The woman who sent me notes from the lecture I gave in her dream

It's hard to keep track of him. When I come home from our travels, I am not quite myself and no longer him. When we part company, I am left to pore over scraps of memory like the things I find in my pockets and on my phone after a regular plane trip: a boarding pass, a bus ticket, a foreign banknote, a scribbled love note, random photos of far-away cities and beaches and train stations.

      I am talking about the Traveler, the self who is not confined to my body or brain in dreams and journeys. I track the Traveler by recording his exploits – the ones I manage to catch – in my journal. In one report he seems to be very like my present self, just two days ahead of me, on my present probable event track. Sometimes he is much further ahead, or on a different – mildly or radically – event track, or he is in another body in another time or another world. 

    Sightings by others give me clues to the range of his excursions. On any given day, it is not unusual for me to receive 20 quite specific reports over the internet from people who say the dreamed of me, in addition to dreams of me shared in person by members of my workshops. My default response is to suggest that the dreamer might want to ask what part of them resembles Dream Robert in some way (for example, as dreamer, teacher, writer, traveler, large person with white hair). Yet I also know that dreaming is social as well as individual, transpersonal as well as personal, and I am aware that the Traveler leads adventures in the dream lands as well as in the physical world. 

    Some weeks after leading one of my 5-day adventures at the Esalen Institute, I received a note from one of the participants, a highly intelligent, spirited lady, a person with two PhDs who had explored consciousness in many ways. "I want to thank you for that wonderful lecture you gave last night."

    I checked the date. I had not given a lecture that evening anywhere in consensus reality. I had already intuited what she was telling me. She had attended a lecture I gave in one of her dreams. The woman from Esalen reported that in my lecture, I had listed, "very clearly and elegantly", five reasons why we misinterpret dreams about the future. I had written them on a whiteboard in view of the group.

    This gave me shivers. On that very day, I was laboring over a chapter in a book that was later published as Dreaming True. The chapter was titled "When Dreams Seem False" and on the first page I was developing a list of the five most common reasons why we misinterpret dream messages about the future. I was satisfied with my statement about the first reason we get these messages wrong. But I was not yet content with my formulation of the other four reasons, or the order in which they should appear on the page.

     I emailed the woman from Esalen. I asked her, "Any chance you kept notes from my lecture, or could reconstruct what I wrote on the whiteboard?"

     She responded within a couple of hours, sending me her version of Dream Robert's five points. They were expressed with admirable brevity, very much in my own style. Borrowing from my dream student's notes, I was able to compose the opening section of that chapter with almost no editing. Here's how it reads:

The five most common reasons why we misinterpret dream message about the future are:

1. We mistake a literal event for a symbolic one, or vice versa.
2. We misidentify people and places.
3. We fail to figure out how far in the future the dreamed event might be.
4. We see future events from a certain angle, that may not reveal the whole picture.
5. We confuse realities, confounding a dream that relates to external reality with dreams that are real experiences in other orders of reality.

    I often play the role of teacher in my own dreams, with many different audiences: with people I recognize, with people I will meet in the future, with people in countries I have not yet visited, with people in other orders of reality, including the afterlife. I have preserved hundreds of reports from people who say they have attended a workshop, a lecture, a ritual or some other type of training with me in dreams. I have learned to pay close attention to reports about Dream Robert's teaching activities, because sometimes I find that he is more than a few steps ahead of me. It's a rare student of mine who brings detailed notes back from the dreaming, but I am open to more. So if the Traveler says something interesting in your dreams, leads a new ritual or demonstrates a new exercise, please send me detailed notes. He is often a few steps ahead of me, as in the case of his lecture about why we miss dream messages.
   Let me hasten to add that if you dream of me and enjoy the experience, I am happy to accept the credit; if the experience wasn’t great, don’t blame it on me!

