I met Ken Eagle Feather a couple of years ago on a train. A former Marketing Manager at Hampton Roads Publishing, Ken has published several titles on personal discovery, including A Toltec Path: A User’s Guide to the Teachings of don Juan Matus, Carlos Castaneda, and Other Toltec Seers, Tracking Freedom: A Guide for Personal Evolution, and Traveling with Power: The Exploration and Development of Perception.
This article is about The Dream of Vixen Tor, his first title to delve into his own personal experience.
“I was dreaming when I wrote this, forgive me if I go astray.”This opening line to one of Prince’s most popular songs could easily be a disclaimer for Ken Eagle Feather’s latest book, The Dream of Vixen Tor.
He was dreaming when he wrote it. But he wasn’t sleeping.
He was conducting a seminar on lucid dreaming in Devon, England, when
he simultaneously entered a dreaming-awake state, flooded with ideas for
his new book.
Written live from within a dream and based on personal experiences in lucid dreaming, it is not surprising that he says it also reads like a dream.
Lucid and waking dreamers, he emphasized, are not to be confused with daydreamers. They have complete command of their bodies but dwell in a state of heightened awareness, in a surrounding that has become dream-like.
[pullquote align=”left|center|right” textalign=”left|center|right” width=”30%”]Written live from within a dream and based on personal experiences in lucid dreaming, it is not surprising he says it also reads like a dream.[/pullquote]The rock formation and seminar site, Vixen Tor, apparently evoked this in many of his pupils. “The workshop we were doing and the energy of the land put everybody into a dreaming-awake frame of mind,” he explained.
Harriett Coleman, 12, whose mother was in attendance at the seminar, composed the poetry that is found in the piece.
Although others, including Florinda Donner and Carlos Castaneda have explored the concept of lucid dreaming, Eagle Feather stresses that the unique format of his latest read, a compilation of how-to exercises, illustrations, myth and poetry, sets it apart from anything else presently on the shelves.
Differing from his other three books, Toltec Path, Traveling With Power and Tracking Freedom, published by Hampton Roads Publishing Company, where he is a marketing director, it is the first to be self-published by Tracker One Studios, Inc. Containing extensive autobiographical material and 112 pages in total, it’s described by Eagle Feather as the most personal and shortest of his works to date.
First visited by the “muse” at 19 when serving as a petty officer in the U.S. Navy, Eagle Feather said his decision to write was cemented years later, in his thirties, when he met Don Juan Matus.
Don Juan became his mentor and met with him many times in person, and even appeared to him in his dreams. He encouraged him to write books about Carlos Castaneda’s writings, that are based on the teachings of Don Juan.
“He was a very powerful person,” he said said of Don Juan. Their meeting clearly had a dramatic impact on his life, culminating in a name and career change.
Following Don J
uan’s proposition, he opted to study journalism at the University of Southern Florida. A military bill of rights and a janitorial position afforded him the funds to go back to school.
He changed his identity around the same time. Declining to give his original surname, he said the name Eagle Feather, given to him by his teacher, means to “serve with detachment.” Read more…
Reprinted with permission from Voices of Central Pennsylvania.