Oh My God Peaches and a Picnic for the Dead

I am in Seattle, wake up early and decide to take a morning stroll around the Pike Place Market. I notice that the produce stalls are bursting with fresh fruit; the peaches look especially ripe and juicy. I consider buying some fruit, but do not want to carry it back to the hotel. However, as I leave the market, I have second thoughts. I just have to sample some of those peaches. I choose Sosio’s stall, where a sign above the mounds of fruit reads “Oh My God Peaches”. I joke with the vendor that the sign should actually read “Oh My Goddess”.

 I now exit the market a couple of minutes later than I would have done had I not gone back for the peaches.

 As I walk along the street, a VW bug slows to match my pace. A woman’s arm reaches out the driver’s window and plucks at my sleeve. “Oh my God! Robert!” she cries, “You got me pregnant five months ago! We have to talk!”

 I am so stunned I don’t immediately recognize the woman in the car. She reminds me, as we move slowly along the street together, that she came to a workshop I led in Seattle five months before. At the time, she and her husband were trying to have a baby through in vitro fertilization. She reminds me that I helped her to journey to meet the soul of the incoming child, and to develop a ritual to add spiritual depth to the medical procedures. She tells me she feels that our work helped. Though she is 45 and her doctors had anticipated difficulties, there have been none; she and her baby are happily on their way.

 She is on her way to the market and asks if she can take me for coffee or breakfast to celebrate. She has a sudden craving for clams, and it requires some negotiation to get them at a restaurant at this early hour. As I watch her sucking down her clams, she tells me, “It’s incredible meeting you here. I came for the peaches. Sosio’s in the market is the best place in the world for peaches.”

 “I know,” I smiled, displaying my bag from Sosio’s stand. “You came for the peaches and I came back for them.”

 She then told me that she was going to buy two dozen Oh My God Peaches to make peach pies for a very special picnic – a picnic in a cemetery. She and several of her friends had lost close family in a tragic Alaskan Airlines crash a few years before. The survivors had agreed to hold a picnic, as well as a memorial service, to celebrate the dead and the living. As we spoke, I felt the presence of her parents. Her father wanted her to bury a personal item at his gravesite; I received the clear impression of a corkscrew with a twisty wooden handle. I might have felt awkward about passing on the message if synchronicity had not opened our path. She identified the corkscrew immediately; it was a fine one with a vine root handle, one of many her father had collected. Since most his body had vanished underwater, it felt right to lay something more of him in the earth on the occasion of the peachy picnic.

Everything that happened around the market that morning was charged with meaning. From the moment I bought the Oh My God peaches, I seemed to have stepped out of ordinary time, into a deeper, juicier reality. The mother-to-be and I met because of the peaches, yet I took my walk with no thought of buying any kind of fruit, and the odds on our meeting in that way, with that connection, are beyond astronomical. There were important reasons for us to meet, involving birth and death.

But I was unaware of these at the time of our meeting, and had not thought of the mother-to-be since the workshop five months before, while on her side – though she had apparently had fond thoughts of me – she had no inkling that I was visiting her city that morning. Whatever brought us together was operating from far beyond the conscious mind, or any plausible notion of probability. As we enjoyed the shared sense that we had entered the play of larger forces, it seemed entirely natural that her parents should join the party – from the other side of death – to announce their wishes for the peachy picnic before it took place.

What is to be said about an episode like this? The first words that come to me are “Thank you.” The mother-to-be and I both felt blessed to have entered a realm of natural magic, where things operate according to dream logic, and the veil between the worlds thins.  I carry my drum - the one I use to power shamanic journeys in my workshops - in a bag from Sosio's fruit stand.

