457. Dream Travel, Soul Purpose & Multidimensional Awakening with Robert Moss

Robert Moss

 [00:00:00] 

Welcome to Soul Elevation, guiding Your Ascension to New Heights. I'm your host, Kara Goodwin. I love this episode with the amazing Robert Moss, where we explore so many aspects of dreaming. Robert is an expert in the field of dreaming from a shamanic and spiritual viewpoint, and I was so honored to talk with him.

I even got to receive guidance from him on a dream, which I had a couple of nights ago. Which I've been mulling over myself. shares captivating stories about a Mohawk woman from 250 years ago. he's connected with Via the Dreamscape, whom he's found verifiable information of about her life.

He also gives fascinating insights about a near death experience he had from childhood In which he lived a complete lifetime in another realm or planet before returning [00:01:00] to his childhood body. Again, he's an amazing storyteller and he has so much to share with us in this episode.

Robert Moss has been a dream traveler since doctors pronounced him Clinically dead in a hospital in Tasmania when he was three years old. From his experiences in many worlds, he created his school of active dreaming, his original synthesis of modern dream work, and ancient shamonic and mystical practices for journeying to realms beyond the physical and growing creative imagination.

He's led popular workshops all over the world, including a three year training for teachers of Active Dreaming and online courses for the Shift Network. A former lecturer in ancient history at the Australian National University. He's a New York Times bestselling novelist, poet, journalist, and independent scholar.

His many books on dreaming shamanism and imagination include conscious dreaming, [00:02:00] the secret history of dreaming. The boy who died and came back and many more. his website is MAs dreams.com,

And we do talk a bit about books in this episode, and I wanna share about my new book, your Authentic Awakening. You can get this book everywhere, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, et cetera, and you can get a signed copy with free shipping if you're in the US by going to kara goodwin.com/book.

This book will nurture your spiritual growth, whether you're just starting to explore your spiritual nature. Or you're further along on your journey, I have practical exercises to help you deepen your spiritual connection. And I also share many of my unusual quantum experiences in consciousness. Check it out at kara goodwin.com/book, and now enjoy this episode. 

Kara Goodwin: Well, Robert, what a dream to have you here. Thank you so much for being here. I'm so excited to [00:03:00] talk to you today. 

Robert Moss: Well, I'm glad to be in the dream with you. 

Kara Goodwin: Well, I have been taking a prerecorded course of yours through the Shift Network that I think you actually did this one in 2023.

From what I can gather, and I've gotten so much, I haven't completed it yet. And even in the, in the, maybe I've seen half of it or interacted with half of it, and my dreams have just been. So, um, they, they just kind of exploded, which I'm a dreamer anyway, but the, my understanding and the, the ideas of what's happening energetically have been really amazing.

And then I, I read your book Dream Gates and that very much activated my dreams. I ha happened to, um. Read it while I was in the Caribbean. So I was in the Atlantis area. I was actually on a cruise, so I was actually over the water. Um, and I think that [00:04:00] that helped. I think there was divine timing there with being in the Atlantian energies and reading your book because, but it was very activating.

I. Felt that my dreams were just, and that that hypnogogic state, which we will talk about, but that space between wakefulness and sleeping, um, was very fertile. But before we get into all of that, um, it seems like your origin story with regards to your life, your life's work goes all the way back to a near death experience with, as a young boy.

Although in actuality, I'm sure it goes like way beyond that, into. Past lives and way ahead into future lives and parallel lives and, and all sorts. But could you please share a little bit about how you became interested in consciousness and shamanism and dreaming? 

Robert Moss: You've thrown a lot of starter dough on the table, so Well, I'll come back.

I'll come back to that question. But before I do that, in honor of your Blue Dreams [00:05:00] and the Caribbean reading Dream Gates. Last time I was in the Caribbean, I was on the island of Aruba, and in that drifty half dream state between sleep and awake, I met an iguana woman. I. She was like an iguana. And there are iguanas on the island.

You've probably seen iguanas in the natural habitat. They're amazing creatures. They are survivors. They can fall 20 feet off a tree without hurting themselves and stay underwater for half an hour. And I drew pictures of her. It was a very interesting engagement. Then I studied the local shamanic traditions of the area, and I found amongst the heroic, the iguana was the shamanic power animal.

So you took my mind back to my last adventures in the Caribbean. In waking life and in that half dream state. And then you talked about my origin point. Well, last night, my dear, I dreamed I was with an indigenous community in the southwest. We were discussing the nature and location of a pu. Pu is a Hopi word for the whole through in the earth, through which humans [00:06:00] emerge, from which they emerge to populate the earth.

And in the dream. A text has been discovered explaining things about the ancient understanding of the cosmic point of origin for the human species, the pu, and you use the exact phrase, so there are things that like to happen together. As a Chinese state, you say, when did my interest in consciousness begin?

Well. You know, I'm a person of experience. I know by direct experience, I'm not really a theorist. I'm perfectly happy to consider different models of explanation and understanding, but basically what I teach and what I practice is what I know through firsthand. Direct experience or indeed revelation. And it was pretty hard for me not to be, uh, conscious, for example, of our connection with other lives because I was born in Australia.

But my parents when I started to talk, said, why have we got a bloodied little English? Lord, you don't hear it today. My accent got roughed up. It's a bit of everything, but when I first spoke, I sounded like a real tough, you [00:07:00] know, from England, from the upper class. Old Etonian Lord type, what happened to our little Aussie boy?

So we understood at the very beginning that, uh, I had a strong connection with England, which many Australians do, but it was something that extended beyond genetics and beyond family trees. So I knew from early, very early in my life that I had some connection with a Brit. Of, of the upper class, but, but not a boring pompous Bri, he's a Royal Air Force pilot, belonged to magical order, dashing chap.

So I knew that very early on. Then I knew about other worlds or remembered them very early on because at the age of three, I died for the first time. Uh, I was pronounced clinically dead in a hospital in Hobart, Tasmania, in a bitter winter pneumonia in both lungs. And then to the doctor's surprise, I came back and they said with some embarrassment to my appearance, oh, he died and he came back, didn't he?

The boy died and came back, which is the origin of the title of my spiritual memoir, the Boy Who Died and [00:08:00] came back. And frankly, I don't remember much of what happened when I was out of the body. I remember how difficult it was to be in the body afterwards. It felt like you are a child trying to drive a great big car and your your feet can't reach the pedals.

