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Robert Moss
WAY OF THE DREAMER
mossdreams.com

DREAMLAND: A Possible Future
By Robert Moss

(page 5 of 5)

 From the report by Tsu-lin Wu, investigator for the National Office of Dreams (NOD), New Beijing, October 1, 330 AS: 

This office respectfully offers a preliminary assessment of materials recently acquired for the ongoing longitudinal study of the oneiric entity. It is noted that the provenance of these documents remains obscure. The author of the first and somewhat colloquial paper (“Starting the Day”) appears to be a sixth-grade student who recorded and incorporated the experiences of younger siblings. Her mature tone and the settled family circumstances suggest that she was writing at least 30 years AS [After Singularity] and I believe this document to be authentic.

    The remaining documents are problematic. They are rife with anachronisms and inconsistencies, and references (which I have checked and corrected, as necessary) are all to BS [Before Singularity] sources. Documents II, III and IV may be derived from a work of utopian fiction titled A Switzerland of the Mind, published three years before the Singularity. This is the famous “lost book” of the Dreamers. No authenticated copy survives, unless in the library of Anamnesis, which is closed to us. Yet the Dreamers regard the author as one of the founders of their oneiric polity. No critical reader could fail to notice the fictional element in document II (“Doctors in Dreamland”); who would ever believe that every doctor, in any kind of society, could agree to the pledge, “My patient is my colleague”?

     At my last holo-conference with the Dreamers, I requested their feedback on these documents. The request was ignored. They spent the whole period of the interview impugning our Big Pharma. The one who projected a whole-body avatar with gills and the head of a salmon bubbled defamation against our President and dared to allege that our enlightened government, in concert with Big Pharma, is involved in a conspiracy to “cage the minds of the people” through unlimited virtual sex and drugs that suppress the dreaming function, while releasing a “psychotic elite” supercharged by “oneiric Viagra and dream steroids”. I have forwarded the holo-record of this disturbing interview to the appropriate authorities.

     I recommend that permission for publication of the foregoing documents in any form should be denied.

     I also respectfully request that I should be relieved from my present liaison duties with the Dreamers. Since I listened to their Salmon Speaker, my nights are filled with a chaos of water, and when I seek a second opinion from the Book of Changes, it is always the same: K’an. The deluge. Falling into the abyss. For three years one does not find the way. Yet (the senior diviner reminds me) the commentary adds that water is always true to itself. [14] Is this how we dreamed BS?

References

[Analyst’s note: All publication dates are given old-style, Common Era.]

 1. “You can go through a painting or you can punch a hole in the world.” Journal of Sophie Moss (aged 5) January 23, 1995. Quoted with permission in Robert Moss, Dreaming True (New York: Pocket Books, 2000) 118.

2. Full instructions for the Lightning Dreamwork Game are in Robert Moss, The Three “Only” Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence and Imagination (Novato CA: New World Library, 2007) 82-84.

3. Steven M. Oberhalen, “Galen, On Diagnosis from Dreams,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 38 (January 1983): 41-42.

4. The case of a dream diagnosis that Freud may, tragically, have missed, is a possible example of how a single body cell can flash an alert, decades in advance, of a malady that will only present symptoms to medical inspection years or decades later. Freud’s 1895 Irma Dream appeared to preview the specific symptoms of the cancer of mouth and jaw that eventually killed him, 28 years before doctors detected it. The vital source on the symptoms and treatment of Freud’s cancer are the medical notes of his oral surgeon, H. Pichler [Case History of Prof. Sigmund Freud] trans. L.Levy, in the Max Schur Papers (3-85R-13) in the Library of Congress. So far as I am aware, the first person to detail the connection between the Irma dream and Freud’s mouth cancer was the Argentine cancer surgeon and psychoanalyst José Schavelzon, in his monograph Freud, un paciente con cancer (Buenos Aires: Editorial Paidos, 1983). Was the dream a (missed) warning of a future disease – or a “tumor marker”, an alert flashed by the body, in a dream, at the very inception of that disease? For a thorough and helpful discussion of the tumor marker hypothesis, see Thomas R. Hersh, “How Might We Explain the Parallels Between Freud’s 1895 Irma Dream and His 1923 Cancer?” in Dreaming vol. 5, no. 4 (December, 1995) 267-287.    

5. Robert Moss, The Practice of Active Dreaming: A Manual for Dream Teachers, Level One (School of Active Dreaming, 2004; only available to members of Moss’ dream teacher trainings). For many inspiring examples of harvesting dream images for self-healing, see Wanda Easter Burch, She Who Dreams (Novato CA: New World Library, 2003).

6. For a fuller discussion of dreams as invitations to soul recovery, see Robert Moss, Dreamways of the Iroquois (Rochester VT: Inner Traditions, 2004) 205-216 and Moss, The Three “Only” Things 66-70.

7. W.B. Yeats, A Vision (London: Macmillan, 1937) 221.

8. Robert Moss, “Time for the Shark God” Journal of Shamanic Practice vol.1 no.2 (Fall, 2008).

9. Diego de Durán, The Aztecs: The History of the Indies of New Spain. Trans. Doris Heyden and Fernanda Horcasitas. New York: Orion Press, 1964, 247-271. For a fuller account of this episode, see Robert Moss, The Secret History of Dreaming (Novato CA: New World Library, 2009) 258-260.

10. Heraclitus: Οὔτε λέγει οὔτε κρύπτει, ἀλλὰ σημαίνει [the lord of the oracle] “neither tells nor conceals but signifies.”

11. Tjurni is one of the Australian Aboriginal terms that has crept into the polyglot vocabulary of Dreamland. For the Kukatja of what was formerly the Western Desert, a  powerful dreamer is one who knows how to open the tjurni. The term is usually translated as “womb” or “abdomen”. For those familiar with chakra work, it may be helpful to think of it as the second chakra. Sylvie Poirier reported her conversations on this subject with a wise woman of the Kukatja in “This Is Good Country, We Are Good Dreamers: Dreams and Dreaming in the Australian Western Desert” in Roger Ivar Lohmann (ed) Dream Travelers: Sleep Experiences and Culture in the Western Pacific (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

12. The Andamans, a shamanic hunter-gatherer people of the islands of the same name in the Indian Ocean, had a similar practice of growing a web for group dreaming. This may have helped them anticipate the terrible Asian tsunami of December 26, 2004 and get out of its way. “They knew the tsunami was coming, and got out of its way by quietly abandoning their fishing huts and taking to the hills. They knew because they observed the movements of animals, and listened to the voices of wind and water, and because they traveled on the web of dreams.” Moss, Secret History of Dreaming 270. For an account of Andaman dream webbing (written before the tsunami, see Vishvajit Pandya, “Forest Smells and Spider Webs: Ritualized Dream Interpretation Among Andaman Islanders” Dreaming 14:2-3 (June-September 2004) 136-150.

13. Robert Moss, Conscious Dreaming (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1996) 3.

14. The NOD analyst in New Beijing has apparently thrown a six in the top line of the 29^th hexagram of the I Ching, K’an (The Abyss). The constituent trigrams are Water above Water. To the Chinese mind, this reflected “the extremity of danger” and “no prospect of escape.” Richard Wilhelm and Cary F. Baynes (trans.) The I Ching or Book of Changes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) 118.