Life, love and adversity.

If you and I traced our ancestors back, say a couple of thousand years, we’d find we were related. But that’s the thing with family trees. The further back you go, the branches widen, sweeping up more and more of us. Even a couple of hundred years is enough to ensure you’ll score some landed gentry among your lot. There’s likely the occasional murderer, too. But you’re only one in tens of thousands of souls, all related in the same vague way, so it doesn’t mean anything, does it?

I used to think there was nothing worse than some ardent genealogist banging on about his family tree. On and on they’d go, like you could be interested. I mean, what did it matter that so and so married so and so a hundred years ago? But then you get the bug yourself and you begin to see things differently. You begin to understand the fascination.

First, you simply want to honour your family by getting all their names in order, names you heard as a child but never met because they were long dead. Or maybe they’d branched off a few generations ago and gone to live on the other side of the world. So now you want to get them straight in your head. You want them with the right spouse, the right children. You want to pass them on to your own kids, a neat little package of heritage – like your own kids could be bothered. But then you tap into something else, you experience a “wow” moment,  and you realize there’s much more going on here.

Tracing your family history is like sketching out a story, and stories are powerful things. Suddenly, they can transform those dimly remembered names into heroes, into characters of mythological status, and myths are strange things. Once we tap into them our lives change, because that’s what myths do. They come from our deepest past, and they energise our present.

My Irish grandfather, Michael, came to Lancashire to work the quarries as a farrier. Whilst here, he had a fling with a mill-girl called Lizzie. Then he lost his job and went back to his parents’ farm in County Mayo, leaving Lizzie behind. But Lizzie discovered she was with child. So, urgent letters were exchanged and Michael returned to a hasty marriage.

He settled in a village on the edge of the Western Pennines, raised a family of four, one of them my mother. If he’d been a different kind of guy, I wouldn’t be here to tell the story. I imagine a hard-working, happy-go-lucky character, a bit of a charmer, and full of stories, not all of them true, but when things got serious, he’d always do the right thing.

That mill-girl had a brother called Richard. He married another mill-girl called Annie. Then he got swept up in the Great War, and died of fever in Mesopotamia, never saw home again. Annie struggled for years on a war-widow’s pension, then left for Australia on the promise of a better life. There, she married Fred, a German guy – at a time when German guys were still unpopular. I’ve not followed him up yet, but I’m thinking Fred must have been something special. Anyway, the two of them went on to pioneer land near Pingaring, and they seemed to make a go of it. That’s where her story peters out for me, them living a cowboy and cowgirl kind of life in the vastness of Western Australia.

This is not to say my family is any more or less fascinating than yours. We can all find the archetypal stories if we look. It’s not about the bloodline. Blood means nothing unless there’s money involved. Annie’s not a blood relative, but I think about her story a lot. Romance, tragedy, courage, adventure and triumph over adversity. It’s got everything and I find it inspiring. Even across time, something about her story, played out a century ago influences the way I think today.

But there’s more. I’ve researched the life of an obscure Victorian man of letters. He’s no relation at all, yet I ended up living his story as intensely as if it were a part of my own. So it doesn’t need to be even a vague family connection either. It runs much deeper than genealogy. It transcends blood and kin. It reaches back to the collective from which all stories rise.

If by some magic we were able to meet those people for real, there’s a chance we might not like them very much. We would find them too human, rather than the perfected heroes and heroines of our imagination. What we’re doing then is projecting parts of our psyche upon a bare structure of names, dates and events. What we tap into are latent energies that seek passage into consciousness, and they take powerful form as stories.

As we unearth these stories, we’re not uncovering the literal truth of a past life. Rather, we are exploring pieces of our own selves. Doing so, we grant new life to the mythical foundations of the past, all our pasts because the thing with myths is they seek renewal for each generation who stumbles upon them. And they reward us with fresh meaning and direction.

I’ve discovered no celebrities, no toffs, no great statesmen, in my family tree, at least not between here and the early Victorian period. Any further than that, who knows?  Four generations seems plenty for keeping it real. Four generations, and the stories are still plentiful, still of sufficient resolution for one’s imagination to get to grips with.

The best stories do not need kings and queens to act them out. We find them in the ordinary. That’s why they’re of such universal appeal. Colliers, labourers, crofters, weavers, quarrymen, farriers, domestics, pioneers and conscripted soldiers. That’s my lot. Plus of course life, love and adversity,… the stuff of stories and the bedrock of existence.

It turns out, genealogy isn’t boring after all.

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The writing life – a tale of twelve novels.

The material life is what it is. We are born into certain circumstances – an ethnicity, a religion, a family, a nationality, a moment in time – and we make of our circumstances what we can. We do this within the limitations of our personality, intelligence, and energy, also the limitations placed on us by history, culture, and by prejudice – our own prejudice directed at others, and theirs directed back at us.

