Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Norri with you,
Speaker 2: Back with Robert Moss. Robert has been a dream traveler
Speaker 2: since doctors pronounced him clinically dead in a hospital in Hobart,
Speaker 2: Tasmania when he was three years old. From his experiences
Speaker 2: in many worlds, he created his School of Active Dreaming,
Speaker 2: his original synthesis of modern dream work in ancient shamanic
Speaker 2: and mystical practices for journeying to realms beyond the physical
Speaker 2: and growing creative imagination. He has led popular workshops all
Speaker 2: over the planet, including a three year training for teachers
Speaker 2: of Active Dreaming and online courses as well. His website
Speaker 2: linked up at Coast tocoastam dot com. His latest book
Speaker 2: is called Growing Big Dreams and Robert. Welcome back to
Speaker 2: the dream world, my friend.
Speaker 3: Good to be dreaming with you. George.
Speaker 2: How have you been.
Speaker 3: I'm absolutely fine. I'm actually doing very well. I don't
Speaker 3: travel with much physically as I used to, but as
Speaker 3: a dream trap where I'm out there all the time.
Speaker 2: Excellent. Lots to talk with you about it. How you've
Speaker 2: changed your life and your pattern. But tell us about
Speaker 2: this episode when you were three. What happened?
Speaker 3: Well, I had pneumonia. I was my great aunt, the
Speaker 3: opera singer friend of Dame Nellie Melbury, had seen it
Speaker 3: in the tea lead. She was that kind of psychic medium.
Speaker 3: She seen me dying, hadn't seen me coming back. So
Speaker 3: the doctor's pronounced me clinically dead. And when I come back,
Speaker 3: they say, with some embarrassment to my parents, oh you
Speaker 3: poor boy. He died and he came back back, didn't he.
Speaker 3: I don't remember much from that episode, George, but when
Speaker 3: I was nine it happened again. I'm an operating room
Speaker 3: under the surgeon's knife for an emergency appendectomy, and I
Speaker 3: find myself floating under the ceiling looking down at the scene,
Speaker 3: not enjoying the sight of my open body with a
Speaker 3: blood or listening to the nurses. So I drift out
Speaker 3: the door and there's my mother grieving, and I don't
Speaker 3: want to feel guilt for her. I'm an only kid,
Speaker 3: and she's worried I'm going to die. I want to
Speaker 3: do something. I look out the window of the hospital
Speaker 3: forgetting the body on the bed, and I look over
Speaker 3: the coast of Melbourne, Austrader. That's where I am now.
Speaker 3: And I remember there's a theme park down there, Lunar Park,
Speaker 3: just for fun, they used to say in the ads.
Speaker 3: And I think, I'm a nine year old kid. I
Speaker 3: want to go on the rides, look at the girls
Speaker 3: and their summer dresses. So I've drift down, float down,
Speaker 3: fly down to the theme park, go through the big
Speaker 3: moon round face of the gate. I'm going to go
Speaker 3: on the ghost train, I guess, And suddenly wish I'm
Speaker 3: in another world, and I'm greeted by people who are
Speaker 3: very tall and pale and beautiful. They receive me as
Speaker 3: one of their own, and they raised me, and I
Speaker 3: forget about the body on the bed, and I seem
Speaker 3: to live a whole life George amongst these different pale,
Speaker 3: slender people, until that life and that body had done,
Speaker 3: and I expect, I think to go to another star.
Speaker 3: But suddenly, bang, after nine minutes of part time and
Speaker 3: one hundred years somewhere else, I'm back in the body
Speaker 3: of a frightened kid in a bed in an operating room.
Speaker 3: And we didn't have Ray Moody's phrase near death experience
Speaker 3: back then. It was die and come back. That's the
Speaker 3: way I was talked about, and we didn't have sympathetic
Speaker 3: people in the add out community to listen to my stories.
Speaker 3: Our poor kid, it must be the medication. He's hallucinating.
Speaker 3: The first person who could validate and confirm what I
Speaker 3: had been through was an Aboriginal kid, and we weren't
Speaker 3: supposed to hang out with them back then, in that
Speaker 3: era in Australia. But the Aboriginal kid said, oh yeah,
Speaker 3: we do that. We get sick, we go and live
Speaker 3: with the spirits. We've come back. Sometimes we're the same
Speaker 3: and sometimes we're not well. So I had to look
Speaker 3: lay quiet about that for a while. I came from
Speaker 3: a conservative military family. You didn't talk about dreams and visions.