It felt like that operating the body was hard and I kept getting sick and I kept sort of starting to check out again, and I didn't live the typical outdoorsy life of a young Australian kid who was born big and strong. I I was in sick rooms a lot, and then at nine I was pronounced dead again. I was is an emergency appendectomy and it starts when I tell it like a classic NDE as we now call them, classic near-death experience.

I will note we didn't have that term back then. Raymond Moody hadn't written his book. We didn't have words for these things, so near-death experience meant nothing at that time was a useful term. Later on, it starts, my experience starts out like that. Okay, outta the body. Under the ceiling of the operating room.

Don't want to watch the mess of [00:09:00] the blood and the surgery. Don't wanna listen to the nurse's gossip. Get out of there. Or there's my mother grieving. Don't want to be around her tears. Only boy feeling guilty for being sick all the time. Oh no. Let's go outside and do something fun. So I feel, find myself stretching the window of the hospital.

In my second body, of course, in my subtle body, it stretches like toffee. I'm out. Pop. There's a theme park along the beach. Luna Park, just for fun. The entrance is a big moon face. Oh yeah, let's go and have some fun. So I'm going to the theme park like a 9-year-old kid would want to do, and I get on the ghost train and I'm no longer in the theme park.

I'm in another world. It feels like a world inside the world with with with a sort of twilight. Atmosphere. The people are beautiful. They're very elongated, they're very long, they're very slender, they're very beautiful, and they welcome me, and I'm one of their family, and they raise me and I become [00:10:00] maybe a father, a grandfather, some kind of shaman, priest.

I forget about the 9-year-old in the operating room. I live a whole life lifetime, a very satisfactory lifetime. It's time to leave that body and I expect to go to another star, but bang. I'm back in the body of the kid in the operating room, coming back from anesthesia out for a few minutes. And when I tried to talk about this, believe it or not, in the 1950s in a conservative family in Australia, there's nobody really who wants to hear, oh, poor kid.

It's a medication, isn't it? The first person I found who could listen to this and confirm it or validate it was an Aboriginal kid, and I wasn't supposed to hang out with them 'cause they're very racist, period. But he's, oh yeah. Matter of fact. Oh yeah, we do that. We get really sick. We go and live with the spirits for a while, and sometimes when we come back we're the same and sometimes we're different.

So to cut to the chase and finally answer your question. I've known with absolute [00:11:00] clarity since then that there are worlds beyond the physical and they are reachable. They're reachable. They're not only real worlds beyond the physical, but we can reach them and it doesn't have to be through the extremity of dying and coming back or the near death experience.

We have the opportunity to do this in dreaming and as we grow our practice of dreams and our memory and recognition of what's going on within us, within them, we find we all have portals. To the multidimensional universe, which is one of the really exciting things for me about being a dream teacher as well as a dream experiencer.

I love watching people's eyes and their souls and their minds open to the reality of the larger universe that dreaming makes accessible. 

Kara Goodwin: Wow. Well, thank you for sharing all of that. Um, did I hear your Lucy in the background? 

Robert Moss: You did. You've got good ears. My literary cat. Yeah. Let me tell you a story about Lucy, which is about dreaming in everyday life.

Lu Lucy. Well, first of all, Lucy [00:12:00] inserted herself in my mind twice before I met her. I'm in that drifty half dream state, and suddenly this little tabby cat face. Very sweet and very fierce wishes itself. Getting put my attention. Two weeks later I met her and we adopted her. Since then, I mean she's many things, but she likes to express her opinion about my reading, and I read a lot.

I'm surrounded by thousands of books. But, and you'll sometimes nudge one, read this or push one aside. Ignore that. But here's the best Lucy story as a literary cat, it's a dreamlike episode in waking life. My favorite Latin American author is Borges Jorge Luis Borges, whose stories are very dreamlike and very compact.

And I'm reading a charming memoir by Jay Perini, well-known American. Uh, author of his time as a student driving Borges the Blind Argentine novelist around Scotland and Borges, you know, pulling various kinds of stunts. And, uh, Lucy comes over when [00:13:00] I put the book down on the ottoman in my feet and she sniffs it and she licks the spine.

And I look, she licks the spine. What I mean, this is excessive. And I returned to my reading two pages later. Borges is in a library, uh, a a library funded by Andrew Carnegie in Scotland. He's blind and he's led into the sort of rarest of rare books room, uh, with the librarian and with Jay Parini, his American escort.

And he takes a first edition of a book of Sir Walter Scott off the shelf, and he sniffs it and he licks the spine. 

Kara Goodwin: Oh my word. 

Robert Moss: The librarian is horrified. I mean, but he's a Nobel Prizewinning novelist, so you don't necessarily just clamp down, but it's a shocking scene. You take this exquisite, valuable edition and you lick the spine.

So look at that. My cat licks the spine of a book about Boor Hayes, in which. Two minutes later, I'm about to read how Borhees licked the spine of a book in a library in Scotland. [00:14:00] So when people ask me about dreaming and reality, I say, when are you going to wake up to the fact that you're dreaming right now?

This world can operate with an I logic, with the logic of a dream. If you pay attention, and perhaps it's doing it whether you pay attention or not, it's all a dream. It's all illusion, it's all reality. Wow. It's a three thing dream illusion reality. It's like that in any of the worlds we normally have access to.

Kara Goodwin: Wow. I mean, that is so profound and it, it brings to mind a couple of, if we wanna call them synchronicities, although that's a synchronicity, just that is way beyond synchronicities where, I mean, that's random that a cat would lick the spine of a book, and then you read about a character doing that in that book.

Two pages later, like, that's unfathomable, unfathomable. Um, but when I was watching an interview with you. Yesterday, um, I had received a vo, a voice note from a friend [00:15:00] of mine who talked about this in hypnagogic state that she had turned into an eagle. So she first saw the word eagle, and then she's like, and my, I could feel my face changing.

I felt. The, the wings coming in and, and she, that was at about eight 30 in the morning. And then at lunchtime, I watch this video, this interview, I don't know, it was maybe a year old or something. And you talk about turning into a hawk and the way that you described it was so similar to how my friend just described turning into an eagle.

And I was like. How often do people talk about turning into birds? Like this might be the only two times in my life that I've been privy to this description of it, so. 

