Tag Archives: dreaming

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Keeping Up the Meds

I fell into the trap of assuming that a little meditation is as good as a lot. But I’ve rediscovered recently that a lot is so much better than a little.

I’d fallen into the habit of snatching 20-40 minutes a day (max), usually skipping it altogether at the weekends. I was labouring under a fantasy that where meditation was concerned, I was done, and it had no surprises left.

What switched me back on was a simple craving for some peace. So I sat for a whole hour, twice in a day, and noticed how much easier it was to do the same the following day. This was the first thing I’d forgotten: more meditation gives you more energy (to expend on whatever you wish.)

I’d also assumed that, after fourth path, meditators no longer experience the cycles of insight. Yet after sitting again for 1-2 hours per day, rather than 20 minutes, it was easier to see that they do – it’s just that the cycles can turn quite fast. Sitting occasionally for 20 minutes simply isn’t conducive to a firm grip on where we are.

Then I had the shock of my life when I ran into a fruition! Conscious thought faded and I was watching my mind forming a dream. I recognised it as one I’d dreamt a few weeks before, yet it was unfolding all over again from its beginning, in real time. I was not remembering the dream, but experiencing it over again, except also watching it fully conscious. This blurring of thinking and dreaming, remembering and experiencing, changed the usual mental landscape into something completely alien and indescribable, and – pop – a fruition. The afterglow lasted a couple of days.

Here’s how a typical one-hour sit generally plays out for me.

To begin with, there’s awareness of the broken mechanism of self. The act of looking fails to join with any trace of a looker. Looking is like scanning a mobius strip of experience, failing ever to find its non-existent other side.

Yet this is only ‘failure’ from the perspective of the looker – and he’s not to be found anyway. So eventually the ‘brokenness’ yields to what is truly the background to experience, which remains uncreated and boundless. This I’ve come to regard as the living, working presence of the Holy Spirit.

Concentration and mental quietness can heighten the connection, bringing into awareness experiential insights. These might include the compassion inherent in existence: how everything is allowed to arise from nothing, and vanish back into it without trace; or how God is that which is absolutely unlimited by Itself, which makes It so good, It even accommodates that which isn’t good at all.

When it occurs to me that I’m not as focused as I could be, or that the mind is wandering, then concentration is exposed as a fraud. Because if ‘this’ isn’t already what I’m trying to make my focus, then just what the hell else do I suppose there is? The whole concept of ‘concentration’ is senseless!

This realisation quickly puts the kibosh on thought. It kills ‘intentional’ mental activity stone dead. Internal chatter falls silent. Dreams still arise, but can be watched consciously. I might even fall asleep, but can be conscious of sleeping.

If awareness remains alert, without lapsing into a murky identification with the content of dreams, eventually the dreams, too, fade out. What’s left is the milky-blue radiance of an impersonal consciousness with no content or commentary. (Which is rather relaxing.)

I might stumble across any of these insights or states, or stumble out again. Towards the end, usually I begin to feel bored, restless, or hit some other form of suffering – because that’s what happens when human beings sit dead-still on their arses for a while.

As the suffering grows louder than other sensations, I turn my mind into it. Or if I find my mind turning away, I turn my mind into how it’s turning away. If it becomes unbearable, I turn my mind into its being unbearable. Because if ‘unbearable’ can be looked at, how is it unbearable? And if it can’t be looked at, then how do I know ‘unbearable’ is what it is?

There’s no escape from consciousness. Always here. Always effortless.

Finally, meditating for longer seems to re-open the gate to paranormal experiences. The 13th of this month was the anniversary of my father’s death. He was also born on the 13th, and had moved into a house numbered 13 a few months before he died.

So I sat for an hour on the 13th this month, before it was light. Nothing remarkable happened, and I wasn’t expecting anything. At the end of the session, my stopwatch sounded – but didn’t give its usual 20 beeps. It got just over half-way, then crapped out. When I picked it up, it was flashing ‘12:00’ and had reset. It had never done this before and I assumed the batteries had died. But, after resetting the correct time, it has worked fine since.

I wish I’d mentally counted the beeps, as I often do. Something tells me I would’ve reached 13. A coincidence, of course. But meaningful coincidences seem to come a little thicker and faster when I’m putting in more time on the cushion.

No prizes for guessing my resolution for 2013. Happy New Year, everybody!

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On Dreams and Architecture

Appian Way

Giovanni Battista Piranesi, ‘Appian Way’, frontispiece for ‘La antichità romane’ (1756).

As I lay awake, I began to feel
that my body’s image from my body
had detached. It’s not entirely pleasant,
this sensation, yet tends to descend
only if I’ve slept too deep for too long
which, these days, is a sure-fire guarantee
I’m not affected by it too often.
This morning when it came – or, namely, when
the mind’s own notion of its body
had stronger than the body grown in strength,
with eyes shut I made an experiment:
moving the mental body a quarter-turn.
When this I’d done, it felt so fully real
(as if I’d made the movement actually)
another virtual quarter-turn I took,
so in my mind my head was resting now
where physically should have been my feet.
Set neurophysiology aside!
Always, in this state, imagination rules.
For of the brain, we have no direct sense;
but, of the mind, it is experience!
Far be it from my intent to argue
that ‘the soul’ departs to disport abroad;
or even that a portion of the brain
(the part, perhaps, that bears within itself
a picture of the body’s pose and motion)
has o’erstepped its mark at times like these,
assuming prominence more than usual.
All I know is this: that having turned about
in the bed an imaginary body,
I opened now imaginary eyes
and found a room not unlike that recalled
from childhood, where my younger sister slept
when we both were kids – excepting its size:
the ceiling high, the walls widely parted,
which – for a child’s room – gave a curious feel
of uncluttered and more than ample space.
A remembered room, so, remembered too,
its bigness perhaps by my childish eyes.
I knew full well that I was in a dream
and stared about in wonder, to discern
what light I saw by. I knew with eyes shut
in reality I lay. And yet I saw.
What kind of seeing is this, lit somehow
by lightless impressions from inside?
Of objects there are none within to see,
nor of reflected rays to see them by.
It is my habit now when in this state
to make a thorough survey of what’s sensed,
inspecting how this seeming-seeing fools
us with a semblance of solid things.
Under applied attention it unweaves.
Look for colour and you will find none; look
for touch, there’s none there either to be found;
nor taste, nor sound, nor smell; yet it presents
as something having each and all of these,
but in the nature of the thought of them,
rather than external things revealed.
In the mysterious night-world of sleep
seeming is semblance enough for being;
light’s mere concept is enough to see by;
memory’s furniture fills the void;
and body is surplus to requirement.
Needed only are body’s sensations
to make a sense of separateness between
impressions from one side or another.
Is mind a place? Milton’s Satan thought so
and built of it a Hell in Heaven’s despite.
But had he looked at what he took for mind,
and paused before assuming it as his,
he might have glimpsed the gaps between the weave
and grasped the awesome truth: that even here,
in our deepest, most interior recess,
we’re no more with ourselves than anywhere,
for self is God’s only, spending, spending,
promiscuously always and forever.

Interior of the Patheon.

Piranesi, ‘Interior of the Patheon’.

Architecture is human habitat,
but in imagination comes to speak
of what is given and of what surrounds.
Buildings in a dream perform no function,
need no plans nor labour of erection,
so, freed from all material constraint,
they can assume forms close to an ideal.
The cities of my dreams throng with structures
cleaving to imaginary purposes.
Gasometers or giant cisterns haunt
the skylines of these imagined townscapes.
Beneath a columned dome last night I walked,
with distant birdsong in autumnal light,
between funeral monuments interspersed
with landscaped gardens, waterfalls, fountains –
yet it was the quality of that light
which seized my heart tightest by its beauty:
golden radiance, seeming to collect
in the porcelain summit of the dome
then raining down, like diagonal mist,
onto the shining tombs and epitaphs.
I stared until light became thought only,
growing in beauty as it grew unreal.

