03:30 am. I have been close to sleep viewing images. They are vague at first, just shapes in a landscape. The more I concentrate on them, the clearer they become until the window sm slams shut. I did that a few times, and then I heard a feint voice say, “No!” forcefully. So I backed off a little, not wanting to get into trouble over this. I’m still doing it but without putting so much pressure on the process. I want to learn the nature of the objection. In a way, I’m negotiating the process. When I do see clearly, when the window slams shut, I have a sense of immense fatigue. I don’t sense the fatigue while viewing images, but get it immediately when the window slams shut. Could this be the fatigue that causes dreaming and the sleep state? Not sure. So much to learn.

Seeing images is different from doing Active Imagination. Seeing images is actually having access to the dream state while awake. It has its own characteristics. Some of it is still images and some is live action. I must investigate this state further. I can’t type while in that state or I pop out of it.

Morning. Also during the night, I again saw the little white light that has  so frequently darted about in my Active Imagination sessions. Well, last night I started using my imaging technique, and to my surprise, I found that I could see into it. At first it was as if I was seeing a bright through a dark forest. I could see dark limbs and leaves, a goth landscape. Then I started seeing further into it, and I believe I could see other things. Not quite sure what. But then a couple of times, I really saw deeply into it, and it was a tunnel, and I could  see detail in the light itself. The light went stationary during these times., and I could see structure along the walls of the round tunnel, as if I was seeing into a long tunner. I almost saw something beyond in the light, but then the window  again slammed shut. Quite exciting though. After this, I started understanding that the little light is of enormous importance. During one of my initial Active Imagination session, dark space around it became a mountain lit by a bright light from behind. Then the light and the darkness separated and started circling each other, finally forming the yin-yang symbol. I’m convinced that everything I see is of importance. The little light may actually be the most important.

Last night, I had a rather unusual set of dreams. Or perhaps the correct way to say it is that I had an unusual perspective relative to my dreams. The dreams themselves were rather normal. What happened was that I dreamed and then woke. A part of me stayed  awake, but another part of me kept dreaming. I was then able to witness my dreams. This is much different than having a lucid dream. I was actually watching my dreams as I was having them and participating in them as myself.

In one, I was with my brother and another young man. We were running along trail  at first, and then we entered a roadway and ran among automobile traffic. I was an amazing runner, running so fast that I had trouble taking the curves. As I remember it, I was running sixty to seventy miles per hour. I remember breaking the speed limit. I was running so fast that I came upon a sharp turn and ran off the road even though I slowed. I went off into a man’s yard where his dogs got after me. I was trapped within a fence when the dogs caught me. They didn’t seem as though they were going to attack me. And then I woke. I had several more dreams that I can no longer remember.

At times I was not conscious that I was dreaming, but at others I was like two people, both dreaming and watching myself dream. At one time, I was guiding my dreams, using Active Imagination or perhaps a daydreaming technique where I had control over the direction of the dream, as if it were coming from my imagination, and at other times I witnessed a pure dream where I had no control. This seems to be an advanced state where all the techniques I’ve been practicing  to come together. It seems I’m on the verge of a synthesis of all these techniques. It all seems natural. I’m not having any unusual psychic or psychological experiences during the day.

Another thing that is amazing about this is that in spite of the panic attacks and other unusual psychological experiences I’ve had in the past, I don’t have any anxiety over these psychic phenomena. It seems that I’m just learning new ways to experience the dreaming and waking states. But again, this is the first time I’ve experienced this integration of processes. At other times, I dream normally. Most of the time, I’m not even able to see images when I try an Active Imagination session.  I have had amazing luck using Active Imagination to write my vampire story. But these are purely creative sessions. In the past, I’ve tried taking my characters into my dreams with me. I did that months ago when I was writing the third volume of The Mysteries. I had a certain amount of success with that technique; however, I’ve not tried that with my vampire novel. My characters are too strange for me to want to do this. It’s too personal, and the technique is too new and untried to for me to take that big of a chance. Dealing with evil is a problem for me.

Again, I’m also amazed at how normal and inconsequential these thoughts and psychic happenings seem while they occur. It’s as if they are not worth remembering or writing down. This attitude seems to me to come from the nature of consciousness and how it feels about the Unconscious.

