Author : Michelle Belanger Screen Reader : Supported Works with : Source : Status : Available | Last checked: 3 Hour ago! Size : 33,090 KB |
THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Dreamwalking is the art of sending forth a part of the self in order to makecontact with others through the medium of dreams. Anyone can learn how todreamwalk, and, as we explore the concept throughout this book, you will findthat most people probably already do. The trick, as with everything related toour internal, psychic worlds, is to bring this inborn talent into the realm ofconscious control.
It's nearly impossible to find written material on dreamwalking. I maintain alibrary of several thousand books, and yet I do not own a single book on thesubject. This is not for lack of trying; books on this topic simply do notexist. A survey of the Internet, moreover, is both flattering and frustrating:aside from references to Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, just about everyentry on dreamwalking led me back to my own work in the Codex. And yet,dreamwalking is not a technique that I invented. It existed before this book,and it existed before I ever described it in The Psychic Vampire Codex.
The lack of available information on dreamwalking exists in part because thereis no consistent nomenclature for the technique. There are accounts ofdreamwalking mixed in with experiments in astral projection, dream telepathy,and lucid dreaming, but they are rarely identified as such. Other experiences,such as deathbed visitations and even some instances of psychic attack, could beclassified as dreamwalking. Once again, however, these are rarely placed in acategory that is separate and distinct. Many occultists from the nineteenthcentury onward have written volumes on astral projection and out-of-bodyexperience, but if they address the intersection of these techniques withdreamwalking at all, it is only in passing. Of everything that has come down tous from the occult explosion of the nineteenth century, only one writer tackledthe idea of dreamwalking head-on. His name was Hugh Calloway. He is betterremembered by his pen name of Oliver Fox.
A WALK IN THE PARK
Hugh Calloway was a science and engineering student when he first began hisstudies of dreaming and the occult. Writing under the pen name Oliver Fox, hepublished a number of articles in the Occult Review and other esoteric journalsaround the beginning of the twentieth century. One afternoon, in the early1900s, Calloway proposed a curious experiment to two of his friends. Hesuggested that they attempt to arrange a meeting later that night—in theirdreams. For their meeting place, he chose Southampton Commons, a park that waswell-known to all three of them. The other two young men, recorded as Slade andElkington, agreed to make the attempt. So began one of the few recordedintentional adventures in the history of dreamwalking.
That night, Calloway dreamed of meeting with Elkington at the park. The twostayed around and chatted for some time, waiting for their third companion.Slade, however, never made an appearance. As they lingered in the dream-aspectof Southampton Commons, both Calloway and Elkington commented on Slade'sabsence. After a while, they grew tired of waiting, and left.
Calloway felt the experiment had been a success, and recorded his experiencesfor future readers. He contacted Elkington, and learned that his friend not onlyremembered dreaming of the Commons, he also recalled greeting Callowayremembered the distinct absence of Slade and how they both had commented on thisin the dream.
Slade, for his part, felt the experiment had been a failure. When Callowaycontacted him, he asserted that he had not dreamed at all that night. As far asElkington and Calloway were concerned, this explained his absence at the park.As tantalizing as this little dream rendezvous was, Calloway writes that he wasnever able to reproduce it.
The young man remembered as Oliver Fox remains one of the few occultists toexperiment with dreamwalking alongside his betterknown work on astralprojection. Most other occultists of his era preferred to explore the distantreaches of the astral plane, returning to tell vivid tales of their visits tothe Akashic Records and the hallowed halls of the Ascended Masters. In manyways, it is easier to convince readers of extended forays into the astral realmthan it is to convince them that one can travel to equally "real" places throughdreams.
But this is the fundamental premise of dreamwalking: on some level, thedreamspace is real. It is not real in the sense that the physical world it real,but it is certainly as real as the astral planes described by writers likeMadame Blavatsky and Dion Fortune. Like the astral planes, the dreamspace is asubjective reality. As much as it is a place we can go to, it is also a placethat we shape with out hopes, desires, and fears. Not all dreams lead to thisdreamspace, but the very act of dreaming opens up a gate that one can harness inorder to enter this other realm of being. Because everyone dreams, even if theydon't remember it, all of humanity can pass through the Gates of Dream and enterinto the dreamspace. Skilled dreamwalkers do this intentionally, harnessing thistwilight realm of shared imagery to communicate over long distances, reachingout to friends and family members in order to share an interaction that feels asreal and immediate as anything carried out face-to-face in the waking world.
