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Mark Twain’s Dream Excursions

“Waking I move slowly; but in my dreams my unhampered spiritualized body flies to the ends of the earth in a millionth of a second. Seems to - and I believe, does....

    "I do actually make immense excursions in my spiritualized person. I go into awful dangers...I go to unnamable places, I do unprincipled things; and every vision is vivid, every sensation - physical as well as moral - is real.”

- Mark Twain’s Notebook edited by Albert Bigelow Paine. New York: Harper & Bros., 1935, 350-1.

At the time he wrote this, Mark Twain was drafting his Letters to Satan and sketches for other books at Weggis (a Celtic name for The Place of the Ferrymen) on Lake Lucerne, where he began to emerge from the crushing despair that gripped him when the death of his beloved daughter Susy followed financial disaster. He now began to turn his dream life into a vital part of his work - drawing validation from William James's recently published Principles of Psychology.

 Dreaming his future wife’s number

 “I dreamed up a phone number and found my bride to be”

         --English cab driver David Brown, explaining how he first contacted the woman he             eventually married.

 English taxi driver David Brown had a heavy night at the pub and woke remembering nothing from his dreams, by his own account, except an eleven-digit mobile phone number. The number appeared as a clear visual image, and instead of fading quickly it kept “turning round and round” in his field of perception.

He wondered whether the number might be that of someone he had met at the pub but forgotten about.

He sent a text message saying, “Hi, did we meet last night?”

The message was received by Michele Kitson, who was just seventeen at the time and had no prior knowledge of David Brown. She was with her mother at the time, and they talked about the possible risks of talking to a stranger who had turned up in this way. But she called him back, liked the feel of the chat. They cyber-dated for a while, then finally arranged a meeting. They fell for each other, and Dave moved from his parents’ home in Middlesex to live with Michele and her parents in Cambridge. They got married in March, 2007 – five years after the mobile phone number flashed in Dave’s head – and honeymooned in Goa. In the wedding photos, they are a striking couple: Dave (now 24) is 6’7”, Michele (now 22) only 5’4”.

Michele told British reporters, “It was not really the way I expected to meet my future husband but it is definitely a story for the grandchildren.”

Dave is hoping the next numbers he dreams will be the winning lottery numbers.

Sources:

“I called the phone number I saw in my sleep and married the girl of my dreams” by Emma Donnan, The People (UK), April 8, 2007.

“I dreamed up a phone number and found my bride to be” by Beth Hale, Daily Mail (UK) April 8, 2007.

Civil War Dreamers 

“If this man gets a dream at you he’ll find you sure”

 -          Richmond, Virginia Daily Dispatch on November 24,1863

It’s well known that some major protagonists in the American Civil War were dreamers. Abraham Lincoln received dream visitations from his son Willie (who died at 12 from pneumonia), and had a recurring dream of being adrift in a boat without oars that he associated with major shifts on the battlefield (and last dreamed the morning of his death). Famously, within two weeks of his assassination, Lincoln dreamed that he saw a body laid out in state in the White House and was told by a guard “the President has been assassinated”. He believed that all dreams are significant, and that the best dream interpreters are “children of nature” – simple people who live close to the rhythms of the Earth. Lincoln was not shy of telling his dreams to generals and at cabinet meetings.

At the time of the Civil War, there was still a culture of dreaming in North America. That’s apparent in the legend that General “Little Mac” McClellan, Lincoln’s first army chief, had a dream or vision in which George Washington appeared to him and showed him the Rebel positions on a map, enabling him to save the capital. This is almost certainly a piece of pious propaganda (though some writers on dreams have been gulled); the interesting thing about it is that you don’t invent a big dream for political advantage unless you are in a society that takes dreams very seriously.

The story of dreaming in the Civil War goes deeper. Dream trackers – people who could see accurately across time and space – were respected by the military on both sides and were put to use. We could call them nineteenth-century “remote viewers” except that this is an unnecessary anachronism and the best of the dream trackers seem to have done much better than the Pentagon-trained RV guys.

