is.

We can’t just believe what we want about the past. But I feel we can’t just leave it be, or accept the “hard evidence” of orthodox archaeology as all that remains. The past is alive, and constantly expresses itself through the present, into the future. This isn’t determinism, it’s just the way things are. You can take a more complex angle if you want, and say that it’s our relationship to the past that is alive. The imagination is one of the most potent forces in human life, and it loves the past. Especially ancient times. It seems wise to engage consciously with this love, to nurture it and guard against its excesses, rather than decry it and hope it goes away.

Dreams, as Jung found, are particularly enthused about the past. Nothing is simple and straightforward in dreams; their metaphoric nature and tricksterish layering of meaning always defy any rational attempt to codify and delineate them. But they respond eagerly when you feed your head with images and stories of ancient things. The outward forms of prehistory, when they permeate your waking life, can seep into your dream world and help give shape to long-neglected patterns in your personal history.

Anyone’s deeper complexes can be as uncertain and hard to pin down as the forever lost—but deeply resonant—rituals of prehistoric tribes. Just as we can’t pin down such archaic events with archaeological certainty, the precise identification of our own ancient moments of significance may forever elude us.

But likewise, just as the lingering, intangible traces of these moments can profoundly shape our lives from behind the scenes, we will never be able to fully wipe away our subtle bonds to the deep past of the species. In both personal and collective psychohistory, our unceasing curiosity should be tempered by a light touch that respects the reality and the importance of the past’s essential unknowability. The lack of hope for solid conclusions needn’t be a cause of despair; it can animate our investigations with a playful delight, and a respect for irreducible mystery.

A quote in David J. Hufford’s brilliant The Terror That Comes in the Night, a study of “supernatural assault traditions” in dreams, put me onto the trail of James Hillman’s Pan and the Nightmare. Before I managed to track down this rare tome, I followed the lead into Hillman’s constantly inspirational oeuvre. But Pan and the Nightmare remained deeply sought-after because Hillman’s insights, connecting the wild Greek god of nature to the liminal experience of waking dreams, seemed to tap so directly into my odd meeting with a little black goat in Avebury.

I finally tracked down a second-hand copy for some quite extortionate price (but at the time, well within my means). It was no disappointment. The body of the work is a translation of a monograph by Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher, ‘Ephialtes: A Pathological-Mythological Treatise on the Nightmare in Classical Antiquity’. A co-founder with Nietzsche of the University of Leipzig’s Philology Club, Roscher is lauded by Hillman as a great example of the kind of nineteenth century scholar whose voluminous, wide-ranging knowledge and enthusiasm for the psychological reality of his subject led to flawed but valuable efforts of synthesis and comparison. As Hillman eloquently argues, the “psychological ferment” of the time (Roscher’s monograph appeared in the same year as Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams) means we “may not blame Roscher for the wide casting of his net nor for some of the odd fish he comes up with.”

Equally valuable is Hillman’s introductory essay, nearly as long as Roscher’s work, in which he applies his characteristically shrewd, penetrating and original psyche-oriented analysis to Roscher’s subject. Classic psychological concepts such as instinct, the uncanny, synchronicity and repressed sexuality are given fertile new frames via Pan’s irresistible force and the shock of the nightmare experience.

It’s a fantastic book, and it’s finally been reissued by Spring Publications. One for the wish list if you’re at all tickled by that shaggy beast of the Arcadian pastures…

I met Jennifer Dumpert during a trip to California in 2005. In a bar on Haight Street in San Francisco she outlined a dream practice she developed during a rough time in New York, a process of mapping dream content onto your local geography in order to foster bonds between the dream and waking worlds.

This sounded fantastic for the first Dreamflesh Journal, but unfortunately she didn’t find time to develop a piece on the subject (though Volume One did include her fascinating examination of how the sense of self-identity in dreams can seep into waking life).

Well, she’s just launched her Urban Dreamscape site which documents her experiments in mapping her dreams onto the streets near her San Francisco home. Two books she mentions as key inspirations will immediately clue in anyone who’s read them: The Art of Memory by Francis Yates and The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin. The former seems most directly relevant, because instead of literally documenting dreams of local places, she takes the creative step of transposing dreams onto walls, windows, lampposts, shops and other features that aren’t associated with the dream content in any linear way. Situationist dérive tactics are the engine for latching dreams onto places, cumulatively layering dreamtime onto everyday geography in a way that seems to cannily draw on hunter-gatherer myth-making, Renaissance magic and modern art activism.

