Robert Moss discusses Dreamgates
Dreamgates: An Explorer's Guide to the Worlds of Soul, Imagination, and Life Beyond Death
Robert Moss came to the Bodhi Tree Bookstore in 1998 to discuss his book Dreamgates. Robert Moss is a shamanic counselor and dreamworker who conducts dream workshops around the world. He is instructive, innovative and entertaining.
"May your best dreams come true and may you remember them"—Robert Moss
Dreamgates: An Explorer's Guide to the Worlds of Soul, Imagination, and Life Beyond Death by Robert Moss
Moss's guidebook helps you move into different ways of seeing and knowing in order to move freely in worlds beyond physical reality. He offers techniques in "active dreaming," creative imagination, and shamanic soul flight that take you out of habitual mind-sets and the "consensual hallucinations" of everyday life. Active dreaming is the bridge between dream work and shamanism. While Moss's earlier book Conscious Dreaming showed readers how to work with night dreams, and the "twilight zone" between sleep and waking, and conscious dream journeys, Dreamgates takes you on a much deeper journey. Here you learn, through dream images, to seek insight and healing for yourself and others, to communicate with spiritual guides, and to expand your knowledge of a greater reality.
Part I offers simple and effective techniques for shifting consciousness in order to fold time and space and to journey beyond the body into hidden orders of reality.
In Part II, Moss embarks on a series of otherworld journeys, into new realms of imagination, initiation and healing. And in Part II, he uses the techniques of active dreaming to follow the paths of soul and spirit beyond the gates of physical death, and to develop an art of dying helpful to one's needs and yearnings today.
This book is a complete training course for embarking on the most rewarding of all forms of travel. -- CD
What follows is an edited version of Robert Moss’s Bodhi Tree presentaion (edited by Camilla Denton).
Robert Moss: Suppose I could help you tonight to look around the corner and see into your possible future. Suppose I could help you research the challenges that lie in wait for you down the road. Couldn't you use that information to make wiser choices and improve your life? Suppose I could introduce you to a healer who will not charge you a penny, will not administer pharmaceuticals, will not cut you open with a knife and will give you an impeccable read-out on your health -- mental, spiritual, emotional and physical, whenever you need it. And suppose this healer could bring you the healing in one experience, overnight? Suppose I could introduce you to your own higher self; that part of you that knows who you are, where you come from, and what you were doing before you lost your soul knowledge? All these things happen spontaneously and sleep-free if you choose to become a conscious and active dreamer. You not only improve your memory of what your dreams are trying to tell you, but you develop the ability to travel intentionally beyond the body, beyond space and time until you can do all these things for yourself and for others whenever you choose. Dreamgates is an invitation to a limitless adventure. Your soul has wings.
In one of my workshops, a woman came in with a dream in which she was standing on top of a tall, tall school building, looking at a beautiful five-year-old girl in a red coat who was playing too close to the edge of the roof. The woman was terrified. She thought the child was about to fall to her death, so she lurched forward to grab the child's hands to pull her away. But next thing the five-year-old grabbed the woman's wrists and pulled her over the edge of the roof. In the dream the woman was falling and screaming, convinced that she and the kid would both die. But suddenly she noticed she was not falling anymore. She was floating and gliding and flying like Wonder Woman! The five-year-old had her wrists and knew how to fly.
The woman wanted to know what the dream meant, so, with the use of primal heartbeat Shamanic drumming, the group embarked on a conscious dream journey back to the gateway of her personal dream. Part of what I do is teach people to travel through their personal image into the dream's meaning. Sometimes it's simply to get the message straight, because our memories of dreams are confused and broken. At other times it's to face a nightmare adversary and to reclaim our power or it is a way to talk to a dream character who might be a spiritual guide or teacher. Always, going back inside a dream is a wonderful adventure that teaches you personal ways to travel between the physical and spiritual worlds.
In this particular workshop, the group embarked on a shared conscious dream adventure. We all traveled inside this woman's dreamscape to see what we could see, and also to be there for her, like a flight of birds watching over her.