There is a highly instructive example reported in the Richmond, Virginia Daily Dispatch on November 24,1863. It involves a Confederate soldier who had the gift of tracking deserters to their hideouts. In this particular incident, the dreamer located a deserted who had been well-hidden in a smokehouse, secretly fed by his wife, for five weeks. Here is the original report:

Hid Away in the Smokehouse

One day last week one of Captain Shannon's men fell asleep, and while in this mood "dreamed" where a deserter could be found. He told his Captain of his dream and he immediately sent a squad of men to the place where the young soldier dreamed he was, and found him. Well, reader, where do you think he was? He was in a hole or cellar, all hid away, and things such as barrels, boxes, &c., plied up over him, in his smoke house. There was a small space left open through which his wife fed him. When taken by the cavalry, he begged them to let him see his children, that he had not seen them in five weeks. This is what we call running the thing in the ground. This is not the only deserter that this same soldier has dreamt of and found. We would here say to the deserters (in the way of parentheses) who are in caves and close places, that you just might as well come along and report, because if this man gets a dream at you he'll find you sure.--Southern Motive.

 Dreaming Up Bouncy Sidewalks

 "In my dream, sidewalks were all bending and twisting, but there was no cracking. I woke up and said, 'Wow! Elastic sidewalks! I wonder how we can make them?’”

       -  Richard Valeriano, Santa Monica street inspector

For two decades, Richard Valeriano’s job as a Santa Monica street inspector included checking for damage to sidewalks caused by the spreading roots of the city’s shade trees. Broken concrete is expensive to repair, and a frequent source of injuries to pedestrians. Work crews in Santa Monica were being sent out with chain saws to cut down mature ficus trees.

One night after work Valeriano dreamed of bouncy, flexible sidewalk that solved the problem. He did not know how to enact the dream until his health club, during remodeling, installed rubber tiles as flooring. This inspired Valeriano to look for a company willing to develop a prototype for rubber sidewalk. The tiles were made from recycled auto tires, and the city of Santa Monica tested them by having bicyclists, roller-bladers and women in stiletto heels, among others, do their worst.

Now rubber sidewalk is being tested in sixty American cities. It’s saving the shade trees, and pedestrians’ footing. Rubber walkways were installed in April 2006 around the willow oaks on Rhode Island Avenue in Washington D.C. The kids like the bounce – though it’s not so easy to carve your initials or draw on the pavement in chalk.

Sources: Los Angeles Times  July 14, 2001; Washington Post July 2, 2006.

Iceland Dreaming

“If you don’t dream, don’t bother to call on me again.”

–         Thyri Haraldsdóttir, an Icelandic woman, to a medieval king of Denmark who wanted to marry her.

 Iceland has always been a country of dreamers. Dreaming is important in the Icelandic sagas and in the V öluspa even the gods go to wise women for help with their dreams. A Gallup survey of 1,200 Icelanders in 2003 found that 72 percent found meaning in their dreams, and many reported dreaming the future and sharing dreams regularly within their families. The Icelandic language distinguishes vital categories of significant dreams, such as dreams of the future (berdreymi) and dream visions (draumspa).

    The story of Thyri Haraldsdóttir, from the sagas, is a beautiful example of how dreaming can make us wiser, and opens the way of the heart. Thyri [written in Icelandic as Þyri] was the daughter of an earl in Iceland. She was a dreamer who saw far and deep into the nature of things, and her father consulted her on all important affairs.

Gormur, king of Denmark, wanted to marry Thyri and asked her father for her hand. The earl said that he would leave his daughter to decide for herself, “since she is much wiser than I am.”

Thyri told her royal suitor to go home and build himself a new house, just big enough to sleep in, where no house had stood before. In this place he must sleep alone for three nights, and pay close attention to his dreams. Then he must send a messenger to her to report on his dreams.

