We suffer pain or trauma or abuse. We are compelled to make a painful life choice, leaving a partner or a job or a home, and part of us resists that choice and still clings to the old relationship or the old place. We fall into depression or addiction or make compromises with the world as we understand it, thus giving up on our big dreams of life. 

In Dreaming the Soul Back Home: Shamanic Dreaming for Healing and Becoming Whole, bestselling author and world-renowned dream explorer Robert Moss explains that these challenging life situations often create a loss of our vital energy and identity — soul loss — and that our dreams are powerful tools in recovering the aspects of our souls that have gone missing throughout the course of our lives. 

Sigmund Freud called dreams the “royal road to the unconscious,” but to bestselling author and world-renowned dream explorer Robert Moss, they are more: portals to the imaginal realm, a higher reality that exists at the intersection of time and eternity. 

The traveler’s tales in Moss’s new book, Mysterious Realities: A Dream Traveler’s Tales from the Imaginal Realm, are just-so stories in the sense that they spring from direct experience in the many worlds. As you journey from the temple of the Great Goddess at Ephesus to an amazing chance encounter on an airplane, from Dracula country in Transylvania to the astral realm of Luna, you’ll confirm that the doors to the otherworld open from wherever you are. 

We hope you'll enjoy this interview with Robert Moss, author of The Boy Who Died and Came Back

Dreams are not on our case; they are on our side. This is one of my personal mantras about dreams and (yes) it applies even to nightmares.

In my personal lexicon, a nightmare is not only a “bad” or scary dream; it is an interrupted or aborted dream. We are so frightened, we run away. We wake ourselves up and try to slam the door on the dream experience, hoping that it is “only” a dream and can’t get out and come after us. This is a very foolish strategy. The challenges we face in dreams are challenges that life itself is presenting to us. If we learn to confront the underlying issues inside the dream space, we may be able to prevent those issues from blowing up in our regular lives. This may require us to take action in waking life, based on what we have learned in our dreams; but we will lack the essential data required for appropriate action if we have left the dream broken and abandoned, behind that door we are trying to keep shut.