Robert Moss: Well, our ancestors would not have been surprised at all because they used to turn into birds in energy bodies. They appreciated people who were particularly [00:16:00] gifted.

Dreamers, IE shamans, who could do this. I remember a Jungian psychologist I know went out to the central desert of Australia. Am I native land? And he goes out among the pigeon jra thinking, well, wouldn't it be cool to understand how Australian Aborigines dream and work with dreams? So here he is in the bush with his interpreter talking to an elder, a spirit man, a shaman, Dr.

A dreamer of the pigeon jra, and he's explaining. I dunno how you do this in pigeon Jra, but he is trying to explain what a Jungian practice is like. And he speaks for a while and there's some translation and there's absolute silence. Just the buzzing of the blow flies. And the Jungian says to the interpreter, well ask him what he does with dreams and the answer comes back, oh mate, he says he becomes an eagle.

And the union psychologist starts discussing the eagle archetype and the symbolism. Oh, now mate. Says the interpret, you don't get it. He becomes an eagle and they mean it. He becomes an [00:17:00] eagle. It means that in his energy, they're not talking necessarily about the physical body, but they're talking about shape shifting and the astral body or the dream body, and being able to operate that way, or indeed about being able to send a part of your own energy in that form to do something at a distance, to see something over those mountains to communicate with someone on the other side of the continent.

Uh, every indigenous streaming tradition knows about this. I won't say it's routine, but it's accepted and recognized as what powerful dreamers do and what the community likes them to do because it's useful. And I would add this, it's in all our ancestry. All of our ancestors knew about this kind of thing.

Some of our societies were faster to forget than others. And Western society leading, you know, the industrial race and then the post-industrial race and so on. Almost forgot about it. Which is why so many people are now running off to take hallucinogenics and so on, because which, which has been part of practice, many traditions, of course, but not necessarily part of the necessary practice of a master dreamer.

Master dreamers [00:18:00] don't need that, but we forgot how to do it, you see? And some of us are bringing it back and because of my life and my dreams, I'm one of those. 

Kara Goodwin: Yes. Well, and that leads very beautifully into. You have a unique and, and I think advanced perspective on dream on dreaming, and you believe that it is more than this mainstream accepted standard of us shutting down in our brain, kind of processing the sensory input from our days.

And you have wildly verifiable evidence to back up this perspective and, and amazing stories. Um, and you write about these and you share, you write about them in your book and you share them in your, in your workshops, in your courses. Talk about what you think some of the opportunities are in dreaming that we have forgotten.

It 

Robert Moss: works in two main ways when you talk about opportunities or gifts. First of all, dreaming is our passport to the multiverse, to the multidimensional reality. [00:19:00] We're all sorts of things available. You wanna know what happens after death, or you wanna meet people who've died. You can go there. As a matter of fact, you probably go there any number of times, whether you recognize it or not.

You are visited by people who live there. You want to know whether the many worlds hypothesis in physics is for real, that there are parallel worlds and there are any number of parallel worlds where you made different choices. Might be interesting to see how that's going. You can do it. You wanna go to places of healing.

Discovery initiation that shamans, mystics and creators have always wanted to go to. You can do it dreaming as your passport, dreaming as a way of getting out there, of getting beyond the veils of consensus. Reality of getting beyond the consensual hallucinations into a deeper world and the universe available through dreaming is vast by far than the physical universe.

So there's that. A way of getting out there to interesting places where it's worth spending time to places of creation and indeed of invention and generation and [00:20:00] manifestation. Because one of the realms you can go to is the imaginal realm. We learned to call it that from the medieval Sufi mystic. Some of us.

It's a realm of true imagination where what is beyond form and beyond thinking meets the possibility of turning into a form that could be manifested and understood and interacted with. By humans who live in worlds of form, a place of creation. And on this side, of course, real magic is the art of bringing gifts from another world into this one.

And we do this with our dreams, where we learn to reach not just the arid analysis of a dream, not just to look at it as a text or to reduce it to the way different parts of the brain light up or go dormant during sleep. I mean, that's really so reductionist. So boring, so sterile. Real magic is bringing something from a deeper world, and when we look at our dreams, the energy.

Healing, insight, guidance, indeed, specific information and solutions we didn't have access to. And we looked to our dreams for things that are not [00:21:00] on the table or not recognizably on the table. And regular life. We find we have a way forward. And this is why, I mean, I'm a historian. I started as a junior professor of ancient history.

That was my first job. As I look over the whole sweep of history. It is very interesting to notice the societies that gave most value most importance to dreams. And dreamers are often at the edge of survival. They're often in very difficult situations, and they need connections and resources beyond the obvious.

So dreaming, unlike some Western fantasies about this, has never been a sort of crystal shop activity for real societies. Not something on the fringe, not something for new age soap bubbles, not just for random or either for random self pleasuring fantasy experiences as some of the lucid dreamers seem to be having.

It's been a matter of soul and survival, getting in touch with soul and re remembering his purpose, getting more of soul and self into the body, and finding practical tools that can be applied in [00:22:00] regular life. One of my teachers and my important teachers has all been in non-ordinary reality. Uh, in, in the deeper reality, one of my most important teachers theor, the woman of power I call Ireland woman in my books de Dwa, she comes across the water, uh, after she called me and I took the former Hawke to get to her.

Uh, and I thought after years of contact, what is really going on here? I realized that from her point of view in her time. Reaching 250 years into her future across future history, she is looking for solutions from her future to problems her people are facing in the early 17 hundreds, specifically smallpox, which is in danger of killing their entire Mohawk population.

And although I don't know about smallpox or epidemics, and I'm not a physician. I found myself doing detailed research on how the first cures for smallpox [00:23:00] came to the American colonies through inoculation as observed in an African slave. And I put the story I. In my historical novel, the Fire Keeper of How a Cure for small Pex or smallpox was brought to the Mohawk people.

I'm not saying that she and I accomplished, you know this factually, but I'm saying, and I'm getting into the personal detail because you want to have the personal detail. I wanna know this person know something about what they're talking about. What I'm saying is I learnt with her, with her, not just from her, but with her as one of my friends, across time and dimension.

The, one of the things that Powerful Dreamers do is they reach across time for the help and healing of a whole community, and she was doing that. On the one hand, she was reaching across dimensions to remind me of things my ancestors understood. In another sense, she was reaching in terms of our multidimensional families because of my connection with an Irishman.

