“My entire life has been guided by an enthusiasm for dreaming and the dream aesthetic…As a child, my intuition told me that lucid dreaming offered an opportunity to expand the human experience and transcend the mortal realm.”
-from Initiation into Dream Mysteries: Drinking from the Pool of Mnemosyne (2023) by Sarah Janes
For the ancients, dreams were serious business. In sacred contexts, they were destiny-changing, distilling–in cryptic language–the mandates of entities otherwise inscrutable to humans.
In Judea, Babylon, Greece, Egypt, Rome and other pre-modern states, dreams portended not only the destruction and salvation of dynasts and kingdoms, but also the rise and downfall of prophets and tyrants. Those long-past days also saw enquirers making pilgrimages to specially designated temples and underground grottoes in order to obtain direct insights from the divine. At these locales–such as the legendary cave of Trophonius in Boeotia—they faced initiation-style trials that often ended in frightening, mind-bending visions, forever altering their views of reality.
In spiritual circles and beyond, dreams retain this mystic aspect. As in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s manual-like occult novel Zanoni, in which dreams serve as the bridge between “this world and the worlds beyond”, the modern-day esotericist sees dreams as therapeutic, providing illumination, instruction, admonishment, and forewarning.
These are some of the themes that Sarah Janes explores in her debut book, Dream Mysteries: Drinking from the Pool of Mnemosyne. Janes wears many hats: among other things, she is a lucid dreamer, scholar, retreat coordinator, and the founder and proprietress of the St Leonards Explorers Club.
Janes recently spoke to The Thinker’s Garden about her new book as well her ongoing research into the shadowy universes of dreams.
The Custodian: When did you first start taking an interest in archaeology, and what would you say most inspired you to establish the St Leonards Explorers Club?
Sarah Janes: I can’t remember a time when archaeology hasn’t interested me, or at least the ideas, people and material culture of the past. Although I have not pursued the subject in a traditional academic or scholarly way exactly, I’ve always been fascinated by the ancient world and contemplating how people experienced their lives in different time periods and places. If I look into my own earliest history, I remember that I was excited about the idea of archaeology when playing as a child.
I grew up in Croydon next to a sewage farm, and when Thames Water starting digging for a new sludge pit in the early 80s, they unearthed the foundations of a Roman villa. I remember looking for archaeological artefacts right on my doorstep and being fascinated by the life that these people led–next door to my own end-of-terrace house, on a main road, opposite an industrial estate and landfill. My bedroom window overlooked the Thames Water field, toward the archaeological site and sometimes I used to see a peacock in the distance. I knew it wasn’t really there, it was a ghost peacock–I always wondered if this was a sort of hallucinatory projection from the past into my childhood mind.
I’m not good in institutions, my mind goes a million miles a minute and so it suits me to pursue my weird interests independently. When I had my daughter in 2008 (Indiana Janes – see, there is a theme developing!) I thought it might be a good idea to go to university for the first time–I had been to drama school and left at 18 to work in TV and film. I was really poor, so I couldn’t afford uni, and also, what I thought I wanted to do was anthropology and I soon realised that I would find it uncomfortable to deal with the structure of university-based learning.
I sneaked into lectures wherever possible and enjoyed ‘pretending’ to be a student. At the time the University of Sussex offered open lectures on neuroscience and so I attended one of Professor Anil Seth’s lectures. I met Anil on another occasion giving a Skeptics in the Pub talk at a local boozer and I thought to ask him if he’d give a talk in St. Leonards for £100. So that’s how the Explorers Club started in St. Leonards. My friend Claudia Barton had a beautiful home full of amazing artefacts–it was rather like a museum because her and her husband Andrew run a business collecting and selling antiques and she helped me co-host. I charged my friends £5 a ticket to cover the speaker fee and made a huge feast so everyone got fed too, it was a tremendously good deal.
I’ve since hosted an incredibly diverse range of speakers on subjects ranging from the ancient Mesopotamian City of Ur (Birger Ekornåsvåg Helgestad), Sex Robots (Blay Whitby), Chemically-enhanced marriages (Brian Earp), DMT Entities (David Luke), Greek Myths (Eva Voutsaki) and I think I’ve done about 350 now. During lockdown I started learning Egyptian hieroglyphs, so I shifted and sharpened my focus onto ancient cultures and Explorers Club became Explorers Egyptology.