Thus constrained we make way as best we can, always striving for personal happiness. But for all our hopes to the contrary, life is messy, impermanent, beset by tragedy, and there is nothing to suggest what we make of our material lives, whether we find our balance, or we thrive or are utterly crushed, is actually of any importance at all.

For proof we need only observe those among the rich and powerful, people who are the most materially successful and surely want for nothing, yet whose ignorance and cruelty suggests they are operating at a very low level of self awareness, that indeed as human beings, not only have they a long way to travel, that wealth or power or popularity is not the real measure of success at all. But then we all know this, don’t we?

Without a certain level of self awareness, we are like automata, we are as lacking in the essence of life as the material things we crave. Self awareness is standing beneath a starry sky and feeling one’s smallness while also awakening to a deep connection with the mystery of all before us; it is the realisation that without our eyes to see and hearts to feel, there is no beauty, that our exquisitely fragile presence is the only thing that grants the universe meaning. Thus the soul in man awakens.

Many confuse this soul-life with religion, and though it is indeed a spiritual matter, it is not about “getting” religion. Religion is easy. Spiritual matters are more difficult. They develop, not supernaturally, but from the psyche and they grow from enquiry into one’s self. Religions can provide a path to self awareness, but one that is too often subverted by the tendency of all hierarchical structures towards corruption.

As unlikely as it sounds, writing – or indeed any form of art – provides another path. There is in all of us a transcendent function that enquires of life and seeks wholeness, seeks oneness with “something”. We can ignore it, or we can grant it creative expression. It’s not a path for everyone, and really rather depends upon one’s psychological type. But it suits me, so I write.

When we write, we are dealing with the unconscious and its unknown contents. Through writing, we invite these contents to become known through the imagination. Once known, or at least hinted at, they become our life’s work, our life’s story. We work then at a pace in partnership between the forces that support us and our natural ability to assimilate them.

My own story thus far is contained in twelve novels, beginning with the Singing Loch, first penned in my twenties, and ending with my most recent, the Inn at the Edge of Light. It begins with the natural world, with the sublime nature of the hills and mountains of the British Isles, and the realisation that the sublime isn’t “out there” at all, but is actually a thing we project from within, like an archetype, a pattern of psychical energy, that the sublime is an abstract impression of the divine ground of being. We were separated from it at birth and we crave reconnection.

The paradox however is that, once awakened and craving reconnection, we realise the river of unconscious contents emanating from this inner universe we are seeking to re-enter, is flowing against us, striving ever more towards an awareness of itself in the physical world, a world that, to a human life, seems curtailed to the point of frustration and despair. It is as if timelessness seeks the ephemeral, a phenomenon as strange as the thought of a free man seeking imprisonment. This is a hard one to crack, but in writing we state the problem, and we invite the answer.

Sometimes the answers come directly from the unconscious, revealing themselves on the page, often trivial details in themselves but which form, over time, a greater structure of understanding. And sometimes it comes serendipitiously, the unconscious guiding us towards the works of others, works we may have perused many times and seen nothing in them, but through our continuing enquiry we awaken sufficiently to return and take what meaning is meant for us, at the time when we are ready to grasp it.

And finally, with the Inn at the Edge of Light I take my seat at the bar and the landlord pours me out a glass of the water of life and I begin to understand through all this mythologising the role of a man with one foot in the camps of both his conscious and his unconscious life. Either that or I fall victim to my own delusions, and what I have achieved is no more than a voyage of Romantic speculation – take your pick.

But if I can close by paraphrasing Carl Jung,…

To the intellect, mythologising is futile speculation. To the emotions, however, it is a healing and valid activity; it gives existence a certain glamour which we would not like to do without.

Nor is there any reason why we should.

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Raw Deal

Tarot cards have an interesting history, most of it the invention of nineteenth century occultists, thus lending them the darker tones of diabolism, at least in popular culture – all of which makes them even more interesting of course. Still, today, the merest sight of the Tarot is enough to cause palpitations in the breast of any God fearing Christian, so deeply scarred is the ancestral memory, and that’s also interesting because the origin of the cards is quite innocent. Fake news, fake narrative has a lot to answer for.

Pictorially intriguing and often very beautiful, the earliest reliable records place the Tarot in Italy in the fifteenth century where it was simply a popular card game. Predating the printing press, each deck of cards was hand made, hand-painted, so each deck was an original, making them rare and powerful symbols of the status of their owners.