She knew in her time in the early 17 hundreds, which made the [00:24:00] link, but then she's also as a dreamer. Reaching for tools for survival, and I will add this in the Mohawk language, which I had to learn because of my dreams. I don't recommend you do this just for fun. It's not an easy language to learn, but the word for shaman or word we translate as shaman is zos, which means simply one who dreams.

The dreamer is the shaman. The dreamer is the healer. The fundamental qualification for being a healer or shaman in that language, and the related language group, the Iqua language group, is that you're a dreamer. It's first and foremost. A dream. Dreamers are wanted, dreamers are valued. 

Kara Goodwin: Okay, well thank you for that.

And there are a couple of big, big topics that you brought there. I wanna come back to the, um, the Mohawk woman because there is a parallel there with something that I, that's kind of, you're making me make some connections that I, I. Would love to explore the fact. But before we get to that, twice, [00:25:00] you mentioned dreaming as being a passport to multidimensional realms and I had what was for me, a powerful dream a couple of nights ago.

I. That I feel is relevant to this and I would love to share this with you a little bit and because I think there could be some relevance to what you're talking about and you're, again, making like these connections come through. Um, but I'm getting off of a plane and I'm searching through my backpack.

This is a back, it was literally the backpack that I travel with, like the same colors and everything, and I'm looking for my passport. And I pull out my passport and it's got a punch in it, which means it's an expired passport. And I thought, well, why did I put this in here? But I'm walking to immigration and I'm like, well, that's not the passport that I need.

So I keep digging in my backpack and as I'm walking to immigration and I get to the line and I keep pulling things out, but none of them are my valid passport and I keep finding more. More [00:26:00] compartments in my backpack, which I think is note notable, noteworthy. Um, and there are things in these other compartments, so I'm like, well, at some point I must have known about these because I put things in them, but they're, it's also new to me.

Um. The immigration officer calls me over and I keep, I'm continuously looking in my backpack and I'm, I'm saying, I know I have to have it because I got on the plane like, you can't get on the plane without your passport. So I'm like, I'm just, I'm still looking. It's in here. Don't worry. And he's not worried.

He's like just going about his paperwork and I find another passport. That has a punch in it. It's another not invalid passport. Expired passport. And um, so I keep looking, I never do find it, but I find these, a whole bunch of red. Gummy candies, and they're two different kinds. There's a smooth, kind, and a bumpy kind.

And I have two [00:27:00] handfuls of the, these gummies, and I'm saying, can you throw these out because, or do you have a trash can? Can I, can I throw these away? And he gives me this bucket and it's got all these holes. It's designed with all these holes in it. And I'm thinking, I don't even know if this bucket's gonna hold them because they're gonna go through the holes, but they, it does, and I get rid of the, the gummies and then some other things happened.

But those were kind of the key elements as far as I was concerned, was the, the. Backpack with the all the compartments, two invalid passports. I can't find my current passport and these candies so well. Well, 

Robert Moss: it's a fun dream to discuss, but let's do it within the grid of my Lightning Dream work process.

Yes. So we can introduce that to people. It's four step process. We won't talk about it. We'll just do it. First of all, your dream requires a title. It's a story. What's the title of the story? 

Kara Goodwin: No identification. 

Robert Moss: Okay. First feelings coming outta the dream. Feelings inside the dream are interesting, but what are your first feelings coming outta the dream?

Kara Goodwin: Um, [00:28:00] I felt some relief because I. I was just dreaming. Does that count really? 

Robert Moss: Oh, yes, yes, yes. That's, that's a feeling and relief because you were dreaming. Relief, relief, relief because it wasn't playing out in the world around you. Okay? Reality check very quickly. What do you recognize from the stream in the rest of your life?

You take plane trips, presumably you have a passport, presumably. Is there any need to update a passport or update identity documents, literally, or could that come up? Could you find yourself in a situation where you need. To update your passport because it's expiring. Could it relate to the future? 

Kara Goodwin: Um, no, but I did have this come up when I went to Cancun years ago, and I realized the last minute that my passport was expired and we were literally waiting for it to arrive before we could get to the airport.

Robert Moss: Okay, well, so the past could be precedent. It's not impossible, is it that something similar could happen in the future? Not impossible. You may not see it at the moment. We always want to [00:29:00] ask these questions about the literal application of the dream. Uh, psychologically oriented people and a lot of dream workers are forever missing the fact that dreams show us what might or might not happen in the future.

It may not be the main function of a dream, but we want to look at it. So I'm noticing I don't travel as much as I used to, but when I was traveling all the time, I was very conscious of my need to have the correct ID and deal with all sorts of things on that front. What about the backpack? Do you have a backpack like that?

Kara Goodwin: I do. It was the very same colors and style of the backpack that I used for the travel. 

Robert Moss: Not as many, but not as many compartments. Correct. In ordinary reality. And what about candy? Do you eat candy, red candy? 

Kara Goodwin: Well, so sometimes I will, I have a. CBD can gummy that, that will help me with the hypnagogic state.

So it will help me to expand my hypnagogic state, but it, it keeps me from remembering my dreams. So I question whether it's helpful or not. Alright. 

Robert Moss: Oh, that's very, that's very good. That's very useful information. So, very quickly, third question. Um, what [00:30:00] do you want to know now? Where's your curiosity right now?

Kara Goodwin: Well, I wonder if the new compartments in the backpack re reflect realms. Different realms, multidimensional realms. I wonder if I am missing some sort of, you know, gate, uh, identification or something for gatekeeper or something like that to enter into. 

Robert Moss: So what we do now is we move on briskly. Sorry, I'm treating you as if you're in one of my workshops.

I 

Kara Goodwin: love it. 

Robert Moss: You shared the dream. We now play the if it were my dream again, which you must know about. Yes. Yes. We say if it were my dream. We do not tell people, we never presume to tell people what their dreams of their lives mean. If it's my dream, I'm actually more interested in what has expired or I need to get rid of or recognize as no longer relevant than anything else.

I have two passports, two forms of identification, two identity documents which are expired. What aspects of myself, my life, my training are no longer relevant. And [00:31:00] what about when it comes to the candies? There's this literal application that I may need to throw in the trash. Something that I thought was useful but is actually not helping.

So I have three instances here. The two expired passports and the candy that goes in the trash are things it might be time to clean out of my life. You know, now the fact that I've got a backpack with all these compartments fills me with optimism because I have far more going for me and even traveling with me than I may have recognized.