Ruins of a sepulchre on the Appian Way

Piranesi, ‘Ruins of a sepulchre on the Appian Way’ (1764).

Thoughts by their nature arise un-unique.
To re-think is to think exactly again.
In dreams, place partakes of this nature.
On having woken, often there’s a sense
we visited nowhere new but returned
to an instance of a former idea.
‘The same place, but a different guise’ is
common in dreams, impossible awake.

There is a vast clock tower, its timepiece
long-broken, or sounding spasmodically.
With weeds the rusted face is overgrown.
Underfoot, debris crunches as we climb
mouldering concrete stairs to its apex.
The dim, dank air is musty with a scent
familiar, of old, abandoned spaces
that dates back somehow to the seventies:
a place in the old house, under the stairs,
where my parents hung coats and stored the shoes,
so much in use and never decorated.
Why the tower should smell like this inside
I cannot fathom, yet each time I dream
of it,in one of a myriad forms,
this odour is a constant that betrays
something hinting at commonality –
but what it might be lurks in mystery.

Ancient altar, with other ruins

Piranesi, ‘Ancient altar, with other ruins’.

There is one other place I’ve visited
so many times, I cannot hope to count.
So often and so many times, perhaps
of all the dreams I’ve dreamt this is the one
my mind tends towards above all others.
A dual place it is, of two clear parts:
linked cemeteries, one old, one new.
The newer one is bright and clean and fine.
The dead lie hidden, decently arrayed.
It’s modern, or else sometimes dating back
to the nineteenth century: regal, sombre,
melancholy – for sure – but well-controlled,
unlike its older twin, which breeds nightmares.
Ancient and decayed, the soil here threatens
to crumble, crack, like mouldy honeycomb,
exposing rancid vaults, mottled coffins,
or – worse – the putrid freight that hides inside.
This place, sometimes, deep-most at its core
resolves to an effigy of decay:
a hunk of oozing scalp, with hair attached;
or severed member, nothing else beside;
as if the place were pointed all at that.
Often, in the prelude, I am firstly
by the newer graveyard, where all is well,
except – already – a faint foreboding.
Inevitably, mischance will intrude:
a wrong turning, a moment’s confusion,
or sometimes an ineluctable pull,
collecting me into the old graveyard’s
slow-motion aura of threat and terror.
‘It dates back to the eighteenth century.’
Prosaic-sounding, yet inside a dream
details can unlock a store of horror.
A serif font ne’er did anyone harm,
yet in the chiselled script upon these stones
the evil genius of this place cavorts.
In curlicue and italic flourish
a brooding evil grins malevolent.
Duped by this place, or having stumbled
within its orbit by my own neglect,
the machine-like demon that here presides
let’s fly the shutter, and up it snaps,
and behold: oozing death and rank decay!
So predictable, that over the years
dreaming is become like recognising,
and as or just before the trap springs shut
often I wake myself by will alone.

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Where the Dead Live

Fast forward to the moment of your death: as the body fails, with a varying degree of rapidity, your perceptual and cognitive faculties shut down. Seeing stops. Then tasting, hearing, smelling and feeling. So too, thinking. In Buddhist traditions, supposedly hearing goes last. And at some point, presumably, consciousness.

But don’t worry too much about that last one – consciousness vanishes for a good part of every night. Sometimes, during the day as well. It comes and it goes and is no more ‘you’ than anything that arises within it. Even with consciousness completely gone, we wake up in the morning and recall stuff that seemed to have happened. Weird stuff, often. We call this stuff that happens to us in the absence of consciousness, dreaming.

Heraclitus said, ‘The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own’ (Fragment 89). Because dreams are so private and unique, we are – in a sense – closest to ourselves in the absence of consciousness. But what is this intensely personal stuff that continues to unfold in us, even in the absence of consciousness and volition? One word for it is karma.

The karmic traces are like photographs that we take of each experience. Any reaction of grasping or aversion to any experience… is like snapping a photo. In the darkroom of our sleep we develop the film. Which images are developed on a particular night will be determined by the secondary conditions recently encountered. Some images or traces are burned deeply into us by powerful reactions while others, resulting from superficial experiences, leave only a faint residue… We string them together like a film, as this is the way our psyches work to make meaning, resulting in a narrative constructed from conditioned tendencies and habitual identities: the dream. (Tenzin 1998: 32-3)

So claims Tibetan Buddhist dream yogi, Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche. Before we write this off as exotic claptrap, consider the similar conclusions of a western dream yogi. Sigmund Freud preferred the term ‘unconscious wish’ (Freud 1976: 200-213 [Ch. III]) instead of ‘reaction of grasping or aversion’; Tenzin’s ‘secondary conditions recently encountered,’ Freud called ‘the day’s residues’ (Freud 1976: 247-76 [Ch. V (A)]); and ‘the way our psyches work to make meaning’ was precisely what Freud believed had been uncovered through his exploration of dreams, to which he dedicated the rest of his career. (He preferred to describe it as, ‘the dream-work’ [Freud 1976: 381-651 (Ch. VI)].)

The end of consciousness is not the end of karma. Indeed, in the absence of consciousness, karma thrives. But what about the end of life? ‘What dreams may come?’ Is death the end of karma too?

I’ve used my limited abilities as a lucid-dreaming yogi to interrogate angelic and demonic entities, and to scry the Enochian aethyrs. In December last year, my father unexpectedly and traumatically died. Since then, whilst grieving for him with other members of my family, cautiously and carefully I’ve tried to use dream yoga to explore his vicissitudes after death.

28th February. To see him was lovely. A vivid sense of his presence. He sat in the chair watching television. Yet as soon as interaction was attempted, things turned problematic. He stood against the wall, frozen and immobile. No response. His eyes opened and stared blankly, like they had in the intensive care unit.

6th March. I went into the kitchen and he was getting ready for work. He looked younger and healthy, but seemed stressed. ‘You’re looking well,’ I said to him. ‘You know that’s because you’re dead now, don’t you?’ He seemed bewildered and unsure. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but I feel poorly. Every time I walk into a room, I –’ Unfortunately, just then the lucid state dissolved.

‘But these are just dreams,’ is the obvious criticism. They were lucid dreams, but other than that I do not disagree – except to point out that our experience of others is always of their behaviour: the way they look, speak and move; the choices and reactions they make. In an encounter with a dead person in a lucid dream, all of these present themselves to consciousness. Phenomenologically, there is no difference from an experience of the person in waking life.

Yet in these dreams, when the dead person is called upon to react to their current situation, the interaction breaks down, because what is missing is not karma, but life. As far as I’m aware, there is no scientifically feasible definition of life that doesn’t point instead at karma. So far, life has not been defined as what it ‘is’ or ‘has’, but only in terms of actions and behaviours – as karma, in other words.

DNA, certainly, is a substance that living things have, but that having is made possible only by a doing: the self-replicating and recombining action of the DNA molecule. It appears that life itself is not the being or having of something, but a continuous unfolding, somehow beyond these, to which being and having are responses, rather than the driving force.

The karma of the dead might persist in various forms, the strongest of which is probably memories and effects upon the living. But although the karmic simulacrum left by the dead is to all extents identical with what they were, in the experience of others, that Grace by which (when alive) they were able to change, develop and respond, has withdrawn.

