The Fall

If philosophy is practice for dying, active dreamers are real philosophers

Death rehearsal on Maundy Thursday, 2026

I know this kind of fall. I’m not sure how it started this time – maybe for the second time in this dream. I am falling, seemingly quite slowly, from a great height. I am not afraid, just curious about where I will land and what will follow. There’s a green patch below, good. But I drift over some rooftops, wishing to come down on another patch of green. I do. There is no bodily sense of impact, but I have some kind of body. I am lying on my side, nose to the ground, looking around the limited field of vision this gives me. There’s activity around me, but nobody seems to be concerned or in a hurry. I’m not sure they have even noticed me.

That’s it for now. I am back in my body in the bed. This happens without any transition I can explain. I am calm but intensely curious. What happened in the dream is a familiar situation. I want to know what happens if I stay in the scene and the story continues.

I will myself to reenter the dream, wide awake and conscious. I am there at once, up from the ground, facing a welcoming party. I don’t see their features distinctly, but I feel their goodness, indeed their radiance. They are guides. They will take me to the next place if I am done with the life I have been living on earth. I want to see what the next place looks like. I am delighted it proves to be a place I know well. I discovered it in a dream, then returned there in shamanic dream journeys. Above a green rise, it is a school of higher learning with beloved teachers, disciplines not taught in earthly universities and of course an infinite library. I have been calling it affectionately my Alma Mater, my School of Soul. Yes, I am ready to come here. But perhaps not this moment. I could drop my elderly body like I once left a broken-down car at the side of a road. However, there are people I love I will grieve, and a whole dreaming family with whom there is more work and play to be shared, and books I would like to complete. There is no pressure either way. No hurry. My call.

My consciousness streams back to my body bed. It’s three in the morning. I get up and read for a bit - Stephen Mitchell’s spiritual comedy Meetings with the Archangel. Then I lie down again and cast off into the dreamlands without setting an intention. Soon I am busy in a workaday scene, leading a training where I have to teach my apprentice instructors to practice time management. I go to work like this in dreams almost every night. I lead far more classes in dreams than in everyday life. Sometimes the dreams are rehearsals for future classes in ordinary reality. Most often they are events in a separate reality that I know is completely real. My feelings are generally neutral: been there, done that. I may be quite tired in the wake of a workaday dream that involved a lot of travel and social interaction.

I dream of The Fall four or five times a year. Most often I step off a high cliff above water. I seem to fall very slowly, fully aware of my situation. When I hit the water, I continue to go down to the very bottom. Then I bounce up, sometimes with a terrific surge of energy, and break surface like a cetacean breaching.

In another version, I am falling from high above the earth, I do not know how the drop begins. It is as if I have stepped out of an airplane thirty thousand feet up. In all versions my body is vertical, legs straight, feet down, a bit like one of Magritte’s raining men.

I usually call this dream The Fall, but today I might call it The Drop. I have not been pushed. I did not slip. I did not dive. I let myself drop. I recall that Jung said something similar about how he embarked on the Underworld journey that gave us the Red Book. He let himself drop. Jung came back with the prima materia for his master works. I am involved in a different scenario. When I let myself drop, I feel I am rehearsing for the journey from which I will not return to the body.

Death rehearsals can never come too soon or too late. As Montaigne said, since we do not know where death is waiting for us, we must be ready to meet death everywhere.

I often fly in my dreams, with and without wings, but in these dreams of The Fall I do not consider flying. I am going to see the experience through, which requires me to go all the way down. I have no fear in these dreams, but I sometimes feel tristesse, and a foretaste of the grief of leaving loved ones behind and work unfinished.

Socrates tells us in Phaedo that philosophy is practice for death, μελέτη θανάτου. In his day people had not forgotten that a philosopher is by definition a lover of Sophia. In this sense active dreamers are real philosophers. We know from experience that soul or consciousness can travel freely beyond the body and will therefore survive physical death. We visit places in the afterlife where the dead are alive. We can study exit ramps, travel itineraries and afterlife options.

People ask me whether we can die in our dreams. I say to them, Isn’t that the best way to check out?

Here’s my report of an earlier dream, of dropping into the ocean.

May 13, 2024

The Drop

I decide it’s time to take the drop. I am high above the ocean, perhaps in a plane. I don’t jump. I simply set my intention and perhaps take a short step forward. Now I am falling straight down. The speed of my descent varies according to whether I spread and flap my arms. If it occurs to me that I can fly, I don’t entertain that thought because I want to go down to the ocean and see what happens.

I prepare myself for the shock of entering the water, willing myself to retain consciousness. Closer to the surface, I see that the ocean is a soft avocado green against the grainy dark backdrop of the sky. When my body enters the water, still straight and vertical, I am surprised by how soft and warm it is. I go down but bob up very fast. I was either able to breathe underwater in those moments or they did not last long enough for it to matter. I am now bobbing in the water, fine and good, not worried at all about what will happen next. It will be revealed.

Journal drawings by Robert Moss, both originally tited “The Drop”

Top: April 2, 2026

Bottom: May 13, 2024