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Dreaming
the Secret Wishes of the Soul
by Robert Moss |
One of the greatest gifts of dreaming is that it
puts us in touch with soul. It takes us beyond the
limited understanding of the everyday self and shows us
who we are, what our soul’s purpose is in this life
experience and what our heart truly yearns for. There is
a word for this vital function of dreams in the language
of the Huron, a dreaming people of North America. The
word is ondinnonk, and it means a "secret
wish of the soul", especially as revealed in
dreams. This expression takes us to the heart of
healing. By connecting with our dreams, and celebrating
and acting on the information they gift to us, we bring
the energy and magic of soul into our daily lives. As we
allow our big dreams to take root in this world, we
become whole and well, and start living our deeper
story. As we help others to honor and celebrate their
soul guidance, as revealed in dreams, we become healers
and dreambringers.
Ancient dream healers understood that we are often
out of touch, in our surface minds, with our deepest
truths and our heart’s desires. Not knowing who we
are, forgetting our soul’s purpose, we do terrible
harm to ourselves and others. Dreams invite us to get
back on the right track, the soul’s track. I learned
about this many years ago when I asked for dream
guidance in support of a narrow, ego-driven agenda. I
wanted inspiration for a commercial potboiler, a
thriller that would follow the formula of a successful
previous novel I had published. In my dream, I found
myself in a banquet hall where a lavish feast for
hundreds of people was being prepared in my honor. But
there was a problem. In the dream restaurant, the master
chef had walked out in disgust because he was bored with
my menu. The message, on waking, was clear. If I
persisted in repeating myself – in using my creative
gifts for a limited purpose – my deepest creative
energy (the "master chef" of the dream) would
bow out; the soul and its magic would be missing. I
abandoned a major book project because that dream showed
me it wasn’t "major" in the ways that serve
the soul.
Dreaming not only renews our understanding of the
soul’s purpose; it can literally bring the soul back
home. From the shaman’s perspective, soul loss is the
root cause of much illness and affliction in our lives.
We suffer deep grief, heartbreak or abuse or trauma –
and maybe then succumb to negative habits and addictions
– and a part of our vital soul energy goes away.
Chronic depression, lethargy, memory gaps, low
resistance to illness and emotional numbness are among
the most frequent symptoms of soul loss.
Our dreams can tell us which parts of ourselves may
be missing, and when it is timely to bring them home.
Recurring dreams in which we go back to a scene from our
earlier lives may indicate that a part of us has
remained there. Dreams in which we perceive a younger
self as a separate individual may be nudging us to
recognize and recover a part of ourselves we lost at
that age. Sometimes we do not know who that beautiful
child is – until we take a closer look. There is a
marvelous story in my book Dreamgates about what
happened when a woman went back into a dream of a
beautiful five-year-old in a red coat, and found herself
fusing at the heart, in a blaze of light, with the part
of herself she had lost at age five through family
trauma.
Unfortunately, a common effect of soul loss is dream
loss. Indeed the absence of dream recall is often a
primary symptom of soul loss – as if the part of the
sufferer that knows how to dream and travel in deeper
reality has gone away, out of pain or disgust. It is
fascinating and deeply rewarding to observe what can
happen when people who have forgotten how to dream start
dreaming again. This can amount to spontaneous soul
recovery.
A middle-aged woman approached me for help. She told
me, "I feel I have lost the part of me that can
give trust and know joy." As preparation for our
meeting, I asked her to start a dream journal, although
she had told me she had not remembered her dreams for
many years. When she came to see me, she had succeeded
in capturing just one tiny fragment from a dream.
She remembered that she was standing over a table,
looking at three large-size "post-it" notes.
Each had a typed message. But the ink had faded and she
could not read the messages.
Slowly and carefully, I helped her to relax and
encouraged her to try to go back inside her dream. Quite
quickly, she found herself inside a room in the house
where she had lived with her ex-husband prior to their
divorce, almost twenty years before. Now she could read
the typed messages. The first read in bold capitals,
"YOU CAN DO IT." They were all about living
with heart, and trusting life.
She realized that she had left her ability to love
and to trust in that room for nearly twenty years. I
asked her what she needed to do. She told me, "I
need to bring my heart out of that room and put it back
in my body." She gathered up the messages and made
the motion of bringing them into her heart. As her hands
crossed over the place of her heart, we both saw a sweet
and gentle light shine out from her heart center. She
trembled, eyes shining, and told me, "Something
just came back. Something that was missing for twenty
years."
