647. Can You Visit the Afterlife in a Dream? Robert Moss

0:07 Hello and welcome to Soul Elevation, Guiding Your Ascension to New Heights. I'm your host, Kara Goodwin, and I'm so thrilled to be joined by Robert Moss today. Thank you so much for being here, Robert. Always good to dream with you. Yes, this is so exciting. I'm gonna just read your bio really quickly. I I think people know who you are, but ~ just to start things off on the right foot and then we're gonna get into it. Robert Moss has been a dream traveler since doctors pronounced him clinically dead in a hospital in Hobart, Tas 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 shamanic and mystical practices for journeying to realms beyond the physical and growing creative imagination.

1:00 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 New York Times bestselling author, poet, journalist, and independent scholar. His many books on dreaming, shamanism, and imagination include Conscious Dreaming, The Secret History of Dreaming, The Boy Who Died and Came Back, and many more. He's launching a new advanced online course for the Shift Network, Psychopom Training, in on October 22nd. And his website is mossdreams.com.

1:42 So welcome again, Robert. What a joy and an honor to have you here. I'm so excited to talk to you. I find you infinitely fascinating, and I'm so excited about your course that's coming up, Psychopomp Training. I I eagerly signed up for this training. I can't wait for it to start ~ next week already. And so let's start with this word psychopom. In case this is a new word for anybody, what does that mean and how does that apply to the course? Well, a psychopomp is literally a guide of souls. And goodness me, we all need some soul guidance. In this day and age, I mean, where all of us are liable to suffer some degree of what shamans call soul loss, losing part of our vital identity and energy because of bad things that are thrown at us or because of our difficulty in handling them.

2:35 the psychopomp training, this is an eighteen week version of something that in a sense I've been teaching and practicing forever. It's an eighteen the deepest The most wide ranging. It's to do with being better prepared to face death, dying in the afterlife, but that means being much better prepared to face life and to approach life with courage, clarity, and a sense of divine comedy. If you can make death your friend rather than a dread, you're going to be better off dealing with what life throws at you in the everyday ups and downs and the turmoil. So part of the purpose of the training is to make friends with death, to make death an ally to actually meet your personified death.

3:17 And negotiate with it about how you can best live this life and be best prepared to live the life beyond this one. The understanding here in the psychopath approach is you're in the afterlife right now. You and me, we're both in the afterlife right now, so is anybody joining us. We came from another world before we were born into this one. We go to another world after this one. This world, this life, as the Buddha said, is a bridge. It's a bridge. Walk on it, don't build on it. Don't take things as being more solid or more solemn than they need to be. So it's a course that has nothing funereal about it. You meet your death, you you discover the conditions upon which you can live a fuller life, you pr rehearse for what will follow death by visiting places in the afterlife.

4:06 You confirm and experience how easy it is, how natural to talk to people who are alive on the other side of death. There's nothing weird about it. Our ancestors have understood this way, way back, and it's very strange that a lot of modern people don't just accept that, okay, you'll you Your dead can be with you in the sense that they can drop in, you can call on them. They might be hanging around for for difficult reasons. You might have to do a little bit of work as a psychopath, caring for the souls of the departed to get them moving in the right direction. But basically, part of the understanding of this. Contact with the deceased is easy and natural. Why? Because they're alive.

4:46 They don't have physical bodies anymore. They might be confused about their condition. They might need help with that. They might still be around. They might be okay for a while. They might think we're hopeless. They're clu we're clueless. We need guidance from them. Or they come calling, especially in dreams. For all the reasons we call on each other and then some. They might come as family healers and counselors, as everyday angels. They might come for healing and forgiveness. Which is always available across the apparent barrier of death. And in dreams, of course, we go traveling. We travel beyond the body and the brain. We travel beyond ordinary reality. And amongst the many places we visit in dreams are places of transition, or at least temporary residence, where the departed are very fully alive.

5:32 Hmm. I love that. I love that there is this element of using the dream to prepare for death and to befriend death. And that's something that you have taught me through your work is that that change of perception. I remember reading, I think it was ~ maybe it was the Dreamgates. I think it was where I was reading about ~ death at death as a friend and death as a as a being. As an entity, as a in a ~ you know, a per there was a personification there that I hadn't considered before. And and the the service that it's doing in escorting you from one world to another.

6:15 But you also mentioned something really interesting, which was the negotiation part of it. And the ~ I think that's how you said it, but the the kind of having a say in. In death's actions, I don't know if you want to talk a little bit more about that. Well let's talk about two aspects of what you brought up in a really thrillingly simple and inviting way. is dealing with a personified death. Someone else may or may not find this a useful thing to do, to have some personification of death. I have a number. I don't just have one. But let me give you an episode in which I met death in a very personal and personified way on a train.

6:57 Everyday circumstances. Dreaming isn't just about what happens with our eyes closed, right? It's about becoming more conscious, more lucid in the dream of waking life. And it's about other things. So I'm on the train from where I live in upstate New York. to New York City and I play a little game that I'd recommend to people if you're a passenger in a car or a train or something like that, not if you're at the wheel. I close my eyes and I just play with seeing how much of the landscape that we are passing, the beautiful Hudson River Valley, I can see through my closed eyelids. I'm interested in seeing the ordinary landscape without using my physical eyes. So I'm rating myself. Okay, I get a B for that, the barn's on the wrong side I saw the barn on the wrong side of the house.

7:43 I get maybe a B plus. Asked for that I saw three cows, there are actually four, that kind of thing. Very very everyday exercise in what? In clairvoyance, in scene with your eyes closed. Suddenly, with my eyes closed, I see a figure dressed all in black, with a rather luxuriant moustache, wearing a flat-brimmed black hat and swinging a lasso, yet he doesn't look like a cow. I don't get this. I open my eyes, he's not there. I'm seeing someone who's absolutely not in the landscape. I close my eyes again and I start having a mental touch. Who are you? ~ I am Yama, my dear.

8:23 Or Yama is the name of the Lord of Death, the Hindus and the Buddhist. But he's often shown in ferocious guise with war tusked and and all. The still is like a a civilized chap except he's wearing the sort of western mouthwick. Doesn't it? He sounds like a Maharaja, he sounds like an Indian prince who's been educated at Oxford, my dear. But why is he in this why are you wearing that? ~ I adapt to circumstances, my dear, he says. And I say to him, what I'd love to have conversation with you. I know you would, my dear, but you know I would have to put my noose around your neck. Now this is where it begins to get real.

9:04 Truth comes with noose butts. Yama, in the mythologies, in the visions, takes the soul out of the body with his noose. So I'm sitting on the train, surrounded by commuters, many of them New York State bureaucrats. And I'm letting Yama, the Lord of Death, put his noose around my neck, and it's absolutely real. It's far more real than this fellow on his cell phone or this person having hushed conversation with someone at the office. I'm talking to Yammer. We talk about many things. You've talked about life and death. We talk about coming events in the world, he's expecting You can deal with process some odd as souls because of various disasters that lie ahead.

9:46 So that was an encounter, just the beginnings of an encounter. I have a memorable session with Yama. That's personified version of death, and I've tried to deal with Yama occasionally on behalf of other people, not just myself. Try to negotiate a life extension. I don't think Yama will mind me telling this story because one of the one of the responsibilities that this personified death has laid upon me is I have to keep coming up with interesting stories. I have to entertain my death, like Shaherazad and the Arabian Knights. Part of my deal with my death is I have to keep producing, amusing, entertaining. stories that are sufficiently interesting for my death to give me a little more time.

10:28 So now we're into the second aspect of what you asked about, which is the life contract. I've worked with people who have been facing physical death, literal death. quite closely, quite intimately. I mean we've been told that they have a limited length of time, for example. We've got stage four metastasizing cancer, for example, in several of these cases. And because of what was accomplished with one of them many years ago, now forty years ago really, I I've sometimes suggested the following and sometimes guided at plain psychopomp at least Anan Kaurra, friend of the soul, or the person who's facing the probability of physical death. Suppose you could find yourself in the presence of your personified death or the envy of your death, the death your death angel.

11:16 Suppose you could be there. And suppose you're asked to respond to a series of questions about what matters, like you're looking over you're doing a bit of a life review, you're looking over the life that you're leaving, and you're asked be asked questions like, What do you most regret not having done in this life that you're leaving? Or When you look over this life, what do you most regret? What moment do you most regret when you could not find the courage to do something that might have made everything different? Or or how do you most regret what do you most regret in terms of causing harm to another person? You go through a questionnaire of that kind. I'm actually now describing a core moment, a core segment in a training of this kind, in the course of making death your ally and Checking the terms of your life contract and negotiating for life extension.

12:09 So the idea, the the non-fantastic fantasy, is your death is available and it's listed. You have a chance to discuss with your personified death or its endo or its representative why you should be given more life. What will you do? What will you do with it that's worthwhile? And in order to make a decision about that and negotiate the terms of your contract really well, you need to look. You have to do kind of life review. Look over your life, decide what was wrong, what was right, what was unsatisfactory. Look at the moments of defeat and the moments of triumph, look at the moments of shame, the moments of guilt. Look at what you would like to do if you could have a second chance in relation to all these areas where you ca caused harm to someone, where someone caused harm to you.

12:57 And by the end of this conversation, you in a sense have drawn out your contract, your agreement, for more life in the body in this earth. If I'm given more life in the body in the zip, I will do such a th I will write that book. I can't make amends to that person because they've moved along or gone on, but I can do something that will be compensation in a sense, will be atonement in a sense for the harm I caused to that person. I will show the courage that failed me before by this specific action. Well you made a contract like that, and of course you're meant to live it. And it it might might not be easy. It gives you a direction and I think the clarity could ~ Well, in the first case when I actually structured it like this, I saw it literally she would agree, I saw it literally give thirty six years and counting of additional life for someone who had an appointment with death that she was able to postpone.

14:01 Wow. Well, that is amazing. Thank you for sharing. So you you did leave us on a cliffhanger where you were on the train and you and Death, Yama had the noose around your neck and you're still here to tell the story. So how did you did you renegotiate? Is that was that part of that encounter? w this wasn't the big contract moment. This was a moment of encounter. But I summarized the follow-up, which and the follow-up now is almost forty years of of of this connection. The follow-up is basically that my central agreement with this form of debt is I have to keep creating and sharing the stories.

14:43 I'm a storyteller and a story maker. You remember Shaherazad in ~ in The Thousand One Nights. My story is similar to hers. She has to come up with a good story every night, or else the Tyrant King will kill her in the morning. She has to leave things on a you say cliffhanger. She has to leave things on a cliffhanger every night so that the Tyrant King will want the next instalment and won't cut her head off. I mean, listen. This is how I feel about my life, and I've had episodes in my life that reflect this very exactly. Do you want to hear one? All right, so I was reading one of my creative writing retreats. The people who are after me to do online creative writing retreats now, but I'm mostly teaching online.

15:26 I'm not sure whether they will or not, but I'd led a five week, a five day five day residential writing retreat, a wonderful place out in that red cedar forest in the foothills of the Cascades in Washington. And to goose myself during the writing retreat, I create a framed story, a story within which other stories will be told. This is my own writing, my own writing retreat. The framed story is Shaherazar. A writer has made a deal with death. He will die unless he can keep producing stories that will entertain death. Within that I start writing a story about a Roman centurion in the wake of the crucifixion, back then, in that in early times of that part of the world.

16:08 And his girlfriend is a Phoenician witch who's very good with dreams. I start writing this, I don't know why. Now I'm on the plane. I'm physically on an airplane going home from Seattle Airport. And as usual, I'm curious to see what the world will give me in the way of incidents that are like dream symbols. And my theme is still entertaining death. On comes an immensely tall woman, she looks immensely tall. She is tall, but she's got huge heels. on her black leather thigh boots and she's dressed all in black leather over a buskill and she's wearing a top hat and she sits next to me and she parks a pudgy little man next to the window next to her.

16:49 We might or might not ever come back to her. And she asks for Crame de Moth, no they don't have creme de moth, so she has a double looking around the plane and said, Mmm, ~ it's a good flight. And I look at her. Yes, she said, all the seats are full. Actuarially she says, if the plane is going to crash, 20% of the seats will be empty. This is the start of the conversation. And I'm looking at her and on her hands she's wearing gloves with cut out fingers and there are death snips on the back of her gloves. This is my companion. I'll just give a few highlights to the conversation. Comes out fairly early on, but she has a profession. She's a dominatrix. Now this is not my theme.

17:30 So the conversation is a bit bumpy. But then she says, knowing nothing of me, she says, You think the dead talk to us in our dreams? Absolutely, I say. good. My dead husband turned up last week. He was in the rock scene. He was shot and killed in a bar in Seattle. It was in the newspapers. He turned up last week and he said, I've got a great job. I'm doing the music for dreams that are being made, for movies that are being made for people to see in their dreams. I said, What do you think of that? I said, That's wonderful. I think that's a great story. And okay, I'll just jump to two more incidents. ~ this was several hours of a gusting conversation of this quality with a woman wearing death's head, a dominatrix, a death's head dominatrix.

18:18 Yeah. She says at a certain point, I'd love to read a story about Jezebel, and I'm searching my memory, who is Jezebel? She fills it in, she says, those Phoenician witches were so good with dreams, it's as if her dead husband or son was whispering in her ear, perfect. Okay, now we've had another pause in the conversation. I have not revealed much about my life, really. Not much. She looks at me and she says, I love crows and I love Of course you do. There is a collective noun to describe a group of crows or ravens. Do you know what it is?

19:00 And I'm very proud of this. yes. A murder of crows? An unkindness of ravens. She sniffs. Everybody knows that. It's a collective noun for both crows and ravens. Do you know what it is? You're going to tell me, yes, I will. It is a storytelling of crows. Or a storytelling of ravens. And I'll tell you why. I saw this once. There was a storytelling of crows listening to a crow who was trying to tell a story to the group. And he must have been a very bad storyteller because when he finished, the other crows pecked him to death.

19:43 I'm sitting here on the plane, and life is giving me what most people would not credit to be a plausible literal experience. in the immediate wake of my setting myself up by writing the frame story of death requiring stories, good stories from the teller, or else the teller would be taken out. So ~ out of all this I have something to say which might be of interest. We're dreaming all the time. I mean all these people go into this almost theological discussion or neuroscientific discussion of what's going on in your brain, what's going on with your God or your gods, and how can you tell if you're dreaming or not?

20:24 Is it all illusion? Is it all reality? From my point of view we're dreaming all the time. And the trick is just to become more conscious, more aware of how this works or does not work for you. And be more of a player. at all those liminal spaces where you're somewhere in between are lovely spaces to do more in. where so many things are accessible, including easy contact with the deceased, which is where we started this conversation. And so this was you said you were dreaming with your eyes open. this was an actual the the story with the Dominatrix on the plane. That happened in waking life. exactly literally what happened. It's it's it's a su it's a short version of what happened.