Text adapted from The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence and Imagination by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Wrinkles in the veil of reality

Coincidence, especially in the form of reincidence*, provides clues that our default reality might be in process of being re-booted. Think of the moment in the movie The Matrix when the black cat crosses the room in exactly the same way twice. This is a signal that a virtual reality is about to collapse – in this case, to be collapsed by the alien forces that are keeping humans in thrall by caging their minds in an artificial world.
     There is a vast genre of Eastern literature about this kind of thing. In their dastangos, Urdu storytellers - eagerly heard in princely courts and humble markets - preserved an imaginal geography that includes constructed realities known as tilisms. The word tilism, related to the more familiar "talisman" describes a realm of enchantment created by sorcerers that becomes a prison for one who falls into it.
     Any world may prove to be a tilism, a mind trap constructed by Dark Side magic in defiance of "the laws of God and of nature". The vast tilism of Hoshruba, with its multiple layers of illusion and deception, is the realm of Afrasiyab, the Emperor of Enchantment. Its geography is more various and complex than that of the ordinary world. 
     There are tilisms within tilisms, nested worlds created by magic and imagination. Humans live in such places but do not see where they are. It is much easier to fall into a tilism than to get out. The only way to pierce the veils of illusion and overthrow a tilism is to find the tablet that holds the secrets of the tilism, including the conditions for its destruction and the name of the person who will destroy it. The tablet could be concealed anywhere, often inside the tilism itself. **      
    The “real world” of the first Matrix movie is a nightmare reality where insectoid machines suck energy from humans who allow their bodies to lie dormant because their minds are trapped in a techno-tilism. But the “real world” beyond our consensual reality may be a brighter, not a darker, one. The shaman-priests of the Kogi warn that the Aluna, the psychospiritual field around the earth, has been polluted by human thought-forms and hungry ghosts to the point where it is difficult for higher intelligences to reach us.
     Star travelers (not only in C.S.Lewis’s adult fiction, The Cosmic Trilogy) report that Earth is known by sentient beings elsewhere in the galaxy as the Veiled or Cloaked Planet, because we have been wrapped in the fabric of illusion, limiting our access to higher intelligences, and theirs to us.
    Noticing wrinkles and loose threads in the fabric of ordinary reality, we begin to lift the veil. Pull on a few of those loose threads, and the fabric of perceived reality may unravel quickly. In Borges’ story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia leads to the discovery of an alternate reality that soon replaces the “real" world.

* Reincidence. A term I invented for a recurring series or riff of synchronistic phenomena over time.

**These traditions were largely unknown in the west until an Urdu scholar and novelist named Musharraf Ali Farooqi was stirred by a dream to embark on a fantastic enterprise. He dreamed he was visited by mythic creatures who came galloping right out of the great Urdu story cycle known as The Adventures of Amir Hamza. He made a tremendous contribution to world literature in giving us an elegant 900-page translation of this work, published by The Modern Library. But this was only the start of his labors. Farooqi has since produced the first volume of a projected 24-volume translation of the oceanic Tilism-e Hoshruba. Titled Hoshruba: The Land and the Tilism

Soul remembering in Yoruba tradition

The Yoruba say that the individual soul, or ori, goes before the high god Olodumare before it joins a physical body. The ori kneels down before Olodumare to receive its destiny. It comes into the world to fulfill this destiny:

What the ori comes to fulfill

It cannot but fulfill it.

This personal destiny is known as iponri, which means “the ori’s portion or lot.” The more fortunate and evolved souls choose their own destiny at the feet of the high god. Most souls accept their fate, with only limited ability to negotiate the details. A third category have their destinies “laid on their backs” and come into the world reluctantly.

     In the Yoruba version, when a soul has received its destiny from Olodumare, it embarks on its journey toward physical birth. When the soul arrives at one of the gates between the worlds, it must answer the question of the Gatekeeper, the oni’bode.

Gatekeeper: Where are you going?

Journeyer: I am going into the world.

Gatekeeper: What are you going to do?

Journeyer: I will be born to a woman named X and a man named Y, in the town of Z.

I will be an only son….At the age of…I will…and will die in…and will be mourned by

all and given proper burial.

Gatekeeper: To. It is sealed. [1]

    The destiny is doubly sealed — at the feet of the high god and at the gates between the worlds.

    When souls come into this world, most forget their contract with the high god: the destiny that has been assigned to them.