25th March. I couldn’t find him, but then I went into a pub and saw him. He looked normal but, on inspection, was like a hollow, metal ornament. His eyes were closed and his face dead. Inside him was black ash and soot. Still in the lucid state, I began to meditate. This way I could find him, because he had abandoned the physical representation of himself. Where he was now, he was in a kind of focused repose. No thoughts. Very peaceful. He was collecting himself quietly, focussing in on himself, with no thoughts or perceptible changes.

The karma of the dead unfolds in the living. Their vicissitudes after death are dependent on us, because they are done with developing and unfolding. Grieving is no isolated event in an individual mind, it is the dreaming-out by the dead (through us) of their karmic remnants. Our mourning is the unfolding of love or antagonisms they left behind. The dead can suffer or cling to life, depending on their dreams, woven by our grief.

3rd April. He seemed neither dead nor alive, but I sensed I could force the issue, so I walked quickly up to him and spoke loudly into his ear, ‘Dad!’ ‘Eh?’ he mumbled. ‘Love you,’ I said. ‘Uv oo,’ he replied, then lapsed back into a stillness, from which I knew he would next time be even harder to rouse.

I found it both difficult and helpful to meet him in this series of dreams. It’s not a technique I’d recommend for anyone with complicated issues concerning the deceased. There are bereavement counsellors who can guide us more safely if this is the case. It was difficult because there he was, completely back again, even though I knew full well he had gone. It was helpful because it showed me directly, painfully, how all that remained of him was karma. What had allowed that karma to unfold had now disappeared, maybe back to where it came.

Dad and me

Dad and me in a slot-machine arcade (probably Blackpool). Late 1970s Polaroid.

This last encounter alerted me I was clinging on too tightly. As time passed, he was moving ever further away, becoming more difficult to find. Reaching out was pulling him back toward a state in which he no longer belonged. It also exposed how, really, we’d said to each other all that needed to be said. It was selfish to continue.

1st May. In the garden at night, I pointed out to him the Pleiades star-cluster. Then I realised I wasn’t looking properly: the whole sky was filled with stars like the Pleiades, packed and dense. Suddenly, he was gone. Vanished from sight, like a jump-cut in a film. Mum and I were in the garden, looking up at the stars and remembering him.

References

Freud, Sigmund (1976). The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated by James Strachey. Harmondsworth: Pelican.

Heraclitus (2012). Fragments. http://bit.ly/MToVOM (wikisource.org).

Tenzin, Wangyal Rinpoche (1998). The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep. Edited by Mark Dahlby. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications.

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The Visions of DEO, MAZ and LIT (Aethyrs 7 through 5)

The visions of the aethyrs are becoming subtler, harder to attain, and yet – surprisingly – more mundane and personal, as I approach the end of this five-year working. (Or has it been even longer?)

The Vision of DEO (Aethyr 7)

I’d not had a lucid dream in ages, so this working was an experiment: I opened the temple with the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram; read the Enochian Call of the Aethyrs and opened Aethyr 7, reciting the names of the governors; and then, without banishing, I then went straight to bed. I had decided that whatever occurred between opening the aethyr and rising in the morning, I would accept as the vision of DEO.

Waiting to fall asleep, a spirit in the form of a young boy came and asked questions. ‘How do you open an Enochian aethyr?’ he kept pestering me. Earlier in the evening, whilst performing other operations, I had sensed a presence behind me, but it had not identified itself. I had banished afterwards, even though the working hadn’t required it. I wondered now if the young boy were that same spirit returning. There was something vexatious in his questions – because if he were a spirit of the aethyrs, why was he so interested in knowing how to open one? And besides, the spirits were there to answer my questions.

Eventually sleep came. The weather was breezy. Something, somewhere, made a slight, intermittent bumping sound that kept me partially awake throughout the night. Maybe this accounted for the paucity of dreams, yet it also provoked a consistent emotional state: not quite anxiety, but certainly a suspicious watchfulness that endured whilst the aethyr was open, and which I decided was one of its attributes.

At 4.19am I woke, got up, and sat in meditation until 5.10. I saw a headless being, composed of white, squirming limbs. Apart from the wind, the night was quiet, and I was reminded of my stint last year in the haunted prison cell. Fear took hold, several times. Watching the fear and its sources, at one point I entered a state where the presence of my mind was the cause of its fear. The mind was frightened just by the weird, ghostly fact of itself. My surprise that such a state could exist immediately put an end to it.

Usually, getting up to meditate and then going back to bed is my sure-fire method for obtaining a lucid dream. I lay on my back (another lucidity aid) but finally turned on my side and slept.

I was in my parents’ old house, sleeping in the room I’d had as a small child. Fra X was staying as a guest, asleep in a room upstairs (although, in actuality, there is no room above). Fra X liked listening to show tunes when he rose in the mornings, and it seemed I heard these, but soon the music stopped and Fra X had still not appeared.

[I hate show tunes. I were asked to nominate someone whose lifestyle was completely at odds with ordinary, family life, then I might nominate Fra X.]

It was still dark, and in the meantime I heard my father get up for work. As he moved about, making his breakfast to the news on the radio, it struck me how agile he sounded. ‘His hip must be better,’ I thought.

[The sounds of my father in the morning are memories from childhood. His bad hip is a reference to the present. By confusing the sequence of time, the past is enlisted to heal the present.]

Then I heard my mother get up and leave the house. I was curious and anxious where she might have gone. I found her at the bus station, waiting with a group of characters from my home town, looking the way they’d appeared in the 1970s. Sitting nearby was my grandmother with her next-door neighbour. This puzzled me, because I knew they were both dead. I missed an opportunity to become lucid at this point, yet they all looked so happy, chatting together whilst waiting, and having reassured myself my mother was okay I decided to leave them all to it. ‘You are all far too early in the morning for me!’ I laughed, and walked away.

Bus Queue

A bus queue in Bedford, 1970. An image of the afterlife?

['Waiting for a bus' can feel like 'forever', and here is used to symbolise eternity. 'You are all too early' is a reversal of how the people waiting are actually 'late' – in the alternative sense of 'dead'. I am anxious for my mother because really I am afraid that she will die. I am able to reassure myself that it is not she who is dead but the others, and – anyway – they are all having a nice time, but evidently this is a fragile reassurance.]

Later, my sister came to visit. Fra X was still upstairs, but that was fine. If he ever got up and came down, it would be great to see him.

[Again, this rings false. If Fra X is the 'anti-family' then when he 'gets up', the family ceases to be.]

I had an electronic gadget that made quiet but distracting sounds – such as the noise of squelching food. I demonstrated it to my sister, at first without telling her. It drove her nuts. She couldn’t fathom where the noises were coming from. But when I showed her the device she found it very funny. She said it was exactly the kind of thing she supposed I would have.

[When we were kids, my sister was a noisy eater – which used to drive me nuts! The animosity of our childhood is forgotten here, the roles reversed, and the source of annoyance made into a toy, a novelty, that is a source of humour.]

Then there was a tiny, enclosed space, perhaps underground. As I was squeezing into this space, our long-dead family cat squeezed past me and ahead. My face was buried in the warmth of her fur, so what might have been a horribly claustrophobic episode was instead reassuring.

['Underground' suggests a grave. The family cat is buried in the garden. Regressive sexual imagery is combined with the deathly connotations. 'Cat' = 'pussy'. I'm pressing my face into the entrance of the womb! As a strategy for escaping death and separation, this is obviously rather flawed.]

The Vision of MAZ (Aethyr 6)

I am walking in a windy place with a childhood friend, thinking, ‘It would really impress him if I could fly.’ Realising that I am dreaming, I conclude: ‘Why not?’ And I do. But then I wonder, ‘Is there enough time to scry an aethyr?’

The state has become unstable, but I concentrate and it becomes more steady, and I state my intention: ‘I wish to enter MAZ, the sixth aethyr!’ Indeed, I state this so powerfully and clearly that I’m sure I’ve spoken it aloud in my sleep. The lucidity begins to fade again, but I reinvigorate it by spinning around and around.