21:07 I I guess I should share the last scene, says the pudgy man, the dominatric is parked the dominatrix ha has parked by the window and as we're getting off the plane she introduces him. This is Homer and I say, ~ Homer, good luck with your odyssey. I'm trying to be funny. And he looks at me blurly and he says, All I want is a one lane bowling alley. What? A one lane bowling alley? Yes, says Homer. Something to do when you get old. So that's it's almost as good as a Dominatrix with a froze peppy. No, that is that is I get this a lot.

21:47 ~ I tell a story from my travels Exactly as it happened. Sometimes I dilute it because I think this will just be too much. And people can't fathom that this was played out like this step by step in ordinary reality. It was. It is. I don't travel that much anymore, so I don't have so many stories from the Bardo of air travel, but there were there were many, many Many and even when I'm not travelling they come to me, and then the cat my literary cat pulls a book off the shelf and it falls open at a certain page and that is exactly what I needed for the day, for example. So the magic of synchronicity is that well it's like this.

22:29 In dreaming, whether it's shamanic journeying or meditation or sleep dreams or lucid dreams, in luc in in dreaming we tend to get out there, we tend to go through the veils or curtains of ordinary perception into another reality. It might be a fantastic reality, it might be a fantastically real reality. Th the Nowdu in West Australia say that the dream world is really, really real. It's really real. The ordinary world is just real. The Through the curtains and veils of ordinary perception when you go dreaming, trancing, journeying, through synchronicity, through coincidence, through meaningful coincidence, the powers and entities of the deeper world come pushing through the veils and make things happen with you and around you in the physical world.

23:14 I think that's the that's the inside-out nature of dreams and synchronicity. So we've got to be alert, we want to be alert and available to play. And yeah. I love it. ~ you ~ there have been a couple of things that you've mentioned in the time that we've been talking. You, well, first of all, you had said, ~ I I would love to get to the dream that you had last night, just to get an idea of what the great Robert Moss, the great dreamer, you know, what's a typical, a typical night? They're probably not typical, but you mentioned Arabian nights ~ very briefly, just in passing. But last night I dreamt one part of my dream and I feel like and I've been watching your supplemental your bonus material for your course and so I feel like it ~ juiced up my dream state a bit.

24:10 But I was ~ with a couple of people who have in my world who have a little bit of shamanic training, ~ maybe not to the same extent that you do, but ~ but we were at a performance of ~ Aladdin. We were watching a live performance of Aladdin. And it was ~ even though that was, we were in a theater, so it was happening. I don't remember a lot of it. I just remember it was Aladdin. ~ but I do also remember that throughout this dream, there was a ~ gigantic feather that kept coming and ~ fanning at me. and I don't it was one of those things that was just kind of happening out Again, it wasn't the main thing, but when I woke up, I was like, yeah, I kept getting this feather that was fanning me.

24:58 ~ and to me, you know, I I think of hawks, I think of eagles, I, you know, especially like big feathers. ~ but I think of shamans as well. And so I and I think of you, you know, as a as a shaman, as a very adept shaman. So anyway, I would love to hear a bit about. your dreamscape. What what was it what interesting dreams have come to you lately? Well, the dream from last night is a very short story. It's amusing and it is also it also reflects some of the things that go on in dreaming according to your, let us say, your vocation, your profession, your orientation.

25:41 So in my dream I'm reading a dream report that I have written. It's a printer. It's a one page printer, Times New Rome, and it's exactly the way that things look when they're printed out from my digital from my digital dream reports. My journals are now all It gives me a search search. But I'm it's a I I've printed out one page. And the page is about a discovery I have made. I discovered that Tolkien, yes, Lord of the Rings, Robert Tolkien. Tolkien actually experimented with Tarot. And this is going to be very exciting to people, because people think Tolkien wouldn't touch tarot anything like that, wouldn't like what he called authority. But in my dream report, which I'm reading in my dream.

26:24 I discovered that not only did Tolkien actually experiment with Tarot, but he had an experience involving the magici the magician card. The magician a common in the old ride awake de ride-away deck w which which was a sort of shimmering revelation, maybe. And I'm thinking I'll write a substack article about this. This would be quite interesting. And I get I'm fully lucid. I get out of bed, I go to my computer, I actually go through my digit dig digital files. It's only at this point, having checked a couple of times, both all the drop box and my journal. I've never read this report. This the dream the inner dream was in some inner court of dreaming and it never made it out of the dreamlands.

27:06 It's only in my dream that I have this report. Referring to an earlier dream maybe in a More secret in a dimension in a level of dreaming. So, anyway, if you gave me research leads, I mean I've now been researching whether it's remotely possible that Tolkien did use terror. I found no evidence that he did. However, I have written to a friend who wrote the book on Tolkien's friend Charles Williams, and MLBs used to drink together with the bird and baby. There's a cover for you, and Mark's for the. Williams wrote a supernatural thriller that was called about Tarot, about the Great of Trinks. And he was we've told you on that for six years. So maybe there is something there. So this is probably a very boring story, except that people have some Tyrone, The dream itself is rather boring.

27:51 Hey, I'm looking at a piece of paper, then I find I don't have it, and then I'm online for an hour trying to track it down. But it takes you into one of the many kinds of dreaming. I mean there are vocational dreams. There are dreams that support and orient, for example, a line of thinking or a line of research. I've actually written a chapter on Tolkien as a dreamer, which I haven't quite to publish yet. So and I dreamed of Tolkien myself, not just it. So that's just a sample from last night. a typical dream for me these days that I'm not travelling Marty is I'm leading yet another workshop. On live, as the French say, face to face, person to person.

28:31 Sometimes at places where I have taught a lot, sometimes at wonderful places which where we're never taught in this world, ~ and are probably in a parallel reality. So they're not pre-cognitory dreams. My dreams of leading workshops are often precognitive in the past. Yes, I was going to go there. Yes, look out for that person who's having some personal drama that might be difficult for the group. ~ give space to that person who's going to bring wonderful dream with dragon flying out of the basement. Be ready for this, be ready for catering issue, be ready to time the drumm sessions. So I'd have lots of lots of professional, let's say, dreams of leading the sort of shamanic dream work stuff at different places around the world.

29:13 Now I think these dreams which are constant, I mean I'm teaching almost every night. And sometimes it seems I'm teaching a five day retreat in two hours at TikTok timing. Sometimes I wake up exhausted. Happy, usually happy and satisfied, but exhausted, as if I've done it. I as I look at my dreams and as I look at dreams in general, I sometimes think it might be helpful to discern, to distinguish three broad bands, three three broad bandwidths of dreaming. There are the literalistic, realistic dreams, which relate to things happening in space and time, in a reality that is either this one or down posted. Then there are the symbolic dreams, and that's where all the analogies And most of the dream workers, what does this mean?

29:58 What does it mean to dream of bananas? What are bananas in your dreams anyway? And then there are the dreams that are experiences of a different reality, of another reality, which for me are actually the most interesting. Because you know, in dreaming we step into the many worlds, we step into parallel worlds, where we made different choices. We stepped into past lives, future lives. Parallel lives, we we go to places where the dead are alive, we go to other planets, we go to other star systems and so on. And we go to our personal dream movie studios where entertainments, horrors, educational documentaries are being greater awareness, with greater lucidity, with greater dream traveller skills, we can go conscious and fully aware to those dream studios and maybe participate in scripted what will be a more interesting dream of life as well as of the night.

30:57 Hmm. Well, I maybe then in that case, could you have been dreaming about a future dream with Tolkien? That like would that could your Yeah. all it all it all twists and turns and rides around, it's all a nervous script. above the magician and in the old rider wake deck there is a lemniscape, lemniscape, the the infin the infinity side. Well how is that you use the word infinity on in this discussion, aren't you? So how is that working? Well it's a nervous strip. I mean inside is outside, up is down, in is out. And and it's like that.

31:37 And it could be a challenge to express what we experience in these ways. will jump on a word like immeable, which is a lovely word. Well, in one of my dreams I invented an effability game in which we were learning to express what people have held to be ineffable and inexpressible. And that of course is your destiny if your fate your character is your fate, your character is your fate. If your character is that of someone who likes to play with words. to describe things that did not have a description before. I'm not as good at this as Jung was or as Fred Myers of the Society Society of Research was in the Thai Victorian era, but I've made up a few.

32:21 For example, I've made up the word chiromancer or chiromancy. describe the practice of someone who navigates life by synchronicity and does it really well, who is forever poised to notice when time changes, it seems Because you feel there is something slipping through the veils of perception and making things happen around you. So, you know, the challenge of bringing new words, fresh phrases is one that I invite people to meet in all of my classes. All of my classes are covert storytelling and writing courses as well as everything else. One of the things we always do. ~ we discuss, and it might be a life story rather than a dream of the night, is I say, well what's your bumper sticker, what's your catchphrase, what's your aphorism, what's your snapper?

33:08 And your astonisher, as Mark Twain would have said, what's the snapper? my snapper from my Tolkien dream might might be, Tolkien did more tarot than he let on. Yeah. Sneaky, let's go. Let's go find some evidence. Yes. I love it. So you've brought up Carl Jung a couple of times. And the last time that we met, we you you brought you mentioned this tiny little tidbit toward the end that you had ~ some dream interaction with Carl Jung and you gave just enough tidbits to like spark interest, but you didn't go into that.

33:53 Is there anything there that you want to share? I can't say that I dream have dreamed with Jung to the extent that I've dreamed, for example, with William Buffer Yeats, with my favourite dead professor from the Australian National University, of whom I have dreamed profoundly, often in that half-dream state that hypnagolic stay over decades. But the dream that I remember now that you confront me was actually a part of a group shamanic journey or my part, part of my part, part of my part of the group shamanic journey I was leading. related to the psychopath training actually. I I was guiding people on the journey to meet someone who is living on the other side of death.

34:35 And the prelude to this, or the let's say the approach rather, is to go to a place on the water, prepared to maybe find a boat or or a water bird or some other way of crossing to the other shore where you're going to meet someone who's at home on the other side of death. You might have someone in mind, you might want to see Grenna Part the intention is you're going to have timely and helpful communication with someone on the other side of death and learn more about afterlife possibilities than you currently know. So that's the general intention. I'm drumming for the group. So I'm in control of my physical body, the extent that I can control the temper of the group. I'm aware and alert to the physical needs of the group, to how the circle is there in in the workshop space.

35:20 And I'm also journeying for myself. I always do, I'd be bored if I were just the drummer line. So I'm journeying for myself. So I come down to the shoreline and there is a boat, a little dinghy there, and there's a man in the boat wearing a boater, a straw boater. And he looks a lot like Carl Jung, who I was not expecting to see. And he's as if he's waiting for me. I really shivers now. I'm getting shivers now. Truth comes with shivers. It's a science of shivers. And he invites me. go with him on his boat and suddenly we are at what looks very much like Bollinger. His retreat on the lake, which he built to a considerable extent with his own hands, where he did all that stonework and carved those remarkable inscriptions and so on.

36:05 With Telosphoros and Philonon, all that stuff, and painted, painted, painted. And ~ The bit that I need to recall now, which is wildly funny, is he shows me the book that he's been writing in this version of the afterlife. It's the purple book, not the red book, it has a purple color. And it's called Voliva Celestia, the Book of Heaven, in Latin. And he opens the book, and there is a preface or a prologue, and the first line is, I'm not a Jungian. Ha ha ha.

36:46 And my Jungian friends are gracious enough to laugh when I tell them that kind of thing. Because Jung actually said that in mind. He I'm not a Jungian. And I'm not a Jungian. I love Jung. I I've we've had this massive material keeps coming out, stuff that wasn't published, notes from his seminars in Zurich. parts that never made it into Memory Streams Reflections with Anyela Yafe and th those books, the two books, are the bits that were left on the cutting room floor after Memory Streams Reflections was published are precious. I mean they are precious. There's amazing stuff there. Some of us not P some of it not PC at all. Because I mean his opinions about people in Africa, for example, So anyway, so that was one of my encounters with Jorgen and there was a follow up.

37:29 That's one the things I teach people to do, not just to do lucid dreams, not just to do shamanic journeying, but to travel together in what Yates would call mutual visioning. To tra you can travel together. you it could be a whole group travel assignment. You're all going to go together to a certain place. We do that in my advanced workshops as part of what I call dream archaeology. You wanna know what's really going on with the cult of Athena? Well let's go to that ancient temple of Prienni in Anatolia. Let's go together, let's go overnight, thirty of us, forty of us, more of us, and let's bring back reports. maps, drawings, group blog. So, you know I I teach in in the in the workshop space, in the course space, in the class space.

38:11 It can all be synchronized with the drumming or other audio effects that we're using. But basically we can have a group of really almost any size within earshots and within coherent understanding of what's going on. undertake an assignment to go somewhere, learn something, talk to someone, bring back information, and the results can be astonishing. And they tend to damp down any skepticism about the reality of this kind of non-ordinary reality and the possibility of lucid dreaming, let's say, between two or more people. There it is. Here are the results. And if you have just one or two cases and you're a certain kind of skeptic, you'll say, well, this is anecdotal.

38:52 But how many anecdotes does it take before you accept That you have a body of state-specific evidence are huge importance and relevance. And one of the things that it's demonstrating is this. A small thing again related to the psychopath dream. There is an afterlife. Consciousness does survive the death of the body. How do you know? Because when you dream in a certain way, you're already trampled the upper body. And therefore, surely when you wake up to what's going on, you're going to be able to recognize that if you can do this. Beyond your body and brain, then you could do it when you don't have a body and brain on it. I mean it's as simple as that. This is the origin actually of religion.

39:34 Because most religions, I think all religions that matter, teach us something about the survival of consciousness or so being physical life. And if that is the heart of religion, then there's dreaming. The first hand evidence through dreaming that consciousness is not confined to the body and brain and mental survives. It is at the origin. the origin itself. Right, right. Well, you know, you have a lot of accounts of either in the dream state, in the in the hypnagogic state, in the shim, you know, in shamanic germ ger excuse me, shamanic journeying, ~ of seeing deceased people, people on the other side, whether historical figures, I know your father has played a big part.

40:22 ~ and When you have these, so for example, with shamanic journeying, when you when people are awake and they you help them get into a meditative state, there's there's an assignment. there's ~ a go the you're gonna go into a post office and you're gonna pick up your ~ packages that have been left for you. For example, and so we know what the assignment is, and so it starts with the imagination, right? And it starts from the from the ~ participants perspective, it begins as like we're invoking this, we're controlling this. This is it, does it from your experience, how does that transfer into, ~ I'm no longer the, you know, the now I'm just receiving what the intel is that's coming from this being and so forth.