Last night I dreamed that I was walking somewhere among a group of students who were talking in a lounge, and one male student was telling a girl student about a text he had for one of his classes. I believe it was a novel, but the one thing that I remember most clearly is that the title of the text was Alph. In my dream, the student had the paperback book in his hands, and the cover was plain, consisting of only large areas of different shades of dark green. The title Alph was written in Arial font in all caps across the top of the cover. In the dream, I remembered having Alph as a text the previous semester, although I hadn’t actually read it, or possibly read all of it. And either I remembered what it was about or the student was telling the girl about it. Alph had something to do with either a person inside a person or a social group within a social group, or a land within a land. It’s really difficult for me to remember that much detail concerning the subject of the book.

When I woke this morning, I decided to see if such a book exists, so I went on Amazon and searched for the title, but only came across TinTin and Alph-Art. Alph in this title actually applies to a shortening of the word alphabet, so this didn’t seem to be a connection. Then I went on Wikipedia and searched for Alph.

Alph turns out to be the name of the sacred river in Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan. Some commentary concerning the poem considers the Alph to be a fictional river, but I would characterize it as being mythological, which is a completely different perception when one uses an educated opinion of what mythology really is. Here is the complete poem as written in 1798:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And ‘mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ‘twould win me,

That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Although I do remember reading the poem for freshman English in 1961 and several times since, I haven’t read the poem in decades and never had a conscious recollection of a river being in the poem, and certainly didn’t remember Alph. I mostly remembered the pleasure dome. I wondered why this word “Alph” should now appear in my dream? And of course, my vampire novel came to mind.

The past couple of weeks or so, I’ve been working on a chapter where my little female vampire protagonist has had, for safety’s sake, to join a colony of vampires in a vast network of caverns deep within the Carpathian Mountains of Romania. Just yesterday I was editing passages where she is to be initiated into the race of vampires. First she, along with other female and male vampires, bathes in a pond fed by an underground stream within the cavern to prepare for her initiation. Here is the text of two sentences as I left them yesterday: “A continuous stream of fresh water feeds the pool. It’s simply an intermediate stop for water on its way to the lower chambers.” Could it be that this was the impetus for my dream’s reference to Coleridge’s sacred river, Alph? Coleridge saw the poem in an opium-induced dream. It came to him as a finished work, although he only wrote down a portion of it before being interrupted and losing the rest. Could it be that I tapped into something within the Collective Unconscious related to this poem? Probably not. But what is even more interesting is what my Unconscious was trying to tell me and why it wrapped the subject matter within that fleeting reference to the Alph.

After considering this a while, I’ve come to the conclusion that it is an answer to a problem I’ve been having trying to determining the location of my character’s initiation. The Alph is a sacred river, so perhaps I should name my stream the Alph and have my little vampire initiated there in the stream or the pool created by it. Since it’s sacred, the pond would be the place for the initiation, which would be similar to a baptism. I’ve also imagined music, and the Coleridge reference to a “damsel with a dulcimer” may be something further I can use. But I’ve noticed so many reference in Kubla Khan that I relate to my vampire story that it is truly remarkable. I’ve already envisioned something I’ve called the “Vampire Wars” and here is a Coleridge’s reference to “Ancestral voices prophesying war!” But perhaps even the most remarkable connection is that of the “stately pleasure-dome.” My vampires are always in pursuit of carnal experiences, and  referencing orgies and characterizing this cavern or a portion of it as a palace of pleasure will do much to secure its identity. Also, the antagonist of my story, and ruler over the race of vampires, is the original vampire who has lived for millennia and who was at one time a king or tribal warlord, somewhat of a Kubla Khan character.

I can scan this poem further for common elements and the way they are portrayed in Kubla Khan, so that I might be able to breathe more life into the situations I’ve already envisioned for my vampire novel.

A truly remarkable dream and the connection made through the title on a book, Alph, that showed up in it.

