Radio Show Archive
Listen and call in to Robert LIVE every second Tuesday of the month at 9-10am Pacific Time (Noon-1pm Eastern Time) or listen to recent shows anywhere, anytime at Healthy.net, or download archived radio programs below.
What can we do to invite balance into our lives in such a way that it brings us into alignment with a larger–maybe even cosmic–context? Listen to the wonderful chat Robert had with Timothy Yuen. He leads us on a powerful Egyptian-themed meditation to the Scales of Adjustment in order to lighten the heart and open the path of heart in our current lives. We take turns to play dream guide for one another, revealing the rich variety and potency of dream experiences and the pleasure of sharing by the fun, fast Lightning Dreamwork process Robert invented. We reflect on the importance of capturing and giving the magic of dreaming in our world, in our time. Dreaming is open to all of us, and working with dreams is both easier and more meaningful than popular dialog might suggest.
Ryan Hurd is a passionate dream explorer and dream educator who says of himself, “I help people become luminous dreamers”. His books include the most helpful handbook on dealing with Sleep Paralysis, a talismanic approach to lucid dreaming and a co-edited 2-volume collection of essays on Lucid Dreaming: New Perspectives on Consciousness in Sleep. Hear him discuss with Robert advances and detours in approaches to dreaming in the era of AI. They are in substantial agreement that this is an area in which fieldwork must be done inside the field of dreaming itself, and share personal stories of how dreams have been turning-points in their lives. Visit his website at https://dreamstudies.org/
Artist and dreamer Victoria Rabinowe is passionate about dreaming and embodying the creative energy of dreams through art and performance, writing and storytelling. In her new book “Conversations with Psyche”, she offers 55 “activities” you can engage in to bring more dream magic into everyday life. In a wildly entertaing conversation with Robert, she shares many of these, from turning a dream report into haiku or a storyboard or board game or comic strip to sending Alice in Wonderland to wander through your dreanspace (in active imagination) asking questions.
The shamanic odyssey of John Lockley takes us deeper on a path in which the patient becomes the initiate. He was called by the “calling illness” the Xhosa call thwasa illness and by dreams to become a white sangoma.. He reports that in southern Africa, “dreams are an essential part of everyday life. Our soul, or spirit, is seen to connect with us through our dreams, keeping us in alignment with our earth walk and day-to-day lives. If someone doesn’t remember their dreams, they are seen as being out of balance with the world around them because they don’t know what is happening to their soul.”
Lockley tells us “the Xhosa elders recognized my sangoma gift as evidenced by my dreams and further confirmed by their own dreams about me. They welcomed me in as family and were not perturbed in the least by my white skin or the fact that I am not a native Xhosa man” He talks with Robert about how ancestral wisdom-keepers may reach outside their lineage for new ambassadors and practitioners.
Dreams call us to recognize and explore our connections with other personalities across time and space. Sometimes a dream opens a portal to a culture and a spiritual tradition of which we previously knew little or nothing, giving a prompt for research that can lead to thrilling discoveries. The dream archaeologist melds the skills of the shamanic dreamer, the scholar and the detective to travel across time, receiver lost knowledge and connect with wisdom keepers of other times. Timothy Yuen, a certified teacher of Active Dreaming, is an enthusiastic dream archaeologist who has led group lucid dream excursions to ancient sites including the great Egyptian temple city of Abydos. In this session he will guide you to an Egyptian hall of the gods and the precinct of Osiris. You’ll have fun with Tim and Robert as they share dreams of wonder, work each other’s dreams and play the game Jung called amplification – linking a personal dream to collective dreams from the mythology and folklore of humanity.
Dream teacher and gemmologist Jane Carleti Jane Carleton joins Robert tgo discuss how dreaming has been a secret engine of creation and problem solving in every area of human endeavor across the centuries, and how dreamwork can open doors and help us to survive and thrive among the challenges of contemporary life. You’ll enjoy hearing the full,story of how biggest oil find in history was the product of the dream of a retired British political agent in Kuwait that starts like a B movie of a mummy rising from the tomb and gives us lessons on practice: record the details, follow the clues like a detective, act on the dream information in an appropriate way.