41:19 Is there a shift for you? There's there's a shift when you absolutely know ~ and and and and if you're ca carrying an inner skeptic with you, your inner skeptic actually falls silent. I remember we had a a very intelligent physician, he was a regular member of my workshop, so he had this skeptic inside him constantly asking, am I making this up? this is all good. How do I know I'm not just making up that kind of course. And he has an experience in which he's following instructions for journey. And he sees a deer, okay, a deer I like deer head and a stag in my dream.

42:00 And he's drifting off somewhere else in his perception. And the stag butts him, quite hard. And he feels the butt, very hard. It it seems his physical body. And then he looks in the direction the deer wants to take him. And you're huge discoveries. For him, the moment that the deer butted his apparently his physical body, it seemed, the energy body anyway, that was the moment of clarity for him. And this is for real. This deer just hit butted me. And underwrite the imagination just as it might help too. William Blake said with poetic parody, eternity is a world of imagination. I mean, we when you die to the body to paraphrase, you enter a world that is all imagination, imagination is the architect.

42:44 So if I set up a journey where I'm going to tell you to go, for example, to the Green Post Office, which is the Black Society we did in did a very very strict operation by the way in an actual training. Did I ask you to go to the Dream Post Office or the Dream Museum or Typically I'm drawing upon your Where you were first excited? fantastic extent. Well this is a real place. It's as real, we could say, as a department store or the Eiffel Tower are in this world.

43:25 It's been built by human imagination over time. It's been visited by many. You can go there. It's a place where you can only enter the interesting stuff by invitation. So you can't just wander and think you're there. version of it, but you're not into the real stuff unless you're about it, and then you're probably going to be tested and going to have to rise through the grates in a sense looked at by various conservators, gatekeepers on different worlds. It's a real place. And pe you know what people live for centuries after death in places like this. I mean what are heavens, hell is in purgatories anyway? Or what are the The pure lands of the Buddhist collective imagination.

44:06 These are places that are constructed through an interface between human imaginations Imaginations of departed masters and great teachers and imagineers. And they're real, I mean they're solid. You can go there. Guru. a a hotel room in what was then Bombay in nineteen thirty five when Sri Yukisva came back and started telling Yogananda what the afterlife is like, giving him a whole astral geography. He said, there are people who live there in any body form they choose, they can keep changing bodies if they like world looks like this and this one looks like that and this one is on another planet.

44:53 He's laying out for those who tend to lean east when it comes to talking about spirituality. Those leaning east if you haven't done it recently, we read chapter 43 of the audiobiography of the yogi the Sri Yucta as well lays out what astral reality is like in the afterlife. Don't tell him or or or tell anyone talking about it. This is just your imagination. This is the imagination, which is a source of incredible creation. And, you know, we we want to train our imagination ~ not only to be ready for our own version of the afterlife, but of course to practice reality creation in this world to a greater extent than most of us are dimly aware.

45:41 Now that is powerful. Practicing reality creation. I love that. That's amazing. So is there anything that you know, if people have recurring themes in in I don't know if you experience this. I've I know you dream, you know, you're such a powerful dreamer, but I feel like maybe when we're getting these recurring themes, I wonder if it's because we're not getting it, you know. For me, when I see these things that keep coming up, and I'm like, okay, I'm in a maybe a different place and it's different people, but here I am again holding a little baby. Here I am again, and I'm expecting I'm very pregnant. Here I am again with little children.

46:23 And here, you know, and it's like, what am I not getting? But I think because you're so introspective, maybe you don't do that. But can you relate? it's interest see the use of words is interesting. Yes, I am very introspective, but I'm also very oriented towards action. I don't want us just to think about our dreams and just talk I want to take action. For example, I'm researching whether it's remotely possible that Tolkien had had some experience with Tyrou. ~ all the sources tell me no, no, no, no, he never did know the word. But I'm on it because of my dream report. So research is a form of action. Since I'm a guy who loves research and a historian by training, I mean I I I that's one action I've always taken.

47:06 So you say introspective, okay sure. But I will say dreams always require action. We must do something with them. And the action might extend to changing our world or at least our experience of life. Now the recurring dream when it is a recurring dream, because people are confused, they're having a series of dreams and they seem to be similar elements, so say it's a recurring dream, but actually looked at more closely it's moving a lot, it's not the same. sometimes those dreams, those series of dreams, serial dreams are actually experiences arguably are the parallel I have a parallel. So So let's put that on one side as something fascinating to look at, but not exactly what you're asking about. When it essentially is the same thing coming at us again and again and again, I think it's sometimes because our dream producers are trying to wake us up.

47:54 ~ Dan, we've got to give it to them again because they won't recognize it or even more, even more important, do anything about it. ~ in in my book Mysterious Reality, which I'm going to mention again, playing authors, 'cause not enough people know it, Mysterious Realities, to some of my stories of this kind, I write a story of a physician, she's an actual physician, a very very respected physician, who is in a very angry, bitter state at the breakfast table at one of my retreats. She says, I am having the same effing dream again and I can't stand it. tell us. Well once again I don't have my medical qualifications.

48:35 I've got to do the exams for my medical degree again. And I tell them as I always do, I've got my effing degree. I got it 30 years ago. Why do I have to keep getting the same effing tree? And she's normally a very, very polished, very mannerly lady. She doesn't normally sit at the table swearing like this. And I just I just play the play a game with the saying, well if I put myself in the position of your dream production crew, they are so fed up with you that they're threatening to walk off the lot because they have to keep making the same effing dream because you will not get the effing message. Well what is the effing message? I say, Well if it's my dream, I need to get ready for a test in some sense in my life.

49:19 Maybe my professional medical career, but in some sense The the the the exams I remember are an analogue for what I'll have to do in regular life. my god, you've got it? I'm considering a job offer from a huge pharmaceutical company and I realize that I'm decades out of date on some of the chemistry elements and I'll have to get the textbooks and get ready. Yes, if I'm going to pursue that avenue. Once she made that realization she didn't have the same dream anymore. The dream was preparing her actually, rather specifically since she's in the medical field, the dream was saying you're going to have to face new tests in terms of your understanding and mastery of the medical literature.

50:01 So she got the message. She needed a conversation. She still couldn't get it on her own. She needed someone making a suggestion, which is why developing the practice and I know this is part of your life, developing the practice of helping each other to talk about these things. To receive suggestions from each other about what might be going on, which are non-authoritarian, non-intusive, and then to guide each other towards appropriate action to clarify the dream and apply its content in ordinary life. This is essential. So I invented what I call the lightning framework technique, introduced it at a conference in the year two thousand. And it's been prospering ever since. It it it includes the famous calls, if it were my dream, which Jeremy Taylor on the West Coast, both popularized.

50:49 We don't tell people what their dreams mean, we say gently, if it were my dream, I think about such and such. That's part of it. But beyond previous approaches, my approach insists on action. You're going to see go there. That might mean going back inside the dream state to clarify things or to carry the story forward. It might mean going out and buying something in the colour red because that's what you dream. It might mean bringing information from the dream in an appropriate way to someone who can use it. It might mean checking every source you can, including a living biographer, as to whether Tolkien might conceivably have had a tarot reading once upon the time.

51:31 All sorts of things you can do with a dream. Yes, I love it. Well, I'm like I said, I'm I'm so excited about your training and it starts next week. And I know that the ~ there we're still in the signup period where people can get the bonus material of which I've gotten such ~ such value from. So please tell people a little bit more about the course and how they can find out more. Well, it's on the Shift Network. If you go to mustreams.com, you'll find a link, ~ or you can go to the Shift Network directly. But why not go to my website? Because there are other things going on there. You'll also discover my very active substack if you haven't done already, for which subscription is currently free.

52:16 Actually I'm not planning to change that, but there's lot going on there. you'll find a very complete menu of contents for the Cyclopon training and it reaches far and wide. It will take us into the experience of into contact with the guy, the self on a higher level, contact with the other soul or higher self that would take us into the dialogue we were discussing with the personified death and the possibility of making agreements with the personified death, which will actually bring you superabundant energy and clarity into regular life. I mean it looking at it all in the broadest possible way, it's all about bringing the sense of divine comedy into life.

53:02 the knowledge based on first hand experience that there is a bigger story, not part of a bigger story. I remember once when I was down in the dunks about things like that. Subway train for Peter airport on Jolly looking fellow who looks like Santa Claus in a country. Now Boder says, Walk on the bridge, don't build on it he says to the this is waiting up this for tree minutes. I'm astonished. Brits don't talk to screen design.

53:47 said early in this discussion, he just told me what it's all about. This life is a bridge between one world and another world. Walk on the bridge, don't do that. Don't take anything that happens here more seriously than you need to. Because, you know, you're in one world amongst many. You're in one life between other lives. And after that actually is one those examples of how those forces and people will intercede in our lives. He has a ple we've had structured conversation, perfectly normal conversation. Somebody's talking about his roses and his garden. Typical civilized country chap. There's nothing about the Buddha, there's nothing about the purpose of life. I think that something grabbed him and used his vocal cords to deliver a message to me from an unlikely source.

54:34 At exactly the moment I needed to hear exactly those words. So this is also no example of being a dream of 24-7. If you want to be a dream 24-7, you're a Sensors are a project. You're not over excited because you carry your sensor. Calm play some. But you're alert to what the world of the world's are giving you. Eyes open or. Beautiful. Well, Robert, thank you so much for coming on today. This has just been such a beautiful discussion. And again, I can't wait. I'll see you next week. Thank you. Thank you so much. What a joy it was playing with you and dreaming with you in this medium.

55:21 Thank you.

56:16 Hello and welcome to Soul Elevation, Guiding Your Ascension to New Heights. I'm your host, Kara Goodwin, and I'm so thrilled to be joined by Robert Moss today. Thank you so much for being here, Robert. Always good to dream with you. Yes, this is so exciting. I'm gonna just read your bio really quickly. I I think people know who you are, but ~ just to start things off on the right foot and then we're gonna get into it. Robert Moss has been a dream traveler since doctors pronounced him clinically dead in a hospital in Hobart, Tas 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 shamanic and mystical practices for journeying to realms beyond the physical and growing creative imagination.

57:09 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 New York Times bestselling author, poet, journalist, and independent scholar. His many books on dreaming, shamanism, and imagination include Conscious Dreaming, The Secret History of Dreaming, The Boy Who Died and Came Back, and many more. He's launching a new advanced online course for the Shift Network, Psychopom Training, in on October 22nd. And his website is mossdreams.com.

57:51 So welcome again, Robert. What a joy and an honor to have you here. I'm so excited to talk to you. I find you infinitely fascinating, and I'm so excited about your course that's coming up, Psychopomp Training. I I eagerly signed up for this training. I can't wait for it to start ~ next week already. And so let's start with this word psychopom. In case this is a new word for anybody, what does that mean and how does that apply to the course? Well, a psychopomp is literally a guide of souls. And goodness me, we all need some soul guidance. In this day and age, I mean, where all of us are liable to suffer some degree of what shamans call soul loss, losing part of our vital identity and energy because of bad things that are thrown at us or because of our difficulty in handling them.

58:44 the psychopomp training, this is an eighteen week version of something that in a sense I've been teaching and practicing forever. It's an eighteen the deepest The most wide ranging. It's to do with being better prepared to face death, dying in the afterlife, but that means being much better prepared to face life and to approach life with courage, clarity, and a sense of divine comedy. If you can make death your friend rather than a dread, you're going to be better off dealing with what life throws at you in the everyday ups and downs and the turmoil. So part of the purpose of the training is to make friends with death, to make death an ally to actually meet your personified death.

59:26 And negotiate with it about how you can best live this life and be best prepared to live the life beyond this one. The understanding here in the psychopath approach is you're in the afterlife right now. You and me, we're both in the afterlife right now, so is anybody joining us. We came from another world before we were born into this one. We go to another world after this one. This world, this life, as the Buddha said, is a bridge. It's a bridge. Walk on it, don't build on it. Don't take things as being more solid or more solemn than they need to be. So it's a course that has nothing funereal about it. You meet your death, you you discover the conditions upon which you can live a fuller life, you pr rehearse for what will follow death by visiting places in the afterlife.

1:00:15 You confirm and experience how easy it is, how natural to talk to people who are alive on the other side of death. There's nothing weird about it. Our ancestors have understood this way, way back, and it's very strange that a lot of modern people don't just accept that, okay, you'll you Your dead can be with you in the sense that they can drop in, you can call on them. They might be hanging around for for difficult reasons. You might have to do a little bit of work as a psychopath, caring for the souls of the departed to get them moving in the right direction. But basically, part of the understanding of this. Contact with the deceased is easy and natural. Why? Because they're alive.

1:00:55 They don't have physical bodies anymore. They might be confused about their condition. They might need help with that. They might still be around. They might be okay for a while. They might think we're hopeless. They're clu we're clueless. We need guidance from them. Or they come calling, especially in dreams. For all the reasons we call on each other and then some. They might come as family healers and counselors, as everyday angels. They might come for healing and forgiveness. Which is always available across the apparent barrier of death. And in dreams, of course, we go traveling. We travel beyond the body and the brain. We travel beyond ordinary reality. And amongst the many places we visit in dreams are places of transition, or at least temporary residence, where the departed are very fully alive.

1:01:41 Hmm. I love that. I love that there is this element of using the dream to prepare for death and to befriend death. And that's something that you have taught me through your work is that that change of perception. I remember reading, I think it was ~ maybe it was the Dreamgates. I think it was where I was reading about ~ death at death as a friend and death as a as a being. As an entity, as a in a ~ you know, a per there was a personification there that I hadn't considered before. And and the the service that it's doing in escorting you from one world to another.

1:02:24 But you also mentioned something really interesting, which was the negotiation part of it. And the ~ I think that's how you said it, but the the kind of having a say in. In death's actions, I don't know if you want to talk a little bit more about that. Well let's talk about two aspects of what you brought up in a really thrillingly simple and inviting way. is dealing with a personified death. Someone else may or may not find this a useful thing to do, to have some personification of death. I have a number. I don't just have one. But let me give you an episode in which I met death in a very personal and personified way on a train.

1:03:06 Everyday circumstances. Dreaming isn't just about what happens with our eyes closed, right? It's about becoming more conscious, more lucid in the dream of waking life. And it's about other things. So I'm on the train from where I live in upstate New York. to New York City and I play a little game that I'd recommend to people if you're a passenger in a car or a train or something like that, not if you're at the wheel. I close my eyes and I just play with seeing how much of the landscape that we are passing, the beautiful Hudson River Valley, I can see through my closed eyelids. I'm interested in seeing the ordinary landscape without using my physical eyes. So I'm rating myself. Okay, I get a B for that, the barn's on the wrong side I saw the barn on the wrong side of the house.

