Create Your Reality Through Dreaming with Robert Moss
December 23, 2023
About Robert Moss
Robert Moss has been a dream traveler since doctors pronounced him clinically dead in a hospital in Hobart, Tasmania, when he was three years old. From his experiences in many worlds, he created his School of Active Dreaming, his original synthesis of modern dreamwork and ancient shamanic and mystical practices for journeying to realms beyond the physical and growing creative imagination. He has led popular workshops all over the world, including a three-year training for teachers of Active Dreaming and online courses for the Shift Network. A former lecturer in ancient history at the Australian National University, he is a New York Times bestselling novelist, poet, journalist, and independent scholar. His many books on dreaming, shamanism, and imagination include Conscious Dreaming, The Secret History of Dreaming, Dreaming the Soul Back Home, The Boy Who Died and Came Back, Sidewalk Oracles, and Mysterious Realities. His latest book, Growing Big Dreams: Manifesting Your Heart's Desires through 12 Secrets of the Imagination is a passionate and practical call to step through the gates of dreams and imagination to survive hard times, travel without leaving home, and grow the vision of a more abundant life so rich and strong that it wants to take root in the world. He has lived in upstate New York since he received a message from a red-tailed hawk under an old white oak.
Links & Resources
Website for Robert Moss: MossDreams.com
Follow along with the Episode Transcript
Dr. Lotte | Intro [00:00:00] Welcome to Dr. Lotte: Science with Soul, the podcast that transcends the boundaries between science and spirituality. I'm Dr. Lotte, your host, a Physician, Medical and Psychic Medium, Ancestral Healer, Keynote Speaker and Award Winning Author of Med School After Menopause The Journey of My Soul. This podcast finds its roots in my own extraordinary life experiences. Through my personal odyssey I have discovered our profound connection within a divine tapestry of existence. I have traversed the realms of illness, healing and transformation, propelled by two near-death out-of-body experiences that bestowed upon me the extraordinary gifts of clairvoyance, clairaudience, and clairsentience. Guided by this sacred calling I embraced the pursuit of medical school at the age of 54. Prepared to be uplifted, transformed, and awakened to create a path to healing your own life physically, emotionally and spiritually by bridging the gap between science and soul.
Dr. Lotte [00:01:20] Welcome back to Dr. Lotte Science with Soul. I'm so excited to share my guest with you all today is Robert Moss. Robert Moss has been a dream traveler since doctors pronounced him clinically dead in a hospital in Hobart, Tasmania, where he was three years old. From his experiences in many worlds he created his School of Active dreaming, his original synthesis of modern dream work and ancient shamanic and mystical practices for journeying to realms beyond the physical and growing creative imagination. He has led popular workshops all over the world, including a three year training for teachers of Active Dreaming and online courses for the Shift Network. A former lecturer in ancient history at the Australian National University, he is a New York Times bestselling novelist, poet, journalist and independent scholar. His many books on dreaming, shamanism, and imagination include: Conscious Dreaming The Secret History of Dreaming, Dreaming the Soul Back Home, The Boy Who Died and Came Back, Sidewalk Oracles and Mysterious Realities. His latest book, Growing Big Dreams Manifesting Your Heart's Desire Through 12 Secrets of the Imagination, is a passionate and practical call to step through the gates of dreams and imagination to survive hard times, travel without leaving home and grow the vision of a more abundant life so rich and strong that it wants to take root in the world. He has lived in upstate New York since he received a message from a red tailed hawk under an old white oak. His website is MossDreams.com
Dr. Lotte [00:03:09] So welcome back, everyone, to another episode of Dr. Lotte Science with Soul. And I am so excited to have a very special guest today, Robert Moss. And he has written so many books and he is an expert on anything that has to do with dreams. And I have so many questions for you. So we're going to just jump right in. In your book, Growing Big Dreams, your last book, one of the things you talk about in there is The House of Time. And I found that fascinating, can you talk a little bit about what is the house of time and how do we, you know, explore that?
Robert Moss [00:03:52] The house of time is a real place. In the realm of true imagination, which we might call the imaginal realm. We borrowed that language from the medieval Islamic philosophers thanks to honorary colbert. The Ālam al Mithāl the realm of just imaginal realm its useful language. There are real places in any language that exist in the realm of imagination that constructed by human minds, interacting sometimes with minds beyond the human. The house of time is local like this, I discovered it and helped to develop it many, many years ago, decades ago. I've led many group expeditions to this place since then. It's a place that offers many portals to explore life experiences and other times, other cultures. As the name suggests, it's a place where you can travel, from which you can travel to past, future or parallel times. It has a remarkable library where you might be fortunate enough to get information and inspiration on any subject that draws you, and to attract a teacher who'll be drawn to you by affinity. In other words, shared interests, shared passions. So I've been guiding groups there for a long time, and I remember one of my own summit experiences there, is when I'm actually drumming. We use drumming in my workshops to shift the mind and maintain fuel and focus. So I'm drumming for a group. We're all inside the house of time. I mean, it's not a fixed environment. People are seeing it in different ways. It's not absolutely laid upon them like a hypnotic trance. They'll see it in their own way and add to it. And I'm in the library and I hear a voice, beautiful voice coming down to the top of a spiral staircase I had not noticed before. The voice says, "What better guide to the other side than a poet?" And I look up and there in a cape or a cape like overcoat is William Butler Yeats, the dead Irish poet who I loved since Boyhood, many of whose poems I can recite. And this began a series of conversations not just in that journey, but in liminal space between Sleep and Awake, which led me to write a book of mine called The Dreamers Book of the Dead, which is all about what might happen beyond death and how we know about it and what guides that kind of thing. I mean, Dante had Virgil. I got my version of William Butler. Yeats is a Yates is a projection of myself that's open to discussion. But the material is very good. So it's a place that is full of possibility and it's one of the numbers of such places which we can learn to visit. It's a gated community. You don't get there without an invitation. And the invitation doesn't necessarily take that much work, but it does mean that you've got to be ready. So you actually can't just walk in on a place like this. You have to learn and demonstrate that you have learned enough to be worthy of entry. Very good opening question, Lotte! You're going in the deep end.