    Can the destiny be changed? It can sometimes be changed for the better by divine intercession, especially with the help of Orunmila, the austere lord of divination who cannot be bribed. It can be changed for the worse through the interference of forces of evil. A destiny can be aborted through human weakness and impatience.

    One of the two most important insights, in the Yoruba version, is that “an unhappy destiny can be rectified if it can be ascertained what it is.” There is a story of a father who traveled to Ajiran — a town reputed to be a gate between the worlds — to discover why his children died young. In what was clearly a soul journey, he previewed the probable death of his surviving son from snakebite and was able to use his foreknowledge to prevent this from coming to pass.

    The other vital Yoruba insight is that we have an ally in heaven who is in no way alien to ourselves. This ally can help us remember our destiny — and coach us on how to fulfill it or modify it. The ori has a “double in heaven,” a personal daimon. When the Yoruba offer you the blessing “May ori go with you,” they are actually saying something like, “May you walk with your guardian angel, your own Higher Self.”

    Soul-remembering, in some of the Yoruba stories, is the key to weathering life’s ups and downs with grace and tenacity. There is a tale in the odu — the verse recitations that accompany Ifa divination — of a celebrated royal drummer who decided to commit suicide at the peak of manhood after suffering many misfortunes. He fainted during his suicide attempt.

    The drummer’s soul now comes face-to-face with a Gatekeeper who demands, “Why do you appear unbidden at the gate?”

    He recounts his troubles. The Gatekeeper shuts him up in a room and tells him to listen carefully.

    He hears footfalls as the people who are going to be born in the world come before the Gatekeeper. He listens as they recount their destinies.

   “Have you been listening?” the Gatekeeper demands. “This shows how one’s life is ordered.”

    The would-be suicide is reminded that what happened to him on earth happened in accord with his destiny.

    The Gatekeeper shows dim a house full of goods and a pen full of cattle that were to be his in the next year of his life, according to his destiny.

    The Gatekeeper shows him a house full of goods and a pen full of cattle that were to be his in the next year of his life, according to his destiny. “But through your impatience, you have forfeited everything.”

    The drummer wept and protested so strongly that at last Olodumare granted him an extension — ten more years in which to enjoy his predestined riches.[2]


1. E.Balaji Odowu, Olodumare: God in Yoruba Belief (New York: Wazobia, 1994
2. ibid, 180

Text adapted from Dreamgates: Exploring theWorlds of Soul, Imagination and Life beyond Death by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library

Image above: Ifa divination board. Ifa divination, under the patronage of Orunmila, may assist in remembering the soul's assignments,  opening the possibility that “an unhappy destiny can be rectified if it can be ascertained what it is.”

Architects of the Imaginal Realm

"You are a space architect,"one of my students declares. "You create tents of vision and bring us inside for shared adventures."
     I like the idea that I am an architect of imaginal space.I dream of scholar cities and pleasure domes, of temples and libraries in a real world that is constantly and delightfully under construction. I invite others to accompany me to the Moon Café, and the House of Time, to the Silver Airport and the Cosmic Video Store. I give them route maps and floor plans. I tell them how to deal with gatekeepers, what to offer and what to leave behind. 
     I help invited visitors to frame their intentions: to meet a guide or an ancestral soul, to find a new song or look (if they dare) in their Book of Life, to design a home on the Other Side, to embrace a lover in an apple orchard at the edge of Faerie. I don’t lead them around like a tour guide. I open space, then turn them loose to make fresh discoveries on their own. 

    The travelers add to the locations they visit. Their very presence makes the ground more solid, the structures more durable and more complex. They are composed of subtle stuff, but may endure longer than buildings of steel and concrete.
     The taste and imagination of visitors add flourishes and sometimes whole floors.In these ideoplastic environments, every visitor is a builder and decorator. A bronze mirror replaces a daguerreotype; a cello is heard in a music room that wasn't there before; a wall of books in the Magic Library rolls back to reveal a druid wood; golden carp gleam in the pool of the Garden of Memory. 