She’s also attempted to express own internal, imaginal palimpsest of dream-place minglings in digital form with a clickable map of her stomping grounds which fires off little impressionistic Flash and QuickTime experiments in depicting these mergings and juxtapositions of psyche and urban environments. These multimedia fragments are intriguing, playful indicators, pointing at the true riches that Jennifer also hints at: interactive, regional collaborations on the generation of local dreamscapes, crafted and intuited in the flesh, on the street…

Anyway, I came across this very recent dream (from 23rd January), which was too charming to not share:

George W. Bush seems to have jumped out of a plane without a parachute. Around the world there’s a general carnival atmosphere, a sense of hope and renewal.

The leader of the group was grounded in the work of Strephon Kaplan-Williams, which I felt boded well. Williams’ work developed from a combination of Jungian “active imagination”, Gestalt “drama therapy” , and somewhat discredited accounts of dream practices among the aboriginal Malaysian Senoi people. (Williams responded to attacks on his appropriation of these techniques with the sound enough claim that they’ve worked for him and his clients; certainly, if you bear in mind that you’re not necessarily following some “authentic tradition”, Williams’ work represents a good model for dreamwork.)

I’ve always taken for granted a dismissive attitude towards “dream dictionaries”, and this has grown over the years into a deep suspicion of most forms of “interpretive” dreamwork. The most devastating attack on the interpretation of dreams is James Hillman’s elliptical, exaggerated, rhetorically brilliant The Dream and the Underworld:

Analytical tearing apart is one thing, and conceptual interpretation another. We can have analysis without interpretation. Interpretation turns a dream into its meaning. Dream is replaced with translation. But dissection cuts into the flesh and bone of the image, examining the tissue of its internal connections, and moves around among its bits, though the body of the dream is still on the table. We haven’t asked what does it mean, but who and what and how it is.

The Williams-style methods we used in the dream group did avoid blunt interpretation. The core of the process is bringing dream characters in, envisioning them, dialoguing with them out loud, sitting in their place and being questioned as them. Williams’ work has a strong “phenomenological” strain to it. Dreams are analysed, pulled apart, but solely (or at least, initially) in terms of the dream’s internal dynamics. Reference to other dreams comes next, and lastly—if at all—associations with waking life are teased out. It’s a kind of structuralist approach that has certain echoes in literary criticism. When I described it to Donal Ruane, who was initiated into the mestizo ayahuasquero tradition in Peru, he thought it resonated strongly with the shamanic method. This makes sense, as they seem to take the Otherworld of visions and dreams as a distinct reality, and don’t have the Western tendency to see it as an illusory projection of the buried concerns of waking life.

However, even though I always managed to have something to bring to each fortnightly session, and always got something interesting out of working with that dream—usually a perspective of the dream character I spoke with that I missed completely but was obvious in retrospect—my dream life withered during that period. Uncannily so.

Was there something in that work, bringing these characters into the daylight world, that they shied away from? Even with Williams’ techniques, I think it’s incredibly difficult for us, in this culture, to not let interpretive tendencies subtly well up and direct work with such frustratingly oblique and slippery things as dreams. Our positivist legacy is deep, and the gravitational pull of the urge to “shed light on things” is potent.

Where id was, there ego shall be. It is a work of culture, not unlike the draining of the Zuider Zee.

Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis

Perhaps this colonizing intinct snuck into the dream group’s work via the part where we took on the role of a dream character and were questioned. We certainly tried to treat the character as an autonomous entity, with its own desires and motives, to be respected for itself; but of course it often became very difficult to not slip into the standard view that in doing this you were enacting parts of yourself. This view isn’t without its uses; but letting it guide your relationship to your dreams has important limitations.

In any case, the dream group finished just before Christmas, and I decided not to re-join in the new year. Since early January, my dreams have returned, almost like a barely-simmering pot being slowly returned to a rolling boil.