1:03:52 I get maybe a B plus. Asked for that I saw three cows, there are actually four, that kind of thing. Very very everyday exercise in what? In clairvoyance, in scene with your eyes closed. Suddenly, with my eyes closed, I see a figure dressed all in black, with a rather luxuriant moustache, wearing a flat-brimmed black hat and swinging a lasso, yet he doesn't look like a cow. I don't get this. I open my eyes, he's not there. I'm seeing someone who's absolutely not in the landscape. I close my eyes again and I start having a mental touch. Who are you? ~ I am Yama, my dear.

1:04:32 Or Yama is the name of the Lord of Death, the Hindus and the Buddhist. But he's often shown in ferocious guise with war tusked and and all. The still is like a a civilized chap except he's wearing the sort of western mouthwick. Doesn't it? He sounds like a Maharaja, he sounds like an Indian prince who's been educated at Oxford, my dear. But why is he in this why are you wearing that? ~ I adapt to circumstances, my dear, he says. And I say to him, what I'd love to have conversation with you. I know you would, my dear, but you know I would have to put my noose around your neck.

1:05:13 Now this is where it begins to get real. Truth comes with noose butts. Yama, in the mythologies, in the visions, takes the soul out of the body with his noose. So I'm sitting on the train, surrounded by commuters, many of them New York State bureaucrats. And I'm letting Yama, the Lord of Death, put his noose around my neck, and it's absolutely real. It's far more real than this fellow on his cell phone or this person having hushed conversation with someone at the office. I'm talking to Yammer. We talk about many things. You've talked about life and death. We talk about coming events in the world, he's expecting You can deal with process some odd as souls because of various disasters that lie ahead.

1:05:57 So that was an encounter, just the beginnings of an encounter. I continued my dialogue with you. I have a memorable session with Yama. That's personified version of death, and I've tried to deal with Yama occasionally on behalf of other people, not just myself. Try to negotiate a life extension. I don't think Yama will mind me telling this story because one of the one of the responsibilities that this personified death has laid upon me is I have to keep coming up with interesting stories. I have to entertain my death, like Shaherazad and the Arabian Knights. Part of my deal with my death is I have to keep producing, amusing, entertaining.

1:06:40 stories that are sufficiently interesting for my death to give me a little more time. So now we're into the second aspect of what you asked about, which is the life contract. I've worked with people who have been facing physical death, literal death. quite closely, quite intimately. I mean we've been told that they have a limited length of time, for example. We've got stage four metastasizing cancer, for example, in several of these cases. And because of what was accomplished with one of them many years ago, now forty years ago really, I I've sometimes suggested the following and sometimes guided at plain psychopomp at least Anan Kaurra, friend of the soul, or the person who's facing the probability of physical death.

1:07:25 Suppose you could find yourself in the presence of your personified death or the envy of your death, the death your death angel. Suppose you could be there. And suppose you're asked to respond to a series of questions about what matters, like you're looking over you're doing a bit of a life review, you're looking over the life that you're leaving, and you're asked be asked questions like, What do you most regret not having done in this life that you're leaving? Or When you look over this life, what do you most regret? What moment do you most regret when you could not find the courage to do something that might have made everything different? Or or how do you most regret what do you most regret in terms of causing harm to another person?

1:08:10 You go through a questionnaire of that kind. I'm actually now describing a core moment, a core segment in a training of this kind, in the course of making death your ally and Checking the terms of your life contract and negotiating for life extension. So the idea, the the non-fantastic fantasy, is your death is available and it's listed. You have a chance to discuss with your personified death or its endo or its representative why you should be given more life. What will you do? What will you do with it that's worthwhile? And in order to make a decision about that and negotiate the terms of your contract really well, you need to look.

1:08:51 You have to do kind of life review. Look over your life, decide what was wrong, what was right, what was unsatisfactory. Look at the moments of defeat and the moments of triumph, look at the moments of shame, the moments of guilt. Look at what you would like to do if you could have a second chance in relation to all these areas where you ca caused harm to someone, where someone caused harm to you. And by the end of this conversation, you in a sense have drawn out your contract, your agreement, for more life in the body in this earth. If I'm given more life in the body in the zip, I will do such a th I will write that book.

1:09:34 I can't make amends to that person because they've moved along or gone on, but I can do something that will be compensation in a sense, will be atonement in a sense for the harm I caused to that person. I will show the courage that failed me before by this specific action. Well you made a contract like that, and of course you're meant to live it. And it it might might not be easy. It gives you a direction and I think the clarity could ~ carry. Well, in the first case when I actually structured it like this, I saw it literally she would agree, I saw it literally give thirty six years and counting of additional life for someone who had an appointment with death that she was able to postpone.

1:10:27 Wow. Well, that is amazing. Thank you for sharing. So you you did leave us on a cliffhanger where you were on the train and you and Death, Yama had the noose around your neck and you're still here to tell the story. So how did you did you renegotiate? Is that was that part of that encounter? w this wasn't the big contract moment. This was a moment of encounter. But I summarized the follow-up, which and the follow-up now is almost forty years of of of this connection. The follow-up is basically that my central agreement with this form of debt is I have to keep creating and sharing the stories.

1:11:10 I'm a storyteller and a story maker. You remember Shaherazad in ~ in The Thousand One Nights. My story is similar to hers. She has to come up with a good story every night, or else the Tyrant King will kill her in the morning. She has to leave things on a you say cliffhanger. She has to leave things on a cliffhanger every night so that the Tyrant King will want the next instalment and won't cut her head off. I mean, listen. This is how I feel about my life, and I've had episodes in my life that reflect this very exactly. Do you want to hear one? All right, so I was reading one of my creative writing retreats. The people who are after me to do online creative writing retreats now, but I'm mostly teaching online.

1:11:53 I'm not sure whether they will or not, but I'd led a five week, a five day five day residential writing retreat, a wonderful place out in that red cedar forest in the foothills of the Cascades in Washington. And to goose myself during the writing retreat, I create a framed story, a story within which other stories will be told. This is my own writing, my own writing retreat. The framed story is Shaherazar. A writer has made a deal with death. He will die unless he can keep producing stories that will entertain death. Within that I start writing a story about a Roman centurion in the wake of the crucifixion, back then, in that in early times of that part of the world.

1:12:37 And his girlfriend is a Phoenician witch who's very good with dreams. I start writing this, I don't know why. Now I'm on the plane. I'm physically on an airplane going home from Seattle Airport. And as usual, I'm curious to see what the world will give me in the way of incidents that are like dream symbols. And my theme is still entertaining death. On comes an immensely tall woman, she looks immensely tall. She is tall, but she's got huge heels. on her black leather thigh boots and she's dressed all in black leather over a buskill and she's wearing a top hat and she sits next to me and she parks a pudgy little man next to the window next to her.

1:13:18 We might or might not ever come back to her. And she asks for Crame de Moth, no they don't have creme de moth, so she has a double looking around the plane and said, Mmm, ~ it's a good flight. And I look at her. Yes, she said, all the seats are full. Actuarially she says, if the plane is going to crash, 20% of the seats will be empty. This is the start of the conversation. And I'm looking at her and on her hands she's wearing gloves with cut out fingers and there are death snips on the back of her gloves. This is my companion. I'll just give a few highlights to the conversation. Comes out fairly early on, but she has a profession. She's a dominatrix.

1:13:59 Now this is not my theme. So the conversation is a bit bumpy. But then she says, knowing nothing of me, she says, You think the dead talk to us in our dreams? Absolutely, I say. good. My dead husband turned up last week. He was in the rock scene. He was shot and killed in a bar in Seattle. It was in the newspapers. He turned up last week and he said, I've got a great job. I'm doing the music for dreams that are being made, for movies that are being made for people to see in their dreams. I said, What do you think of that? I said, That's wonderful. I think that's a great story. And okay, I'll just jump to two more incidents.

1:14:39 ~ this was several hours of a gusting conversation of this quality with a woman wearing death's head, a dominatrix, a death's head dominatrix. Yeah. She says at a certain point, I'd love to read a story about Jezebel, and I'm searching my memory, who is Jezebel? She fills it in, she says, those Phoenician witches were so good with dreams, it's as if her dead husband or son was whispering in her ear, perfect. Okay, now we've had another pause in the conversation. I have not revealed much about my life, really. Not much.

1:15:21 She looks at me and she says, I love crows and I love Of course you do. There is a collective noun to describe a group of crows or ravens. Do you know what it is? And I'm very proud of this. yes. A murder of crows? An unkindness of ravens. She sniffs. Everybody knows that. It's a collective noun for both crows and ravens. Do you know what it is? You're going to tell me, yes, I will. It is a storytelling of crows. Or a storytelling of ravens. And I'll tell you why.

1:16:02 I saw this once. There was a storytelling of crows listening to a crow who was trying to tell a story to the group. And he must have been a very bad storyteller because when he finished, the other crows pecked him to death. I'm sitting here on the plane, and life is giving me what most people would not credit to be a plausible literal experience. in the immediate wake of my setting myself up by writing the frame story of death requiring stories, good stories from the teller, or else the teller would be taken out. And then the story So ~ out of all this I have something to say which might be of interest.

1:16:50 We're dreaming all the time. I mean all these people go into this almost theological discussion or neuroscientific discussion of what's going on in your brain, what's going on with your God or your gods, and how can you tell if you're dreaming or not? Is it all illusion? Is it all reality? From my point of view we're dreaming all the time. And the trick is just to become more conscious, more aware of how this works or does not work for you. And be more of a player. A great day. at all those liminal spaces where you're somewhere in between are lovely spaces to do more in.

1:17:33 I mean that are the things that I'm pushing all the time. describe taught or practice. Actually where so many things are accessible, including easy contact with the deceased, which is where we started this conversation. And so this was you said you were dreaming with your eyes open. this was an actual the the story with the Dominatrix on the plane.

1:18:17 That happened in waking life. exactly literally what happened. It's it's it's a su it's a short version of what happened. I I guess I should share the last scene, says the pudgy man, the dominatric is parked the dominatrix ha has parked by the window and as we're getting off the plane she introduces him. This is Homer and I say, ~ Homer, good luck with your odyssey. I'm trying to be funny. And he looks at me blurly and he says, All I want is a one lane bowling alley. What? A one lane bowling alley? Yes, says Homer. Something to do when you get old. So that's it's almost as good as a Dominatrix with a froze peppy.

1:19:02 No, that is that is I get this a lot. ~ I tell a story from my travels Exactly as it happened. Sometimes I dilute it because I think this will just be too much. And people can't fathom that this was played out like this step by step in ordinary reality. It was. It is. I don't travel that much anymore, so I don't have so many stories from the Bardo of air travel, but there were there were many, many Many and even when I'm not travelling they come to me, and then the cat my literary cat pulls a book off the shelf and it falls open at a certain page and that is exactly what I needed for the day, for example.

1:19:42 Haven't seen gentle So the magic of synchronicity is that well it's like this. In dreaming, whether it's shamanic journeying or meditation or sleep dreams or lucid dreams, in luc in in dreaming we tend to get out there, we tend to go through the veils or curtains of ordinary perception into another reality. It might be a fantastic reality, it might be a fantastically real reality. Th the Nowdu in West Australia say that the dream world is really, really real. It's really real. The ordinary world is just real. The dream world is Through the curtains and veils of ordinary perception when you go dreaming, trancing, journeying, through synchronicity, through coincidence, through meaningful coincidence, the powers and entities of the deeper world come pushing through the veils and make things happen with you and around you in the physical world.

1:20:38 I think that's the that's the inside-out nature of dreams and synchronicity. So we've got to be alert, we want to be alert and available to play. And yeah. I love it. ~ you ~ there have been a couple of things that you've mentioned in the time that we've been talking. You, well, first of all, you had said, ~ I I would love to get to the dream that you had last night, just to get an idea of what the great Robert Moss, the great dreamer, you know, what's a typical, a typical night? They're probably not typical, but you mentioned Arabian nights ~ very briefly, just in passing. But last night I dreamt one part of my dream and I feel like and I've been watching your supplemental your bonus material for your course and so I feel like it ~ juiced up my dream state a bit.

1:21:34 But I was ~ with a couple of people who have in my world who have a little bit of shamanic training, ~ maybe not to the same extent that you do, but ~ but we were at a performance of ~ Aladdin. We were watching a live performance of Aladdin. And it was ~ even though that was, we were in a theater, so it was happening. I don't remember a lot of it. I just remember it was Aladdin. ~ but I do also remember that throughout this dream, there was a ~ gigantic feather that kept coming and ~ fanning at me. and I don't it was one of those things that was just kind of happening out Again, it wasn't the main thing, but when I woke up, I was like, yeah, I kept getting this feather that was fanning me.

1:22:22 ~ and to me, you know, I I think of hawks, I think of eagles, I, you know, especially like big feathers. ~ but I think of shamans as well. And so I and I think of you, you know, as a as a shaman, as a very adept shaman. So anyway, I would love to hear a bit about. your dreamscape. What what was it what interesting dreams have come to you lately? Well, the dream from last night is a very short story. It's amusing and it is also it also reflects some of the things that go on in dreaming according to your, let us say, your vocation, your profession, your orientation.

1:23:05 So in my dream I'm reading a dream report that I have written. It's a printer. It's a one page printer, Times New Rome, and it's exactly the way that things look when they're printed out from my digital from my digital dream reports. My journals are now all It gives me a search search. But I'm it's a I I've printed out one page. And the page is about a discovery I have made. I discovered that Tolkien, yes, Lord of the Rings, Robert Tolkien. Tolkien actually experimented with Tarot. And this is going to be very exciting to people, because people think Tolkien wouldn't touch tarot anything like that, wouldn't like what he called authority. But in my dream report, which I'm reading in my dream.

1:23:49 I discovered that not only did Tolkien actually experiment with Tarot, but he had an experience involving the magici the magician card. The magician a common in the old ride awake de ride-away deck w which which was a sort of shimmering revelation, maybe. And I'm thinking I'll write a substack article about this. This would be quite interesting. And I get I'm fully lucid. I get out of bed, I go to my computer, I actually go through my digit dig digital files. It's only at this point, having checked a couple of times, both all the drop box and my journal. I've never read this report. This the dream the inner dream was in some inner court of dreaming and it never made it out of the dreamlands.

1:24:30 It's only in my dream that I have this report. Referring to an earlier dream maybe in a More secret in a dimension in a level of dreaming. So, anyway, if you gave me research leads, I mean I've now been researching whether it's remotely possible that Tolkien did use terror. I found no evidence that he did. However, I have written to a friend who wrote the book on Tolkien's friend Charles Williams, and MLBs used to drink together with the bird and baby. There's a cover for you, and Mark's for the. He's edited in the six years. Williams wrote a supernatural thriller that was called about Tarot, about the Great of Trinks. And he was we've told you on that for six years.

