Outside a house, I found a bearskin hanging on a rack. This confusion of reason may be purposeful it’s a function of good storytelling, allowing for deeper processes to emerge from the fractured Western ego.Īfter reading his book, I dreamed I was in a workshop with Moss: I notice my inner skeptic constantly at war with my intuitive self when I read Moss. Stories Bearing FruitĪdmittedly, his stories sometimes have a fanciful air to them, and can strain credulity. Moss walks the walk, and his mission is to wake up the slumbering West to this aspect of reality, so we can start taking responsibility for our actions on this planet. This is not a tightrope of postmodern political correctness, but one drawn through his own lifetime of experience in procuring natural and “altered” states of consciousness, including not only sleeping dreams, but also those visions that happen at the boundary between sleep and wakefulness, as well as those accessed through sonic driving with the drum. He walks a tightrope, steering away from cultural appropriation while managing to not prematurely chop off our own (Western) access to shamanic waters either. Moss doesn’t ever claim he is a shaman per se, although he sometimes refers to himself as shamanic practitioner in interviews and the press. “I am using the adjective here to describe a method for shifting consciousness in order to enter non-ordinary reality for purposes that include the care and recovery of the soul.” (p. As an ex-history professor, he knows the term has been used and abused. Parsing Shamanic dreaming Bear shaman, by American painter George Catlin (1796-1872)
I am honored to be a small part of this cultural milieu that is ushering in a more holistic-and appropriate-recognition of self-awareness in dreaming as more than an enactment of a schema or a rational conquest of a primitive world, but rather an ability that comes with a wide range of cultural and transpersonal possibilities. 50) (See my article here that Moss is referring to as well as this blog post). He also nods to my own influence, suggesting, “I am going to borrow a phrase employed by one of my friends in the lucid dreaming fraternity, who refers to my ‘shamanic lucid dreaming adventures.’” (p. Moss credits Robert Waggoner’s mature discussion of lucidity in Lucid Dreaming: gateway to the inner self as a cultural turning point away from the control model of lucid dreaming. “It is utterly misguided to seek to put the control freak that is the ego in charge of something immeasurably wiser and deeper than itself.” (p.4) For years, he rejected this phrase because of the pop-cultural associations of lucidity with controlling your dreams, a practice that Moss finds distasteful and unbalanced. Interestingly, for the first time in any of his books, Moss adopts the phrase lucid dreaming. We choose to stop running from the monster in our dreams-who may turn out to be our own power hunting us-when we brave up and turn around to confront it.” (p. “We learn to recognize that, whatever situation we are in, we always have a choice. By becoming an active dreamer, we become a chooser of our stories, rather than a victim of the limitations others have imposed on us. This different way, Moss suggests, begins with noticing that we live our lives as characters in a great cosmic story, but we often do not recognize the roles we play.
When you become an active dreamer, you’ll notice that the world speaks to you in a different way.” (p. This approach includes paying attention to night dreams, but it is not only, or even essentially, about what happens at night. “You are going to learn an approach to life that I call Active Dreaming. At once useful, playful and threaded with captivating storytelling, Active Dreaming is a guide for rediscovering your innate ability to live your dreams like they really mattered.īecause, as Moss might say, they may be the only thing that does. His latest title, Active Dreaming: journeying beyond self-limitation to a life of wild freedom, is a welcome distillation of his approach to dreamwork. If you haven’t read a book by Robert Moss yet, you’re in for a treat.