March/April 2009 Spirituality
The Secret History of Dreaming

by Robert Moss

Robert Moss Robert Moss

Dream archeology requires skill to excavate the inner dimension of the human adventure.

While archeology is often understood to be the science of unearthing and studying antiquities, the root meaning is more profound: it is the study of the arche, the first and essential things.

The practice of dream archeology requires mastery of many sources, and the ability to read between the lines and make connections that have gone unnoticed by specialists who were looking for something else. It requires the ability to locate dreaming in its context - physical, social and cultural. And it demands the ability to enter a different time or culture, through the exercise of active imagination, and experience it from the inside as it may have been.

Dreaming is an expansive term used to encompass not only night dreams but also waking visions, the interplay of mind and matter that is sometimes called synchronicity, and experiences in a creative solution state. The history of dreams and imagination play a vital role in science and literature, war and religion, medicine and the survival of our kind. History without the inner side is as shallow as history without economics, and as boring as history without sex.

Dreams of Oil

In 1937, Colonel Harold Dickson, the former British political agent in Kuwait, dreamed that a sandstorm opened a crater under a strange tree in the desert, and revealed a mummy that came to life as a beautiful woman who gave him an ancient coin. His wife recorded the dream for him in the middle of the night, and then he consulted a Bedouin woman dream interpreter who gave him the location of the tree in his dream - in the Burqan hills - and told him he would find great treasure there.

He was able to persuade the Kuwait Oil Company (which had been drilling dry holes up to this point) and they struck it rich at the exact place he had dreamed. This was the origin of Kuwait's oil wealth and a major source for the Allies in World War II.

Founding Fathers

John Adams and Dr. Benjamin Rush, who made a close study of precognitive dreams, were in the habit of exchanging dreams in their extensive correspondence. In 1809, Rush wrote to Adams about a dream in which the doctor's son read him a page from the future history of the United States.

The dream letter described "the renewal of friendship" between Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who had been estranged for many years because of their political disagreements. It stated that the later correspondence of the two former presidents would inspire many. And it recorded that Adams and Jefferson "sunk into the grave nearly at the same time."

Nearly 17 years later, long after their reconciliation, the two former presidents died on the same day - July 4, 1826. The predictions on the page of Dr. Rush's dream history were exactly fulfilled.

Underground Railroad

Harriet Tubman is an iconic figure in American history as the runaway slave from Maryland's Eastern Shore who went back to the South, braving great dangers, to free her fellow slaves and become the most successful "conductor" of the Underground Railroad. Yet the secret of Harriet Tubman's achievement has rarely been told.

She was a dreamer and a seer. In her dreams and visions, she could fly like a bird. Her gift may have been associated with a near-death experience in her childhood, when an angry overseer threw a two-pound lead weight that laid open her skull. We learn from her how great gifts can spring from our wounds. Harriet herself said she inherited special gifts, including the ability to travel outside the body and to visit the future, from her father, who "could always predict the future."

Freud's Dreams

The most famous of all the dreams Freud analyzed was one of his own, the Irma Dream. In The Interpretation of Dreams he gives a lengthy account of this 1895 dream and his work with it. In the dream, he inspects the mouth of a patient called Irma and discusses her condition with several doctors. The tragic irony is that in all his work on this dream, Freud may have missed a health warning that could have saved his life. A cancer surgeon compared Freud's medical records with his dream report and concluded that the dream contained an amazingly exact preview of precise symptoms of the oral cancer that killed Freud 28 years later.

Dreaming isn't just what happens during sleep. Dreaming is waking up to sources of guidance, healing and creativity beyond the reach of the everyday mind.

Robert Moss, author of The Secret History of Dreaming, began his fascination with the dreamworld in his childhood, when he had three near-death experiences and first learned the ways of a traditional dreaming people through his friendship with Aborigines. See Moss on March 3 in Seattle at ElliottBay Bookstore and March 5 in Portland at Powell's Books on Hawthorne. Visit www.mossdreams.com.