Robert Moss: The Dream Archeologist
ROBERT MOSS: Yes, Sandie. That’s so wise. We think we’re just daydreaming, just idle fancy. But it’s an aspect of dreaming, of using your imagination, and here’s what medical science is telling us—the body believes in images. It will adjust the pharmaceuticals that it’s pumping out of its own inner chemical factory according to the images we’re entertaining. So, you can put yourself on that beach and dwell there for a while. Your body is going to respond to some extent as if you’re actually doing it. So, there is a key to getting well and staying well and boosting your immune system in using your imagination to put yourself into desirable environments right now. This is the kind of daydreaming that can actually become a mode of self-healing and self-protection, as well as just pure enjoyment. So, anything we can do that can boost our imaginal defenses – that’s a good adjective imaginal, it means the product of the true imagination–is worth entertaining.
SANDRA SEDGBEER: Let’s move on to Dreaming the Soul Back Home. The book about which Stanley Krippner said: “If we would like to work with our dreams and can read only one book this year, we can do no better than read this one.” In the Shamanic tradition, when we have physical or emotional trauma, we lose part of our energy, part of our soul. So how do we get it back?
ROBERT MOSS: The general concept, very briefly, is that soul loss is the Shaman’s main explanation about existential complaints. Why our immune systems don’t work. Why we get depressed. Why we have chronic fatigue. Why we’re prone to addiction, etc. The simple explanation is that the world gets cold and cruel. We suffer violations. We suffer cruelty or shame or embarrassment. Part of us goes away. It doesn’t want to be around, and, you know, good therapy can try to get it back. Still, maybe it’s gone so far away that something beyond conventional therapy is required, and that would be the soul retrieval if the Shamanic practitioner is going to make the journey and try to put it back in your body. It involves a physical ritual, but it might be called soul recovery, the phrase I like to use when it’s something that essentially if you’re in a sufficiently safe and protected environment. You might be able to bring it about by doing some work with your own dreams, including the absence of dreams.
This might sound crazy, but one of the main symptoms of soul loss that you’ve lost a vital part of yourself is the absence of dream recall. Divorce from the dream state. The Iroquois, whose language I had to study, say that you’ve lost your dreams because you’ve lost the part of your soul that is the dreamer. I believe this to be literally true. So what use is dreamwork if you don’t have any dreams?
SANDRA SEDGBEERIn a video on your website, you spoke about what is happing in the world today and how, because we do dream about what is happening into being, we now need to change the dream. You say that we can have a great effect on what the future holds. How do we do that?
ROBERT MOSS: Well, I wish we could dream our way, all of us, into a parallel universe. Where the virus never happened and what is happening in Washington never happened. I wish we could do that. We can certainly, in dreams, take a flight to alternate realities and other places in this world and beyond this world for rest and recreation and regeneration. When our dreams are scary these days, relating to the literal world around us, it’s worth asking yourself, is the dream reinforcing something you need to think about. Is it, for example, reinforcing the need to go on wearing the facemask or sheltering at home, even if other people aren’t doing it? I think some of those dreams that we don’t like are cautionary dreams, telling us to pay attention, and not just listen to the warning on the TV. So, there’s a level of looking at dreams, which involves enquiring whether this is literally or physically, a preview, or a current scan of what’s going on in the external world. Because our dreams are a kind of intuitive radar. They’re a guidance system. They’re a survival system. So don’t throw away any dream. Any dream is telling you more than you already know, even if it’s a dream that you don’t like. The so-called scary dreams and nightmares might be glimpses of our mass condition and the bad things that might happen to people around us. They could involve our personal situation. It could be that a greater power is seeking your attention. It could be that your dreams are producing special effects because there’s something you need to look at. It could be that you’re being invited to step into a place of a new power that will require you to brave up.
So, this is one of the ways that dreaming can support our life today. Can we change the world overnight? Well, we can improve our own experience of the world. That can happen with a moment of revelation. We have the ability at any moment in life to change our attitude, and that can change everything, and dreaming can be part of doing that. Before the pandemic, I was thinking about the enduring lesson of Victor Frankel, the Viennese psychiatrist. He was sent to Auschwitz in World War II and was reduced to a skeleton with a tattoo on his arm. He got himself through by putting his imagination into a scenario that seemed impossible. A scenario in which a year after the war has ended, Hitler’s a memory, and he’s giving a lecture on the psychology of the concentration camps. He wrote a book about it called Man’s Search to Mean. Can you imagine that? He’s imagining himself well-fed in a nice suit in an auditorium in New York City talking about the psychology of the concentration camps, and one year after the war, he was in that auditorium giving that lecture. I was thinking about that before COVID.
I actually did a new version of that story as an introduction to my book Growing Big Dreams, which is coming out in October. His example reminds us that we can grow a vision of possibility that can take us beyond present circumstances. It is dreaming big in the sense of using our imagination to imagine a world where we’ve dealt with the climate situation, where we put decency and civility and honor back in Government, where we’ve restored our balance with nature.
We dream of a world in which humans are thinking about the soul, thinking about spirit, sharing their dreams of life, and their dreams of the night. Using them as sources of healing and guidance and helping each other to manifest what needs to be done. I have that vision in my heart and my mind.
From my point of view, it’s going to involve us doing nothing less than attending to the rebirth of the dreaming culture. At the same time, we support each other in all those ways. We can put our minds and imagination there. We can take other actions in the ordinary world, and none of that will be lost. Eventually, out of shifting our attitude and using our imagination to dream our way forward in our own lives, the change will come. And, hopefully, with hindsight, we’ll look back on all of this and say it was a ghastly, awful, crazy but ultimately cleansing experience from which a new world will emerge. That’s my hope.
More information about Robert Moss and his work is available at www.pastdreams.com, www.mossdreams.com, and www.mossdreams.blogspot.com
