Everyone who dreams is a little bit shaman.
— Kagwahiv, an Amazonian dreaming people

The shaman is a dreamer. Shamans typically receive their calling in dreams, and are initiated and trained in the dreamtime.

The heart of their practice is the intentional dream journey. They may incubate dreams to diagnose a patient and select the appropriate treatment. They travel — wide awake and lucid — in their dream bodies to find lost souls, intercede with the spirits, fight sorcerers, and guide spirits of the departed along the right roads.

As you embark on your own 12-module adventure along the many roads of dreaming, Robert will offer essential tools and resources, encouraging you to go to a place of sanctuary and healing deep in your imagination... a place you can visit at any time, to raise your energy, and feel rooted and protected.

You’ll also be invited to connect or deepen your connection with a spiritual guardian who will stand with you in all your journeys, in all the worlds.

In this first module, you’ll:

• Discover how to break a dream drought
• Explore simple techniques to understand your dreams and take action to embody their energy and guidance
• Connect or reconnect with spiritual allies and guardians
• Confirm that you can travel without leaving home
• Learn from the stories of ancient dream shamans and modern shamanic dreamers
• Explore highly effective invocations and rituals for protection

Australia’s First People believe we dream our way into this world, and dream our way out of it.

They look to dreams as the place of encounter with spiritual guides and sacred healers — who often appear as totem animals, but may come in many other forms.

In this module, you’ll discover how, in the Aboriginal tradition, dreaming is a highly social activity. You get out and about, make visits and receive visitations.

So the first questions to ask about a dream are those of a detective, rather than an analyst: Who, what, where, why, when?

Our lives follow Dreaming Tracks, or Songlines. We travel through “countries of belonging.” And those who can hear the inner songs of the land can cross a thousand miles of desert without maps.

In this module, you’ll explore:

• How the ancestors speak to you in dreams
• Why your Big Story is hunting you
• The ways you walk in a Speaking Land — and why you want to expand your attention to listen to its many voices
• How your personal dreams can be portals to the dreamtime
• Your Songlines, which comprise a personal map for your soul’s journey — starting from when your spirit decided to enter your mother’s womb (maybe even before)
• How to make a map of your Dreaming Tracks and the landscapes of your soul

In the Mohawk language, the word for shaman or healer is ratetshents, which means “dreamer.”

Robert’s life was changed by his visionary encounters with the ancient Mohawk shaman and Mother of the Wolf Clan he calls Island Woman. In her tradition, dreams reveal the “secret wishes of the soul” and the daily task of the community is to gather round a dreamer, help her recognize what the soul is saying, and then take action to honor the soul’s purpose.

In Native American tradition, dreaming is also about human survival. Dreams show us what’s happening at a distance in time or space. If you see a future event you don’t like, you can take action to avoid that possible future.

Dreaming is a way of connecting with the ancestors and of looking at the consequences of human actions, down to the seventh generation beyond ourselves — as the Iroquois insist that wise leaders must always do.

The Beaver Indians of British Columbia say strong dreamers may travel to higher realms of reality where they will encounter “Six Grandfathers,” spiritual beings who are their ancestors.

With each encounter, the dreamer absorbs energy and memory from each of these beings, as well as their songs of power. When such a dreamer returns, they’re viewed as the Seventh Grandfather — actually regarded as seven beings in one, because they’ve brought the wisdom of the spiritual teachers to live with them and their people in the ordinary world.

In this module, you’ll learn how to:

• Recognize the secret wishes of the soul, as revealed in dreams
• Honor the wishes of the soul for healing and integration
• Recognize and clarify future events revealed in dreams
• Connect with ancestors on your bloodlines, the land where you live, and your spiritual lineage
• Make giving thanks an everyday prayer in the animate world around you

Inanna
daughter of the Moon
silken bud unfolding
riding out on your wild blue bull
through the Gate of Wonder.
— Inanna and Elih, c2300 BCE

The poem in honor of the Sumerian goddess Inanna was written by the first named author in history, a priestess of the moon god at Ur. What was happening with the cult of the bull — and the cow — that was central to the ritual life and imagination of the ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean worlds?

It’s a mystery that must be experienced rather than explained.

It is embodied in another text from the same culture, the oldest recorded dream in history. In “The Dream of Dumuzi,” Inanna is hungry for her lover and he enters her like a wild bull. This poem takes us where great writers do not fear to go: into the inner chambers of the heart, into the demon-haunted mind, into the mysteries of death and rebirth. Thanks to its survival, we can say without hesitation that one of the first uses of writing was to record dreams, and that one of the great things that emerged from dreaming with the Goddess, at least 5,000 years ago, was literature.

Come to class ready to take a tour of ancient cultures where the bull was evoked and often subjected to ritual sacrifice — and where the cow was associated with beauty as well as mothering and nurturing...