Dr. Lotte [00:06:57] Laughter. So time. So does time exist in other realms the way we experience time in this realm?
Robert Moss [00:07:10] Oh, the point is, we can step in and out of time. I mean, Einstein said that time is just a human convenience, a way of ensuring that things don't happen all at once. And that sort of makes sense. I mean, that's clock time. You and I are on clock time. We agreed to meet at a certain hour according to the clock, but that's not the only kind of time. And I know that experientially we could step in and out of time. In medieval times, they talked about stepping in and out of the Aevum, A-E-V-U-M, which is a time between temporal time of humanity and eternity. That's one way of looking at it, in dream time, whether it's a sleep dream or lucid dream or meditation or shamanic journey is all forms of dreaming as far as I'm concerned. We can step out of time that is measured by the clock and into a space from which we can reenter linear time if we need to look in upon it. And in this way get information about the past, the future, or if we like parallel times, because there's also parallel times, which is one of the things that most interests me. I mean, while you and I are sitting here Lotte, you know, there's another reality not far away where we are not talking to each other. It's not the reality where you never did this and where I know what I'm doing, etc., etc.. Physics allows for this because of the many worlds hypothesis or many worlds interpretation of reality. And they say that the universe is splitting all the time, uncountably. I think that this is probable, but I don't to give myself a headache by worrying about all the thousands of Lotte's and Robert's that are doing something different that had breakfast or did not have breakfast. What interests me is the fact that you and I might, on parallel time tracks, parallel continua to be doing something different, which is interesting to know about, might even be able to reach to that parallel time and bring knowledge and gifts from that to us. So that's one of the things that we can accomplish when we learn that we can step out of time. And I would say this is a dreamer. As a dreamer, you and I and everybody else who opens to their dreams and learns to work and play with them. You're a time traveler. You travel whether you think about it or not to past times. You see earlier scenes from this life. You might see earlier scenes from past lives, whether they yours of the family or the ancestors or the spirits of the land, you travel into the possible future. I wouldn't be talking to you if I hadn't traveled into the possible future on three occasions when I saw my probable death in accidents on the road, was able to use the information to avoid those probable deaths. So we not only see the future, we see possible or probable futures. And with that information, if you pay attention and use it, you might be able to avoid something really bad and navigate toward something really good. And as I say, we also see these parallel time tracks, which to me are quite which to me are quite fascinating. So the House of Time is an magical architecture, it's a structure which I use with my groups, with my students, specifically my advanced students, to as a portal to all sorts of experiences. It is imaginal architecture, but so is the Empire State Building. So is the Louvre. So other buildings built by human hands. So is the house or apartment you and I live in is are all created by human imaginations. A human perception on the imaginal plane, which is probably also similar to the astral realm, if we want to use that that terminology. Things are made of subtle stuff and it's very malleable. The mind imagining mind can shape things much more easily than in the world of bricks and mortar and glass and steal. But nonetheless, there are structures there that are relatively solid and you could just go there again and again.
Dr. Lotte [00:10:55] I find it fascinating so that the House of Time is such a great description. I've had many of those events myself where I've had a vision and then avoided the accident. You know, getting a warning, avoid this truck. Watch out for this, watch out for that. And then it happens. And so and in those states, I'm awake and I'm just getting a vision or the spirit world comes in and gives me a warning. And then there are other times when, you know, I'll have a dream and I'll go somewhere and I'll see what this building looks like on the outside and on the inside. I don't even know if this building exists, but then a week or two later, there I am in that building that I have either told somebody like told my my daughter about it or I wrote it down. So I know it's not a deja vu. So how can we, what is it that happens when we have dreams or we have visions in meditations or a waking state when we see things that are going to happen in the future? What is it? What does that?
