Dreams - Best of Coast to Coast AM - 7/19/23

and growing creative imagination. He has led popular workshops all over the planet, including a three year training for teachers of Active Dreaming and online courses as well. His website linked up at Coast tocoastam dot com. His latest book is called Growing Big Dreams and Robert. Welcome back to the dream world, my friend.

I was nine it happened again. I'm an operating room under the surgeon's knife for an emergency appendectomy, and I find myself floating under the ceiling looking down at the scene, not enjoying the sight of my open body with a blood or listening to the nurses. So I drift out the door and there's my mother grieving, and I don't want to feel guilt for her. I'm an only kid, and she's worried I'm going to die. I want to

do something. I look out the window of the hospital forgetting the body on the bed, and I look over the coast of Melbourne, Austrader. That's where I am now. And I remember there's a theme park down there, Lunar Park, just for fun, they used to say in the ads. And I think, I'm a nine year old kid. I want to go on the rides, look at the girls and their summer dresses. So I've drift down, float down, fly down to the theme park, go through the big

moon round face of the gate. I'm going to go on the ghost train, I guess, And suddenly wish I'm in another world, and I'm greeted by people who are very tall and pale and beautiful. They receive me as one of their own, and they raised me, and I forget about the body on the bed, and I seem to live a whole life George amongst these different pale, slender people, until that life and that body had done, and I expect, I think to go to another star.

But suddenly, bang, after nine minutes of part time and one hundred years somewhere else, I'm back in the body of a frightened kid in a bed in an operating room. And we didn't have Ray Moody's phrase near death experience back then. It was die and come back. That's the way I was talked about, and we didn't have sympathetic people in the add out community to listen to my stories. Our poor kid, it must be the medication. He's hallucinating.

The first person who could validate and confirm what I had been through was an Aboriginal kid, and we weren't supposed to hang out with them back then, in that era in Australia. But the Aboriginal kid said, oh yeah, we do that. We get sick, we go and live with the spirits. We've come back. Sometimes we're the same and sometimes we're not well. So I had to look lay quiet about that for a while. I came from a conservative military family. You didn't talk about dreams and visions.

But I knew, I mean I knew completely from age nine. Because of that their wills beyond the physical. I knew to pick up on your last guest. But consciousness precedes to one body, and it survived soul. Consciousness survives the death of one body. I knew it's not weird to talk to people who we might consider dead. I'm the ancestors and so on. So that's where I start from as a dreamer. These are things I've known through experience since I was nine years old.

my legs. And on that land, I started dreaming of the ancestors of the land, of an Irishman who came to the American colonies in the eighteenth century, with whom I have a distant genealogical connection, and other connections. I started dreaming of the first peoples. I started dreaming of a wise woman of long ago who insisted in speaking

to me in her own language. It turned out to be an archaic form of the Mohawk Indian language with some Huron spiritual vote dicagory from her birth people and I through synchronicity and through hard work and through scholarship and research, I began to understand what she was telling me she would never translate. I understood, for example, that a funny word she kept using it sounded like this ontnunk had a meaning. It meant the secret wish of

the soul, especially as revealed in dreams. And I understood that in her tradition of dreaming and healing, what we need to do is listen carefully, tenderly to dreamers, see what their soul, what their greatest self, if you like, is saying to them in the dream, and help them act on that guidance or else they're going to go wrong. I also learned from her tradition learnt again the dreaming is about survival because the Mohawk were not pantsies. I mean,

they were very fierce warriors. They held their own with very small numbers against many enemies, and they used their dreamers as their scouts, as their reconnaissance people to warn them about where the enemy was hiding an ambush and get through. So I learned from this contact within digital this tradition. Of course, I met people living today who help you with the language and the customs has understood. Today, I learned two vital things about dreaming known I think

to all our ancestors. But it's about soul. And yes, it will tell us that soul has an origin before this life and has a destiny beyond this life. That's a rather important thing to know. That you're connected to

other lives, you have a larger purpose. And that dreaming is also about survival in the sense that it will show you the possible future to pick up your on your previous guest again, our dreams show us not only what is going to happen, they show us what might or might not happen, depending on how you work with the information and apply it. Those are very important things to know, and our understanding of these things was atrified Western society. So I've devoted myself to bringing back that

kind of knowledge because it works. It puts us in touch with a deeper source. It puts us in touch, if you like, with the god we can talk to, or the spirits of nature, or the ancestors, and it puts us out on the right trail.

for results, wait for a response. So I think you're doing something that smart dreamers have always known how to do, because a telepathy is a real phenomenon that there was given that name by very interesting Victorian psychic researcher called Fred Myers. We sometimes forget talking about science that there've been ways and waves of scientific attention to this stuff.

One of the great waves of scientific attention was in the Victorian era when the first professor of anthropology at Oxford University, who used the racist colonial language of his time, said, actually, these savages, you know, these savages, they knew things we don't know anymore. We have fallen from the high level of savage knowledge because they knew, because of dreams, that the soul survives physical death and has and has an origin before physical life. We've fallen from that high knowledge

of savage tradition. So you know, you did something right that smart dreamers have always known about. And that's I suppose partly why you're leading a dream life, George.