Text adapted from The Boy Who Died and Came Back: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Photo: Dream coast at Esalen by RM

When a dreamer gave me notes from a lecture by my second self

I know that my dream self often travels far ahead of my waking self, scouting possible roads into the future, gathering skills and experience beyond my current level. I quite often feel that I am forever seeking to catch up with him. Sometimes others who have encountered him make that easier by bringing me reports I can trust. On one occasion, a very wise woman was able to give me notes she made from a lecture he gave in her dreams, and I was able to apply those notes immediately in writing a book. Here's what happened:

Some weeks after leading one of my five-day adventures at the Esalen Institute, I received a note from one of the participants, a highly intelligent, spirited lady, a person with two PhDs who had explored consciousness in many ways. "I want to thank you for that wonderful lecture you gave last night."
    I checked the date. I had not given a lecture that evening anywhere in consensus reality. I had already intuited what she was telling me. She had attended a lecture I gave in one of her dreams. The woman from Esalen reported that in my lecture, I had listed, "very clearly and elegantly", five reasons why we misinterpret dreams about the future. I had written them on a whiteboard in view of the group. 
    This gave me shivers. On that very day, I was laboring over a chapter in a book that was later published as Dreaming True. The chapter was titled "When Dreams Seem False" and on the first page I was developing a list of the five most common reasons why we misinterpret dream messages about the future. I was satisfied with my statement about the first reason we get these messages wrong. But I was not yet content with my formulation of the other four reasons, or the order in which they should appear on the page. 
     I emailed the woman from Esalen. I asked her, "Any chance you kept notes from my lecture, or could reconstruct what I wrote on the whiteboard?" She responded within a couple of hours, sending me her version of Dream Robert's five points. They were expressed with admirable brevity, very much in my own style. Borrowing from my dream student's notes, I was able to compose the opening section of that chapter with almost no editing.

What the bleep the body knows before the mind does

A phenomenon that has long intrigued me is how the body sometimes seems to “know” about a future event and responds as if that event has already taken place. This is sometimes called presentiment. In my last post here, I described how I seemed to experience presentiment in relation to the horrific terror attacks in Brussels while changing planes at Brussels airport a month earlier.
     Here I will start with a more benign example, one for which there is also solid evidence, as recorded during a visit to my doctor's office. Here presentiment amounts to experiencing anticipatory symptoms.

     I went to my doctor’s office for an annual physical. A new medical assistant took my blood pressure to get us started. Though she did not faint, but my blood pressure was much higher than normal in the initial reading, much higher even than it had been when I had hobbled into that office two months before with a serious knee injury that had not yet been diagnosed.

    I was startled by the blood pressure reading, since I was in excellent spirits and feeling no anxiety about this visit to the doctor.

    “What do you want to do next?” the assistant asked. “The bloodwork or the EKG?”

“Let’s go for the blood and get a little color.” We briefly discussed how people react to having blood drawn. Personally, I have never minded the needle or the sight of the blood.

     The assistant found the right place and stuck a needle in my left arm. As she extracted the needle after filling the syringe, she started a gusher. I had never seen anything like it in all my years of giving blood or blood specimens. In an instant, my whole left arm was covered in blood, and blood was spattered all over my freshly laundered linen pants.

     The assistant squealed and rushed about, trying to stop the blood flow at the same time as she attempted to treat my pants with hydrogen peroxide.

     “You’re upset!” she panted. The odd thing was that I really wasn't upset at all. I responded quite philosophically, as if the incident had taken place in the past, even as the blood was still spurting and spattering.

     When things were under control, and she calmed down, I asked her to check my blood pressure again. “I want to test a hypothesis,” I told her. “There’s hard laboratory research that suggests that subjects can exhibit physical responses to events before the actual events take place. I want to check whether the spike in my blood pressure came about because - in some way - my body knew what was going to happen and had an anticipatory response.”

     She gaped at me, her eyebrows climbing her forehead, but she obliged.

     She gasped when she gave me the new reading after releasing the pressure cuff. The first number had dropped by fifteen points; the second number had dropped by thirty points. She was amazed because she thought that after the crazy turmoil of the blood gusher, my readings should have gone up, not down.

    “Not if my body knew and reacted to what was going to happen ahead of time,” I suggested quietly.

     When the doctor - a careful, conservative practitioner - came in and heard the data, he was quite impressed. “Maybe there's something in that theory,” he allowed. He decided to check my blood pressure himself. The numbers dropped even lower.

