1: Meet Your Heavenly Twin and Explore the Imaginal Realm

Dreaming with Rumi and the Great Sufi Visionary Philosophers

All branches of Islam are characterized by a deep reverence for dreams and visions. In the hadith, Muhammad says that dreams are the only form of glad tidings (mubashshirat) of prophecy that will survive his death. It is understood that there is a hidden realm where “true dreams” take place, either through journeys of the soul that take the dreamer there, or through visitations by authentic guides who come from that realm.

The most luminous description of this hidden realm – “the isthmus of imagination” – is in the writings of the medieval Sufi philosophers Ibn ‘Arabi and Suhrawardi. And Rumi gives us the aching beauty of the longing to join the heavenly twin, the Beloved of the soul. 

In this class we will learn

·  Dreams are experiences of the soul that travels to supersensory realms where contact with sacred teachers is possible

·  A dream is an “event” (vaki’a), the term used repeatedly by Ottoman Sultan Murad III in 2,000 dream reports he sent to his Sufi master.

·  The practice of dream interpretation as “crossing over” to the dream realm

·  The teaching of Rumi’s vision of the appearance of Gabriel to Mary

·  How to embark on a journey of ascension to the heavenly twin using Suhrawardi’s Hymn to Perfect Nature

·  Ibn Arabi’s keys to the Barzakh, the isthmus of imagination between the spiritual and the material, the visible and the invisible, personal creativity and the creative power of the universe.

2: Be a Snake in the Grass, a Leopard in the Forest, a Bird in the Air

Dreaming for Liberation with Harriet Tubman and the Spirits of Africa

Harriet Tubman was the most famous conductor of the Underground Railroad, the network that got escaping slaves from the South to safety in the era of the American Civil War. She is credited with helping up to 300 slaves to find freedom. As a girl she suffered a terrible wound. Afterwards she was prone to falling into sudden “sleeps” in which she saw the future. There was a gift in this wound; it enabled her to find safe roads forward when leading fugitives on the run. Harriet dreamed that President Lincoln freed the slaves three years before he issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

She may have inherited shamanic tracking skills from ancestors in West Africa; there is evidence that both her parents were Asante. In the language of the Asante, "to dream” is so dae, which literally means “to arrive at a place during sleep”. The idea that dreaming is traveling is in the word. Robert has dreamed of Harriet, including when he lived in a house in Troy NY where she once worked as a maid. 

In this class we will learn

·  We can use our dreams to navigate through the obstacles of everyday life, opening paths to freedom and creative fulfillment for ourselves and our communities.

·  Dreams show us what lies ahead on our life roads, and enable us to make better choices

·  Dreams introduce us to soul friends and allies in the physical world and on the spiritual plane

·  We can tap into ancestral wisdom, as Harriet may have drawn on the shamanic tracking skills of the leopard dreamers among her West African forebears.

·  We will make a shamanic lucid dream journey to our own ancestors for counsel and guidance on how to help others.

3: The Soul of Wandering Aengus

Yeats, Mutual Visioning and Re-Enchantment of the World

Yeats’s poetry carries us into the dreamworld: to the enchanted hazel wood where a silver trout becomes a girl with apple blossom in her hair, to the lake isle, to the golden birds of Byzantium,  the lovely and perilous realms of Faerie. Many know that Yeats was a magus – an adept of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn – familiar with ceremonial magic and also an avid psychical researcher who went to seances and sought to talk to the dead through mediums. with seances. Few know the depth of his practice as a dreamer.

Yeats valued dreams that are “granted” more than dreams that are “sought”, and recorded dreams in his notebooks and letters. He also developed practices for dream incubation, lucid dreaming and “mutual visioning” in which he met others on the astral plane. Drawing on little-known primary sources and Robert’s lifelong love of Yeats, in this class we unpack insights and practices we can follow in our own lives and embark on magical journeys powered by the sonorous verse of the greatest poet of the twentieth century. 

In this class we discover, with Yeats, that

·  Spontaneous night dreams provide the best “ways of lighting on the truth, that the reason has not”.

·  We experiment with Yeats’s methods of “mutual visioning” – lucid entry into shared dreamscapes with a partner or group.

·  We try out Yeats’s methods of “symbol sending” – telepathic transmission of powerful or magical images

·  We study Yeats’s conception of the anima mundi, a single intelligence that causes universal symbols to appear in individual minds

·  We follow Yeats’s account of how the dead “dream back” to the living and scenes from the life just ended to get their stories straight

·  We companion the poet on the journey to Otherworld sources of wisdom and inspiration

·  We journey into with Aengus into the enchanted hazel wood on a path of real magic and soul remembering