When shamans go dreaming, they are often accompanied by spirit allies who appear in animal form. Developing a strong working connection with power animals will give essential guidance and protection. This is one of the quickest ways to raise your vitality and discern the natural path of your energy. You may already be working with animal guardians. You will discover new things and may be able to expand your shamanic menagerie. You may find it includes mythic beasts and beloved pets that have shared your life.

You’ll discover how to:

• Deepen and grow your connection with spiritual allies who will appear as animals and birds
• Learn from the natural habits of your animal allies and their role in folklore
• Call on power animals for healing, psychic protection and help in journeying
• Feed and honor your animal spirits in everyday life

We’ll briefly review what different human cultures have looked for in dreams — from interaction with the gods to “day residue” in the dyspeptic shallows of the personal subconscious — and how dreams have been shared.

We’ll visit the booth of a Minoan dream interpreter whose shingle was a painting of a bull, and listen in as Jung encourages a patient to work a dream towards healing and resolution through active imagination.

You’ll discover nine keys to open the meaning of dreams:

• Trust your feelings
• First associations
• Running a reality check
• Dream reentry
• Dialogue with dream characters
• Tracking your dream self
• Symbol exploration
• Playing the “What part of me?” game
• Playing the “Space alien” game

The most important book about soul and dreaming that you will ever read is your own journal. Kept over many years, you’ll find it is a treasure chest. In this module, you’ll receive expert guidance on the art of creative journal keeping.

You’ll discover:

• How to use your journal to keep dates with your Self and track your many aspects
• How to produce your personal Encyclopedia of Symbols
• How to develop a personal database that will provide first-hand evidence of precognition, telepathy, clairvoyance and the existence of parallel universes
• How journal keeping and “journaling from journals” (favored by Thoreau and other writers) will help you grow your gifts as a writer and artist
• How to do bibliomancy and play other games with your journals

Tinker Bell told Peter Pan, “Look for me in the place between sleep and awake. There you will always find me.” It’s no fairy story. In the history of science, as in many other fields, the liminal state of hypnagogia has been the solution state in which creative breakthroughs are made and inner guides are easily accessible.

This is an ideal launch pad for lucid dreaming and astral travel. It is recognized in dream yoga, as in the mystery traditions, that by learning to maintain a state of relaxed attention on the cusp of sleep, we develop heightened awareness and the ability to operate in more than one reality simultaneously.

You’ll discover:

• How to maintain awareness on the cusp of sleep and have more fun in the “twilight zone”
• How to embark on lucid dream adventures from the Twilight of the Dreamer, between sleep and awake
• How to screen your energy field, set good psychic boundaries and maintain flight security during your journeys beyond the physical realm
• How to communicate with inner guides and practice discernment in this liminal state

The dreams you remember are your best portals for travel into the deeper reality, and your royal road to lucid dreaming. A dream is a journey; it is also a place. You went somewhere in your dream, near or far from the fields you know in your regular life. Because you have been to that place, you can find your way there again.

You’ll discover how to:

• Use a dream or personal image as the portal for a shamanic journey
• Re-enter a dream to confront and resolve a nightmare terror, solve a mystery and claim a power
• Dialogue with a dream character
• Construct personal doorways to places of healing, discovery and initiation in the multiverse

As we embark on adventures in other worlds, we need to be careful to stay grounded in this world, to establish and maintain good psychic boundaries and to discern different entities and energies we may encounter. This week, we’ll consult with Dion Fortune, a true priestess of the Western way, on how to prevent psychic intrusion and stay away from bad neighborhoods.

You’ll discover:

• How to maintain flight security during soul journeys
• A quick course in Paleo Psych 101, learning the nature and operations of the subtle energy bodies in life and after death
• A simple and powerful exercise for raising energy and setting good energy boundaries
• Practical methods for spiritual cleansing and releasing unwanted energy attachments
• A low-maintenance everyday plan for psychic wellbeing
• How to recognize what you are inviting into your space, and how to call on higher guidance and protection

You are a natural psychic of a high order in your dreams, when you let down your left-brain inhibitions and just do it. You routinely practice precognition, clairvoyance, telepathy. Such powers are sometimes described as examples of ESP. Today scientists are reviving a better term invented by the great Victorian scientist of the unseen, Frederick Myers: supernormal. Scientists like Dean Radin maintain that quantum entanglement means that supernormal phenomena are inevitable.