    I created a huge tent, the kind used for family reunions and elegant outdoor weddings, and told my invited guests that they could come here to encounter and reclaim multiple aspects of self and soul. I showed group after group the way to this House of Gifts, and to make sure they did not get lost, I assigned the sheepdog of shamanic drumming to sort out their brainwaves. These visits produced marvels. Then I noticed that what I had raised as a tent had grown in wondrous ways. From one side, it looked like a fairytale castle; from another, like a Victorian mansion with many wings and countless rooms to open one by one.
     The act of observation, we are informed by quantum physics, makes things, even worlds. Looking brings definite events into manifestation out of a soup of possibilities, Heisenberg's "world of tendencies." Frequent explorers of the Imaginal Realm are quite familiar with the observer effect. I am constantly astonished, though rarely surprised, by how the travelers who follow my maps change what they look at. There is now a pink woman with an elephant's head at the ticket counter of the Cinema of Lost Dreams, and there is a three-headed oracle on the dark side of the Moon.

Image: illustration for Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities 

Tracking the Traveler

Sometimes, lying in the drifty state near sleep, I sense that as I grow drowsy, a second self, back to back with me on the bed, is stirring awake, ready to prowl. I call him the Traveler.
    I can only keep up with him by becoming 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 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.
     When I am the Traveler the journey often begins at a certain threshold, a gap between the worlds, in a twilight of the mind. I may find myself floating upwards. I roll over and as I do so I feel something pulling loose from my physical body. Lights flash at the top of my head and I find myself being drawn up into a cone of light, like a pyramid with an opening at the top.
     There are days when, flat on my back under a tree, I fall upwards into the bowl of the sky, like Rumi. There are nights when I feel I am about to blast off like a rocket, or be blown from the mouth of a cannon, through circles of red within black. Or I find myself stripping off, shedding the body like a snake skin, dropping it like an old overcoat. When the travels begin, I often find myself looking at a geometric pattern. It may be a glowing energy grid. It may resemble the weave of a carpet, or the strands of a net.
     This has been going on for as long as I can remember. You might say I got a jump start by being thrown out of my body and into other worlds at an early age. At age 3 and again at age 9 I was pronounced clinically dead in hospitals during crises of illness. Today we talk about near-death experiences but I still think of this as dying and coming back, which is what Australian doctors told my parents I had done. During one of these experiences, during a few minutes under a surgeon’s knife, I seemed to live a whole lifetime with a different people in another world. So I have always understood that there are worlds beyond the physical world that are no less real – and possibly more real – and that we can travel there by shifting consciousness.

Six Gates to Lucid Dreaming

A lucid dream is one in which you are aware that you are dreaming. This awareness can give you the power to use the dreamscape as an adventure theme park, a place of training or higher education, or a field in which you can vanquish nightmare terrors and recognize and integrate different aspects of yourself.
     How do you become a lucid dreamer? Let me count the ways.

1. Waking up spontaneously to the fact that you are dreaming

This may happen because you notice an anomaly inside the dream. In ordinary reality, you don’t stand up naked in front of a crowd, you are not still in elementary school and you do not keep dragons in your basement. You look in a mirror and see a different face.
     When dream elements of this kind make you aware that you are dreaming, the trick is to stay with the dream instead of letting yourself be startled out of it. This requires practice and a fine melding of excitement and familiarity. Your excitement over what is going on will make you want to stay with the dream. Increasing familiarity with the phenomenon will help you maintain the poise and balance to go on with it.
     It is interesting that it is often scary experiences in early life, especially adolescence, that first bring spontaneous dream lucidity. For example, the phenomenon of sleep paralysis, in which you begin to stir from sleep and find that you cannot operate major muscle groups, can be the prelude to lucid dreaming – when you are able to relax into the situation and let something else develop.

