Up All Night with the Daimon

 

My creative daimon is the most demanding of the spirits I seek to entertain. I use the word “daimon” as Yeats did, to describe a spirit that is forever driving me to do the most difficult things “among those not yet impossible.” Real angels (not the greeting cards kind) are forever saying, Get Up, Wake Up, Get On With It. My creative daimon operates the same way. He has never heard of a body clock. He has no interest in what time it is, or how much sleep I get, and knows that what I most need to do with this body is to create with passion, entertain the spirits, ignite creative and healing fire in others... and marry the worlds. 
    I felt the wind of his wings in the middle of the night in Paris in May, 2013. I was staying in a studio on the Street of the Moon Man and the Sun Woman, as I renamed this section of the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis because of the statues a couple of blocks away. After a long day leading an Active Dreaming workshop, followed by dinner at a pleasant brasserie opposite the Gare de l'Est, I rose at 1:00 a.m. and sat at a table to work on the  book that was published as The Boy Who Died and Came Back. 
      In France, it seemed natural to write about my "far memories" of other lives lived here, and to narrate how I have used the tools of dream archaeology - marrying shamanic dreaming to scholarly research - to investigate one life in particular: that of Charles d'Orléans, the medieval poet-prince in whose name Joan of Arc went to war. Three hours later, I was satisfied with a fresh 3,000 word draft and had written a couple of shorter pieces, so I thought I might put my body back to bed in order to be rested for the morning workshop session.
     Flat on my back around 4:00 a.m., I found my body was nowhere near flirting with sleep. I considered my situation from the perspective of a greater entity I felt was with me in the space. I sensed the wind of his wings. I rose from my body to join him and look down at the Robert body sprawled under the sheet. From this perspective, I had no concern, no worries, about how much sleep the body in the bed might get, or what might be done with it, as long as it served my creative purpose. I agreed with the daimon: let’s get that body up. Let’s get on with the new book. So I did, and turned out another 2,000 words. When the time came to shower and dress and get myself to the workshop, I was charging on all cylinders. Writing is a workout, and the creative act is energizing and healing. And the extraordinary becomes easy when we entertain our creative spirits and borrow their wings.
     I have learned this:
- When we are passionately engaged in a creative venture - love, art or something else that is really worthwhile - we draw support from other minds and other beings, seen and unseen.- - -
-  We draw greater support the greater the challenges involved in our venture. Great spirits love great challenges.
- Whether we are aware of it or not, all our life choices are witnessed by that creative spirit that that Yeats called the daimon. The daimon lends or withholds its immense energy from our lives according to whether we choose the big agenda or the little one. The daimon is bored by our everyday vacillations and compromises and is repelled by us when we choose against the grand passion and our life Work, the “talent that is the call”.
- The daimon loves us best when we choose to attempt what is all but impossible, and may be perceived as quite impossible by the daily trivial mind.

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: On the Street of the Moon Man and the Sun Woman

 

 

 

On Dying and Coming Back

I first died in this lifetime when I was three years old. My great aunt the opera singer saw this in the tea leaves but didn’t talk about it until long after. What she did not see was that – as a doctor at the hospital in Hobart, Tasmania told my parents – I “died and came back”. That is still the term I prefer to use of these experiences. I don’t remember much of what happened when I left my body at age three, only that it was very hard to live in a body in this world after I came back, and that I felt that my home reality was somewhere else.

     At nine, I died again during emergency appendectomy in a Melbourne hospital. This time I seemed to live a whole life somewhere else, among a beautiful people who raised me as their own. I came back remembering that other life and that other world. It still wasn’t easy for me to live in the ordinary world, and I was nostalgic for that other world. The gift of these experiences,  and my persisting illness (I had double pneumonia twelve times between the ages of three and eleven) was an inner life that was rich and prolific, and an ability to move between states of consciousness and reality at will.
    The first person who gave me a model for understanding what had happened to me was an Aboriginal boy. He told me, “When we get real sick, our spirit goes away. We go and live with the spirit people. When we get well, we come back.”

    At age eleven, I had the vision of a great staff of burning bronze with a serpent wrapped around it that seemed to fill half the sky. Right after that, I came very near death for a third time, back in hospital with pneumonia. But this time, I came back healed, and was able to live a relatively normal life – except that in my mind, the dream world was my “normal”.
    I had to be fairly quiet about these things, growing up in a conservative time in Australia, in a military family. But as I grew older, I was able to do more and more with the gifts of dreaming. My dreams of ancient cultures led me to my first job, as lecturer in ancient history at the Australian National University. My dreams of possible future events enabled me to avoid death on the road, quite literally, on three occasions.
    In the mid-1980s, I left the fast-track life of a bestselling thriller writer and moved to a farm 130 miles north of New York City, thanks to a hawk and a white oak. I found myself drawn into trans-temporal dramas and the spirit world of a Native American people. I became deeply engaged in issues and dramas from the life of an 18^th century Irishman, a major historical figure who knew the Mohawk very well. My engagement with him opened a link to a woman of his time, an extraordinary dream shaman, the Mother of the Wolf Clan of her people, who tried to influence him and most certainly succeeded in influencing me. She reminded me why dreaming is central to healing, and I cherish our continuing relationship across time. I learned what it means to be so deeply involved with a personality from another time that your lives turn together. I was eventually required to undergo death and rebirth in the mode of a shaman. I see now that, as with the years Jung recorded in his Red Book, all the important work of my subsequent life has flowed from this stormy period of spiritual emergence.   
    What happened to me in midlife was another experience of dying and coming back.  I learned that when you change your life, your true friends are those who will support you through that change and your worst friends are those who try to keep you in the frame of past expectations.
    Dreams showed me how to find my way in my new life as a dream author and dream teacher.    Young children, especially my own daughters, became my most important mentors in ordinary life on what dreams require from a family or community. Time among children confirmed my understanding that dreams are for real, that there is magic in making things up, and that we change the world when we tell a better story about it.