“If you don’t dream, don’t bother to call on me again,” Thyri told him firmly.

Gormur remembered his dreams, and the content seems to have satisfied Thyri, because she consented to marry him and is became the wisest of the queens of Denmark. Through dreaming, she helped the king to scout the future and read the true factors at work behind the surface of events. Decisions of state were based on these dreams.

 Source: The story of Thyri Haraldsdóttir is in the version of Ólafs Saga Tryggvasónar in the 14th century Icelandic Flateyjarbók. I am indebted to Valgerður Hjördis Bjarnadóttir, a gifted Icelandic dreamer and scholar who is helping to revive the ancient dreamways, for bringing this wonderful story to my attention, and for the translation on which this summary is based.

Dream Travel by an Early Christian Father

 “I shall appear tonight to her in a dream, and then she must not still be determined to see my face in the flesh.” 

-          John of Lycopolis, c. 385

 John of Lycopolis (d. 394) was one of the most celebrated saints of the early church in Egypt. He was famed for his austerities, living in a cave and eating only fruit consumed after sundown. He was believed to have great psychic gifts, and advised emperors and generals on the outcome of future battles and political conflicts. He was attributed “mighty works” of healing and prophecy.

He was fully aware of the ways in which psychic energy can work outside – and on – the physical body, and of the reality of dream travel and dream visitations.

John was about ninety when a Roman tribune implored him to see his wife. She was anxious about a possibly dangerous journey by river and wanted the holy man’s blessing. John had not seen a woman in forty years, and refused to see this one. The tribune’s wife was persistent, swearing that she would not embark on her journey without John’s blessing. When the tribune reported this to John, the desert father said, “I shall appear tonight to her in a dream, and then she must not still be determined to see my face in the flesh.” The tribune reported this to his wife.

That night, John came to her in a dream. He told her modestly, “I am a sinful man and of like passions with you.” He added “Nevertheless I have prayed for you and for your husband’s household,  that you may walk in peace according to your faith.”

The tribune’s wife woke up and related the dream to her husband, who confirmed John’s appearance as she had perceived him. She sent her husband to thank him, convinced she had received a real blessing.

City of the Wolf (or Jackal)

It is significant that this account of a dream visitation by an early Christian father involves a former cult center of one of the Egyptian deities most closely associated with astral travel. In Greek, Lycopolis means “City of the Wolf”. The “wolf” in question is the jackal- (or dog-) headed god Wepwawet, whose name means “Opener of the Ways”.

Wepwawet is similar to Anubis in both attributes and functions. Both are divine gatekeepers and psychomps – soul-guides – for both the living and the dead. In early times, Wepwawet was a god of Upper (or southern) Egypt while Anubis was worshipped in Lower (or southern) Egypt; later, they became syncretized. Special to Wepwawet is the function of serving as a scout and bodyguard for the pharaoh and his generals. His image appears on the shedshed, the battle standard of Upper Egypt, and he is often depicted in battle gear carrying a mace and a bow.

So it is interesting that John of Lycopolis is described as having been consulted by generals on the outcome of battles, and as having accurately forecast the results of the Emperor Theodosius’ struggles with opposing armies and rebels.

The Brothers from the Mount of Olives

The primary source on John of Lycopolis and his dream visitation is The History of the Monks of Egypt, an anonymous account of a journey by a group of seven brothers from a monastery on the Mount of Olives to the desert fathers in Egypt in the 380s. The author does not expound on the past history of Lycopolis, whose former residents included the great experiential philosopher Plotinus as well as a jackal-headed god. But the world of the Monks of Egypt is a magical landscape where ascetic superheroes work miracles, do battle with evil spirits – and operate on the astral as well as the physical plane. The desert holy men live in a separate reality. “Some of them do not even know that another world exists on earth or that evil is found in cities.” Yet “it is clear to all who dwell there that through them, the world is kept in being.”

