The Unexpected Animal - A Shaman Journey

 Years ago, I wrote The Ghost Drum, about a shaman who steps into other worlds and explores them as easily as we breathe.

Lucy Coats

     At the end of last year, I went on a shaman journey. Not a very long one. Barely across Shaman Street.
     Like the first, it was under the guidance of Lucy Coats, fellow member of the Scattered Authors Society and well known writer and witch about town.
      A few years ago now, at the SAS's annual conference at Charney Manor, Lucy led a 'shaman journey' workshop. Like Lucy, who has written several retellings of myth, I love these ancient stories and their imagery and have a great interest in all things pagan and witchy. So I went along out of curiosity.
       Lucy had us all lie down on the floor, close our eyes and get comfortable. Then, with her drumming and her gentle voice, she hypnotised us into a state of deep relaxation. She was going to take us on a guided journey, she said. What did we see, behind our closed eyes?

          There's a proverb that I used as a touchstone while I wrote The Ghost Drum -

'When we sleep, the dreamer inside us wakes.'

          I used it to help myself imagine how someone could walk in another world - to remind myself how vivid, solid and in every way real dreams can be.
         When Lucy asked us what we could see, the dreamer inside me woke, and looked up at an enormous tree towering high above, its grey branches spiralling upwards against a starred sky. I was taken aback by the strength and vividness of the image, so much so that, of course, I had to belittle it.
         'Oh, of course, it's the World Tree,' I thought - something I'd been imagining since I first came across the Norse Myths at eleven. I knew that the World Tree was about as ancient a symbol as you could find, and that Siberian shamans had 'climbed the World Tree' to travel between worlds.
         My mind is very well stocked with mythic images - so there was nothing very surprising in it producing one on request.
        But it was so very clear and real an image. It had solidity and weight. I've seen - and touched - images as real in dreams, but my waking imagination can't attain that degree of detail. So maybe, I thought, something out of the ordinary was going on here.

Ygdrasil - Wikipedia, public domain

          Maybe that's how it works, I thought. If you're taking a trip into your own inner world and dreams, you can only use the imagery in your own head. My own image of the World Tree had been with me a long time.
          So I decided to stop bitching and let things happen. Lucy led us, with her words and drumming, along a path and to a door... Behind the door were three caves, and we were to find, if I remember correctly, a spring in one, a fire in another, and some kind of prize or gift in the third.
          It was a long time ago, and I don't remember all of the experience - what did stay with me was the extraordinary reality of everything I 'saw.' There was a large bowl carved out of crystal, a burning fire lighting the darkness of a cave. Perhaps none of the imagery was very original - but then, the archetypal, by definition, is not going to be original. It was all very real. I felt the heat from that fire. If I'd put my hand into it, it would have burned.
          There was also the great feeling of peace and relaxation the experience left me with when Lucy called us back. I remember thinking it a very interesting experience indeed and that if ever the chance came along to take another trip, I would jump at it.

The chance came at another SAS event - the 'Winter Warmer' held at Folly Farm in Somerset. Lucy was there, and offered another chance to take a 'shaman journey.'
     The event took place at the end of November 2015, over a weekend where one storm roared into another. Or maybe it was one long storm that lasted three days. It was dark, wet and cold. Lucy suggested that we bring our duvets with us to the studio, which might be a bit draughty.
       I'd had a sleepless night - as had many others, as the storm roared and stomped about the sky - and had just returned from a walk with my friend Jenny Alexander, where we'd tramped over a hill in strong winds. So I was more than willing, at Lucy's suggestion, to lie down and stretch out, snuggle into my duvet, close my eyes and - Zzzzz-Zzzzz
        Unfortunately, I do snore and I did keep falling asleep. For me, Lucy's voice faded in and out...