2. Recognize your dream signs

You want to follow the practice of journaling all your dream experiences. This is going to be your personal encyclopedia of symbols and will give your first-hand data on the reality of precognition, parallel universes and so much more. In relation to developing your abilities as a lucid dreamer, your journal is the place where you can study your dream signs – the elements in your dreams that could make you aware that you are dreaming.
     For example, the dead are alive in your dreams. Or a dream element is repeated, exactly, in the way the black cat runs across the room the same way twice in the movie The Matrix. There is a sudden transit from one scene to another and you don’t know how you got to the new place. You are making love with a movie star. You find that when you try to read a text, it blurs.
     You can then select one or more dream signs and tell yourself that when you observe the same element, you will become aware that you are dreaming. You can borrow suggestions from frequent flyers. A very popular one is Carlos Castaneda’s suggestion (in Journey to Ixtlan) that whenever you see your hands, you should ask, “Am I dreaming”? I do that when I look at my watch. Inside a dream, the watch sometimes operates very differently from its regular functioning.

3. Set an intention for lucid dreaming

Before going to bed, you set an intention to be aware you are dreaming and repeat that intention until it is firmly implanted in your mind. Give the intention some juice. “I am going to have fun in my dreams and I will be aware that I am dreaming” is perfectly acceptable. So is “Tonight I will go on a road of healing and I will know I am dreaming.”

4. Start in the Twilight Zone

The twilight zone between sleep and waking is a great launch pad for adventures in lucid dreaming. Sleep researchers distinguish the hypnagogic state, when you are on your way to sleep, from the hypnopompic state, when you are leaving sleep. In both states, if you are able to relax and entertain the images that form on your mental screen, you may find you are being offered a rich menu of portals and scenarios for dreaming. Choose to go with one of those images or developing stories, and you may start out lucid and stay that way.
    However, when the adventure begins in the first period of the night, you may fall asleep and lose dream awareness (and often memory of the dream) because your body craves rest. In most people’s daily cycle, the first hours in bed are a time for “industrial sleep” to restore and replenish the body. Dream recall and lucid awareness may be less important in this period, in relation to daily maintenance, than the need for nourishing sleep and downtime.
    The best times to experiment in the twilight zone are when you wake in the middle of the night, and when you wake from your final sleep cycle to start the day. I love what becomes available in the middle of the night (especially between 3:00 and 4:00 a.m.) when I can simply lie back in a drifty state and let images come. After your final sleep cycle, you may find you remember dreams that have juice and energy and vivid detail. If you can arrange your life so you don’t have to jump out of bed right away, you can stay with one of these dreams and let it unfold into a fully lucid dream excursion.

5. Reenter a dream

Dream reentry is the royal road to lucid dreaming. This is one of the core techniques of Active Dreaming. The central idea is this: a dream scene is a place you have been, wherever in the worlds that may be. Because you have been there, you can go there again.
     Why would you want to do this?
      Maybe you were having a great adventure or romance, but were interrupted by the alarm clock and would like to go on with it. Maybe you were fleeing from a nightmare bogey and you realize it is time to face up to that challenge and resolve it on its own ground – which, by the way, is the smartest way to end a series of scary dreams. Maybe you want to talk to someone who appeared in the dream.
     Maybe you simply want to develop entry points for lucid dreaming, personal dream gates through which you can access realms of adventure, guidance and healing.
      How do you practice dream reentry? You need three things: a strong image, a clear intention, and the ability to fuel and focus the lucid dream journey that is going to unfold. You hold the dream that is calling you in your mind and let it become vivid and alive. It might be the dream from which you just awakened or a dream from years ago, maybe a dream that frightened you in childhood and was never resolved. Next, you set your intention. I am going to see what’s behind that door. I am going to confront my pursuer. I am going to dance with the bear. I am going to meet my dream lover again on that tropical island and I don’t have to pay for the plane ticket.
     If you have a tendency to drift off to sleep, you may add the intention: I will remain alert and aware that I am dreaming.
     If you find that you need extra fuel to accomplish liftoff, and/or that your focus is easily distracted, try using shamanic drumming as you embark on the journey. In my workshops, we use shamanic drumming very frequently to power conscious dream journeys. I have recorded a CD of shamanic drumming specifically for conscious dream travelers, Wings for the Journey.