1:25:11 So maybe there is something there. So this is probably a very boring story, except that people have some Tyrone, people some Toro. The dream itself is rather boring. Hey, I'm looking at a piece of paper, then I find I don't have it, and then I'm online for an hour trying to track it down. But it takes you into one of the many kinds of dreaming. I mean there are vocational dreams. There are dreams that support and orient, for example, a line of thinking or a line of research. I've actually written a chapter on Tolkien as a dreamer, which I haven't quite to publish yet. So and I dreamed of Tolkien myself, not just it.

1:26:05 So that's just a sample from last night. a typical dream for me these days that I'm not travelling Marty is I'm leading yet another workshop. On live, as the French say, face to face, person to person. Sometimes at places where I have taught a lot, sometimes at wonderful places which where we're never taught in this world, ~ and are probably in a parallel reality. So they're not pre-cognitory dreams. My dreams of leading workshops are often precognitive in the past. Yes, I was going to go there. Yes, look out for that person who's having some personal drama that might be difficult for the group. ~ give space to that person who's going to bring wonderful dream with dragon flying out of the basement.

1:26:45 Be ready for this, be ready for catering issue, be ready to time the drumm sessions. So I'd have lots of lots of professional, let's say, dreams of leading the sort of shamanic dream work stuff at different places around the world. Now I think these dreams which are constant, I mean I'm teaching almost every night. And sometimes it seems I'm teaching a five day retreat in two hours at TikTok timing. Sometimes I wake up exhausted. Happy, usually happy and satisfied, but exhausted, as if I've done it. I as I look at my dreams and as I look at dreams in general, I sometimes think it might be helpful to discern, to distinguish three broad bands, three three broad bandwidths of dreaming.

1:27:27 There are the literalistic, realistic dreams, which relate to things happening in space and time, in a reality that is either this one or down posted. Then there are the symbolic dreams, and that's where all the analogies And most of the dream workers, what does this mean? What does it mean to dream of bananas? What are bananas in your dreams anyway? And then there are the dreams that are experiences of a different reality, of another reality, which for me are actually the most interesting. Because you know, in dreaming we step into the many worlds, we step into parallel worlds, where we made different choices. We stepped into past lives, future lives.

1:28:08 Parallel lives, we we go to places where the dead are alive, we go to other planets, we go to other star systems and so on. And we go to our personal dream movie studios where entertainments, horrors, educational documentaries are being greater awareness, with greater lucidity, with greater dream traveller skills, we can go conscious and fully aware to those dream studios and maybe participate in scripted what will be a more interesting dream of life as well as of the night. Hmm. Well, I maybe then in that case, could you have been dreaming about a future dream with Tolkien?

1:28:53 That like would that could your Yeah. all it all it all twists and turns and rides around, it's all a nervous script. are revolving. above the magician and in the old rider wake deck there is a lemniscape, lemniscape, the the infin the infinity side. Well how is that you use the word infinity on in this discussion, aren't you? So how is that working? Well it's a nervous strip. I mean inside is outside, up is down, in is out. And and it's like that. And it could be a challenge to express what we experience in these ways.

1:29:36 will jump on a word like immeable, which is a lovely word. can't express it. Well, in one of my dreams I invented an effability game in which we were learning to express what people have held to be ineffable and inexpressible. And that of course is your destiny if your fate your character is your fate, your character is your fate. If your character is that of someone who likes to play with words. words to describe things that did not have a description before. I'm not as good at this as Jung was or as Fred Myers of the Society Society of Research was in the Thai Victorian era, but I've made up a few.

1:30:21 For example, I've made up the word chiromancer or chiromancy. describe the practice of someone who navigates life by synchronicity and does it really well, who is forever poised to notice when time changes, it seems Because you feel there is something slipping through the veils of perception and making things happen around you. So, you know, the challenge of bringing new words, fresh phrases is one that I invite people to meet in all of my classes. All of my classes are covert storytelling and writing courses as well as everything else.

1:31:04 One of the things we always do. ~ we discuss, and it might be a life story rather than a dream of the night, is I say, well what's your bumper sticker, what's your catchphrase, what's your aphorism, what's your snapper? And your astonisher, as Mark Twain would have said, what's the snapper? my snapper from my Tolkien dream might might be, Tolkien did more tarot than he let on. Yeah. Sneaky, let's go. Let's go find some evidence. Yes. I love it. So you've brought up Carl Jung a couple of times.

1:31:44 And the last time that we met, we you you brought you mentioned this tiny little tidbit toward the end that you had ~ some dream interaction with Carl Jung and you gave just enough tidbits to like spark interest, but you didn't go into that. Is there anything there that you want to share? I can't say that I dream have dreamed with Jung to the extent that I've dreamed, for example, with William Buffer Yeats, with my favourite dead professor from the Australian National University, of whom I have dreamed profoundly, often in that half-dream state that hypnagolic stay over decades.

1:32:25 But the dream that I remember now that you confront me was actually a part of a group shamanic journey or my part, part of my part, part of my part of the group shamanic journey I was leading. related to the psychopath training actually. I I was guiding people on the journey to meet someone who is living on the other side of death. And the prelude to this, or the let's say the approach rather, is to go to a place on the water, prepared to maybe find a boat or or a water bird or some other way of crossing to the other shore where you're going to meet someone who's at home on the other side of death. You might have someone in mind, you might want to see Grenna Part the intention is you're going to have timely and helpful communication with someone on the other side of death and learn more about afterlife possibilities than you currently know.

1:33:14 So that's the general intention. I'm drumming for the group. So I'm in control of my physical body, the extent that I can control the temper of the group. I'm aware and alert to the physical needs of the group, to how the circle is there in in the workshop space. And I'm also journeying for myself. I always do, I'd be bored if I were just the drummer line. So I'm journeying for myself. So I come down to the shoreline and there is a boat, a little dinghy there, and there's a man in the boat wearing a boater, a straw boater. And he looks a lot like Carl Jung, who I was not expecting to see. And he's as if he's waiting for me. I really shivers now. I'm getting shivers now. Truth comes with shivers.

1:33:54 It's a science of shivers. And he invites me. go with him on his boat and suddenly we are at what looks very much like Bollinger. His retreat on the lake, which he built to a considerable extent with his own hands, where he did all that stonework and carved those remarkable inscriptions and so on. With Telosphoros and Philonon, all that stuff, and painted, painted, painted. And ~ The bit that I need to recall now, which is wildly funny, is he shows me the book that he's been writing in this version of the afterlife.

1:34:35 It's the purple book, not the red book, it has a purple color. And it's called Voliva Celestia, the Book of Heaven, in Latin. And he opens the book, and there is a preface or a prologue, and the first line is, I'm not a Jungian. Ha ha ha. And my Jungian friends are gracious enough to laugh when I tell them that kind of thing. Because Jung actually said that in mind. He I'm not a Jungian. And I'm not a Jungian. I love Jung. I I've we've had this massive material keeps coming out, stuff that wasn't published, notes from his seminars in Zurich. parts that never made it into Memory Streams Reflections with Anyela Yafe and th those books, the two books, are the bits that were left on the cutting room floor after Memory Streams Reflections was published are precious.

1:35:26 I mean they are precious. There's amazing stuff there. Some of us not P some of it not PC at all. Because I mean his opinions about people in Africa, for example, are things that it's a bit hard to So anyway, so that was one of my encounters with Jorgen and there was a follow up. I mean I tracked That's one the things I teach people to do, not just to do lucid dreams, not just to do shamanic journeying, but to travel together in what Yates would call mutual visioning. To tra you can travel together. You can do things together. you it could be a whole group travel assignment.

1:36:06 You're all going to go together to a certain place. We do that in my advanced workshops as part of what I call dream archaeology. You wanna know what's really going on with the cult of Athena? Well let's go to that ancient temple of Prienni in Anatolia. Let's go together, let's go overnight, thirty of us, forty of us, more of us, and let's bring back reports. maps, drawings, group blog. So, you know I I teach in in the in the workshop space, in the course space, in the class space. It can all be synchronized with the drumming or other audio effects that we're using. But basically we can have a group of really almost any size within earshots and within coherent understanding of what's going on.

1:36:49 undertake an assignment to go somewhere, learn something, talk to someone, bring back information, and the results can be astonishing. And they tend to damp down any skepticism about the reality of this kind of non-ordinary reality and the possibility of lucid dreaming, let's say, between two or more people. There it is. Here are the results. And if you have just one or two cases and you're a certain kind of skeptic, you'll say, well, this is anecdotal. But how many anecdotes does it take before you accept That you have a body of state-specific evidence are huge importance and relevance. And one of the things that it's demonstrating is this. A small thing again related to the psychopath dream.

1:37:31 There is an afterlife. Consciousness does survive the death of the body. How do you know? Because when you dream in a certain way, you're already trampled the upper body. And therefore, surely when you wake up to what's going on, you're going to be able to recognize that if you can do this. Beyond your body and brain, then you could do it when you don't have a body and brain on it. I mean it's as simple as that. This is the origin actually of religion. Because most religions, I think all religions that matter, teach us something about the survival of consciousness or so being physical life. And if that is the heart of religion, then there's dreaming. The first hand evidence through dreaming that consciousness is not confined to the body and brain and mental survives.

1:38:16 It is at the origin. the origin itself. Right, right. Well, you know, you have a lot of accounts of either in the dream state, in the in the hypnagogic state, in the shim, you know, in shamanic germ ger excuse me, shamanic journeying, ~ of seeing deceased people, people on the other side, whether historical figures, I know your father has played a big part. ~ and When you have these, so for example, with shamanic journeying, when you when people are awake and they you help them get into a meditative state, there's there's an assignment.

1:39:00 there's ~ a go the you're gonna go into a post office and you're gonna pick up your ~ packages that have been left for you. For example, and so we know what the assignment is, and so it starts with the imagination, right? And it starts from the from the ~ participants perspective, it begins as like we're invoking this, we're controlling this. This is it, does it from your experience, how does that transfer into, ~ I'm no longer the, you know, the now I'm just receiving what the intel is that's coming from this being and so forth.

1:39:43 Is there a shift for you? There's there's a shift when you absolutely know ~ and and and and if you're ca carrying an inner skeptic with you, your inner skeptic actually falls silent. I remember we had a a very intelligent physician, he was a regular member of my workshop, so he had this skeptic inside him constantly asking, am I making this up? this is all good. How do I know I'm not just making up that kind of course. And he has an experience in which he's following instructions for journey. And he sees a deer, okay, a deer I like deer head and a stag in my dream.

1:40:24 And he's drifting off somewhere else in his perception. And the stag butts him, quite hard. And he feels the butt, very hard. It it seems his physical body. And then he looks in the direction the deer wants to take him. And you're huge discoveries. For him, the moment that the deer butted his apparently his physical body, it seemed, the energy body anyway, that was the moment of clarity for him. And this is for real. This deer just hit butted me. And this was not some flimsy. underwrite the imagination just as it might help too.

1:41:05 William Blake said with poetic parody, eternity is a world of imagination. I mean, we when you die to the body to paraphrase, you enter a world that is all imagination, imagination is the architect. So if I set up a journey where I'm going to tell you to go, for example, to the Green Post Office, which is the Black Society we did in did a very very strict operation by the way in an actual training. Did I ask you to go to the Dream Post Office or the Dream Museum or the Dream Typically I'm drawing upon your Where you were first excited?

1:42:03 So we've not fantastic extent. Well this is a real place. It's as real, we could say, as a department store or the Eiffel Tower are in this world.

1:42:43 It's been built by human imagination over time. It's been visited by many. You can go there. It's a place where you can only enter the interesting stuff by invitation. So you can't just wander and think you're there. You can wander version of it, but you're not into the real stuff unless you're about it, and then you're probably going to be tested and going to have to rise through the grates in a sense looked at by various conservators, gatekeepers on different worlds. It's a real place. And pe you know what people live for centuries after death in places like this. I mean what are heavens, hell is in purgatories anyway? Or what are the The pure lands of the Buddhist collective imagination.

1:43:26 These are places that are constructed through an interface between human imaginations and imaginations. Imaginations of departed masters and great teachers and imagineers. And they're real, I mean they're solid. You can go there. Guru. a hotel room in what was then Bombay in nineteen thirty five when Sri Yukisva came back and started telling Yogananda what the afterlife is like, giving him a whole astral geography. He said, there are people who live there in any body form they choose, they can keep changing bodies if they like world looks like this and this one looks like that and this one is on another planet.

1:44:16 He's laying out for those who tend to lean east when it comes to talking about spirituality. Those leaning east if you haven't done it recently, we read chapter 43 of the audiobiography of the yogi the Sri Yucta as well lays out what astral reality is like in the afterlife. Don't tell him or or or tell anyone talking about it. This is just your imagination. This is the imagination, which is a source of incredible creation. And, you know, we we want to train our imagination ~ not only to be ready for our own version of the afterlife, but of course to practice reality creation in this world to a greater extent than most of us are dimly aware.

1:45:04 Now that is powerful. Practicing reality creation. I love that. That's amazing. So is there anything that you know, if people have recurring themes in in I don't know if you experience this. I've I know you dream, you know, you're such a powerful dreamer, but I feel like maybe when we're getting these recurring themes, I wonder if it's because we're not getting it, you know. For me, when I see these things that keep coming up, and I'm like, okay, I'm in a maybe a different place and it's different people, but here I am again holding a little baby. Here I am again, and I'm expecting I'm very pregnant. Here I am again with little children.

1:45:46 And here, you know, and it's like, what am I not getting? But I think because you're so introspective, maybe you don't do that. But can you relate? it's interest see the use of words is interesting. Yes, I am very introspective, but I'm also very oriented towards action. I don't want us just to think about our dreams and just talk I want to take action. For example, I'm researching whether it's remotely possible that Tolkien had had some experience with Tyrou. ~ all the sources tell me no, no, no, no, he never did know the word. But I'm on it because of my dream report. So research is a form of action. Since I'm a guy who loves research and a historian by training, I mean I I I that's one action I've always taken.

1:46:29 So you say introspective, okay sure. But I will say dreams always require action. We must do something with them. And the action might extend to changing our world or at least our experience of life. Now the recurring dream when it is a recurring dream, because people are confused, they're having a series of dreams and they seem to be similar elements, so say it's a recurring dream, but actually looked at more closely it's moving a lot, it's not the same. sometimes those dreams, those series of dreams, serial dreams are actually experiences arguably are the parallel I have a parallel. So let's put that on one side as something fascinating to look at, but not exactly what you're asking about. When it essentially is the same thing coming at us again and again and again, I think it's sometimes because our dream producers are trying to wake us up.

1:47:16 ~ Dan, we've got to give it to them again because they won't recognize it or even more, even more important, do anything about it. ~ in in my book Mysterious Reality, which I'm going to mention again, playing authors, 'cause not enough people know it, Mysterious Realities, to some of my stories of this kind, I write a story of a physician, she's an actual physician, a very very respected physician, who is in a very angry, bitter state at the breakfast table at one of my retreats. She says, I am having the same effing dream again and I can't stand it. tell us. Well once again I don't have my medical qualifications.