Unlike a modern deck of 52, the Tarot has 78 cards, split into the major (22 cards) and minor (56 cards) arcana – arcana meaning secrets. The minor arcana are split into four “suits” of 14 cards each which comprise the number (or pip) cards from ace to ten, and four royal cards of King, Queen, Knight and Page. The major arcana are also known as the “trumps”. This structure is roughly familiar and suggests somewhere along the line card games simply evolved away from using a full deck, requiring instead only the minor arcana, so the rest were ditched.

The early cards had no associations with occult practices. This was an invention of mostly Victorian mystics and ceremonial magicians who adopted them for their own purposes, and it’s easy to understand why when you look at the images of the major arcana. These can be interpreted in an allegorical or an archetypal sense, that to draw certain cards might have a deeper meaning for the individual, or be suggestive of a future fate. But occult writings on the subject go further, attempting a complete revisioning of history, tracing the origins of the Tarot to the mythical, alchemical and hermetic traditions of ancient Egypt. It’s an evocative thesis, and one that’s often picked up by uncritical scholarly writings, but there doesn’t seem to be any actual historical evidence to back it up, which means most of what you think you know is probably wrong.

Most of the earliest Tarot decks, restricted their pictorial artistry to the major arcana with the exception of the Sola Busca Deck, dated around 1500. This was prpbably use as the basis for a later popular deck, the so called Rider-Waite-Smith version, which came out around 1910. Brainchild of the occult writer A E Waite, it was created by the illustrator and mystic Pamela Coleman Smith, and is very much in the esoteric, mystical tradition. Indeed if you’re into alchemy, cartomancy, dark or light path magical traditions, you’ll most likely be familiar with this deck.

The anxiety caused by the Tarot arises from its use as a fortune telling device, also its association with occult magic, with occasional diabolism, and with controversial figures like Aleister Crowley, also an over-literal interpretation of the meaning of the Death card. I’m open minded about the paranormal in general but personally sceptical regarding anyone’s ability to foretell future events with any great accuracy, and suspect our futures are more probabilistic than fixed anyway. It would therefore be unnecessarily dangerous to assume a too literal interpretation of one’s future in the cards, especially if that future did not seem fortuitous, and we did not feel able to avoid it.

Where I have found cartomancy and other forms of divination useful is in understanding the complexities of the present moment. But I’m of the opinion this knowledge comes out of the personal unconscious. We already possess the information we need for understanding a particular situation, but it’s jumbled up and we just can’t get at it. But by judicious use of archetypal imagery, and thinking metaphorically, we invite projection from the unconscious and a corresponding “aha!” moment, a moment of insight.

In this way the Tarot might yield some practical wisdom on an issue we’re facing, a bit of lateral thinking, an angle we’ve not considered, but it’s not the cards themselves that wield the power, nor some omnipotent diabolic entity that’s called down upon their shuffling. You can believe that if you want, and many do, but it’s not necessary in order to read wisdom in the cards themselves. There is mystery enough in the phenomenon of unconscious projection without inventing devils and angels as facilitators.

Sadly, popular media hasn’t helped. All too often in film and fiction the death card is drawn and strikes fear into the heart of the receiver – or even strikes them dead on the spot. Interpreted metaphorically however, the death card can mean change and renewal, sweeping away the old to make way for the new, abandoning old ideas when they are no longer useful, all of which is quite different to being actually struck dead. There’s also the “Live and Let Die” James Bond outing in which the Tarot touting Jane Seymour draws “The Lovers” for a swivel eyed Roger Moore. The only likely outcome of that of course being their future coupling, and one that’s far from metaphorical.

I’d probably spend some time writing more on a common sense approach to the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot, but that’s a big job, and it’s already been done here. I’m not sure what use or what answer the cards have for me, if any, nor if the question is one I’ve already posed, or has yet to crop up, but I’m glad at least to have blown the dust away and brought the cards out, if only from the shadows of my own mind.

They get a bit of a raw deal in popular culture, one that’s not entirely deserved.

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The way of the dream

Don’t worry, I know there’s nothing more boring than listening to an account of someone else’s dreams. Our own dreams interest us of course, but then I think they’re meant to. Me? I take them as the surface of a sea of unconscious currents upon which the vessel of my ego floats. It’s a temperamental vessel, at times leaky, and it has a tendency to become unstable in stormy weather, skittering all over the place, lacks ballast perhaps, or sufficient steerage. Reading ones’ dreams then is like listening to the shipping forecast – you know when to venture far out into calm water, and when to put back into safe harbour.

Or maybe not. Dreams are funny things.

We seem to get by well enough if we pay them no attention. Indeed to analyse them sometimes only confuses us, and we’re taught by the materialists to forget them anyway, even though materialists have no more idea than you or I what dreams are, exactly, or if they’re important,… or not.