        This time, Lucy played a tape of gentle music rather than drumming but, as before, she first lulled us into a deeply relaxed state. It was very cosy, lying on the floor among my fellow Scattereds, warmly snuggled in a duvet and drifting off gently into a half-sleep.
         When she had us all relaxed, Lucy suggested that we were lying cradled in the roots of a big tree, in a forest. I was there! I felt the roots around me, smelled the leaf-mould and earth, looked up and saw the branches and leaves above, scattering the light.
          As others said, the sound of the storm outside helped our imaginations - we didn't have to call up the sound of wind soughing in branches. It was soughing like billy-o. My imagination, somehow boosted or freed by the hypnotism, worked at full strength, using all my memories of trees and woods, weaving them together into a - well, a virtual reality. An alternative reality. I could smell the forest. I could hear it. I could feel those cradling roots.
          I've experienced this other-worldly reality in dreams but here, I wasn't exactly asleep. I wasn't exactly awake either. I kept drifting off - but then I'd hear a snatch of what Lucy said, or a whisper or movement from one of the others around me.
          An animal is going to come to you, Lucy said. It doesn't matter what kind.
          Oh, it'll be a cat, thought my doubting mind. I like cats, I had a cat narrate the Ghost World books, it'll be a cat for sure.
          So I 'looked around' as it were, into the wood, fully expecting to see a cat. Trying to see a cat. Probably my ex-cat, Biffo.
          Coming through the trees, I saw a huge white stag. Plain as anything, there was this huge white stag with an enormous spread of antlers -
          No, no, I thought. Hang on. Return to sender. This is wrong. Should be a cat. Stands to sense it should be a cat.
          The stag came on regardless. It was white, it had a big mane or ruff of fur around its

shoulders, and from the great tree of its antlers hung golden chains, bells, apples, and a golden key. These golden ornaments swung as the stag came, catching the dim woodland light and shining.
          (Since I've been trying to learn to use graphics programmes, I tried to make something like what I saw, but the stag in my image is Bewick's engraved stag and much daintier than the white stag I saw in my dream or whatever it was. The stag I saw was a much beefier, shaggier specimen with heftier antlers.)
          If, awake, I'd tried to imagine how a stag would walk, I doubt I could do a very good job, but here I saw each movement of the head and hooves.My subconscious was drawing, I suppose, on a lifetime of BBC Wildlife documentaries.
          Follow your animal, Lucy said. It will take you to your special place, your safe place.
          I can't remember exactly what Lucy said about this place, because I kept drifting off to sleep, but I think it was the place where you can go for inspiration, if you need an idea or a solution to a problem. The place where your imagination lives and springs from.
          So, I got up and went with the stag. He greeted me by blowing on my hand, and I felt his warm breath. I felt his fur (which I suspect felt more like a cat's fur than a deer's, since I don't think I've ever touched a deer's fur in my life.) I walked at his shaggy shoulder and he led me uphill through the trees that arched overheard and rutted the track with their roots.
          Your animal will bring you to a door, Lucy said, and the stag led me to a small wooden door. of thick planks, set in the hillside.
          Your animal will give you the key.
          And there was a big golden key hanging from a chain on the stag's antlers. He lowered his head so I could take it.
          I turned the key and ducked through the low door into a dim, round, warm little place. There were wooden beams, an open fire, and benches covered with hides and fur. I think it probably owed a great deal to a yurt I once ate venison and blueberries in, in Arctic Finland, and maybe a little to Scara Brae, the Stone Age village in the Orkneys. It was a very nice little gaffe to find inside your own head, and certainly felt safe and warm, but my memories of this 'shaman journey' weren't of 'the safe place' but of meeting that amazing and unexpected stag.
          Why a stag? And why one bedecked in gold chains? - If, waking, I'd been asked to predict what animal would appear in this half-dream, I'd have said, a cat. Maybe a dog. If pushed to be a bit more dramatic, I might have said, 'A wolf,' since I've several times written about wolves. But never a stag with gold hanging from its antlers
          It's this quality of the unexpected, as well as the vivid detail, that makes these experiences, for me, so strange and so interesting. I remember the feeling of surprise, even shock, when I 'saw' the stag. I expected to be in control, to be able to 'order up' the expected cat. But I had no control. I wasn't expecting the stag, but there he was, gold and all, and there was no getting rid of him.

         At the end, we sat up and recounted what we'd seen. I was glad that my inevitable snoring had turned into 'a giant in a cave' for another traveller. Everyone had 'seen' an animal and had been led to a secret, special place - but it's for them to give their account of their journeys, if they choose, not for me.

          I've tried repeating this experience, but it's not easy without Lucy's soothing voice.

          Thank  you, Scattered Authors Society, and especial thanks to Lucy Coats, for making this trip into my own head possible.

          Lucy Coats' website is here.

          And here is Lucy on 'creative napping.'

A Shaman's Handbook - a review

Writing In The House Of Dreams by Jenny Alexander

'Writing In The House Of Dreams' by Jenny Alexander

This is an astonishing book. I don't think I've read another like it.