I am on a mattress without blankets in a room that reminds me of my sister’s room in my parents’ old house, except it has an exceedingly high ceiling. My girlfriend is asleep next to me, and next to her is an identical aspect of herself, with a scarlet pentagram on her forehead at the third eye. She says something, which I do not remember and may not have been verbal anyway, but I recognise who she is: the part of my girlfriend that is childlike, mystical, and loving towards everyone.

[The amalgam of sister's room and partner suggests (again) the mystical sister, soror mystica, a personification of the male alchemist's 'female half' who assist in his quest. The pentagram is a symbol of earth and humanity. 'Scarlet' recalls the 'Scarlet Woman', the shakti, or tantric partner. The magickal practice of placing symbols on the forehead of the partner, charging them as sigils through orgasm during lovemaking, is also suggested here.]

Shakti

'He meets his shakti Tuesdays, / Down the launderette. / They go behind the driers / And invoke Baphomet.'

At the foot of a mattress, high up against the wall on a ladder, a large naked man is fixing a red cube to the wall. ‘Who’s in charge?’ I call up to him. He laughs, but not derisively. ‘You’ll never see him around here,’ he says.

[Red cube: another symbol of earth and matter.]

There was a second part to this vision, which has faded from memory, in which it now seems that I did see and meet who was in charge. But whether there were images and I have lost them, and that’s why only the purport of it remains, I can no longer tell. Yet I know that the person in charge gave me something. Because he was angelic it was something very subtle and fine, so he showed me how to mix it with what is gross and disgusting, in order to make it usable in everyday experience.

[This suggests the magickal techniques of tantra and the Left Hand Path.]

Earlier I’d dreamt non-lucidly that Edgar Allan Poe decided to take his own life. He rode on his beloved horse to the edge of a cliff, then took out a handgun, intending to blow out his brains. It was the horse that swayed him. Poe couldn’t bear the thought that his horse might come to harm, and – realising a source of genuine love in his life – the urge to commit suicide faded. Instead he went home, and dined alone with gusto on a meal of roasted rats.

[Poe's lack of love contrasts with the compassionate nature of the mystical sister. The horse represents the bodily or animal nature of the rider. What we might have here is a view of the Right Hand Path from the perspective of the Left. Poe's 'spiritual practice' is to blow out his brains, rather than to use his connection with the 'horse'. The rat traditionally symbolises observation and intelligence – mental awareness, rather than bodily. In Poe's story 'The Pit and the Pendulum', the narrator is tortured by the Inquisition, but escapes after rats gnaw through the ropes that constrain him. The rat, in this instance, is perhaps a symbol of 'liberation by mental means'. Poe, of course, was an intensely cerebral character.]

The Pit And The Pendulum

'They swarmed upon me in ever-accumulating heaps...' Illustration for The Pit and the Pendulum by Byam Shaw, 1909.

And so the person in charge mixed the subtle thing he gave me with cooked, minced rats. And although Poe ate with relish what was actually disgusting, the mixture of the subtle thing and the rats was really quite palatable. Only when I thought of the ingredients did I feel disgust, but then only weakly, because it came from thinking and was not a bodily reaction.

[This suggests a way forward in my current practice.]

With this second scene, if there ever really was one, the vision ended.

The Vision of LIT (Aethyr 5)

I’m at a magickal moot. There’s a theatre performance, and also we’re all doing our rituals on the stage. There’s a large, dark guy who’s in an aggressive mood and keeps shoving me. I get angry and we start to fight, but we’ve only shoved each other a few times before the magickal brothers and sisters crowd in and calm us down.

[Are my magickal brethren really doing me a favour by preventing the fight between me and my shadow?]

It’s dawn and I want some breakfast, so I step outside and discover I’m in the main street of my home town. Mum and Dad aren’t far, but I doubt they’ll have the kind of breakfast I need. I could just buy a cup of tea, but realise I have no money. Then I remember there is both breakfast and tea back at the moot. It has begun to rain, so I decide to run back to where I came. A feeling of discontent arises at that thought and, noticing it, I also become aware that – anyway – I’m dreaming.

[The moot hasn't taken me far from home, but I seem to realise that it's still where I'm more likely to find appropriate 'food'.]

I look up at the sky and ask to enter LIT, the fifth aethyr. My words sound slurred, so I say it again. Beautiful coloured lights appear, swirling above me. When I look back to earth it’s as if my gaze drags the colours down – the lampposts and houses are festooned with bright decorations made of organic stuff, circular membranes of vivid colour. Everywhere I look more of the stuff appears, but I decide it’s all a bit ‘trippy’, so I head into the town centre to find something interesting.

Where the roads meet is a small café, which somehow I know offers divination. The sign above the window reads QUILITY FRINDS. The premises are very small: candlelit tables for two crammed closely together. At each table sits a woman, waiting for a customer. They are mostly quite short in stature, homely looking, with their hair tied up as if they really were workers in a café or bakery.

[QUILITY FRINDS ('QUALITY FRIENDS'?) = 75 = Five-Pointed Star.]

One of the women with her back to me turns around, sees me, and seems to take an instant dislike. ‘I’m sorry, but I won’t be able to help you,’ she says. But on my left is a woman who looks more friendly. She’s inside a kiosk, and it takes her a while to squeeze out. Another woman occupies the chair where I am supposed to sit. She squeezes out also, to share the seat with the woman from the kiosk. As it turns out, the second woman does most of the talking. The woman from the kiosk merely nods and says a few words.

‘Can you give me some information about the fifth aethyr?’

Quility Frinds

Next time you're in a lucid dream, visit QUILITY FRINDS. (Hopefully, their cakes are better than their divination.)

‘Well, yes,’ the second woman says, ‘although there are certain things about it we’re not permitted to tell. And anything I do say, you mustn’t take as an official representation. There are lots of beings here, so it’s just my view.’

‘Okay, that’s fine. What can you tell me?’

‘Something’s going to happen, but I’m not allowed to reveal it. It’s not good and it’ll come about on November 16th.’

Of course, on hearing this, I was determined to squeeze more details out of her.

‘Is it to do with my family or with health issues?’

‘No. Nothing like that.’ She sighs, and seems to give in. ‘It’s a bit of a rip-off, really. You’ll buy something and it’ll turn out not to be worth it.’

‘But hang on,’ I realise, ‘where I’ve come from, it’s November 21st. The 16th has already passed.’

[I had got up to meditate shortly before going back to bed and obtaining the vision. I had noticed the date whilst setting the alarm for the end of the meditation.]

The two women stare at each other as if this were entirely unexpected. ‘Then you’ll be able to look back and work out what it is,’ the first woman responds.

This seems to have broken our concentration – theirs, and also mine, because at this point the vision breaks up and fades.

[Looking back to November 16th, I have so far found nothing to support or illuminate this retrospective 'prediction'.]

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The Vision of ICH (Aethyr 11)

I was walking a complex route to another part of the city when I realised I was dreaming, so I cried up at the sky: ‘I wish to scry the eleventh aethyr, ICH!’

I didn’t wake, but carried on with my journey, noticing that the route now seemed to be trending downwards. There was a series of forbidding-looking buildings, vast and ruinous, including a domed structure, like a mosque or a derelict gasometer. A spiral staircase led down into the dark. I followed it, until I began to think: ‘Well, no harm can come to me, so why don’t I just do it?’ I threw myself into the central well of blackness, but instead of falling I hung in space, consciousness suspended. I’m not sure if it was a jhanic state, or if I lost self-awareness, but after a time it became boring so I willed myself back to the stairs and climbed outside.

