Robert Moss - Dreaming the Soul Back Home: Shamanic Dreaming for Healing and Becoming Whole

Shamanism is the original psychotherapy and shamans were the first psychotherapists, counselors, and physicians. In Dreaming the Soul Back Home, Robert Moss teaches his readers how to become shamans of their own souls as well as how to help others heal their own lives. Shamans were also the first dreamworkers, and Moss provides his readers with enjoyable activities through which they can turn to their dreams for inspiration. Of special value is his description of soul loss and how shamans helped people retrieve errant parts of themselves, becoming whole again without the aid of electroshock therapy, dangerous medications, or superficial therapeutic Band-Aids. If you would like to work with your own dreams and can read only one book this year, you can do no better than Dreaming the Soul Back Home.

Stanley Krippner, PhD, coeditor of Perchance to Dream and professor of psychology and humanistic studies, Saybrook University

I was entranced by this book from the first page. Through vibrant storytelling language, Robert Moss brilliantly offers a new connection between bridge dreams and waking life, empowering each world to inform the other in restorative and startlingly dynamic ways. Reading this book feels like peeking into forgotten ancient rituals and exclusive healing secrets, yet Moss makes even the most sophisticated concepts feel blissfully accessible and easy.

Marney K. Makridakis, author of Creating Time and founder of ArtellaLand.com

Robert Mosss Dreaming the Soul Back Home opens up the many-layered world of dreaming its landscapes, characters, and secret places where our souls can grow and thrive. This is the book for everyone who has ever wondered, What can I do with dreams? Here is an exciting array of answers and exercises that shamans have known for thousands of years.

Tom Cowan, author of Yearning for the Wind: Celtic Reflections on Soul and Nature

Captivating, well written, and sure to please.

Library Journal

Erudite, brilliant, and delightful the first history to pay serious attention to the sacred art of dreaming as practiced worldwide by women as well as by men.

Barbara Tedlock, PhD, author of The Woman in the Shamans Body

Moss gives voice to the primal joy that dreaming evokes, the sheer creative freedom thats set loose every time we go to sleep.

Kelly Bulkeley, PhD, author of Dreaming in the Worlds Religions

Robert Moss is a brilliant teacher of the immense and intimate field of dreaming. Nearly anything imagined, from invention to strategy to poetry, has its roots in dreams. Moss deftly and powerfully demonstrates that dreams are the spirit body from which this world emerges.

Joy Harjo, poet and musician, author of How We Became Human

Readers will be pleased and inspired by Mosss reinterpretation of the world.

Library Journal

Writing about dreams, Moss is eloquent and authoritative, a wise teacher.

Publishers Weekly

Sits at the intersection of poetry and practicalityRead this book.

Peter Block, coauthor of The Abundant Community

Robert Moss is a wizard of the Dreamways and a master teacher.

David Spangler, author of Apprenticed to Spirit

Active Dreaming

Conscious Dreaming

The Dreamers Book of the Dead

Dreamgates: An Explorers Guide to the Worlds of Soul, Imagination, and Life beyond Death

Dream Gates: A Journey into Active Dreaming (audio)

Dreaming True

Dreamways of the Iroquois

The Secret History of Dreaming

The Three Only Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence, and Imagination

The Way of the Dreamer (video)

Copyright 2012 by Robert Moss

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, or other without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Text design by Tona Pearce Myers

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

First printing, June 2012

ISBN 978-1-60868-058-0

Printed in the USA on 100% postconsumer-waste recycled paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For the dreamer in every soul

The man on whom the soul descends,
through whom the soul speaks,
alone can teach.

R ALPH W ALDO E MERSON ,
1835 address to Harvard Divinity School

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the others welcome.

D EREK W ALCOTT , Love after Love

The important things usually prove to be very simple. They are also open secrets in the sense that no one is hiding the knowledge from us except ourselves.

This book centers on a simple reality that is fundamental to the human condition. We are more than body and brain: we are also soul and spirit. But humans are forgetful animals. We forget that we have a story beyond our current circumstances, that we may have come into this world with an assignment and an identity that predate our present lives and wont end when our present bodies are left behind. Forgetting who we are, and what our souls purpose is in this world, we get into all kinds of trouble. The situation gets worse when we lose some of our vital essence because bad things happen to us, and part of us wants to check out of the body and may actually succeed, a condition that shamans call soul loss and shrinks call dissociation.

Lame Deer, the Lakota dream shaman, warned of where this condition leads: Human beings have come to a point where they no longer know why they exist. They dont use the knowledge the spirit has put into every one of them and so they stumble along blindly on the road to nowhere a paved highway which they themselves bulldoze and make smooth so that they can get faster to the big, empty hole which theyll find at the end, waiting to swallow them up. Its a quick comfortable superhighway but I know where it leads. Ive been there in my vision and it makes me shudder to think about it.