C: Which personal experiences convinced you start studying ancient dream culture and its contemporary applications?
SJ: I’ve always, always been a dreamer and experiences in lucid dreams especially have guided, transformed and enriched my life enormously. Since babyhood really, I can remember dreams from being a toddler and before, which were just this pure whiteness and nothing else. I have recently been lucky enough to interview Rebecca Sharrock with my friend and author Anthony Peake. Rebecca has an absolutely incredibly memory. She is one of only about 90 people in the world to have been assessed for HSAM–Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory. Rebecca is autistic and synaesthetic and has this fantastic multi-sensory, cross-referencing, colour-coding and organisational memory ability which means she can accurately access distant memories and place them in time and space in a way that is incomprehensible to mere mortals! When Anthony told me we would be interviewing Rebecca for his online chat show I was really excited to ask her about her dreams, as I was sure HSAM would mean that she would always be lucid in them, and she is! We swapped notes too on early childhood dreams and she remembers the pure whiteness as well.
During the course of running the Explorers Club in St Leonards, I crossed paths with Dr David Luke who is very well known in the world of psychedelic science and other exceptional human experiences. Dave and I got chatting on the subject of lucid dreaming when he came to give a talk for me, and really I had something of a penny dropping moment when he was talking about visiting the British-Romano sleep temple in Gloucestershire–the Temple of Nodens in Lydney Park. I realised that researching ancient dream culture was undeniably my niche and an irresistible opportunity to mesh together my two great loves and passions–ancient culture and dreams.
C: Why did you decide to write Initiation into Dream Mysteries?
SJ: My life’s work is to reactivate the sleep temples of the ancient world, to reopen the portals that connect heaven to the terrestrial sphere and the regenerative chthonic realms of the ancient healer gods and goddesses. I mean this in a wholesome and pantheistic kinda way obviously. I’m coming to realise that much of the healing that was achieved in ancient sleep temples is due to that fact that ancient people didn’t see or feel themselves to be as separate from the world and the other beings in it as we do today – and I think this is really at the root of our current malaise. I think ancient people understood very well that aesthetics and harmony do actually heal. If you put a person in beautiful, harmonious, nature-inspired surroundings they just feel better. They begin to identify with the beauty of their environment. I knew if I coherently organised all of the information and research about ancient dream culture I have collected over the years, it would naturally inspire people to dream.
I’ve always wanted to write. I love lots of novels and books have played a significant role in my waking and dreaming life. I like Jodorowsky’s idea of psychomagic–that art acts on the unconscious as a catalyst for inner alchemy. And all divinely inspired art seems to me to be somehow oracular. I’m deeply curious about the nature of inspiration. My research into ancient Greek sleep sanctuaries has helped me form this idea of Mnemosyne as the goddess of lucid dreams, the source of all inspiration–she is the mother of the Muses and the personification of divine remembrance, sense-making and eloquence.
In school my favourite authors were J.G. Ballard, Vladimir Nabokov, Günter Grass, Gabriel García Márquez, Jean Cocteau. I love Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings, I was unduly influenced by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll and Tolkien’s mythopoeic word-worlds in the Chronicles of Narnia as a small child, Twin Peaks and comedians Vic and Bob as a teen–dreams gave me this sense of utter ecstasy and appreciation for the ridiculousness of life. My taste in books, cinema, TV and art has always had a oneiric bent. I’ve always wanted to transmit this. I think ultimately I’ve always wanted to start a really good cult. My book is the first step.
C: While experimenting with lucid dreaming, have you ever experienced negative outcomes, such as sleep paralysis?
SJ: Sleep paralysis is very rare for me, or at least a negative experience of it. I usually enjoy occupying the hypnagogic edge and use it to consciously enter dreaming, and sometimes use it to create the dream scene/characters that I want. I did have an experience many years ago of perhaps a sort of dream version of sleep paralysis, where I couldn’t get out of a dream and was plummeting into an abyss. That was effing scary. It felt as though my dream body was rapidly rotating back and forth inside my sleeping body. I was a a dream spirit trying to lock back into the place of my physical vessel.