When the woman looked again at that five-year-old face she saw herself -- the child she lost because of terrible abuse at that age. She opened her arms to her five year-old self and the child returned her embrace. And in the embrace, a blaze of light erupted at her heart, and at the child's heart, which grew between them and joined them together in one radiant effusion. In that exchange she gained back part of her soul that went missing in childhood. And she also reclaimed the part of her that never forgot how to fly. In fact, in that session she flew off to check on various relatives throughout the country. Some of the other participants were able to see what was going on, and were able to exchange their impressions about her dream.
So, in that one conscious dream journey, that woman was able to achieve something that others search for through years of disciplined practice. She could travel beyond the body and beyond space time to visit all the dimensions of reality. Moreover, she was able to enter the realms of the departed, because one of the people she visited is no longer living.
Dreams come with timely messages to guide and enrich and enlarge your life and it's interesting to discover how to work with those messages. I've always been a dreamer -- my home base is the dream world. As a young boy in Australia, I had pneumonia in both lungs twelve times by the age of eleven. I was struck by lightning, I nearly drowned, I lost vital signs three times . . . It was so bad, a doctor advised my mother to give up on me, and have another child! But I survived, and came out of these experiences with a gift of familiarity with the realms of dreaming -- with inner and outer worlds and their denizens and inhabitants. In my childhood, however, the only person who would validate my experiences was someone from a dreaming tradition -- an aboriginal boy. When I talked about communications and dreams and visions with the departed, he said matter-of-factly, "Oh, yeah? We do that all the time. Grandma's been gone for ten years but she told Mom what to take for her sciatica."
Our society says, "In your dreams baby," meaning it's not going to happen. Or, "It's only a dream," meaning forget about it. But dreaming people know differently: The dream world is a real world. "Night is the university of the dervish," goes an old Sufi saying. In other words, you can learn intentionally. Through the portals of your dreams, there are cities and palaces and heavens and hells waiting for you -- a geography much more varied than physical reality. Indeed, the Iroquois Indians of the Northeast say that this physical world is the shadow of the dream world, which is the real world.
Maybe tonight you will return in one of your dreams to another life in another city, another world, in another dimension. If you change your life radically, say you split up from your partner, or you change your job, a part of you goes on living in the old situation, where you pursue a parallel life. I have dreams in which I'm still married to my first wife. I'm my present age, still living in London, and I'm acting and behaving as I might be if I remained in that marriage. I also know that other Roberts are living in realities that do not correspond to earth realities. We're dealing with a territory that is larger than any definition or any map that has ever been devised. What we make of it is depends on our courage, our imagination and our curiosity.
Let me move quickly into what I call the open secrets of the dream time. The first is that the dream world is the real world. The second is that we dream the future all the time. In dreams, we are all naturally psychic. Whatever speaks to you in dreams will warn you about the big stuff -- the crisis of illness, the possible road accident, the challenge in your work, the new relationship, the possibility of your finding the creative inspiration to do your heart's work. I was out in the woods chopping wood with an Iroquois Indian healer and his son when the boy slipped and cut himself. As the father tied up the wound, he berated the boy: "This would not have happened if you remembered your dreams." "Dad, I didn't dream this," his son complained, but the Shaman would hear nothing of it. "Of course, you dreamed it," he said. "We dream everything before it happens. If you remembered your dreams, you wouldn't need to cut yourself with a damn ax."
Nothing happens before it is dreamed and maybe everything is created inside the dreamer. Everything is created in a subtle order of reality before it is emanated downward into physical, concrete events.
The third open secret is that dreams are central to healing. Dreams show us parts of ourselves that are missing. Often, people are called back again and again to situations earlier in their lives, to see a separate soul of a younger age, like the five year-old in that woman's dreams. Dreams also show us the work of the psychic vampires in our lives and show us how to cut the negative attachments that make that possible.
The fourth open secret about dreaming is that in many dreams we routinely travel outside the body. The challenge is to become more conscious and deliberate and selective about where we're going to go.