If we pay them no heed, we forget them on waking, perhaps even lending the impression to some they do not dream at all. But everyone dreams, every night, if we remember or not. Dreams can be embarrassing, frightening, or simply puzzling. They can have us waking with feelings of foreboding, or regret, or a deep bliss, or even with the cryptic understanding of the answer to a question we’ve not asked yet.

I suspect anything that affects our emotions should be taken seriously, because emotions influence our physical well-being too. Thus an awareness of one’s dream life can lend insight and depth to one’s waking reality. We must take care though not to allow the ego to get wound up when the dream turns its back on us, when it becomes inscrutable to analysis.

Sometimes dreams are subtly nuanced, contain no obvious nuggets of meaning, as if in our dream life we sometimes simply tread water. Sometimes there is meaning aplenty, messages we can take back with us into the waking world. And these messages will speak to our emotions, speak of balance.

To remember our dreams, we simply ask it of that inner part of ourselves before we sleep, and eventually, we rediscover the trick of keeping hold of them, otherwise they leak away on waking. But even then there is a strangeness to these kept dreams. My journal is filled with accounts of dreams I no longer remember, as if even once firmly recounted and committed to print, there is a sell by date on them, and when we read them back, perhaps a year later, it is like reading the dream of a stranger.

Not all dreams are like that, and perhaps the ones that aren’t are the ones of most importance to us, even though we do not know why.

Freud talks of dreams as wish fulfilment, and its true I have experienced many a fulfilment in the dreaming that was denied me in waking life – whether this be compensatory or not I do not know, but also what is denied in life, I spend a deal of time chasing fruitlessly in dreams as well, so the dream also mirrors, or caricatures waking reality oftentimes to a cruel degree.

On waking the ego then writhes in agony, or rails in frustration at its inability to shake some sense out of the dream world. And sometimes the ego can break in. Just as we can teach ourselves to hold on to our dreams, we can also arm ourselves with the keys to the kingdom and drop the ego into the dream world. Then we are no longer passive as the dream unfolds around us. We are conscious, as if awake in the dream.

This called lucid dreaming.

It’s relatively rare phenomenon, but commonly enough reported, though I have mixed feelings about it. It’s not a thing I’m able to indulge in, nor am I advised is it wise, like trying to see the bottom of a pool of crystal water while splashing about in it. Ego assumes dominion, like it does over everything else, bending all to its will, flying about, having sex with strangers, or worse: sex with people you would never dare proposition in waking life, and all are suddenly putty in your hands, or rather in your mind, your thoughts manifested in apparent form. Oh, the ego can have a ball all right, but then the dream itself becomes shy, loses meaning, serves not its natural purpose.

That said, I know the techniques, and sometimes ask the keeper of dreams to grant me lucidity, “if it would help”. But I have yet to be trusted, and perhaps just as well.

Jung shows us the dream as an expression of the unconscious, sometimes personal, sometimes collective. He teaches us to recognise the subtle players of the dreamscape and the masks they wear – anima, shadow, trickster, peur, senex. From a study of their manifestation in the dream over time we can chart the development of our personal myth, our very own hero’s journey to wholeness.

And then we have Hillman who likens the dream more to the underworld of classical learning, its archetypes, like Jungs, proxies of the gods. And Hillman, rather than emphasise the importance of analysis and understanding the meaning of the dream, speaks more of submitting ourselves to the experience of it, to ask not what does this dream symbol represent, for then we lose the dream. Remembered dreams are thus less messages from the unconscious as memories of preparations for death and permanent residence in that place.

Or not, maybe.

Sweet dreams.

 

 

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Approaching the unconscious

As we age we undergo a process of emotional development. Obviously we do not possess the same outlook in our middle years as we did when we were children, but what is it that drives us to change? Is it merely that we come to inhabit a progressively older body? Is it the experience of life itself that changes us, or is it that are we subject to influences from the unconscious mind that would have us seek those experiences out as a medium for change?

Life can provide any number of varied environments enabling us to grow in all manner of positive directions, but it can just as easily arrest our development if experience of life is at odds with our aspirations. So where does the aspiration, the imperative, the drive come from? Abusive relationships, personal misfortune, global upheaval, even financial ruin, all present challenges to health and well being, subverting a life’s path and running it onto the rocks. Yet in spite of misfortune some people suffer no injury beyond the initial trauma, while others are maimed for life. To avoid lasting scars appears to require an agile frame of mind and a deep intuitive sense of one’s abiding value in the face of all rational evidence to the contrary. Where does such strength, such resilience come from?

With bad experiences, what usually happens is we push the memories out of range of our emotional radar and get on with things as best we can. We are all good at this, at removing from conscious awareness those things that are most painful to us, and anyway we cannot always react to hurt in the way we would like, and in which our instincts are urging us – like punching the other guy on the nose. In the course of life, there is a lot we simply have to swallow, but the unconscious never forgets a slight. It remembers everything.

