Robert Moss - The Boy Who Died and Came Back: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse

This remarkable book traces the links between near-death experience, shamanism, and dreams. In a uniquely personal yet profoundly universal way, it takes readers into worlds that demonstrate the limitations of customary concepts of time and space.

Stanley Krippner, coauthor of The Voice of Rolling Thunder and Extraordinary Dreams and How to Work with Them

In this fascinating tribute to the depths of the psyche, Robert Moss reminds us in the words of Shakespeare, We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, / and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep. By unearthing these personal stories, we readers participate in an archaeology of the Self, across time, space, and dimensions, in which treasures abound.

Robert Waggoner, author of Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self

In Platos Republic, Socrates asks an old man named Kefalos for his perspective on life. Kefalos replies that after spending most of his life engaged in making money as a businessman, he now sees death approaching, and questions of life and death have taken on a new urgency: What is this all about? What comes after death? As an unprecedented number of people around the world reach their own Kefalos moments, Robert Moss brilliant book can help. Here he shows clearly how a persons experiences of dying and coming back can shape not just one persons life but those of many others around them. Ive seen this to be true over and over in my own work as a psychiatrist, and, knowing Moss work, I am sure the valuable tools he offers for exploring and understanding these experiences as well as the many mysteries of dreams and synchronicity will do a lot of good for many people. Robert Moss is truly a man who died and came back, bringing gifts from another world. His extraordinary life story, told with beauty and passion, confirms that there is life after life and will inspire all who read it to transcend the fear of death and live richer and deeper lives.

Raymond Moody, MD, author of Life After Life

The indigenous peoples understand from direct experience of their dreaming that the world presents itself in two modalities the world of things seen and the world of things hidden. In this extraordinary personal narrative, Robert Moss reveals himself as a master dreamer, as one of those modern mystics who can see into the world of things hidden. He is also a gifted storyteller, and in reading his words, we discover (through direct experience) that truth comes with goose bumps. I loved this book!

Hank Wesselman, PhD, anthropologist, author of

The Bowl of Light and the Spiritwalker trilogy,

and coauthor (with Sandra Ingerman) of the award-winning

Awakening to the Spirit World

ALSO BY ROBERT MOSS

Active Dreaming

Conscious Dreaming

The Dreamers Book of the Dead

Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination, and Life Beyond Death

Dream Gates: A Journey into Active Dreaming (audio)

Dreaming the Soul Back Home

Dreaming True

Dreamways of the Iroquois

The Secret History of Dreaming

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

The Way of the Dreamer (video)

T HE C YCLE OF THE I ROQUOIS (Fiction)

Fire along the Sky

The Firekeeper

The Interpreter

P OETRY

Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories

Text and drawings copyright 2014 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, March 2014

ISBN 978-1-60868-235-5

Printed in Canada on 100% postconsumer-waste recycled paper

New World Library is proud to be a Gold Certified Environmentally Responsible Publisher. Publisher certification awarded by Green Press Initiative. www.greenpressinitiative.org

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Sing in me, creative spirit

of the boy who died and came back

and the man who flew through the black sun

and returned to walk the roads of this world

as the envoy of a deeper world;

and of how (being human)

he falls down and gets up, over and over,

forgets and remembers,

remembers and forgets.

Let me explain through his story

how the world is a playground, not a prison

when we awaken to the game behind the games.

Let this story help those who read it

to find their bigger and braver stories

and live them, and tell them well enough

to entertain the spirits,

win the indulgence of the gods

and bring through effortless healing.

Gore Mountain, April 27, 2013

CONTENTS

It is not more surprising to be born twice than once.

Voltaire, The Princess of Babylon

I died for the first time in my present body when I was three years old. My mothers aunt, the opera singer, saw my death in the tea leaves a few months before it happened. She would not talk about that until much later, because although she was a gifted psychic, she missed something. I died and came back.

I died again when I was nine. This time, I slipped through the window of a Melbourne hospital where my body was lying in an operating room. I thought I was going to have some fun at a theme park along the beach but ended up spending a whole lifetime in another world. It was very hard to have to come back to the body of a young boy, carrying all those memories.

During my boyhood, it was almost impossible to talk about these experiences. It was a conservative era in Australia, and I was in a military family. The first person who was able to confirm and validate my experiences of leaving my body dead in a hospital room while I entered other worlds was an Aboriginal boy from a traditional dreaming culture. Oh yeah, he said to me matter-of-factly. We do that. When we get real sick, we go and live with the spirits. When we get well, we come back. Not always as the same person.

We did not have terms like near-death experience (NDE) in Australia in that era, more than twenty years before Raymond Moody, MD, expanded our general understanding of how widespread that phenomenon is, in his bestseller Life After Life. I am glad to have that term, and use it as shorthand to describe what happened to me as a boy and often made me feel like a stranger in a strange land. I have read and heard hundreds of accounts of near-death experiences since I read Moody, and feel great sympathy for those who have been through them. But NDE is not my preferred term for my boyhood experiences, and still less for what happened to me in midlife, in a profound and protracted crisis of spiritual emergence that led me to transform my life. I like the phrase a doctor used when, aged three, I lost vital signs after succumbing to pneumonia in a bitter Tasmanian winter. When I returned to that childs body, against all expectations, he told my parents, Your boy died and came back.