Robert Moss [00:11:59] Well, the first part of my response is that consciousness is never confined to the body and brain, let alone to any physical place except by a lack of imagination or our inhibitions or unwillingness to recognize what's going on. I will add, it's not necessary to go to sleep in order to have these experiences. Many of my most important dreamlike experiences are in the in-between state, the liminal state between sleep and awake, which so little of the literature mentions. I mean, this is absolutely fundamental to me. The sleep researchers term for this is hypnagogic, which is about what happens when you're not awake and not asleep, somewhere in between, it's before you fall asleep, it's the middle of the night, it's before you wake up. The ancients understood that this is God Space in the senses is a time when larger forces have access to you. And you're very psychic. Very intuitive. And it could happen in the midst of a bright day. The problem is waking inhibition so left brain attitudes get in our way. So where do you put yourself in a space? Where do you find yourself in a space where those inhibitions are dormant and you could simply see and perceive? I mean, you're an intuitive. You know a lot about how to do this. So it's not about what happens during sleep. It's about waking up, waking up to more of what is possible. How is it possible to see the future for. Well, from my point of view, because consciousness is not confined to the body in the brain. Some aspect of ourselves may be forever scouting ahead, checking the roads ahead for our survival, for our well-being. It's part of our survival instinct. When we are naked apes it's at risk of being eaten for breakfast by leathery pterodactyls and sabertooth tigers. You know it was unsafe to sleep. Part of us is out there scouting the environment and telling us when we need to wake up and move and so on. So that carries on with all our technology. We still now need that kind of basic survival kit. That's radar, if you like. So, you know, I subscribe, I'm very old age about that Lotte it's nothing new age about me I'm very Paleolithic. I'll when we look back, the oldest understanding of dreams and dreamlike states is we go traveling, we travel beyond the body and or we receive visitations. And I think this is actually basically correct. The many kinds of dreams. They don't all fit that description, but particularly in our psychological era where we have all sorts of dreams, dreams inspired by our strengths and therapists and our waking attitudes and so on. But so this doesn't cover all dreams is a wonderful bevy of levels and kinds of dreams. But interesting dreams are sometimes the result of traveling, going somewhere, And amongst the places we travel, when we go beyond the body and brain is the possible future. And once you've had the experience, which you and I both had at seeing something before it happens, you have confidence that, okay, I can see the future. So wait a minute, can I see the future and change it if I don't like it or if I see a future that I do enjoy, can I use that information to navigate my paths so that I catch up with a desirable future? This is the interesting thing. I'm not interested in simply seeing things that are going to happen. I mean, this could be terrifying, boring, disheartening. You see things that are going to happen and you don't like them, look at our world, I don't spend all my nights or all my days thinking about bad things that are going to happen. I'd like to change them. Okay, maybe I can't do that on a world scale, but maybe I can get a little glimmer from time to time, which enables me to do better. I could be a very simple kind of example of a helpful dream of the possible future. So I dream that I'm trying to give a lecture in an auditorium where people cannot hear me because the air conditioning is unbearably loud and crackpot making horrible noises. But to open to turn it off and open the windows would let in the searing heat outside the auditorium. So I wake from this dream irritated and think, wait a minute, I asked the question, "Could this happen in the possible future?" So we're already talking about technique, about practice. Could I be in this situation? And I'd check my calendar, yes, I have a I have a summertime engagement at a college and we've actually most of the students away but people will be there. And I decide because it's in driving range I'll actually go out to the college and check the setup. The air conditioning is exactly as I saw it in the dream, you turn it on clank bang, you cannot hear things. And already, though it's not full summer, you open the windows, it would be impossible to breathe in there. So we had the lecture moved to another place. Small, trivial, but, you know, useful to get right. So if you can dream about something as trivial as trying to get the A.C. right in a lecture theater a couple of months ahead, you could probably understand that you might be able to dream about more important things. But, you know, you get to this understanding, the understanding, the practical understanding of that you have information here you can use to do better. Once you've confirmed to yourself, as you have, I believe, and I certainly have many times, that you simply dream something or seen something, perceived something, intuited something before it happens. So you have insight into the future. And once you see something that does happen, you can then raise the more interesting question. Okay, if I see things of the future that will happen, can I see in such a way that I can change the future, modify the future, tame and gentle the future if I don't like what I saw, or alternatively, if I like it, can I make a plan which might require work on my part to navigate towards that vision of alluring possibility?
Dr. Lotte [00:17:52] Have you ever had an experience where you're seeing the future but then you weren't able to change it?
Robert Moss [00:17:59] Oh, there are things that I felt unable to change. I mean, my personal deal with my dreaming is I don't want to see too much of things that I cannot influence or cannot use in a helpful way because all sorts of terrible things are going on in my world. And I would spend all my nights or all my days thinking about all the things that are going wrong and can go wrong. I have seen things that I cannot change in terms of the facts, but might be able to gentle and modify in terms of how the facts are connected. For example, you see the coming death of someone or the coming medical crisis of someone. And you know, because of life karma up to this point, lifestyles up to this point, you probably can't stop that event and you choose probably not to talk directly to the person with terrible information of that kind because it might we as suggestible, it might push them towards that. But what can you do? Well, you could be nice to that person. You could communicate with them. You can see whether you can play soul friend in terms of getting them ready for what lies ahead, and you can talk to the family to help prepare the family for the event. So that's the kind of thing where, though you might not be able to change the event, you might be able to change things around it. I've seen coming natural disasters. I basically have been able to say to friends, okay, don't take your vacation there or, you know, something like that or, you know, check, check, check, check how you are in terms of a possible fire of a wildfire in the area, that kind of thing. Because unless you're on direct, intimate relations with the goddess of the volcano or the spirit of fire or earthquake or whatever, you might not be able to effect what's going to happen with natural disasters, but maybe you could prepare for it. Now, I think in terms of the history of trade and I'm a historian as well as other things. I think back to the great Asian tsunami of 2004, which killed a lot of people around the Indian Ocean. There are islands in the Indian Ocean called the Andaman Islands. So the Andaman Islanders are dreaming people. They are in terms of the way we described them, savage or primitive people, they use bows and arrows to go fishing. They don't like modern technology. They don't acknowledge that the Indian government says that they are their rulers. When the tsunami came in 2004, the Andaman Islanders visited disappeared from the seasonal fishing villages they have around the shore. A number of people thought they'd been washed out. They just been destroyed by the immense waves. Then the Indian army helicopters checking the islands come overhead and an Andaman Islander comes out the bow and arrow and fires the helicopter saying, Go away, we don't need you. What happened? They survived because they dream it. They have a practice of community dreaming. They go into their big houses, as their called they lie in a sort of cartwheel formation. They make it their intention to dream on practical things like where are the fish that we're going to seek today? Where's the jackfruit that we're going to eat? And on this occasion, they picked up the news that something which they probably didn't call us an tsunami, but something like a giant wave was coming. And of course, they read the waves of the winds and the fish better than most people. So they left the coastal fishing settlement. So what happened to the hills. They were not there when the tsunami came and they survived. So that's a very practical example from a whole community of how dreaming can be a community practice. It can get people through and sometimes think when people talk about this in our society and don't understand, you know, that the dreams are important, they don't understand how practical this is. It's mystical in the sense it puts us in touch with soul. It can connect us with our life purpose. It could show us our spiritual guides and teach us. But it's also what gets us through when we're really up against it. And ordinary recourses are not working in our ordinary tools and connections are not enough. It gives us something more. And dreaming peoples, when you look at it historically, practical people often on the edge of survival, I learned a lot when I started dreaming in the traditional Mohawk Indian language Kanaka Hakka Mohawk in their own language, thanks to a woman of power from a long time ago who is seeking me across time to get information for her people in her own time and in the process taught me things about dreaming from her tradition. You know, I learned that, dreaming gets you through it shows you where to find the food in the starving time. It shows you where to watch out for your enemies who are stalking you or lying for you in ambush. And it also shows you what the soul wants, which is perhaps the most practical thing of all. Because to live without soul connection is a very bad way to try to get through.