——————-

Now, just a few words about relating my story to such a famous poem. One thing I’ve noticed since beginning this excursion into Jung’s Active Imagination is that the Conscious mind always has a tendency to denigrate anything that comes from the Unconscious, particularly the Collective Unconscious. I’ve written about this several times and have come to the conclusion that this is the nature of the relationship between the Conscious and the Unconscious. It’s always a big-brother, little-brother relationship with the big-brother always intimidating, browbeating and invalidating the little-brother. It has also become obvious that such relations are natural because we are dealing with the Collective Unconscious, with which all of us have access, and Consciousness has to keep it at bay or we’ll all go insane. The clincher in placing a certain value in all these associations is the fact that such references occur naturally and are beneficial. Even Coleridge’s poem seems to have been influenced by several other works, and I would assume that the relationships were formed just as I believe were mine, in the Collective Unconscious.

To practice Active Imagination, Murray Stein suggests first clearing off a portion of psychic space where you will then conduct your sessions. I have called the psychic space I’ve allotted for this purpose the Iris of Time. But I have a different intention for my activity than that used for therapeutic sessions. I use the Iris of Time for writing fiction and other creative projects. This is also a different psychic space than that I use for personal ego-type problems that spontaneously occur during the day and at night. I’m thinking that maybe I should have a space for ego-type/therapeutic problems and another yet for spiritual issues.

These then are my three divisions of psychic space: (1) ego, (2) spiritual, and (3) creative. These separate spaces are of my own concoction and have nothing to do with Jungian theory, at least as far as I know. I will use Active Imagination in each of them but for different purposes. The ego space is where I will investigate personal topics that bother and/or interest me: gult, anger, sex. These are both actual and imaginary as well as fantasy. My spiritual space is where I will engage psychic entities connected with the divine world. Doing this will, hopefully, keep the three separate activities from contaminating each other, at least to the extent they do now.

I need an entry point for each, and of course I already have the Iris of Time for creative Active Imagination sessions. Perhaps in the divine world I should request admission to what I will imagine to be the City of God for Active Imagination sessions. I will enter through a gate guarded by angels. I believe I should have a separate entry point for ego encounters. Perhaps it should be a home, a castle or a grotto, but still a place where I can engage, enjoy, and learn from profane encounters that primarily have to do with matters concerning the real world and me in it. My ego space is one that comes upon me, that thrusts itself upon me unbidden; however, I do at times engage it of own free will.

I believe separating my psychic space in this way will give each division legitimacy and prevent one from having a continuous denigrating attitude toward one of the others. Problems that would ordinarily occur between say the spiritual realm and that of the ego will then be negotiated in what might be termed therapeutic sessions. Ego problems will be more fully developed and presented in detail, instead of suppressed and locked away in the shadow, and then a negotiating session with the spiritual part of my psyche could moderate extremes. Perhaps this will also force the spiritual world to wake up to some of the realities of the ego world.

A couple of things I should say about these psychic divisions. First, I’ve imagined, invented them if you will, and second, that they aren’t pure. Remember that I’m for the most part doing this stuff at night in the dark with my eyes closed. And I am close to sleep generally. In that state, I sometimes drift between these divisions. I might start out in the Iris of Time gathering material for my novel and then unconsciously lapse or migrate over into one of my ego states. I typically don’t catch myself for a while. I also may drift in and out of sleep while in an Active imagination session. It’s just not a pure process on any level. Even though I say that I’ve invented these separations, it seems to me that the need for them has naturally evolved.

03:30 am. I woke tonight from another dream of my mother. I had just entered a room and saw her standing alone, having just talked to someone who was leaving, The room had no fixtures or furniture, totally vacant except for her. She turned toward me, recognized me and started toward me smiling. I was concerned that she might fall but was pleased that she could walk again without her walker. She was quite old, but she recognized me and took a few steps toward me, her arms outstretched. I walked to her and we embraced. I held her very tight, basking in our embrace. And then the dream ended.

This is the only dream I remember having tonight. I haven’t been having memorable dreams lately.

Last night I practiced Active Imagination to resolve some issues relative to this mystery project on which I’m currently working. I hadn’t actually worked on it in several days, and I went into the session seeking a solution to a character problem, specifically whether to allow a character to live or have them die after a few chapters, but not really expecting a concrete answer. This has been a tough issue and has been lying around unresolved for some time, but once I opened the Iris and started viewing scenarios, I quite quickly learned that keeping her alive led to a dead end. However, with her death, my protagonist’s life and the storyline started to grow, and I could see far into the future. It was as if I could actually see into my character’s life as it filled up the story. The one character’s death provided a liberating effect on all my characters and allowed them to fulfill their potential.