THE GOLDEN FLEECE
In the ancient world, it was believed that the realm of dreams connected themortal world to the realm of the gods. Because of this, dreams were seen as theprimary method by which the gods communicated with mortal men. In accordancewith this belief, the kings of ancient Sumeria would ascend to the tops of theirziggurats and await a sacred dream that revealed the divine will. Some of theearliest known records of this kind of divine dreaming are clay cylinders thattell the story of King Gudea, ruler of Lagash, who sought the god Nin- Girsu indreams. The Sumerian cylinders date to about 2200 B.C.E.
In Sumeria, contact with the gods through dreams was a privilege reserved forkings. By the time of the ancient Greeks, however, it was accepted that anyonecould communicate with gods or daimons through the dreamspace. In a practicecalled "dream incubation," people would travel from all over to famous shrinesand temples, seeking answers through dreams. These ancient dream-seekers wouldsleep in special dormitories, literally "sleeping houses," waiting for the godsto appear. In the most traditional method, the dreamer seeking counsel would layout a sacred sheepskin, make the appropriate sacrifices, and then lay down onthe sheepskin to go to sleep. A god, or a messenger of the gods, was thenbelieved to appear to the dreamer in sleep. If the person was sick, the godwould describe a cure for the illness. Others went to dream temples seekingadvice on everything from career paths to marriage arrangements. As aninteresting side note, the tale of Jason and the Golden Fleece is directlyrelated to this practice. The fleece that Jason was charged to recover was asacred sheepskin believed to be especially potent for this type of divination.
Dream incubation was not limited only to temples or shrines. A number of tombsin the ancient world were also considered ideal places to incubate. Theseincluded the tombs of the heroes Podalirius and Calchas in Apulia and the tombof Trojan War veteran Achilles in Asia Minor. In these places, it was the spiritof the dead hero that appeared in order to communicate with the sleeper.
Just as the realm of dreams was believed to be accessible from the realm of thegods, the ancient Greeks also believed that the spirits of the dead inhabited arealm that intersected with the dreamspace. This belief that the dead can travelthrough the realm of dreams is not limited purely to the ancient world. TibetanBuddhists developed a system called Dream Yoga that utilizes the similaritiesbetween the dreamspace and the Bardo, or spirit realm, to help a practitionerlearn how to navigate the afterlife. Here in the West, one of the most commonpsychic experiences recorded among modern men and women is the deathbedvisitation—a dream in which a loved one who has just passed away shows up to saygoodbye. All of these traditions suggest that the Gates of Death and the Gatesof Dream can both lead to the same place.
DEAD BUT DREAMING
Deathbed visitations are normally lumped in with ghostly phenomenon or withcases of proof of survival after death. However, they abide by all the rules ofdreamwalking, with the possible exception that the person initiating the contactis dead. There is a long-standing belief that, once we die, all the mysteries ofthe Universe are imparted to us. This belief is the foundation of medievalnecromancy, where magicians would conjure the spirits of the dead to lead themto buried treasure or to teach them secret wisdom that such individuals couldnever have known in life. Anyone who has dealt with spirits knows that the humandead do not, as a general rule, immediately ascend upon disincarnation. Quitethe contrary, most human spirits are, in death, exactly the way they were inlife, with the singular exception that they are no longer tied to a body.
That one small detail—the release from the physical body—has inspired the beliefthat death reveals some secret store of amazing wisdom to people. Deathcertainly seems to open up a whole host of abilities and perceptions. Ghostscommunicate through empathy and telepathy. When they travel, they do so purelyby an act of will, going from one place to another with little more than athought. They have an innate sense of energy and a potent ability to interactwith it. With sufficient effort, they can sometimes move physical objects. Theirmere presence can change the temperature in a room, and they can often achieve avariety of electromagnetic effects, causing lights to flicker, turningappliances on and off, and even influencing recording devices. And, of interestto ancient Greeks and everyone reading this book, ghosts can also use thedreamspace to appear and communicate with the living.
Ghosts can do all of these things because they are beings of spirit, and spiritis energy. The punch line to the joke is that we're all beings of energy. Theapparent difference in powers is not because ghosts have something we don't.Rather, the difference arises because they're lacking something that we have—aphysical body to distract them from their subtler, spiritual side.
The Greeks were close in seeing the dreamspace as a point of intersectionbetween the living and the dead, but their perception was a little skewed. Thedreamspace is a crossroads, but not because it is the only place where the deadcan cross over into the world of the living. In that space, spirits are stilljust beings of energy, no more or less "real" to us than they are in any otherspace. However, it is one of the few spaces where the living are also on equalfooting with the spirits, obliged to interact beyond the context of the physicalworld.