If dreams wither so readily in the face of the daylight ego, our tendency is to consign them to the “weak” and “illusory” end of the dualistic oppositions that this ego sets up, i.e. we place them exactly where hard-headed scientism wants them. This relegation is far from an impassive, objective assessment; it is an active, even aggressive move. The polarizing model of reality, splitting everything into light/dark, rational/irrational, strong/weak, real/illusory, is unconsciously forced into place, and the resulting arrangement of phenonema is seen as “the way it is”. Stepping back and lifting these constraints from our experience can set the potency of dreams free. I can feel it as I lie there after waking, basking in the dark afterglow of that world, allowing its images to dwell in me through the day without “bagging and tagging” them.

James Hillman’s approach is infuriating to the action-based ego (or the “Hero archetype”, as he would have it). It often seems to be saying, “Do nothing.” Often—from the ego’s perspective—this is precisely what is required. But really, something is happening, even if nothing is being “done”. It takes a while to learn, I’m finding.

The belief that the soul wanders away from body in sleep is another way of stating that dreams leave the body-soul’s literalistic and naturalistic perspective. If so, then to grasp at dreams with body techniques and apply their images directly to the relation of bodies is to miss their wandering. Therapies that go at dreams in terms of body-language, body-ego, and physical life are attempting to force the free soul into perspectives that sleep allows it to leave. The key here is indirection: if the soul wanders from the body in sleep, then our way of letting the soul return in concrete life must follow the same wandering course, an indirect meandering, a reflective puzzling, a method that never translates the madness but speaks with it in its dream language.

Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld

It’s Independence Day today. I thought I might feel like checking out the local parade here in Palo Alto, but actually my lack of connection to the whole thing, together with everyone else’s immersion, creates the ideal sense of dislocation in which to take stock and reflect. The thumping parades have died down, so I guess everyone’s tucking into the barbecues now. Where shall I begin?

San Francisco

A wonderful city. The air is clean, fresh and bright, and the feeling permeates. Well, it seemed to permeate pretty much everything except my skin. The expression “hitting a funk” bubbled up at the time as the best description of my state. Some combination of the mounting length of time without real personal space, and the contrast between some ugly feelings this brought up and the prettiness around me… all conspired to conjure a less than ideal introduction to the city.

There were good things, of course. I caught Erik Davis doing a reading from his new book on Led Zeppelin in a bookshop on Haight Street, which was a blast. Erik and his wonderful partner Jennifer Dumpert graciously let me crash at their splendid place for a few nights, and the bits of their social whirl that I hooked up with were great. Had some great chats with Erik’s fiery, freaky friend Wef, and met a bunch of great DJ/artist friends of Erik’s. Sadly, my dancing feet weren’t around for the night these guys put on. By then, Erik’s sage recommendations from his arcane, extends-to-every-room library had possessed me, a channel to cope with the dark clouds gathering over my head.

James Hillman is an author who’s been looming over my horizon for a while now, and his Dream and the Underworld immediately started hitting home, crystallizing some of the vaporous thoughts and feelings I’ve been having relating to this Dreamflesh journal I’m planning. Even more potent was Michael Ortiz Hill‘s Dreaming the End of the World: Apocalypse as a Rite of Passage. Published in 1994, the year I started a zine about dreams, the year before I started a journal concerned with apocalyptic themes, it’s one of those books that you can’t believe you haven’t discovered sooner – and yet in a way, you’re glad you didn’t. In short, it comes at just the right time. Michael’s sophisticated yet heartfelt analysis of themes and patterns in people’s dreams of nuclear and ecological holocaust resonated deeply with my own perspectives, feelings, and yes, dreams. What’s more, the brief biographical details in the introduction – mentioning his period of homelessness and his work with the dying as a registered nurse – underlined his “effort to understand the path of compassion during a tumultuous age” with something more than mere credibility. When he talked of sneaking in to lectures by Norman O. Brown while he was homeless, to listen to this oft-neglected curiosity of classical scholarship colliding with the millennial fervour of the 1960′s, the connections deepened (Brown was a key influence on my thinking during the 90′s, and I had as yet failed to come across anyone else standing up to claim him as a key source). So I tracked Michael’s email down, and got in touch. I’d left the last week of my stay here open for “what may come”, and it seemed like Michael fit the bill. Over the next week I gradually planned my trip to visit him in the Santa Monica mountains.