Dr. Lotte [00:22:52] So when you're dreaming, and you have all these you can see the future and you can access the future. Now, a lot of people will say, I never have those kinds of dreams. I just dream about, you know, what I did during that day. How can people tune into that to access that kind of information if they don't already have those kinds of dreams? Or if they say, I don't even remember my dreams?
Robert Moss [00:23:18] Well, you know, remember, our society is bereft of dreams are still something I dreamed about, although more people, funnily enough, started paying attention during the pandemic. Maybe because they're less out and about, they turned more to inner resources and they tried to find some story to tell each other other than, you know, what happened on the way to work, all the way to the on the plane trip somewhere. So I think more people have been talking about dreams. And they discovered, of course, during the pandemic that dreaming is a safe and can be a very fun way of traveling without leaving home, without paying for plane ticket, without going through quarantine, without waiting for your bags, which is part of the joy of dreaming, dreaming can be a great outing, can be a great holiday, can be a great entertainment. But if you remember any dreams, first, to the first part of what you said, don't throw it away, don't say this is just hum hum humdrum. You know, humdrum dreams may be the most likely to be showing us the future because a lot of ordinary life is humdrum. So if you think you're back in the office or back in an ordinary situation, check and ask. Wait a minute. Could I be seeing some variant on this? Maybe just some little twist is showing me something that's going to happen next Wednesday. Is that possible? And it often is. So that's to deal with the humdrum aspect of dreaming. Cannot remembering your dreams at all? Well, relax and have a practice. Set yourself the intention. Have some fun tonight in your sleep. And remember, whenever you wake up, be ready to record something. If you're capable of using your vocal cords and you wake up record. I'm not. I talk a lot, but I don't want to talk in the middle of the night or when I first wake up. I first record my dreams on my phone and I do it as a sort of email. So I email myself my first dream report. I love the idea of emailing myself from the dream world, but it might be a notebook or pencil or something rather. You don't have the dream, relax, write something down anyway, start keeping a journal, in other words, start keeping a diary. As you start writing things down, you're saying to your dream produces and some dreams do seem to be produced for us, we'll come to that later. Maybe I'm here, 'm ready to listen. And if you still don't have any dreams, relax. The world around you is speaking to you like a dream. Pay attention. You would like guidance on something. Set an intention. I'd like guidance on my relationship, my job, the book I want to write. Going to the dentist on Thursday. Whatever the intention is. Walk out into the world and accept the first thing the world gives you. Terms about pop up, incident, symbol as a message from the world around you talking to you like a dream. Because the world will speak to us in signs and symbols if we pay attention. So dreaming, once again is not just about what you do in sleep. It's not just about what you do with your eyes closed. It might be about what to do with your eyes wide open and all your senses are quiver paying attention to synchronicity, which is something that I also teach people to do. I call it Kairomancy, K-A-I-R-O-mancy a word I made up. Jung made up the word synchronicity. I made up the word Kairomancy for the practice of navigating by synchronicity, being alert to those kairos moments of opportunity. When time works differently, the universe becomes personal. You can get a dreamlike message from the world, and it's amazing how when you learn to do that, pay attention to these dreamlike pop ups around you. The spigot might come on, the tap might come on in the night, and you might start getting more dreams as well.
