“The trick in setting up the dreaming does not lie in looking at things, but in sustaining sight of them when they are no longer in sight. Dreaming becomes real once you have succeeded in bringing into sharp focus anything you bring to mind, for then there is no difference between what you do when dreaming and what you do when you are not dreaming.”

I think it fair to say that I am artistically challenged, I am not good at sketching. In school when there was a class mural for assembly, I was allowed to do the pine trees. I can however visualize well, perhaps very well.

There are many different notions on dreaming but the Toltec aphorism above suggests a visualisation perhaps in a meditative state. Setting up the active dreaming starts with the visualisation of a yellow rose. This is the Western analogue of the Eastern lotus. I have done both approaches. The idea is to open up the heart centre and connect it vis throat to Ajna.

When I am meditating, I look like some geezer sat in a chair with his eyes closed.This is what is going on inside.

In January 2009 I had been meditating on the Caduceus slowly building the form over weeks.  Here is an attempt to sketch what went on in a half hour rāja yoga or active dreaming meditation. If you take you time the form stabilises and becomes reproducible.

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There are many models and if you look closely, you can see a re-presentation of kabalistic Otz-Chiim or Yggdrasil of the runic shaman or Asvattha which preceded the Hermetic Caduceus according to Blavatsky.

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Attitudes to non-concrete science have changed since the days of Prof. James Emerson Reynolds FRS.

James Emerson Reynolds (8 January 1844 – 18 February 1920) was an Irish chemist who was the first scientist to isolate thiourea and developed the “Reynolds’s test” for acetone.

Reynolds was a member of a number of institutions, including the Institute of Chemistry of Great Britain and Ireland, the Society of Chemical Industry, of which he was president from 1891-91, the Chemical Society and the Royal Society. In 1919 he had a serious accident, which was followed by a stroke. He died at his home 3 Inverness Gardens, Kensington on 18 February 1920. The chemistry department in TCD have his original specimen of thiourea on display.