     To my mind, this is pretty persuasive first-hand evidence of the possibility that the body, through its own ways of knowing, may anticipate and respond to an event that has not yet taken place.

     In my book Dreaming True I call this “The White Queen Gambit.” As you may remember, in Through the Looking-Glass the White Queen screams before she pricks her finger. When her brooch-pin subsequently flies open and she does prick her finger, she doesn’t need to scream. “I’ve done all the screaming already,” says the Queen. “What would be the good of having it all over again?”

     It seems that the body, or the energy field around it, has intricate antennae that are constantly scanning for changes that will affect it. Most of us know about this from everyday experience. You have a “gut feeling” about something. You feet a sense of dread or elation, a lifting of the heart or a churning in the stomach that has no evident explanation until a subsequent event takes place that would cause such physical reactions. When the event catches up with the anticipatory symptoms, you and your body may be quite calm and detached – because you’ve done the screaming or the hyperventilating already.

     Scientific research into this phenomenon, sometimes described as “time-reversed interference”, has been going on since the 1990s. Dean Radin ran tests in a University of Nevada lab at Las Vegas that involved showing subjects a series of photographs on a screen that were calculated to produce vividly contrasting somatic reactions, read by scanning heartbeat, perspiration, and so on. A photo of a peaceful rustic scene might be followed by hard porno or a picture of a gruesome crime scene. The very interesting finding was that many times subjects had the physical reactions a certain picture would be expected to produce moments before the image came up on the screen.

    I told the story of my gusher in the doctor’s office to Larry Dossey MD, one of the trailblazers for mind-body medicine in America, and asked him what he thought of my theory that the spike in my blood pressure was an anticipatory symptom. Dossey commented, “I think your interpretation is right on target.  People need to know that these ‘presentiment’ effects are not just laboratory curiosities but are phenomena that get played out in real life zillions of times, under our very noses, quietly, often without our realizing they’re happening.”

    Maybe we can all do a little better if we let our bodies tell us what’s going down. This is a case of “what the bleep we know” that we don’t usually recognize that we know. In my book Sidewalk Oracles I suggest rules for playing the White Queen Gambit. Here they are:

GAME RULES FOR PLAYING THE WHITE QUEEN GAMBIT

1.Pay attention to any sudden change in what you feel in your body.
2.Self-scan to check the source of the shift. If it does not seem to reflect the current state of your body or your feelings, ask whether it is possible that your body’s sensors are picking up something that is happening at a distance, in space or time. You may be experiencing presentiment. Alternatively, you could be experiencing telepathy, which literally means “fellow-feeling at a distance.”
3. Check for subsequent events or discoveries that may reflect that shift in your body.
4. Develop a personal code for signals of this kind. For example, you may find that a certain kind of sudden, sharp and brief pain in the head is a message that someone is trying to contact you. Or you may notice when you smell a certain aroma that is not emanating from your immediate environment, that is a signal that someone at a distance who is connected to you has opened a link. Notice exactly how your body acts in anticipation of a subsequent physical event.
5. Log your findings in your journal. 

Game rules adapted from Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

We dream the future, all the time

Dreaming, we are released from the limitations of the body and of spacetime. We fold time and travel into the future (and into the past and parallel dimensions).

    I became fascinated by this subject because I have been dreaming about future events, large and small, before they happened since my early childhood in Australia. Here are a few examples:

Dream 1: I check into a hotel where they tell me the credit card I use to pay my bill will be my room key.

Follow-up: Three months later, I make last-minute arrangements to stay at a New York hotel. They explain they have a new system; the credit card I will use to pay my bill will be my room key.

Dream 2: 68 people have signed up for one of my workshops.

Follow-up: Thirteen months later, I arrive at a rural retreat to lead a workshop (not even conceived at the time of the dream) and find 68 people are signed up. The rest of my quite complex dream report gave me very helpful guidance in handling things over the weekend.

Dream 3: A silly little dog decked out in fake antlers for a Christmas event runs out on the road and is killed. He is magically revived by a bizarre character who doesn’t conform to any normal standards of behavior.