    I started teaching what I had learned, and learned through teaching. I found, as Emerson counseled, that “there is one direction is which space is open to us.” When I followed my calling, doors opened in astonishing ways. When I slipped back and away from my path, doors stayed resolutely closed. I am grateful for that.
     I was now able to give people who were willing to share dreams and other experiences of the larger reality the confirmation and validation I had desperately needed as a lonely boy. I developed an original synthesis of contemporary dreamwork and primal shamanic methods for shifting consciousness and operating in the spirit worlds, and called this Active Dreaming. I found people everywhere were hungry for this. The more I gave them, the more happy and fulfilled I felt. I knew joy every time I saw more of spirit shining in someone’s eyes in one of my workshops.

Adapted from The Boy Who Died and Came Back by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

My personal relationship with Death informs much of my teaching and practice. "Going Beyond Death: The Survival of Consciousness" is Part 4 of my new online course for The Shift Network, "Quantum Dreaming". Classes begin on August 14 and run for 24 weeks.

Nine keys to living consciously in the multiverse

1

The only time is Now. All other times - past, present and parallel - can be accessed in this moment of Now, and may be changed for the better.

2

We dream to wake up. Dreaming is not fundamentally about what happens during sleep. It is about waking up to a deeper order of reality. Dreaming is a discipline; to get really good at it requires practice, practice, practice.

3

Treasures are waiting for us in the Place Between Sleep and Awake. The easiest way to become a lucid or conscious dreamer is to spend more time in the twilight zone between waking and sleep, or between sleep and waking.  Tinker Bell told Peter Pan to look for her in the Place between Sleep and Awake. This liminal state is a place of encounter with inner guides and transpersonal visitors. It is also a place of heightened psychic perception and creative breakthroughs, where it is easy to make connections that escape the daily mind.

4

We live in the Speaking Land, as the First Peoples of my native Australia say. Everything in the world around us is alive and conscious and will speak to us if we are paying attention. Navigating by synchronicity becomes very simple, even irresistible, when we stream into this mode of understanding.

5

To live well, we must practice death. We bring courage and clarity to life choices when we are aware that death is always with us, and that we should be ready to meet it any day.

6

We must feed and honor our animal spirits. A working connection with them gives us immense resources for self-healing.

7

We have a guide for our lives who is no stranger. He is always with us and does not judge us. This is the Self on a higher level. When we rise to the perspective of the Greater Self, we are able to make peace between different personality aspects, including our counterparts in other times and parallel realities.

8

We are at the center of all times. The dramas of lives being lived in other times and in parallel realities may be intensely relevant to understanding and navigating our current relationships and life issues. We can learn to reach into those other lives to share gifts and lessons. We can dialog with our own older and younger selves within our present lifetimes.

9

We must entertain the spirits, starting with our very own – the child self, the inner artist, the passionate teen, the animal spirits, the creative daimon.

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.

The education of a dream teacher

The dream world is my home world, and has been from very early childhood.
    I first died in this lifetime when I was three years old. My great aunt the opera singer saw this in the tea leaves but didn’t talk about it until long after. What she did not see was that – as a doctor at the hospital in Hobart, Tasmania told my parents – I “died and came back”. That is still the term I prefer to use of these experiences. I don’t remember much of what happened when I left my body at age three, only that it was very hard to live in a body in this world after I came back, and that I felt that my home reality was somewhere else.
     At nine, I died again during emergency appendectomy in a Melbourne hospital. This time I seemed to live a whole life somewhere else, among a beautiful people who raised me as their own. I came back remembering that other life and that other world. It still wasn’t easy for me to live in the ordinary world, and I was nostalgic for that other world. The gift of these experiences,  and my persisting illness (I had double pneumonia twelve times between the ages of three and eleven) was an inner life that was rich and prolific, and an ability to move between states of consciousness and reality at will.
     At age eleven, I had the vision of a great staff of burning bronze with a serpent wrapped around it that seemed to fill half the sky. Right after that, I came very near death for a third time, back in hospital with pneumonia. But this time, I came back healed, and was able to live a relatively normal life – except that in my mind, the dream world was my “normal”. I later realized that my vision in the sky resembled a giant version of the serpent staff of Asklepios, the Greek god who heals through dreams.

