Robert Moss on Substack

“There is a close relationship between shamans who travel to the moon and dreamers with their heads in the clouds.”

I count Journeys into the Invisible, by French anthropologist Chares Stépanoff, as an essential book in the literature of shamanism..Stépanoff has done extensive fieldwork among shamans in Siberia, has gone deep into archives of Soviet-era Russian ethnography generally unknown in the West, and brings to bear a fine discerning intellect and a particular focus on something that has not received enough attention in the vast literature on shamanism: the extent to which the shaman may be an imaginal architect, helping to shape the realities invisible to ordinary sight where he or she does their essential work.

Stépanoff makes the case that shamans are “technologists of the imagination”, and distinguishes four basic types of working imagination: guided (in which you are led through images given to you), exploratory (in which your own imagination is released to perceive and produce spontaneous imagery), contemplative (in which you are witness) and agentive (in which you are agent – actor director, scriptwriter).

Creative Lucidity and Ethics of Lucid Dream Sex

Robert’s recent conversation with Dr. Clare Johnson 

Available Now!

GROWING BIG DREAMS

Here’s a fun note on the pre-history: A year ago, I had a clear vision in the space between sleep and awake of the manuscript of my new book being delivered to my door in a baby basket.

July 6, 2019: Hypnapompic zone

Baby Basket at My Door

Someone is at the door, making a delivery. I go to the door and look out into a narrow street of whitewashed houses, flooded with sunlight. At my door someone has left a baby basket. Really? I look more closely. Instead of a baby there is a bundle of typed pages, neatly stacked and tied with both pink and blue ribbons. I know this is the next book I will publish. Feelings: happy, excited

At that point I had not decided what my next book would be or made a publishing plan. After I shared my dream and the drawing with my wonderful editor Georgia Ann Hughes we agreed on a plan for the book.  GROWING BIG DREAMS, which contains a chapter on the creative gifts of hanging out in that liminal space between sleep and awake, was officially published on September 29. The audiobook version, narrated by me, is available on Audible.