1:47:57 I've got to do the exams for my medical degree again. And I tell them as I always do, I've got my effing degree. I got it 30 years ago. Why do I have to keep getting the same effing tree? And she's normally a very, very polished, very mannerly lady. She doesn't normally sit at the table swearing like this. And I just I just play the play a game with the saying, well if I put myself in the position of your dream production crew, they are so fed up with you that they're threatening to walk off the lot because they have to keep making the same effing dream because you will not get the effing message. Well what is the effing message? I say, Well if it's my dream, I need to get ready for a test in some sense in my life.

1:48:42 Maybe my professional medical career, but in some sense The the the the exams I remember are an analogue for what I'll have to do in regular life. my god, you've got it? I'm considering a job offer from a huge pharmaceutical company and I realize that I'm decades out of date on some of the chemistry elements and I'll have to get the textbooks and get ready. Yes, if I'm going to pursue that avenue. Once she made that realization she didn't have the same dream anymore. The dream was preparing her actually, rather specifically since she's in the medical field, the dream was saying you're going to have to face new tests in terms of your understanding and mastery of the medical literature.

1:49:23 So she got the message. She needed a conversation. She still couldn't get it on her own. She needed someone making a suggestion, which is why developing the practice and I know this is part of your life, developing the practice of helping each other to talk about these things. To receive suggestions from each other about what might be going on, which are non-authoritarian, non-intusive, and then to guide each other towards appropriate action to clarify the dream and apply its content in ordinary life. This is essential. So I invented what I call the lightning framework technique, introduced it at a conference in the year two thousand. And it's been prospering ever since. It it it includes the famous calls, if it were my dream, which Jeremy Taylor on the West Coast, both popularized.

1:50:11 We don't tell people what their dreams mean, we say gently, if it were my dream, I think about such and such. That's part of it. But beyond previous approaches, my approach insists on action. You're going to see go there. That might mean going back inside the dream state to clarify things or to carry the story forward. It might mean going out and buying something in the colour red because that's what you dream. It might mean bringing information from the dream in an appropriate way to someone who can use it. It might mean checking every source you can, including a living biographer, as to whether Tolkien might conceivably have had a tarot reading once upon the time.

1:50:53 All sorts of things you can do with a dream. Yes, I love it. Well, I'm like I said, I'm I'm so excited about your training and it starts next week. And I know that the ~ there we're still in the signup period where people can get the bonus material of which I've gotten such ~ such value from. So please tell people a little bit more about the course and how they can find out more. Well, it's on the Shift Network. If you go to mustreams.com, you'll find a link, ~ or you can go to the Shift Network directly. But why not go to my website? Because there are other things going on there. You'll also discover my very active substack if you haven't done already, for which subscription is currently free.

1:51:38 Actually I'm not planning to change that, but there's lot going on there. you'll find a very complete menu of contents for the Cyclopon training and it reaches far and wide. It will take us into the experience of into contact with the guy, the self on a higher level, contact with the other soul or higher self that would take us into the dialogue we were discussing with the personified death and the possibility of making agreements with the personified death, which will actually bring you superabundant energy and clarity into regular life. I mean it looking at it all in the broadest possible way, it's all about bringing the sense of divine comedy into life.

1:52:24 the knowledge based on first hand experience that there is a bigger story, not part of a bigger story. I remember once when I was down in the dunks about things like that. Subway train for Peter airport on Jolly looking fellow who looks like Santa Claus in a country. Now Boder says, Walk on the bridge, don't build on it he says to the this is waiting up this for tree minutes. I'm astonished. Brits don't talk to screen design.

1:53:08 said early in this discussion, he just told me what it's all about. This life is a bridge between one world and another world. Walk on the bridge, don't do that. Don't take anything that happens here more seriously than you need to. Because, you know, you're in one world amongst many. You're in one life between other lives. And after that actually is one those examples of how those forces and people will intercede in our lives. He has a ple we've had structured conversation, perfectly normal conversation. Somebody's talking about his roses and his garden. Typical civilized country chap. There's nothing about the Buddha, there's nothing about the purpose of life.

1:53:48 I think that something grabbed him and used his vocal cords to deliver a message to me from an unlikely source. At exactly the moment I needed to hear exactly those words. So this is also no example of being a dream of 24-7. If you want to be a dream 24-7, you're a Sensors are a project. You're not over excited because you carry your sensor. Calm play some. But you're alert to what the world of the world's are giving you. Eyes open or. Beautiful. Well, Robert, thank you so much for coming on today. This has just been such a beautiful discussion.

1:54:30 And again, I can't wait. I'll see you next week. Thank you. Thank you so much. What a joy it was playing with you and dreaming with you in this medium. Thank you. Hello and welcome to Soul Elevation, Guiding Your Ascension to New Heights. I'm your host, Kara Goodwin, and I'm so thrilled to be joined by Robert Moss today. Thank you so much for being here, Robert. Always good to dream with you. Yes, this is so exciting. I'm gonna just read your bio really quickly.

1:55:11 I I think people know who you are, but ~ just to start things off on the right foot and then we're gonna get into it. Robert Moss has been a dream traveler since doctors pronounced him clinically dead in a hospital in Hobart, Tas 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 shamanic 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.

1:55:52 A former lecturer in ancient history at the Australian National University, he's a New York New York Times bestselling author, poet, journalist, and independent scholar. His many books on dreaming, shamanism, and imagination include Conscious Dreaming, The Secret History of Dreaming, The Boy Who Died and Came Back, and many more. He's launching a new advanced online course for the Shift Network, Psychopom Training, in on October 22nd. And his website is mossdreams.com. So welcome again, Robert. What a joy and an honor to have you here. I'm so excited to talk to you. I find you infinitely fascinating, and I'm so excited about your course that's coming up, Psychopomp Training.

1:56:38 I I eagerly signed up for this training. I can't wait for it to start ~ next week already. And so let's start with this word psychopom. In case this is a new word for anybody, what does that mean and how does that apply to the course? Well, a psychopomp is literally a guide of souls. And goodness me, we all need some soul guidance. In this day and age, I mean, where all of us are liable to suffer some degree of what shamans call soul loss, losing part of our vital identity and energy because of bad things that are thrown at us or because of our difficulty in handling them. the psychopomp training, this is an eighteen week version of something that in a sense I've been teaching and practicing forever.

1:57:23 It's an eighteen the deepest The most wide ranging. It's to do with being better prepared to face death, dying in the afterlife, but that means being much better prepared to face life and to approach life with courage, clarity, and a sense of divine comedy. If you can make death your friend rather than a dread, you're going to be better off dealing with what life throws at you in the everyday ups and downs and the turmoil. So part of the purpose of the training is to make friends with death, to make death an ally to actually meet your personified death. And negotiate with it about how you can best live this life and be best prepared to live the life beyond this one.

1:58:06 The understanding here in the psychopath approach is you're in the afterlife right now. You and me, we're both in the afterlife right now, so is anybody joining us. We came from another world before we were born into this one. We go to another world after this one. This world, this life, as the Buddha said, is a bridge. It's a bridge. Walk on it, don't build on it. Don't take things as being more solid or more solemn than they need to be. So it's a course that has nothing funereal about it. You meet your death, you you discover the conditions upon which you can live a fuller life, you pr rehearse for what will follow death by visiting places in the afterlife.

1:58:48 You confirm and experience how easy it is, how natural to talk to people who are alive on the other side of death. There's nothing weird about it. Our ancestors have understood this way, way back, and it's very strange that a lot of modern people don't just accept that, okay, you'll you Your dead can be with you in the sense that they can drop in, you can call on them. They might be hanging around for for difficult reasons. You might have to do a little bit of work as a psychopath, caring for the souls of the departed to get them moving in the right direction. But basically, part of the understanding of this. Contact with the deceased is easy and natural. Why? Because they're alive.

1:59:28 They don't have physical bodies anymore. They might be confused about their condition. They might need help with that. They might still be around. They might be okay for a while. They might think we're hopeless. They're clu we're clueless. We need guidance from them. Or they come calling, especially in dreams. For all the reasons we call on each other and then some. They might come as family healers and counselors, as everyday angels. They might come for healing and forgiveness. Which is always available across the apparent barrier of death. And in dreams, of course, we go traveling. We travel beyond the body and the brain. We travel beyond ordinary reality. And amongst the many places we visit in dreams are places of transition, or at least temporary residence, where the departed are very fully alive.

2:00:15 Hmm. I love that. I love that there is this element of using the dream to prepare for death and to befriend death. And that's something that you have taught me through your work is that that change of perception. I remember reading, I think it was ~ maybe it was the Dreamgates. I think it was where I was reading about ~ death at death as a friend and death as a as a being. As an entity, as a in a ~ you know, a per there was a personification there that I hadn't considered before. And and the the service that it's doing in escorting you from one world to another.

2:00:58 But you also mentioned something really interesting, which was the negotiation part of it. And the ~ I think that's how you said it, but the the kind of having a say in. In death's actions, I don't know if you want to talk a little bit more about that. Well let's talk about two aspects of what you brought up in a really thrillingly simple and inviting way. is dealing with a personified death. Someone else may or may not find this a useful thing to do, to have some personification of death. I have a number. I don't just have one. But let me give you an episode in which I met death in a very personal and personified way on a train.

2:01:39 Everyday circumstances. Dreaming isn't just about what happens with our eyes closed, right? It's about becoming more conscious, more lucid in the dream of waking life. And it's about other things. So I'm on the train from where I live in upstate New York. to New York City and I play a little game that I'd recommend to people if you're a passenger in a car or a train or something like that, not if you're at the wheel. I close my eyes and I just play with seeing how much of the landscape that we are passing, the beautiful Hudson River Valley, I can see through my closed eyelids. I'm interested in seeing the ordinary landscape without using my physical eyes. So I'm rating myself. Okay, I get a B for that, the barn's on the wrong side I saw the barn on the wrong side of the house.

2:02:25 I get maybe a B plus. Asked for that I saw three cows, there are actually four, that kind of thing. Very very everyday exercise in what? In clairvoyance, in scene with your eyes closed. Suddenly, with my eyes closed, I see a figure dressed all in black, with a rather luxuriant moustache, wearing a flat-brimmed black hat and swinging a lasso, yet he doesn't look like a cow. I don't get this. I open my eyes, he's not there. I'm seeing someone who's absolutely not in the landscape. I close my eyes again and I start having a mental touch. Who are you? ~ I am Yama, my dear.

2:03:05 Or Yama is the name of the Lord of Death, the Hindus and the Buddhist. But he's often shown in ferocious guise with war tusked and and all. The still is like a a civilized chap except he's wearing the sort of western mouthwick. Doesn't it? He sounds like a Maharaja, he sounds like an Indian prince who's been educated at Oxford, my dear. But why is he in this why are you wearing that? ~ I adapt to circumstances, my dear, he says. And I say to him, what I'd love to have conversation with you. I know you would, my dear, but you know I would have to put my noose around your neck.

2:03:46 Now this is where it begins to get real. Truth comes with noose butts. Yama, in the mythologies, in the visions, takes the soul out of the body with his noose. So I'm sitting on the train, surrounded by commuters, many of them New York State bureaucrats. And I'm letting Yama, the Lord of Death, put his noose around my neck, and it's absolutely real. It's far more real than this fellow on his cell phone or this person having hushed conversation with someone at the office. I'm talking to Yammer. We talk about many things. You've talked about life and death. We talk about coming events in the world, he's expecting You can deal with process some odd as souls because of various disasters that lie ahead.

2:04:30 So that was an encounter, just the beginnings of an encounter. I continued my dialogue with you. I have a memorable session with Yama. That's personified version of death, and I've tried to deal with Yama occasionally on behalf of other people, not just myself. Try to negotiate a life extension. I don't think Yama will mind me telling this story because one of the one of the responsibilities that this personified death has laid upon me is I have to keep coming up with interesting stories. I have to entertain my death, like Shaherazad and the Arabian Knights. Part of my deal with my death is I have to keep producing, amusing, entertaining.

2:05:14 stories that are sufficiently interesting for my death to give me a little more time. So now we're into the second aspect of what you asked about, which is the life contract. I've worked with people who have been facing physical death, literal death. quite closely, quite intimately. I mean we've been told that they have a limited length of time, for example. We've got stage four metastasizing cancer, for example, in several of these cases. And because of what was accomplished with one of them many years ago, now forty years ago really, I I've sometimes suggested the following and sometimes guided at plain psychopomp at least Anan Kaurra, friend of the soul, or the person who's facing the probability of physical death.

2:05:58 Suppose you could find yourself in the presence of your personified death or the envy of your death, the death your death angel. Suppose you could be there. And suppose you're asked to respond to a series of questions about what matters, like you're looking over you're doing a bit of a life review, you're looking over the life that you're leaving, and you're asked be asked questions like, What do you most regret not having done in this life that you're leaving? Or When you look over this life, what do you most regret? What moment do you most regret when you could not find the courage to do something that might have made everything different? Or or how do you most regret what do you most regret in terms of causing harm to another person?

2:06:43 You go through a questionnaire of that kind. I'm actually now describing a core moment, a core segment in a training of this kind, in the course of making death your ally and Checking the terms of your life contract and negotiating for life extension. So the idea, the the non-fantastic fantasy, is your death is available and it's listed. You have a chance to discuss with your personified death or its endo or its representative why you should be given more life. What will you do? What will you do with it that's worthwhile? And in order to make a decision about that and negotiate the terms of your contract really well, you need to look.

2:07:24 You have to do kind of life review. Look over your life, decide what was wrong, what was right, what was unsatisfactory. Look at the moments of defeat and the moments of triumph, look at the moments of shame, the moments of guilt. Look at what you would like to do if you could have a second chance in relation to all these areas where you ca caused harm to someone, where someone caused harm to you. And by the end of this conversation, you in a sense have drawn out your contract, your agreement, for more life in the body in this earth. If I'm given more life in the body in the zip, I will do such a th I will write that book.

2:08:07 I can't make amends to that person because they've moved along or gone on, but I can do something that will be compensation in a sense, will be atonement in a sense for the harm I caused to that person. I will show the courage that failed me before by this specific action. Well you made a contract like that, and of course you're meant to live it. And it it might might not be easy. It gives you a direction and I think the clarity could ~ carry. Well, in the first case when I actually structured it like this, I saw it literally she would agree, I saw it literally give thirty six years and counting of additional life for someone who had an appointment with death that she was able to postpone.

2:09:01 Wow. Well, that is amazing. Thank you for sharing. So you you did leave us on a cliffhanger where you were on the train and you and Death, Yama had the noose around your neck and you're still here to tell the story. So how did you did you renegotiate? Is that was that part of that encounter? w this wasn't the big contract moment. This was a moment of encounter. But I summarized the follow-up, which and the follow-up now is almost forty years of of of this connection. The follow-up is basically that my central agreement with this form of debt is I have to keep creating and sharing the stories.