I can’t remember a time when I did not understand that our personal dreams can take us into the Dreamtime, which is about more than the bargain basement of the personal subconscious; it is the place where we find our spiritual kin on a higher level and remember the origins and purpose of life. That’s the way the First Peoples of my native Australia, the Aborigines, see it, and one of the few people I met in childhood who could confirm and validate my experiences of dreaming was an Aboriginal boy. He said of my near-death experiences, “Oh yeah, we do that. When we get very sick, we go and live with the spirits. When we get well, we come back.” He did not think it was extraordinary to dream future events, or to meet the dead in dreams, as I did all the time.
    I had to be fairly quiet about these things, growing up in a conservative time in Australia, in a military family. But as I grew older, I was able to do more and more with the gifts of dreaming. My dreams of ancient cultures led me to my first job, as lecturer in ancient history at the Australian National University. My dreams of possible future events enabled me to avoid death on the road, quite literally, on three occasions.
   Then, in mid-life, on a farm in the Upper Hudson Valley of New York, I was called in a lucid dream – also an out-of-body experience – into a meeting with an ancient Native American shaman, a Mother of the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk people, who insisted on speaking her own language. When I learned enough of her language to understand her, she taught me that dreams reveal the secret wishes of the soul, and the the task of decent people in a decent society is to gather round a dreamer and help her recognize those wishes and take action to honor them, so that more of soul comes into life.
    As I struggled to understand our connection, I grew to realize that we were joined in a trans-temporal drama. The other key player was a colorful Irishman who entered her world in the 1700s and came to rule the Mohawk frontier like a tribal king. She had tried to influence him; she succeeded better with me, though that meant reaching seven generations into her future.
     My initial encounters with these personalities of an earlier time coincided with the death of my father, who returned to me in dreams as guide and counselor for the family. The convergence of these events, and the resurgence of dreams and visions that came with them, led me deep and far in my studies and exploration of the deeper reality. In the liminal space between sleep and awake, a guide who spoke to me in a voice I had learned to trust instructed me that it was time for me to teach what I had learned. I embarked on the path of a dream teacher, for which there is no career track in Western society.

For a full version, please see The Boy Who Died and Came Back by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Art: "Serpent Staff in the Sky" by Robert Moss

Nights with the daimon

My creative daimon is the most demanding of the spirits I seek to entertain. I use the word “daimon” as Yeats did, to describe a spirit that is forever driving me to do the most difficult things “among those not yet impossible.” Real angels (not the greeting cards kind) are forever saying, Get Up, Wake Up, Get On With It.
    My creative daimon operates the same way. He has never heard of a body clock. He has no interest in what time it is, or how much sleep I get, and knows that what I most need to do with this body is to create with passion, entertain the spirits, ignite creative and healing fire in others... and marry the worlds. 
    I felt the wind of his wings in the middle of the night in Paris in May, 2013. I was staying in a studio on the Street of the Moon Man and the Sun Woman, as I renamed this section of the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis because of the statues a couple of blocks away. After a long day leading an Active Dreaming workshop, followed by dinner at a pleasant brasserie opposite the Gare de l'Est, I rose at 1:00 a.m. and sat at a table to write some of the book that was published as The Boy Who Died and Came Back.
    In France, it seemed natural to write about my "far memories" of other lives lived here, and to narrate how I have used the tools of dream archaeology - marrying shamanic dreaming to scholarly research - to investigate one life in particular: that of Charles d'Orléans, the medieval poet-prince in whose name Joan of Arc went to war. Three hours later, I was satisfied with a fresh 3,000 word draft and had written a couple of shorter pieces, so I thought I might put my body back to bed in order to be rested for the morning workshop session.

   Flat on my back around 4:00 a.m., I found my body was nowhere near flirting with sleep. I considered my situation from the perspective of a greater entity I felt was with me in the space. I sensed the wind of his wings. I rose from my body to join him and look down at the Robert body sprawled under the sheet.
   From this perspective, I had no concern, no worries, about how much sleep the body in the bed might get, or what might be done with it, as long as it served my creative purpose. I agreed with the daimon: let’s get that body up. Let’s get on with the new book. So I did, and turned out another 2,000 words. When the time came to shower and dress and get myself to the workshop, I was charging on all cylinders. Writing is a workout, and the creative act is energizing and healing. And the extraordinary becomes easy when we entertain our creative spirits and borrow their wings.
     I have learned this:

* When we are passionately engaged in a creative venture - love, art or something else that is really worthwhile - we draw support from other minds and other beings, seen and unseen.

* We draw greater support the greater the challenges involved in our venture. Great spirits love great challenges. 

* Whether we are aware of it or not, all our life choices are witnessed by that creative spirit that that Yeats called the daimon. The daimon lends or withholds its immense energy from our lives according to whether we choose the big agenda or the little one. The daimon is bored by our everyday vacillations and compromises and withdraws its presence when we choose against the grand passion and our life Work, the “talent that is the call”.

* The daimon loves us best when we choose to attempt what is all but impossible, and may be perceived as quite impossible by the daily trivial mind.

- 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: On the Street of Moon Man and Sun Woman (Rue du Faubourg St. Denis) by RM.