Every night, your dream self goes ahead of your waking self, scouting out challenges and opportunities that lie on the roads ahead. This is part of our human survival kit. Once you wake up to the fact that you dream events before they happen in regular life, you can graduate to the good stuff, which is changing your possible future for the better and becoming co-creator of your reality.

You’ll discover:

• How to discern when your dreams are showing you future events
• How to develop personal markers so you don’t miss dream messages about the future
• Ways to take action to avoid unwanted future events you have dreamed and manifest happy outcomes
• Ways to embark on conscious journeys to scout out the possible future
• How to dream your way consciously to your dream partner, your dream home, your dream job

A kairomancer is someone who is ready to recognize the special moments when synchronicity is at work — and to seize on the revelation or opportunity that is now available. To be a kairomancer, you must be open to new experience, willing to set aside plans, grateful for secret handshakes and surprises, and ready to honor your special moments of revelation by taking appropriate action.

This week, we’ll learn from an American master of navigating by synchronicity — Mark Twain, no less — who will also remind us never to leave home (or return to it) without our sense of humor. And we’ll play a wildly entertaining and instructive digital version of Robert’s celebrated Coincidence Card Game that will give you instant guidance on a life issue.

You’ll discover:

• The essential rules of living by synchronicity
• How to practice bibliomancy and other everyday forms of divination and develop a working list of personal omens
• How to become a “strange attractor” for happy encounters by checking your attitude and following the laws of spiritual gravitation
• How any setback can offer an opportunity
• How to listen to the Speaking Land
• How to recognize what rhymes in a day, or a life

We need to be more literal about dreams and more symbolist about everyday life. Walk your environment with the right kind of awareness, and you’ll notice that the world is constantly giving you messages in the form of signs and symbols. You can play fun games any day by receiving these messages — the vanity plate on that car, that overheard snatch of conversation from a stranger, that chance encounter — as tarot cards being dealt to you by the world. A tarot deck has 78 cards; in Sidewalk Tarot, the number is unlimited.

You’ll discover:

• How to put your question to the world and receive guidance on a life theme
• How to let the world put its questions to you, by scheduling unscheduled time to pay attention as you walk in “the forest of living symbols that are looking at you”
• How to listen for your daily kledon, a favorite oracle of the ancient Greeks that works well on any day
• How meaningful coincidence multiplies when you are in motion, traveling outside your familiar rounds or going through a major life transition

The body believes in images. Abundant evidence from medical science and sports psychology demonstrates that the body responds to an image as it might do to a physical event, pump out self-generated pharmaceuticals according to where we place our attention. Any image that belongs to you can be a source of power and healing, even the scary stuff you would rather keep in a locked box. The trick is to learn how to develop your personal imagery so it can help you to get well and stay well. Your body is waiting for you to get good at this.

You’ll discover:

• How to harness the diagnostic power of dreams
• Ways to stock your mental shelves with healing imagery from dreams and meditation
• How to use active imagination and dream reentry to transform scary dreams and disturbing images
• How to seek direct healing from a sacred guide and healer
• Ways to grow a personal House of Healing in your imagination where you can return for sanctuary, healing and regeneration

You know this in your heart and in your gut: soul loss — the loss of vital energy and identity as the result of pain or trauma or wrenching life choices — is at the root of many of our existential complaints. We lose vital soul energy through pain and trauma and heartbreak, through wrenching life choices, and by giving up on our big dreams and ceasing to live the soul’s purpose.

When we lose the energy of soul, the magic goes out of life. We are often fatigued for no apparent reason, we can’t experience joy or love, and there is a gaping hole in us that we try to fill with addictive behaviors. Soul loss can put us in the procession of the walking dead, playing the roles that other people cast us for, no longer knowing who we are or why we are in this world.

As a time traveler, you can journey to a younger self in her own Now time. As a voice in her mind, you can provide the encouragement and counsel she may need at a time of unbearable pain or challenge. You can be the friend and protector she lacked when her need was great. From this can flow tremendous healing for both of you, for you in your present time and for her in her own time.

