{"id":5733,"date":"2013-09-23T23:00:21","date_gmt":"2013-09-24T03:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/dreamgates\/?p=5733"},"modified":"2013-09-23T23:00:21","modified_gmt":"2013-09-24T03:00:21","slug":"dreaming-is-ancient-wisdom-and-everyday-practice-for-our-contemporary-lives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/2013\/09\/dreaming-is-ancient-wisdom-and-everyday-practice-for-our-contemporary-lives.html","title":{"rendered":"Dreaming is ancient wisdom and everyday practice for our contemporary lives"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"RM<\/a>Most human societies have valued dreams and the dreamers for three principal reasons. They have recognized that in dreams we see the future, and this can help whole communities as well as individuals to make better choices. They have understood that dreams give us a direct line to the sacred, to the God\/Goddess we can talk to, to the ancestors, to the animate spirits of Nature. And they have grasped that dreaming can be very good medicine. Dreams diagnose problems before they present symptoms; they offer imagery for self-healing; and they show us the state of the soul and can help us retrieve parts of our vital energy that may have gone missing through what shamans call \u201csoul-loss\u201d.<\/p>\n

In Western society, dreams are undervalued by those the English call the \u201ctalking classes\u201d, especially in academe and the media. Yet we all dream, so this is common property. Ever the hardhead who says \u201cI don\u2019t dream\u201d is only saying \u201cI don\u2019t remember\u201d or \u201cI don\u2019t care to remember\u201d. And when life is tough or he is going through a big life transition, his head may be cracked open by a big dream that will expand his understanding and maybe give him sources and resources not otherwise available.\u00a0 One of the most common types of \u201cbig dreams\u201d that can accomplish that is a visitation by a dead family member or loved one.<\/p>\n

All ancient and indigenous peoples that I have encountered, in my studies as an independent scholar and in my travels, understand that the dream world is a real world, maybe more real than the regular world of our consensual everyday hallucinations. When I told an elder of the Longhouse People, or Iroquois, about my dreams of the Mohawk \u201cwoman of power\u201d,\u00a0 he told me \u201cyou made some visits and you received some visitations.\u201d There you have a central understanding, forgotten or ignored in much of Western psychology: dreaming is traveling. In dreams, soul or consciousness gets around, far beyond the body. In dreams, we may also receive visitations. The very words for \u201cdream\u201d in many cultures reflects this insight. In the language of the Makiritare, a shamanic dreaming people of Venezuela, the word for \u201cdream\u201d is adekato<\/i>, which literally means \u201ca journey of the soul.\u201d<\/p>\n

Look at what is painted on the walls of the Paleolithic caves and you have evidence of the central importance of dreaming from as far back in the human odyssey as we can trace. The images are portals into a deeper reality, not simply hunting or fertility magic, but ways of connecting with the spirits, of calling through power, and of traveling between dimensions. On the most practical level, dreaming has always been a key part of our human survival kit. When we were little better than naked apes, without good weapons, dreaming helped save us from becoming breakfast for leathery raptors or saber-toothed tigers, by enabling us to scan our environment, across space and time, and identify possible dangers.<\/p>\n

We want to learn to meld ways of dreaming and healing that \u00a0our ancestors knew with the best of science and scholarship today. The methods of Active Dreaming that I teach and practice are not a “New Age” approach, but the revival of ancient wisdom, adapted to our contemporary lives, and providing essential tools to get us through life’s challenges and find and fulfill our bigger and braver stories.<\/p>\n

–<\/p>\n

For more on the importance of dreaming throughout human history and evolution, please see my book The Secret History of Dreaming.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

“Cave Shaman” drawing (c) Robert Moss<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Most human societies have valued dreams and the dreamers for three principal reasons. They have recognized that in dreams we see the future, and this can help whole communities as well as individuals to make better choices. They have understood that dreams give us a direct line to the sacred, to the God\/Goddess we can…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":224,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,10,5,23,19,20,7,12,30,22],"tags":[493,225,1667,920],"class_list":["post-5733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ancestral-traditions","category-conscious-dreaming","category-dreams","category-dreams-of-the-dead","category-healing-dreams","category-history-of-dreaming","category-lucid-dreaming","category-meaning-of-dreams","category-precognition","category-shamanic-dreaming","tag-dream-visitations","tag-makiritare","tag-paleolithic-cave-paintings","tag-paleolithic-psychology"],"yoast_head":"\nDreaming is ancient wisdom and everyday practice for our contemporary lives - Dream Gates<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/2013\/09\/dreaming-is-ancient-wisdom-and-everyday-practice-for-our-contemporary-lives.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Dreaming is ancient wisdom and everyday practice for our contemporary lives - Dream Gates\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Most human societies have valued dreams and the dreamers for three principal reasons. 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He is the creator of Active Dreaming, an original synthesis of dreamwork and shamanism. Born in Australia, he survived three near-death experiences in childhood. He leads popular seminars all over the world, including a three-year training for teachers of Active Dreaming. A former lecturer in ancient history at the Australian National University, he is a best-selling novelist, journalist and independent scholar. His nine books on dreaming, shamanism and imagination include Conscious Dreaming, Dreamways of the Iroquois, The Dreamer's Book of the Dead, The Three \"\"Only\"\" Things, The Secret History of Dreaming, Dreamgates, Active Dreaming and Dreaming the Soul Back Home: Shamanic Dreaming for Healing and Becoming Whole. His most recent book is The Boy Who Died and Came Back: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse. Over the past 20 years, he has led seminars at the Esalen Institute, Kripalu, the Omega Institute, the New York Open Center, Bastyr University, John F. Kennedy University, Meriter Hospital, and many other centers and institutions. He has taught depth workshops in Active Dreaming in the UK, Australia, Canada, Costa Rica, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Brazil and Austria and leads a three-year training for teachers of Active Dreaming. He hosts the \"\"Way of the Dreamer\"\" radio show at www.healthylife.net. He has appeared on many TV and radio shows, ranging from Charlie Rose and the Today show to Coast to Coast and the Diane Rehm show on NPR. His articles on dreaming have been published in media ranging from Parade to Shaman's Drum.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.mossdreams.com"],"url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/author\/rmoss"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/224"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5733"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5733\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5735,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5733\/revisions\/5735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}