Before leaving San Francisco, my funk came to a head, and Erik’s prize cactus bore the brunt. In one of those accidents that immediately feels like psychic steam forcing its way out any which way it can, I knocked over a Tjuringa board that in turn toppled the cactus that was well over a foot high. It’s now considerably shorter. Sorry, Erik.

Garberville

So I was in kind of a state on the Amtrak bus north up to Garberville in Humboldt County. Initially, my fragility wasn’t helped in the slightest when, just as the landscape started to kick in with beauty and majesty, a few of the other passengers lobbied to get a video showing. The gaudy teen-flick vibe of Orange County‘s opening half-hour sent me reeling into a profoundly stressed space between America’s good (outside drifting by) and bad (inside being loud at me). But, the film turned out to be kind of interesting and pretty funny in a goofy-but-intelligent way. Jack Black has a very-much-in-his-element turn as a drugged-out loser, and there’s some great supporting roles filled by Lily Tomlin, John Lithgow, Chevy Chase and Harold Ramis (doing a great scene as a Stanford dean getting spiked).

As we hit real redwoods-and-windy-rivers country, I was thrilled and privileged by my first site of the Eel River: an osprey plunging straight into the waters and emerging swiftly with a fish in its claws. I was in love with birds of prey as a kid, and this is one of the archetypal scenes of such a love. My jaw dropped. When the first really fucking big redwood trunks slid by, a tear threatened to drop from my eye. There are no words for such impassive, undeniable presence.

I was in Garberville at the invite of a friend of a friend, Scott, who met Merrick while he was at the protest against the extension of the Manchester Airport runway. Scott lives in an Airstream trailer (while he builds his cabin) on some land way up in the hills near Garberville, and works with the Trees Foundation, a charity helping grassroots groups to preserve the ecological integrity of the Pacific Northwest. The week I arrived he was working with some other people preparing to do a fund-raising Thai noodles stall at a festival that weekend. Unfortunately the festival itself clashed with the dream conference I’d come to attend in Berkeley, but it was gratifying fun to muck in a help paint signs and such like for the stall.

Scott was – like pretty much everyone who’s extended their hospitality to me over here – a gracious and generous host, and we put up a groovy tent (actually more of a grandiose mosquito net) for me to get some up-close-with-nature time during my stay. Connecting with Scott that first night was great. Feeling more and more ecological ideas weave themselves forcefully into my thinking for Dreamflesh journal, I found myself hitting the classic writer’s guilt about not doing enough practical, hands-on work. If the environment’s so screwed, shouldn’t I be learning permaculture and agitating instead of waxing philosophical? Naturally I’m never much of an either/or person, but I do manifest an imbalance… But then here was Scott, someone devoting so much energy to pragmatic activism, and yet, at least that night when I arrived, he felt starved of perspectives, ideas, inspiration. So between Scott’s responses to my loquacious musings, and my lending a hand to Scott’s stall construction efforts, we seemed to find exactly the kind of fruitful meeting and exchange we both needed. Cool.

Sadly I was stricken with flu and allergies the next day (and for over a week from there, in total). One of Scott’s first, fatal remarks to me were, “Oh, I’ve got a bit of a cough, but don’t worry, it’s not catching.” But despite the hacking and sniffling, I couldn’t not appreciate the humbling redwoods in the Humboldt State Park, on a daytrip with with Scott’s girlfriend Joan, and her friend Matt from New York.

The strange little town of Garberville, I soon learned, is renowned for its dope-growing. Oddly, I missed out on sampling some while I was there. But knowing this, the hemp shop and the fantastic organic bagels and smoothie shop fell right into place, as did the wiry Latino guy called J-Bird who approached me about ten minutes after I arrived asking if I wanted to smoke some pot with him. I also remembered a great little film called Homegrown about dope-growing in northern California, and realised where the region depicted there hooked up to the place I was now in.

On my last night there, I checked out the tiny cinema to see Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. It’s an essential film for our times. Seeing it in California – especially such an environmentally-conscious area of the state – added some force to it, given those infamous recordings of Enron traders as they create California’s rolling blackouts for blatant, ugly profit. And yet more Dreamflesh concepts resolved themselves into sharper focus; the Enron saga seems to be as crucial as 9/11 for understanding what’s going on in our world now, and it seems to me there is more than a little uncanny cosmic resonance in the fact that CEO Jeff Skilling resigned a week before the World Trade Center was destroyed.