Dreaming is so amazingly underrated but can obviously differ significantly from person to person, place to place and time to time. Learning about ancient dreams is a fascinating way to philosophically ponder, to dip your toe into the dreamworld of an ancient dreamer and contemplate their perception and experience within their dreams. Dreams were often used as a narrative device in propaganda texts (a god visiting a wannabe pharaoh in a dream for example was seen to legitimise a claim to the throne), but aside from these kinda dream stories which may or may not be true/embellished etc, dreams reports often offer an extraordinarily honest account of ancient inner landscapes, preoccupations and future visions. Dream beings were usually considered to originate from outside of the dreamer, and what we call sleep paralysis today would in ancient times have most likely been perceived as a demonic force or entity exhorting its influence over a vulnerable sleeper, falling upon them in sleep.
This is part of the reason why dreams and healing were so entangled, illness and sickness too were often perceived to be demonic ill-winds, malignant spirits or pissed off star gods withdrawing their favour. I’ve interviewed the Egyptologist Kasia Szpakowska who specialises in dreams, nightmares and Egyptian demonology a couple of times and this is a fascinating area of study. Ancient Egyptian sleepers who were worried about a demon falling upon them in the night, or Babylonian sleepers not wishing to have their semen harvested by a demoness whilst they slept, would often enlist the protection of another demonic entity: Bes, Tawaret, Tutu, Pazuzu et al. to scare the dream demon away. In Egypt they would also make apotropaic cobras from clay–to do away with any unwanted intangible bedroom visitors.
C: What role does music play in your ritual practice with dreams?
SJ: Interestingly there is some research that shows regular lucid dreamers are more sensitive to sound when asleep and sound and music very often works its way into my dreams. I can’t wake up with an alarm buzzing, I have to use the radio or music and frequently the track playing gets incorporated into my dream. Music often gives me shivers and is a reliable way to induce that euphoric feeling that I also get in lucid dreams. I think the more euphoric feelings you have in life, the more likely you are to become lucid in dreams and this also develops a feedback loop.
I like to sleep in silence but whenever I have had difficult or stressful periods in life I use yoga nidra recordings and the most excellent new age music to calm me down and help me relax. I especially love having afternoon naps if I am feeling depleted. I love Ally Boothroyd for yoga nidra recordings on YouTube and adore the early music of the musician/Pan-like Iasos for old school new age music. I had a epiphany once listening to Iasos during meditation, he is famous for being the grandfather of the New Age music genre in California–although of course he has Greek-Asklepion roots! Apparently lots of people who have had a Near Death Experience say that the music of Iasos is just like the music they heard when they entered the celestial realms–and I can believe that!
C: Could you tell us more about the Dream Palace? What other projects are you working on?
SJ: The Dream Palace is part of my project to reactivate the ancient sleep temples, rekindle enthusiasm for dreaming, and reawaken the slumbering dream goddesses and gods. Next week actually I’m going to Epidaurus to take my offerings to Asklepios and Mnemosyne. I think dream research is absolutely the place to go for consciousness science, memory research, homeostasis and overall physical and mental health. We’ve put sleep on the back-burner for far too long and our culture is being dominated by boring beta wave alertness. To me this seems to dampen cultural creativity.
Creativity is absolutely vital if we want to problem solve, and dreams enrich the human experience no end. The Dream Palace has been conceived to act as a nexus; one which weaves dream science, art, history, culture and philosophy back together. It’s a symposium inside a touring dreamzone, beginning in Athens this October, an immersive installation designed to help participants access a dreamlike consciousness. We will have speakers and presenters, workshops, performers and concerts, but will also be employing psychodrama, beauty and world-building to curate a modern Mystery festival.
I’ve become rather obsessed with ancient mirrors and the mythologies of fountains of youth recently. So am writing and thinking about these things a lot and I think eventually these themes will work themselves into a book. My next event is a mirror-themed creative lab at Apiary Studios. To help fund the Dream Palace project we’re running a series of events there that give us an opportunity to audience test, develop ideas and experiment with tech. I’m often giving talks and hosting workshops on dreams and I’m doing several festivals and conferences this year, I’m particularly looking forward to taking part in an event at the Pari Centre in Tuscany in June. I absolutely love running kids’ workshops, especially on the subject of ancient Egyptian dreaming and magic.
For the ongoing Dream Palace project I’m hosting a number of dream incubators, the incubators are a blend of retreat and creative residency and will be held at sacred sites in Greece and Egypt– beginning with Epidaurus in Greece and ending in New Hermopolis, Egypt in December.
There is loads of other stuff too–do have a look at my website: www.themysteries.org for more.