Maybe we're dreaming all the time. So but a lot of people who don't know how to look at the material and don't have a way of talking about it. That's something I've tried to correct. I came up with a very simple way by which we can tell our stories to someone else who doesn't have to be an expert, doesn't have to have a certificate on the wall, just needs to be well intentioned and ready to, you know,

go where the flow takes you. When you say to each other, okay, if it were my dream, I think about such and such and okay, then we have a conversation. We don't leave it hanging in mid air as a sterile set of words. We want some action. What are you going to do to apply this material? If you think the car accident could be next Tuesday, in front of that shopping mall. What are you going to do

to avoid it? Maybe there's something worth researching in your dream that phrase from a different language, that city that you might or might not visit in the future. Do some research, you know, ask Auntie Google to translate that phrase for you. Check out what might go on in that city. And one thing that you can learn to do with your dreams if you're catching them and recording them, and a journal becomes essential, writing these things down becomes

vitally important. You get good at dreaming. This is your log book. If you're catching your dreams and recording them, something you can learn to do is to go back inside them and go on with them. This is a key. I need a royal road to lucid dreaming. Suppose you've been scared by something, and maybe you run away from it, and maybe that's why you're trying not to listen to your dreams. You can learn to go back into the place where you encountered the fear in dream land, face

the fear and go beyond it. Deal with that giant bear who came into your bedroom, as I had to do when I first met went to Upstate New York, and I found that the bear was an ally waiting for me. Once I got beyond my fear, you might want to go back into the dream to clarify that information. Is that car crash a literal car crash, or is the symbolic of the state of your marriage, the state of your job or whatever.

something else that's got some juice for you. As maybe the juice is fear or mystery or romance. You can go on with it. You can go back into it. And when you do that, as I say, you are on one of the royal roads to becoming a lucid dreamer.

indigenous attitude in Australia. The first people, the Aborigines of my native country, say we live in the speaking land. Everything is speaking. The mountain is speaking, the lizard is speaking, the toyota is speaking. They'll pay attention to the signs and symbols that are popping up around you. You've got a question on your mind, you play the game this way. You say I'd like guidance on such as I'd like guidance on the job interview, I'd a guidance on my marriage.

Then the game is you go out into the world, walk around the block to take ten minutes off during your lunch break and look at the first unusual, maybe wacky thing that enters your field of perception as a message for you, like a dream symbol. What is the world saying to you? It's funny how when you start paying attention to synchronicity, that's what this is about. To borrow Jung's word, your dream figot opens. Can I tell you a story about how that works?

She decided, go out into the street and see what the world says to you. So she's leaving an evening program. She goes out into the streets. She knows the area perfectly, well. When she comes back the following week, she tells us what happens. She finds herself driving the wrong way down a one way street and doesn't realize what's happening until a big truck puts on its high beams and its air horns, and seems the airhorn seems ready to brush her off the road. Did you get the message? I say, yes,

the job is blown. But Robert, what happened when I realized that is I remembered my dreams. I've got a few. Oh to give us one. Oh yeah, Well, I'm living somewhere else, maybe Washington, d C. I'm organizing conference on transportation. I said, could you go to Washington, d C. Yes, I've got a friend there. Do you know think about conferences on transportation? All I know about transportation is driving the wrong way down a one way seat, one way street.

But she says, but my work essentially consists of organizing conferences. She goes to Washington, d C. Stays with the friend, checks out the job market. Six months later, she got a new job. It's relocated to DC. Is organizing the conference on transportation that she dreamed six months before, which is very good news because her job in state government department no longer exists, So there you are. That's a

story about the practicality. It's also a story about how if you start looking at the world around you as a set of dream signs and dream symbols, maybe you'll encourage your dream producers to talk to you a bit more directly.

the car cress. You might be implanting fear if you're if you have specific information, on the other hand, because they look I think if I were you, I would be careful, you know what, driving in Minneapolis, because on this particular part of town I saw a truck run a red light and the weather was like such. If you've got information like that and you have good relations with that person, I would be in favorite passing it onto them, but not as some generalized, vague, muddy kind of fearful thing.

That Freud didn't understand and the most famous dream that he ever interpreted of the dream might be about him rather than one of his patients, because he couldn't understand that he missed in it a long term advisory who would have alerted him to the oral cancer that killed him twenty eight years later. Is a tragic story, one that isn't well enough and well enough known. And I write about my book The Secret History of Dreaming, So we always have to pause and say, actually, this is

about me. And we've also got to pause, as we said earlier, and say, actually, is this more literal or symbolic? Is this a literal car crash or is it a symbolic car crash. If we feel it's a literal car crash, then we've got to get the facts of the dream as clear as possible. Otherwise we're as going to be laying some kind of fear and confusion on someone else.