Speaker 3: But I knew, I mean I knew completely from age nine.
Speaker 3: Because of that their wills beyond the physical. I knew
Speaker 3: to pick up on your last guest. But consciousness precedes
Speaker 3: to one body, and it survived soul. Consciousness survives the
Speaker 3: death of one body. I knew it's not weird to
Speaker 3: talk to people who we might consider dead. I'm the
Speaker 3: ancestors and so on. So that's where I start from
Speaker 3: as a dreamer. These are things I've known through experience
Speaker 3: since I was nine years old.
Speaker 2: And Robert Day, what was your midlife career before you
Speaker 2: became the dream teacher.
Speaker 3: Well, I've been a successful journalist. I was a best
Speaker 3: selling thriller writer. I had four spy novels on the
Speaker 3: New York Times First seller List. And I don't know.
Speaker 3: I was bored. It looks like somebody else's dream. But
Speaker 3: I moved to a farm in upstate New York, trying
Speaker 3: to put down some roots, I guess in my adopted country.
Speaker 3: I moved because of an oak tree behind the farmhouse
Speaker 3: and a red tailed hawk that dropped the feather between
Speaker 3: my legs. And on that land, I started dreaming of
Speaker 3: the ancestors of the land, of an Irishman who came
Speaker 3: to the American colonies in the eighteenth century, with whom
Speaker 3: I have a distant genealogical connection, and other connections. I
Speaker 3: started dreaming of the first peoples. I started dreaming of
Speaker 3: a wise woman of long ago who insisted in speaking
Speaker 3: to me in her own language. It turned out to
Speaker 3: be an archaic form of the Mohawk Indian language with
Speaker 3: some Huron spiritual vote dicagory from her birth people and
Speaker 3: I through synchronicity and through hard work and through scholarship
Speaker 3: and research, I began to understand what she was telling
Speaker 3: me she would never translate. I understood, for example, that
Speaker 3: a funny word she kept using it sounded like this
Speaker 3: ontnunk had a meaning. It meant the secret wish of
Speaker 3: the soul, especially as revealed in dreams. And I understood
Speaker 3: that in her tradition of dreaming and healing, what we
Speaker 3: need to do is listen carefully, tenderly to dreamers, see
Speaker 3: what their soul, what their greatest self, if you like,
Speaker 3: is saying to them in the dream, and help them
Speaker 3: act on that guidance or else they're going to go wrong.
Speaker 3: I also learned from her tradition learnt again the dreaming
Speaker 3: is about survival because the Mohawk were not pantsies. I mean,
Speaker 3: they were very fierce warriors. They held their own with
Speaker 3: very small numbers against many enemies, and they used their
Speaker 3: dreamers as their scouts, as their reconnaissance people to warn
Speaker 3: them about where the enemy was hiding an ambush and
Speaker 3: get through. So I learned from this contact within digital
Speaker 3: this tradition. Of course, I met people living today who
Speaker 3: help you with the language and the customs has understood. Today,
Speaker 3: I learned two vital things about dreaming known I think
Speaker 3: to all our ancestors. But it's about soul. And yes,
Speaker 3: it will tell us that soul has an origin before
Speaker 3: this life and has a destiny beyond this life. That's
Speaker 3: a rather important thing to know. That you're connected to
Speaker 3: other lives, you have a larger purpose. And that dreaming
Speaker 3: is also about survival in the sense that it will
Speaker 3: show you the possible future to pick up your on
Speaker 3: your previous guest again, our dreams show us not only
Speaker 3: what is going to happen, they show us what might
Speaker 3: or might not happen, depending on how you work with
Speaker 3: the information and apply it. Those are very important things
Speaker 3: to know, and our understanding of these things was atrified
Speaker 3: Western society. So I've devoted myself to bringing back that
Speaker 3: kind of knowledge because it works. It puts us in
Speaker 3: touch with a deeper source. It puts us in touch,
Speaker 3: if you like, with the god we can talk to,
Speaker 3: or the spirits of nature, or the ancestors, and it
Speaker 3: puts us out on the right trail.