Alan was there, yet although I didn’t explicitly acknowledge it couldn’t really be him, nevertheless in what followed I took care not to listen too much to what he said, nor let him follow his own lines of questioning with the spirit that was about to appear. We found a grassy area between the buildings and sat chatting until a gangly young man hurried towards us and sat down.

gasometer

A beautiful Viennese gasometer.

‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

He muttered something that began with ‘H’.

‘Was that Hyperion?’ ['Hyperion' = 56 = Choronzon.]

‘If that’s what you want it to be then that’s what it is,’ he remarked grumpily.

Maybe something went wrong at this point. I recollect talking for a long time with Hyperion, but I remember hardly anything. Something tells me Hyperion himself may be responsible for this. I think we may have argued and actually come to blows. What I definitely recall is becoming thoroughly sick of him and deciding to banish.

‘I’m not leaving,’ was his response.

‘That’s not because you can refuse to,’ I pointed out, ‘but because you didn’t give me your true name. So tell me now: what is it?’

‘Hincapie,’ he admitted. ['Hincapie' = 47 = 'Man of Earth'.]

On confessing this, his appearance changed. He wasn’t quite so tall, although he retained the same basic features, hair and clothes. We continued talking, but – again – it feels as if something has been erased. The gist of Hincapie’s talk, however, was that everything humans do is incorrect or inferior. His whining diatribe quickly became tedious again.

In my dreams throughout that night I repeatedly felt hungry, and had frequently dreamt I was eating. Alan and I had some chocolate that we proceeded to share. I offered some to Hincapie, and he complained how poor it tasted. But then it struck me he was simply complaining too much. I took the flesh of his face between my thumb and forefinger and gave his cheek a tug.

‘I realise what’s happening,’ I told him. ‘You just love humans and our food so much you can’t keep away from us.’

This pierced Hincapie to his roots. No matter if he’d managed to mislead us or erase parts of the conversation, it felt like I’d discovered the truth of him. It seemed he didn’t want to part with what he told us next.

‘There are lots of spirits like that throughout the aethyrs,’ he said. ‘Many are the ghosts of shoes.’

George Hincapie

The spirit didn't look completely unlike professional US cyclist George Hincapie.

It never occurred to me that objects intimately connected with humans might take on a spiritual dimension by association, but Hincapie had revealed that many spirits are like this. Their nature is petty, circumscribed, because it depends entirely upon human beings, and so the understanding of these spirits cannot penetrate beyond or even as far as everyday human consciousness. Or is it just a mocking pun? Are ‘the ghosts of shoes’ really just ‘lost soles’?

The vision ended at this point.

I’ve debated whether this vision is legitimate. I’m not convinced this vision isn’t an instance of false lucidity – i.e. merely dreaming, unconsciously, that one is lucid. One of the ways to spot the difference between true and false lucidity is the presence of ‘day’s residues’ in the dream. This was Sigmund Freud’s term for elements appearing in a dream that are obviously based on experiences from the preceding day. A dream from the unconscious consists of a large proportion of day’s residues (because our consciousness, during sleep, has no other material to work with). A lucid dream doesn’t, because it constructs itself instead from the idea that one is awake.

In the vision, I could indeed easily identify a lot of day’s residues. For instance, during the day my partner had remarked that if she had a lucid dream, then she would use it to eat chocolate all night; an episode of Doctor Who I had watched earlier in the evening involved a race of aliens that could erase memories of themselves from human perception; and I had also watched an episode of the drama series Afterlife, which included a scene where a psychic medium, in order to keep persecutory spirits at bay, occupied herself with re-organising her shoes.

However, I’ve come to the conclusion that a vision arises from the intention to have a vision, and that the state in which the vision is received – whether it’s the waking state, a naturally or chemically-induced trance, a lucid-dream or a false lucid-dream – doesn’t matter; it’s simply the means of manifestation.

Looking up the English Qaballah equivalents for ‘Hyperion’ (Choronzon) and ‘Hincapie’ (Man of Earth) seems to have provided further validation. The next aethyr up is No. 10, which, according to tradition, crosses the Abyss and is home to the demon Choronzon. Perhaps the influence of No. 10 is already being felt in Nos. 12 and 11!

Certainly, I ran into some further spooky overspill, talking with my mother. ‘I had such a weird dream on Saturday night,’ she mentioned. This was the same night that I scried the aethyr. My mum hadn’t been able to sleep, so she’d tried meditating in bed. ‘I found myself in something like a dream, only it was real,’ my Mum explained. ‘I got out of bed and went downstairs, and found you in the kitchen making toast. You kept saying you felt really, really hungry.’

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A Field of Dreams

If I’d had audio the recording would have included distant thunder, the pattering of sporadic rain, breezes amongst leafs, and intermittent cheers from the football stadium at the edge of town.

It was a Saturday afternoon in August. Warm, but interrupted by showers running on an automatic cycle every thirty minutes.

I was walking in my childhood town when, near the recreation ground, it struck me there is a certain area to which I return repeatedly in dreams. In fact, I wasn’t sure I hadn’t stood there the night before, beyond that arc of trees on the grassy slope.

Saturday afternoon

Saturday afternoon. The community together at play.

So I turned back for my camera, to see if I could somehow chart the space and pin down the essence that draws my subconscious back.

Everyone has such spaces. They are the contours of the cave walls upon which experience plays. Dreams and hallucinogens can sometimes place us far enough outside ourselves to see how fragments of memory, their textures, moods and significances, underpin our perception. They go so far down we cannot ask what our relationship with these sites ‘means’ or ‘represents’. Rather, they are what provide our capacity for meaning and relating.

The house we were born in has engraved within us the hierarchy of the various functions of inhabiting. We are the diagram of the functions of inhabiting that particular house, and all other houses are but variations on a fundamental theme. – Gaston Bachelard (1969: 15)

One dream has stayed with me, of the space below the arc of trees flooded with brackish water. Beneath the surface lie submerged objects: rusted clocks, old coins and sodden books, one of which is titled The Book of Clawed Verse.

The flat space above the slope, meanwhile, is an area for panic, of nightmares from which I wake in terror before recognising what frightens me. But then again, it’s sometimes where I splay my arms and fly. The grass becomes bouncy and assists my gradual lift-off above the trees. These are templates for exhilaration.

My route to school

My route across the fields to school.

So I took some photographs, fascinated by the changes, the degradation of these spaces since childhood. The gap in the hedge that was my route to school is blocked now by a barbed metal fence. Ancient trees once stood one on either side, but those are gone. The dead stump of one remains.

On the grass against the hedge lay an inexplicable lump of concrete whose shape was naggingly familiar – but I couldn’t decide if this were true.

The bowling greens have been allowed to turn into an overgrown wasteland. The tennis courts exude an equally unloved feeling. No doubt, a saving on money and effort, but how slovenly and how fuck you.

Bowling greens

The immaculate town bowling greens.

The sky was darkening. Rain threatened. I wanted moving images, to catch a fuller impression of the space, but my batteries were low, so I made a detour to the gift shop in the town centre. I found a pound coin on the pavement near the post office, which covered the cost of new batteries and felt like an endorsement.

When I arrived back the sun was bright again, and the trees cast shadows as I made circles of footage. I ran around the flat space with the camera, but did not succeed in taking off.

The sunlight passed. Thunderclouds were massing again. I shot footage of the sky. Was something going to happen? Why assume this wasn’t already something?

Steps

Steps.

In a corner were concrete foundation stones of a vanished building. Tiny, it had once housed some kind of a pump, defunct even then. Now, it returns in another strand of my dreams, of subterranean complexes and chambers, semi-flooded, often perilous, into which I descend and retrieve miraculous secrets from their obsolete machinery of pipes and circuits and analogue dials.

