Lucy
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Hi Betsi !
not an easy question to answer, because this book is more biographical and Moss is high energy and all over the place with this stuff. He was a (monetarily) successful writer before he started sharing the dreamwork, so he is good at using words! He is definitely a verbal type. So he is clear in his writing but he also "talks" a lot!
(and I do not necessarily follow a linear route when I read a book so I have to try to recall where I read what).
He talks a lot aout his own experiences and the problem is that he has a great variety of dream experiences (William James would be impressed I bet!) and in this book many are excursions to "former" lives and so the interpretation gets ...complicated. What is symbolic and what is recreation of something physically accurate (I hesitate to use the word "real").
I think in the classes he teaches, he has people pair up and then he sends them into a dreamlike state using shamanic drumming, and they report shared dreams afterwards and of course get all excited. I think this validates for people that dreams have a lot of meaning. His "thing" is using the shamanic drumming with the dream state. I am not clear on exactly what that means but I get the idea.
In the biographical part, he writes about how Jung influenced him. So he is by example advocating writing down everything that can be remembred from a dream. I'm getting the impression that for both of them (Jung and Moss) it took a good bit of writing everything down before they could see the patterns that they could then interpret and understand.
I think this is the part that I have not understood and ccomplished about my own dreams...I long ago gave up recording them because the whole thing made no sense to me. But you can't take them one by one and attach an arbirary meaning to items in them. You have to keep workign with them and explore how they might show up in your life later on. Later = days? weeks? years? It isn't easy. But to discover your own symbols it isimportant to kep at it. (though sometims a little success would help motivation!)
Moss quotes Jung "Dreams are the facts from which we must proceed." (he discusses Jung on pages 72-75 if you happen to have a copy of the book)
Somehow it makes it easier knowing that JUNG sturggled with this ! and succeeded.
Another technique he mentions in passing is that....I think he might teach this in his classes...he asks that each person, when offering an interpretation of someone else's dream, begin by saying "If it were my dream, then ..." yada yada whatever the interpretation is. And he seems to encourage people to interpret their own dreams rather than giving them his interpretation. Does that answer your question?
His own discussion of his own dreams is so woven into the fabric of his life that the word "interpretation" seems not quite the right one.
Well I obvously need to look at one of his "how to " books as opposed to this fascinating biographical stuff. he is so colorful and such an accomplished writier that it is hard to not ask if he is making some of this stuff up! Which is why I started the thread. Is this for real?
I'll stop for now with something he says (p. 143 in a chapter called "We are asleep until we are dreaming")
"...Dreaming is not fundamentally about what happens during sleep. It is about waking up to a deeper order of reality and finding ourselves at home in the multiverse."
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