Sharing Bear Medicine through a coincidence game

One night I found myself deep inside an ancient warrior cult of the Bear Goddess. As soon as I lay down and closed my eyes, in the early hours of the morning, a portal opened. It appeared as an ancient stone gateway immensely tall in proportion to its width. Through the dream gate, I saw warriors armed with axes, spears and swords were marching to battle. They wore leather armor of a type I thought might be Romano-Celtic. Above them fluttered the banner of a Bear Goddess; the standard bearer wore the full pelt of a bear.
    My curiosity became intense. I zoomed in on the scene, then my consciousness joined one of the bear warriors. I felt the heat of the bear skin over my body, and the heat of the coming battle. The body I had joined was compact and heavily muscled. But I did not want to be present for the hacking and killing that was about to begin.
     I seemed to jump across time, into a different season, when the leaves were gone from the beeches and oaks. Still in leather armor, I stumbled alone through the wilderness. I was tired of battles, weary of slaughter. I was ready to die. I abandoned my weapons, and stripped off the bear skin that had been stained by the blood of battles and the grime of life. I lay down among the roots of an oak. But I was not alone. A bear cub, walking on two legs, took me by the hand and led me to a place of healing. The doctor here was a huge mother bear. She opened my chest and took out my heart. She rinsed the organ carefully and replaced it in a soft green bed of moss and herbs. Grateful and amazed, I looked around the space I was now in. The hut was full of natural remedies and charms, herbs and spices, dried lavender and other flowers. Dried lavender was laid around my neck, like a necklace.
     I emerged from this lucid dream adventure feeling blessed and healed. I also recognized that, not for the first time, I had been taken into ancestral territory and challenged to make some choices.
      There were gifts here to be shared with others, and very soon the world gave me a remarkable opportunity to do this. I led a workshop in Santa Fe the next weekend, at a center not far from Bear Canyon, where I found a white quartzite stone in the natural shape of a bear’s head; I gave this to a man who had been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. One of the people who came to that workshop was a most reluctant participant I will call Bella. She, too, had been diagnosed with a serious illness and felt that her life, at this time, was a “train wreck”; she had recently lost both her job and her marriage. She did not remember dreams, was skeptical about shamanism, and was basically there only because friends had dragged her to my workshop. She sat with her arms folded tight over her chest, resisting all efforts to turn her into an active participant. I wondered whether she would make it through the morning.
      But Bella was still with us after lunch, when I had decided to introduce a new game. I set an intention for my own dreams the night before: “I would like a new game to play in this workshop.” In my dream, I saw my group swapping story cards, regular 3”x5” index cards on which each participant had been invited to write something with story value; this might be part of a dream, or a life memory, or something experienced in a journey with the drum, or the product of pure imagination. The cards were made into a deck and shuffled. Then people drew from the deck at random, read out what was written on their cards – and then pretended that this was part of their own story. They were now required to make something up to dramatize that story, or expand it.
      I followed my dream directions exactly. When the cards had all been written and distributed, I span my drumstick to pick the first person to play. It pointed to Bella. I groaned inwardly, thinking, That’s the end of this game. Bella turned over her card with evident reluctance and read out what was written on it. This was the text:

I am a warrior in leather armor in an ancient army that marches under the banner of the Bear Goddess. Tired of battles, I go into the wilderness to die. But a bear cub takes me by the hand and leads me to a place of healing.

Bella coughed. She got to her feet, but then her legs folded and she lay full-length on the floor, making the sounds of dry retching. She crawled a few feet, then croaked her own lines. “I have been fighting in the army of the Earth Mother. I have been fighting for clean water and clean air. But I have lost my battles and I can’t fight any more. I have come here, into the desert, to die. But bear cub won’t let me leave. She brings me to a healing shack, where my organs are regenerated. I don’t have the disease anymore. Now the Mother Bear places dried lavender across my throat, and I smell its sweetness.”
     She had most of us in tears. She had taken the story on the card — the card I had written, of course — and made it her own. She had moved the action from the Northern forest to the desert of the Southwest, where she lived. She had defined the field of battle as the environmental cause she had been fighting bravely, but without success. She had shifted the symptoms to the area sof her body affected by her own disease.
     When she returned to her place in the circle, the woman seated next to her opened her journal and took out a sprig of dried lavender. “You mentioned dried lavender, so I would like you to have this.” Bella let her neighbor place it across her neck. I must note that although dried lavender was in my original dream, I had not mentioned it on the card I wrote. Two secret handshakes from the universe.
     At the end of the day, Bella stood before the group to thank us, and the Bear. “I am going to let my body believe. I am not going to die the way the doctors said. However I die, I will die standing up. And I will fight the good fight in the ways that Earth Mother teaches me.”

Adapted from my book The Boy Who Died and Came Back. Published by New World Library. This was the first time I introduced a version of my Coincidence Card Game, which we now play in several versions in my playshops all over the world map. We experiment with a digital version, with exciting results, in my new online course for The Shift Network last night. Please see my book Sidewalk Oracles for guidance on playing the game with friends, and developing a solitaire version.

Drawing: "Dancing with the Bear" by RM

Nine Keys to Living Consciously in the Multiverse

The only time is Now. All other times - past, present and parallel - can be accessed in this moment of Now, and may be changed for the better.

We dream to wake up. Dreaming is not fundamentally about what happens during sleep. It is about waking up to a deeper order of reality. Dreaming is a discipline; to get really good at it requires practice, practice, practice.