Sarah Janes is fired and inspired by the ancient world, its oracles, and its approaches to dream divination and leads workshops and conferences at ancient sites in Greece. Here she talks with Robert about her personal practice of lucid dreaming and her research and exploration of ancient traditions from Babylon to Bubastis. They discuss dream incubation and Robert’s methods of dream archaeology, in which we meld the skills of the shamnic dreamer, the scholar and the detective to unearth and breathe life into ancient ways and ancient lives. Sarah shares discoveries from her new book Initiation into Dream Mysteries: Drinking from the Well of Mnemosyne.
Nikki Sleath says that all her work, as author, high priestess, and occultist, is inspired by her “practice of engaging the realms of dreaming as the ultimate spiritual classroom”. She formally trained herself in the Religious Order of Witchcraft. She talks to Robert about her magnificent new book The Goddess Seals, in which she reveals 13 magical symbols she created for 13 goddesses ranging from the Morrigan to Hathor. We learn about the rites and attributions of Hekate, the Lady of Three Ways. The conversation ranges deep into wildwoods of wonder as Robert recounts a dream of Nikki from long ago in which she is conducting rituals on a hill protected by legions of tiny owls and Nikki confirms the dream in every detail. We are carried into the heart of real magic, which Robert defines as the gift of bringing gifts from other worlds into this one.
Psychiatrist Bernie Beitman MD is fascinated by how inner and outer, psyche and physis, weave together in the experience of meaningful coincidence, the theme of his new book. In lively conversation with Robert, he shares stories from the road and models for understanding what is going on in those special moments when the universe gets personal. You’ll be moved by his account of the unlikely way he and a lost dog found each other when he was a boy, and of being rehearsed by an odd coincidence for an unexpected play on a football field.
Robert and dream researcher Kelly Bulkeley, a former president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, discuss seven fascinating individuals who left records of their dreams, from Aelius Aristides, a famous second century orator, to Wolfgang Pauli, the pioneer quantum physicist, who are profiled Kelly’s new book The Scribes of Sleep. Along the way, they compare their personal journal keeping practices, review the limits of content analysis, and discuss why William James did not include a chapter on dreaming in The Varieties of Religious Experience. Your journal is your most important tool for becoming more conscious in dreams, eyes open or closed.
“I have dreamed of places before I arrived at them and experiences before they occurred. I know that in my dreams I travel – through time and space, between worlds, beyond the limits of a single life,” Perdita Finn declares in her beautifully written new book, Take Back the Magic. She knows the magic of story, and in her conversation with Robert she talks about the everyday magic of living close to the land and to the Otherworld. They confirm, through memorable personal experiences, that healing and forgiveness are always available, beyond the apparent barrier of death, and that our lives may turn on dramas being lived by other personalities in other times.
Claire Perkins, dream teacher and creative coach, has published”Fallen: The Adventures of a Deep Water Leaf”, a charming and heart-warming allegory of a soul’s journey that reminds us that everything is alive and conscious. We are stirred to remember what it means to descend into the physical body from a deeper world, and what we were doing before we came here. The book is illuminated by her own lovely illustrations, which include a map of Lake Sojourn where the adventures take place. Claire and Robert also talk about the springs of creativity and play dream guide for each other with recent dream reports.
In the 1920s Paramahansa Yogananda suggested that the world is a motion picture. A century later, inThe Simulation Hypothesis and The Simulated Multiverse, MIT physicist and game designer Rizwan Virk hypothesizes that reality is more like a complex interactive video game. In his new book, Wisdom of a Yogi, Riz marries this idea to what he has learned from Yogananda. He encourages us to mine precepts for conscious living from the great yogi, such as: Setbacks May Be Part of Your Story, Make Little Pilgrimages, Practice EveryDay – and follow the play of synchronicity as a set of clues to hidden treasures. Robert and Riz also talk about how Yogananda was schooled in the geography of the astral worlds in a visitation by his deceased guru.
“When I finally came upon the Buddhist teachings on dream yoga, which is when you strive to have lucid dreams with the goal of doing specific practices with them, I knew I had come home”. The voice is that of Andrew Hiolecek, a man of many parts – classical-level pianist, author, dental surgeon, athlete, longtime teacher of Vajrayana meditation in his book Dream Yoga. What is the difference between dream yoga and lucid dreaming? Andrew suggests, beyond the spiritual orientation and cultural symbols of dream yoga, a very interesting distinction:while lucid dreaming emphasizes the differences between waking and sleeping, dream yoga focuses on their similarities. In lively conversation with Robert, Andre explains the eyes-open yoga of “illusory forms”, the interplay of “appearances” and “emptiness”, illusion and reality, and how through conscious dreaming you can accumulate frequent flying miles for your journey beyond death..