It's a book of writing exercises and advice on how to write - but, equally, exercises and advice on how to live another life, in your dreams. Jenny Alexander has spent a lifetime exploring and coming to know that other world that we visit when we dream. She's spent twenty years writing and revising and adding to this book.

I feel it's as much a shaman's handbook as a writer's.

I remember a conversation with Jenny where she told me that she'd become a writer because of her dreams. She'd always been creative, but had suppressed that side of herself, and gone to University instead of to Art school. That other, suppressed side of herself reacted with fury, sending her terrible nightmares where she killed herself. [You can read a record of our conversation here.]

Jenny Alexander

Finding no real help in dealing with her nightmares from doctors, counsellors or psychiatrists, she began exploring her dream world for herself.

For most of her life - certainly for all of her writing life - she has been, perhaps, more aware of that other self, The Dreamer, The Creative Self, than most of us.

Having moved from an exploration of dreams into writing, Jenny taught workshops both on writing and dreaming. In this book she has pulled together a lifetime's experience of both.

It starts with 'The Ordinary World' - how a child leaves 'the magical world of childhood, where teddies can talk...and monsters hide in the shadows.' This is close to the dream-world, from which writers - from which all artists - have always drawn inspiration.

Then there's 'Crossing the Threshold' of the House of Dreams - in which Jenny urges us to let go of the Western idea that dreams are merely a rehashing of waking events, or something to be 'interpreted' for psychological meaning. That, Jenny says, is simply rationalising something which disturbs us, so we can dismiss a terrifying nightmare, or a sequence of strange dream events, with a glib, 'Oh, I know what that meant.' - Perhaps we do 'know what it meant' on one level - but perhaps the dream is larger and contains more than its meaning to us at that moment.

Another approach, instead of dismissing the nightmare with a rationalisation, is to enter it and explore it as a reality. Then you are approaching and communicating with the source of your own creativity, even with the worst, most sinister nightmare.

This makes the chapter, 'The Beast In The Basement' a necessary one, as it arms you with techniques to deal with the Beast when it charges out - and here Jenny shares some of her own dream-battles and victories.

Then comes 'Making Yourself At Home' in the House of Dreams. We're all familiar with the weird images that dreams can throw up but Jenny, as a seasoned explorer of the dream-world, can assure us that as we become more familiar with it, the dream-world 'stabilises' and even has its own familiar landscape, time-sequence and

Shaman: from Wikimedia Commons

inhabitants. Is, in fact, another world, with its own reality.

This is something that the shamans, who climbed or descended ladders into the spirit-world, always maintained. Now, I have never been one to insist that a belief is 'wisdom' simply because it's old. On the other hand, age doesn't mean a belief has no basis either.

Jenny is a writer, and this book is partly about writing. The value of exploring this dream-world, for writers, she says, is that 'it makes us aware of the continuous flow of stories and images moving through us all the time, like an underground stream.'

Jenny has moved far beyond my piddling knowledge of such things, into areas that I doubt I shall ever experience - but again and again, as I read the book, she described things that I recognised and have experienced. Which makes me pay more attention to the rest.

She talks about dreams that are indistinguishable from waking life. I am well aware of such dreams. When I wrote my book 'The Ghost Drum', I was writing about a shaman who spirit-travels in other worlds. I needed to be able to imagine what that was like - and after some thought, decided to conceive of these other worlds as the places where we go when we dream. This gave me a firm basis: I was able to believe, entirely, in my shaman 'turning and stepping into another world' simply by imagining this as a kind of dreaming.

This worked for me because, throughout my entire life, I have dreamed in full-colour, 3-D, stereo-sound surround, with a sense of touch thrown in. In my dreams, if I put a hand into water, I felt the wetness. If there was snow, I felt the bite of the cold. In one of my short stories 'The Dreamer' (included in my collection, Hauntings) I used an experience - which I've had - of dreaming that I'd woken and begun my day, only to find, after half an hour or so of what seemed perfectly normal waking life that I was, in fact, still asleep and had only dreamed waking. Which raises the question: how do we know which waking, which world, is the 'real' one?

Jenny mentions lucid dreams and predictive dreams. Well, I've never personally had a lucid dream - which is where you know, while dreaming, that you are dreaming, and can take control of the dream and direct events, or ask questions of dream inhabitants. But once, many years ago, when I expressed doubts that such a thing as lucid dreaming existed, my brother said, no, he had them all the time. So commonly, in fact, that he'd assumed everyone had them and had never thought them worth mentioning.

He is also quite matter-of-fact about predictive dreams. Has them all the time. That's where the sense of deja-vu comes from, he says.