Treasures are waiting for us in the Place Between Sleep and Awake. The easiest way to become a lucid or conscious dreamer is to spend more time in the twilight zone between waking and sleep, or between sleep and waking.  Tinker Bell told Peter Pan to look for her in the Place between Sleep and Awake. This liminal state is a place of encounter with inner guides and transpersonal visitors. It is also a place of heightened psychic perception and creative breakthroughs, where it is easy to make connections that escape the daily mind.

We live in the Speaking Land, as the First Peoples of my native Australia say. Everything in the world around us is alive and conscious and will speak to us if we are paying attention. Navigating by synchronicity becomes very simple, even irresistible, when we stream into this mode of understanding.

To live well, we must practice death. We bring courage and clarity to life choices when we are aware that death is always with us, and that we should be ready to meet it any day.

We must feed and honor our animal spirits. A working connection with them gives us immense resources for self-healing.

We have a guide for our lives who is no stranger. He is always with us and does not judge us. This is the Self on a higher level. When we rise to the perspective of the Greater Self, we are able to make peace between different personality aspects, including our counterparts in other times and parallel realities.

We are at the center of all times. The dramas of lives being lived in other times and in parallel realities may be intensely relevant to understanding and navigating our current relationships and life issues. We can learn to reach into those other lives to share gifts and lessons. We can dialog with our own older and younger selves within our present lifetimes.

We must entertain the spirits, starting with our very own – the child self, the inner artist, the passionate teen, the animal spirits, the creative daimon.

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.

The Boy at Niagara Falls. Photo by Julie Tumbarello.

Nine keys to living consciously in the multiverse

The only time is Now. All other times - past, present and parallel - can be accessed in this moment of Now, and may be changed for the better.

We dream to wake up. Dreaming is not fundamentally about what happens during sleep. It is about waking up to a deeper order of reality. Dreaming is a discipline; to get really good at it requires practice, practice, practice.

Treasures are waiting for us in the Place Between Sleep and Awake. The easiest way to become a lucid or conscious dreamer is to spend more time in the twilight zone between waking and sleep, or between sleep and waking.  

We live in the Speaking Land, as the First Peoples of my native Australia say. Everything in the world around us is alive and conscious and will speak to us if we are paying attention. Navigating by synchronicity becomes very simple, even irresistible, when we stream into this mode of understanding.

To live well, we must practice death. We bring courage and clarity to life choices when we are aware that death is always with us, and that we should be ready to meet it any day.

We must feed and honor our animal spirits. A working connection with them gives us immense resources for self-healing.

We have a guide for our lives who is no stranger. He is always with us and does not judge us. This is the Self on a higher level. When we rise to the perspective of the Greater Self, we are able to make peace between different personality aspects, including our counterparts in other times and parallel realities.

We are at the center of all times. The dramas of lives being lived in other times and in parallel realities may be intensely relevant to understanding and navigating our current relationships and life issues. We can learn to reach into those other lives to share gifts and lessons. We can dialog with our own older and younger selves within our present lifetimes.

We must entertain the spirits, starting with our very own – the child self, the inner artist, the passionate teen, the animal spirits, the creative daimon.

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 (c) Robert Moss

Nine Keys to Living Consciously in the Multiverse

1. The only time is Now. All other times - past, present and parallel - can be accessed in this moment of Now, and may be changed for the better.

2. We dream to wake up. Dreaming is not fundamentally about what happens during sleep. It is about waking up to a deeper order of reality. Dreaming is a discipline; to get really good at it requires practice, practice, practice.

3. Treasures are waiting for us in the Place Between Sleep and Awake. The easiest way to become a lucid or conscious dreamer is to spend more time in the twilight zone between waking and sleep, or between sleep and waking.  This liminal state is a place of encounter with inner guides and of heightened psychic perception and creative breakthroughs.

4. We live in the Speaking Land, as the First Peoples of my native Australia say. Everything in the world around us is alive and conscious and will speak to us if we are paying attention. Navigating by synchronicity becomes very simple, even irresistible, when we stream into this mode of understanding.

5. To live well, we must practice death. We bring courage and clarity to life choices when we are aware that death is always with us, and that we should be ready to meet it any day.

6. We must feed and honor our animal spirits. A working connection with them gives us immense resources for self-healing.

7. We have a guide for our lives who is no stranger. He is always with us and does not judge us. This is the Self on a higher level. When we rise to the perspective of the Greater Self, we are able to make peace between different personality aspects, including our counterparts in other times and parallel realities.

8. We are at the center of all times. The dramas of lives being lived in other times and in parallel realities may be intensely relevant to understanding and navigating our current relationships and life issues. We can learn to reach into those other lives to share gifts and lessons. We can dialog with our own older and younger selves within our present lifetimes.

9. We must entertain the spirits, starting with our very own – the child self, the inner artist, the passionate teen, the animal spirits, the creative daimon.

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.