Follow-up: The next day, having missed a connection, I am seated on the “wrong” plane for the second leg of a flight to the West Coast. At the start of the in-flight movie, a silly little dog decked out in fake antlers for a Christmas photo shoot is killed on the road, and magically revived by a bizarre character: the Archangel Michael as portrayed by John Travolta.

If we can dream something as trivial as the in-flight movie on the wrong plane, or the key card system a a hotel, it seems safe to assume we dream about the big stuff ahead if time too. And indeed we do.

    How common is the experience of dreaming the future? I think it goes on all the time, because our dream self is forever traveling ahead of us, scouting the roads we have not yet taken in physical life. Even the most prolific dream recaller can handle only a limited number of the “memories of the future” with which the traveling dream self returns to the body. And it may be difficult to figure out what exactly is going on in a future situation until waking events catch up with the dream.

     If you have ever had the sense of déjà vu, you are already deep inside this territory. That feeling of déjà vu (“already seen”) generally comes when you enter a scene in waking life that you have already dreamed. You may have lost the dream, but you recognize a place or a person you encountered when you were dreaming.

      In modern Western societies – unlike traditional dreaming cultures, like those of Aborigines, Native Americans or ancient Celts – few of us are given much encouragement or coaching to grow the skills of dreaming true. Many of us are quite unaware that we dream the future (maybe all the time) until a specific dream jolts us awake.

     The first time many of us notice that we been to the future in a dream is when we are shocked by a dream of death or disaster that subsequently takes place in physical reality. A radio show host told me he was terrified, as a teenager, by a dream in which he looked down on his mother, apparently dead inside a coffin. A week later, he saw the scene tragically enacted in waking life when the family was out tobogganing in the Rocky Mountains. His mother’s sled shot off over a precipice and – when he got to the foot of the slope – the dreamer found himself looking down at her as she lay, with her back broken, inside the coffin-like box .

      Dreams of this kind can seem like a curse, when we feel unable to do anything to change an unhappy outcome we have dreamed. But if we pay attention to our dreams, we’ll soon notice that our dreams of the future don’t only involve death and disaster. Our dream radar scans events large and small, happy and sad, which are coming into our field of experience.

     Some indigenous peoples maintain that we dream everything that will manifest in physical life before it happens. I think this is correct.

     Let’s be constantly aware that the futures we see in dreams (or through waking intuition) are possible futures, not predetermined ones.. We can change the odds on the manifestation of any possible future depending on whether we are able to recognize and clarify the information and then take appropriate action to move towards a desirable outcome or avoid an unwanted one.
    The future we can foresee can often be changed or shaped for the better. If we don’t know where we are going, we are liable to end up where we are headed. The travels of the dream self enable us to take a long clear look down the roads of life, and make better choices.

For much more on this subject, please see my books Conscious Dreaming (especially chapter 6 on "Using Dream Radar") and Dreaming True.

At the Maison Carrée, the Roman temple in Nîmes, a locale I dreamed before I went there. My dream self routinely visits foreign countries before I go to them – and doesn’t have to pay for a plane ticket or wait for his bags.

The dreamer who sent me her notes from the lecture I gave in her dream

Some weeks after leading one of my 5-day adventures at the Esalen Institute, I received a note from one of the participants, a highly intelligent, spirited lady, a person with two PhDs who had explored consciousness in many ways. "I want to thank you for that wonderful lecture you gave last night."
    I checked the date. I had not given a lecture that evening anywhere in consensus reality. I had already intuited what she was telling me. She had attended a lecture I gave in one of her dreams. The woman from Esalen reported that in my lecture, I had listed, "very clearly and elegantly", five reasons why we misinterpret dreams about the future. I had written them on a whiteboard in view of the group.
    This gave me shivers. On that very day, I was laboring over a chapter in a book that was later published as Dreaming True. The chapter was titled "When Dreams Seem False" and on the first page I was developing a list of the five most common reasons why we misinterpret dream messages about the future. I was satisfied with my statement about the first reason we get these messages wrong. But I was not yet content with my formulation of the other four reasons, or the order in which they should appear on the page.
     I emailed the woman from Esalen. I asked her, "Any chance you kept notes from my lecture, or could reconstruct what I wrote on the whiteboard?"
     She responded within a couple of hours, sending me her version of Dream Robert's five points. They were expressed with admirable brevity, very much in my own style. Borrowing from my dream student's notes, I was able to compose the opening section of that chapter with almost no editing. Here's how it reads:

