It’s not unusual for me to receive 10-20 dream reports a day in which the dreamers have encountered me. These reports come from complete strangers and from intimate friends, from people engaged in live workshops where we are practicing conscious group dreaming to members of my online courses where the interaction takes place at a distance.

I will often respond to these reports by encouraging the dreamer to ask what part of himself or herself Dream Robert may represent – for example, their inner teacher or writer or dreamer, or perhaps simply an older white-haired self.

Yet I have known since chldhood, through direct experience, that dreams are transpersonal as well as personal, and that dreaming is a social as well as an individual activity. Dreaming, we get around and meet other people. Dreaming is traveling; we make visits and we receive visitations.

I am very conscious, from my recollection of the nightime activities of my dream self, that I do even more teaching in the dream state than in ordinary reality. Take last night. In the midst of leading a depth two-day workshop in Tallinn (Estonia) I surfaced from successive cycles of sleep with vivid memories of lecturing to a group on three topics:

Getting the Message Out

I explain to a group what it takes me to get messages out from a location deep in the forest, at a remote station at the head of a river where boats must be carried by portage along the bank to get round the waterfalls, like in the old days. There is a terrific sense of adventure, that seizes the whole group, and I wake excited and satisfield.

Explianing how we can be reborn through the Orders

I respond to a question on reincarnation by quoting some of my inner dialogs with William Butler Yeats, as described in my books Dreamgates and The Dreamer’s Book of the Dead. I explain that I share Yeats’ opionion that initiates may be reborn within the Orders – such as the Mystery schools and shamanic lineages. This has very direct resonance for some people within the group, for example, a woman who belongs to a female lineage whose “wise women” have continued to practice – often in remopte villages or in hidden cabins in the forest – from generation to generation, through all the wars and occupations of the country, and a man who is connected to a medieval knightly brotherhood that fought for honor.

Getting the greatest “strength for work”

I take as my text an Estonian greeting that means, “Strength for work.” I suggest that we get the greatest energy for our creative projects when we give ourselves to the work that calls us with all of our passion and persistence, disregarding the consequences, doing the work for its own sake.

Photo by Savannah Caitlin, who has taken my training for teachers of Active Dreaming