Feature Story – October 2007
The Dreaming Mind
A Conversation with Robert Moss
by Sydney Murray
I am a dream enthusiast. I love to dream every night and well, sometimes I daydream too. I have kept a record of my dreams for over twenty-five years. I am amazed and sometimes perplexed by my dreams but I am usually having fun in them. I think that’s why it is such a safe place for me. And I often want to know who those people were that I was having so much fun with in them. And in wanting to understand more, I spoke with Robert Moss, the renowned dream researcher and a self-confessed dreamer. He is the author of Conscious Dreaming and has written a new book called the Three “Only” Things - Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence and Imagination.
Vision Magazine: Where do dreams come from?
Robert Moss: What might be more apt is a second question: Where do we go in dreams? We travel in dreams. Actually, across human history, most human beings in most cultures have believed that dreams are a wiser source of knowledge then is available in ordinary reality. The other accepted belief is that dreaming is traveling; we go beyond the physical reality of the body and the brain. We can travel into the future and travel into other dimensions. Of course, my friends who are neuro-scientists and brain physiologists view it differently but they say some pretty interesting things in the new science of Dream Theory. Scientifically, in our dreaming brain we do stuff that prepares us for life. There is a new theory called Simulation Theory which holds that in the whole of humanity, whether we are conscious of it or not [or whether we] remember it or not, the dreaming brain is rehearsing us for challenges that lie ahead. We are being prepped in our dreams to recognize when something appears so that we can respond faster than we would do otherwise. That approach is part of the survival mechanism of the human being.
One of the first things you want to do to remember your dreams is to keep a dream journal because you’ll discover your own encyclopedia of symbols. You can track what these symbols are in your dreams and what your dreams mean to you.
You may discover you have a parallel life that you return to again and again which is not necessarily a recurring dream. It’s like a soap opera with many installments. You’re going on an adventure somewhere else and in [it], there is a survival mechanism. We dream the future all the time in various ways. We have glimpses of what is going to happen. We dream things that may or may not happen depending on the use we make of the dream information and whether or not we get it clear. This is a very important survival function of dreaming.
VM: That’s true. When I first came to California, I had a dream that I was driving on the I-5 South, going right by downtown San Diego. For lack of a better word, a ‘ghost’ car went right through me. Since that dream, I was very careful on that stretch of highway and have avoided several major accidents.
RM: I believe my life has been saved in that way. And I’ve worked with many people on dreams like that. What we’ve learned to do is try and get the specifics of the dream and be as clear as possible in our mind; and feel whether this [dream] is literal or symbolic because the car could symbolize a relationship or something. But if it’s a literal car on the road, see if you can get a feel from the dream when this is happening. What is the weather like? What is the situation on the road? What are the other cars like? And then take this information and shape it into your own travel advisory. This is the stuff that humans have been dreaming about forever.
VM: Why do some people think they don’t dream?
RM: The main reason we don’t remember our dreams is either habit or fear. We are not in the habit in our culture of supporting each other in remembering dreams, recording them, or sharing them. We don’t give a good incentive for sharing dreams. Our habits include being pulled out of bed by the alarm clock and then rushing off to work, instead of taking the time to experience a few languid moments to see what was there to take from our night of dreaming. We don’t give ourselves that extra time in the morning. And we don’t make a practice of sharing our dreams by telling someone else in a way that produces helpful, non-authoritarian feedback that guides us toward some action.
I teach what I call The Lightning Dreamwork Process, which is a fun, five-minute process that you can do with a workmate, friend or partner. It is a format for telling dreams in a way as a storyteller and encourages non-authoritarian feedback that doesn’t take your power away and helps you to move to a healing action. If we do that, we will see how our dream life comes alive because we are discovering how much fun it is.
Fear is the other reason why people forget their dreams. They’re scared, whether they know it or not, that their dreams are telling them something bad about themselves or something bad that might happen. I might get sick, my house will be broken into, I’m going to lose my job. They don’t want to hear that information so they bang the door shut on the dream. Then they get into the habit of forgetting. But that is a foolish strategy because dreams are constantly rehearsing us for the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead and we don’t want to miss the messages.