Minnesota-based dream teacher and artist Cheslea Lee joins Robert for a fun hour demonstrating the LIghtning Dreamwork Game and talking about life-guiding dreams and the foibles of our dream producers. Robert recounts a New Year’s Day dream in which he delights in the breath of a new baby after a wild ride by a long blue lake, and we are reminded of the double joy of sharing dreams in the right way. We recognize something of ourselves in the archetypes and universal motifs that feature in each other’s dreams – the new baby, the life road. At the same time, as we go into the details of a dream, we see that each dream has features unique to the individual. The snake or the baby in your dream is not the snake or the baby in mine, yet we can talk about what it would mean to me if it were my dream, and what I would do to bring its energy and guidance into everyday life.
An image can take us beyond our everyday assumptions into the animate information field all around us. It may be that any image – however initially scary and unwanted – can bring us to a place of healing and creative flow if we are willing to work and play with it. Kim Hermanson ecoaches people to find “core images” that can reorient and energize body and soul. She talks to Robert about her personal experience of crises of wounding and spiritual emergence that set her pon her path. She offers a simple exercise to call up an image that is looking for you right now. She wants us to do more with images than analyze them; she wants us to project consciousness into the image, however fierce or humble, and become the tiger, or stand tall as the skyscraper, or as blocky and bounded as the box.
Dream educator and explorer Ryan Hurd has produced a new guide to promoting dream lucidity that comes with a satisfyingly hefty metal talisman that may help you on the journey. Robert and Ryan talk about the uses of amulets and talismans, a spectrum of approaches to lucid dreaming and lucid living, and their personal experiences of dreams that were life-expanding experiences. Ryan is an excellent storyteller abd a charming guide. You’ll enjoy Robert and Ryan’s genial disagreement about whether the inability to read text is a lucid marker (a sign that you are dreaming). Robert is as voracious a reader in dreams as in ordinary life and sometimes brings back several pages
As most of us are living longer than in previous generations, many families are challenged with caring for elderly members who are not only frail physically but losing the power to discern and communicate well. Maureen Biro’s personal story of helping her mother after she succumbed to Alzheimers is deeply inspiring and offers very practical counsel. When Maureen’s mother lost the power of speech, she found that she could still communicate with her in dreams and dreamlike states. They found places together where Mom was unimpaired, could explain what she wanted and needed, and could let loose and sing, as she loved to do. At a certain point they became a threesome; a marvelous being Mauureen calls her mother’s Greater Self came to join their conversations. In a moving conversation with Robert, Maureen describes a loving dream relationship that deepened over 16 years and brought constant comfort.
“Maybe spells are nothing more than words you believe in with all your heart,” says the vampire Mathew de Clermont in Deborah Harkness’ magical novel Shadow of Night. Hear Robert discuss the many forms of ritual and magic with self-described word witch and heathen visionary Danielle Dulsky. Her new book The Hold Wild Grimoire, is a handbook with verses, prompts, stories, and spells, organized around five elements — earth, water, fire, air, and ether. Robert and Danielle talk about dreaming, the art of keeping a journal, coming up with “fresh words” to entertain the spirits, identifying our forbidden fruits, making new life stories and giving the stories we grew up with room to breathe.
A beloved herbalist and earth keeper, Asia Suler reveals herself in conversation with Robert as an enchanting poet of consciousness who rouses us to heal our lives by telling better stories about them. Robert writes about Mirrors in the Earth:
Read Asia Suler’s lovely book and your world will tilt. You’ll not only see that the world is your mirror but that the world is looking at you. You will learn from willow that what breaks can give birth, and from beech that it may be okay to hold onto your leaves for longer than the almanac says. Born highly sensitive with a skin as thin as ephemeral bloodroot petals in early spring, Asia healed herself in communion with nature, in a Brooklyn garden as well as on wild Appalachian trails and Florida springs. Now she comes tripping lightly through the ladyslipper orchids with a willow twig between her teeth to help us to heal by making our confessions to the forgiving land, by aligning ourselves with earth cycles of regeneration – and by recalling that the plots of our lives, like gardens, require boundaries.