So I wanna get my head back inside the dream and, and, you know, route around in those other compartments and see what is there. I might also, if I can get back inside the dream, want to try to talk to the very tolerant fellow. At the immigration or passport control, he is letting me put my candy in his trash pocket.

He's not rushing me that I'm an idiot with two expired passports. I mean, what a friendly guy. What a friendly gatekeeper. And whether I do it by the dream reentry technique, something I teach and practice myself, which you must know [00:32:00] about, you make it your intention to journey back into the dream. In a workshop we might use shamanic drumming at home.

I'll just use my intention and. Pull up the image and try to go into it, but I might do it just as a written dialogue. I might just sit down and picture that the immigration official is in front of me and ask him some questions and ask him to help me find what I'm searching for because he's so tolerant.

And I know, I mean, he, he could be, he could be actually a standin for some figure. I will meet at a customs control booth or whatever in the future. That's not impossible, and that's not contradictory to the other things that I'm talking about. Dreams could have multiple levels of meeting an application, but if I'm gonna take him for an archetypal or, uh, you know, generic figure for the moment, he is a former, the gatekeeper.

I'm very interested in the forms of the gatekeeper, so I'm gonna make it my game probably as the first action to sit down and write a dialogue. With the gatekeeper, ask him some questions and see what emerges from both of us. Just [00:33:00] letting flow, what wants to flow. 

Kara Goodwin 3: Ah. 

Robert Moss: So, and for temporary closure, I mean, that would be my immediate action plan, but every closure I wanna make myself a bumper sticker.

I mean a mantra banner, a Chiron, something that carries some energy or guidance from the dream. What would that be? What is the phrase that carries from this conversation? Something that you want hold onto. 

Kara Goodwin: That's a good question. Um, I think it's again, around the identity, but the, uh, but uh hmm. Oh my, oh goodness.

I guess I'm not good on the spot. 

Robert Moss: Oh no, it's right that away. Spit that out if you're one of my Go outside down. Spit that out. No negative mantras. Yes. I would say for now I need to identify myself. Mm-hmm. And you see, when we move into that mode, it gets more serious and more interesting and more powerful for me.

'cause I [00:34:00] stressed what is no longer work here, needs to be released. What do I want to claim? I mean, a human being is an animal that has to define itself or be defined by others. I didn't invent that phrase, but it's a true statement I think. How do I define myself? How do I as assert or affirm my identity now today in my life?

In that sense, I need to write my own passport. So this is forward moving stuff. Maybe I'm gonna sit down and do that the other day. Struggling with, with one of the many book ideas I have, I met my favorite deceased professor who's become a sort of stand in for the kind of guy you'd like to hear from. He said, tell me what this is about, Robert.

But I had to identify the fate in one sentence. What did Fundamental was about, and I gave that sentence, I'm so happy with it. It's given me clarity and orientation for the book. I had to identify my book and I've got millions of words. So if I'm [00:35:00] you, I have to identify myself, sit down and write a paragraph that is self identification in my life right now.

That's an interesting assignment. 

Kara Goodwin: Yes. Yes. I do love that. Thank you. You know, and, and you bringing to light to the gatekeeper and the, these qualities of the gatekeeper at part of the, where I said the dream went on a little bit, um, you know, I had a friend who was, who had gotten through immigration. She, um, and she got a boat for us.

And she came back and she said, are our boat's coming and in, you know, a certain amount of time or whatever. And the, and the immigration person said, okay, I wouldn't take that boat if I were you. Uh, there's a later one, but you'll get there faster. And so I'm telling my friend, well, he says we should take a different one, and so forth.

So he really was like watching out for us and just a beautiful. Part of the dream 

Robert Moss: and league gatekeeper. It's always a good thing. It's also an example of one of the [00:36:00] rules of living by synchronicity for every setback look for an opportunity. Mm-hmm. So you're held up, but it's in order to be told a way in which you will not be held up with the next stage of the journey.

For example, very small, benign example of finding an opportunity in a setback. 

Kara Goodwin: Yes. I love that. Well, thank you for taking us through that. And I do love that process that you have, that you share in your courses, in your workshops to help us get more from our dreams and to internalize them and embody them more.

Um, the other piece I. That was fascinating to me is talking about the Mohawk woman and the connection that you have to this woman from, did you say 200 years ago? 300 years ago. 

Robert Moss: 250 years ago. She was in her heyday in the early 17 hundreds. 

Kara Goodwin: Okay. 

Robert Moss: And in just say a word about this, about verification. 'cause we hear all these stories past lives.

This, the other, you know, I'm a former history professor and a former investigative journalist. I do my fact [00:37:00] checking. I do my research. I don't want loose floating, you know, unverified uh, stories. I want good stories, but I want you to test and verify. And that, by the way, is how you feed the skeptic. So in you, so the skeptic doesn't get in your way.

So, okay, I'm dreaming with this native woman from 250 years ago, let's say I find her. I find her in the memoirs of a half Cherokee, half Scottish officer who fought in the war of 1812 for the British and knew her son. Uh, who told the story of how his mother aged five in a Huron village? Not yet. Mohawk Huron, we dad, Huron, uh, in Canada, uh, was captured by a Mohawk raiding party and taken back to the Mohawk castle.

They called them castles and raised as a mohawk. So she starts start south as Huron, not Mohawk is adopted as many captives were by Native American people and becomes part of the. Host Society and Rise has become [00:38:00] Mother of the Wolf clan of the Mohawk people. She has a historical identity. The story of her Precognitive dream at the age of five is in the memoirs of Major John Norton.

I find this, I mean, I'm a historian and then you know, I. Track forward several years later, a Mohawk woman of the Turtle clan comes to one of my workshops in Midwinter. She says, Robert, I've heard your dreaming like my ancestors. We need to get back. That is why I've come to you. We have some big experiences, and then she invites me to Canada to teach 50 Mohawks speaking women who've never led an A non mohawk or a man.

Into their circle before, spend a day teaching them to dream again. It's a beautiful day. And at the lunch there are two beautiful Mohawk women sitting across the table and their surnames are the names of the family of the woman we're talking about, and of the Irishman she tried to influence in the 18th century.