It even knows what I was doing at half past three on Wednesday afternoon, December 28th 1978. I can no longer consciously recall this moment of course – it is lost to my every day awareness but well documented cases of spontaneous and total recall suggest the memory of this moment still exists, somewhere, and if, during that moment, I was experiencing an emotional upset that was never healed, my unconscious will offer it back. And it will keep offering it back, until I deal with it.

It does this through the dreaming process, using a symbolic language in which the objects, the people, the situations we encounter in the dream world are emotionally charged in ways reflective of our life experience, including the things we’d rather not acknowledge. And the dream is saying, here, look, take this back this and then we can move on. But if we have fallen foul of a culture that devalues the dreaming process, if we never take notice of our dreams, the process of “dealing with it” can be a problem. And stuff mounts up. Some of us incubate hidden, forgotten traumas, combine them, allow them to breed, then hatch them into inexplicable and stupendously debilitating neuroses. At such times as these it seems our unconscious is overrun with demons out to do us harm. We might feel that to go poking around in there is the very last thing we should be doing, but paying attention to our dreams helps defuse things. It puts the unconscious mind in a better mood for dealing with us, if it realises we are receptive.

We all dream, every night, though some people dispute this, claiming never to have dreamed at all. But the thing with dreams is they play out in a part of the mind that bypasses the way we normally acquire memory. If we want to remember our dreams we have to make a conscious effort to do so. We have to remind ourselves, when we lay down to sleep, we would like to remember our dreams. Then, on waking, in the first seconds of awareness, we have a fleeting opportunity to drink the dream down whole, sufficient at least to recall it well enough to record it later on. But even then we must make haste, or the memory will fade to nothing like an imperfectly processed photograph. Reading my dream journal now, accounts of many dreams I had years ago are like reading the fantasies of a complete stranger.

So we have our dream. What now? Well, the best we can do is sit down and ponder upon it. What might it be showing us? What emotions does it provoke? It does not matter if we cannot understand the dream. It seems to be the conversation with the unconscious that’s the important thing. If we fail in the first dreams, to understand what it’s showing us, it will try other ways of illustrating the same thing, until we finally get it.

We can forget those dream dictionaries. What they fail to point out is that the dream is a personal thing and that, for example, a rabbit in my dream might mean something entirely different in yours. You can forget also asking advice from others because they may react to your symbols differently. Thus, slowly, respectfully, and with an attitude of genuine enquiry, we approach the unconscious, preferably on bended knee.

I worry about self-help dream techniques that sound more assertive, like a battering down of a door into unconsciousness in order to plunder its contents, in an effort to turn us into mega-star celebrities with millions in the bank, and perfect teeth. The lesson of a century of psychoanalysis tells us we are only a small part of who we think we are, that we are not entirely in charge. We can be part of the solution to the mystery of our lives, which involves being a good listener and a willing partner in the adventure, or we can remain for ever a part of the problem.

I suppose the bottom line is we do not need to be ill to take an interest in our personal development, in the rounding out and the maturation of our soul. True there are grown men and women as emotionally well developed as four year olds, or for that matter wildebeest, and for whom all talk of the dreaming process will sound ridiculous. But for those who seek meaning beyond the normal watering and rutting of the species, the dream is nature’s own gift to aid us on the path to a greater self awareness.

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The Naked Dreamer

In the biological sciences, dreams don’t amount to much. Bizarre and useless, we’re advised there is no meaning to be extracted from them. We dream of a rabbit, look it up in a dream dictionary, and learn the rabbit means we’ll have good luck. Hmm – seems superficial at best.

But wait!

What if we dream we’re naked among people we know – family, friends colleagues? Depending on which book we look this one up in, it can be interpreted as meaning we are afraid of showing others our true selves. In this case then, the dream appears symbolic of personal unconscious complexes, and that’s meaningful in that it reveals to us aspects of our selves in a potentially helpful way, prompting further questions like: what parts of myself do I not want others to see, and why not?

Maybe there’s more to dreams after all?

In fact dream interpretation has been an important part of psychoanalysis for over a century. Sadly though, for the layman, dreaming still languishes in the realm of simplistic dream dictionaries. Serious literature is more elusive,… but infinitely more enlightening.

We all dream, every night. It’s just remembering our dreams that’s the problem. But it’s actually not that difficult and consists merely of making a mental note as we lay down to sleep that we will try to remember our dreams. And in time, we remember them. And the more dreams we remember, the more richly we are rewarded with our dreams – the first foggy, disjointed fragments maturing into vivid dream canvasses resplendent in allegorical meaning and which leave us tingling all day in their numinous afterglow.