In addition to resolving this one character’s longevity issue, I also started having revelations concerning the Premise of my novel. I now realize that it is Mortality vs Immortality. I’ve not yet decided which will overcome the other, but I suspect Mortality will overcome Immortality, a very Cosmic Premise. At the character level, I now believe that the Premise is Love vs Lust. I’ve also not yet decided which of these forces will overcome the other, although I suspect Love overcomes Lust. I’m trying to keep my personal views out of this, sort of not trying to impose my brand of morality, and allow the story to play out according to the way the brutal world works.

Another thing that gained ground was my knowledge of the relationship between my characters and each character’s “domain of influence.” My protagonist is the executive, the one who executes their joint decisions. The girlfriend is the strategist, and the boyfriend is the philosopher. The three of them form a trinity that transcends what they could accomplish individually. They need each other, rather desperately.

All in all, this was a very productive Active Imagination session. I went in and out of sleep while thinking about my novel, and it seemed to stay at the edge of my consciousness throughout the night. I now have my laptop repaired, so I’m back to typing while practicing Active Imagination.

07::00 am. Last night I had a strange dream. It came in two parts, but now I can’t remember the first part at all. Even the second part is hazy. I was in a woodshop working with a friend of mine who has done a lot of carpentry. We had several large sheets of rough plywood, and we were making the leaves of a book from them. We were going to record the script of an ancient text we’d received. We kept hearing some words spoken, words that we kept saying almost like a mantra. It is tempting to say that the words were, “The Messiah is coming,” but then this doesn’t seem quite right. My carpenter friend kept saying that the book wasn’t coming out right because the plywood was too warped and rough. The wood book was very large, maybe three feet wide and seven feet long, perhaps eight inches thick. It was bound at one end by leather straps. Later we had a young retarded man with us. I’m not sure who he was, but he seemed to be someone special and was helping us put the book together. Don’t know the content of the ancient text. It was not translated.

I wanted to write this dream down right after I dreamed it, but the memory then was already hazy, and I was very sleepy.

04:30 am. Just woke from a dream. I was with two women in a field, and we were looking up into a large tree that we were considering climbing. One of the women was older and possibly a teacher. The other was a friend of mine, a girlfriend that I’d been going with for only a short while. Perhaps we’d only been on one date. They were on the far side of the tree talking, and I was looking up into the tree for a strong horizontal limb I could hand hang from. I saw some strong limbs high up in the tree, but they were too high if I should fall. The two women left, and I was alone. I continued to look for a moment, and then I followed in the direction they had gone. I remember hearing music, and that I was happy. I thought how lucky I was to be going to a school where I could hear music like that. I may have been in a car. But then I was walking again. I was on my way to class when I ran into the two women again. My new girlfriend looked back at me when we passed, and I turned back to look at her. She told me that she didn’t have a chance to get a hug before we parted. I put my arms around her but something from my chest, a paper napkin brushed across her face. It was a napkin she’d put there when we were at the tree. (Don’t know what that napkin was about.) But then I hugged her. Felt really great to hug her. And then the dream ended.

I started to continue this dream using AI, but somehow it seemed that I shouldn’t, that I would spoil the integrity of the dream. I call this process, where I continue the situation of the dream with AI when I shouldn’t, “torturing the dream.” Somehow it is not always appropriate.

I can only remember part of a dream I had last night. I was in a home, not sure where, and my mother was there too. I was talking to her, can’t remember what about, but it was a comfortable conversation. My aunt was there also. She came walking down the hall toward us. I told her to look at my mother. I said, “She’s really here with us.” And my aunt said, “Of course she is.” I knew that I was awake. I remember thinking, I know I’m awake. But of course, my mother passed away last October 2010, and my aunt passed away the previous Christmas.