Dr. Lotte [00:26:52] So when you're having a dream and you go other places, is that world as real as the world that we're living in when we're awake? Would you look at it -
Robert Moss [00:27:07] It might be more real, it might be more real. I mean, this is, again, one of the things that, you know, our modern conception of things might be wrong about. It might be that would be we think that we're so physically, materially oriented. We think that reality is what we can touch and kick and smell. But by the way, you can touch and kick and spell in your dreams too. The ancients always thought the dreams in which senses of the visual and the audio come alive are particularly important. I taste a lot in my dreams I talk I discuss the people, I find not many people today, even avid dreamers, report tasting things as intensely as I do, but really intense sense of taste. My sense of smell isn't all that strong, it's not all that good in waking life either! I noticed my sense of taste is pretty good in the dream world. But, you know, we go to other worlds in our dreams and they're no less real. We go to realms, for example, The Dead or Alive, which is one of the main points of dreaming. Most humans are interested or maybe should be interested, might be interested in what happens when we leave our bodies in this world. Isn't that an interesting subject? Doesn't your opinion about that have some influence on the choices you make? I think it might. You might ignore it, but I wouldn't think that that's very good policy for the long haul. One of the ways we know, I think it's the oldest way that we have ever known about the reality of the soul and it's survival of physical death is through dreaming. I think it is actually the number one reason why most human societies have believed in something called soul or spirit, and that it survives the death, the physical body that in dreaming we go to places for the dead or alive. And maybe we rehearse for what lies ahead for us, and that's a real experience. We go to these parallel worlds. We go to alternate realities. We go to many aspects of the multidimensional universe. And I mean, it's fascinating and it's fun. I often feel I mean, it's very routine for me. I don't get excited about it all the time. I mean, I might sound excited right now, but it's pretty routine. I feel. I actually read this somewhere the other day. I read I read an anthropologist quoting a Chukchi, Chukchi are people of Siberia, shamanic dreaming people. And the Chukchi apparently say, "oh, well, I lie down and I sit on my bed and I step into another world." That's what happens every night according to the Chukchi dream, oh come to my house! That's that's how it feels to me. Laughter. I'm glad to see I have confirmation from the Chukchi because that's how it often feels to me. I feel myself, it is almost as routine as stepping from one room into another, except it's one world into another. When I come back okay, I don't always bring back a very detailed dream report because quite often it feels so every day. Okay. Yes, I was there. I mean, I'm a teacher. A lot of my dream activity is very routine by my standards. I give workshops, I give lectures, almost every night of the week in great detail. And I could come back and I could tell you if you quizzed me early enough before I let more of it go, who was there? What are the personality issues? How did the timing go? When did I use drumming? How did I explain such and such? How did the brakes work? What happened overnight? It's like that. I mean, it's it's it's it feels absolutely granularly real to me. And then I get reports because, of course, lots of people who communicate with me. I have thousands of students who seem to like me and share things with me. I get reports every day, sometimes dozens of them. But at least 3 or 4 of people say, "Robert, I was in a workshop or a lecture with you last night." Not just I dreamed of you: "and I can't remember everything you said, but can you tell me what you might have said about such and such." Laughter. So, so I get see, this is one of the ways that we get confirmation about things. I have a skeptic in my left brain who's going to make the check and test and verify everything. And it's important for all of us to keep that kind of skeptic alive and not just get mushy and new-agey and sloppy about these things. I mean, I'm a former historian. I'm still a historian. I'm former investigative journalist. So I'm used to fact checking. And I do this with dream activity, too. And by the way, the thing I most commonly do when I come out of my dreams is I hit Google or my own library, I have lots of books. I research the odd name, the odd detail. Did really, did a Roman centurion really address like that in the second century? Is that the name of an area in Hyderabad province in India and things like that? Very specific. I get very specific information I'm bookish, so I get lots of specific information I'll go and check it out, I'll go and research, and when I can find something in my research that I didn't know beforehand that satisfies a skeptic in me that I went somewhere and learned something beyond the ordinary. But another way that we know that we went somewhere and did something beyond the ordinary. When we experience what is sometimes called mutual or interactive dreaming, we've dreamed with someone else. Our experiences overlap. We when we write up what we think happened last night, there are points of comparison which are so close it's hard not to believe that one person was looking in another or actually encountering and being with someone other than the dream world. You can do this with intention, of course. I mean, I train people to have benign and helpful rendezvous, the meetings in the dream space and to embark on travels together in the workshops. We often have a whole group of people flying together, traveling together to a space of non ordinary reality. I remember when I first introduced this stuff to the world audience at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands in 1994, I had 300 people in the room for one workshop and I said, "Form couples, form dyads, find a partner, you're going to do this." And they're mostly academics, scientists, psychologists, shrinks. Find a partner here's what you're going to do. You're going to tell each other a dream, and then during the drumming, you will take turns I think I said to enter each other's dream. One is dreamer, you're going back inside to dream to get more information, which is a core technique of my approach. You've been somewhere to dream, you can go again. The other person will follow you into your own dream, with your permission as a tracker, and try to get more information from you from their point of view inside your dream. So you're giving them information to enter your psychic space. This worked brilliantly well! At the end of the workshop, I'm walking across the courtyard to Freudians, the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt, running out from seeing "Shaman! Shaman! Stop! How did you do that? He was inside my dream! He saw things I hadn't told him, but I would wish he had not seen! How did you do that? Did you hypnotize us?!" Oh, yes. I walked around hypnotizing 150 couples, right! Yes, of course I could do that! Laughter. So it's interesting how rapidly this can work. Of course, the hardest people to work with sometimes are highly educated, cerebral people, including psychiatrists and psychologists, Lotte. Laughter. Sometimes they are the hardest nut to crack.
Dr. Lotte [00:34:19] Yeah.
Robert Moss [00:34:19] But it's funny what happens when the show cracks and they get out there and do it.
Dr. Lotte [00:34:27] Yeah, that's fascinating. So they are linking up to each other's dreams by tapping into the other person. Is that-
Robert Moss [00:34:37] It's beyond that. Yeah. I mean, their Freudians, Freud actually had some sympathy for the idea of telepathy. He was open to the idea of telepathy, so he wasn't closed on that front. But it's a bit beyond telepathy, I mean, they're actually making a journey together. Journey in consciousness. The dream is pushing it, they're journeying through the doorway of one person's dream, two of them going through that doorway. They've got the image on their minds. One person wants to go inside the dream because there are things they would like to know and there are things I would like to do. So the preamble would be, you know, this dream has some traction for you. It has some pull, it has some mystery. It has some fear. It has whatever, some attraction. What do you want to know about it? Okay. And then what would you do if you could get inside your dream? Would you open that door? Would you dance with the bear? What would you talk to that poet, talk to your deceased grandmother? What would you do? Would you pull Freud's beard? What would you do if you could get through the door and then the other person is going to be your tracker. Do you give him or her your permission to come with you and give you information from their point of view? So yes, there'll be telepathy will be part of it, they're lying or sitting together in the space, so there's some transaction going on between them. But the idea is they're both actually traveling in consciousness to somewhere beyond the physical space they're in. They are going together. And sometimes they'll be conscious of being together in that space and sometimes they'll have separate experiences. One, that's the primary journey and the other one looking in bring information and they're going to share it at the end. The interesting thing is that, you know, with no preparation in a foreign city with highly educated, highly cerebral, highly cognitively centered people, it just worked like that. Worked like that, bang!