By interpreting my dreams I sought a new direction in life. The experience was wholly positive, but not in the way I expected. Most dreams remained inscrutable; life was unchanged; I did the same things, the same job, faced the same problems. However in retrospect, I realised the dreams had guided me towards the centre of a newly reconstructed self, one in which the same elements were present, but had been rearranged.

I had gained a different perspective.

Dreams, it seems, serve a potentially transformative function of the psyche, if we can only bring ourselves to take them seriously.

And now?

I admit I’m out of the habit of recalling dreams. My journal is rarely updated and what few dreams I spontaneously hold onto these days have lost their depth and their power. But I’ve been wondering if the time has come to make an effort to uncover my dreams again, or even to crank it up a bit,…

…and go flying in them!

In all my dreaming, I have simply let the dreams wash over me, so that like most dreamers, I do not know I am dreaming, when I dream. But dreaming can be taken further; we can train ourselves to dream lucidly.

In lucid dreams we are no longer passive observers of the dream, but self determining participants, capable of critical reasoning and intelligent engagement. We can shape our environment, talk to dream characters, and we can get about by flying. How cool is that?

Lucid dreaming requires a more advanced skillset, one I don’t possess, but one I’m led to believe can be acquired easily. The question is, should I make the effort?

The fictional characters in my current work-in-progress are adept at lucid dreaming. The dream space allows them a more flexible stage on which to explore the nature of their being, and I find the philosophical implications irresistible. But if one writes of Australia, how authentic can one be if one has never been there?

The tales of lucid dreamers have been like Siren voices for a while now urging me to make the push and become a lucid dreamer myself. But a wise old friend cautions me that to enter on this path is also to risk losing oneself inside one’s own head, becoming mired in a different kind of mud – one of self-generated and entirely hedonistic dream-content – none of which means anything.

Lucid dreamers talk of directly engaging with the unconscious, rather than being passively subjected to its whims, as in ordinary dreams. They talk of strange, paranormal things too, like precognitive dreams, healing in dreams, and even of meeting the dreaming selves of other people. But while such things fascinate and feed my hunger for interesting fictional scenarios, to actually bluster in and interrogate one’s own unconscious, seems an immodest thing to do. My wise old friend reminds me that when we travel the liminal zones bordering the Faery lands, we are always better going quietly, and on tiptoe.

I do need to move on from where I’m at. I sense a stagnation in my ways and in my thoughts. So, I have blown the dust from my dream journal, and made a few fresh entries, but the dreams I seek are strictly of the ordinary kind. I’m sure lucid dreaming can be a wild party, but I’m also thinking it’s better to wait for an invitation than to use one’s cleverness and egotistical wit to gatecrash a gathering where nobody’s quite sure what’s going on. Notwithstanding the extraordinary exploits of my fictional characters, to dream lucidly is perhaps to risk dragging the expectations of the real world into the realm of the Faery, to inform it, to shape it, and ultimately I fear, as with any other environment we seek to exploit for our own aims, to irreparably corrupt it.

So, while I may continue to appear, on occasion, naked and embarrassed in my dreams, my dreams at least are seeing me as I truly am, rather than how I would prefer myself to be seen. I think they prefer me that way.

And who am I to argue?

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Hypnotism for dummies

I’ve been looking into hypnotism recently, a subject I know nothing about, but which has been cropping up in another area I’m interested in – namely the early work of the Society for Psychical Research. The Society was founded in 1882 with the aim of studying reports of so called paranormal phenomenon – things like extra sensory perception, spiritual mediumship and other apparent indications of some form of survival of the human personality after bodily death.

At the time, the scientific establishment was busy defining the world along strictly rational lines and sweeping all before it, enabling society to make rapid advances in technology and medicine, but there was (and still is) among champions of the “scientific method” a deep seated aversion towards anything that could be labelled paranormal. The Society for Psychical Research was formed outside of the scientific establishment, though headed by a group of open minded scientists who sought to apply the rigour of the scientific method to the investigation of the paranormal – the aim being to see once and for all if there was anything in it. They’ve been going about it now for 130 years and have uncovered much that still isn’t generally well known, as well as debunking a good deal of what was and is still being claimed as fact by the more credulous proponents of the paranormal.

Two distinguished early investigators, as well as being the founding fathers of the society, were Edmund Gurney (Phantasms of the living 1886) and Frederick Myers (Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death, 1903). I’ve recently been ploughing through both of these substantial works, and fascinating reading they make too, but that’s another story.