It seems that Active Imagination is affecting my consciousness level in my dreams. I’m so conscious that I believe I’m awake. This is a remarkable feeling, to know you’re awake when you’re actually dreaming. I have been opening the Iris and stepping inside before I fall asleep. I generally step out into a meadow and look around, seen what I encounter there. Images then come to me, and I drop off to sleep. Sometimes I take my characters from my novel The Twice-Born in with me. But lately, my mother has been showing up a lot in my dreams. Yet, the remarkable thing about them is that they are seeming more real. Quite the opposite of lucid dreaming, where you realize that you’re having a dream.

03:00 am. I just woke from a dream that I was on a business trip in a foreign country. I was with two other men. We were walking somewhere over rough terrain, and we came to a hamlet where we spent the night out in the open. I remember a man and a young woman seemed to own the place where we were staying. We laid down on the ground to sleep. It was very dark. The three of us were side by side on a blanket without any cover. I was on the far right. In the dark the young woman came to lie down beside me with her back to me, and scooted up close to me. I moved even closer to her and rolled over facing her and put my arm around her. I remember hoping it was her and not the man.

When we woke, it was morning and we were moving around. I saw the man but not the young woman, and wondered if it was he who I had cuddled up against. I hoped not, and he didn’t seem to act suspicious. Then we were walking again over rough terrain but next to a sea. One of the men had a fishing rod, and I told him that I had always wanted to fish the sea from shore. We walked at the edge of the water, then out in it a ways. I said that the tide must be in because the water came right up to the rough ground leaving no beach. I could see through the water to the bottom. It was a only a foot or so deep, and we walked out into the water. He  cast out into it, but the water was so clear that I could tell that no fish were around. We walked on around the shore, and that’s the last I remember.

Two or three weeks ago, I had a dream that I didn’t record. I was in my parents bedroom with my mother. The house was empty and dark, possibly without any furniture other than the bed in their bedroom. My father had been dead for some time, but my mother (she passed away last October) was still alive and lying on the bed on top of the covers with a pillow at her back and leaning aginst the headboard. We had our clothes on. I laid down beside her, also propped up against the headboard. I said that I would probably die before she would. That was all that happened. Or at least, that’s all I remember of the dream. It was about my death.

A couple of things about Active Imagination. First concerns definition, specific features, of beings viewed within Active Imagination. The second concerns time and its relationship to Active Imagination. Let’s take the second first.

From my experience so far, it sems that events within an Active Imagination session occur in a proto- or pseudo-primordial or even primeval time. Essentially they are a mythology. [Kerenyi, The Heroes of the Greeks, page 1-2.] I become increasingly pleased with this concept of the Iris of Time within which I conduct my Active Imagination sessions, because it is a constant reminder that in dealing with my Unconscious, I enter a strange, alien world. Time as we know and experience it does not exist there. The events I experience while within the Iris are always, permanently inside that psychic space. I can return and re-experience them. In doing so, I learn more about the event. It continues to unfold, and by that I mean that it gains depth and not necessarily length. It also may shift some. Events within the Unconscious are changlings. I believe that is because they are always translated into real-world “language,” so that we can understand them, but also because I am always seeing only the surface of an event that is much more complex and multi-dimensional. Also, Unconscious psychic content seems to collect around an image, like pollen on a honeybee. I’m increasingly convinced that beings and events are “created” in the Unconscious from psychic content and formed in such a way that it can be interpreted by Consciousness and maintain its relevance to our existence.

Now back to the first item I wanted to discuss: features of beings. These beings within an Active Imagination session seem to be alive and active although when I try to see them clearly, to see details, my vision always seems blurred. The ancient Greeks had two words for “life” whereas we only have one. [See Kerenyi, Religion of the Greeks and Romans, page 13, and more expansively in Dionysos, Archetypical Image of Indestructible Life, pages xxxi-xxxvii.] The first is “zoë,” which is eternal but undifferentiated. Zoë has always existed and always will. But zoë is featureless. It does have some definition within its Collective Unconscious configuration, but that is minimal. This could well correspond to what we ordinarily refer to as the “soul.” Zoë exists outside time, although events concerning it are linear and seemingly time ordered.

The ancient Greeks’ other word for “life” was “bios.” Bios is life as we know it, a well-defined, differentiated existence with arms and legs, eyes, mouths, etc. Bios exists within time andis limited. We are born, grow to adulthood, age and die. From “bios,” we derive our word “biography.” The Greeks believed that we have many bios, which they viewed as reincarnations. Bios are strung along our zoë like pearls along a necklace.

