Introduction to the Dream

The Dream Manual text was created by Bill Whitcomb using William S. Burrough's cut-up/fold-in "third-mind" techniques to combine material from western magical and occult writings, ancient Egyptian and Assyrian texts, and sections from Antero Alli's wonderful book All Rites Reversed. The text can be considered as literary experiment or a serendipitous grimoire, if it even needs to be considered at all.

Bill Whitcomb created the original Selections from the Dream Manual by combining the Dream Manual text with collage images. This version of Selections from the Dream Manual was published in an edition of twenty-three copies in the late eighties for an amateur press association, the Society for Creative Thought (SFCT).

The new Selections from the Dream Manual is a re-interpretation of the original Dream Manual text by Michael Skrtic in which Michael has created a new collage painting corresponding to each line of the Dream Manual text. In addition to the new images, Michael has incorporated the text in his painting using a magical alphabet called "The Alphabet of Dreams", thus making the new Selections from the Dream Manual an example of Asemic writing, an art form in which the artist uses inscrutable writing to convey aesthetic meaning without semantic content.

Magical Alphabets and the Alphabet of Dreams

Magical alphabets differ from mundane alphabets primarily in two respects. First, a magical alphabet is different from the alphabet used by the magician in his or her daily life, thus setting it aside or consecrating the alphabet for magical use. To make something magical, one must treat it as magical. Second, a magical alphabet typically has many layers of analogical symbolism that allow it to act as bridge between our normal, linear, verbal consciousness and the part of our mind that communicates best through metaphor and symbol - the elements of dreams and visions. Typically, each letter of a magical alphabet will have many symbolic associations, such as images, plants, animals, colors, minerals, metals, days or times, parts of the body, mind, personality, and so on. Alphabets with long-standing traditions of magical and mystical use, such as Sanskrit, Futhark (runes), or Hebrew, have extensive symbolic associations.

The Alphabet of Dreams is an alphabet of 25 consonants and seven vowels based on traditional associations of elemental and planetary symbolism. It was created to demonstrate one way in which people could create personal magical symbols and symbol systems and was first published in The Magician's Reflection by Bill Whitcomb (Llewellyn Publications, St. Paul, 1999).

Serendipity, Synchronicity, and Fold-In Texts

Being a fold-in/cut-up text, the Selections from the Dream Manual text is very much an artifact of serendipity and synchronicity. The cut-up method involves taking writing from two or more sources and permutating the text, either by folding the pages in half and sticking disparate halves together, or by cutting the text into strips and mixing it up. Burroughs and Gysin believed that the resulting texts could be viewed as the product of a composite or "third" mind.

The term serendipity was coined by Horace Walpole after his tale The Three Princes of Serendip. The three princes of the story seemed to possess an aptitude for making fortunate discoveries accidentally, hence serendipity is fortunate coincidence. In this sense, fold-in/cut-up texts are similar to "found poetry".

Believing that that the word coincidence was merely an attempt to settle a mystery by naming it, the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung created the word synchronicity to refer to an acausal connecting principle he used to describe phenomena linked by meaning rather than causality.

The cut-up techniques was originated by Tristan Tzara, a leading member of the Dada movement. Perhaps as a reaction to the horrors of the 1st World War, Dada embraced irrationality and the use of chance. Tzara cut newspapers into pieces, and then selected them randomly from a hat, pasting the resulting combinations of words together. He described this process in the fifth of his Seven Dada Manifestoes (1916-20):

To make a dadaist poem
Take a newspaper.
Take a pair of scissors.
Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.
Shake it gently.
The take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag. Copy conscientiously.
The poem will be like you.
And here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.

The writer and painter Brion Gysin rediscovered Tristan Tzara's cut-up-technique while cutting through a newspaper upon which he was trimming some mats. Gysin did many experiments with cut-ups while living in Tangiers. It was during this period that he shared his discovery with his friend William S. Burroughs.

Writing is fifty years behind painting. I propose to apply the painters' techniques to writing; things as simple and immediate as collage or montage. Cut right through the pages of any book or newsprint...lengthwise, for example, and shuffle the columns of text. Put them together at hazard and read the newly constituted message. Do it for yourself. Use any system that suggests itself to you. Take your own word or the words said to be "the very own words" of anyone else living or dead. You'll soon see that words don't belong to anyone. Words have a vitality of their own and you or anybody can make them gush into action.

From The Third Mind, by William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin

For some years, Bill Whitcomb spent a lot of time experimenting with fold-ins, cut-ins, and other forms of "found" or randomized text. He gradually accumulated various batches of cut text strips, each batch consisting of differing percentages of the various source texts. At the height of his enthusiasm, he faithfully laid out at least three columns of text each night and recorded anything that seemed, if not coherent, at least more or less grammatically correct. Bill has somewhat recovered, but still has an active interest in the subject.

From a literary standpoint, the fold-in or cut-up method can produce some striking and poetic phrases now and then. Used well, it can produce some interesting effects in fiction not unlike the repetition of phrases in music. Used indiscriminately, intercutting can make a text annoying and incomprehensible. The threshold is pretty much a matter of taste.