At university, once I slept with an unknown photograph in a sealed envelope under my pillow, at the behest of a social psychologist. I recorded my dreams, to see if the unseen photograph had seeped telepathically into them. On opening, the photo showed a ruined cottage, and during the night I had dreamed of the derelict building within whose long-gone walls I was now standing. But its appearance in the dream was so incidental, so casually background, that it didn’t feature in my written account, and thus the experiment seemed a failure.

My photography elicited suspicious stares from occasional dog-walkers. Two teenage girls chatting on the playground rides kept a cautious distance. Then a man with white hair passed by, walking a collie, and we fell to talking about the peculiar atmosphere.

A peculiar atmosphere

A peculiar atmosphere.

‘It rains but doesn’t soak,’ he said. ‘Things aren’t growing. My tomatoes haven’t ripened and the potatoes are tiny and green. I’d done something wrong – I thought – because I don’t garden much, until the old boys who do had told me it’s a good year for fruits but not for roots.’

Another bout of rain ended our conversation. From under a tree I shot more sky, until it had eased off as suddenly as it came. Should I wait for the storm that was surely coming? Again, I was seeking a narrative, whereas leaving just then would include me in the happenings of the place, far more than trying to bend out a story.

Video

A Field Of Dreams

A short narrated sequence with footage from the drift. Click to view on YouTube. (Duration: 2.5 mins.)

Reference

Gaston Bachelard (1969). The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press.

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The Liberation of Ronove

If you can summon a demon and bind it to your will, why couldn’t you liberate it into everlasting luminosity and peace?

But if you did, would that demon be gone for good? Would other magicians still be able to work with it?

Suppose someone summoned each demon of the Goetia in turn and compelled them to yield to everlasting bliss. Would that maleficent system of sorcery then have been dismantled for good?

From past experience I’ve learned it’s never a good idea to invite Goetic demons into your home, so Alan and I decided on an outdoor venue: the ancient hill fort on Hollingbury Hill, near Brighton. But first – at home – we banished, then invoked the Holy Guardian Angel and asked it via the pendulum whether this venture was a good idea. The answer was affirmative, so next – using bibliomancy – we chose a specific demon to liberate. The lucky winner was number twenty-seven, Ronove, who takes the form of ‘a monster’. (Not ideal company at midnight on the summit of an isolated hilltop.)

Hollingbury Hill Fort

The sensible way to approach Hollingbury Hill Fort - by daylight.

Previously we’ve established that recitation with intent of Leo Marks’ poem ‘The Life That I Have’ will liberate spirits that were formerly human. But, as Alan put it, ‘There’s no way am I declaring to a Goetic demon: “The life that I have is yours!”‘.

It was a good point. Luckily, Alan had to hand the text of a Tibetan Buddhist ritual: Natural Liberation of Negativity and Obscuration Through Enactment of the Hundredfold Homage. This seventeen-page wonder, which is included in the full translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Dorje, 2006), involves prostration to no less than a hundred ‘Peaceful and Wrathful Deities’ yet, with its promised result of guiding all beings to the pure buddha fields, it seemed that nothing less would do.

Equipped with rucksacks of Goetic paraphernalia, we set off for the site after dark. The hill fort is situated in a golf course on park land, so quite what that couple and the man with the dog had been doing, whom we encountered as we headed up, past the woods and into the dark, was entirely their business.

Raising Hell: The Ritual

No one else was in evidence when we arrived. It was Lammas (1st August), and I’d wondered if any pagans might be marking the festival, although midday seemed a far better time to be commemorating the fructifying powers of the sun. The lights of Brighton twinkled below us as we walked around the fort’s outer rampart, yet once we’d stepped down inside and begun our search for a suitable spot, the night was absolutely dark.

The demon wouldn’t choose to manifest as a feeling of being watched. I knew that much, because I was experiencing it already. The interior of the fort was covered in thick patches of gorse, which kept making sounds suggestive of someone hiding inside. Alan was putting on a brave face, but I could tell it was creeping him out too.

Circle and triangle.

A triangle of glo-sticks, and an uncircular circle of LED fake candles.

We found a raised, roughly circular area that we decided marked our spot. To form the triangle for the demon and our protective circle, we’d brought some string. Yes, somewhat flimsy, but I’d figured that it defines an unbroken area well enough, and is so light that it was actually quite unlikely to be blown away by the wind. We’d also brought a bag of plastic LED fake candles and a tube of glo-sticks. (It’s remarkable how much magical equipment is stocked by The Pound Shop.) We used the glo-sticks to delineate the triangle. The flickering LEDs we placed around the circumference of the circle, which – due to the uneven and scrubby ground – was in fact very far from being circular indeed. In recognition, once I’d performed the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, Alan took the trouble to cast a wand around our perimeter, to give it that extra protective boost.

Troubling both of us as we stood amongst our string and pretty lights was the thought of how we’d stand our ground if the demon manifested (for instance) as a police helicopter with its searchlight directed at us; or (far worse) as a psycho with a knife running at us from the bushes. Alan’s first evocation of the demon, which featured all the classic threats of ‘blasting rods’ and ‘torture in the fires of Hell’, produced no such results however. There was indeed a sensation of lurking, gloating evil, but – as I mentioned – that had been there already.

I took a turn at evoking. Then Alan again. Then me again. We’d just decided out loud to burn the demon’s sigil and be done with it (a bluff, because both of us had realised we’d forgotten to bring any source of fire) when Alan suddenly stopped and said, ‘He’s here.’

As soon as Alan said it, I could feel it too – what he later described as, ‘Just a nasty, creepy feeling.’ To me it seemed like a sort of ‘shimmer’ in reality; the fabric of space was wobbling in a queasy, decidedly not good way.

Asking the demon to confirm its presence, we listened out. Apart from the breeze there was no sound, so we resorted to the pendulum. In true demonic fashion, Ronove chose an anti-clockwise spin for ‘YES’, clockwise for ‘NO’, and side-to-side for ‘CANNOT ANSWER’.

He left us in no doubt that he knew what liberation was, but hated it. He said he was afraid – yet was this an attempt to gain our sympathy? He also insisted that even though we might dispel him, he’d somehow still be available to other magicians.

The Seal of Ronove.

Seal of the 27th demon of the Goetia, Ronove.

We were going to do it anyway, so we cut the chat and got down to business. Neither of us relished the thought of seventeen pages of prostrations, to be read by two tiny LED flashlights, which had to be kept lit by pressing down on a tiny button that after a few minutes reduced our hands to painful cramps. (The Pound Shop, again.) But we set about it, mustering as much gusto as we could.

We fell into a pattern: one of us reading; both of us bowing; the one not reading casting an eye into the darkness for any signs of mischief. My heart hammered when I saw distinctly over Alan’s shoulder a light not far away, as if someone were approaching with a torch. It quickly went out, and I never resolved whether that’s indeed what it had been, or whether it was just a headlight in the distance. And it wasn’t as if the Tibetan deities whose praises we sang were all sweetness and light either:

I bow down to Gauri of the eastern direction…
Wrathful, white and aloof on her throne of human corpses,
Brandishing a human corpse as a cudgel
To destroy the conceptual landscape of cyclic existence…

Not the sort of bodhisattvas you’d want to meet on a dark night. Except that was precisely what was happening in Alan’s case. He reported afterwards a vision during the prostrations of a host of bodhisattvas and buddhas.

The results were more subtle in my case. If Ronove had upset my perception of space, then The Peaceful and Wrathful Deities affected my sense of time. Hours and hours seemed to have been compressed into that period we’d been standing inside the circle. How long had it been really? I had no idea. Both of us were surprised when we reached the end of the prostrations. It felt too soon, even though (as you might imagine) we’d taken every care to miss out not a single one.