In the most literal sense, dreaming can make us
whole. It not only connects us with lost or buried
aspects of ourselves. It connects us with our larger
identity – our Higher Self – and our larger purpose.
Honoring the secret wishes of the soul, as involved
in dreams, requires us to learn some simple and powerful
strategies that are central to my dream workshops:
- Opening to dream guidance
Start a dream journal, if you are not keeping one
already, and resolve to catch your dreams and write up
your dream reports, giving each dream a title. You’ll
find it very rewarding to dream with intention. Before
going to sleep, write down a question or issue on which
you would like some guidance. This can be specific
("Should I change my job?") or general and
open-hearted ("I open myself to the power of
healing"). If you remember dreams from the night,
se how they might relate back to your intention.
Learn simple steps to clarify dream messages
The all-important keys are (a) trust your feelings
(b) run a reality check and (c) go back inside your
dream to get more information. Your feelings, on first
waking up, are an instant and usually impeccable guide
to the general quality and urgency of the dream. Running
a reality check means checking how elements in
the dream relate to your waking life and – especially
– checking to see whether the dream may be giving you
a window into possible future events in waking
reality. We dream future events quite often, though few
of us pay attention and fewer still are alive to the
interesting possibility that if you can see the
(possible) future you may be able to take action to
change the future for the better. (This is the theme of
my recent book Dreaming True.) Finally, the best
way to understand the full meaning of a dream is to
learn to go back inside it, as you might step back into
a room, take a good look around (while fully alert and
conscious), and maybe talk to someone in the scene or
dream the dream onward to healing or resolution.
Open a safe space to share and celebrate dreams with
others
When we know that dreams show the wishes of the
soul, we will surely want to support each other in
honoring this guidance. Start sharing dreams with a
friend, by email if necessary. Never presume to tell the
other person what his or her dreams mean. Start by
encouraging your partner to tell the dream as simply and
clearly as possible, give it a title. Ask what the
dreamer felt when she first woke up. Ask her to run a
reality check to see whether there are messages about
current situations in waking life, or possible future
events. Then offer your own thoughts and associations in
a gentle way by always saying "if it were my
dream" rather than laying down the law. Finally,
ask your partner what she can now do – in a practical,
positive way – to honor the dream and act on its
guidance. With a little practice, you’ll find safe
ways to bring dream-sharing to larger groups and start
building a dream community. An office that starts the
day with dream-sharing is a vastly more lively and
creative space!
Always do something with your dreams!
Real dreamwork is about energy – about bringing
vital energy from a deeper reality into the daylight
world. In my workshops, we turn our dreams into stories,
drawings and songs; we stage spontaneous dream theatre;
and we agree on action plans to work with the guidance
of our dreams and the powers that speak to us in dreams.
Sharing a dream with another person is already a step
towards action. Writing yourself a personal motto
inspired by a dream – a bumper sticker – is a
further step. Buy the red shoes, make the phone call,
plant those flowers, study the transformations of the
Goddess or the Bear in myth and art, as your dreams may
guide you, and you are taking a longer step on the road
of soul, the only road to walk.
© 2001 Robert
Moss. All Rights Reserved.
Robert Moss is a world-renowned dream
explorer, a shamanic counselor, a bestselling novelist
and a former professor of ancient history. His many
books include Conscious Dreaming, Dreamgates,
Dreaming True and the novel The Firekeeper.
He has recorded the popular Sounds True audio course Dream
Gates: A Journey into Active Dreaming. Born in
Australia, he survived a series of near-death
experiences in childhood. When he moved to upstate New
York in the mid-1980s, he started dreaming in a language
he did not know which proved to be an archaic form of
the Mohawk language (which he subsequently studied to
interpret his dreams). He teaches courses in Active
Dreaming – his original synthesis of dreamwork and
shamanic techniques – all over the world. He is
leading a 5-day course, "The Temple of Dream
Healing" at the Esalen Institute at Big Sur, CA
from September 16-21, and a weekend Shamanic Dreaming
intensive in the San Francisco area from November
10-11.For further information, visit his website at www.mossdreams.com.
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