Speaker 2: Good for you, Robert. I have used dreams to manifest
Speaker 2: things that I want to happen in my life, and
Speaker 2: I've used it all the time. When I sometimes wanted
Speaker 2: a job in my earlier days, I'd concentrate on the
Speaker 2: individual who did the hiring and I'd go to sleep,
Speaker 2: and sure enough, within a day or two, that person
Speaker 2: would call me and go, George, we're looking for this
Speaker 2: per producer or this or that, and I'd get the job.
Speaker 2: What did I do right?
Speaker 3: So you belong to the school of Mark Twain? Remember
Speaker 3: Mark Twain. Mark Twain was the world class prema. People
Speaker 3: don't know enough about him. He practiced what he called
Speaker 3: mental telegraphy. Today we might call it mental texting or
Speaker 3: something like that. He would set his mind on someone
Speaker 3: that he wanted to be in contact with, and actually
Speaker 3: he would write a letter, but never send the letter,
Speaker 3: but he'd focus on that person that way. I'd wait
Speaker 3: for results, wait for a response. So I think you're
Speaker 3: doing something that smart dreamers have always known how to do,
Speaker 3: because a telepathy is a real phenomenon that there was
Speaker 3: given that name by very interesting Victorian psychic researcher called
Speaker 3: Fred Myers. We sometimes forget talking about science that there've
Speaker 3: been ways and waves of scientific attention to this stuff.
Speaker 3: One of the great waves of scientific attention was in
Speaker 3: the Victorian era when the first professor of anthropology at
Speaker 3: Oxford University, who used the racist colonial language of his time, said, actually,
Speaker 3: these savages, you know, these savages, they knew things we
Speaker 3: don't know anymore. We have fallen from the high level
Speaker 3: of savage knowledge because they knew, because of dreams, that
Speaker 3: the soul survives physical death and has and has an
Speaker 3: origin before physical life. We've fallen from that high knowledge
Speaker 3: of savage tradition. So you know, you did something right
Speaker 3: that smart dreamers have always known about. And that's I
Speaker 3: suppose partly why you're leading a dream life, George.
Speaker 1: I love it.
Speaker 2: There are so many different kinds of dreams. We'll talk
Speaker 2: about all of them tonight. Robert Moss our special guest.
Speaker 2: He's got a number of books out, including his latest
Speaker 2: one that he wrote a couple of years ago, called
Speaker 2: Growing Big Dreams. His website is linked up at coastocostam
Speaker 2: dot com. How many people do not pay attention to
Speaker 2: the messages in their dreams, Robert, Well, we have.
Speaker 3: To consider all the people who are not in touch
Speaker 3: at all in the sense they make no time, no
Speaker 3: room to catch their dreams or record them or look
Speaker 3: at what's going on. And indeed, we'll find quite a
Speaker 3: number of heart to say I don't dream. When you
Speaker 3: say that, you're just saying I don't remember, because you know,
Speaker 3: the people who analyze brainways and sleep rabs, labs and
Speaker 3: so on will say you dream on average for X
Speaker 3: number of hours a night at least to say three hours.
Speaker 3: Maybe we're dreaming all the time. So but a lot
Speaker 3: of people who don't know how to look at the
Speaker 3: material and don't have a way of talking about it.
Speaker 3: That's something I've tried to correct. I came up with
Speaker 3: a very simple way by which we can tell our
Speaker 3: stories to someone else who doesn't have to be an expert,
Speaker 3: doesn't have to have a certificate on the wall, just
Speaker 3: needs to be well intentioned and ready to, you know,
Speaker 3: go where the flow takes you. When you say to
Speaker 3: each other, okay, if it were my dream, I think
Speaker 3: about such and such and okay, then we have a conversation.
Speaker 3: We don't leave it hanging in mid air as a
Speaker 3: sterile set of words. We want some action. What are
Speaker 3: you going to do to apply this material? If you
Speaker 3: think the car accident could be next Tuesday, in front
Speaker 3: of that shopping mall. What are you going to do
Speaker 3: to avoid it? Maybe there's something worth researching in your
Speaker 3: dream that phrase from a different language, that city that
Speaker 3: you might or might not visit in the future. Do
Speaker 3: some research, you know, ask Auntie Google to translate that
Speaker 3: phrase for you. Check out what might go on in
Speaker 3: that city. And one thing that you can learn to
Speaker 3: do with your dreams if you're catching them and recording them,
Speaker 3: and a journal becomes essential, writing these things down becomes
Speaker 3: vitally important. You get good at dreaming. This is your
Speaker 3: log book. If you're catching your dreams and recording them,
Speaker 3: something you can learn to do is to go back
Speaker 3: inside them and go on with them. This is a key.