Dr. Lotte [00:36:35] So when people are dreaming or in this state. Do you believe that the spirit world, the spirit world has their their realm or we have the dream world, we've got our realm. But when we are dreaming, people often talk about how the spirit world or, you know, their mom just passed away and they visited them in their dreams. So is that when we're dreaming, are we then more open to communicate with the spirit world?
Robert Moss [00:37:07] Absolutely. Once again, it's not necessary to sleep or to dream, and in the general sense of the word, in order to be open to the spirit world, the spirit world is there. It is thickly settled, as they say in Massachusetts. The world around the hot air around us is thickly populated, thickly settled. And if you're not careful or if you're open to it, you might find yourself overwhelmed by just how much, just how much activity is all around you! You're probably very familiar with this. I personally don't see want to see the spirits with my eyes open unless I absolutely have too. And I don't want to be open to just anybody barging in on me. However, dreaming. However, there are many cases where people want to have contact with the spirit world because, for example, they want to be in touch with beloved family members or friends. They want to have guidance. They want to have assurance about the law to reality. And dreaming is probably the ideal way to do this because once again, your left brain inhibitions are down. And but it doesn't have to happen in sleep or dream, it can happen for people who are halfway intuitive or sensitive at any time, as you well know, but particularly in dreaming contact with the spirit world and the sense of the departed now is not weird, it's not supernatural, it's common. And not that difficult to arrange for three reasons. Our departed are still around. Right? That could be okay or not okay. They're around because they think you are clueless and you need some guidance, they're around because they don't know they're dead, this is not so okay. They're around because they want another drink or something else, they are still addicted to and they think maybe you're the place to be. You're their bar or you are the one who's going to satisfy their needs. They're around because you're familiar and feel safe. They're around because they're lonely. They're around because they think they're damned and they don't want to have to go out for all sorts of reasons. So you might still be around. Could be okay. Could be good, bad or mixed, after a certain point it's not okay because if the departed lingered too long, we're often in the situation of being caught up in the heavy energy of the dead. In the West, we don't talk enough about the different aspects of energy and spirit that survive physical death. This leads to great confusion, great confusion. I'm very conscious of this. I always have been, very conscious of the need to discriminate to discern between the heavy energy of the death, which the Theosophists and others used to call the etheric double, for example, and other aspects of the dead, like the astral body, like consciousness on higher levels. So, you know, to to return to the main threads our dead, might still be around, and of course they're not dead they might still be around them might be okay or not be. They come visiting! They visit each other for the reasons that you and I call on each other, and then some for a whole range of reasons. You know, they they want healing and forgiveness. And one of the most beautiful things for us to realize is that healing and forgiveness are all available, always available across the apparent barrier of death. This is a great thing to awaken to on both sides. By the way, of course, the dead don't change immediately just because they're dead. They might be more like they were before they died and more problematic. But eventually things will evolve. Healing is possible. And then the third reason why contact with the deceased, the departed is not difficult, especially in dreams, is we travel to their realms. Most people do that without realizing what's going on. You might do it every night. I mean, a lot of that's why I say to people, quite apart from who you meet in your dreams. Look at the location, location, location, location. Seth James Robinson Seth was very clear about this, look at the location because the places you visit in your dreams might be the places you are going after death and the places that, you know, places where people relevant to you who've died are living right now. The unfortunate great priestess of the Western mystic traditions said exactly the same thing. Pay attention to the places that you visit in your dreams, because they're probably the landscape, the buildings, the structures of the environment you're going to. So all of this seems incredibly clear to me and basically incredibly simple. Handling it case by case can be a bit more complicated, particularly when you've got to help people disentangle and separate from problematic continuing relations with the dead on the wrong heavy level level level of energy. But once again, it's not essentially about what happens in sleep or dreams. It's about what's available to us. However, given our state of mind and the inhibitions we carry in Western society, for most people, the easiest way to get in touch with all of this is through a dreaming. There's an old film, called The Sixth Sense, where the boy says to the Bruce Willis character, who's trying to contact someone who's living, I think Bruce Willis is dead. I might have it back to front. But anyway, laughter, someone is trying to communicate between the dead and the living. Boy says, Talk to her in her dreams. That's the way you will get through. And I say the same thing to people. Talk in your dreams, be open to that.
Dr. Lotte [00:42:29] So we're talking about the spirit world and and moving on. Can dream, dreamwork, help people who are dying?
