Dream beyond the body and discover worlds beyond the body

Wherever spirituality is alive, conscious dreaming is recognized as the most important source of instruction on the soul’s survival of death and its condition in the afterlife.
    Even St. Augustine – who had problems with dreams when he abandoned his lover for the church and decided that sex was disgusting – recommended paying the closest attention to dreams in which the dreamer is conscious he is outside his body. In a letter he wrote when he was working on The City of God, Augustine quoted the experience of one Gennadius, “a physician of Carthage”.
   In a dream, Gennadius encountered a radiant young man who led him to an otherworldly city where he heard singing “so exquisitely sweet as to surpass anything he had ever heard”. Waking, the doctor dismissed his experience as “only a dream”. His radiant visitor returned the following night and asked Gennadius whether he had been asleep or awake when they had met before.
   At this point, the doctor became aware that he was dreaming. When his guide asked him, “Where is your body now?” he became aware that he was also having an out-of-body experience. This was the preliminary to a teaching session in which he learned that the soul’s condition after death is similar to its condition in dreams, and he lost his doubts about life after life.
    The story of Gennadius finds echoes in the experiences of conscious dreamers today. In the wake of Raymond Moody's Life after Life (1975), there have been a flock of accounts of visionary journeys reported during "near-death experience" (NDE). It is not necessary to suffer life-threatening illness to make a conscious journey to explore the conditions of the soul after death.
    In a dream that was the gateway to many further explorations, I found myself in a large room where people in a circle were waiting for me. An electric blue fire burned in an alcove. A radiant guide indicated that I was to lead them through it. As we danced into the fire, my guide asked, "Where is your body?"
    Now aware that I was dreaming and out of the body, I was briefly tempted to rush back to check on the inert form on the bed. But I managed to stay with the dream and was shown a number of places of teaching for people who seemed to have passed on. At one of these teaching facilities, students of all ages joined their voices in songs of extraordinary beauty. The chorus of one of these songs stirs in me now:

What cannot be seen in the dream
cannot be seen in its glory

Behind the singers rose the buildings of a beautiful university. I have been able to visit this wonderful place of higher learning, meet some of its faculty, and audit some of its classes. For me it is the true Alma Mater, the school of Mother Soul.

Text adapted from Conscious Dreaming: A Spiritual Path for Everyday Life by Robert Moss. Published by Three Rivers Press.

Photo: Still from Nosso Lar (Astral City) a Brazilian film about the afterlife

Commencement at Alma Mater

from last night's dreams:

I am walking across a campus with a host of people arriving for a big ceremony, something like commencement. I feel wonderful, young and fit and strong. 

    I am a young professor, no older than my early 30s. I am a celebrity, and the college kids are so excited by my presence. They look at me as if I am Indiana Jones. I am wearing well-cut “donnish” clothes – tweed jacket, slacks, shirt and tie. I consider the impact it will have if I turn up later for a lecture I am scheduled to give in a trench coat and broad-brimmed black fedora, which are also part of my wardrobe.

    There is special seating reserved for me in a vast auditorium.

    However, I first go to see a wise woman – wise beyond her apparent years, since she looks to be in her mid-thirties, a little older than my dream self. I present a card. It looks like a tarot card. It is brilliantly colored. The central figure wears a costume patterned in sky-blue and orange lozenges, with a big floppy Renaissance hat. He could be the Fool or the Magician, but I want to call him the Troubadour. The card glows in my hand, casting rays of light.

    When she sees the card, the wise woman reveals a whole set of cards. I am charged with excitement. This is the real deal. These images hold real codes of life and manifestation. I will consult them when I teach courses at the university, where I have been given a special, highly prized, appointment.

Feelings: Delight. I wanted to stay in this dream, and did so, despite the morning light spilling through the windows.

Bernart de Ventadorn

Reality check: The dream felt entirely physical. The body was definitely mine, but not the one I am living in right now. I was a very young professor (of ancient history) long ago at the Australian National University. This is a different college. The buildings are older, and the campus is larger.
    I work with tarot and have taught courses in "Tarot for Dreamers".
    I was introduced to Troubadour songs that spoke to me deeply when I was teaching in southern France earlier this month. One was from Bernart de Ventadorn, the meaning of whose surname ("Adorns the Wind") is already a poem. Another was from Guilhem de Peitieu, Count of Poitou ((1071-1127), who has been called The First Troubadour:

Farai un vers de dreyt nien....

qu'enans fo trobatz en durmen

sobre chevau.

I made this song from pure nothing...

It came to me when I was sleeping

on a horse.

    I cannot immediately identify the wise woman.
    I have seen myself teaching in a pleasant college in the afterlife in dreams and visions over many years.

What do I want to know?

-          Is this an alternate reality?

-          Is it a glimpse of a life I might inhabit after death, in an Alma Mater – School of Mother Soul – where I have seen myself teaching in dreams and visions over decades in this current life?

-          Does it reflect energy and presence I can claim right now?

-          All of the above?

Action: I will study the Troubadour song I was given. I will reflect on the significance of the combination of blue and orange. I may try to reenter the dream, talk to the wise woman, review the rest of the deck of cards, and find out what I am teaching at this nonordinary university.

Bumper stickers: 

1. Live in blue and orange.

2. Indiana Jones is a professor!

The school of Mother Soul

There is a sudden stillness in the classroom. One by one, those who are ready rise from their bodies and gather in the corner where a hearth fire is now burning.
    The fire is extraordinary. It is electric blue. The flames stream and dance like shimmering blue silk. It is lovely and beckoning. Yet it is fire, and what is beyond it is unknown. So there is hesitation, and some fear.
    One who has passed this way before enters the fire like a dancer, becomes a figure of bright flame, and is gone. The others join the dance, and move through the blue fire. There is no pain. The pain was on the other side.
    Loving arms receive them. The angels have familiar faces. They are going to a new school, a pleasant place on a green hill, among beds of flowers and flowering trees. The course selection is amazing. Whatever they have learned already will be put to use, and their classes and assignments will be built around their curiosity, passion and imagination.
    They will want to communicate with those they left behind, to try to ease their grief by letting them know that there truly is a better place, beyond the pain of the world, where learning and growth continue, and where fun and adventure are encouraged, and where the most important skill is the ability to make things up.
    Every experience is different, here even more than in the previous world. They are cheered by watching a graduating class, gathered on the green hill in front of an ivy-wrapped, warm brick building. They are dressed in simple white smocks. Their voices are achingly beautiful. Their songs are not hymns from church, or what used to play on headphones.

Sunrise, sunset, evening star
What cannot be seen in the dream
cannot be seen in its glory

     I walk and talk with some of the faculty. A donnish, tweedy man with a mustache reminds me of my favorite teacher in high school, eons ago, a British professor of ancient history who decided to come out of retirement to share his passion with hormonal boys in a burned landscape in Australia. What is the name of this school? Alma Mater, of course, Mother Soul.

I discovered this school of Mother Soul when I started teaching public dream classes, more than 20 years ago. I asked, in the night, to see what I most needed to teach and found myself leading a class through that blue fire. Since then, I have visited this Alma Mater many times, and have found that its offerings are ever-growing. Some students study communications, learning and inventing techniques to facilitate helpful contact between people on this side and those left behind in the physical world. There is great compassion, among the faculty, for the grief of the survivors, and great eagerness, among the students, to alleviate that pain by reaching back to offer love and direct knowledge of life beyond life.
     I do not know where the victims of the Newtown horror are going, but I know that there are beautiful schools, for students on all levels, on the Other Side, and guides to show the way, and I am certain that the souls of the innocent are held in the arms of angels.