The five most common reasons why we misinterpret dream message about the future are:

1. We mistake a literal event for a symbolic one, or vice versa.
2. We misidentify people and places.
3. We fail to figure out how far in the future the dreamed event might be.
4. We see future events from a certain angle, that may not reveal the whole picture.
5. We confuse realities, confounding a dream that relates to external reality with dreams that are real experiences in other orders of reality.

Now, I am well aware that very often I am playing the role of teacher in my own dreams, with many difference audiences: with people I recognize, with people I will meet in the future, with people in countries I have not yet visited, with people in other orders of reality, including the afterlife  and what I like to call the imaginal realm. 
    I have received hundreds of reports from people who say they have attended a workshop, a lecture, a ritual or some other type of training with me in dreams. I have learned to pay close attention to reports about Dream Robert's teaching activities, because sometimes I find that he is more than a few steps ahead of me. It's a rare student of mine who brings detailed notes back from the dreaming, but I am open to more!

Photo "Under the Bean" (c) Robert Moss
   

Dream telepathy and writing assignments

I'm chuckling over a fresh example of long-range telepathy at work between a dreaming and a waking mind. Not the first, in my experience, that involves the writing process.
   I kept vampire hours tonight, mining old journals for material for new writing. I paused from time to time to look at ideas and exercises for creative writing that I have sketched out over the years, both for my personal use and as plans for one of my favorite workshops, "Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming."
    Just as I was thinking of continuing my dreaming in bed, I received an email message from my friend Ana Maria Stefanescu n Romania, who hosted a marvelous workshop for me in the Bucegi mountains last month. She reported that - while I was reading and making notes - she dreamed that I gave her a series of ideas and exercises for a creative writing workshop she is planning to lead in Romania in December. She commented that she woke up very excited, but still tired. Certain that she would be able to remember what she had learned, she allowed herself to drift back to sleep, then woke again to find that most of the content was gone.
     She requested me to show up in her dreams again and repeat the instructions!
     I recalled that on a previous occasion, someone who dreamed they received tuition from me was not only able to recall the whole session in exact detail, but to help me fill a page in a book I was writing. Back in the period when I was working on my book Dreaming True, I received a message from a woman in California who had attended one of my programs. She wanted to thank me for the lecture I had given overnight, in her dream, in which (she said) I had summarized part of my argument very cogently in five points that I wrote on a whiteboard.
     Unknown to her, except for her dream, I had reached a stage in my book draft when I wanted to sum up part of my thesis in five points, but had only formulated the first to my satisfaction. I shot back a message to the California dreamer asking if she could retrieve her lecture notes and send them to me.  
     Right away, she sent me the five points Dream Robert had made in his lecture. They filled in, exactly, the missing bits in my book draft.  And I put them in the book with almost no editing!
     My response to my friend who lost the details of what Dream Robert was telling her about crafting a creative writing workshop? "Maybe you can go back inside your dream and get Dream Robert to give you those ideas and exercises again!"
     Ana Maria said she will try this. It took her only an hour or so to came back to me that she now recalls that Dream Robert's first exercise was to encourage writers to go to the place from which their truest words come. This was further good telepathy, and dream tracking, since (unknown to Ana Maria) I have led an exercise along these lines. I wrote a poem of my own ("A Place to Write From") on this very theme, on where I find my truest and most passionate words:

Write from the place that is raw
from the night when you lost your skin.

The poem is in my collection, Here, Everything Is Dreaming that will be published in April 2013.
     I couldn't help joking that this fine flow of telepathy may have been aided by the fact that my friend is in Romania, while I was keeping vampire hours!       

I will be leading my five-day creative writing adventure, "Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming" at magical Mosswood Hollow, near Duvall, Washington, from May 6-10, 1013.