6. Look at the world around you as a waking dream

As is well understood by teachers of dream yoga, lucid living is fundamental to growing the practice of lucid dreaming. Practice mindfulness in everyday circumstances. Ask yourself from time to time, What am I doing now? What is playing on my inner soundtrack? Take some quiet, unscheduled time, inside or out and about, and receive impressions – both the contents of your mind and the incidents of external reality – without judgment.
     Look for signs and symbols in the world around you. I suggest many games in this cause in my book Sidewalk Oracles. You’ll become aware that the world is speaking to you in many voices, and you’ll start to glimpse the patterns of a deeper order of reality, behind the veils of ordinary perception.
     You’ll find you can carry this heightened awareness into the dream state, and that your deeper dreams will expand your consciousness, in turn, on the roads of everyday life.

Photo by RM

How did I get here?

You set off from home and find yourself on a high mountain top, or another country, with no idea how you got here.
    You go to the rest room and come out in a completely different place: a forest, a space ship, a theme park.   
    You close your eyes and wake up somewhere else. Maybe this happens again and again.    
    You're in one place and then suddenly in another, without any recollection of how you got from A to B.    
    These are common experiences in dreams. If we are too quick, on waking, to flatten our adventures into a single linear narrative, without pausing to reflect on the unexplained transits, we can miss a very important opportunity to learn more about what goes on in dreaming - and about the nature of reality itself.    
    When you jump from one scene to another, you may have stepped from one dream into another, as you might step from an outer to an inner courtyard.    
    Make it your game to ask "How did I get here?" when a sudden scene shift takes place. Ask people around you, if they can see and hear you.
   These maneuvers may cause you to wake up to the fact that you are dreaming. Stay with your experience, and you may find yourself embarked on a full-fledged lucid dream adventure.   
    Look deeper, and you may find you are traveling between different realities, no less real than the one where your body is lying dormant in bed. You have not only switched dreams; you have changed worlds.

Art: Leonora Carrington, "The Inn of the Dawn Horse"

The Hermit Crab, Garfield the Cat and the Space Alien Game

When I am sharing dreams I often enjoy playing the Space Alien Game. This means asking the dreamer to explain a character or element in the dream as if speaking to an extra-terrestrial who has just dropped in from another star system and has little or no idea of how things operate on Earth. Speaking as an inter-galactic drop-in, I may ask you to explain a refrigerator, or a hippopotamus, or George Clooney. If we are talking about George, it won't be enough to tell me that he is a movie star, because I may never have heard of films or actors. You are going to have to explain what is a cinema, and what is a role - and what roles you most associate with Clooney.
     I once played the Space Alien Game with a dream of Garfield the Cat. During a break in an evening lecture for a church group, a very earnest woman approached me with a question. She wanted to know whether she could meet her guardian angel in her dreams. "Absolutely!" I told her without hesitation.
    I started to explain dream incubation. "I've done that," she cut me short. "I've read your book Conscious Dreaming and I know about setting intentions for dreams. The problem is, I asked three times to meet my guardian angel. And three times I got Garfield the Cat."
    It struck me that the original meaning of "angel" - άγγελος - in Greek is "messenger". Was there some sense in which Garfield could be a messenger for a woman who had clearly given much of her life to service for others?
    "Pretend I've just landed from another star system," I invited her. "I've never seen the funny pages and I know almost nothing about humans or their imaginations. Tell me who is Garfield the Cat."
     "Well, he's greedy and selfish and always looking out for Number One."
     "Is there a sense in which he could be a messenger?"
     She thought for a moment, then glanced at the line at the well-stocked buffet. "Do you think it would be okay if I jumped the line and got a piece of chocolate cake before it's all gone."
     "Garfield would say, Go for it!"
     She ran to the buffet, shouting, "Garfield told me to do it!" and came back with chocolate cake and the grin of a mischievous child all over her previously solemn face.

