Robert Moss answers the question:

What is the nicest thing a non-family member has ever done for you?

Well, non-family members have done very nice things for me in life, but here's the story I want to tell. It's a story of a dreamer and a writer. It's my story. It's a story of another dreamer who gave me the right dream when I needed a dream. It becomes a story of something we can do for each other, a way of gifting something which for many in our society might be unexpected, but might be exactly the release, the power, the energy that you want at a certain stage in life. 

I was busy, as usual, traveling and teaching a lot around the world, and my book deadline was two weeks away. Although I write fast, two weeks isn't very long to write a book when you actually haven't knuckled down and done any of it as a draft up to that point. A friend of mind in Europe sent me a message and said, "How's the book coming along?" I said, "Well, I don't really know what to say. The deadline's in two weeks. (This is my spiritual memoir, The Boy Who Died and Came Back. That's the published title.) It's all with me in a sense, but I haven't put anything really on paper, yet." She said, "Okay. Maybe this dream will help you, Robert. I want to give you a dream. It's a dream about you." "Sure," I said. This is not exotic for me for people to dream about me.

So she gives me a dream story, and in her dream she sees me climbing a hill, climbing a mountain, really, with a mess of papers under my arm, and she understands that this mess of typed scripts and bits and pieces sticking out in all sorts of disorder is probably the text of my new book, the book I'm working on. And I lie down under a big evergreen in front of a lodge that she calls a log house, except it's huge; it's like a log mansion. I lie down under the tree and take a nap. A magical wind whips up while I'm taking a nap under the tree and it swirls the pages of the messy manuscript into the air, and they come down on my chest in her dream and they're neatly stacked and perfect. In her dream, Robert, this Robert, awakens, looks at the neat stack of typed script pages and says with absolute confidence and serenity, "That's it. The book is done." 

This is the dream that she gives me, and there are several significant things about the gift. This dream is, for me, a real gift of the most important kind for the dreamer-writer that I am. First of all, she has seen and described with great accuracy a location that she has never seen with physical eyes. This is a mountain where I lead and show many gatherings, invitation-only gatherings twice a year in the New York Adirondacks. The house is magnificent, but it looks as if it's built of logs. It's more like a villa or a mansion than a log house, so she's described that well. The tree stands exactly where she described it, beside the path. So, I know I have confidence that she has dreamed me in a location where I will be in a couple of weeks' time, around the same time as the book deadline.

But it is the energy of the dream as transferred to me, as transplanted to me. This is the interesting thing. The magical wind from her dream is moving through me as I contemplate what I've been given. I feel it streaming through me and I say to her, "Okay, right. I'm going to take this dream and make it my own. I'm going to use this wind of creative energy to bring together the book in the two weeks I have." I spring to it and I find in my journals and folders and bits and pieces all over the place, in a mess of pages, are the pages which properly stacked, properly cut and pasted, properly edited, make the book. And two weeks later, on deadline, I deliver the book.

So, that's a story about a gift and it's also a story that is an example of the process that I teach and will be central to my course for The Shift Network, which I call Dream Transfer or Vision Transfer or Story Transfer, which is the gift that we can bring to another person where we have an image, a story, a vision that has some energy and power that they can put to work and play in their life. The gift was given to me that day and I am deeply grateful for it. And my book, The Boy Who Died and Came Back, might not have come through that time, that year, except for the wind from my friend's dream.
 

Robert Moss is the creator of Active Dreaming, an original synthesis of modern dreamwork and shamanism. Born in Australia, he survived three near-death experiences as a child, which provided him with early access to other realms. He leads popular seminars all over the world, including a 3-year training for teachers of Active Dreaming. A former lecturer in ancient history at the Australian National University, he’s a bestselling novelist, poet, journalist, and independent scholar. His more than a dozen books on dreaming, shamanism, and imagination include Conscious Dreaming... The Dreamer’s Book of the Dead... Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination, and Life Beyond Death... Dreaming the Soul Back Home... Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols, and Synchronicity in Everyday Life... Mysterious Realities: A Dream Traveler’s Tales from the Imaginal Realm... and his spiritual memoir, The Boy Who Died and Came Back. His latest book, Growing Big Dreams: Manifesting Your Heart’s Desires Through 12 Secrets of the Imagination, is a passionate and practical call to step through the gates of dreams and imagination to survive hard times, travel without leaving home, and grow the vision of a more abundant life so rich and strong that it wants to take root in the world. Click here to visit Robert’s website. Click here to read Robert's blog.