So which had it been: had time passed quickly or slow? Both, it seemed. Even more apparent was the effect on my mood: the fear and sense of being watched had gone. Granted, you’re unlikely to feel entirely relaxed whilst out in the countryside at midnight, but the oppressive fear that had been there at the beginning had lifted. And it was evident from the size of his grin that Alan felt it too. So we banished, packed up, and made our way off the hill.

The Devil in Me: The Results

Both of use had positive dreams that night, but the next morning, when we performed a tarot divination to cast more light on the outcome of the ritual, there were strong suggestions that something had been overlooked and was likely to result in emotional fallout. The phrase that came to my mind was, ‘We’ll end up feeling gutted.’

Three Card Spread

The forecast in short.

Detailed Card Spread

The forecast in detail.

Right on cue, the next morning I woke from an intensely personal and turbulent dream the like of which I’d not experienced in ages. Alan too reported a confrontation with psychological issues of an unusual intensity. For both of us these experiences were strong and disturbing, but left us feeling somehow resolved and cleansed.

I wish I could remember where he says it, but I’m sure in one of Steiner’s lectures he remarks that it’s not the business of humans to liberate spirits of any kind. Of course, you’d have to give it a try to fully understand why. And perhaps now I have.

It seems possible that liberating a demon leaves behind a vacuum that our own etheric bodies rush to fill. In the dream, I was confronted by feelings that presented as being unresolvable. Perhaps we resolve a demon only to have what is unresolvable in ourselves come to the fore. What came to the fore in me were feelings for the first girl I ever loved, which – I realised – I could never renounce or overcome.

It was as if I were being told, ‘Well, you might have liberated a demon, but look at the intensity of what remains unresolvable in you. From the perspective of a higher being, you look to them like a demon.’

As Alan put it, ‘There are certainly personal aspects to any invocation or evocation, and we essentially liberated a certain part of ourselves from “negativity and obscurations”. That’s certainly how it felt, anyway.’

What will the longer term outcome of this working be? Should we suppose that magicians around the world will begin to report they are no longer able to evoke or gain results from Ronove? It would be nice to think so. I suspect, however, that the true result is the exorcism of this particular demon only from my reality, plus the realisation that we cast out a demon by surrendering that which appears demonic within ourselves.

Video

The Liberation of Ronove

A short film containing footage from the working. Click to view on YouTube. (Duration: 7 mins.)

Reference

Gyurme Dorje, Trans. (2006). The Tibetan Book of the Dead: First Complete Translation. Introduction by The Dalai Lama. London: Penguin.

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Psychoanalysis of an Angel

The patient, whom I’ll call ‘Wendy’, presented with a bad case of anxiety dreams. ‘In the dream,’ she said, ‘I’m lost and have to get home urgently, but I haven’t a clue where I am or need to go. I’m always in unfamiliar streets and there’s a horrible feeling of panic. I dream the same thing nearly every night.’

Knowing that I was familiar with the psychoanalytic technique of dream interpretation, Wendy asked, ‘What does this mean?’

I’ve moved on since my interest in psychoanalysis, having discovered that magick is a far more powerful (if more volatile) therapeutic tool. I advised her to find the dream’s meaning for herself by making a resolution each evening that if she dreamed it again she would wake up inside it and recognise there was no need to panic. ‘If you can recognise within the dream that you are dreaming,’ I said, ‘then perhaps the underlying issue – if there is one – will present itself.’

Two days later she phoned me in excitement. The dream had come to her again the previous night. She had found herself once more on unfamiliar streets, wondering where she was with that urgent sense of needing to get home. ‘When all of a sudden,’ she said, ‘there was a kind of a rush and a ping, and Nina stood in front of me.’

Nina is a friend of hers, a mature woman whom Wendy has known for many years.

‘But it wasn’t really Nina,’ Wendy continued, ‘because she wore a short dress and tights and she had curly hair piled on her head.’

‘What happened next?’ I asked.

‘Nina told me, “I’ve seen Miriam. She’s over there.” And then the dream stopped. Nina stood right in front of me, blocking my way, as if she was preventing the dream from continuing. For the first time in ages I went back to sleep without feeling anxious at all.’

So Wendy had attained the result I’d hoped, from making a resolution to become aware inside the dream. This wasn’t full lucidity but it was significant progress.

‘I don’t know why Nina looked so strange,’ Wendy remarked. ‘And why on earth did she mention Miriam?’

At this point I supposed there was no harm in using psychoanalysis to uncover some of the dream’s meaning, now that Wendy had succeeded in realising her intention not to allow herself to be drawn into it.

‘Did Nina look like anyone else you know?’

‘She reminded me of Beatrice,’ Wendy answered after a moment’s reflection.

Over the previous weekend Nina had helped Wendy with a certain, quite demanding task. Over that same weekend Wendy had also met up with Beatrice, a younger woman whom she hadn’t seen in some time. Unexpectedly, Beatrice also expressed an interest in the task that had occupied Wendy and Nina. To Wendy’s delight, Beatrice proved her interest by paying Wendy a visit on the day before the dream. Nina’s outfit and hair in the dream were features that actually belonged to Beatrice.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Inventor of psychoanalysis and crypto-occultist.

According to the psychoanalytic theory, when a figure in a dream is a composite of more than one person then there is an idea that all the parts share and it is this idea which is finding expression (Freud 1900: VI A, 399f). For instance, Nina and Beatrice were both interested in Wendy and eager to help her. Furthermore, Beatrice had paid a visit unexpectedly. The figure in the dream, composed from elements of both Nina and Beatrice, was indeed someone interested in Wendy, had indeed proved helpful, and had appeared unexpectedly (with ‘a kind of a rush and a ping‘). Yet this was not simply the meaning of the figure in the dream. By blocking the anxiety, this was what the figure had accomplished; it was what the figure was.

‘Why did Nina say to me in the dream, “I’ve seen Miriam. She’s down there.”?’

‘Was Miriam having some kind of crisis over the weekend?’ I asked.

‘You know Miriam,’ Wendy said. ‘She’s always in a state of crisis.’

‘Possibly your concern for Miriam is a contributing cause to the anxiety in the dream,’ I said. ‘More likely, I think the Nina-figure was telling you that the streets in the dream belong to people who are in crisis. Miriam, as always, is in a crisis, so she’s “down there”, but you don’t have to be. The Nina-figure was saying that if you continue down that street you’ll find yourself in a state of crisis like Miriam, but – on this occasion, at least – you were shown that you didn’t need to do that.’

I advised Wendy to continue with her resolution to wake inside the dream, and predicted that although she might not be as successful as this every time, in the longer term she would continue to assuage the anxiety that was ruining her sleep.

Wendy’s resolution seemed to have summoned to her aid and astral helper who prevented the anxiety from unfolding. Psychoanalysis, in this instance, had found a different use from that to which it is normally applied. Instead of decoding the dream’s contents by relating them to Wendy’s waking life, it proved useful in deciphering the speech and appearance of the being that had come to Wendy’s aid. Although the true nature of this being may have been ultimately formless, it had clothed itself in Wendy’s thoughts and ideas. Psychoanalysis is a useful tool for engaging with how ideas organise themselves in the human mind. But, as Freud himself acknowledged, what enters the unconscious sometimes originates from beyond the confines of the senses and of personal experience:

It would seem to me that psychoanalysis, by inserting the unconscious between what is physical and what was previously called ‘psychical’, has paved the way for the assumption of such processes as telepathy. (Freud 1933: 85-6)

References

Sigmund Freud (1933). ‘Dreams and Occultism’, in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988.

Sigmund Freud (1900). The Interpretation of Dreams. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.