Robert Moss [00:42:39] Absolutely! Dreaming is the best preparation for death! There's a saying of the Lakota "The path of the Soul after death is the path of solid dreams." Once again, dreaming, we become familiar with worlds beyond the ones we know, and we might be visiting and checking out the place that we're going. We make connections. We have a sense of continuity. A sense of destination. Beyond the obvious. I will say to people, what are the great gifts we can give to people who are dying is simply to ask to see if they remember a dream. You don't have to do an interpretation, need dream, work with it. Just ask them to remember a dream. Would you like to hear a story about this and how it evolved in the life of someone who is approaching death? It'll take a couple of minutes. So a friend of mine said, "How do I help dad?" Well, what's Dad situation? "He's in a nursing home." Okay. "He's had a series of strokes." Yeah. "He's a good, man. Senior executive. Outdoor life. No inner practice of any kind. I'd mentioned dreams and he'd say "Oh yeah, you and your new age friends. Real men don't dream." Okay, fine. "What can I do?" I said. Just ask him if he ever remembers to tell you a dream. "Well, I can try." This is, this is the whole practice. So she says to "Dad, Dad, if you remembered. Are you in your dreams? If you remember a dream, tell me." And one day he remembers a dream! It's about a house that's squirting in all directions, and it reflects the wretched state of his plumbing, his physical plumbing, at that stage, it's a bit embarrassing, it's a bit funny. But he tells them, the mood lifts. And then after that he starts reporting dreams and every time he has a dream, he's like a kid who's gotten "A" or gold star for the first time. He's got a new job. Oh, he's doing cabinetry. He never did this in his life, but he liked wood work. Oh, he's got another new job. What is it? Oh, he's ironing out angels wings. You see when angels fly around they get rumpled, so he's smoothing out the angel's wings, so they fly right. It goes on it goes on, for six months. Then he says to his daughter, "I had the greatest dream." Tell me! "I'm at this white mansion on a hill. And the door opens and there's this gentleman who looks like an ambassador, black tie, silk sash, "Oh, we've been waiting for you!" And dad says, "I'm in my hospital gown. I'm really feeling bad, my rear end sticking out. And here's the ambassador. Welcome, welcome! Brings me in. They're so charming. They give me something like filet mignon except it's not, it's better, something like champagne, except it's not, it's better, have this lovely evening. When I leave "They say, Well, now you know where we are. We'll be waiting for you at the right time." And now dad, who always liked to have the right connections, has confidence. And he approaches the last stage of life with confidence and grace. And after he dies, he comes back and he says to his daughter in a dream after he's died, "I want to show you the white mansion on the Hill. I want you to meet my friends." Now, you can be you can say this is all wishful thinking. You could say this is all subjective projection. You can say this is a spirit world opening. I don't mind what you say. It was very good. It got the job done. It got him through death in a state of grace and confidence, and it produced results after death. I actually think that was the transpersonal experience. Did the characters the dream put on masks some time some kind, maybe they did. But you know, I will judge by results. The real is what works said Mr. Jung, and this worked. And all that was required was the daughter to the say repeatedly, without pushing, if you have a dream, tell me. And if they don't have a dream at the end of all this, we can grow a dream for them. One of the techniques I teach, which is a very radical and radical case of benign prediction, on the techniques I teach, I called Dream Transfer. That's when we produce. We put together an image, a vision we can give to somebody else to say, "Here's a vision for you", maybe a personal map to the afterlife. They don't actually say that. Take any part of it that you like. Tell it back to me. Don't take more than you want. I've used that technique and people are trained by me, have used that technique often to give people approaching death, elements of a personal map for the journey without laying it on them as some hand-me-down theology, some hand-me-down, without pushing it on them, something they have to receive. Just saying I've got a dream for you. Would you like to hear it? Okay. Take any part that you like. Use it as you like. Tell it back in general. You don't like any part of it, throw it away. It's amazing how that has worked. So those are two ways, two very important ways that Dreamers who learned the kind of practice that I teach, which I call Active Dreaming, to describe an original synthesis of Dream work and shamanism. And those are some things we could do.
Dr. Lotte [00:47:47] This is beautiful because there's so many people that are afraid of dying. If they could just learn how to do, you know, how to dream and and see it and then have a beautiful transition. So much, so much love and beauty in that whole experience. Not just for the person who is ready to leave this realm, but also for the people around them to see that that person then comes to peace with passing over to the next state of their journey. So it's a really beautiful way to transition.
Robert Moss [00:48:24] It is.
Dr. Lotte [00:48:25] Yeah, I know we're coming to a close with this podcast, but I have one more question, and it's about nightmares. So people who have nightmares and they have repeating nightmares. Do you have any advice for those people or people who have children who will have nightmares? How can we help them?