Speaker 3: I need a royal road to lucid dreaming. Suppose you've
Speaker 3: been scared by something, and maybe you run away from it,
Speaker 3: and maybe that's why you're trying not to listen to
Speaker 3: your dreams. You can learn to go back into the
Speaker 3: place where you encountered the fear in dream land, face
Speaker 3: the fear and go beyond it. Deal with that giant
Speaker 3: bear who came into your bedroom, as I had to
Speaker 3: do when I first met went to Upstate New York,
Speaker 3: and I found that the bear was an ally waiting
Speaker 3: for me. Once I got beyond my fear, you might
Speaker 3: want to go back into the dream to clarify that information.
Speaker 3: Is that car crash a literal car crash, or is
Speaker 3: the symbolic of the state of your marriage, the state
Speaker 3: of your job or whatever.
Speaker 1: Or your life or your life or your life exactly.
Speaker 3: I mean maybe your life is it is a train
Speaker 3: wreck or a car crash. I mean, you can look
Speaker 3: at it that way. How do you know, Well, you'll
Speaker 3: know if you spend more time with your dream, maybe
Speaker 3: just having interesting time in your dream, having a romantic adventure.
Speaker 3: You can go back, go on with it, not pay
Speaker 3: for the plane ticket, not have to wait wait for
Speaker 3: your bags. So that's the core technique of what I
Speaker 3: give people we call a dream re entry. You've got
Speaker 3: an airmage. It might be a dream, it might be
Speaker 3: something else that's got some juice for you. As maybe
Speaker 3: the juice is fear or mystery or romance. You can
Speaker 3: go on with it. You can go back into it.
Speaker 3: And when you do that, as I say, you are
Speaker 3: on one of the royal roads to becoming a lucid dreamer.
Speaker 2: What about some people, Robert, who just can't remember their dreams.
Speaker 2: They have a really difficult time grasping that.
Speaker 1: Well.
Speaker 3: One thing that I find works very well is, okay,
Speaker 3: let's say you can't don't have anything. First of all,
Speaker 3: if you're going to play the game, keep recording materials
Speaker 3: close to when you wake up. Write something down. You
Speaker 3: don't have a dream, Okay, write down whatever passes through
Speaker 3: your mind, and maybe you'll actually notice you have a
Speaker 3: fragment from a dream. But the other thing that works
Speaker 3: really well is learn to look at the world around
Speaker 3: you as a dream. I mean this is a very
Speaker 3: indigenous attitude in Australia. The first people, the Aborigines of
Speaker 3: my native country, say we live in the speaking land.
Speaker 3: Everything is speaking. The mountain is speaking, the lizard is speaking,
Speaker 3: the toyota is speaking. They'll pay attention to the signs
Speaker 3: and symbols that are popping up around you. You've got
Speaker 3: a question on your mind, you play the game this way.
Speaker 3: You say I'd like guidance on such as I'd like
Speaker 3: guidance on the job interview, I'd a guidance on my marriage.
Speaker 3: Then the game is you go out into the world,
Speaker 3: walk around the block to take ten minutes off during
Speaker 3: your lunch break and look at the first unusual, maybe
Speaker 3: wacky thing that enters your field of perception as a
Speaker 3: message for you, like a dream symbol. What is the
Speaker 3: world saying to you? It's funny how when you start
Speaker 3: paying attention to synchronicity, that's what this is about. To
Speaker 3: borrow Jung's word, your dream figot opens. Can I tell
Speaker 3: you a story about how that works?
Speaker 2: Please, we've got some time. Go ahead.
Speaker 3: So when I was doing a seri but one of
Speaker 3: my very first evening series of dream workshops over several weeks,
Speaker 3: we had a lady of a kind you're describing who
Speaker 3: wasn't remembering her dreams. She used to she had some
Speaker 3: self awareness. She said, I think I'm not receiving my
Speaker 3: dreams because I'm worried about what they're telling me, which
Speaker 3: whether my job is faith. Okay, I said, you've got
Speaker 3: no dreams, do this write down an attention for guidance.
Speaker 3: I'd like Johns and my own guidance and my job.