Art: "World Tree" by Annick Bougerolle

Dreaming like a child

I often hear dreams from adults that sound like the products of a child's imagination. One dreamer is menaced by giants. She runs but can't get away - until Superman swoops down to rescue her. Another dreamer is entertained by a strange composite animal, a cross between a jolly pink pig and a hairless dog, with a strip of carpet instead of a tail.
     In such dreams, buildings and people around the dreamer often seem vastly larger than in regular life, as adults and cities might appear from the perspective of a young child. At the same time, the dreamer may find she has the ability to make herself greatly bigger or smaller, like Alice with the "Drink Me" bottles.
     I wonder whether such child-like dreams really are the dreams of the child within the dreamer. They may be returning memories of dreams in early life. They may also be a direct link to the inner child, providing a chance to bring more of her energy, joy and imagination into current life. They may even be a bridge to connect with the child in her Now time, which is past history for the adult except when released from the constraints of linear time, as in dreaming.
    I have given happy examples thus far, but the dreams of the child may of course be filled with challenge and drenched in fear. Those menacing giants may represent abusive adults and authority figures the child can't handle, and Superman is not always available. Yet when the bridge to the child in her own Now time is open, we can slip across it, to offer support and mentoring that may be desperately needed. We can help to provide the heroes our child selves want to be dreaming of.

I know that this helped a sick, lonely boy in Australia long, long ago, in the 1950s. I was reminded how that worked not long ago when I ordered a taxi to take me to the airport at 4:00 a.m. The driver was whiskery and bleary, but friendly, and struck up conversation by remarking, "You have an accent." I get this endlessly in the United States, where anyone who speaks another form of English is held to have an "accent". After allowing that my accent might be described as "Anglo-Australian", the driver proceeded to tell me that he is fascinated by "the British life style" and watches lots of period English movies and TV. He then asked if I could solve a mystery. "The characters are always having tea and crumpets. What is a crumpet?"
    I spent the rest of the ride explaining the difference between a crumpet and an English muffin, and singing the praises of the crumpet, a staple of my boyhood and still a favorite comfort food, though I must now order my supply by mail.
    As I got out of the cab, I realized this odd early morning conversation had given me a lead for the day. I was scheduled to give a lecture that evening at East West Bookshop in Seattle. I had already decided that I would read some fresh selections from The Boy Who Died and Came Back but had not yet made my selection. Now I had it. An early chapter in my memoir is entitled "Crumpet Time". It celebrates crumpets, but is also a narrative of time travel by an older self to support a younger self in his own Now time. Here is an excerpt:

~

The friends who helped me most in the time I was sick and lonely as a young boy were invisible to others. One of the best of these friends was the Big Man. He was like a favorite uncle I did not have. One of the lessons he taught me was how to eat crumpets.

    The Big Man came to me when I was in my bedroom, sick and lonely and feeling really sorry for myself. It was one of those days when I wanted to leave.  I felt a presence in the room, then the mattress tipped a little as someone eased down on to the edge of the bed. A hand closed on my shoulder, squeezing just a little.
    “That’s right,” my visitor said. “You really are all right.”
    The warm, confident voice was familiar but I could not put a name to it. I rolled over and looked up into a large pink face, smiling at me from under a mane of white hair.

     “I know it’s hard for you,” my visitor went on. “I know you’re lonely and feel rotten. But you are going to make it through. You’ll be knocked down some more, but you will always get up again. You are a survivor, Robert. Trust me. You will make it through.”
     The Big Man was hugging me then. I felt so small and fragile in his embrace, and I could not stop the tears flowing because I felt safe and because this stranger was holding me as my mother never did, not since I died.
     “Write,” he encouraged me. “Write your dreams. Write those adventures that stream through your head when you’re playing with your toy soldiers.”
    “Nobody wants to hear my dreams,” I complained.
    “You may have to lie low for now. But the day will come when lecture halls will be filled with people who are eager to hear your dreams and to tell their dreams to you. I promise you.  You are lonely,” he repeated. “But I promise you that the time will come when you will know the love of women and women will love you.”
    I must have fallen asleep, because I did not see him go. I did not ask him who he was. I often sensed him nearby, when I was alone. When he was close, I felt bigger and stronger.

When we were living in Melbourne, my mother took me to the café in the stately old Myers department store for afternoon tea, and I always had crumpets.
    I felt the Big Man close to me one afternoon in the café. “Crumpets taste much better with salt and pepper,” he nudged me. “Go on. No one will mind.”.  
    I reached around the pots of jam and marmalade for the shakers, and gave my crumpets a good dose of salt and pepper. The waitress looked at me. My mother just went on sipping her tea. .I had done stranger things. The Big Man was right. Crumpets are really nice with salt and pepper. 
     I know this: we can travel across time, and we can play mentor and counselor to a younger self, or receive help and guidance from a wiser older self. At the very least, when we reach to that younger self, we can offer the assurance that however much he is suffering, he or she will make it through. 

We dream dreams of the child, and the child dreams dreams of us.

Book excerpt from The Boy Who Died and Came Back by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library. 

Photo: The dreamer as a boy.