Berkeley and the Dream Conference

The tail-end of my flu kind of smothered my engagement in the Association for the Study of Dreams conference in Berkeley, but it was definitely worth my while. I loved Berkeley itself. Being the old stomping ground of Philip K. Dick and Terence McKenna, among others, it had strong associations for me, and it didn’t disappoint. As pretty in its way as the hipper parts of San Francisco, but lower-lying and less assuming, seemingly more at ease with its run-down aspects, it exuded a relaxed kookiness evident in its wildly diverse religious communities. Curiously, the evident Indian and Pakistani community – I grabbed some very passable samosas on University Avenue – made me feel quite at home, having spent most of my adult life surrounded by transplants of these cultures in Leeds and London. Yet more warm hospitality came in the form of Antero and Sylvi Alli, whose place was the picture of esoteric Berkeley homeliness.

The conference opening didn’t bode well. A woman had been invited to initiate proceedings with a song. She explained very sincerely that she had done “a lot of research” on the internet about dreams, songs, and the current world situation, but when she started her backing tape and some terribly standard pseudo-soul session music issued forth, I braced myself. She launched into some sub-’Ebony and Ivory’ lyrics about dreaming of a better world, and asked us to clap along and sign the word “dream” in the chorus. My ice is often reluctant to break with these things, but break it will, given enough seduction through humour, intelligence, or just plain charisma. Sadly none of these showed themselves, and I half-heartedly suppressed my smile as I wrote, “… this is California. I have arrived.”

It was good to see some of the “big names” in consciousness research – Charles Tart and Stan Krippner being the most prominent – but as is usually the case with conferences, it’s the impassioned people with less of a standing that make the most impact, that and the social connections. Texan Bitsy Broughton‘s talk on manifesting connections with dream animals, entwined with working with ancestors and a vision of dream animals’ relevance to our ecological crisis, set a chorus of bells ringing for me, as did the brilliant Jeremy Taylor‘s lucid, gutsy approach to dreamwork and social justice. The panel on dreams and spiritual practice could – given the tone set by the opening song – have been pretty uninspiring, but Anne Hill and Rose May Dance (both from the Bay Area witchcraft group Reclaiming) gave us some righteous, open-minded, grounded perspective from their work with dreams in group rituals and solo retreats, and Jungian psychologist Meridith Sabini managed to bind her own thoughts with Jung’s and conjure a palpable sense of spiritual common ground in the room.

I met a couple of great people: Brian Mills MacGregor, a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed artist from Savannah, Georgia, and Clare Johnson, a fellow Limey who researches lucid dreaming and creativity. We drank to our common achievement of having managed to avoid regular working hours for most of our lives.

On the Sunday night, there was the Dream Telepathy contest. Someone concentrated on one of three previously unseen images that had been especially posted in, and if people felt their dream that night connected with any of them, they put their dream in an envelope next to that image. The closest match wins. Clare had actually won the year before. Stories abound of people in previous years having gained lucidity in their dream to go searching for the image being transmitted; I hadn’t been dreaming much at all on my travels, so I didn’t hold out much hope of hitting any connection.

Well, before the contest, of course, we had to establish some form of personal connection with the “sender”, so we all lined up to give her a hug, which was great fun, reminding me of those Indian gurus who go around do gigs at arenas where everyone lines up for their hug-dispensed prana. I did a little affirmation to dream before crashing, and dozed off in a red wine haze. I was pretty shocked to wake up the next morning with the vivid memory of becoming lucid in my dream and going, “Oh yeah, there’s this contest on. Where’s that woman who’s sending the image?” I ran around looking for her, finding one woman, deciding it was the wrong one, then moving on a trying to find another, and so on. Well, all this feminine contact seemed to veer off in a direction that derailed my lucid awareness of the situation (dreams aren’t much different from waking life in many respects), and before long I was introduced to an especially beautiful young woman naked from the waist down. Things became, how shall I put it… predictably personal. Suffice it to say, I had zero success with the telepathy thing.

Mulholland Drive

By now I had booked myself a flight to Burbank and a hire car for me at the airport. The plan was to visit Michael Ortiz Hill in the Topanga hills west of Los Angeles, then take it easy driving back up to the Bay Area along the Pacific coast.

