{"id":6005,"date":"2014-06-02T06:20:14","date_gmt":"2014-06-02T10:20:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/?p=6005"},"modified":"2014-06-02T06:20:14","modified_gmt":"2014-06-02T10:20:14","slug":"the-secret-history-of-dreaming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/2014\/06\/the-secret-history-of-dreaming.html","title":{"rendered":"The Secret History of Dreaming"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Secret<\/a>What is one thing people should know about the role dreams have played in history?<\/i>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Dreams are part of our human survival kit, part of what has kept us going, and evolving on this planet. Across history most people have valued dreaming for two reasons beyond all others: because dreams enable us to see into the possible future, and because they put us in touch with sources of knowledge and wisdom beyond the ordinary mind. If you look at the state of our world and how we are being constantly blind-sided by unexpected and unwanted mass events, you’ll see that our ability to navigate the history of the future may depend on reviving the arts of dreaming.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

You are a former history professor and you say that to research and write this book you had to become a \u201cdream archaeologist\u201d. What is \u201cdream archaeology\u201d and what skills and resources are required to practice it?<\/i><\/p>\n

While \u201carchaeology\u201d is often understood to be the science of unearthing and studying antiquities, the root meaning is more profound: it is the study of the arche<\/i>, the first and essential things. The practice of \u201cdream archaeology\u201d requires mastery of a panoply of sources, and the ability to read between the lines and make connections that have gone unnoticed by specialists who were looking for something else. It requires the ability to locate dreaming in its context – physical, social and cultural. And it demands the ability to enter a different time or culture, through the exercise of active imagination, and experience it from the inside<\/i> as it may have been. These are the skills we need to excavate the inner dimension of the human adventure.<\/p>\n

What is the most important thing you can tell us about your book, <\/i>The Secret History of Dreaming?<\/i>\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

The Secret History of Dreaming<\/i> restores a missing dimension to our understanding of what drives the human adventure: the vital role of dreams and imagination in science and literature, war and religion, medicine and the survival of our kind. History without the inner side is as shallow as history without economics, and as boring as history without sex. <\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 <\/i>This is not another book about dreams. It is a history of dreaming<\/i>, a term I use in an expansive sense to encompass not only night dreams but also waking visions, the interplay of mind and matter that is sometimes called synchronicity, and experiences in a creative \u201csolution state\u201d.<\/p>\n

Explain your statement that a dream led directly to one of the biggest oil discoveries in world history.<\/i>\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

In 1937, Colonel Harold Dickson, the former British Political Agent in Kuwait, dreamed that a sandstorm opened a crater under a strange tree in the desert, and revealed a mummy that came to life as a beautiful woman who gave him an ancient coin. His wife recorded the dream for him in the middle of the night, and then he consulted a Bedouin woman dream interpreter who gave him the location of the tree in his dream \u2013 in the Burqan hills \u2013 and told him he would find great treasure there. He was able to persuade the Kuwait Oil Company (which had been drilling dry holes up to this point) and they struck it rich at the exact place he had dreamed. This was the origin of Kuwait\u2019s oil wealth and a major source for the Allies in World War II.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

Tell us about the dreams of the Founding Fathers<\/i>\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

John Adams and Dr Benjamin Rush \u2013 who made a close study of precognitive dreams \u2013 were in the habit of exchanging dreams in their extensive correspondence. In 1809, Rush wrote to Adams about a dream in which the doctor\u2019s son read him a page from the future <\/i>history of the United States. The dream letter described \u201cthe renewal of friendship\u201d between Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who had been estranged for many years because of their political disagreements. It stated that the later correspondence of the two former presidents would inspire many. And it recorded that Adams and Jefferson \u201csunk into the grave nearly at the same time.\u201d Nearly seventeen years later, long after their reconciliation, the two former presidents died on the same day \u2013 July 4, 1826. The predictions on the page of Dr Rush\u2019s dream history were exactly fulfilled.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

Explain how Harriet Tubman\u2019s dreams and visions helped her to guide escaping slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad.<\/i>\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