The absentee Australian and the friendly Gatekeeper

I am an absentee Australian. I have not visited my native country - where I have no blood family left - or taught workshops there in many years. Yet last time I taught in Australia, a decade ago, I had very powerful experiences of soul recovery, especially in Melbourne, where hundreds of people crowded into a university auditorium for a one-day workshop I gave on shamanic dreaming.
    I did not bring happy memories with me to my birth city. I died in a Melbourne hospital, aged nine, and had a very hard time living in the world around me when I came back with what seemed to be memories of a whole life lived in another, beautiful world. In those days, growing up in a military family in a conservative environment, it was very hard for me to talk safely to anyone about my deepest experiences. I drew solace from the words of an Aboriginal boy who told me, "When we get sick, we go and live with the spirits. When we get well, we come back, not always as the same person."
    In my workshop in Melbourne, I found myself in the company of a vibrant, creative, spiritually questing group of people who were eager to share dreams and to learn the arts of Active Dreaming. I realized that one of the inner guides who helped me to survive my lonely boyhood, when I was so often in the half-light of sickrooms, had kept his promise. He appeared to me as a large man with white hair, looking very much as I do today. He assured me that, despite everything, I would survive. He promised that though it was hard for me to talk about my dreams to anyone in my environment, "The day will come when people all over the world will be eager to hear your dreams." He was right.
   I may not fit most stereotypes of an Aussie. I know those stereotypes irritate my thoughtful countrymen. But I must confess that I am willing to reap their benefit upon occasion.
   My favorite example is an incident at my local airport not long after 9/11, and the tightening of security checks at American airports.

   I had been leading a shamanic gathering up on a very special mountain and had rushed to the airport without considering what tools and toys I had stuffed in my drum-bag. On the other side of the X-ray machine, a security guard asked me, "Is this yours?" To my horror, I saw he was holding up a ceremonial Lakota knife with an elk-bone handle that he had just removed from my drum-bag. He extracted the nine-inch blade from the sheath and held it up. "Wait here. I have to get my supervisor."

    Wild thoughts are thrashing in my brain. They'll arrest me. They'll grill me. At least they'll give me a tongue-lashing for being such a fool as to leave that knife in my carry-ons.
    The supervisor appears. His first words are, "What time is your flight?"
    "6.15."
    "Good. We've got time to get this in your checked luggage so it can meet you at th other end. I'll walk you back to the ticket desk." With this, he hands me the knife, still out of its sheath.
      I wonder if I am dreaming as I accompany him, knife in hand, back through security.
     "Go on, do it," he says.
     "Do what?"
     "You're Australian, aren't you? Do the Crocodile Dundee thing."
     So I fake a strine accent and snarl, brandishing the knife, "Call that a knife? This is a bloody knife, mate!"
     Gales of laughter. All the airport security people within earshot are cracking up.
     Down at the airline check-in desk, the ticket agent is delighted to put his long line of passengers on hold when I explain the situation. He dashes to get my knife into my checked suitcase. He returns beaming. "It will be waiting for you at the other end. I know you Aussies can't go anywhere without a bloody knife."
    I think the Gatekeeper who opens our doors and gates in life was in laughing mood that day. And that he sometimes makes special rules for people from Down Under.

On the absentee bit: I do plan to return to Australia to teach, and to continue to explore my

personal connections with my native country and its Dreamings. Several wonderful Australians have taken my trainings for teachers of Active Dreaming, and I believe that Australia is one of the places where we will see the rebirth of a dreaming culture, in the not-so-distant future. It's time.
    Dream people from my native land come after me, across the Pacific Ocean and the continent of North America. I have written of how the sea eagle - a bird I knew in my boyhood - flew me back to Australia to prepare me for a death in the family, and gave me a visa into the Dreaming of an Aboriginal people, the Mununjali.
    When I get sick, sometimes the spirits of plants and animals I knew as a boy come, unasked, to help me through. Eucalyptus Man may come to help clear my sinuses. Echidna Woman may come, with her family, to suck bugs out of my body. The results are always healing, sometimes to an astonishing degree.

I have written about my Australian boyhood and its challenges in my new book, The Boy Who Died and Came Back.
    

Moon Gate in the sea of the shaman who died and came back

Büyükada, Princes' Islands, Sea of Marmara, Turkey

For a portal to the Underworld, try the Şişhane Metro station, just above the Galata Tower at the end of the M-2 subway line in Istanbul.. Five very steep and long escalators, plus a moving walkway, are required to get you down to the track. The station is spotless (unlike similar portals in other world cities) with great mural art and no graffiti, putting London and New York City to shame.
    I started at Şişhane on a visit to the Princes' Islands. A quick ride to the Taksim Square station, three more escalators, then through another turnstile requiring an orange plastic jeton to the underground "funicular" down to the ferry terminal at Kabataş. The Jetonmatik at the ferry station delivered a metal token, more like the legendary coin for the boatman.
     The ferry stopped first at Kadıköy (the Chalcedon of the Greeks) and I again felt the thrill of crossing from Europe to Asia in the time required to drink a glass of the hot tea they offered on board. On to the Sea of Marmara, stopping at Henna Island and Carry-Bag Island before we came to Büyükada, the Big Island of the Princes'. 
     I was vividly aware that I was on the sea where an ancient poet and shaman named Aristeas, famous to the Greeks, used to fly beyond the body in the shape of a raven. He was said to have been a master of bilocation, showing up in more than one place at the same time. He was also said to have left his body, seemingly dead, only to rise again, showing up in another place and time. I had first heard the name "Aristeas" in a boyhood dream. More recently I have been dreaming the title and scenes of the Arimispea, an epic poem of adventure across mythic borders that is attributed to him; it survives in the world of documents only through second-hand accounts,
     I saw plenty of ravens on Büyükada, above the bustling restaurants and ice cream stands around the port. Cars are banned on the island, and the easiest way to get around - unless you feel like a long uphill climb - is by phaeton. Here the give the name of the chariot of the sun god to a horse-drawn carriage. I was again feeling the mythic edge, clattering up the hill behind a pair of silver gray cart horses. The streets were lined with tall Ottoman era mansions, some in desperate need of TLC, and acacia and bougainvillea was rife everywhere.