VM: How can we increase imagination and problem solving in our dreams?
RM: This works on so many levels and I like to tell stories to illustrate this. Here’s a California story. The founder of Monster.com, Jeff Taylor, wakes up at four o’clock in the morning from a dream in which an electronic bulletin board is lighting up with would-be employees and would-be employers finding each other from all over the map. He writes down on a pad [the word] “Monster Board” and goes to a 24-hour copy shop and develops a business plan from his dream. Bang—he’s created Monster.com.
This is a wonderful teaching example of a very successful entrepreneurial story. [It tells] how a dream can give us a creative idea so that we can then use [it with] our practical imagination. In this case, [it was] a terrific business plan from which many people benefited.
Taylor got the dream inspiration, he recorded it, he was willing to get up at that anti-social hour and do something with it and he turned his imagination loose on what the dream gave him.
One thing I say in my book is that dreams are a creative studio where we dream up new ideas. And it’s not just about business, art, music, or literature; to be creative is about bringing something new to the world. It’s about making connections that no one else could think up, or that we couldn’t think up in our ordinary mind. Dreaming leads to so much creation, so many discoveries, so much success throughout the years if we allow it. We make connections in our non-ordinary ways and we get the first draft or the first sketch of a fabulous new invention or idea.
VM: How do you believe our dreams help us to heal our bodies and ourselves?
RM: It’s an open secret about the relationship between the images in our minds and our bodies. Medical science is telling us this is not new age fluff; this is what medical science now agrees on. The body believes in images [taken from] our feelings, our thoughts, our mental pictures. Our images, in other words, shape the behavior of the body directly. We have a pharmaceutical factory inside of our body and every time we give our body a strong picture, a strong image, our body pumps out drugs accordingly. We pump out adrenalin if we feel the equivalent of fight or flight. We can pump out the equivalent of Valium if we can get ourselves into a nice, relaxed situation.
So one of the things to think about in your life, and it is the central theme in my book, is to learn how to give attention to the images that can make us well and keep us well as opposed to the things that bring us down or make us sick…We can get [healing images] from a number of places, but a really good place to look is in your dreams.
What comes to us in our dreams is personal, it is for us, it is original, and it is timely to work with. Our dreams can become a terrific source of imagery to heal our bodies. And another thing about the relationship between our dreams and our bodies is that dreams diagnose possible problems before we develop the symptoms.
There are some really striking examples of this in the section [of the new book] on dreams and medicine and how our dreams can help our bodies get well and stay well. It’s a very important thing to recognize. If we want to do better for our health and well being and if we want our health care system to work better, we will create groups that will meet informally and will help each other recognize messages from the body in dreams so that we can avoid developing the symptoms that the dreams are warning us about.
VM: Do you believe nightmares are negative?
RM: One of my personal mantras is, “Dreams are not on our case; they are on our side.” In my personal opinion, a nightmare is an interrupted dream, an unfinished dream. I can have a scary dream and have a resolution and I can wake up feeling okay. That is not a nightmare. I can be torn apart by saber tooth tigers and I wake up feeling good. That is not a nightmare. I could have a less terrifying dream by the sound of it, but if I get up and run away and close the door, then that is a nightmare, which is an unfinished dream.
We have the habit of running away from dreams that might be giving us advice to do better in life. We want to learn to be brave for the challenges that dreams give us and to deal with them, when possible inside the dreaming space itself. Children can be great teachers on this [point]. My youngest daughter Sophie when she was four came into my space at 3 o’clock in the morning and said, “Dad I’m having a scary dream.” So I asked what happened. She said, “I’ve been chased by two Yaki monsters.” And I asked, “What did you do?” “Oh, I put on a dragon outfit and chased them back.” It was all in the space of a possible nightmare and she turned [it] into a dream that had a happy resolution. We ought to learn how to do this. If I dream of someone breaking into my house and I get out of it because I’m scared, I want to try and put myself back into the dream with a technique I call Dream Re-Entry. Which is basically putting your head back into your dream and getting some more information and trying to resolve things inside the dream space. If I dream about the break-in and I’m scared by it—I don’t want to leave that unfinished and unresolved. I want to know if that is a sketch, a premonition of a possible literal break-in of my house and, if so, I need to test my security system. I want to know if the dream is symbolic or metaphorical about the intrusion of a disease or virus into my body and avoid that. But maybe it is my bigger self, my “wiser” self breaking out of my little narrow ego without all of its preoccupations that understand so little. I want to know what it is about—I don’t want to leave it unfinished. I teach that nightmares can be a gift if only we stop running away and turn around and be brave and try to figure out what is actually going on in the rest of the dream.