\"-<\/a>Harriet Tubman is an iconic figure in American history \u2013 the runaway slave from Maryland\u2019s Eastern Shore who went back to the South, braving great dangers, to free her fellow-slaves and became the most successful \u201cconductor\u201d of the Underground Railroad. Yet the secret of Harriet Tubman\u2019s achievement has rarely been told. She was a dreamer and a seer. In her dreams and visions, she could fly like a bird. Her gift may have been associated with a near-death experience in her childhood, when an angry overseer threw a two-pound lead weight that laid open her skull. We learn from her how great gifts can spring from our wounds. Harriet herself said she inherited special gifts \u2013 including the ability to travel outside the body and to visit the future \u2013 from her father, who \u201ccould always predict the future\u201d In The Secret History of Dreaming, <\/i>I examine the evidence that her ancestors were Ashanti, and that she may have inherited something of the Ashanti experience of dream tracking. I also look at the influence of the first, fiercely brave and inspiring, itinerant black women preachers, whose example may have helped Harriet develop the power to transfer her vision. She could sing courage into people\u2019s hearts.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/i>Tell us how Freud, tragically, may have missed an early dream diagnosis of the mouth cancer that killed him many years later.<\/i>\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

The most famous of all the dreams Freud analyzed was one of his own, the Irma Dream. In The Interpretation of Dreams <\/i>he gives a lengthy account of this 1895 dream and his work with it. In the dream, he inspects the mouth of a patient called Irma and discusses her condition with several doctors. The tragic irony is that in all his work on this dream, Freud may have missed a health warning that could have saved his life. I report on the exhaustive work of a cancer surgeon who compared Freud\u2019s medical records with his dream report and concluded that the contained an amazingly exact preview of precise symptoms of the oral cancer that killed Freud 28 years later.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

You write: \u201cBecause young Sam Clemens could not find Brazil, he failed to become the first cocaine dealer in North America and instead became Mark Twain.\u201d Tell us that story!<\/i>\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

\"-<\/a>While he was working as a printer in Keokuk, Iowa, young Sam Clemens read a book that described \u201ca vegetable product with miraculous powers\u201d that was growing in Brazil. Sam was \u201cfired with a longing\u201d to go up the Amazon, secure a supply of this miracle plant \u2013 and make a fortune. He sailed to New Orleans on a riverboat whose pilot was the celebrated Horace Bixby.<\/p>\n

When he got to New Orleans, Sam found that no ship in port was sailing for Brazil and no one could tell him how to get there. So he changed his plans, sought out Bixby, and persuaded him to take him on as an apprentice pilot. Working on the Mississippi river, he got many of the ideas for the books that made him famous under a pen-name borrowed from the boatmen\u2019s cry \u201cMark Twain\u201d, meaning two fathoms, safe water.<\/p>\n

The miracle plant Sam had set out to find was coca. Had he succeeded in his original plan, Keokuk, Iowa would have become the cocaine capital of America. Because Sam Clemens couldn\u2019t find Brazil, he failed to become the first cocaine dealer in North American history and instead became Mark Twain.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/i>Tell us about the woman you call \u201cthe beautiful dream spy of Madrid\u201d.<\/i>\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

Ah, the lovely Lucrecia de Le\u00f3n! When she was a guest of the Spanish Inquisition, one of the investigators told her, \u201cYou are so beautiful a dead man would rise up and make you pregnant.\u201d Since women are absent from so much of the history written by men, it is remarkable that \u2013 thanks in part to the Spanish Inquisition \u2013 the record of no fewer than 415 dreams of a young woman of Madrid have survived from the time of the Spanish Armada. They were transcribed between 1587 and 1590, by clerics who listened to her accounts of her night adventures while an armed courier waited in the street ready to gallop to the holy city of Toledo to carry the latest dream installment to the head of the powerful Mendoza clan, second only to the Habsburgs in Spain. The reason Lucrecia\u2019s dreams were so prized was that she had a gift for seeing the future and discovering what was going on behind closed doors, in the royal palace or the house of Sir Francis Drake in England. Her dreams were exploited as sources of military intelligence and as political propaganda, in a time when dream visions were still greatly respected. Some of them were painted; others were performed as theatre for high society in the town house of a dowager duchess who may also have been an English agent. Lucrecia\u2019s story is a fascinating chapter in the history of women as well as the history of dreaming.<\/p>\n

– from an interview with Robert Moss on his book The Secret History of Dreaming<\/em><\/a> published by New World Library.<\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What is one thing people should know about the role dreams have played in history?\u00a0 Dreams are part of our human survival kit, part of what has kept us going, and evolving on this planet. 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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\/6005","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=6005"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6005\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6008,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6005\/revisions\/6008"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}