Robert talks with a profound teacher of Kabbalah, transpersonal psychologist, and founder of the School of Images about the power of dreaming to carry us to enlightenment and the power of imagery to heal body and soul and ancestral relations. Catherine describes how dreams and an inner voice brought her to study with the renowned Kabbalist teacher Colette Aboulker-Muscat in Israel and to join a mystical lineage dating back to the 13th century in Girona and Southern France. She offers two of her powerful short imaginal exercises to carry us to a place of vision. She inspires us to plunge deep into the ocean of dreams and access gifts of the great unconscious and superconscious that are hidden from the everyday trivial mind. She speaks of the life project she announces in these rousing terms in her new book, The Kabbalah of Light: “This is a journey back to the pure light of Eden, where human and God and human gaze into each other and become one. This can only be accomplished by dreaming.”
Born in the Netherlands, very active in Sweden leading workshops on seidr – seership and the magical arts – in Sweden, artist and shamanic teacher Imelda Almqvist has devoted herself to cultural soul recovery: helping us to bring back authentic rituals and traditions from the realm of the ancestors. In spirited conversation with Robert, she shares how her dreams have guided her in these realms and how she melds scholarship and science to shamanic journeying and dreaming with the land. She talks about her wonderful new book, North Sea Water in My Veins, in which she brings together a treasure trove of information and guided meditation on the spiritual traditions of the Low Countries, reclaiming the names and cult of Goddesses and Ancient Mothers.
Jeanne spent many years as a hospice social worker and grief counselor helping the elderly and their families approach death and dying with courage and grace. Her book Dreams at the Threshold is one of the most valuable I know on the vital theme of inviting dreams to help midwife death. deeply simple and simply deep. She shows us, with a wealth of moving stories, that we don’t need to be experts to help others with their dreams. All we need is to hold a safe space, encourage someone (here, usually terminal patients) to tell a dream if so inclined, and then listen with full attention without trying to interpret or analyze. A person who has been bedridden for months now finds that she has a story to tell, and communication with her family opens up. She may soon become aware that she is receiving visitations from departed loved ones and has guides with familiar faces for the tremendous journey that lies ahead. This is the substance of a grand conversation..
From time immemorial, humans have turned to ndreams for guidance on life issues and access to wiser sources than the ordinary mind. For many cultures, dreams were and are a field of interaction between humans and the more-than-human: with gods and spirits, with ancestors and elementals. So the practice of dream incubation – of putting a question to the oracle of the night – was often approached with care and elablorate preparation, For a pilgrim hoping to be admitted to the sacred dormitory of Asklepios, the god of dream healing, this involved ritual cleansing and offering a dream of invitation. Hear Robert discuss how to turn to your dreams for guidance with Kelly Lydick, an avid dreamworker and creative coach who has written a short on Dream Incubation for Greater Self-Awareness. Her website is kellylydick.com.
Lisa is a graduate of Robert’s first full online Training for Teachers of Active Dreaming (Level One). She is a dreamwork coach and YouTuber who helps others reclaim their magic and expand their horizons by teaching them how to unlock the power of their dreams. She says that her goal is to act as a guide for others as they travel and ‘wake up’ along their personal journeys through the Multiverse, with a focus on awakening and living a fuller life through dreaming. You’ll enjoy her lively interaction with Robert as they work and play with each other’s dreams and her passionate commitment to helping to rebirth a dreaming society in our world, in our time.It’s time!
Most human cultures have looked to dreams as a field of interaction with wiser intelligences, call them the God we can talk to, angels or ancestors, the spirit of Nature. Hear Robert in dialogue with spiritual counsellor and veteran deram teacher Carol Davis on the many ways that guides may communicate with us in dreams, and enjoy them playing coach for each other as they share personal experiences.
“To listen to your dreams, even if you don’t understand their meaning, is to be in contact with the poet, artist, dancer, musician, and philosopher resting at the base of your soul crying out to be heard,”says Walter Berry, a passionate dreamworker who has been leading dream sharing circles for many years. He also has long experience of Hollywood as a professional lighting designer for film and television. He is the author of a forthcoming book, Drawn into the Dream, in which he encourages us to release our inner artist through dreamwork and open windows into a deeper world. He declares, “I am not looking for answers so much as opening all the windows I can find I hope to open enough windows that the magic inside wakes up and engulfs us.” Hear Walter and Robert share their dream adventures and play dreamwork guides for each other in this lively, sometimes wildly funny, conversation.