2:09:43 I'm a storyteller and a story maker. You remember Shaherazad in ~ in The Thousand One Nights. My story is similar to hers. She has to come up with a good story every night, or else the Tyrant King will kill her in the morning. She has to leave things on a you say cliffhanger. She has to leave things on a cliffhanger every night so that the Tyrant King will want the next instalment and won't cut her head off. I mean, listen. This is how I feel about my life, and I've had episodes in my life that reflect this very exactly. Do you want to hear one? All right, so I was reading one of my creative writing retreats. The people who are after me to do online creative writing retreats now, but I'm mostly teaching online.

2:10:27 I'm not sure whether they will or not, but I'd led a five week, a five day five day residential writing retreat, a wonderful place out in that red cedar forest in the foothills of the Cascades in Washington. And to goose myself during the writing retreat, I create a framed story, a story within which other stories will be told. This is my own writing, my own writing retreat. The framed story is Shaherazar. A writer has made a deal with death. He will die unless he can keep producing stories that will entertain death. Within that I start writing a story about a Roman centurion in the wake of the crucifixion, back then, in that in early times of that part of the world.

2:11:11 And his girlfriend is a Phoenician witch who's very good with dreams. I start writing this, I don't know why. Now I'm on the plane. I'm physically on an airplane going home from Seattle Airport. And as usual, I'm curious to see what the world will give me in the way of incidents that are like dream symbols. And my theme is still entertaining death. On comes an immensely tall woman, she looks immensely tall. She is tall, but she's got huge heels. on her black leather thigh boots and she's dressed all in black leather over a buskill and she's wearing a top hat and she sits next to me and she parks a pudgy little man next to the window next to her.

2:11:52 We might or might not ever come back to her. And she asks for Crame de Moth, no they don't have creme de moth, so she has a double looking around the plane and said, Mmm, ~ it's a good flight. And I look at her. Yes, she said, all the seats are full. Actuarially she says, if the plane is going to crash, 20% of the seats will be empty. This is the start of the conversation. And I'm looking at her and on her hands she's wearing gloves with cut out fingers and there are death snips on the back of her gloves. This is my companion. I'll just give a few highlights to the conversation. Comes out fairly early on, but she has a profession. She's a dominatrix.

2:12:32 Now this is not my theme. So the conversation is a bit bumpy. But then she says, knowing nothing of me, she says, You think the dead talk to us in our dreams? Absolutely, I say. good. My dead husband turned up last week. He was in the rock scene. He was shot and killed in a bar in Seattle. It was in the newspapers. He turned up last week and he said, I've got a great job. I'm doing the music for dreams that are being made, for movies that are being made for people to see in their dreams. I said, What do you think of that? I said, That's wonderful. I think that's a great story. And okay, I'll just jump to two more incidents.

2:13:13 ~ this was several hours of a gusting conversation of this quality with a woman wearing death's head, a dominatrix, a death's head dominatrix. Yeah. She says at a certain point, I'd love to read a story about Jezebel, and I'm searching my memory, who is Jezebel? She fills it in, she says, those Phoenician witches were so good with dreams, it's as if her dead husband or son was whispering in her ear, perfect. Okay, now we've had another pause in the conversation. I have not revealed much about my life, really. Not much.

2:13:54 She looks at me and she says, I love crows and I love Of course you do. There is a collective noun to describe a group of crows or ravens. Do you know what it is? And I'm very proud of this. yes. A murder of crows? An unkindness of ravens. She sniffs. Everybody knows that. It's a collective noun for both crows and ravens. Do you know what it is? You're going to tell me, yes, I will. It is a storytelling of crows. Or a storytelling of ravens. And I'll tell you why.

2:14:35 I saw this once. There was a storytelling of crows listening to a crow who was trying to tell a story to the group. And he must have been a very bad storyteller because when he finished, the other crows pecked him to death. I'm sitting here on the plane, and life is giving me what most people would not credit to be a plausible literal experience. in the immediate wake of my setting myself up by writing the frame story of death requiring stories, good stories from the teller, or else the teller would be taken out. And then the story So ~ out of all this I have something to say which might be of interest.

2:15:23 We're dreaming all the time. I mean all these people go into this almost theological discussion or neuroscientific discussion of what's going on in your brain, what's going on with your God or your gods, and how can you tell if you're dreaming or not? Is it all illusion? Is it all reality? From my point of view we're dreaming all the time. And the trick is just to become more conscious, more aware of how this works or does not work for you. And be more of a player. A great day. at all those liminal spaces where you're somewhere in between are lovely spaces to do more in.

2:16:06 I mean that are the things that I'm pushing all the time. describe taught or practice. Actually where so many things are accessible, including easy contact with the deceased, which is where we started this conversation. And so this was you said you were dreaming with your eyes open. this was an actual the the story with the Dominatrix on the plane.

2:16:50 That happened in waking life. exactly literally what happened. It's it's it's a su it's a short version of what happened. I I guess I should share the last scene, says the pudgy man, the dominatric is parked the dominatrix ha has parked by the window and as we're getting off the plane she introduces him. This is Homer and I say, ~ Homer, good luck with your odyssey. I'm trying to be funny. And he looks at me blurly and he says, All I want is a one lane bowling alley. What? A one lane bowling alley? Yes, says Homer. Something to do when you get old. So that's it's almost as good as a Dominatrix with a froze peppy.

2:17:35 No, that is that is I get this a lot. ~ I tell a story from my travels Exactly as it happened. Sometimes I dilute it because I think this will just be too much. And people can't fathom that this was played out like this step by step in ordinary reality. It was. It is. I don't travel that much anymore, so I don't have so many stories from the Bardo of air travel, but there were there were many, many Many and even when I'm not travelling they come to me, and then the cat my literary cat pulls a book off the shelf and it falls open at a certain page and that is exactly what I needed for the day, for example.

2:18:16 Haven't seen gentle So the magic of synchronicity is that well it's like this. In dreaming, whether it's shamanic journeying or meditation or sleep dreams or lucid dreams, in luc in in dreaming we tend to get out there, we tend to go through the veils or curtains of ordinary perception into another reality. It might be a fantastic reality, it might be a fantastically real reality. Th the Nowdu in West Australia say that the dream world is really, really real. It's really real. The ordinary world is just real. The dream world is Through the curtains and veils of ordinary perception when you go dreaming, trancing, journeying, through synchronicity, through coincidence, through meaningful coincidence, the powers and entities of the deeper world come pushing through the veils and make things happen with you and around you in the physical world.

2:19:11 I think that's the that's the inside-out nature of dreams and synchronicity. So we've got to be alert, we want to be alert and available to play. And yeah. I love it. ~ you ~ there have been a couple of things that you've mentioned in the time that we've been talking. You, well, first of all, you had said, ~ I I would love to get to the dream that you had last night, just to get an idea of what the great Robert Moss, the great dreamer, you know, what's a typical, a typical night? They're probably not typical, but you mentioned Arabian nights ~ very briefly, just in passing. But last night I dreamt one part of my dream and I feel like and I've been watching your supplemental your bonus material for your course and so I feel like it ~ juiced up my dream state a bit.

2:20:07 But I was ~ with a couple of people who have in my world who have a little bit of shamanic training, ~ maybe not to the same extent that you do, but ~ but we were at a performance of ~ Aladdin. We were watching a live performance of Aladdin. And it was ~ even though that was, we were in a theater, so it was happening. I don't remember a lot of it. I just remember it was Aladdin. ~ but I do also remember that throughout this dream, there was a ~ gigantic feather that kept coming and ~ fanning at me. and I don't it was one of those things that was just kind of happening out Again, it wasn't the main thing, but when I woke up, I was like, yeah, I kept getting this feather that was fanning me.

2:20:55 ~ and to me, you know, I I think of hawks, I think of eagles, I, you know, especially like big feathers. ~ but I think of shamans as well. And so I and I think of you, you know, as a as a shaman, as a very adept shaman. So anyway, I would love to hear a bit about. your dreamscape. What what was it what interesting dreams have come to you lately? Well, the dream from last night is a very short story. It's amusing and it is also it also reflects some of the things that go on in dreaming according to your, let us say, your vocation, your profession, your orientation.

2:21:39 So in my dream I'm reading a dream report that I have written. It's a printer. It's a one page printer, Times New Rome, and it's exactly the way that things look when they're printed out from my digital from my digital dream reports. My journals are now all It gives me a search search. But I'm it's a I I've printed out one page. And the page is about a discovery I have made. I discovered that Tolkien, yes, Lord of the Rings, Robert Tolkien. Tolkien actually experimented with Tarot. And this is going to be very exciting to people, because people think Tolkien wouldn't touch tarot anything like that, wouldn't like what he called authority. But in my dream report, which I'm reading in my dream.

2:22:22 I discovered that not only did Tolkien actually experiment with Tarot, but he had an experience involving the magici the magician card. The magician a common in the old ride awake de ride-away deck w which which was a sort of shimmering revelation, maybe. And I'm thinking I'll write a substack article about this. This would be quite interesting. And I get I'm fully lucid. I get out of bed, I go to my computer, I actually go through my digit dig digital files. It's only at this point, having checked a couple of times, both all the drop box and my journal. I've never read this report. This the dream the inner dream was in some inner court of dreaming and it never made it out of the dreamlands.

2:23:04 It's only in my dream that I have this report. Referring to an earlier dream maybe in a More secret in a dimension in a level of dreaming. So, anyway, if you gave me research leads, I mean I've now been researching whether it's remotely possible that Tolkien did use terror. I found no evidence that he did. However, I have written to a friend who wrote the book on Tolkien's friend Charles Williams, and MLBs used to drink together with the bird and baby. There's a cover for you, and Mark's for the. He's edited in the six years. Williams wrote a supernatural thriller that was called about Tarot, about the Great of Trinks. And he was we've told you on that for six years.

2:23:45 So maybe there is something there. So this is probably a very boring story, except that people have some Tyrone, people some Toro. The dream itself is rather boring. Hey, I'm looking at a piece of paper, then I find I don't have it, and then I'm online for an hour trying to track it down. But it takes you into one of the many kinds of dreaming. I mean there are vocational dreams. There are dreams that support and orient, for example, a line of thinking or a line of research. I've actually written a chapter on Tolkien as a dreamer, which I haven't quite to publish yet. So and I dreamed of Tolkien myself, not just it.

2:24:38 So that's just a sample from last night. a typical dream for me these days that I'm not travelling Marty is I'm leading yet another workshop. On live, as the French say, face to face, person to person. Sometimes at places where I have taught a lot, sometimes at wonderful places which where we're never taught in this world, ~ and are probably in a parallel reality. So they're not pre-cognitory dreams. My dreams of leading workshops are often precognitive in the past. Yes, I was going to go there. Yes, look out for that person who's having some personal drama that might be difficult for the group. ~ give space to that person who's going to bring wonderful dream with dragon flying out of the basement.

2:25:18 Be ready for this, be ready for catering issue, be ready to time the drumm sessions. So I'd have lots of lots of professional, let's say, dreams of leading the sort of shamanic dream work stuff at different places around the world. Now I think these dreams which are constant, I mean I'm teaching almost every night. And sometimes it seems I'm teaching a five day retreat in two hours at TikTok timing. Sometimes I wake up exhausted. Happy, usually happy and satisfied, but exhausted, as if I've done it. I as I look at my dreams and as I look at dreams in general, I sometimes think it might be helpful to discern, to distinguish three broad bands, three three broad bandwidths of dreaming.

2:26:00 There are the literalistic, realistic dreams, which relate to things happening in space and time, in a reality that is either this one or down posted. Then there are the symbolic dreams, and that's where all the analogies And most of the dream workers, what does this mean? What does it mean to dream of bananas? What are bananas in your dreams anyway? And then there are the dreams that are experiences of a different reality, of another reality, which for me are actually the most interesting. Because you know, in dreaming we step into the many worlds, we step into parallel worlds, where we made different choices. We stepped into past lives, future lives.

2:26:41 Parallel lives, we we go to places where the dead are alive, we go to other planets, we go to other star systems and so on. And we go to our personal dream movie studios where entertainments, horrors, educational documentaries are being greater awareness, with greater lucidity, with greater dream traveller skills, we can go conscious and fully aware to those dream studios and maybe participate in scripted what will be a more interesting dream of life as well as of the night. Hmm. Well, I maybe then in that case, could you have been dreaming about a future dream with Tolkien?

2:27:27 That like would that could your Yeah. all it all it all twists and turns and rides around, it's all a nervous script. are revolving. above the magician and in the old rider wake deck there is a lemniscape, lemniscape, the the infin the infinity side. Well how is that you use the word infinity on in this discussion, aren't you? So how is that working? Well it's a nervous strip. I mean inside is outside, up is down, in is out. And and it's like that. And it could be a challenge to express what we experience in these ways.

2:28:09 will jump on a word like immeable, which is a lovely word. can't express it. Well, in one of my dreams I invented an effability game in which we were learning to express what people have held to be ineffable and inexpressible. And that of course is your destiny if your fate your character is your fate, your character is your fate. If your character is that of someone who likes to play with words. words to describe things that did not have a description before. I'm not as good at this as Jung was or as Fred Myers of the Society Society of Research was in the Thai Victorian era, but I've made up a few.

2:28:55 For example, I've made up the word chiromancer or chiromancy. describe the practice of someone who navigates life by synchronicity and does it really well, who is forever poised to notice when time changes, it seems Because you feel there is something slipping through the veils of perception and making things happen around you. So, you know, the challenge of bringing new words, fresh phrases is one that I invite people to meet in all of my classes. All of my classes are covert storytelling and writing courses as well as everything else.

2:29:37 One of the things we always do. ~ we discuss, and it might be a life story rather than a dream of the night, is I say, well what's your bumper sticker, what's your catchphrase, what's your aphorism, what's your snapper? And your astonisher, as Mark Twain would have said, what's the snapper? my snapper from my Tolkien dream might might be, Tolkien did more tarot than he let on. Yeah. Sneaky, let's go. Let's go find some evidence. Yes. I love it. So you've brought up Carl Jung a couple of times.

2:30:18 And the last time that we met, we you you brought you mentioned this tiny little tidbit toward the end that you had ~ some dream interaction with Carl Jung and you gave just enough tidbits to like spark interest, but you didn't go into that. Is there anything there that you want to share? I can't say that I dream have dreamed with Jung to the extent that I've dreamed, for example, with William Buffer Yeats, with my favourite dead professor from the Australian National University, of whom I have dreamed profoundly, often in that half-dream state that hypnagolic stay over decades.

