Active Dreaming. Robert Moss A.

Health

       11. Finding and Living Your Essential Story

       12. Dreamgrowing in Auschwitz

       13. Tracking the Synchron-O-city Beast

       14. Symbol Magnets

       15. Life as a Conscious Dream

       Part Three. Toward a Commonwealth of Dreamers

       16. Cry of the Trees

       17. Dream Groups as Models for a New Community

       18. Community Dreaming

       19. Midwives of a Dreaming Society

       20. Unto the Seventh Generation

       Appendix: Dreamland — Documents from a Possible Future

       Acknowledgments

       Notes

       Selected Bibliography

       Resources

       Index

       About the Author

       PROLOGUE

       Making Every Day a Holiday

      Today is the first day of your new life. When you opened this book, you put yourself on a road that will lead you to manifest your life dreams. To follow this road, you’ll want to define who you are and what your life project is all about. This is essential, because the human being is an animal that must define itself or else be defined by others. Let others tell you who you are, and you can find yourself trapped in the cage of other people’s needs and expectations rather quickly. You can find yourself stuck inside a frame and required to forever remain the same. You might be bent double under the weight of a past history you want to let go of but can’t because others keep strapping it on your back. You might find it hard to breathe under the low ceilings of the little box houses of other people’s limiting beliefs about the world and your role in it.

      This book will help you get out of those cages and frames and chart your own course in life, to a place of wild creative freedom I call the Place of the Lion. To get there, you need to find your essential life story and tell it and live it so that others can receive it. If you don’t know that your life has an essential story, then you have probably been trapped in a little story, one of those confining stories spun by others that crush your ribs and pinch your throat so you can’t breathe, let alone speak up. You have come to this book because you are ready to break out and claim your bigger story, and to learn to tell it so well that others will not only hear you but also welcome what is most alive and creative in you. When the lion speaks, everyone listens.

      You are going to learn an approach to life that I call Active Dreaming. This approach includes paying attention to night dreams, but it is not only, or even essentially, about what happens at night. It is a method for conscious living. When you become an active dreamer, you’ll notice that the world speaks to you in a different way.

      As I write these lines, I am poked by a friend on Facebook with a quote from Henry David Thoreau: “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.”

      This quote is hardly obscure; there’s a whole industry devoted to reproducing it on T-shirts, aprons, posters, bangles, and fridge magnets. Maybe you have it on a coffee mug, as I do.

      Thoreau’s words are brilliant, practical advice for conscious living, but only if we can brush off the cliché dust that settles when something is quoted so often that it loses its punch.

      So try this, right now, with the words in front of you. Say them out loud. Now make them your own by saying something like: “I go confidently in the direction of my dreams. I am living the life I’ve imagined.”

      Are you feeling some forward movement? It requires a next step. You now want to decide on one thing you’ll do today (or tonight) to act on what is now your living, personal affirmation that you are following your dreams (present tense) and you are living the life you’ve imagined. Don’t be vague, and for goodness’ sake don’t try to be spiritually correct. You’ll do one thing to get a great life plan working. Could be as simple as filling that Thoreau mug with another jolt of java to make sure you’re wired for some fabulous problem-solving or creative effort — or some chamomile tea to make you sweet and mellow.

      This little plan for brushing the cliché dust off Thoreau is an example of the practice of Active Dreaming as a way of conscious living. We receive what the world gives us as a prompt to turn in a certain direction and make a creative choice.

      Active dreamers are choosers. We learn to recognize that, whatever situation we are in, we always have a choice. We choose to stop running away from the monster in our dreams — who may turn out to be our own power hunting us — when we brave up and turn around to confront it. We choose not to buy into self-limiting beliefs or the limited models of reality suggested by others. We learn from Viktor Frankl, an exemplary active dreamer, that we can grow a dream of possibility even inside a Nazi death camp — and that when we can grow that dream strong enough it takes us beyond terror and despair to a place of freedom and delight.

      In Persian tradition, there is a knightly order of spiritual warriors known as the Fravartis. They choose to enter this world to fight the good fight. They move in this world with the knowledge of a higher world. They are attuned to a secret order of events beyond the facts recorded in the media and our day planners.

      Active dreamers engage with this world in a similar way. We are choosers. We know who we are, where we come from, and that our lives have meaning and purpose. And that part of this purpose is to generate meaning and help others to find meaning in their lives at every opportunity. As Viktor Frankl taught us, rising from the hell of Auschwitz, humans require meaning just as they require air and food and water.

      Stories are better teachers than theories. This book will help you find your bigger and braver story — the one that can give you the heart and guts to get through the darkest day — and have that story heard and received by others. So let’s start with a story from the road, to give you a sense of what it means to be an active dreamer on an ordinary day.

      MY FIRST FLIGHT OF THE DAY IS DELAYED, and when we land at Chicago’s O’Hare airport a voice mail from the airline informs me that I have missed my connection and have been rebooked, on a combination of flights that will get me to my destination seven hours late, much too late for the dinner and evening event I have planned. Oh joy. But wait — my watch tells me I may just have time to dash from one end of the vast airport complex to the other and make my connection after all.

      When I arrive, breathless, at the departure gate, the plane is still on the ground but the doors were closed one minute ago, and no, there’s no way they’ll open them. “But you might