Dream Gates

The ancient Egyptians understood that in dreams, our eyes are opened. Their word for dream, rswt, is etymologically connected to the root meaning “to be awake”. It was written with a symbol representing an open eye. The Egyptians believed that the gods speak to us in dreams. As the Bible story of Joseph and Pharaoh reminds…

Have you ever dreamed that you looked at yourself in a mirror and noticed you were quite different from the way you think of yourself in waking life?  While we look in a mirror in some of our dreams, the dream is also looking at us. The whole of a dream may function as a…

When we give the best of ourselves to a creative project – accepting the risks that creativity involves – we draw the interest and engagement of supporting intelligences from beyond our ordinary field of connection. There is a passage in Yeats’s essay Per Amica Silentia Lunae (“The Friendly Silence of the Moon” , included in his book Mythologies)…

“Man attracts spirits according to his own temperament,” as William Butler Yeats observed. To “the sanguine, the spirits of fire, and the lymphatic, those of watery nature, and those of a mixed nature, mixed spirits.” While observing that like attracts like, Yeats was also fascinated by the way that opposites may be drawn together, to…

What the bleep do we know that we don’t know that we know? A sudden shift in your energy or feelings in the presence of a stranger – or a life memory that floats to the surface – may be telling you something about that other person. A sudden twinge or pain that has no…

A frisky breeze is tossing fall leaves into the air in front of my windshield when I turn on the car radio. The commentator on a classical music station is introducing a recording of Mozart’s Kegelstatt Trio. He explains that “Kegelstatt” is the German word for a place where you play skittles, and that Mozart…

After a murky sequence in my dreams last night, when I needed to avoid various dangers and distractions, I found myself lying at the edge of the ocean in marvelous gleaming morning sunlight. With my legs in the water, I enjoyed the waves lapping over my lower chest, and the warmth of the early sun,…

When I posted my recent essay on Synesius – the “bishop of dreams” and student of Hypatia -on this blog, I had no idea that writer-director Alejandro Amenábar had made a movie in Spain (“Agora”) with Rachel Weisz as Hypatia and Rupert Evans as her admiring student Synesius. Still less that it opened at the…

It happened again last night. I was rushing around between cities and airports in Europe, and realized I did not have directions for a house where I had an appointment. I decided to call the people I was visiting, and found that the cell phone in my pocket was not my regular one. It had…

He lives in a world lit mostly by fire. The Roman Empire has recently been split into two. Rome, the capital of the West, will soon fall to the Goths. The barbarians are inside the gates of Constantinople, the capital of the East. His home city of Cyrene, in what is now Libya, is under…

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