In his conversations with the brothers from Jerusalem, John attributes his ability to see into the future, receive direct revelation and perform “mighty works” to his efforts to master the passions and achieve single-minded contemplation of divine things, which has made him “a friend of God”.

He speaks of the power of images, and their ability to take palpable form. He tells a cautionary tale of “the image of a beautiful woman” that is sent by the Tempter to seduce a holy man in his cave, and is so real to him he tries to “mount her like a stallion” – at which point she escapes him, “slipping away like a shadow”, and the air is filled with mocking laughter. That ascetic gave up and returned to the world.

Source: The Lives of the Desert Fathers: The Historia Monachorum in Aegypto. Translated by Norman Russell. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Cistercian Studies, 1981.

 A 16th Century Spanish Noblewoman's Dreams Survive the Spanish Inquisition

“The registers of Lucrecia’s dreams represent a source without parallel in the annals of European history.” – Richard L. Kagan, Lucrecia’s Dreams: Politics and Prophecy in Sixteenth-century Spain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

The archives of the notorious Spanish inquisition contain 415 transcripts of dreams reported by a young Spanish noblewoman called Lucrecia de León. When the inquisitor asked her at the audiencia in Toledo in 1590, “Why have you been arrested?”, she responded, “Because of the dreams that are written.” The Inquisition charged her with “inventing” dreams that were profoundly embarrassing to church and state.

Lucrecia’s dreams offer an amazing window into vitally important but woefully underreported aspects of history: into the lives of women, and above all into the experience of dreaming across time and cultures. Lucrecia was a genuine vidente, or seer, and her main way of knowing what was going on – across time and behind closed doors – was to dream her way in. Sometimes her Lion Man would appear, holding a lion on a leash, and carry her through the air to witness a private scandal unfolding in the royal palace, or across the English Channel to eavesdrop on a conference of Spain’s enemies in the home of Sir Francis Drake. Information she acquired in this way was sometimes highly accurate. Thus she dreamed the defeat of the Spanish Armada a year before it set sail for England in 1588. She terrified one of her scribes by describing the interior of his monastic cell – a place she had never visited in an ordinary way – in exact detail.

If we study Lucrecia’s story with any sensitivity, we may intuit that as a young woman with normal appetites and aspirations, she would most have liked to have been dreaming her way to a splendid lover or a suitable marriage. But she was soon thrust into a role in the political – and even the military scene – that was unsought, even though she may have found it flattering. Alerted to her clairvoyant gifts, the powerful Mendoza clan tried to use her as an asset in their jockeying for power. Clerics were sent to her family home to record her dreams every morning, while an armed and mounted courier waited to carry the transcripts to the Don Alonso de Mendoza. She was quizzed on specific details, down to the precise length of the lace cuffs of a certain courtier (for identification purposes). Sketches were made of buildings and people she had dreamed. Some of her dreams were even turned into traveling theatre among some of Madrid’s elite. Mendoza prepared an index of her dreams and cross-referenced images from them.

Many of her dreams showed the king, Philip II, as a disastrous and unworthy ruler, and Lucrecia’s arrest was prompted more by the palace than the church. She was jailed and eventually tortured – but not executed – and vanished from history, pregnant. The best source available on her life and dreams in English is a scholarly work by Richard L. Kagan that would be better if the author were more familiar with dreamwork and the experience of dream travel. This would have helped him to penetrate the editing and bowdlerization effected by Lucrecia’s transcribers, who no doubt twisted some of the reports to serve their own agendas. When her full story is disinterred, it will prove to be a fascinating and vitally important chapter in the history of women and the history of dreaming. The Spanish text of Lucrecia’s dreams is in Maria Zambrano, Edison Simons and Juan Blazquz, Sueños y procesos de Lucrecia de León, Madrid: Editorial Tecnos, 1987.

