Robert Moss – Reclaiming Ancient Dreamways

The words for “dream,” “soul,” and “shaman” in Indigenous languages often reflect how dreaming means traveling beyond the body. These terms also reveal that the true shaman is, first and last, a dreamer who can shift consciousness and visit different worlds at will.

Among the Makiritare of Venezuela, the word for dream is adekat o, which means a journey of the soul. The Kwakiutl say that dreams are news the soul brings when it comes back from its outings. The Mohawk word for a shaman is ratetshents, which means “one who dreams.”

Shamans typically receive their calling in dreams and are initiated and trained in the dreamtime.

The heart of their practice is the intentional dream journey. They may incubate dreams to diagnose a patient and select the appropriate treatment. They travel — wide awake and lucid — in their dream bodies to find lost souls, intercede with the spirits, fight sorcerers, and guide spirits of the departed along the right roads.

As you embark on your own 12-module adventure along the many roads of dreaming, Robert will offer essential tools and resources, encouraging you to go to a place of sanctuary and healing deep in your imagination — a place you can visit anytime to raise your energy and feel rooted and protected.

In this first module, you’ll:

• Explore simple techniques to understand your dreams and take action to embody their energy and guidance
• Connect with or deepen your connection with a spiritual guardian, including animal spirits who will stand with you in all your journeys
• Confirm that you can travel without leaving home
• Learn from the stories of ancient dream shamans and modern shamanic dreamers
• Explore highly effective invocations and rituals for protection

Australia’s First People believe we dream our way into this world and dream our way out of it.

They look to dreams as the place of encounter with spiritual guides and sacred healers — who often appear as totem animals, but may come in many other forms.

You’ll discover how, in the Aboriginal tradition, dreaming is a highly social activity. You get out and about, make visits, and receive visitations.

As Robert will explain, the first questions to ask about a dream are those of a detective, rather than an analyst: who, what, where, why, when?

Our lives follow Dreaming Tracks, or Songlines. We travel through “countries of belonging.” Those who can hear the inner songs of the land can cross a thousand miles of desert without maps.

In this module, you’ll explore:

• How the ancestors speak to you in dreams
• Why your big story is hunting you
• The ways you walk in a Speaking Land — and why you want to expand your attention to listen to its many voices
• Sharing dreams as “sand talk” and detective work
• How your personal dreams can be portals to the dreamtime
• How to make a map of your Dreaming Tracks and the landscapes of your soul

In the Mohawk language, the word for shaman or healer is ratetshents, which means “dreamer.”

Robert’s life was changed by his visionary encounters with the ancient Mohawk shaman and Mother of the Wolf Clan who he calls Island Woman. In her tradition, dreams reveal the “secret wishes of the soul” — and the daily task of the community is to gather round a dreamer, help her recognize what the soul is saying, and then take action to honor the soul’s purpose.

In Native American tradition, dreaming is also about human survival. Dreams show us what’s happening at a distance in time or space. If you see a future event you don’t like, you can take action to avoid that possible future.

Dreaming is a way of connecting with the ancestors and of looking at the consequences of human actions, down to the seventh generation beyond ourselves — as the Iroquois insist that wise leaders must always do.

In this module, you’ll learn how to:

• Recognize the secret wishes of the soul, as revealed in dreams
• Honor the wishes of the soul for healing and integration
• Recognize and clarify future events revealed in dreams
• Borrow a distinctive Iroquoian method for taming an unwanted future event
• Connect with ancestors in your bloodlines, the land where you live, and your spiritual lineage
• Tap into the mythic power of sacred stories of healing from the Dark Times

The ancient Egyptians understood that in dreams, our eyes are opened. Their word for dream, rswt, also means “awakening” and was written with a symbol representing an open eye.

By recalling and working with dreams, we develop the art of memory — tapping into knowledge that belonged to us before we entered this life journey.

The Egyptians developed an advanced practice of conscious dream travel. Trained dreamers operated as seers, remote viewers, and telepaths — advising on state and military strategy and providing a mental communications network between far-flung temples and administrative centers.

They also practiced shapeshifting, crossing time and space in the dream bodies of birds and animals.