So if you think there's a logic to history, if you think that, you know, [00:39:00] there's a deeper purpose and a deeper connection in our soul families. I know it, and I wrote about all of this and how it works quite openly in two of my books. One is Dreamways of the Iroquois, or Dreamways of the Iroquois Americans would say, but it should be iqua anyway, and the other is the boy who died and came back in which I give the story of my connection with these other lives.

And it's not straightforward. It's not linear, not just linear reincarnation. It's a more complex and interesting story, but this is part of what you can explore for yourself through dreaming. I mean, I have my own stories. They're pretty good stories. They excite people and they tend to enjoy them. But at the end of the day, my purpose is not to sit around telling my own stories.

It's to facilitate the ways by which other people can find their own bigger and braver and brighter stories, and they can be large or small. One of the beauties of dream sharing is. You can share a very small story and all that's in it is a laugh or an awakening, or maybe, you know, something will make you red in the face with embarrassment 'cause it shows you yourself from an [00:40:00] angle you hadn't considered.

But nonetheless, it's a great way of building real friendships. And real relationships and creating small islands of coherence to borrow from the noble laureate, chemist, Ilia Prego, small islands of coherence in a time of crazy imbalance. Groups like this, friendships like this, duets like this, that can share in this way, create a place of order and stability.

A place where it is easier to bring things through from the larger world, where it's also easier to take off for that larger world. You see, dream is both about getting out there beyond the body and the brain, and about bringing more into the body and brain in this world. It works both ways. But you'll never get there if you settle for some theory about dreaming that makes it, you know, chemical wash in the brain or neurons randomly firing or routine processing of day residue, or binds you to a Freudian theory or any theory at all.

As Mr. Young said, dreams are facts from which we must proceed. That the facts [00:41:00] speak, listen to the facts, speaking to you, don't bind them to a theory. 

Kara Goodwin: So thank you for that. And do you find that when you dream. Are all of your dreams, um, as coherent as a lot of them that you've shared? And are there, are there nights where you don't remember your dreams or are there Sometimes I try to write my dreams down and I don't even know where to start.

I've only got like a, such a fragment or there's more of a feeling and, and not so much of a story. 

Robert Moss: Well, uh, it's, it's variable. I mean, there are nights when I don't write anything down, not because I have nothing, but because there's been so much that really I'm feeling too lazy about trying to separate out what I want to keep, and nothing feels urgent.

That's why feelings are so important. I. You know, are you excited? Uh, you want to go forward with this? Are you frightened? Does this feel urgent? Does this feel personal? Does this feel like some calamity about to happen? Does this feel like some party's about to begin? [00:42:00] Your feelings will guide you if your feelings are rather neutral.

I. Uh, then there's no real impetus to work on the dream. I mean, if you want to make it your practice to be a dreamer, you'll journal everything you can, just, just because you'll find it has something in it. But I'll be guided by my feelings about how much time and immediate attention I give. I love doing research and I'm a very bookish fellow.

So, uh, when I'm given a dream, it gives me a chance to do some more research, acquire some more books. Despite AI at Google, I still have books arriving in my house every day. Uh, I'll do that. That's the first thing I will do. Jung called it amplification by which he meant he'd, he'd go to his own immense library, heavy on mythology, anthropology, archeology, literature, philology, and he'd follow that strange word or that clue that might be related to an Assyrian myth.

Uh, and I'm the same. I mean, my days typically start even before coffee, almost before going to the bathroom. Following a lead from my dream, writing some quick [00:43:00] report, but then researching a lead. This morning it was pu, there's this, this hole through which the first humans emerge and stop looking like lizards as they did in the underworld and start walking the earth like humans 

Kara Goodwin: Did you already know that word?

Pu 

Robert Moss: Pu I've heard it. I mean, I've been to the Southwest. I've had big experiences in the southwest. I was in the dream, my dream self, struggling to keep up with the accents and, and different languages being spoken. Here's both PU and PU waking. I think, well, it, it's gotta be pu because we're clearly in the southwest, so I knew something of that.

I do receive lots of words and phrases in my dreams that I initially don't recognize at all. And being like most Anglos, a lazy linguist. Even if I half recognize something, I may not be able to give you a definition. I mean, this is, this is part of the challenge of bringing things through from the dream world.

If we know absolutely nothing about a certain subject, it's very hard to keep [00:44:00] anything at all. I used to have a lot of. Quantum physics, quantum mechanics oriented dreams. But since I'm a bit of a scientific ignoramus, I couldn't really understand the ones that had a lot of terminology, including the ones where someone like Wolfgang Poly is scribbling formulas on a blackboard.

Well, if I had the mathematical knowledge, I might be on the brink of a. World changing discovery, but I don't. I flunked out of math in the fourth grade and really never caught up. So I realized that although my dreams might try out that language, they're not gonna prosper very much. When I dream of Wolfgang Paley, who's a world class dreamer and help Jung evolve his theory of synchronicity, I dream of Wolfgang Paley bobbing around in a bathtub.

A I.

Spoken languages. Written languages. I'm better at those because I am bookish. I and I love literature and I'm prepared to read very [00:45:00] widely. Nonetheless. Unlike my Dutch, my typical Dutch friend is fluent in at least six languages and competent in another 12. You know, actually one of my favorite Dutch Dream Shamanic types says she's now fluent in, I think, 27.

And I don't doubt it, but most of us, Anglos. Have it too soft. You know, we're not really required to operate in other languages. I can operate in a few I Greek and Latin, even though I had a classical education, a very thin, but in my dreams, all of these things come alive and I get words in other languages as well.

It was a word from the old I. Iroquois family of languages. They actually originally Huron when that word on that really oriented my whole approach to dreams and on contemporary, uh, native Kara Goodwins, didn't have it in their vocabulary. Had to find it in the records of Jesuit missionary from the 16 hundreds.

Who wrote from Huron Country, the country of Ireland woman, the lady we've been talking about, he wrote from Huron, uh, country the most. These savages say, [00:46:00] 'cause they call them savages. These savages say the most important thing about dreams is the ook. And what is that? It is the secret wish of the soul.

Especially as revealed in dreams and they gather, I'm paraphrasing now. They gather round the dreamer in their community in the morning to hear the dream and help them identify the ook, the wish of the soul that is being expressed in the dream, and then to take action to satisfy the wish of the soul.

'cause they say this is not done. The dream will become sick. One of their souls will leave them. Now, think about that for a moment. There's a whole practice more than a theory. There's a whole practice of dreaming, healing, and living life itself in this funny word, which I initially heard without seeing, it was a pre-literate language.