I played the Space Alien Game on another occasion with a dream of a hermit crab. A woman artist who felt trapped in a hollow marriage told me that for years she had dreamed of a hermit crab, or a succession of them.
    "I've just arrived from Arcturus," I informed her.'"Tell me about the hermit crab."
    "It's a sea creature. It's different from other crabs because it doesn't grow a shell of its own. It borrows the shells of other creatures. It moves from house to house."
     Her eyes widened in recognition as she made the last statement. "I know what the hermit crab is telling me," she said with sudden conviction. "It's telling me I no longer need to stay trapped in a borrowed house that no longer suits me."
     She took decisive action to honor this insight. She took on a teaching job her husband had told her she would never be able to fulfill, asserting her own value and moving towards financial independence. She started spending more time by the sea which she recognized as her natural habitat, and made a series of paintings celebrating the freedom of wind and wave and light. When she was ready to leave the marriage, she met a new partner who was able to fulfill emotional and sexual needs that had long been repressed.

In our Active Dreaming approach to sharing dreams, we recognize that it is the task of the guide to help the dreamer become author of meaning for her own dreams, and her own life. Asking a dreamer to explain a dream element to an innocent or mystified ET can bring up deep levels of knowing that had not previously entered consciousness. As with any of our processes, we always want the exchange to end with action to embody the guidance and energy of the dream in physical life. This may bring back the playful child to the over-serious adult. It may free the creative spirit from the confining shell of a sterile relationship.These are examples of real magic, which is the art of bringing gifts from one world into another world.

Healing the wounded men in our ancestry

She stands before the fire, straight and tall as a flame, her fierce green eyes blazing. Irene stoops for a moment to make an offering to the fire, a pinch of tobacco, a sprig of sage. Then she carefully unfolds the first piece of paper. She reads aloud the following statement she has written:  “I give to the fire all deep encrusted feelings of powerlessness that drove my ancestors, our beloved men, into alcohol dependency.”
    She consigns the paper to the fire, and the fire takes it hungrily.
    She unfolds the second message and reads it in a clear, ringing voice so that even the people on the edge of the circle can hear her without leaning in. “I give to the fire the great sadness of my ancestors, the abandoned men, who never knew love and felt less than honored by their women, mothers and sisters, daughter and lovers.”
    The flames leap higher as the second paper crackles and burns.
    She bends to blow into the fire, adding soul, which travels on the breath, to her deep intentions.
    When she stands again and turns to face the circle, there is a moment’s hush before we applaud her and celebrate what she has done, because we are amazed. In a fire ceremony like this, people bring many things they wish to release: old habits, fear or guilt, addiction or attachment. She has just sought to release a multi-generational history of stunted lives and toxic relations. Instead of casting out the men who blighted the lives of their women, she has asked to free them, back through the bloodlines, back through time immemorial. She has asked for deep ancestral healing, and she has asked as woman of power, with the right of the priestess to forgive and to intercede.
     When we sat quietly together later that night, I asked where she had found those remarkable words. “Kate and Caroline,” she told me. “They were very clear. They had written everything out. They wanted to make sure I got it exactly right.”
    She explained that Kate was her Irish great aunt, Caroline her German grandmother. Both were long deceased, but both had come through to her as spirit helpers in the soul recovery work we had been doing with the group. They had helped her recover a desperately sad and lonely six-year-old part of herself who had been left in a foster home and cruelly separated from the father she loved without explanation, and then beaten for mentioning him. Though she remembered Caroline as aloof and rigid, this grandmother now appeared as warm and loving, urgently concerned to assist in healing all the family, across the generations.
     We were both filled with gratitude for the help that becomes available when we make ourselves available for soul work.
     Guided by strong women of her family, reaching to her from the other side of death, Irene sought to free the generations of men in her bloodlines who were trapped in powerlessness, sorrow and addiction. I believe she made a difference that night, bringing light into many lives across time and across dimensions. Her example may inspire us to seek similar healing for our ancestors.

Text adapted from Dreaming the Soul Back Home: Shamanic Dreaming for Healing and Becoming Whole by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

photo by RM

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.