My Dream Bodies
(recovering the long story of our souls)
[art: Chagall, “In the Shadow of Dreams”]
An article this past summer in The New Yorker explores What Are Dreams For? Forget outer space or the depths of the ocean, the great uncharted territory is the realm of sleep. Not that scientists aren’t constantly hooking up folks to electrodes and mutilating the brains of lab animals to try and get to the bottom of it all. Why do we need to sleep? Why if we don’t sleep do we die? How can we market it, make it more productive, find out what it’s good for? What purpose does it serve?
The problem, of course, as with most modern science, is fundamentalist notions of time and space, being and consciousness. This article includes a treasure trove of fascinating information, not the least of which is we are mostly dreaming when we are in our mothers’ wombs. How can this be? If dreams are a processing of our waking experience, but we’ve had no waking experience, what could possibly be going on? One scientist suspects that we are “learning how to have a body.”
You wouldn’t think that the body is something a brain needs to learn, but we aren’t born with maps of our bodies; we can’t be, because our bodies change by the day, and because the body a fetus ends up becoming might differ from the one encoded in its genome. “Infants must learn about the body they have,” Blumberg told me. “Not the body they were supposed to have.”
We must learn about the bodies we have.
For Blumberg this is mostly about biological mechanisms that he documents after implanting all manner of horrors into the heads of baby rats and watching how they twitch.
Not once in this well-researched article which refers to all kinds of dream research and philosophizing is any of the work of Robert Moss cited. Moss has devoted his life to collecting and honoring indigenous dream wisdom—wisdom that doesn’t arise in a lab as a tiny pink baby rat, its skull cracked open, squirms under a microscope.
Yet I think Blumberg is probably on to something he cannot understand. We are learning about the bodies we have…in this lifetime. When we sleep we are remembering other bodies…bodies that crawled and flew and swam, bodies that suffered and died, bodies that loved and lost and loved again, bodies whose experiences we can recover when we are asleep and can visit to reclaim what we need for these bodies we are currently inhabiting. Or maybe we are always in many bodies at once. When time is no longer linear, when it is folded over itself as our less fundamentalists scientists suspect, then a soul, like an electron, can be in more than one place at once.
What if we could look at sleep and dreams and consciousness from the perspective of the long story of our souls?
In my yoga class I take the shape of dogs and cows, eagles and trees, activating a somatic knowing I can barely articulate much less understand. At night I feel my roots meander through the darkness of soil, my wings catch currents of air as canyons unfold beneath me, my tail guide me ever deeper into the depths. I awaken remembering that I have this body but also that I have had many bodies and my soul remembers them all.
[art: Dreamtime Sisters by Colleen Wallace Nungari]
In my dreams I remember them all.
How many of my dreams are inaccessble to me upon awakening, or are translated into not-quite-right symbols of something else, because the bodies I have been exploring are so different than this body I know in this lifetime?
We contain multitudes.
We sleep in our mothers’ wombs dreaming of worlds we have known, bodies we have been, lifetimes we have both endured and reveled in, finding our way always to new bodies, more bodies, lifetime after lifetime.
How many of us know we are time travelers, lifetime travelers, body travelers when we sleep? What other worlds have you remembered upon awakening? What other bodies can you feel your body remembering?
Please, if you are interested in accessing the deep wisdom of your dreams, check out the books and workshops and podcasts of Robert Moss. He is a great dream elder and a living treasure.
Also, if you are interested in exploring the long story of your soul, do consider one of my workshops on working with the dead. My offerings for 2024 are all available at takebackthemagic.com
AND do consider for the holiday my SPECIAL OFFER for your book club. If you buy ten or more (signed) copies of Take Back the Magic from the Golden Notebook bookstore, they will let me know…and I will zoom in to your book club for a Q & A in the new year! Take care of your holiday gift-giving, support a local independent bookstore, AND start a conversation with your friends about your experiences with the unseen world!
I believe this, too. I am aware of several lifetimes I have lived as a woman. I have not had a sense of a past life as a man, but it seems logical I would have inhabited a male body, too. But I wonder if because I am in a female body now if that reminds me of other female bodies I have inhabited. I also feel a strong connection to owls, crows, foxes, and bears. Must have been in those bodies, too. I love the idea of the fetus being this embodied soul remembering, learning, and coalescing.
“Learning how to have a body”- I love this. - that Dreamtime is remembering the bodies we have been and where we bring the world into being. I do want to read Robert Moss’ work.. thank you!