From a magical standpoint, the practice could be thought of as a form of divination or channeling. If you have a jar of text strips, you can remove one or more strips in response to a question. You can combine specific sources to channel text of a particular flavor or subject. Of course, bear in mind that just as one shouldn't believe everything in the newspaper, you should take randomly generated (or channeled) text with a significant grain of salt, regardless of your beliefs concerning the text's spiritual or psychological source.

Still, fold-ins sometimes seem to speak so clearly and directly that it is hard to think of the experience as anything but a communication, but of what sort? Is it a message from one's unconscious? Instructions from the community of ascended masters? A greeting from our space brothers? A lure of Satan? A sacred transmission? Is it just a random phenomena, without significance, brought about by our evolved need to perceive pattern? Tread lightly here. Tread very lightly.

On the other hand, fold-ins can be thought of as more directly magical than just divination. Burroughs wrote extensively about fold-ins as rewriting reality, like editing film or recordings. As Burroughs put it "When you cut up the present, sometimes the future leaks out". This isn't as strange as it might sound, since in order to create a future outcome, you have to know what you want. Most techniques approach creating an outcome through visualization, but one can also sit down, as Burroughs did, and write out the desired result and fold-it in with descriptions of the past and present. This concept holds true whether you believe you are changing the world through magical power, divine assistance, or simply attuning your mind to perceive the possibilities surrounding you. Knowing what you want helps you get it, or at the very least, lets you know it when you see it.

Antero Alli and All Rites Reversed

Antero Alli is the developer of paratheatre, a medium with its own principles and techniques of physical theatre, dance, standing Zazen, vocalization and song, all of which have been organized and published in his book, All Rites Reversed, recently revised, expanded, and republished under the title Towards an Archeology of the Soul (Vertical Pool, 2003). Two documentary videos (1991 Archaic Community and 1999 Crux) have been produced showing this work in a non-performance context. Orphans of Delirium (2004), an experimental docudrama, shows this work in a performance context.

This paratheatrical medium is inended to provide access to the internal landscapes of archetypal process as a spiritual event and movement resource. More advanced and disciplined stages of this work aim to distill from this inner material universal symbols, themes and stories for artistic expression, public presentation and theatrical performance.

The ongoing objective of this paratheatrical medium is to discover individual movements and group rituals for triggering miraculous interactions. They are miraculous whenever they invoke (by sound & word) or evoke (by feeling & motion) strong spiritual and visceral resonances that - with enough commitment - erupt in spontaneous gestures, movements, patterns of motion, sounds, vocal creations, characterizations, and stories to be shared with others.

More information concerning the paratheatrical medium as well as Antero Alli's publications, videos, and paratheatrical productions can be found through his website, www.paratheatrical.com.

Michael Skrtic and Bill Whitcomb

Michael Skrtic was created by an improbable laboratory accident between the end of the Atomic Age and the beginning of the Space Age. He was pulled from the resultant conceptual debris and raised by primates of a species unknown to science, living a carefree existence in the urban jungles of North America until found by a passing pseudo-scientific expedition. After learning to practice a rigorous daily routine of artistic exercises, Skrtic vowed to devote his life to fighting evil through the unrelenting application of painting and collage. It is rumored that Michael Skrtic now lives hidden in the wilds of deepest, darkest Sweden and will not reappear until he has developed an unbeatable form of aesthetic kung fu.

Bill Whitcomb was born a typical child of the 20th century until contracting Semiotic fever, an imaginary disease characterized by oneirodynia, mythopoetic swelling, and hermeneutic convulsions, resulting in chronic obsession with symbols and language. Some claim that after being bitten by a wide variety of non-radioactive creatures and exposure to extra-terrestrial solar rays, Whitcomb exhibited a seemingly complete lack of paranormal abilities, though there is little proof of this assertion. Whitcomb is best known for his books on magical symbolism and practices, The Magician's Companion and The Magician's Reflection, both published by Llewellyn Publications. Bill Whitcomb is believed to be living in the Pacific Northwest United States where he researches the practices of non-existent secret societies.

In addition to Selections from the Dream Manual, two other fold-in texts by Bill Whitcomb are available online.

The Book of the Luminous Word – A mix of ancient Egyptian and Assyrian sources, a bit of Aleister Crowley, and a sprinkle of Necronomicon. This pungent combination yielded texts that ranged from sort of inspirational to mildly disturbing. Some of results have been used to develop rituals.

The Unauthorized Transmission – Bill got bored one night while working on the glossary for The Magician's Companion (a reference work concerning magical and religious practices and symbolism). The text editor being used had the capability of moving lines of text a specified number of lines in the document, so he thoroughly scrambled a copy of the glossary, printed it, then repeated the process a couple of times for good measure. Bill cut-up the scrambled glossaries and assembled any sections that appeared to be discussing the same topics. The resulting fold-in essay is sometimes funny, depending on one's appetite for metaphysical puns.