During this module, you’ll:

• Journey with shamanic drumming to an ancient Sumerian temple
• Travel to Egypt and Çatalhöyük in Anatolia, where a matriarchal culture flourished In Neolithic times — and perhaps as far west as Ireland, as far east as India, and as far north as Scandinavia
• Enter the life story of a poet-priestess of ancient Sumer and be thrilled by her creations
• Learn the practices of the ancient Mesopotamian Dream Questioner
• Study ancient Egyptian rituals of the bull, including dream incubation in the mausoleum of the Apis bulls and the “opening of the mouth” of the dead
• Seek blessing and nurturing in the precinct of the cow goddess Hathor and her sisters in other cultures

The ancient Egyptians understood that in dreams, our eyes are opened. Their word for dream, rswt, also means “awakening” and was written with a symbol representing an open eye.

By recalling and working with dreams, we develop the art of memory — tapping into knowledge that belonged to us before we entered this life journey.

The Egyptians developed an advanced practice of conscious dream travel. Trained dreamers operated as seers, remote viewers, and telepaths, advising on state and military strategy and providing a mental communications network between far-flung temples and administrative centers.

They also practiced shapeshifting, crossing time and space in the dream-bodies of birds and animals.

In this module, you’ll visit the dream school of Anubis, patron of astral travel and the gatekeeper between the realms of the living and the dead, using shamanic drumming to power your direct experience of what is possible.

In this module, you’ll explore:

• Dream telepathy and dream communication with the departed
• The nature and operations of the different subtle bodies
• How, through conscious dream travel, ancient Egypt’s “frequent flyers” explored the roads of the afterlife and the multidimensional universe
• The meaning of true initiation and transformation that takes place in a deeper reality, accessible through the dream journey beyond the body
• The power of heka, or magic words
• Why, in the age of Cleopatra, the Egyptian priests who specialized in dreaming were called the Learned Ones of the Magic Library

When they were in need of healing, the peoples of the Greco-Roman world often turned to Asklepios (Aesculapius to the Romans), “the kindest of gods to humans,” and his divine family...

Asklepios popularized dream incubation, which flourished for more than a thousand years, from as far east as modern Ankara to as far west as the British Isles.

The practice of Asklepian healing begins as a quest. You go on a pilgrimage, when you have failed to find other remedies for what ails you. You travel to a holistic center. You are cleansed and purified. You pray. You are shown images of the gods, and evidence of “what happened before.” You see hundreds, maybe thousands of votive offerings and inscriptions depicting healings that have taken place. This stirs up the psyche, fires the imagination, and primes you for a big experience in the sacred night.

The temple helpers will ask you about your dreams as they look for a dream of invitation, noting when the caliber of your dreams indicates that you’re ready for the big experience.

Contact with animals and animal spirits is a vital part of this tradition. The snake is a primary healing ally of Asklepios. There were snake pits in the Asklepian sanctuaries, and seekers of big dreams often had to brave up to serpents (nonvenomous, but still scary for many) slithering over them in the night. In the testimonies, healing was often delivered by the experience of a snake licking or biting or coiling around an afflicted part of the body.

In this module, you’ll learn how to:

• Find and bring the dream of invitation to open your doors to the inner temple
• Step out of your old mindsets and self-limiting beliefs
• Learn from the healing that pilgrims before you received within this sacred space
• Address the sacred guide and healer — and seek healing for others in this temple
• Receive the gifts of the animal doctors
• Practice dream incubation whenever you need guidance of healing from a deeper source
• Create a shamanic journey to an inner version of the Temple of Dream Healing — and go through several phases of spiritual cleansing, dream incubation, and instruction before you’re admitted to the inner sanctuary... where a direct encounter with the sacred guide and healer may become available to you

I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
— W. B. Yeats, “The Song of Wandering Aengus”

In Ireland, they call it going Away. The world seems cold or cruel or indifferent, so a vital part of you leaves the body — or is lured away — and goes to live in another world, in a realm of Faeries or in a garden behind the moon...

People in the ordinary world may not notice anything is gone from you, but you’re missing something that you need to be whole, to live fully and to create.

In this module, you’ll sample some of the ever-living Celtic wonder tales that speak of soul and dreaming and lands of the heart’s desire. You’ll journey to places of healing, like the sacred spring of Sequana, the Fast-Flowing One, at the source of the River Seine.

You’ll follow the deer tracks of Elen, goddess of the Ways. Robert will share a story from The Mabinogion about how your dreams may give you a map to manifest the wishes of your soul — and carry you to your beloved.

The roads of enchantment in this module will include:

• Dreaming with Yeats and Wandering Aengus
• Journeying to the sacred spring of the Goddess for healing and revelation
• Entering the sacred grove and deepening our connection with our council of Tree People
• Growing the art of “goodly speech,” valued by the Celts above all other gifts
• Laying paths for parts of your vital soul that went Away to come home