 An early bishop affirms the authority of dream experience

“In divination by dreams, each of us is his own instrument. It is not possible to desert our oracle even if we wanted to do so. A tyrant could never enjoin us not to gaze into dreams, unless he could banish sleep from his kingdom… [The dream oracle] “repudiates neither race, nor age, nor condition, nor calling…She is initiator and initiated, announcing good tidings …and informing against the worst so we can guard against it and repel it before it happens.    “Dream divination is present to all, the good genius to every man.”

 -- Synesius of Cyrene, De insomniis (“On Dreams”), c 400

 Synesius of Cyrene became bishop of Cyrene in north Africa in 409. He was a gifted Neoplatonist philosopher and polymath who had studied with Hypatia, the celebrated woman scientist, in Alexandria.

His views on dreaming and synchronicity reflect deep personal experience and his desire to empower dreamers as the final authorities on their own dreams and their own lives is almost shockingly modern.

He insisted on the need to keep a journal in order to make the most of our dreams, and actually advised keeping twin journals, one for dreams of the night, the other for incidents of the day – rightly understanding the importance of tracking patterns of symbol and synchronicity in waking life.

He despised dream dictionaries, as popular in his time as in ours: “I laugh at all those books and think them of little use.”

He strongly counseled that we must not assign the interpretation of dreams to “experts” other than the dreamer: “It would be shameful for those who have lived ten years beyond adolescence to stand in need of any other diviner.”

He wrote of how dreams carry us into higher worlds, and put us in direct contact with the God we can talk to. He hinted that the road of dreams is the road of the soul, on both sides of death, noting that “the soul’s way of life in another world is similar to the imaginings of the dream condition.”

In a beautiful and rousing passage, Synesius described how through dreams God sometimes makes us “fruitful with his own courage”:

 "It is written, ‘Others even in their dreams He made fruitful with his courage.’ Do you see? One man learns while awake, another while asleep. But in the waking state man is the teacher, while it is God who makes the dreamer fruitful with His own courage, so that learning and attaining are one and the same. Now to make fruitful is even more than to teach.”

He shares many examples of how dreams guided his own life in every field, from writing books to success in the hunt (he was a keen huntsman in early life) to escaping plots and conspiracies, to rising to intimacy with the rulers of the Roman Empire. Dreams “helped me in the management of public office in the best interest of the cities, and finally placed me, more undaunted than was ever any Greek, on terms of intimacy with the Emperor.”

Synesius deserves to be much better remembered, as a great dream teacher from the world of the early Church, one who spoke eloquently against those who seek to stand between people and the direct experience of the sacred. He wrote about dreams not on the authority of his excellent education, nor his contacts with the great, nor any high office that he held. Synesius speaks to us across the centuries with the authority of experience, understanding – as do all true dreamers – that the best guides to dreaming are frequent flyers who travel far and deep on its roads.

Yeats on Death and Dreaming

William Butler Yeats was one of the greatest poets of the modern era, and a magus of the Western way, one of the leading figures in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. His driving ambition, throughout much of his later life, was to produce a Western Book of the Dead, containing a description of the soul’s journey “a little before conception and a little after death.”

In the two versions of his fascinating, difficult book A Vision, he reports his discovery that the soul’s transitions after death are a lot like dreaming – and that in dreaming, the living have frequent and natural interaction with the departed and travel some of the same roads. Yeats concluded that the main difference between the dream state during physical life and the dream state after death is that prior to death the soul remains in “exclusive association with one body.”

In the 1925 edition of A Vision, Yeats made his simplest and most important observation about the connection between death and dreaming: “In sleep we enter upon the same life as that we enter between death and birth.” He explains that in dreaming, the spirit may travel through some of the levels of being that are accessible after death. In rare cases, moving beyond the astral plane, the spirit may discover “a new center of coherence” in the celestial body. So dreaming may be an exact rehearsal for the progression of the spirit after death as it gradually disentangles itself from lower energy bodies to move to higher planes.

In the 1937 edition of A Vision, Yeats develops the provocative thesis that our dreams of the departed are frequently the result of the departed reaching for us. Yeats describes an early phase in the after-death transition that he calls “Dreaming Back,”  through which the departed seek to review, understand and resolve the issues of the life experience that has ended.