I've had what you might call predictive dreams myself, though never in any dramatic, save-people-from-an-aircrash kind of way. The foreseen events are mundane - but you're left wondering how and why you dreamt of this little incident two nights ago. There are 'sensible explanations' about the unreliability of memory and our eagerness to see patterns - explanations which I've accepted but not altogether believed.

If I clearly remember buying milk on Tuesday, nobody tells me to doubt my memory. So when I wake up on Tuesday morning, clearly remembering a dream where I knock my favourite yellow mug off the dresser and break its handle, why should I doubt that memory just because, on Thursday, I knock my favourite yellow mug off the dresser and break its handle?

Jenny's experience is that you rarely recognise that a dream is predictive unless you keep dream-diaries and look back through them. Her diaries, when re-read, contained a quite eerie prediction of a miscarriage, disregarded at the time.

My 'predictive dreams' and those of my brother are usually about small, insignificant events, of no importance even to us. A cup being dropped and broken, or, say, stubbing your toe painfully. They're only noteable because they were dreamed before they happened.

All this makes me trust Jenny when she reports on her exploration of the dream country far beyond where I've ventured.

I can also vouch for the effectiveness of her writing exercises - my story, Mow Top, which is found in Overheard In A Graveyard, sprang fully formed from her 'collage' exercise.

'Writing In The House Of Dreams' - altogether a fascinating, original book, whether you're interested in writing, dreams, or both.

Paperback edition
                           UK                   US 



Kindle edition    UK                   US

In Conversation With Jenny Alexander...

          Sue Price: Jenny, when we’ve talked before, it seemed that we were approaching the same place from opposite directions.

Your experiences made you sensitive to dreams and your unconscious life, and in exploring that, you moved towards writing... Whereas I started in a sceptical place, denying any such nonsense as 'the subconscious' or 'meaningful dreams' but, in writing more, was forced to acknowledge both the power of the subconscious and the truth often found in dreams.
          Would you agree with that? - and could you tell us more about how you began your dream-work and writing?

       Jenny Alexander: Yes, I would absolutely agree, Sue - it was an interesting conversation!

          All through my childhood I wanted to be a poet or an artist - writing and painting were my passions.

          But I finally yielded to pressure to apply for university rather than art school, and gave up my artistic ambitions. After a while at uni, learning to dissect a text with brutal efficiency, I gave up on writing too.

          Sue Price: That is so sad! It must have been torture!

          Jenny Alexander: At that point, I had a series of nightmares about killing myself. I would put my finger in a light socket and flick the switch, or turn on the gas fire in my student room and not light the gas.

           These dreams felt totally real and terrifying. One night, in my dream, I climbed out onto the ledge outside my room, and sat looking down at the cold concrete four floors below, gearing myself up to jump.

The Royal Holloway College

           I woke to find that I really was there. I had opened the sash window and climbed out in my sleep. Shaking violently, I somehow managed to clamber back in.
     (That's a picture of the Royal Holloway, right, where Jen had this terrifying dream.)

           Later that morning, I told my doctor, 'I think my dreams are trying to kill me.'

           I felt that I had no choice but to engage with my dreams, and over the next two decades, I became thoroughly familiar with my dream-world, so that when I was ready to think about becoming an author again, there was no anxiety or self doubt, because I knew I had inside myself this abundant, continuous flow of stories and images, and I knew how to capture them. 

           Could you say a bit about how your writing became an opening into the dreamworld, as I call the unconscious mind, for you?

          Sue Price: Your dreams were trying to kill you!

           That strikes a chord with me, because there was a time in my life, when I was denying that ‘other’ in my head, when I think my subconscious very deliberately worked against me, although it wasn’t as murderous as yours!

           For instance, I would say something quite innocent to someone – something like, ‘How are you?’ -  and hear myself saying it in a way that made it insulting. I had absolutely no conscious intention of insulting anyone, and would be as astonished as the person I’d just offended. But what could I say? I’d just bitten their heads off for no good reason!

           It was impossible to explain that it wasn’t me who’d said it! They’d have thought I was mad. Occasionally, I thought I was mad.

           I was at logger-heads with what I now call ‘my daemon’ because I was refusing to acknowledge that it existed. It fought me all the way. I’d be writing something and would decide to make some change to the plot. The ‘daemon’ would object, but I didn’t recognise its voice and took it for a mere passing thought, which I’d ignore because I had my plan. I was certain there was only one voice in my head: the ‘I’ voice, which I would now call ‘the editor’.

