Conscious Dreaming: A Spiritual Path for Everyday Life

I loved this book, and found it to be a very "shamanic" dreamwork manual. It has wonderful exercises for both the beginning and more advanced dreamworker and includes everything you could imagine, from dream incubation, dream reentry and working with nightmares to shape-shifting, meeting deceased loved ones, angels and psychic self defense. Conscious Dreaming has much to offer both the beginning and more advanced dreamworker and I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in finding out more about their inner world of the Dreamtime.

It's very simple, really. This book changed my life. Robert Moss' basic rule of dream exploration is NEVER to let anybody tell you what your dreams mean. Such integrity is what has attracted me to the practice of Active Dreaming. In Conscious Dreaming, Mr. Moss explains very clearly how to work with dreams and create one's Own dictionary of symbols. What's important to me might not be important to you. He delves appropriately into dreaming with the departed, and into precognitive dreaming - things that drew me to dream work to begin with. He illustrates in practical terms how we can return to night dreams in a waking state and look around some more - or possibly change things if we don't like them! Haven't we all had dreams that we wish we could have enjoyed for longer, or nightmares that we would change if we could? A dear friend used to have horrific nightmares. The kind that had him punching holes in the bedroom wall. Since he has read this book and been sharing his dreams using Robert Moss' Lightning Dreamwork process, his frequency of nightmares is Way down (1 or 2 per Year, rather than per Week). I asked him Why he feels this change has taken place. He replied "Because I'm finally paying attention and honoring my dreams!" To me, this is Healing at its most basic - SELF-Healing! The seeds of which are all very skillfully set forth in this one little book.Mr. Moss now has a series of videos from Psyche Productions called "The Way of the Dreamer". They expand beautifully on Conscious Dreaming, showing the history that brought the author to dream work, and depicting very clearly the practical applications of the principles illustrated in the book. And listening to Robert Moss speak is a remarkable experience in itself!I have given this book to many friends over the years, and it's my sincere hope that everyone who reads it will begin to Pay Attention to their dreams!

Industrialized people such as ourselves are people who have inherited a profoundly distubing situation that has two faces: one is the destruction of our environment, the other are our atrophied spiritual senses, what I call our Otherworldly senses. Moss' book breathes new fire into our situation, calling on us to re-enliven a dreaming culture every bit as in tune with our souls and the living earth as the Australian culture that influenced him in his younger days, and the Scottish-Celtic druidic culture that shaped his ancestors. The problem with some of the other reviews I have read of this book are two-fold: instant, jaded disbelief, and what seems to be a lack of follow through on a pivotal point that Robert makes time and again: that success with active dreaming requires an active dreaming practice. Practice. The book Conscious Dreaming is a profound introduction (or shall I say, reintroduction) of an ancient way of relating to our dreams and ways for apprehending a greater fluency with non-ordinary reality. Anyone interested in dreams or incorporating a more shamanically-based dreaming practice into your life should consider CONSCIOUS DREAMING part of your required reading.

Robert Moss certainly knows how to dream- he talks about Aboriginal, Celtic and Native American shamanic and dreaming practices, as well as his own dreams and the dreams of memebers of his Active Dreaming workshops, and explains how the average person can use dreams to make the most of their everyday life. He shows why dreaming is so important, how to make it a fun and enjoyable experience, and gives tips on exploring the dreams and symbols of your dreams (note: Moss does not take symbols on a dry Freudian level- according to Moss, symbols may have different meanings for different dreamers, and some symbols are transpersonal). His discussion of shamanic dreaming goes far beyond any book I've read before (except, possibly, "Dreamgates", another book by Moss.) This is one book I could not put down.There is one slight weakness in this superb book (if you want to call it a weakness)- he doesn't fully explain the methods of shifting consciousness into the dream state. Complete beginners might even be wondering exactly what it means to "shift consciousness". However, this is information you can find in nearly any other dream or astral projection book (as well as slews of internet sites), and Moss opts to go a step further- by showing the reader that the dream world is a real world, full of real characters and real things- perhaps more real than physical reality.