With the help of “teaching spirits” a soul in this phase “may not merely dream through the consequences of its acts but amend them, bringing this or that to the attention of the living.” During this phase the dead often appear to the living in dreams: “It is from the Dreaming Back of the dead . . . that we get the imagery of ordinary sleep. Much of a dream’s confusion comes from the fact that the image belongs to some unknown person, whereas emotion, names, language belong to us alone.”

 References: W.B. Yeats, A Vision: An Explanation of Life Founded upon the Writings of Giraldus and upon Certain Doctrines Attributed to Kusta Ben Luka. London: T. Werner Laurie, 1925.———. A Vision. London: Macmillan, 1937.

Robert Moss explores Yeats’s explorations of the afterlife and describes his own visionary relationship with the poet in his forthcoming book  The Dreamer’s Book of the Dead (Destiny Books, October 2005).

Actor Jamie Foxx on dream guidance from his grandmother

On February 27, 2005, Jamie Foxx won the Best Actor Academy Award night for his portrayal of Ray Charles, in the film, Ray.  Recounted in The New York Times the next day:

A joyous Mr. Foxx, 37, tearfully recalled how his grandmother –“my first acting teacher” - told him how to carry himself, to "act like you got some sense" and beat him when he did not.

"Now she talks to me in my dreams," he said, breaking down in tears. "And I can't wait to go to sleep tonight because we got a lot to talk about. I love you."

John Lennon's songs inspired by dreams

 "The best songs are the ones that come to you in the middle of the night
and you have to get up and write them down, so you can go back to sleep."

                                - John Lennon

Like many musicians and composers, John Lennon frequently received his inspiration in dreams or hypnagogic states. He told his biographer Frederic Seaman that he felt these "inspired" songs were usually far superior to "formula songs," as he characterized many of those that he and Paul McCartney had produced in the early years of the Beatles.  "Writing formula songs is like painting by numbers." 

Source: Frederic Seaman, The Last Days of John Lennon. New York: Random House, 1996, 171

Lucille Ball’s career guidance from a dream of Carole Lombard  

“Everyone warned Desi and me that we were committing career suicide, by giving up highly paid movie and band commitments to go for broke on TV. But it was either working together or good-bye marriage!  Ever try being married seven years out of ten by long-distance call and wire? Then I dreamed about Carole Lombard.  She was wearing a very smart suit Carole always dressed very beautifully--and she said, `Take a chance, honey.  Give it a whirl!'   After that, I knew FOR CERTAIN that we were doing the right thing."

                           -  Lucille Ball

Lucille Ball was devastated when her good friend Carole Lombard died in a plane crash in January 1942. But their friendship continued after Carole’s death and – as Lucille explains in the quote – Carole gave her friend the confidence to take the risk and shine as TV’s “Lucy.” At a party, she told Clark Gable that his long-deceased wife kept turning up in her dreams to offer very helpful advice.  Lucille recalled that the actor "stared, gulped, and plowed off in a daze." This is a fine example of a departed friend reappearing in dreams to offer counsel and encouragement.

Source: Warren G. Harris, Lucy and Desi, the Legendary Love Story of Television's Most Famous Couple.  New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.

Elvis dreamed of his departed twin

"I always felt there was something missing inside me.  I could hear my brother talking to me inside and I'd dream about him.  Dreams tell us truths we gotta' be smart enough to interpret." 

- Elvis Presley

Elvis Presley was born an identical twin.  His twin, the first to come through the birth canal, was stillborn. Elvis’ remarks suggest that he had personal experience that the departed speak to us in our dreams, something confirmed by a huge number of contemporary dreamers but still denied or neglected by many of our mainstream psychologists.

Source: Video, Elvis, the complete story 1996, Passport Video, 10520 Magnolia, Blvd.  North Hollywood, CA 91601