They had no writing for these things. When I found that word, when I understood what she was talking about, I was, oh my goodness. How could we, in our cultures, in our societies, have forgotten [00:47:00] this? Dreams show us the secret wishes of the soul of the larger self, and they recall us to the purpose. For which we might have come here.

And if we can align ourselves with that purpose, maybe we'll do better. And if we forget about it and don't serve the soul, maybe we'll get sick, dejected, chronic fatigue, depression, all those other symptoms of soul loss, because part of us that is. Soul oriented goes away 'cause it doesn't like us anymore.

And so we get the sad perspective of all these people who've lost their dreams in every sense, lost their dreams of the life of the night, lost their sense of purpose because they have not been heeding the secret roches of the soul and have not had a society or a culture or even a friend who helps 'em to follow the right path.

Kara Goodwin: Wow. When I hear you talk about that, it makes me think of, you know, in, in modern society, especially in the west, you know, we have kind of an epidemic of, of this, [00:48:00] um, soul disconnect, you know, where we're living in a way that we've been. Trained and we're, we're really not giving ourselves the opportunity to live from a soulful way in our waking life a lot of the times, and how, how strong that can come through.

I would imagine in the dream state when we're not, when we're so busy, you know, from a day to day, moving from one thing to the next and this item on my to-do list to this one, and, and there's really, you know, we're just plowing through life and then we get that time. To sleep. I'm sure it just screams through in our dream state, you know, in, in modern times equally as much, I'm sure as they, you know, you talked about with the our, with our ancestors, how they were on the edge of survival and how important dreaming is in that state.

You know, we don't have, we have a lot of creature comforts now, [00:49:00] and we're not. You know, in the literal sense, on the edge of survival in the same way. But from a soul perspective, you know, a lot of people are in dire straits. 

Robert Moss: Yeah. Yeah. And actually, I mean, you and I are talking as reasonably comfortable.

Middle class Westerners, Euro-Americans, a lot of the world doesn't fit the description that you just gave. You know, a lot of the world does not. Let's remember that. 

Kara Goodwin 3: That's true. A 

Robert Moss: lot of, there are a lot of dreamers there, and there are a lot of dreamers among them who are trying to dream their way out of the horrible situations they're in.

And even in our situations, for goodness sake, what the hell has happened to our society, our politics, all the rest of it. Can we somehow, we dream all of this, dream our world into a big rollover, like a body turning over and sleep and find that everything is better when we open our eyes again. Uh, well it might sound silly, but uh, I don't know whether what the answer to that question is, but I do know that in [00:50:00] crazy times, having little pods or partnerships, it couldn't be just two people just with one friend who can share these deeper stories.

Which might be light. They don't have to be heavy or complex stories, but they take you beyond the level of ordinary. Consciousness, they take you into realms of perhaps deeper understanding and deeper application. I mean, again, I think of, you know, the mohawk in the starving times, you know, it's mid-winter, you're running outta food, you know, your supply of ped corn and, and, and, and, uh, and, and, and meat and dried meat is, is almost gone.

You, you are going to send a team out on a hunt to try and get you something to eat. Where do you go? And in that extremity, they would ask the dreamers, those who could dream with say the Wolf or the Raven or the hawk. To go out and use the eyes and the pedaling mobility of the hawk to find the game animals.

And so they could go out the next day and find the deer and bring back the meat. 

Kara Goodwin 3: Mm-hmm. [00:51:00] And it 

Robert Moss: worked more often than not because when it didn't work, you didn't give credence to that kind of dream anymore. 'cause he or she wasn't that good. You turned somewhere else. So this was part of the survival system and although we've got all this technology and gee whiz stuff, it is not necessarily irrelevant to how we get by in the most.

Diurnal practical terms because as I say, it gives you things beyond what is on the table in ordinary terms. So once again, dreaming works both way ways. I mean, I see a lot of people in my ambit who come out of, let's say, for example, eastern philosophical religious traditions and tend to be very correct in the sense it's all about, uh, you know, moksha, liberation from this world and getting off the cycle of rebirth, et cetera, and reaching some higher standard.

Yet dreaming as a practice in Eastern cultures is very clearly about two things. Not one. Part of it is about spiritual ascension and liberation. Part of it is about managing in this world of [00:52:00] samsara, this world of illusion and repetition, managing and doing better. Finding your way better maybe with a certain kind of detachment, spiritual detachment from the fruits of action that you have to acquire by spiritual ascension.

But it's not all about going up the grade spiritually. It's also about bringing things to bear in ordinary life that can get you through. So in my approach to these things, I'm not a mystic at all. I'm a practitioner. I'm practical about it. I think it's impractical not to be concerned about soul, not to be concerned about where your soul is and what your soul wants.

I think it's impractical to go around as a hollow person, not surfing your deeper purposes and and not finding meaning in your life. I think that's very impractical. I also think that, as I say, dreams gives us very specific solutions, tools, and suggestions for immediate application. Mm-hmm. So this is a practical approach.

Kara Goodwin: Right. And I think it was you I was hearing not too long [00:53:00] ago in my world, um, but it probably was in your course where that, that example of the, maybe it was the ear, the Mohawk woman, um, and her culture, her tribe. Is it, is it correct that there are examples of like the dreamer dreaming of an animal who is beckoning to them?

So I, what I'm thinking of is maybe there was a deer who had an injury or had something and they were ready to go to the next realm and they were draw, they were trying to draw the dreamer to them to help them for, you know, to pass to the next realm 

Robert Moss: story exactly like that. And, uh. Hunting cultures typically are very respectful of the game animals.

They respect that the game man animal is being asked to give its life to feed another species. So they surround the hunt itself with all sorts of sacred, uh. Substitutes [00:54:00] sometimes sacred rituals, and there's certainly the belief that the dreamer who can find the gay animal the deal, let's say before it is killed, is asking its permission to take its life.

It might sometimes be, as you said, the gay animal is actually offering its life. There are stories like that. And actually they get deeply moving when you go against, uh, go amongst one of the, the servant related peoples, the reindeer people of Central Asia, people like the een. Uh, they, um, they uh, piers Ky wrote a book called The Reindeer People about Them.

They live with both domesticated and wild. Deer. So they ride reindeer like horses, but they also hunt reindeer. And they say that in every family there is a reindeer. Who is the willing sacrifice? The reindeer is connected to the big dreamer in the family. Their lives are connected, intertwined. If the human is ill, the reindeer will take on the illness.