Robert Moss [00:48:41] Let's be clear, clear about the words we're using. For me, a nightmare that you might not hear this from other people. To me a nightmares just a bad dream or scary dream, it's it's a broken dream. You're so scared, you run away. You slammed the door. And so Thank God it's only a dream, I hope never to have that again. You leave it unresolved. Aborted. A nightmare. The sovereign remedy for this is to learn to stay with the dream. To go back into it, if you've left it or stay with it next time it happens and confront the issue on its own ground. Now, you might need support. You might need allies to do that. So you might need people to help you summon those allies, whether they're angels or spirit animals or something else, in order to confront the threat. And sometimes what you discover is that what you fear is your own power waiting for you to brave up. I mean, I meet the bear that way when I first started living in North America, I started having terrifying dreams of a giant bear that was trying to get in my bedroom. And then the bear is there and it can't fit, but there it is and I'm not happy. And eventually I decide I better face this. This is many years ago, decades, decades ago. So I sat in the easy chair in my living room and I summoned the dream. It's there. Bang. I can see the bear. I can smell the bear. The bear is rank, rank and feral. And I'm scared. I know it's a dream. It's a vision. But I'm scared. The bear is really there. I step up to the bear. I forced myself. And the bear wraps its arms around me. I think that's it. I'm dead. It's going to crack by rib cage, but it's a gentle bear hug. Suddenly we're the same size. It goes on and on. So I'll just cut to the important bit. At a certain point, I notice because the bear makes me notice, that we are joined at the heart. There's something like an umbilical pumping life energy back and forth, heart to heart. Somehow the bear and I are joined at the heart, and the bear says to me, mind to mind, "Call on me and I'll show you what you need to heal. And I'll show other people what they need for healing." And the promise has been kept across nearly 40 years. The bear has always been their to heal for me and other people that I help. But sometimes the nightmares about something you're ducking or dodging the famous or notorious shadow, some part of yourself or some issue in your life that you won't look at. And it might be helpful. It might even be life saving. It might be good for your health to have a look at that, because sometimes we don't look at things in dreams and leave them as unresolved nightmares because they're showing us, for example, there's a health advisory. We'd rather not see it, but take a look. Maybe you don't have to go to hospital and have that operation. Maybe you don't have to develop that symptom. If you look at what the dream is telling you, maybe the dream is showing you that there's a problem in your relationship. It's going to blow up and maybe you better be prepared for that so you can either change the situation or be ready when it comes. So the sovereigen remedy is to be able to look inside the dream and deal with the issue on its own ground. Now with children, it might be more difficult to suggest that their children are actually more wily and more capable than most adults give them to, particularly dreams. Children are much more understanding about what's going on in dreams than adults until they've had their understanding crushed out of them by adult idiocy and incomprehension. But I remember I had a young girl once and the family asked for help. She was, I think, just 9 or 10 years old at the time. And her problem was not nightmares, but really night terrors, formless night terrors. I understood talking to her, these are probably an effect of dysfunction in the family and the psychic disturbance in the house, in the neighborhood, etc.. So the easiest thing to do with her was to give her allies. So I gave her a Roman soldier. I'm a boy. I still have toy soldiers. I gave a plastic soldier, I gave her Roman centurion. I said, "Here's your guardian of the night." She wasn't that young, I think. 9 or 10. "Here's your guardian of the night. He's going to look after you in the night. Call on him." Three years later, we're at family party and there she is, she says, "Robert! Lex was great!" Lex? She's really dismayed that I don't know what she's talking about. Like, "Oh, the Roman soldier!", Oh, the Roman soldier! Tell them about Lex. "Oh, he's ten feet tall now. And you're right. As promised, he's on the case! They scare in my dreams. Lex is on it. He doesn't let anything bad happen!" So that's a case of improvizational. You know what shamanism? Priestly protection work? I don't know. Psychic defense? I gave her a form that could become a focusing point for some entity beyond either of us, probably those protective, her imagination went into it, my suggestion went into it. Maybe something else came into it, too. But he became her Guardian of the night and he worked. He was on the job. So there's there's some very ancient magic involved here. Benign magic. Simple magic. With a child do you want to give them an ally, and if they've turned to you, you are the first ally that they're turning to. You hug them. If they don't like the energy of something with the night, you help me get rid of it. Spit it out. Draw something and tear it up or burn it. Tell the story and listen. Don't interrupt. Don't be on your cell phone and then decide what more needs to be done and what more needs to be done. Might be to get suggested ally for the night, like that stuffed toy with who is the tiger, or the dog, or that Roman soldier.
Dr. Lotte [00:54:13] That's just a that's a great story. It's I just love that story. That's such great advice, too, for anybody who has kids who have nightmares and and how to handle that situation. I feel many times people don't know where to go.
Robert Moss [00:54:26] Read my book, Active Reading, which has two chapters about working with kids with dreams and imagination.
Dr. Lotte [00:54:32] Yeah. Which book is that?
Robert Moss [00:54:34] Active Dreaming.
Dr. Lotte [00:54:35] Active Dreaming. Yeah. So all you parents out there go get that active dreaming. Active dreaming book. How can people learn more about you or take classes with you or your workshops?
Robert Moss [00:54:48] MossDreams.com is my website. I teach a lot online these days. Some of it is quite advanced up, but there are always courses that are open to anybody who would like to join this new one coming up actually in January, which is open to everyone. The short one, there'll be a new one for the Shift Network where I teach a lot drawing upon 12 different world traditions of dreaming, which is very interesting from the ancient shaman dreamers to Jung and beyond Jung, etc. So I don't teach many in-person workshops anymore with the pandemic I tended to drop that, but I'm very busy online. If you go to MossDreams.com, you'll see and you'll find guidance on my many books on this subject and I hope some of them tickle you and get you to have a look.
Dr. Lotte [00:55:35] Well, it's been an absolute pleasure to have you as a guest today! And we're going to put that website in the podcast notes. It's MossDreams.com And so you can just click on that and go check out all his workshops and all his work. And how do people find all your books? Are they available at Barnes Noble's, Amazon?
Robert Moss [00:55:56] I should be in every bookstore, if they're missing well, you could certainly find them from the usual online suspects like Amazon and so on. And there you go.
Dr. Lotte [00:56:05] Right. Well, thank you so much, Robert, for taking the time and being a guest today, it was an absolute pleasure!
Robert Moss [00:56:11] Dream on Lotte, may your best dreams come true.
Dr. Lotte | Ending [00:56:17] As we conclude this episode, I want to express my heartfelt gratitude for your presence within our community. If you haven't yet, make sure to subscribe, leave a review and share this podcast with friends and family. Subscribe to my newsletter in the show notes and receive new podcast episodes delivered right to your inbox. If you resonate with the interconnectedness of mind, body and soul and are motivated to embark on a journey of personal healing, I invite you to connect with me at DrLotte.com Together, we can pave a path towards transformative healing in your own life.