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City of Dreams
I have been reading a very interesting book on shamanism: The Spirits are Always with Me by Jane Shutt, who practises and teaches in North Yorkshire. In the chapter on soul retrieval I came across an account of “the City”. Jane had journeyed there to rescue someone’s soul part which had become separated. She thought at first she was in Newcastle, since the first thing she recognised was the Tyne Bridge, then saw the Eiffel Tower and the Lincoln Memorial. Her spirit helper told her she was in the City, “the City that is the idea behind all cities. Many lost souls find their way here. Cities suck people in.”
I was fascinated by this as I have often visited the City not on shamanic journeys but in dreams, sometimes finding myself in dangerous situations, and other times enjoying myself. Usually I start by enjoying myself and end up in fear of getting lost. Once I found myself in an affluent suburb full of gardens, and walked towards the City centre down a boulevard lined with shops selling extraordinary artworks and antiques. Other times I have walked to it along the coast through hilly country. More often I find myself in a vast, crumbling hotel on many levels which is attached to a vast ramshackle Victorian railway station. I quite like this place, so I tend to wander around it, but sometimes I manage to find my way out of the railway station into the City itself.
Close by is an area of even older townhouses facing each other across a wide street with tramlines. It all looks very bleak and post-war. The City livens up as you approach its centre, but it is easy to go round in circles. Fearing that I would never get back to my hotel, I took a taxi, an old Cadillac, but that took me miles out into some very steep hills where a sort of South American shantytown had grown up. It could have been a slum in Rio, not that I have ever been to Rio. So the taxi took me back downtown to Cairo, where we entered an alleyway so narrow we were almost touching the men sitting drinking coffee along the pavement. Directly ahead was the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. At this point I woke up.
In some ways the City is fun because living quietly as I do in the country I sometimes miss the buzz of city life. But it is certainly a place where situations change fast and it is easy to get lost. I remember two menacing dreams. In one, I emerged from a restaurant with a group of friends into a warm, scented evening by the river, which could have been the Liffey, or it could have been in Southern France because of its low medieval bridge. As we walked along the cobbled street I somehow got separated from my friends and was approached by a man who clearly meant me no good. In the other dream I emerged from a skyscraper in the financial district, having spent the day working in the kitchens. The streets were deserted and the sun was setting with an ominous light. I had no idea how to get home from where I was.
What is fascinating about menacing dreams is that we always wake up at the moment of actual danger. According to Daskalos, the teacher in that wonderful book The Magus of Strovolos, if we dream of falling we always wake up before we hit the ground because otherwise we would suffer an injury in our physical body.
How amazing it all is. Until I read Jane Shutt’s account of the City I had always assumed it was a purely personal recurring dream, concocted by my subconscious mind to reflect the concerns and anxieties of my daily life. But it seems I have been visiting an actual place in which other people also get lost, and if they are unlucky, can get permanently stuck.
This City is the idea behind all earthly cities with all their imperfections. I believe that another idea, the Perfect Idea, also exists for every city, enshrining its legends, its uniqueness and the true beauty of its ideal self. Some years ago I was sitting by the Thames in Westminster, the heart of London which I love, and saw a vision of London floating in the sky. It was pristine, pure and sparkling, small and concentrated, the London of dreams whose streets are truly paved with gold, the fairytale, Golden Age version of London. It existed in the etheric as the ideal, the model, to which our earthly London might aspire.
And if there is a Perfect Idea of London, there has to be one for every other city worth the name. Most famously there is the New Jerusalem, described in the Book of Revelation (21) which gives details of its construction and the gold and precious stones used. According to Revelation, the New Jerusalem is set to replace the old.
At the time I saw the ideal London I was inspired to write a poem, not directly about the vision, but about the feeling of peace and timelessness which it evoked. I append it here.
Thames Thoughts
London changes
But the river never
Years ago
Ben Jonson must have sat and watched it flow
With the same unceasing rhythm,
Moving and stirring in a sunlit mass,
A surface for the mind to float upon,
A depth of peace
Untouched by traffic noise
And all the sordid thoughts
That millions think.
Maybe the Day of Judgement is at hand,
But still the branches stoop towards the waters of Whitehall,
Providing form to shapeless wavery light,
Expressing something timeless even to those
Who do not spend their lunch hours writing verse.
April 2010