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Shades of Greys: My Experience of Why Aliens Don’t Exist

A few nights ago I was woken by the hallucinatory sound of a barking dog. I’d been waiting almost two years for that yelp, ever since I’d performed a magical ritual to get myself abducted by aliens.

Now, this will all sound weird – but try to keep up with me, because what the bark of the dog revealed was something far odder than aliens…

The ritual I’d performed was a consequence of reading Whitley Strieber’s Communion. If the greys were really out there, I figured, then a bit of magick might persuade them to take me off on a trip. The full details I’ve written about elsewhere, but the upshot was that although I’d hoped for a full abduction experience, all I got was an odd set of dreams including the following:

I had put a dog in a certain place. Not a real dog, but a symbolic dog. Its function was to intercept information from a television. The dog was in place to filter information from the TV system, which it accomplished by repeating a soft movement that mitigated the harshness in the message. I was told by the senders of the signal that only later ‘when I heard the dog bark’ would I understand.

That was all – except that the aliens left a calling-card by my doorstep the next day, in the shape of a discarded packet of snacks emblazoned with their face. And also, over the next few days a wave of UFO sightings swept the county, to which I and a friend were witnesses, although the objects in the sky weren’t extraterrestrial craft at all but Chinese lanterns, as so many ‘UFOs’ are these days. So although my magical working seemed to have created a UFO flap it produced no sign of any aliens.

packet of crisps with an alien face on the front

The blatant calling card left by the 'aliens' on my doorstep.

I listened out nervously over succeeding days, in case the sound of dogs revived repressed memories of lost time aboard a flying saucer and a close encounter with an anal probe. But nothing happened and so I stopped thinking about it – that is, until a few days ago.

My girlfriend mentioned that the night before she had been woken by an hallucinatory alarm-clock. It worried her whether this experience might be a precognitive signal from her unconscious for something possibly bad. Probably not, I reassured her, and mentioned that in my experience auditory hallucinations are prone to arise on the threshold of the lucid dreaming state. ‘It’s just a natural state of consciousness and doesn’t mean anything,’ I said. For me these experiences usually took the form of a knock or a bang, or less often of a buzzer or someone shouting.

But that very night it was a dog’s bark that I heard. My girlfriend reported that she too had been woken again, this time by a phantom old-fashioned telephone. Something seemed to be going on…

The outcome of my ritual to summon aliens was that I would only understand what I’d been told when I heard the dog bark. That was clearly what I’d heard, so I was now duty-bound to accept it as a signal. The night before, I’d assured my girlfriend that these sounds were the product of a natural state of consciousness that arises as we approach the lucid dreaming state. The fact that both of us then went on to experience auditory hallucinations of this type, neither of which seemed an omen or presaged anything in particular, seemed to underscore my explanation at the time. So the message from the aliens seemed to be a simple affirmation of what I myself had suggested: alien abductions are the product of a natural state of consciousness that arises as we approach the lucid dreaming state. Just as the initial working gave rise to a wave of UFO sightings that were obviously Chinese lanterns, now I was being shown that alien abductions are obviously lucid dreams.

But this is not just a crude debunking I’m suggesting here, because the aim of my ritual was to communicate with the aliens themselves, so this message must have come from the aliens. Therefore, were the aliens telling me they didn’t exist? Suddenly everything became clear, even as it swallowed itself up its own arse in a delicious paradox.

It would seem there are forces in the universe far more impressive than a supposed bunch of grey-skinned bottom inspectors. What I’d communicated with had the power to show me it didn’t exist. Now, if I were capable of setting up a series of situations that showed you how I didn’t exist, that would be because I was describing myself from a place somehow outside existence. These ‘aliens’ that had communicated with me, then, seemed to be showing me how they transcend existence. They are also capable of interacting with the human mind directly (the ‘sounds’ we heard) and transpersonally (my girlfriend’s experience interacting with mine).

grey alien

They are not that.

After the original ritual and the UFO wave that followed, I’d supposed the outcome indicated simply that aliens didn’t exist. Yet it was true I hadn’t understood until the dog barked, at which point I realised that, yes, aliens don’t exist, but in the sense that the nature of these ‘aliens’ is that they don’t exist. The fact of their non-existence is what gave them the ability to communicate how they had, transcending time, individuality and existence. No dome-headed little freak in a tinpot flying-saucer could ever get anywhere close to that!

Why a barking dog? Well, some time ago I recorded a meditation experience where the sound of a dog barking in the park enabled me to see how reality is so filled with experiences there’s simply no room for a self that contains those experiences. In other words, I saw how ‘I’ (in the sense of a metaphysical agency that ‘possesses’ experience) doesn’t exist. The dog’s bark from the ‘aliens’ was pointing me back to this experience, saying in effect: What you experienced back then applies to us.

But I wouldn’t blame anyone who supposes instead that it’s simply me who’s barking.

by

The Froth of Lucidity

I was arguing with someone last night who insisted that enlightenment entailed constant awareness during the dream state. That’s pants! I said. He’d based his opinion on assertions made by a Tibetan Buddhist nun. I’m wary of monastics. They have a lot of time on their hands. I suspect the best of them get enlightened after a few years, then spend the rest of their lives sitting around the monastery inventing stuff to do next.

Anyhow – that kind of chat before bedtime was like a red rag to a bull. I found myself in a snowy cemetery and marvelled at the dazzling brilliance of the ice and the detail on the tombstones and monuments, which changed their perspective as I walked, just as I’d expect in reality.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi

Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778). Frontispiece: Ancient Intersection of the Via Appia and Via Ardeatina.

The last few occasions I’d been lucid the state had dwindled rapidly when I’d focused my attention closely on the sensations creating the illusion. This time I held back, and discovered as a consequence that the state became more stable. I continued to play with it as I moved forwards, and it became obvious there are things you should do in a lucid dream to make the state perpetuate itself.

Foremost among these: do not look at anything too hard. In the lucid environment, objects and settings morph or appear from nothing between one moment and the next. If you focus on a single point, or try to pin down what’s there and what’s not, then the fabric of the dream gets ripped, as if we were holding it too tight. Buildings appeared: large, ornate mausoleums, and – in the distance – a vast cathedral of white marble that I knew hadn’t been there a moment ago. The lucid world is similar to the phase of hypnagogic imagery that precedes sleep; leave it alone and it will restlessly throw up more of itself out of itself in a style both brittle and fluid. It reminded me of Piranesi’s drawings and De Quincey’s descriptions of opium visions:

With the same power of endless growth and self-production did my architecture proceed in dreams… The splendours of my dreams were chiefly architectural; and I beheld such pomp of cities and palaces as never yet was beheld by the waking eye, unless in the clouds. (De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater)

I pushed the state a little further now. I knew I wasn’t really in this fantastic landscape at all, but asleep, so as I walked I tried to feel the position of my body in bed. I figured that if I knew where my real body was then I’d be able to distinguish it from my astral body and then take the latter off on an astral projection.

But this is not a viable technique for getting into an out-of-body state from a lucid dream – or so it seems at the moment. First off, it was very difficult to feel the physical body. Dimly, I managed after a while to sense myself lying on my right side in the bed, but it simply wasn’t possible to hold both the physical and the dream body together in awareness to a significant degree. During an out-of-body experience we are vividly aware of both bodies, but this is not the case in a lucid dream because it seems to depend on impressions not being ‘pinned down’. Images bubble up and replicate in a rich and complex froth of impressions. Introduce anything into the mix that solidifies things – such as rigid attention, or sensations from the physical body – and its soufflé-like texture sags and tears.

If we’re looking for an out-of-body state, then it seems we must first exit the lucid state and find a separate state altogether. The two states certainly share characteristics, but – as other experiences have suggested in the past – they do not appear to be organised along a continuum.