You’ll visit the dream school of Anubis, patron of astral travel and the gatekeeper between the realms of the living and the dead — using shamanic drumming to power your direct experience of what is possible.

In this module, you’ll explore:

• That a dream is an awakening
• How a dream is a place you can revisit
• How to open the third eye the Egyptian way
• How to get around in your Ka and other soul vehicles
• The Hall of the Gods, where you will explore your personal connections with the Neteru
• The power of heka, or magic words
• Your personal connection with Egyptian god-forms

When they needed healing, the peoples of the Greco-Roman world often turned to Asklepios (Aesculapius to the Romans), “the kindest of gods to humans,” and his divine family.

The cult popularized dream incubation, which flourished for more than a thousand years, from as far east as modern Ankara to as far west as the British Isles.

The practice of Asklepian healing begins as a quest. You go on a pilgrimage, when you have failed to find other remedies for what ails you. The temple helpers will ask you about your dreams as they look for a dream of invitation, noting when the caliber of your dreams indicates that you’re ready for the big experience.

Contact with animals and animal spirits is a vital part of this tradition. The snake is a primary healing ally of Asklepios.

You’ll also learn how Galen the physician used dreams for diagnosis, how the famous dream interpreter Artemidorus read dreams of the future, and how the dedicated dream journalist Aelius Aristides talked and walked with his gods of healing.

In this module, you’ll learn how to:

• Find and bring the dream of invitation to open your doors to the inner temple
• Step out of your old mindsets and self-limiting beliefs
• Learn from the healing that pilgrims before you received within this sacred space
• Address the sacred guide and healer — and seek healing for others in this temple
• Receive the gifts of the animal doctors
• Practice dream incubation whenever you need the guidance of healing from a deeper source

I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
— W.B. Yeats, “The Song of Wandering Aengus”

In Ireland, they call it going away. The world seems cold or cruel or indifferent, so a vital part of you leaves the body — or is lured away — and goes to live in another world, in a realm of Faeries or in a garden behind the moon…

People in the ordinary world may not notice anything is gone from you — but you’re missing something that you need to be whole, to live fully, and to create.

Robert will guide you to sample some of the ever-living Celtic wonder tales that speak of soul and dreaming and lands of the heart’s desire. You’ll journey to places of healing, like the sacred spring of Sequana, the Fast-Flowing One, at the source of the River Seine.

You’ll follow the deer tracks of Elen, goddess of the Ways. Robert will share a story from the Mabinogion about how your dreams may give you a map to manifest the wishes of your soul — and carry you to your beloved.

The roads of enchantment in this module will include:

• Dreaming with Yeats and Wandering Aengus
• Journeying to the sacred spring of the Goddess for healing and revelation
• Entering the sacred grove and deepening our connection with our council of Tree People
• Reclaiming the ways of the vision-seer and journeying with Raven to see across time and dimensions
• Growing the art of “goodly speech,” valued by the Celts above all other gifts
• Laying paths for the parts of your vital soul that went away to come home
• Finding keys to cultura l soul recovery

China has rich traditions of dream understanding and practice — shamanic and Daoist, Buddhist and Confucian — ranging from reading dream messages about the future to engaging in nightly journeys to otherworld realms and calling in dakinis and star beings.

Contact with the ancestors can be so powerful that physical objects are transported from one realm to another. Books and treasure texts, including a whole Buddhist sutra, are delivered from the dreamscape.

Robert will guide you to look at the “perfected sleep” practices of the Daoist master Chen Tuan (871-989), credited with creating kung fu and pursuing many far journeys beyond the body.

Drawing on a cornucopia of wildly exciting stories and meditation practices, you’ll learn how:

• Dreaming can be a form of interspecies communication
• Dreamland is a field of interaction with gods and dakinis, ancestors and spiritual guardians
• Dreams show you the future — and you can clarify the messages through other modes of divination
• Puns and homophones may be keys to dream interpretation
• Diagnosis, healing, and psychic surgery are available in dreams
• You can dream your way to the Pure Lands, walk among the stars, and develop a vast astral geography
• Sleep can be horizontal meditation and you can prepare for that through the Sleeping Tiger posture and other preparatory techniques
• Dreaming shakes up your understanding of reality, as in the famous dream of Zhuang Zhou: Am I a man dreaming he is a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he is a man?

