A young woman in my Chicago workshop last Saturday shared a dream of that morning in which the Moon appeared and came closer and closer until she could walk on it. She met a wise and good-humored guide who showed her what happens after death in the realm of Luna: “You get to review the life you have left and then you make decisions about your next life.”

She learned that it’s possible to know these things while living in the body, and draw courage and clarity for life by rising to the perspective of what happens beyond our present lives. “You can go to the Moon to experience this.”

We all loved this dream. It evoked, for me, what the ancients of many traditions believed about the importance of the Moon in the transits of soul both before and after death. On the way to birth, it was widely believed, the traveling soul passes through the astral realm of the Moon, where it puts on an astral body in which it descends into the body of a fetus. Some souls return to the realm of Luna after death – but not all, because some are held down by temptations,  addictions, or evil deeds that must be scrubbed away before soul can rise. When the life review is complete, a spirit takes off its astral body in this realm in order to move on to other planes of consciousness and existence.

Plutarch, the Greek biographer, philosopher and priest of Apollo, wrote about these matters with great accuracy and clarity. Plutarch explained how after death spirits that are able to rise beyond the lower astral plane may enjoy a pleasurable afterlife in the realm of the Moon. They may live on there for a great length of Earth time, or graduate to existence on a higher plane, leaving their astral bodies behind. Or they may become Moon-based daimons, closely engaged with human affairs, playing far-from-infallible guides to people in the physical world.

I have led group shamanic journeys into the astral realm of the Moon to check on current conditions. The dream shared in the Chicago workshop was an irresistible invitation to make a return visit. Fueled and focused by shamanic drumming, we journeyed to the Moon and discovered or remembered some essential things.

I met fierce guardians, and returned to a pleasant and familiar neighborhood for conversation with an old friend who has inhabited this territory for an immensely long time by human standards.

“Permanent residents in my realm are few,” observed this spirit of Luna, ” though some of us live here for millennia by human counting.  We receive dreamers and soul travelers in vast numbers.  We are a transit lounge for ex-physicals who come up from the sublunar planes. Some find solace for ages in our pleasure palaces and studios, before they are ready for the second death.”