ICSA TODAY 12
my life: my father, mother, brother, husband, and four lifelong
friends. They are also my most frequent and enduring dream
characters. During the ISKCON years, I also dreamed about
people I knew in the organization. After leaving, most of
those characters faded quickly from my dreams.
Since my dream journal spans four decades, I also study it for
the continuity of one person’s dreams over time. For example,
I have looked at instances where new characters enter my
dreams after meeting them in daytime life. Then I track how
long they stay in my dreams after they are no longer in my
daytime life.
I have not attempted to
compare my dreams to other
populations yet, but one of my
mentors published a blind study
of my dreams and compared
my dream statistics to baseline
dream statistics for all women.2
My other mentor asked me to
compile all my dreams about
the Covid pandemic to use in a
section of his new book.3
I have also studied my dreams
of Krishna. In 2018, I presented
my dreams on a panel with two other dreams of god
researchers.4 In the course of studying my dreams about
Krishna, I found several significant dreams continuous with
my daytime experience.
Dreams of Krishna
My job in ISKCON was to work in the public affairs office,
and part of our responsibility was to respond to scandals
reported in the media. The worst disaster we handled was
the murder of Steven Bryant (also known by his ISKCON
name, Sulochan). He was a dissident from ISKCON’s rural
community in West Virginia who believed the guru there
broke up his marriage. He wanted to bring his case, and the
guru’s corruption, to light. He got himself locked in protective
custody there and told the police everything he knew then
he traveled to Los Angeles where he thought he would be
safe. On May 22, 1986, he was parked in his van about a mile
from the L.A. temple, and a man from West Virginia shot him
in the head.
The conspiracy to murder Bryant traced back to ISKCON
officials. Everyone knew it, and I knew it as well. Nevertheless,
I compliantly typed and mailed the press releases we issued
to deny ISKCON’s involvement. The matter was before a West
Virginia grand jury by the time I had the following dream:
Dream dated October 17, 1986 (abridged): I
dreamed that people I know were deeply involved
in the murder the grand jury is investigating....
After they told me everything I had to hide it....
There were Jagannatha Deities with knots on them,
according to our impurities.
The Jagannatha deities are a form of Krishna carved from
wood. Normally, they do not show knots in the wood, which
would be considered an impurity or flaw. In the dream, the
deities had knots that showed our impurities. The dream
mirrored my daytime concerns because deep inside I was
mad at myself for lying to the media. However, the dream
mirrored my daytime concerns
with compassion. It was as
though the deities noticed,
acknowledged, and shared the
burden of guilt with me.
I had another dream that
offered a symbolic, but direct
correspondence to my waking
life role in ISKCON: “Dream dated
February 26, 1987 (abridged): ...
I was an actress in a play where
demons kill each other for
Krishna....”
Of course, I knew it was wrong to lie, but I felt obligated to
protect ISKCON. About a year after the murder, I had the
following dream that corresponds to my defensive daytime
attitudes and behavior at the time:
Dream dated May 31, 1987 (abridged): The media
(TV, radio, etc.) were making a campaign against
ISKCON. Went to the devotees’ store and the
window was whitewashed. I put a message like,
“We’re proud to be ISKCON,” or something, in the
window to counteract bad PR.
ISKCON had other problems, but the Bryant murder stood
out, turning the organization into a media spectacle. Around
that time, I was out shopping, dressed in a sari as usual. A
man called out “Hare Krishna,” and I shouted back, “Yeah,
what about it?”
Typing the ISKCON Years
UC Santa Barbara Special Research Collections Library has
the largest collection of cultic materials in the country. It’s
now called the American Religions Collection (ARC). In 2005
they wanted the papers related to my memoir about ISKCON,
Betrayal of the Spirit.5 I had just turned fifty when I sent
them seven boxes of internal documents, news clippings,
and other materials including my journal notebooks up to
that time. Because UCSB holds my notebooks, I needed to
travel there to work on site. Later they allowed me to take
notebooks home to type them.
Uncovering the true story
of my life set the record
straight. I could forgive
myself and let go of
my self-hatred and
guilt for the first time.