In the House of Healing, you’ll discover how to:

• Use dreams and life memories as clues to where vital energy and identity that have gone missing can be found
• Travel to a place where you can reclaim soul energy and reconnect with younger selves, including the “child of wonder” who may have left your life because the world seemed too cruel
• Journey across time to younger selves who need help and support in their own Now time
• Entertain your spirits — your child self, your teen self, your Goddess self, your animal spirits — in your body and your life

We can heal the body and our experience of the world by telling better stories about them. We can do this for others as well as ourselves. We can grow a bigger and better story — a healing image, a vision of life possibility, even a map to the next world — for someone who is bereft of images or stuck in an old, confining story.

You’ll discover:

• How to grow a dream for someone in need of a dream
• How to develop positive imagery for healing and empowerment you can offer to others
• How to offer your visions in a way that avoids manipulation by inviting the intended beneficiary to receive only what they choose to take from you
• How to become a “word doctor” who can help people to heal by telling better stories

The Inuit says that the spirits like “fresh words.” They want to be entertained. They are easily bored with humans who go on repeating old formulas and old ways. When we bring something fresh and new into the world, we entertain the spirits and delight our own creative genius, and our lives are infused with natural magic, confirmed by the play of synchronicity. To create is to bring something new into the world. Dreams and twilight states of consciousness have inspired great scientists, inventors, musicians, writers and liberators of human possibility throughout history.

You’ll discover:

• How dreaming has been the secret engine of creation in every field of human endeavor — from science to rock music — over the centuries
• How to build your own creative studio in the Imaginal Realm
• How to turn dreams into poems and stories, art and scripts and creative life projects
• How to entertain your creative genius and bring fresh creation into your world

You have access to a Magic Library whose doors are never closed to you, through you may be required to show some ID and put down your baggage. How it looks and what it contains are conditioned by your interests and your passions. It could look like an art gallery, or a fashion museum, or a music school.

Within this space, you can have access to inspiration and information in any area that attracts you. There are guides available. They may include master teachers in any field. I meet a lot of dead writers here who are very much alive to me. Whether they are the spirits of those authors, or personality essences, or aspects of myself is less interesting to me than the creative discoveries they share with me and the surge of creative energy and direction I receive from these encounters.

In your version of the Magic Library, you may be able to find the Big Story you need for your life right now.

In this adventure you’ll:

• Enter a creative space you can access any time
• Find your personal entrance to the Akashic Records or quantum information field
• Communicate with master teachers in any field that is calling you
• Find the Big Story you need to recognize and embody in your life right now

When we take on a creative project — and its element of risk — and step out of whatever box we have been in, we draw supporting powers, especially the power that the ancients called the genius or the daimon. Most people understand this intuitively, even though we may fumble for an agreed language to describe it.

The Romans never described a person as a genius. They might say, “Apollonius has a genius” — i.e., a special relationship with a tutelary spirit. The word genius is related to gignere, which means to engender or “beget.” It implies reproductive energy, the power of inseminating new life.

To choose and act creatively, we must be able to put our commonplace selves, with their reliance on structures and schedules, on one side, and make room for the source energy of the begetter.

In the School of Soul, we’ll learn essential things about co-creation:

• When we are passionately engaged in a creative venture, we draw support from other minds and other beings, seen and unseen
• We draw greater support the greater the challenges involved in our venture — great spirits love great challenges
• Whether we are aware of it or not, all our life choices are witnessed by that creative spirit that Yeats called the daimon and the Romans called the genius
• The genius lends or withholds its immense energy from our lives according to whether we choose the big agenda or the little one. The daimon is bored by our everyday vacillations and compromises

Your present life is intimately related to dramas and relationships that are playing out in other times — past, future and parallel. This is your invitation to visit a very special location in the multiverse to learn more about your connection with other personalities in your multidimensional family.

In the process, you will learn about reality creation in the Imaginal Realm, the vast plane of reality where human imagination works with higher intelligence to build enduring structures for healing, learning and initiation. The House of Time has been developed through the active imagination of dream explorers and archaeologists who have traveled here. It stands on ancient foundations.

In this high adventure, you’ll be invited to:

• Explore your connection with the lives and dramas of personalities living in other times
• Learn how “past life” and “other life” dramas may be influencing your present life and relationships
• Journey through effective portals to enter a “past life” or “other life” situation and establish conscious communication with your counterpart in that time for mutual benefit
• Learn about reality creation in the Imaginal Realm

Of all the guides and mentors that may become available to us in a lifetime, the most important is a friend of the soul that will never lie to us and will never judge us. It’s the Higher Self, which the Sufis call, beautifully, the soul of the soul. Ultimately we can only make peace between the many aspects of ourselves by opening a direct and conscious connection with the Self on a higher level — the Self that is no stranger.