2:30:58 But the dream that I remember now that you confront me was actually a part of a group shamanic journey or my part, part of my part, part of my part of the group shamanic journey I was leading. related to the psychopath training actually. I I was guiding people on the journey to meet someone who is living on the other side of death. And the prelude to this, or the let's say the approach rather, is to go to a place on the water, prepared to maybe find a boat or or a water bird or some other way of crossing to the other shore where you're going to meet someone who's at home on the other side of death. You might have someone in mind, you might want to see Grenna Part the intention is you're going to have timely and helpful communication with someone on the other side of death and learn more about afterlife possibilities than you currently know.

2:31:47 So that's the general intention. I'm drumming for the group. So I'm in control of my physical body, the extent that I can control the temper of the group. I'm aware and alert to the physical needs of the group, to how the circle is there in in the workshop space. And I'm also journeying for myself. I always do, I'd be bored if I were just the drummer line. So I'm journeying for myself. So I come down to the shoreline and there is a boat, a little dinghy there, and there's a man in the boat wearing a boater, a straw boater. And he looks a lot like Carl Jung, who I was not expecting to see. And he's as if he's waiting for me. I really shivers now. I'm getting shivers now. Truth comes with shivers.

2:32:28 It's a science of shivers. And he invites me. go with him on his boat and suddenly we are at what looks very much like Bollinger. His retreat on the lake, which he built to a considerable extent with his own hands, where he did all that stonework and carved those remarkable inscriptions and so on. With Telosphoros and Philonon, all that stuff, and painted, painted, painted. And ~ The bit that I need to recall now, which is wildly funny, is he shows me the book that he's been writing in this version of the afterlife.

2:33:08 It's the purple book, not the red book, it has a purple color. And it's called Voliva Celestia, the Book of Heaven, in Latin. And he opens the book, and there is a preface or a prologue, and the first line is, I'm not a Jungian. Ha ha ha. And my Jungian friends are gracious enough to laugh when I tell them that kind of thing. Because Jung actually said that in mind. He I'm not a Jungian. And I'm not a Jungian. I love Jung. I I've we've had this massive material keeps coming out, stuff that wasn't published, notes from his seminars in Zurich. parts that never made it into Memory Streams Reflections with Anyela Yafe and th those books, the two books, are the bits that were left on the cutting room floor after Memory Streams Reflections was published are precious.

2:33:59 I mean they are precious. There's amazing stuff there. Some of us not P some of it not PC at all. Because I mean his opinions about people in Africa, for example, are things that it's a bit hard to So anyway, so that was one of my encounters with Jorgen and there was a follow up. I mean I tracked That's one the things I teach people to do, not just to do lucid dreams, not just to do shamanic journeying, but to travel together in what Yates would call mutual visioning. To tra you can travel together. You can do things together. you it could be a whole group travel assignment.

2:34:39 You're all going to go together to a certain place. We do that in my advanced workshops as part of what I call dream archaeology. You wanna know what's really going on with the cult of Athena? Well let's go to that ancient temple of Prienni in Anatolia. Let's go together, let's go overnight, thirty of us, forty of us, more of us, and let's bring back reports. maps, drawings, group blog. So, you know I I teach in in the in the workshop space, in the course space, in the class space. It can all be synchronized with the drumming or other audio effects that we're using. But basically we can have a group of really almost any size within earshots and within coherent understanding of what's going on.

2:35:22 undertake an assignment to go somewhere, learn something, talk to someone, bring back information, and the results can be astonishing. And they tend to damp down any skepticism about the reality of this kind of non-ordinary reality and the possibility of lucid dreaming, let's say, between two or more people. There it is. Here are the results. And if you have just one or two cases and you're a certain kind of skeptic, you'll say, well, this is anecdotal. But how many anecdotes does it take before you accept That you have a body of state-specific evidence are huge importance and relevance. And one of the things that it's demonstrating is this. A small thing again related to the psychopath dream.

2:36:04 There is an afterlife. Consciousness does survive the death of the body. How do you know? Because when you dream in a certain way, you're already trampled the upper body. And therefore, surely when you wake up to what's going on, you're going to be able to recognize that if you can do this. Beyond your body and brain, then you could do it when you don't have a body and brain on it. I mean it's as simple as that. This is the origin actually of religion. Because most religions, I think all religions that matter, teach us something about the survival of consciousness or so being physical life. And if that is the heart of religion, then there's dreaming. The first hand evidence through dreaming that consciousness is not confined to the body and brain and mental survives.

2:36:49 It is at the origin. the origin itself. Right, right. Well, you know, you have a lot of accounts of either in the dream state, in the in the hypnagogic state, in the shim, you know, in shamanic germ ger excuse me, shamanic journeying, ~ of seeing deceased people, people on the other side, whether historical figures, I know your father has played a big part. ~ and When you have these, so for example, with shamanic journeying, when you when people are awake and they you help them get into a meditative state, there's there's an assignment.

2:37:34 there's ~ a go the you're gonna go into a post office and you're gonna pick up your ~ packages that have been left for you. For example, and so we know what the assignment is, and so it starts with the imagination, right? And it starts from the from the ~ participants perspective, it begins as like we're invoking this, we're controlling this. This is it, does it from your experience, how does that transfer into, ~ I'm no longer the, you know, the now I'm just receiving what the intel is that's coming from this being and so forth.

2:38:16 Is there a shift for you? There's there's a shift when you absolutely know ~ and and and and if you're ca carrying an inner skeptic with you, your inner skeptic actually falls silent. I remember we had a a very intelligent physician, he was a regular member of my workshop, so he had this skeptic inside him constantly asking, am I making this up? this is all good. How do I know I'm not just making up that kind of course. And he has an experience in which he's following instructions for journey. And he sees a deer, okay, a deer I like deer head and a stag in my dream.

2:38:57 And he's drifting off somewhere else in his perception. And the stag butts him, quite hard. And he feels the butt, very hard. It it seems his physical body. And then he looks in the direction the deer wants to take him. And you're huge discoveries. For him, the moment that the deer butted his apparently his physical body, it seemed, the energy body anyway, that was the moment of clarity for him. And this is for real. This deer just hit butted me. And this was not some flimsy. underwrite the imagination just as it might help too.

2:39:39 William Blake said with poetic parody, eternity is a world of imagination. I mean, we when you die to the body to paraphrase, you enter a world that is all imagination, imagination is the architect. So if I set up a journey where I'm going to tell you to go, for example, to the Green Post Office, which is the Black Society we did in did a very very strict operation by the way in an actual training. Did I ask you to go to the Dream Post Office or the Dream Museum or the Dream Typically I'm drawing upon your Where you were first excited?

2:40:37 So we've not fantastic extent. Well this is a real place. It's as real, we could say, as a department store or the Eiffel Tower are in this world.

2:41:17 It's been built by human imagination over time. It's been visited by many. You can go there. It's a place where you can only enter the interesting stuff by invitation. So you can't just wander and think you're there. You can wander version of it, but you're not into the real stuff unless you're about it, and then you're probably going to be tested and going to have to rise through the grates in a sense looked at by various conservators, gatekeepers on different worlds. It's a real place. And pe you know what people live for centuries after death in places like this. I mean what are heavens, hell is in purgatories anyway? Or what are the The pure lands of the Buddhist collective imagination.

2:42:00 These are places that are constructed through an interface between human imaginations and imaginations. Imaginations of departed masters and great teachers and imagineers. And they're real, I mean they're solid. You can go there. Guru. a hotel room in what was then Bombay in nineteen thirty five when Sri Yukisva came back and started telling Yogananda what the afterlife is like, giving him a whole astral geography. He said, there are people who live there in any body form they choose, they can keep changing bodies if they like world looks like this and this one looks like that and this one is on another planet.

2:42:49 He's laying out for those who tend to lean east when it comes to talking about spirituality. Those leaning east if you haven't done it recently, we read chapter 43 of the audiobiography of the yogi the Sri Yucta as well lays out what astral reality is like in the afterlife. Don't tell him or or or tell anyone talking about it. This is just your imagination. This is the imagination, which is a source of incredible creation. And, you know, we we want to train our imagination ~ not only to be ready for our own version of the afterlife, but of course to practice reality creation in this world to a greater extent than most of us are dimly aware.

2:43:37 Now that is powerful. Practicing reality creation. I love that. That's amazing. So is there anything that you know, if people have recurring themes in in I don't know if you experience this. I've I know you dream, you know, you're such a powerful dreamer, but I feel like maybe when we're getting these recurring themes, I wonder if it's because we're not getting it, you know. For me, when I see these things that keep coming up, and I'm like, okay, I'm in a maybe a different place and it's different people, but here I am again holding a little baby. Here I am again, and I'm expecting I'm very pregnant. Here I am again with little children.

2:44:19 And here, you know, and it's like, what am I not getting? But I think because you're so introspective, maybe you don't do that. But can you relate? it's interest see the use of words is interesting. Yes, I am very introspective, but I'm also very oriented towards action. I don't want us just to think about our dreams and just talk I want to take action. For example, I'm researching whether it's remotely possible that Tolkien had had some experience with Tyrou. ~ all the sources tell me no, no, no, no, he never did know the word. But I'm on it because of my dream report. So research is a form of action. Since I'm a guy who loves research and a historian by training, I mean I I I that's one action I've always taken.

2:45:02 So you say introspective, okay sure. But I will say dreams always require action. We must do something with them. And the action might extend to changing our world or at least our experience of life. Now the recurring dream when it is a recurring dream, because people are confused, they're having a series of dreams and they seem to be similar elements, so say it's a recurring dream, but actually looked at more closely it's moving a lot, it's not the same. sometimes those dreams, those series of dreams, serial dreams are actually experiences arguably are the parallel I have a parallel. So let's put that on one side as something fascinating to look at, but not exactly what you're asking about. When it essentially is the same thing coming at us again and again and again, I think it's sometimes because our dream producers are trying to wake us up.

2:45:49 ~ Dan, we've got to give it to them again because they won't recognize it or even more, even more important, do anything about it. ~ in in my book Mysterious Reality, which I'm going to mention again, playing authors, 'cause not enough people know it, Mysterious Realities, to some of my stories of this kind, I write a story of a physician, she's an actual physician, a very very respected physician, who is in a very angry, bitter state at the breakfast table at one of my retreats. She says, I am having the same effing dream again and I can't stand it. tell us. Well once again I don't have my medical qualifications.

2:46:31 I've got to do the exams for my medical degree again. And I tell them as I always do, I've got my effing degree. I got it 30 years ago. Why do I have to keep getting the same effing tree? And she's normally a very, very polished, very mannerly lady. She doesn't normally sit at the table swearing like this. And I just I just play the play a game with the saying, well if I put myself in the position of your dream production crew, they are so fed up with you that they're threatening to walk off the lot because they have to keep making the same effing dream because you will not get the effing message. Well what is the effing message? I say, Well if it's my dream, I need to get ready for a test in some sense in my life.

2:47:15 Maybe my professional medical career, but in some sense The the the the exams I remember are an analogue for what I'll have to do in regular life. my god, you've got it? I'm considering a job offer from a huge pharmaceutical company and I realize that I'm decades out of date on some of the chemistry elements and I'll have to get the textbooks and get ready. Yes, if I'm going to pursue that avenue. Once she made that realization she didn't have the same dream anymore. The dream was preparing her actually, rather specifically since she's in the medical field, the dream was saying you're going to have to face new tests in terms of your understanding and mastery of the medical literature.

2:47:56 So she got the message. She needed a conversation. She still couldn't get it on her own. She needed someone making a suggestion, which is why developing the practice and I know this is part of your life, developing the practice of helping each other to talk about these things. To receive suggestions from each other about what might be going on, which are non-authoritarian, non-intusive, and then to guide each other towards appropriate action to clarify the dream and apply its content in ordinary life. This is essential. So I invented what I call the lightning framework technique, introduced it at a conference in the year two thousand. And it's been prospering ever since. It it it includes the famous calls, if it were my dream, which Jeremy Taylor on the West Coast, both popularized.

2:48:45 We don't tell people what their dreams mean, we say gently, if it were my dream, I think about such and such. That's part of it. But beyond previous approaches, my approach insists on action. You're going to see go there. That might mean going back inside the dream state to clarify things or to carry the story forward. It might mean going out and buying something in the colour red because that's what you dream. It might mean bringing information from the dream in an appropriate way to someone who can use it. It might mean checking every source you can, including a living biographer, as to whether Tolkien might conceivably have had a tarot reading once upon the time.

2:49:26 All sorts of things you can do with a dream. Yes, I love it. Well, I'm like I said, I'm I'm so excited about your training and it starts next week. And I know that the ~ there we're still in the signup period where people can get the bonus material of which I've gotten such ~ such value from. So please tell people a little bit more about the course and how they can find out more. Well, it's on the Shift Network. If you go to mustreams.com, you'll find a link, ~ or you can go to the Shift Network directly. But why not go to my website? Because there are other things going on there. You'll also discover my very active substack if you haven't done already, for which subscription is currently free.

2:50:11 Actually I'm not planning to change that, but there's lot going on there. you'll find a very complete menu of contents for the Cyclopon training and it reaches far and wide. It will take us into the experience of into contact with the guy, the self on a higher level, contact with the other soul or higher self that would take us into the dialogue we were discussing with the personified death and the possibility of making agreements with the personified death, which will actually bring you superabundant energy and clarity into regular life. I mean it looking at it all in the broadest possible way, it's all about bringing the sense of divine comedy into life.

2:50:57 the knowledge based on first hand experience that there is a bigger story, not part of a bigger story. I remember once when I was down in the dunks about things like that. Subway train for Peter airport on Jolly looking fellow who looks like Santa Claus in a country. Now Boder says, Walk on the bridge, don't build on it he says to the this is waiting up this for tree minutes. I'm astonished. Brits don't talk to screen design.

2:51:41 said early in this discussion, he just told me what it's all about. This life is a bridge between one world and another world. Walk on the bridge, don't do that. Don't take anything that happens here more seriously than you need to. Because, you know, you're in one world amongst many. You're in one life between other lives. And after that actually is one those examples of how those forces and people will intercede in our lives. He has a ple we've had structured conversation, perfectly normal conversation. Somebody's talking about his roses and his garden. Typical civilized country chap. There's nothing about the Buddha, there's nothing about the purpose of life.

2:52:21 I think that something grabbed him and used his vocal cords to deliver a message to me from an unlikely source. At exactly the moment I needed to hear exactly those words. So this is also no example of being a dream of 24-7. If you want to be a dream 24-7, you're a Sensors are a project. You're not over excited because you carry your sensor. Calm play some. But you're alert to what the world of the world's are giving you. Eyes open or. Beautiful. Well, Robert, thank you so much for coming on today. This has just been such a beautiful discussion.

2:53:03 And again, I can't wait. I'll see you next week. Thank you. Thank you so much. What a joy it was playing with you and dreaming with you in this medium. Thank you.