           The daemon took revenge by withdrawing. The piece of writing I was working on would fall over dead. I had to learn that with writing – or, I think, any art – the daemon does the real work! The Editor may make some great improvements, once the real work is finished, but shouldn’t be allowed to interfere with the daemon.

           A vengeful, spurned daemon is a dangerous thing, I think – especially yours! Mine not only stymied my efforts at writing, it played those tricks to embarrass me. It was ingenious at finding ways to make such remarks as, “Yes, please,” or “I’ve heard of that,” nasty and cutting.

           I had to learn that talk of ‘muses’ and ‘daemons’ was not the arty-farty nonsense I thought it, but a way of talking about something that we don’t quite understand, and don’t have an everyday vocabulary for. I began to deal with writing-problems by saying to the daemon, ‘Solve this for me.’ And it did! The more I trusted it, the faster and more inventively it solved the problems.

           I started to give way to it. If it insisted that a particular character should – or shouldn’t – die, I no longer argued, but humbly worked with it to make it so. I discovered that the more I trusted the daemon, the friendlier it became. It stopped playing those tricks on me!

           So I paid more attention and ‘heard’ it more clearly. I saw how a piece of writing I’d ‘made up as I went along’ had sub-texts planted in it, and other subtleties that ‘I’ hadn’t planned – so who had? And then I read Kipling’s description of his ‘daemon’ and knew what he was talking about right away.

           It seems that your ‘daemon’ was so furious at your moving away from your art – or so despairing – that it wanted to kill you. That’s frightening.

           Do you think it was drawing and writing again that made your peace with it?

          Jenny Alexander: Well, that was not what I expected, Sue! All my struggles with the daemon were fought within the inner world of dreams, in a quite elemental way, long before I came back to writing at the age of forty. So I hadn't imagined what it would feel like to have to learn to stop fighting and 'humbly work with it' through the process of becoming a writer.

           I knew that must happen, and I've watched other writers struggle to let go of the ego position and begin to trust in the ‘somewhere else’ where the real movement and growth of the story happens outside conscious control, in its own time and at its own pace. But I hadn't imagined it, and your description conjures it very vividly, and also the taming of the 'I' in the outer world by these dark forces pushing through and disrupting things.

           I met my dark forces in dreams. That's where I learnt the language of symbols and stories, and developed a relationship with them which turned out to be the perfect grounding for a confident and happy experience of writing, and that is certainly how I would describe my career so far. 

           Thinking about your story, I'm wondering whether this awareness and conscious working with the daemon, which started in the outer world and continued into your writing, is continuing to carry you towards new ideas and ways of being?

          Sue Price.  I am always amazed by how many ways there are to write! I had no idea I was letting go of the ego position. It felt – and still feels, often – as if I’m listening to another voice, or being handed an image and ordered to write about it, or almost physically nudged towards an idea. Or pushed away from one! Very much like the voice which all but spoke to me as I woke and said, ‘Make a Green Man mask out of papier-mache.’ I’m obediently making it and I still don’t know why! I’m enjoying it, so I carry on.

           But is it carrying me towards new ideas and ways of being? I don’t think so!

          For all this talk of daemons and ‘voices’, I continue to be as spiritual as a brick. I am essentially, I think, pragmatic. If something works, use it. I wanted to write, so I used whatever seemed to work, but without, if I’m honest, ever thinking very deeply about it. Unlike you!

           I am fascinated by your struggles and fights in the’ inner world of dreams.’ This sounds so much like what I read about shaman’s spirit travels and I imagined for my Ghost World books. It’s quite startling to hear someone talking matter of factly about fighting battles in dreams.

           I think we’re out of space for now – but I would love to hear more about this inner world and the battles you fought, if you wouldn’t mind talking about them. Perhaps we could continue this conversation another time?

           Jenny Alexander: Absolutely! And in the meantime, how about being 'in conversation with' that Green Man? It would be interesting to know why he's come and what he wants...

          Susan Price: There's a thought! I'm not sure I'd get an answer - or if I'd want to hear it if I did!

          Jenny Alexander is a highly respected author for children, as well as an expert dream-wrangler! Her website can be found here. 

          Her excellent blog, about dreams and creativity, can be found here.

          I apologise for the failure of the blog last week. This Blott would have been nearly topical then! But I post it, because I like it.

          It demonstrates the dangers of excitable and uncontrolled daemons/muses!