Myers and Gurney began their psychical investigations with the study of spirit mediums, an avenue that turned up unambiguous evidence of fraud on the part of all but a few. Discouraged, Myers and Gurney abandoned this line, and began to study instead evidence for the apparently anomalous faculties of the mind. This proved to be a more fruitful avenue and a great deal of data was documented in support of the concept of extra sensory perception – the apparent transfer of thoughts or sensations from one mind to another. These early studies suggested there was something about the human personality, the psyche, or whatever you want to call it, that extended beyond the boundaries of the brain, and was able to interact with the minds of others, regardless of the distance by which they were separated.

Myers, a classicist and poet, also established himself as one of the few British depth psychologists of his day. A contemporary of both Pierre Janet and Sigmund Freud, he was also an influence on Carl Jung’s emerging theories of a collective unconscious. Rather than attempting to trim away the anomalous and somewhat untidy fringe of human experience, Myers insisted one could not formulate a comprehensive understanding of the nature of personality or “mind” without including a study of its occasionally anomalous though well documented feats of extraordinary cognition – from the calculating savants, reports of preconative dreams, or the laboratory-controlled evidence of extra sensory perception, all of which defied rational explanation.

Myers and Gurney were interested in hypnotism because it had been observed that anomalous feats of cognition could be more reliably brought about with a subject in hypnotic trance. Their work with hypnotism also raised the question: could the experiences of apparent contact with discarnate entities – in other words “spirits” – be explained as a form of super-extra-sensory-perception, emanating not from the minds of the dead, but from the minds of the living?

One of the earliest advocates of hypnotism was Anton Mesmer (1734-1815) who built up a reputation as a healer by the use of what he called “animal magnetism”. He claimed this was different to the better known magnetism associated with compass needles, that it was inherent in the bodies of people and animals, and that it was possible for one person to have a “magnetic” influence over another. His methods eventually came under scientific scrutiny, and a board of inquiry concluded that his technique, at the bottom of it, involved nothing more than a form of suggestion, working upon the mind of the patient.

This of course is exactly what hypnotism is, but the board’s findings had stripped it of the glossy mystique Mesmer had wrapped it in. As a consequence Mesmerism fell into disrepute until the middle of the 19th century when it was taken up again by the Scottish surgeon James Braid, and what we now call “hypnotism” became respected once more as a therapeutic method.

Rather than uncritically accepting Mesmer’s claims of a mysterious “animal magnetism”, Braid approached the subject from a purely rational, psychological and physiological angle, and was the first to identify a definite trance state, or a state of deep relaxation, in which a subject became more easily suggestible to the thoughts or the will of another.

One of the biggest drivers of early research into hypnotism was its potential use as an anaesthetic, since it had been found that hypnotised subjects could be “persuaded” to feel no pain. This enabled surgical procedures to be carried out that were unthinkable before. It was only the later development of more reliable chemical anaesthetics that led to hypnotism being abandoned as a means of pain control, and it became instead a tool for opening up and investigating the dark recesses of the mind.

It was in France, through the work of the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) that the greatest advances in the study of hypnotism were made and used to good effect in the treatment of hysteria. It was also through Charcot’s work, and that of his pupil Pierre Janet (1859-1947), that anomalous forms of cognition were first reliably documented. It was these cases that came to the attention of Myers and Gurney, and were used in support of their own investigations, and their subsequent reports to the Society of Psychical Reasearch.

Speaking as a layman, what hypnotism seems to point to is that the unconscious mind is really rather powerful, that its true nature is still largely unknown and that its reach, rather than being confined spatially and temporally to the insides of our own heads and the span of our own lives, is potentially infinite, and independent of our current understanding of the nature of space and time.

What hypnotism seems to reveal is that many of our most remarkable psychical and even physical abilities are obscured by the simple fact of our conscious awareness, that our consciousness filters out or restricts our actual potential though possibly for very good reasons. Hypnotic methods bypass the controlling or patterned instincts of our conscious mind and reveal traits of behaviour, cognition or personality that we can pass our whole lives in ignorance of.

Any foray into the subject of the true nature of human personality is to kick over a can of existential worms, and I don’t want to go on too long here, but a good example of one of the greyer documented areas of personality are the many cases of so called automatism. This is where an apparently sane person begins to produce communications, either written or verbal, that appear to come from an intelligence other than their own. Perhaps the best documented and most perplexing of these cases is that of Patience Worth who produced millions of words of published literature through the mediumship of Pearl Curran(1883-1937), a young woman of modest education and no prior literary expertise or pretensions. Then there is Seth, communicating tomes of existential wonders through the mediumship of Jane Roberts (1929-1984).

You’ll find Seth’s books on Amazon, also the works of countless other latter day chanellers, though of course their voluminous nature does not in itself provide proof of their veracity. However, the material clearly comes from somewhere and evidence suggests it comes from the mind of a personality that is removed from the apparent personality of its physical author. The lesson of hypnotism however is that none of this material – remarkable though it might seem – can be taken at face value. The work of Patience Worth, largely poetic and fictional in nature, can be enjoyed for what it is, but when these chanelled personalities begin transmitting information as truths regarding the nature of “life, the universe and everything”, then we need to be careful we don’t become so open minded we let our brains fall out.