     We came to a restaurant below the Greek Orthodox church that is popular with pilgrims. When I saw the name of the restaurant, I had no thoughts of making the 30 minute hill climb to the church. Luna Park.
     I burst out laughing. "It's where I went when I died, aged nine!" I exploded. My friend was confused and concerned. Was it a terrible mistake, to have brought me here?
     "No, not all. I can't wait to see what is beyond the Moon Gate this time."
     Luna Park is the name of a popular theme park in Melbourne, Australia, my birth city. Its entrance is through the mouth of a huge moon face. At aged nine, when I died in a Melbourne hospital under the surgeon's knife, undergoing emergency appendectomy, I left my body in the operating theater and enjoyed the freedom of flight, leaving the scenes of blood and pain and grieving parents behind. I flew above the beach. When I saw the gate of Luna Park, in my second body, I was not too clear about my circumstances. I was excited by the chance to do things any ordinary nine-year-old would want to do, to go on the rides and have fun in the fun park. So I flew through the Moon Gate. And found myself in a different world. A world of beautiful, pale, very elongated people who received me as their own. Thay welcomed me and raised me and I lived a whole life among them until my new body was used up and I was required to return to the body of a nine-year old boy the doctors had finally managed to revive after he lost vital signs for some minutes.
     I tell more of this story than I have chosen to make public before in my new book, The Boy Who Died and Came Back.
     I bounded up the steps of the Luna Park on the Sea of Marmara full of eager curiosity. What would I discover when I went through the Moon Gate this time. As I passed the stands of postcards and shiny things and tourist knicknacks, it occurred to me to wonder whether I had any evidence that I was not actually dead again. I had paid a coin to the boatman to come here.
     The upper level of this Luna Park was more than a step or two above the milling tourists below. A charming, spacious restaurant overlooked one of the most glorious views I have ever been privileged to see from my table. I looked out through the pines, over Spoon Island in the Sea of Marmara, to the continent of Asia. The food was delicious, and the many dishes were brought by an old-fashioned waiter with grace and impeccable timing. They had fresh-squeezed pomegranate juice, but I decided not to have it on this side, remembering what happened to Persephone. I drank of Ephesus (a popular Turkish beer called Efes, which is Ephesus in English) and lingered over coffee. If this was the afterlife, it was a lovely reception.
     On the return ferry, I thought again about the legends of the raven shaman who died and came back, and how the raven had spoken to me early that morning, from the streets of Beyoglu near my hotel. I was on a different ferry line than the one that had carried me out across the sea. As we docked at the neighboring island, named for a certain kind of carry bag, I wondered again about which side of which reality I was on. The sign on a portside restaurant read Terk-i Dunya. "Leaving the World." What an improbable name for a restaurant, in ordinary reality. The question became inescapable: which world am I leaving now?

Trotsky's island

Maybe Trotsky had similar questions, even if they went outside his standard belief system. I learn after the voyage to the Moon Gate on the Big Island that Trotsky spend the first four years of his exile here, after Stalin threw him out of Russia in 1929. 

The poet shaman who died and came back
    
Herodotus wrote about Aristeas in Book IV of his Histories:

I will now relate a tale which I heard concerning him both at Proconnesus and at Cyzicus. Aristeas, they said, who belonged to one of the noblest families in the island, had entered one day into a fuller's shop, when he suddenly dropped down dead. The fuller shut up his shop, and went to tell Aristeas' family what had happened. The report of the death had just spread through the town, when a certain Cyzicenian, lately arrived from Artaca, contradicted the rumor, affirming that he had met Aristeas on his road to Cyzicus, and had spoken with him. This man, therefore, strenuously denied the rumor. However, Aristeas' relatives proceeded to the fuller's shop with everything required for the funeral, intending to carry the body away. But when the shop being opened, Aristeas was not there either dead or alive. Seven years afterwards he reappeared, they told me, in Proconnesus, and wrote the poem called by the Greeks The Arimaspeia, after which he disappeared a second time. This is the tale current in the two cities above-mentioned.

Two hundred and forty years after his death, Aristeas appeared in Metapontum in southern Italy to command that a statue of himself be set up and a new altar dedicated to Apollo. He said that since his death he had been travelling with Apollo in the form of a sacred raven.

Proconessus, the island where Aristeas died and came back, is called Marmara by the Turks. There is no daily ferry service, so I contented myself on this visit with another island in the Sea of Marmara, and that choice seems to have been just right.