Jane is both a seasoned dream teacher and Robert’s host for workshops in the Bay Area, and a certified gemologist and jewelry appraiser. She brings a jeweler’s eye to appraising dreams, as well as the tools of Active Dreaming. Hear her talk about how stones and crystals may be used as dream talismans, and how estate jewelry may carry the energy of those who wore it before. Jane and Robert have fun as she leads investigation of Robert’s fresh and mysterious dream of a museum in the desert where centaurs are livelier and stranger than in classical art and the coffee is so good that you don’t want to wake up to smell common grounds..
Dreams, even the scary ones, are not on our case; they are on our side. Writing from this essential perspective, in her new book The Art of Transforming Nightmares Clare Johnson gives us practical guidance on how to use “bad” dreams and nightmares as portals to healing and transformation. She observes that some “bad” dreams are telepathic or precognitive, part of our innate intuitive radar. She encourages us to grow our dream lucidity in order to confront and resolve nightmare challenges on their own ground, and to understand that recurring dreams may be playing again and again because we have failed to receive an important message or, no less important, to act on it. In this lively conversation, Robert and Clare share personal experiences of resolving scary dreams through lucid dream reentry. Hear them explore the idea that nightmares are gifts in ugly wrapping paper that challenge us to brave up to our monsters in dreams and in waking life.
Czech dream teacher and life coach Jana Mitzoda tells us about the dream that called her from the sea or dreams to the waves off Lanzarote and how she uses dreamwork to help people find and fulfill their life calling. Share the fun as Jana and Robert play the Lightning Dreamwork Game together with recent dreams.You can find out more about Jana and her new book “Through the Eye of the Whale”, available in English in an audio edition in February, at her website: https://lamurai.com/
In this lively conversation she talks with Robert about how to the Egyptian mind would understand the pandemic, and how we can bring sacred powers and imaginal scripts for healing from ancient traditions.They describe their personal experiences of healing with the aid of Sekhmet. Hear them do live divination with Normandi’s hieroglyph deck,finding the hope of a movement towards the restoration of flow in our world and the resurgence of the Divine Feminine.
In the second half of the show he is joined by Minnesota dream teacher Monica Kenton to demonstrate how much fun we can have sharing dreams in the Lightning Dreamwork Game. Invented by Robert, this fast and frisky four-step process allows us to share dreams and personal stories, offer each other non-intrusive feedback and guide each other to take action to bring energy and guidance into embodied life. Monica’s dream of The Railroad Tycoon and the Sewing Machine awakens us to the possibility that in dreaming we may have access to great intellects from other times and that this dream business can be good for business in the worldly sense!
“The dream knows,” says Catalan psychologist and dream explorer Jordi Borras, who brings the gift of dreaming to many through his courses in dream integration and his work in radio, television and film in Catalonia. Robert and Jordi share their experiences of helping young children with dreams and learning from them. Kids put adults back in touch with experiences adults may consider extraordinary, but are entirely natural in the childhood worlds of dreaming, as in the shaman’s. Kids also need help with scary stuff. Jordi gave one of his daughters a rag doll call Lluna (Moon) and told her to make drawings of bad dreams and put them in Lluna’s pocket; Moon would eat them overnight.
Hear Robert and Jordi share their personal dreams and their passions for helping to rebirth a dreaming society. Jordi is one of those who understands deeply that dreams require much more than analysis; they require creative action to embody their healing energy and guidance.
“We are literally made of story. Every night, something in our biology compulsively spits out dream-stories in order to keep us healthy. As essential as breathing, these stories have layers of usefulness that are part self-regulatory, part transmission of wisdom, and part connective tissue to a networked intelligence unconstrained by time and space.” – Toko-pa Turner, Belonging
“The state of hypnagogia presents us with what might be considered prime time for channeling the energies of thought…The hypnagogic state is one of the rare times when almost anyone can use mental images to induce emotion. I advise using the hypnagogic state to picture the achievement of a cherished aim…Feel the pleasure of attainment.”
A lively conversation with Danielle Dulsky, author of
The Holy Wild: A Heathen Bible for the Untamed Woman