What is Active Dreaming?

By Robert Moss[break]
Active Dreaming? The phrase is a provocation, designed to shake us free from the assumption that dreaming is a passive activity. I am grateful for the gift of spontaneous sleep dreams, the ones we don’t ask for and often don’t want. They hold up a magic mirror in which we can see ourselves as we truly are. They serve as a voice of conscience. They preview challenges and opportunities that lie in our future. Sleep dreams show us what is going on inside the body, diagnose developing complaints before medical symptoms present themselves, and show us what the body needs to stay well. We solve problems in our sleep. And, as the First Peoples of my native Australia teach, our personal dreams may be a passport to the Dreamtime, the larger reality in which we can meet the ancestors and our authentic spiritual teachers. [read more ..][break]

Active Dreaming: Journeying Beyond Self-Limitation to a Life of Wild Freedom

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Practical Magic for Living the “Life of Your Dreams”[break]
Active Dreaming is a way of being fully of this world while maintaining constant contact with another world, the world-behind-the-world, where the deeper logic and purpose of our lives are to be found. Active Dreaming offers three core areas of practice: talking and walking our dreams to bring energy and guidance from the dreamworld into everyday life; shamanic lucid dreaming; and conscious living.[break]

Active dreamers are choosers. They learn to recognize that whatever situation they are in, they always have choice. They choose not to buy into self-limiting beliefs or the limited models of reality suggested by others. Active dreamers learn to grow a dream of possibility, a dream strong enough to take them beyond fear and despair to a place of freedom and delight.[break]

Robert Moss

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Robert Moss, born in Melbourne (Victoria) in 1946, is an Australian historian, journalist and author and the creator of Active Dreaming, an original method for working with dreams and imagination.
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Interest in dreaming
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In 1986, Moss felt the need to get away from the commercial fast track and moved to a farm in upstate New York, where he started dreaming in a language he did not know that proved to be an archaic form of the Mohawk language. Helped by native speakers to interpret his dreams, Moss came to believe that they had put him in touch with an ancient healer – a woman of power – and that they were calling him to a different life.
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Out of these experiences he wrote a series of historical novels and developed the practice he calls Active Dreaming, an original synthesis of contemporary dreamwork and various methods of journeying and healing. A central premise of Moss's approach is that dreaming isn't just what happens during sleep; dreaming is waking up to sources of guidance, healing and creativity beyond the reach of the everyday mind.
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He introduced his method to an international audience as an invited presenter at the conference of the Association for the Study of Dreams at the University of Leiden in 1994.
Core techniques of active dreaming:

• The "lightning dreamwork" process, designed to facilitate quick dream-sharing that results in helpful action; the use of the "if it were my dream" protocol encourages the understanding that the dreamer is always the final authority on his or her dream.
• Dream reentry: the practice of making a conscious journey back inside a dream in order to clarify information, dialogue with a dream character, or move beyond nightmare terrors into healing and resolution.
• Tracking and group dreaming: conscious dream travel on an agreed itinerary by two or more partners, often supported by shamanic drumming.
• Navigating by synchronicity: reading coincidence and "symbolic pop-ups" in ordinary life as "everyday oracles".

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Present! - Dreaming with Robert Moss

In Part One of this interview with Mel Van Dusen, writer, lecturer and professor of ancient history, Robert Moss, talks about dreams and their power in guiding us to an experience of deeper realities and fuller lives.[break]