A crisis of illness may open the gates of the Dreaming. I learned something about this in childhood. At age nine, in a Melbourne hospital where I underwent an emergency appendectomy, I left my body and found myself drawn down into what seemed to be a world inside the world. I was welcomed by very tall, pale beings who raised me as one of their own. I seemed to spend a whole life with these people, becoming a father and grandfather, until they laid my body to rest and I found myself yanked back into the body of the nine-year-old kid in the hospital and learned that I had lost vital signs for a few minutes and everyone had been worried that I had checked out.

Many years later, I encountered an Aboriginal artist from Arnhem Land who said that, whenever he got sick, he went to live with the "Mimi spirits" until he got well. In painting and sculpture, the Mimis are depicted as very tall and skinny. They are said to be more ancient than the Rainbow Serpent and to live inside rocks. They come and go through what my Celtic ancestors might call the "thin places," blowing on crevices in the rocks to open doorways to and from their hidden worlds.

--Robert Moss

EDITOR'S NOTE

The Mimi are well known across Australia, not just in Arnhem Land. In Patricia Wrightson's novel The Ice is Coming a Mimi is even a central character.

--Chris Wayan

SOURCE: The Secret History of Dreaming (p.10-11) by Robert Moss, the pioneer of Active Dreaming; Moss leads a lively online dream school. His other books include Conscious Dreaming and Dreamgates.

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