Also, dreaming is the best way to find out about what follows death. In sleep dreams we have spontaneous encounters with departed loved ones and ancestors, who can become guides. Sometimes our departed friends and relatives in dreams are lost and confused and need help from us. Dreams show us the transition between physical life and death. They show us how to travel and develop a personal geography of the after-life. As the Plains Indians say, "The path of the soul after death is the same as the path of the soul in dreams."
The interesting thing is not just that we can see the future, but that we can often change it if we don't like it. One way we can change the future it is to run a reality check on all the dreams that we have, particularly the ones that seem to contain challenges. You ask yourself, "Is it remotely possible that this dream could be played out in waking reality?" Sometimes this requires going back inside the dream to see if you can change the events inside it in a way that seems authentic. If you cannot, then usually you need to take action in waking life to change the events you have foreseen. If you see a car accident, you can try and figure out what day and what road. If the warning is for someone else, then you have to be diplomatic about it. I once dreamed about the toddler of an acquaintance: I saw the toddler playing on a stairwell above a wide-open window, and was afraid he would fall to his death. He and his mother live in another country, and I've never seen the house. I called a mutual friend of ours, and asked her to go round to check on the situation. Sure enough, she discovered the toddler playing on the staircase with the window on the landing standing wide open. As a concerned friend, she was able to point out the danger to the toddler's mother.
Dreams bring us timely and gentle messages about challenges in our lives. It's like having an impeccable advisor at your shoulder whispering in your ear. If you don't listen, the counselor will send his or her message in the form of a nightmare in order to scare you into paying attention. If you slam the door on the nightmare, the issue is going to come and bite you in the throat and wake you up. This is one of the greatest reasons for doing dream re-entry. Go and face the adversaries and ask, "Who are you? What is your message? Why are you after me?" Sometimes, nightmares are warnings of a possible danger in ordinary reality that need to be addressed. Sometimes they're warnings of a challenge on another level being expressed symbolically. Whatever it is, the dream is on your side, not on your case.
On the other hand, psychic intrusions reflect the fact that we need to protect ourselves psychically as well as physically. If it's an experience of that kind, we should not run away from it, but learn to clear our space, set-up good boundaries and simply prevent them from coming in.
All you need are the techniques for improving your ability to travel in and out of your dreams intentionally. I don't mean lucid dreaming the way the term has been bandied around recently. Lucid dreaming has become a bit mixed-up with ideas of controlling your dreams, putting them to service of the waking mind, which I have no interest in doing. For me, dreams are one of the ways that I can connect to a higher source, and I don't want to try and put my little ego in charge of that material. Dreamgates, amongst other things, is a paean of praise to the twilight zone -- those relaxed states of attention, either in bed at night or any place during the day -- when you can be open to the birth of dream images. Try hanging out behind closed eyelids for awhile and let the patterns come. When I do it, after the patterns I'll notice faces, then scenes forming and next thing I'm being offered a menu of dream adventures. In the twilight zone I like to track forward through my waking life and check something out.
A dreamer's task is first to cast loose in the astral body or dream body, which carries a much finer energy than the physical side. You move more fully into the astral plane, and when you're ready to move beyond that -- because there are higher universes -- you leave your dream body behind and travel in a finer vehicle of consciousness. You raise your vibration if you want to get out of the room, and lower your vibration if you want to get back to the body.
However, you need to pay attention to your psychic security, particularly if you plan to become an active explorer and are going to journey out of your body, intentionally. And, as a shamanic practitioner, I find that invoking guardian dream animals is one of the single most effective defenses. If you have a proven and working relationship with your guardian animals, you can ask them to stand guard over your psychic body or to accompany you on your journeys. Also, as a shape-shifter, the best way to get started is to see yourself spreading your wings or running on the fleet legs of your animal counterpart. That's a very good way to get started on a memorable conscious dream journey. You can also send your power animals to do things at a distance, even if your consciousness is somewhere else. This way, you can be at several places at once.
May your best dreams come true and may you remember them. Thank you very much.
