The Secret History of Dreaming

Dr. Robert Moss is the preeminent authority on Dreaming. He takes us through his personal journey and fascinates us with his mastery of all aspects of our dream life. Learn how our own dream assets empower our life’s adventure through the sacred art of dreaming.

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Robert Moss Excerpt

Tom Park:
As usual I have a traveling author this week. This is indeed an astute gentleman. We will have a treasure today folks. I have with me Robert Moss. Good morning doctor.
Dr.Robert Moss:
Glad to be with you Tom.
Tom Park:
And the book of this tour is The Secret History of Dreaming. But I want to reference back to the grand, more original work, Conscience Dreaming. Many of you may have heard Conscience Dreaming, and of course Robert Moss has a list of his fabulous works he’s created over the years. So give us, for the folks who don’t know you, a little profile of who you are these days.
Dr. Robert Moss:
Well Tom, I’m a dream teacher. I mean there’s no career track for that in our culture. I’ve had to invent one. I’m not a shrink. I’m not a certified psychologist. My first job was as a lecturer in ancient history in my native Australia. So there’s not a lot of employment as a history professor. What has been important to me all my life has been drawing on sources of information and guidance from beyond what is available to the ordinary mind.
I’ve been a dreamer. I’m an Aussie. I grew up in a country which has a long indigenous tradition of dreaming. For the indigenous people of Australia, the aborigines. the dream time is where it’s at. It’s the source of creativity, of healing, of guidance, of contact with wise ancestors. And how do you get there? You get there sometimes through your personal dreams and also listening to what aboriginals call the speaking land. Listening to the voices of nature around you. So by osmosis, from my Australian childhood, I’ve shared some of those attitudes. The attitude that dreaming might be a way of getting into a world bigger than this one, richer than this one. And that we also want to dream with the earth and pay attention.
I’ve done different things in my public life, but over the last getting on for twenty years now, I’ve essentially been engaged in trying to midwife a dreaming society in our time. And in that cause, I have published seven books for which the nonfiction books on dreaming, which The Secret History of Dreaming is the latest. And I teach workshops and seminars of a lively kind all over the map, and I’ve introduced a novel approach to dreaming, healing, and living, which I call active dreaming. Already in the title, there’s a provocation. Active dreaming, how do you get active? Well I’ll talk about that if you like.
Tom Park:
I would love. So folks we’re going to really have an exploration of dreaming today, but what I’d like are some of these subtleties that your mentioning. Especially this issue of how the signs of life are relevant. As Americans, and God bless, I hope you respect us a little bit, Robert, but as Americans, it’s a crazy culture, are we paying attention to the signs? God!
Dr. Robert Moss:
Well, most of us in our urban world, with our headphones on, or living on the computer all the time or texting all the time. We’re out of touch with the natural world around us. We’ve been out of touch with what patterns of traffic really mean. We’re sitting in our cars having road rage without noticing there might be a message for us as in this odd pattern of traffic or vanity plate on the car in front of us. We’re getting out of the habit of having peripheral vision, of having field perception, of noticing of what is going on in the world around us. And that is very important. Most traditional peoples have understood that the universe is giving us signs and messages all the time about what wants to happen or what might happen. And we do better by paying attention.
So as a dreamer and a dream teacher, I’m not just in the business or in the game of teaching people how to work with sleep dreams. I’m in the business of teaching them how to be dreamers 24-7 by paying attention to signs, symbols, synchronicities.