If the human is facing death, the reindeer may take on their [00:55:00] death in exchange for good life. Respect. Good food. Good conditions. Now that's a, a degree of engagement and, and of mutual uh, sharing mutual sacrifice, which is really quite extraordinary. And I think it again reflects times and situations 'cause there are people who still live like this.

It's not dead for indigenous people who still live with this understanding. There are indigenous people who think that they can not only take the form of a bird or animal and their energy body, but that they can enter the mind of a bird or animal and operate within it and be like that to that extent.

Uh, and of course they see everything as alive. They see trees as alive, stones, as alive, all the rest of it. But, uh, you know, our divorce from nature in this sense. Of the mobility of consciousness, the ability of consciousness to shift into different forms, to dream in the heartwood of an oak, uh, to feel with the heart of the deer that is giving its life, or to hunt with the sensors [00:56:00] of my little Lucy, my miniature mountain lion, who just loves to be a hunter.

Uh, well, some of us do it. Some of us still do it. I mean, we're not dead to these things. It's just our society hasn't encouraged it. And one of the things that I've tried to do, and that's why I was glad to demonstrate the Lightning Dream work process, this simple four step, fast, fun way of sharing dreams and stories.

One of the things I've tried to do is to. Encourage conditions and processes by which people can share more with each other of these realms from these realms and do something good with it. Because one of the reasons that dreaming almost died in our society is it wasn't socially rewarded and people didn't know how to talk about it, apart from typically a girl and a mother, they often didn't know who to turn to.

So that. We, some of us are trying to change, although it might seem a slow process. It is a passionate and very lively process for those who are part of it. 

Kara Goodwin: That's beautiful. And I, I'm, I'm sorry. I'm just [00:57:00] noticing the time and I, I know we're right up against the edge of it. So you do a lot of work with the Shift Network.

You've got a wonderful course coming up as we're recording this, and I mentioned the course that I've been taking through them. What types of, how can people engage with your work in terms of the cor, the courses, the recordings, and your amazing books? 

Robert Moss: Well, they wanna go to mass streams.com. My website, I do teach courses almost back to back for the Shift Network.

We're starting a long advanced course. One of whose new features is nine of the 18 modules are devoted to dreaming with masters. Uh, so we take nine exemplary figures, uh, who did a lot of dreaming, and we learn from them. With them. We make journeys and exercises. Inspired by the Yates, for example, the poet Yates.

We going to realms of Celtic and Chapman? Of course, Jung is obvious, but we'll have a spin on Jung here that might be surprising. The Mohawk woman, the Mohawk clan mother I talked about. [00:58:00] She's an author, Harriet Tubman conductor, the Underground Railroad, whose dreams guided, escaping slaves, ma perhaps a dreaming for liberation and of the survival of methods from the old world of Africa.

For example, beyond what we routinely know about. Then I lead my, my training for teachers of active dreaming. Uh, and we've so far graduated more than 500 from Senegal to Seattle, from Vanuatu to Victoria. I kid you not, it's absolutely wonderful. These things work online better than I had thought possible before Covid made me.

Focus on online activities so you can come if you like, and go very deep with this in the best kind of intentional family, uh, family of creative spirits who will cheer you on in your soul's journey and encourage you to deepen your practice. I. 

Kara Goodwin: Beautiful. And you have a cornucopia of books, um, under your name.

So, because I can see them in the background, and I know you own a lot of books, but [00:59:00] you have penned many, many books and you have an amazing resource on your website so that people can navigate to the best title for them. But, um, where could people start with your work? 

Robert Moss: Conscious Streaming, which is the first 30 year, it'll be 30th anniversary next year.

Good to speak. Wow. Congrat, congratulations. Those years. Go Conscious Streaming was the first and still the foundation book. And I, I must admit, sometimes when I open I think, oh, I could have stopped here. Of course there's a huge amount of new stuff and exciting stuff and the other books. But I would say conscious streaming is the one, um, to start with and, and to go back to.

Kara Goodwin 3: Out 

Robert Moss: all of them. Now I feel guilty because it's like a father being asked who's your, and you've mentioned the oldest, and 

Kara Goodwin 3: what about the young ones? What about me? 

Robert Moss: Uh, I think that, I think the Dream Gates, which was my second, which is the Frequent Flyers book that, that they was very, [01:00:00] very, very radical.

When first published in 1998, the new edition is from 2010 or something like that. And what I say there is now more understood and accepted than it was, but uh, actually someone wrote of me like 30 years ago. Robert's problem is he is forever, so far ahead of the advancing caravan. He's forever endang being sculpted by hostile Indians, 

Kara Goodwin 3: which is funny 

Robert Moss: in terms of how life turned out for me, because of course I did.

To some extent go native amongst an indigenous American people. I didn't go seeking it, but it called to me. Uh, so, you know, but anyway, so Dream Gates is, is a, a book that's very important in my, the Dreamers Book of the Dead, which has a lot about my relationship with Yates and how Yates turned up and said, in a visionary journey I was leading and said, what better guide to the other side than a poet?

And then guided me. He wanted to write a Book of the Dead himself. He had several goes at it. He guided me as I wrote the book and introduced me to [01:01:00] characters. And I write about this quite openly. I mean, it's quite astonishing, really, um, that more people haven't made more or less of it because it is a remarkable story of communication across dimensions, between, uh, a writer who is not channeling, but actively and creatively collaborating with an intelligence.

From beyond this world about things that affect all of us. Wow. 

Kara Goodwin: Well, you've given me some good ideas for upcoming reads for myself. So Robert, thank you so much for being here and for all of the work that you've contributed to humanity and to making people active dreamers. It's such important work, and I'm really, really grateful for my time with you today.

Robert Moss: So what you are doing to spread the dreaming and bring more people to knowledge of all the gifts it holds and may you live your best dreams. 

Kara Goodwin: Thank you so much. 

Thank you for listening to this episode of Soul Elevation. Please take a moment to think about someone in your [01:02:00] life who might be uplifted or have their curiosity sparked by this content, and please send it onto them. Let's keep sharing high frequency, empowering content to reinforce the highest potential for humanity.

I also invite you to subscribe to this content. Thank you for your support and I'll see you for the next episode of Soul Elevation. 

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