Speaker 3: She decided, go out into the street and see what
Speaker 3: the world says to you. So she's leaving an evening program.
Speaker 3: She goes out into the streets. She knows the area perfectly, well.
Speaker 3: When she comes back the following week, she tells us
Speaker 3: what happens. She finds herself driving the wrong way down
Speaker 3: a one way street and doesn't realize what's happening until
Speaker 3: a big truck puts on its high beams and its
Speaker 3: air horns, and seems the airhorn seems ready to brush
Speaker 3: her off the road. Did you get the message? I say, yes,
Speaker 3: the job is blown. But Robert, what happened when I
Speaker 3: realized that is I remembered my dreams. I've got a few.
Speaker 3: Oh to give us one. Oh yeah, Well, I'm living
Speaker 3: somewhere else, maybe Washington, d C. I'm organizing conference on transportation.
Speaker 3: I said, could you go to Washington, d C. Yes,
Speaker 3: I've got a friend there. Do you know think about
Speaker 3: conferences on transportation? All I know about transportation is driving
Speaker 3: the wrong way down a one way seat, one way street.
Speaker 3: But she says, but my work essentially consists of organizing conferences.
Speaker 3: She goes to Washington, d C. Stays with the friend,
Speaker 3: checks out the job market. Six months later, she got
Speaker 3: a new job. It's relocated to DC. Is organizing the
Speaker 3: conference on transportation that she dreamed six months before, which
Speaker 3: is very good news because her job in state government
Speaker 3: department no longer exists, So there you are. That's a
Speaker 3: story about the practicality. It's also a story about how
Speaker 3: if you start looking at the world around you as
Speaker 3: a set of dream signs and dream symbols, maybe you'll
Speaker 3: encourage your dream producers to talk to you a bit
Speaker 3: more directly.
Speaker 2: You mentioned a car crash. If somebody has a dream,
Speaker 2: let's say, of a friend getting into a car crash,
Speaker 2: is it our obligation to tell that friend we had
Speaker 2: that kind.
Speaker 1: Of a dream.
Speaker 3: Well not unless you are able to check out the
Speaker 3: information and get specific detail. If you just say, guess what,
Speaker 3: I'm terribly sorry, I saw you in a car crash,
Speaker 3: you're projecting, and you might, because we're suggestible, you might
Speaker 3: even producing, even be producing the psychology that will let
Speaker 3: the car cress. You might be implanting fear if you're
Speaker 3: if you have specific information, on the other hand, because
Speaker 3: they look I think if I were you, I would
Speaker 3: be careful, you know what, driving in Minneapolis, because on
Speaker 3: this particular part of town I saw a truck run
Speaker 3: a red light and the weather was like such. If
Speaker 3: you've got information like that and you have good relations
Speaker 3: with that person, I would be in favorite passing it
Speaker 3: onto them, but not as some generalized, vague, muddy kind
Speaker 3: of fearful thing.
Speaker 2: Interesting take, you're you're right, because you could be manifesting
Speaker 2: it yourself just by bringing it up.
Speaker 3: Yes, you say you've got you've got to just work
Speaker 3: on your own dream? Is that you've got to ask? Example,
Speaker 3: is this about me? I think it's about my friend,
Speaker 3: but really is my friend like me in some way?
Speaker 3: Do we behave like each other under some circumstances? I mean,
Speaker 3: you can't rule out that the dream is about you.
Speaker 3: That Freud didn't understand and the most famous dream that
Speaker 3: he ever interpreted of the dream might be about him
Speaker 3: rather than one of his patients, because he couldn't understand
Speaker 3: that he missed in it a long term advisory who
Speaker 3: would have alerted him to the oral cancer that killed
Speaker 3: him twenty eight years later. Is a tragic story, one
Speaker 3: that isn't well enough and well enough known. And I
Speaker 3: write about my book The Secret History of Dreaming, So
Speaker 3: we always have to pause and say, actually, this is
Speaker 3: about me. And we've also got to pause, as we
Speaker 3: said earlier, and say, actually, is this more literal or symbolic?
Speaker 3: Is this a literal car crash or is it a
Speaker 3: symbolic car crash. If we feel it's a literal car crash,
Speaker 3: then we've got to get the facts of the dream
Speaker 3: as clear as possible. Otherwise we're as going to be
Speaker 3: laying some kind of fear and confusion on someone else.
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