Every night, our physical bodies shut down, and we are free to roam the pathwaysof mind and spirit. Most dreamers never reach out beyond their own internalrealms, content to watch the play of images that results as their minds processinformation and experiences from the previous day. But we are all connected,even on the level of dreams. Psychologist Carl Jung observed this and called itthe "collective unconscious." His contemporary, Sigmund Freud, observed that themind is more receptive to psychic phenomenon in dreams. This is not to say thateach and every dream leads us outside of ourselves to the dreamspace, but thegate is there, should we choose to walk through it.
SONGS BEYOND THE GRAVE
My maternal grandfather was an arresting figure of six foot eight, with a hugebarrel chest and long rangy limbs. He was a man of many talents: a boxingchampion in World War II, he was also a gifted dancer and a musician. Although Idid not meet him until I was in my twenties, when we met, music was one of thethings we bonded over. He was delighted to learn that, like him, I sang andplayed piano. When he passed away in the summer of 2004, his keyboard was themost important thing that he left to me. I had sworn to him that I'd play it,but of course, life can get overwhelming at times. I do a lot of things, andalthough I love music, I don't always find the time that I should to play. So,eight months after grandfather's death, his keyboard was still languishing in acorner.
Music was a talent that grandfather and I shared. Magick was another. Althoughhe didn't always know what to call it, he worked magick every day of his life.As in music, he had no formal training in magick. He was gifted with somethinglike the magickal equivalent of perfect pitch. Once he decided he wanted to dosomething, that's all it took. There was no theory, no spells, and no fancyterms. He would simply work his "mind over matter" with the same ease andproficiency that he would reproduce a song on the piano after hearing it once.Knowing this, I should not have been surprised when he showed up in my dreams tohave a talk about the neglected keyboard.
The dream started out as exactly that—just a dream. I remember that it wasnight, and I was walking through a park in the city. I had come from a meetingof some sort and I was going to meet with some other people as a kind of followup.Both my point of origin and my point of destination were hazy, although theyheld great significance within the context of the dream. I think it all hadsomething to do with books at a university library, forbidden knowledge, andsome shadowy group of people seeking to uncover "the truth." That part of thedream seems trite, and might have had a lot to do with having read Dan Brown'sAngels and Demons not long before. These details are really irrelevant to theoverall experience, beyond the fact that they show that it started out as anordinary dream—symbolic, but hazy, a little disjointed, and filled with aprofound sense of meaning that becomes trite or elusive once it's translatedinto the waking world.
The thing that I recall most clearly is walking along the concrete path in thepark. The night sky overhead was covered with clouds, and there were no stars.It would have been very dark, but old-fashioned street lamps with frosted orbslit the way. It had to have been late fall in the dream because I could seetrees just beyond the reach of the light, their branches naked and black againstthe sky. Writing it out now, it sounds terribly ominous, but there was no senseof menace in the dream. I often walk alone at night, and I find such a scenerelaxing.
Time seemed to jump, as it so often does in dreams, and I found myself stillwalking along the same path, only now there was a building off to one side inthe trees. The building was huge, styled like an old cathedral, complete withstained glass windows. There was light pouring through the windows, and peoplewere going in and out of two big double doors on the side of the building. Iknew, with that strange logic we encounter in dreams, that this was where I wassupposed to meet up with the people I was going to see. I pulled my long camel-coloredcoat around me (a coat that I last owned in second or third grade), andheaded into the cathedral-like building.
The inside of the building was bustling with people. Most of the main floorseemed to be a restaurant. There were tables everywhere, with richly-dressedpatrons dining and sipping wine. I believe there was a fireplace against onewall, and everything was lit with candles or gaslight. The interior of the placehad that warm glow that only living flame can convey. From this perspective, Icould see the huge rose window that dominated the front of the building. It wasdone in rich blues and deep purples which, since it was dark out, looked almostblack against the night. As the plot of the dream went, there was someone here Iwas supposed to meet, apparently so we could discuss whatever mystery had beenuncovered at the university over dinner. I had just located his table and he wasintroducing me to two of his associates when something else captured myattention. This was a detail I had not noticed before, but when I did, it waslike every other aspect of the dream became two-dimensional and indistinct.
(Continues...)Excerpted from PSYCHIC DREAMWALKING by MICHELLE BELANGER. Copyright © 2006 Michelle Belanger. Excerpted by permission of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.