I believe that the reason for my blurred vision during my Active Imagination session when trying to distinguish the features of a being is because I am witnessing zoë and not bios. I believe zoë is the most basic nature of beings within the Collective Unconscious.

I’ll explore this subject further as I gain experience and confidence with Active Imagination.

This morning I woke early, but my MacBook Air has a bad hinge, and I couldn’t use it realtime to type out my session. Perhaps it wasn’t a session at all because I didn’t talk to anyone. But I did see images, and that was my primary goal. And the strange thing is that images came so easily that I could sort of thumb through them like I was looking through a photo album. It started off in the desert where I was either traveling slowly by car or perhaps I was on foot. I could see the desert floor before me cover with cactus and mesquite bushes. In the near distance a huge mountain reared up, very rocky. I was obviously somewhere in the Southwest, perhaps New Mexico where I lived for so many years, although Phoenix, where I also have lived, also comes to ming. The second image was of Ireland. Again I was traveling along a country road looking at the green fields with cows grazing, the undulating landscape dotted with white homes with tile roofs and all connected by shrub-lined lanes. I spent a week traveling Ireland in 1989, so I recognized the countryside immediately.

Following these two scenes I moved on to a series of images, or scenes really. They were not static but dynamic with people moving about. A couple of them were street scenes, much like the one I witnessed a few weeks ago. They were not quite as vividly real but still quite impressive.

Following these images, I went back to sleep and dreamed of a dog I was chasing. It was injured somehow, and I want to help it. It ran into a building, and I went in after it. The building was crowded with people, and the dog ran past them, down the stairs a few floors to the basement. I found him down there, but he was hurt and afraid of me. I finally cornered him, and he quietened down, so that I could see what was wrong with him. He had gotten into some kind of contraption and had a pliers-like device attached to his mouth and a chain wrapped around it. He let me reach for the pliers, I squeezed them, and they came off. I could then unwrap the chain. He was okay then. Didn’t seem to be injured at all. I look at his collar, found a tag with his owner’s name and telephone number and started to call them. But my iPhone seemed to be in some strange mode, and I could find the phone app. Someone else was with me then, a little boy who started trying to help. And then I woke.

Since I got out of bed this morning, I’ve been thinking that it’s time to move on to a new phase with Active Imagination. I’m doing this to investigate how it might be of benefit to novelsmiths. So perhaps the time has come to start putting Active Imagination into practice. I’ve decided to start writing the third volume of The Mysteries, A Novel of Ancient Eleusis using Active Imagination. The Mysteries is a trilogy, and the first two volumes are already written, published, and available on Amazon as well as Smashwords, the iPad, iPhone, etc. I’ve been working on the third volume, titled The Twice-Born, for some time but haven’t done much on it lately. I have an outline and the rough drafts of a couple of chapters. I’m going to put all this material on the blog I’ve used for The Mysteries and will write The Twice-Born online using the technique developed and documented in my book Novelsmithing, The Structural Foundation of Plot, Character, and Narration. It’s available online free.

So here’s what I’m going to do. I’ve decided to consult the Pythia, the personage I met during my Active Imagination sessions, for advice concerning the overall book. After all, it is set in ancient Greece. I’ll also have Active Imagination session with my characters. This is as much as I currently know about the process I’ll use going in. Certainly it’ll develop over time. As this technique develops, I’ll document it more formally on another of my blogs titled Jungian Novelsmithing. It’s located here: http://jungiannovelsmithing.com. So here are the blogs involved in this project:

• http://MysteriesBlog.com – Blog devoted to the development of The Twice-Born, the third volume of The Mysteries.
• http://IrisOfTime.com – Active Imagination sessions dedicated to the development of The Twice-Born, although other Active Imagination session, which may not be related to the novel, will be reported here too.
• http://NovelsmithingBlog.com – Static blog contain all of my book Novelsmithing, The Structural Foundation of Plot, Character, and Narration.
• http://JungianNovelsmithing.com – Blog documenting the development of a new book on novel writing titled Jungian Novelsmithing, With Dream Analysis and Active Imagination

My mother passed away on October 12. I’ll not be posting here for another week or so.

David Sheppard