In the mind of India, Vishnu is dreaming this world, which will continue until he ends the dream and disperses his dream characters — including you.

The god with skin the color of rain-filled clouds sleeps on a great serpent, drifting on the Ocean of Milk. While Vishnu sleeps, his mind generates dreams — and this is the stuff that you, and our world, are made of.

A Sanskrit name for dream travelers, kamacarin, means “those who can transfer themselves at will.” The sacred writings of India are a treasury of tales of dream travel, grounded on experience. In this session, we’ll explore the teachings of the Yoga Vasistha, where dream travelers find that time is elastic. You may live a hundred years in a dream world and return to find that only a day has passed in ordinary time.

What’s experienced in dream worlds is real and has real consequences in the traveler’s waking world. Spiritual apprenticeship and initiation can take place in this way.

In this module, you’ll learn that:

• True initiation and apprenticeship can take place in dreaming
• You can enter and retrieve other life experiences as conscious dreamers
• When you awaken inside your dreams, you’re ready to create realities
• Dreams provide treasure maps for fulfillment in this world, as well as maps of other worlds
• You’re dreaming all the time, including when you think you’re awake

Tibetan Bon/Buddhist teachers of dream yoga say the best perspective for lucid dreaming is to consider all of life a dream. They also say that the yoga of dream and sleep is the best preparation for dying.

These teachers emphasize developing the practice of dream yoga for self-liberation from “karmic traces” and the manacles of “grasping and aversion” to enter the clear light. They also value the practical benefits of dreaming. In “dreams of clarity” you can visit people at a distance, see across time and space, and entertain deities and dakinis.

It’s possible to borrow from these traditions without adopting their religious elements. Everyday dream yoga is available to you — if you follow the counsel of Tinker Bell. In the movie Hook, she tells Peter Pan, “You know that place between sleep and awake, the place where you can still remember dreaming? That’s where I’ll always love you. That’s where I’ll be waiting.”

You’ll explore how the fertile space of hypnagogia (the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep) has led to breakthroughs and solutions in nearly every field, including science. You can place yourself in a state of horizontal meditation and progress towards the continuity of awareness, which is a primary goal of advanced practitioners of dream yoga.

In this module, you’ll discover:

• Life is a dream, and a school — any experience is an opportunity for spiritual practice
• “Sending wishes,” a charming Tibetan formula for dream incubation
• A dream can announce your life calling and your reincarnation story
• How “mind treasures,” including advanced practices such as the Chöd cycle, are delivered through dreams
• Dream experiences related to specific lokas (spiritual realms), chakras, and time cycles
• You have an effortless cure for insomnia available to you — as soon as you decide to make more creative use of twilight states of consciousness
• You can visit a night cinema where the movies are exclusively for you — and step through the screen to become scriptwriter, director, and star of your own productions

Seth deserves his own place in a course devoted to the great dreaming traditions. Seth, a multidimensional teacher channeled by Jane Roberts, is crystal clear about the important events that happen while you’re dreaming.

Every night in dreams, consciousness travels outside the body, according to Seth. You travel to other realities, no less real than the physical world.

You’ll explore how you can choose from an infinity of probable events while you’re dreaming. As you become a conscious dreamer, you’ll not only shape reality on other planes — you’ll engage in reality creation on the physical plane, too.

You can also tune in to parallel selves by waking up to what’s going on in your dreams.

Great creativity is a multidimensional art in which the creative mind draws on the gifts and the energy of many selves. You can borrow strength and skills from parallel selves who made different choices — and are walking the roads in the Many Worlds.

In this module, you’ll discover how:

• You’re living continuous lives in other realities that you glimpse in dreams
• You can connect with other personalities in your multidimensional soul family for mutual benefit
• Reincarnation is real — but it’s just one of many after-death options, and you mustn’t get trapped in linear conceptions of karma
• Dreaming is the best preparation for dying
• You can connect with personalities in your multidimensional family in past lives and future lives — and change your physical environment by manipulating your dream environment
• Your most important life teacher may be your Oversoul, or Greater Self — awakening you to a hidden order of events and blessed sense of divine comedy