Phil Rickman - The Cold Calling

St Mary’s

Herefordshire

England

August 20Dear Grayle,First off, if you want the nice stuff about the accommodation and the scenery and all the wonderful people I’m meeting, you should read Mom’s letter. I’m not doing that crap twice.OK. You may be interested in some of this, but for Christ’s sake, DSF!As I may have indicated, I was frankly skeptical about the University of the Earth summer school. There is a lunatic fringe which has infiltrated archeology here in Britain (people who believe ancient sites were strung out in mystical straight lines, to follow the courses of some mysterious earth-power which they cannot define except to say it can give you a buzz) and I was less than enthusiastic at the thought of working with an organization which seeks to build bridges with these airheads.However, in the absence of a better way of researching prehistoric remains in the British Isles and getting paid for it … here I am, in this tiny, comparatively isolated village on the border of England and Wales.So … OK.The dreaming experiment.The airheads have been suggesting for some time that human consciousness can be altered or infiltrated by the ‘energies’ at ancient burial mounds, stone circles, whatever, and that this occurs most effectively during sleep.Our distant ancestors were people whose day-to-day survival depended upon an intimacy with their environment, an understanding — which we today would consider inexplicably precognitive — of what the Earth was going to do and when. Dreams were considered to be an important way in which useful information was conveyed to them. In the Old Testament, wasn’t it Jacob who slept on a pillow of stone and had prophetic dreams? While in ancient China, the emperor would spend the whole night on stone before making some important decision. You get the idea.The University of the Earth Dream Survey aims to establish whether specific images or motifs occur in the dreams of people sleeping at particular ‘sacred’ sites. Individuals elect to spend the night in a sleeping bag inside a circle or a burial chamber with a helper or therapeute who, while they sleep, stays awake with a tape recorder, watching for the Rapid Eye Movement which will indicate they are dreaming. At which stage the dreamer is awoken and gives a full resume of the dream into the recorder.Off-the-wall? Yeah, I thought so when I was appointed therapeute to a middle-aged woman who talked about meeting fairies with which she frolicked naked under a waterfall! Then Roger suggested I should sleep at a site myself… and my mind was somewhat blown by an extraordinary vivid and lucid dream — one in which I was fully aware of dreaming and able to function on a mental level I would never have imagined possible.I was, you might say, hooked .

Lyndon shook sugar from Ersula’s letter. ‘Looks like she’s headed back your way.’

‘Which is not good, for the reasons I already stated.’

‘Whooosh?’

‘As an academic, Ersula believes nowadays in the power of the mind over the power of the spirit. Well, OK, she has a good mind and I’m stupid, and when you’re stupid all you got to fall back on most of the time is, like, the dream that some kind of spiritual earthquake will come along and get us out of all this shit.’

‘This may be getting too heavy and West Coast for a poor Brooklyn boy,’ Lyndon said.

Grayle stared at the river of blood seeping out of the half-eaten doughnut. For Ersula, nothing was an inexplicable phenomenon any more. So nothing was spiritually threatening.

She looked up, saw her own frustrated face in the mirror across the counter, lumps of blond hair all over the place, the Eye of Horus earrings swinging. Crazy Grayle Underhill, New Age Sub-culture Columnist, widely syndicated.

‘Huh?’

‘I said, if there’s some way I can help you,’ Lyndon McAffrey said patiently, ‘maybe you could just lay it out for me in moron-speak.’

‘Finish the letter,’ Grayle said. ‘I’m delaying you. Your wife will think you’re having an affair.’

‘Haw,’ said Lyndon. He picked up the second sheet of blue airmail paper and read it with obvious concentration before re-reading the first sheet.

‘Hmm.’ He grunted thoughtfully. ‘I begin to see your point.’ At night, you discover, stone is always cold.Sleeping on stone — that’s not natural. You awake time after time, usually uncomfortable as hell and sometimes in a panic simply because of the stone all around you. Well, that’s good — it shouldn’t come easy, not at first. Without a challenge there can be no achievement.Which is just as well because this particular burial chamber, where I slept last night, is fully exposed, the earthmound which once concealed it having long since eroded. It is like a long, low stone table on little, stubby legs. Or maybe a clump of big mushrooms fused together. Kind of weird-looking, but not what you would call spectacular. Indeed, without a large-scale map you would not find it at all except by accident.Well, certainly not at night.Under your head is an old gray stone which you can feel as though there was no sleeping bag there at all. What it makes you think of is those petrified pillows supporting marble effigies on tombs in old churches. Creepy, huh?Hey, come on. This is a scientific experiment.Anyway, like I said, when you sleep on stone, sometimes you awake but you’re not awake, if this makes sense. You know you can’t be, because the stone isn’t cold, nor even hard; you’re sinking into it — so damn grateful it isn’t cold and hard any more that you just let yourself luxuriate in it. And down you go, quite painlessly, into the ground, into the earth. Your subconscious mind that is. Or whatever you want to call the part of you that admits the dreams.You come to realize that the very easiest phase is the letting go. I say easy … it was hard for me at first. I am, as you can guess, the odd one out on this course, most of the others being half-assed pseudo-mystics who are just here for the buzz. (You will notice, Grayle, that I have been at pains not to say ‘people like you’.)They tell you not to think too hard before you go to sleep, so maybe it’s just as well your main concern is to get comfortable. If you go into waking fantasies and your conscious mind influences your dreams, this is a bad thing, obviously.Before you know it, you’ve been gently awoken and the therapeute is whispering, Did you dream? Tell me … describe it to me…You feel wonderful then. You did it. You interacted.The actual interacting, the dreaming, often becomes, well … kind of scary, if you want the truth. Not at all what you’re expecting. Maybe it has occurred to you that this place where you’re sleeping, when it comes down to it, when you get beyond all the screwball stuff about secret energies and the healing powers of Mother Earth…… is a grave.A repository for bodies. Flesh has rotted here, bones have crumbled.The claustrophobia, at this point, can be intense. You start to scream inside. All you want is out of there. But, like I said, you have to stop your conscious mind getting a hold of you. What you are dealing with here is the unconscious and that must be left to find its own route to what you would probably call enlightenment.In relation to this, OK, there is one small problem, I am told.You know how, in nightmares, when you get into a very frightening situation — like, you’re about to fall a thousand feet onto rocks or you turn around to find the psycho with the ax was behind the door all the time — you awake?Well, sleeping in a prehistoric burial chamber, so they tell me, you can’t always count on this happening — implying that under these physical conditions it is possible to reach a deeper level of unconsciousness. This, I am convinced, is the first step to a scientific explanation of so-called prophetic dreaming, as supposedly experienced by Jacob and tribal shamans the world over, and it excites me profoundly.Before you say a word, sure I’ve heard that stuff about how, if you weren’t able to awake from a nightmare, when you got into a terminally tight corner you’d just die.Like I said, it’s important that it isn’t easy. That there are risks. Nothing significant is ever achieved without risk .