Hitting Burbank was interestingly crazy. I’d driven a bit up in Garberville and was pretty used to driving on the wrong side of the road, but the LA freeways are something else. I decided, given my intense love for David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, and as a huge stretch of that mythic road took me to the region I was heading for, I just had to go that way instead of saving a bit of time of the madcap, choked freeway. So, brushing past the Hollywood Hills, down through Coldwater Canyon, really digesting Lynch’s comment about the optimistic quality of the light and quickly absorbing what I could of the intense cultural emanations of this area for me (Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jane’s Addiction and Fishbone – all locals – were my three favourite bands as a teen), I joined Mulholland and headed west. Actually I missed the turning first time, giving me a little taste of things to come. You see, Mulholland Drive is impossibly twisty. I knew Lynch built on this quality in his labyrinthine, tricksy narrative structure in the film, but I wasn’t quite prepared for the in-the-flesh insight I was about to get into that story. There was one bit where you had to kind of join another road and rejoin Mulholland, but as far as I felt able, I kept heading west.

Then I saw some traffic lights approaching. The junction looked familiar, but I didn’t recognise it. Suddenly it hit me. I was at the very junction where I had initially joined the road, only now heading out of it in the other direction. Such a spatial flip really hits you on a gut level. I could comprehend making a wrong turning – but doubling back on yourself, maybe two miles along then two miles back again, and only clocking it right at the end? The moebius strip quality of Mulholland Drive‘s plot seemed to now be etched into my brainstem. I gasped and reeled (and cursed), and meekly headed for the freeway.

Topanga Canyon

Michael’s place is tucked away right at the end of a tiny road in the Santa Monica mountains near Topanga, a fantastic area ripe with the bohemian overflow from Hollywood, where the semi-arid hills ooze displaced Chumash myth and entrenched hippy dreams. Michael has been initiated into a Bantu tradition of healing by his mapatya (spiritual twin), Augustine Kandemwa, and, together with his humbling (for him and for anyone who reads of them) experiences as a registered nurse at UCLA Medical Centre, he comes across as someone engaged with compassion and spirit to the utmost degree. A Liberian guy, whose peacemaking efforts Michael is involved with, dropped by soon after I arrived. Michael told me of this guy’s brother, who was tortured to death during the civil war, and how this event forced him to a place where he knew he could take the path of vengeance or peace. It’s a realm of moral choice I have zero experience of; but it’s so heartening to meet people who have been there and braved such impossible forks in their paths.

I did a brief interview with Michael, then he read my tarot cards and performed a little ritual for me to get healing dreams when I slept up on the hill behind his house that night. Offering tobacco to a Buddha that Michael had once buried under the site of the first nuclear bomb explosion in New Mexico as part of an intensive ritual for peace, I gingerly smoked some too. (I swore to never smoke tobacco under any circumstances again about 6 years ago, but refraining here didn’t seem right. Any connection with the indigenous traditions of the Americas pretty much involves this highly sacred plant.) Michael sung his prayers in Bantu and Spanish (he’s half Mexican), and deposited me under a tree on the hill.

No dreams as such really came that night, but, as I was braced for something “real-seeming” (my strong dreams sleeping out are usually of things that seem to be there, very real), a certain event became my “dream”. I’d asked Michael for a blanket in case the night got chilly, but later he’d decided to bring up a duvet just in case. He said I was snoring when I came. My experience was a half-conscious fright as something brushed against my body and a light flashed above me. I lay motionless, terrified of looking around to see what had touched me. I was actually warm enough at that point, and before I got the courage to investigate, the warmth of the duvet soon had me sweating profusely. Of course I felt pretty silly when I realised a very mundane duvet had been benevolently placed on me. I could pull off some of my shiny sleeping bag and huddle up with the duvet’s softness. Michael took this as hugely symbolic, a feeling he saw confirmed in his I Ching reading for me over breakfast. My coin throws brought up the K’un (The Receptive) hexagram, with the middle line of the lower trigram changing it to Shih (The Army). I don’t know my I Ching, but Michael was pretty struck by how positive it all looked. The chili and cheese omlette tasted better and better as we discussed the reading.

[Final installment soon...]