VM: My experience with Indigenous people all over the world has been their believe that the dream world is as valuable and as real as our waking one. When did we lose the connection with our dreams?
RM: For traditional [Indigenous] dreaming people, dreaming isn’t about sleep, it’s about waking. In ancient Egypt the word for dream is literally an awakening, to awake. Translated as Rswt, with the symbol of an open eye at the end of the word. The ancient Egyptians were a culture that understood a lot about dreaming with a perception which is unfamiliar to us in our modern Western society but which is very familiar to Indigenous peoples. Dreaming is about waking up—waking up to multidimensional reality, waking up to the hidden order of events, waking up to the possibility of soul-power with helpful communication and powerful intelligence. And with a wiseness and intelligence at a different level of life and [quite possibly] with communication with the ancestors.
Another common opinion of dreams that most Indigenous people have is that dreaming may be traveling. You go to sleep and your body is asleep and your consciousness travels outside the body. In the Artic language, they say in sleep you are absent; which means that your consciousness or your soul has gone somewhere else. This is a very common perception. Then there is the way that most human cultures have looked to dreams for two very important sources of information: the knowledge about the future, in a sketch of what lies ahead, not just for individuals but for the world; and for a place of interaction between humans and the more-than-human, the interaction between the human mind and the gods you interact with.
VM: I am so fascinated by my premonitory dreams yet my logical mind rebels at this. I am wondering how I can dream about something that is six months in the future.
RM: The mind is non-local, which means that the mind is not confined to the brain and not confined by the body and our illusion that it is so. Therefore, we are able to scout ahead of ourselves, as consciousness is not imprisoned in the body or the brain except by our selective sense of understanding. One of the things our consciousness or our wiser self would presumably want to do for us is help us prepare data for challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. [There is a] way to track this for yourself and satisfy that logical skeptic in the left-brain, which deserves to be well fed. We should check and verify everything we are told. Begin to journal your own dreams—write them down, track them for any parts that are played out in the future. [For example], when you got this sort of “hit” that you talked about in your dream that helped you avoid that car accident. Once you get your first “hit,” you know that you dreamed something before it happened. Then you will know that for you, this stuff works and you will be encouraged to do more. I work with literally thousands of dreamers all over the world and have collected thousands of examples of premonitory dreams, dreams involving the future. If you have a few of those, people tend to address them as anecdotal, but it’s a bit hard to dismiss it as anecdotal when you have data amounting to thousands of dreams involving the future. My personal database has thousands of dreams involving the future that have checked out. In addition, this is all about playing better games and it’s all about getting in touch with our bigger story. That is one of the huge things for me. I love good stories and I like telling stories and I like to teach people to become storytellers. The aborigines in my native country say that the Big story is hunting the right people to tell them. Start being in touch with the Big story. A sense of a deeper drama in your life gets you through all the challenges in your everyday life and lets you know your life is somehow connected to a larger story. The way that the larger story catches us, to borrow the aboriginal idea, is when we are not guarded and fenced off from the larger universe. So when we go dreaming, we are not trapped in the everyday clutter of the ordinary mind. We are in a place where the Bigger story can find us. We can begin to remember that our life may have a purpose [and] we may be on a life mission that we don’t remember. When you recover that sense of purpose of your life mission, you make much bolder moves, you take greater risks and you’re open for much more creative— inducing experiences in everything. And that’s what it is all about.
For more about Robert Moss visit www.mossdreams.com. To find his books, visit www.newworldlibrary.com.