My own view is that the extraordinary cases of automatic or chanelled material are too extensive and intellectually coherent to be dismissed as fraud, self-delusional fantasy, or the mad “ravings” of a sadly afflicted “human” author and I’m prepared to accept that secondary personalities (fragments within one’s own psyche) provide as convincing an explanation as the theory of a discarnate agency. Were Pearl Curran and Seth real? I think the answer is yes, but my next question is: in what sense were they real?

What this tells us about the nature of human personality is no less breathtaking, perplexing, or disturbing – that within each of us, there may lie channels of communication to versions of our selves that are both independent of what we think of as being our primary self, but also of quite different intellectual endowment and personality, that these other versions of our selves can far exceed our own ability – and equally, at times, be so infantile as to be easliy eclipsed by it.

The use of hypnosis in the latter part of the 19th century opened the door, or rather the mind, for the field of depth psychology, and its use therein has been long established, but what it actually reveals about the nature of human personality proved so difficult and controversial a thing to deal with it led at least one pioneering psychiatrist, Carl Jung, to eventually abandon it in his therapeutic practice because he said it seemed to pose more questions than it answered, and revealed far more of the human personality than could be explained.

Nowadays we are most familiar with the use of hypnotism as a means of behaviour “modification”, a therapy to be tried in cases of addiction or in overcoming phobias. This was its original function, going back to Mesmer, but even now, as then, we have little understanding of how it works, why it works, or even what it works upon. All we can say is that a person  is gradually relaxed into a trance-state, one in which they become suggestible, and the hypnotist, to quote Myers: suggests to the patient that they get well. And sometimes they do.

The fact that hypnotism is still unexplainable in rational terms is one reason it gets a bad press and is viewed by the layman with suspicion,  either that it is simply fraudulent – an act between a charlatan and his stooge – or that it is a dangerous and half-understood technique that has left a trail of subjects suffering psychological damage as a result of it.

One of the most frightening aspects of hypnotism is that it can apparently modify our memories, preventing us from recalling events that have actually happened, or it can convince us that events that did not happen actually happened, or that the blatant nonsense we’ve been fed by the hypnotist is true, or it can convince us that things other people can plainly see, are simply not there. Our memory is very much associated with our sense of self, and the thought that another person could come along and modify us, change us, or even rob us of that which is most intimately our own is deeply disturbing, and earns the subject of hypnotism, rightly or wrongly, its notoriety.

Given the power of the unconscious mind, and its apparent suggestibility, I would err towards the view that hypnosis is not a subject to be treated lightly, and certainly not a thing to expose oneself to at the hands of an inexperienced practitioner, nor one whose art extends no further than the entertainments industry.

Practitioners of therapeutic hypnotism are required to study at recognised schools, though I note in the UK many of these are in the “private” sector and seem vulnerable to infiltration by opportunist charlatans. Certification is regulated, but conversely you need no medical qualifications to enrol on a course of certificated study. Even yours truly, whose medical knowledge extends no further than opening a box of sticking plasters could apparently obtain the necessary certification to set himself up in therapeutic practice, and begin poking about for the secondary personalities of my unsuspecting clients, and doing all manner of untold damage in the process.

certification or no, we can all perform a harmless kind of hypnosis, at least upon ourselves. It involves nothing more than a form of relaxation, breath control, and “talking to oneself”. I tried it out one night on one of those middle aged aches and pains we get from time to time, with good results – the sort of thing which if you presented the symptoms to the sawbones he’d mutter something about it being muscular, and tell you to take an aspirin.

So, you lie in bed and you go through a fairly standard relaxation technique, identifying in turn each part of your body – feet, legs, torso, arms, neck head,… and you progressively relax them, breathe into them. You take your time, and when you feel deeply relaxed you go through a prearranged script, something about counting yourself down to ten or something, at which point you say you are in the zone of suggestibility. Then you start breathing into the achy bit, telling yourself to imagine it as a physical thing about the size of a golf ball – and once you’ve got the measure of it you tell yourself you’re going to shrink it down to the size of a marble, then a grain of rice, then a pin head, and finally, you tell yourself that by morning it will be gone completely. You come out of your self-induced trance by some other pre arranged method, counting yourself up to three or perhaps, and as daft as it all sounds, my ache, which I’d had off and on for months had gone in the morning and has not returned.

So, either it was going to get better on its own anyway, or it was all in the head. But there are apparently many things in the head, that we are entirely unaware of.

Michael Graeme

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