VOLUME 13 |ISSUE 3 |2022 13
My original connection with UCSB was completing my
Bachelor of Arts degree there in 1978. I met devotees
when they opened a preaching center in an apartment
in Isla Vista, the college town adjacent to campus. I
spent a lot of time at the preaching center learning the
philosophy, then joined the Los Angeles temple the day
after graduation.
There I was forty years later, setting out to type the ISKCON
years of my journal. It took four weeks, typing eight hours
a day in the UCSB Special Research Collections reading
room. During my free time, I walked around Isla Vista
revisiting landmarks from my senior year. I walked to the
apartment building where I had lived and noticed the pool
was gone. The man in the office told me my $90 studio
apartment now rented for $1,500 a month.
I found the old preaching center and was dismayed at how
rundown the building looked. It reminded me of ISKCON,
and how broken down it had become, still pitifully trying
to hide its history of child abuse, murder, etc. I knew about
some of their crimes all along, but after leaving, and doing
the research for my memoir, I realized ISKCON was like a
building that became a money pit. The more I looked, the
more problems I found.
I felt reluctant to revisit my ISKCON years because I knew
it would bring back bad memories. But as it turned out,
typing the notebooks was therapeutic. For one thing,
I realized I had valid reasons for joining and staying so
long. I was alienated from my family as a teenager, so I still
wanted to experience growing up in a family. ISKCON gave
me that. The people in the public affairs office cared about
me and made me feel like I belonged. I worked my way up
from secretary to my position as associate editor of The
ISKCON World Review newspaper.
The best part was to find out I was the hero of my own
story. In 1987 the organization started to unravel, and
there was little more the public affairs office could do. By
that time my husband and I had started our own company
doing freelance typesetting, so we walked away in 1988
when we were both ready to leave. Instead of feeling
traumatized about leaving, I realized it was not up to me
to fix ISKCON. I felt proud of myself for getting on my
own two feet. Uncovering the true story of my life set the
record straight. I could forgive myself and let go of my self-
hatred and guilt for the first time. That left me with a sense
of gratitude for everything I remembered. n
Notes
[1] Calvin Hall’s and Robert Van de Castle’s dream content
analysis is explained in further detail in G. William
Domhoff’s article, “If we don’t interpret dreams, what do
we do?” Go to https://dreams.ucsc.edu/Info/content_
analysis.html
[2] Bulkeley, K. (2018). The meaningful continuities between
dreaming and waking: Results of a blind analysis of a
woman’s 30-year dream journal. Dreaming, 28(4), 337–350.
https://doi.org/10.1037/drm0000083
[3] Nori’s pandemic dreams are referenced in G. William
Domhoff’s new book, The neurocognitive theory of
dreaming: The where, how, when, what, and why of dreams
(MIT Press, 2022). See the section on Beverly: A frequent
pandemic dreamer, pp. 133-136.
[4] Nori Muster on a panel on Dreams About God (2018,
June 19). Dreams of ten years with the Hare Krishnas,
Conference of the International Association for the Study
of Dreams (IASD), Scottsdale, Arizona. See: surrealist.org/
dreams/dreamsaboutgod.html
[5] Muster, N. (1997). Betrayal of the spirit: My life behind the
headlines of the Hare Krishna movement, University of
Illinois Press.
About the Author
Nori Muster, MS, Arts Editor of ICSA
Today, is an artist, writer, and teacher.
From 1978 to 1988, she was a full-time
member of the International Society of
Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), then left
and earned her Master of Science degree
at Western Oregon University in 1991. Her
thesis is on whether to use creative art therapy with juvenile
sex offenders. In 1997, she published her memoir, Betrayal
of the spirit: My life behind the headlines of the Hare Krishna
movement (University of Illinois Press, 1997, paperback 2001,
e-book 2014), then Cult survivors handbook: Seven paths to
an authentic life (first edition, 2000 Kindle Paperback edition,
2017), and Child of the cult (2012 revised edition, 2015 Kindle
Paperback edition, 2017). Her web page for cultic-studies
information is surrealist.org/cults/ n