The Yoruba have a fascinating teaching about this. They say that we have a “double in heaven” who watches us from a higher level while we operate down below as “the double in the marketplace.” From life to life, they say, we switch roles with that other self.

In her Oversoul Seven trilogy, Jane Roberts gave us an equally fascinating picture of our relations with an Oversoul that is responsible for supervising and connecting a family of personalities living in different times, past and future.

This week, we’ll explore these models, and journey to:

• Meet the Soul of your Soul on the highest level accessible to you now
• Practice deep soul remembering, reclaiming the knowledge of who you were before you came into your present body
• Remember your sacred contract
• Attain a witness perspective from which you can bring clarity to current life choices
• Embody knowledge and energy from your Higher Self in your present life — and keep it with you!

You are in the afterlife right now. You died to another world in order to come here. This will become very clear to you in the School of Soul. You’ll find that the space you enter after death and the space you are in before birth are closely related. You come from the dream world into the physical world at the moment of birth. But few of us are born with clear memories of where we were before, and those of us who remember will have to withstand not only the trauma of the birth canal but the amnesiac influences of most of those around us.

This week, you’ll:

• Meet members of your soul family who have been with you in other lives
• Remember your soul assignments in this life
• Harvest guidance on current relationships, life challenges and health issues
• Identify soul companions who have come across space and time to be with you in your current life
• Meet your council of elders
• Learn how souls select a new life experience on Earth, or in another reality

Part of the secret logic of our lives may be that our paths constantly interweave with those of numberless parallel selves, sometimes converging or even merging, sometimes diverging ever farther. The gifts and failings of these alternate selves — with all the baggage of their separate lives — may influence us when our paths converge, in ways that we generally fail to recognize.

We can travel into the life experiences of personalities in other time periods with whom we are connected in our multidimensional family of selves. We do this spontaneously in our night dreams. When we learn to do it consciously, our view of life and possibility expands tremendously.

In physics, the Many Worlds hypothesis advances the idea that we are living right now in one of countless parallel worlds, and that they interact with each other. Physicist Brian Greene speculates that we all have “endless doppelgangers” leading parallel lives in parallel universes. When you develop the skills of Active Dreaming, you can explore this experientially — and learn how to bring gifts and lessons from a parallel world into this one.

In this wildly exciting class, you’ll discover how to:

• Recognize that serial dreams may be glimpses of continuous lives you are living in other realities
• Examine experiences of déjà vu as clues that you may have experienced something in a parallel life that is now converging with this one
• Journey into a parallel life to dismiss old regrets and claim gifts and knowledge from your selves who made different choices
• Effect a quantum shift in your present life

The ancestors are calling, calling. We are talking about ancestors in three senses: the ancestors of your bloodlines, and of the lands where you live or travel, and of your soul family across time and place.

You’ll discover how to:

• Track your spiritual DNA to the ancestors you need to know about
• Access secrets of past times, of which the waking mind may know nothing or very little, following clues from dreams
• Make shamanic journeys to the ancestors for cultural soul recovery, reclaiming authentic traditions and spiritual practices
• Conduct research assignments set by dreams
• Construct effective rituals to release ancestral karma and the earthbound dead

You are called into the woods to a grove where many different trees stand in a circle as if in council. You know some but not all. One is calling you now. You enter the tree, and the dream of the heartwood. You ask for your tree name, and the wisdom this tree has for you. This is how your expedition into Celtic realms begins.

This week, you’ll:

• Learn the ways of the tree seer
• Practice dream incubation and healing in the precinct of Sequana, the “fast-flowing” goddess of the River Seine
• Follow in the deer tracks of Elen of the Ways, the antlered goddess of the ancient British Isles
• Reenter the world of the Celts at ancestral sites that are calling you, whether in Ireland or Akara, Bohemia or Brittany (the Celts got around!)
• Write your own shapeshifting poem in the style of Amergin
• Connect with elemental powers and the Celtic blessing way

The Faculty of Dream Archaeology advises that the dreams and journeys, the memories and desires of the group, along with the play of shelf elves and synchronicity, will shape the content of the final class offered in this cycle. We may find ourselves traveling to the future or the past, to specific sites or through mythic portals. We’ll remember, as Seth advised, that we “stand at the center of all times” and that, as Black Elk counseled, the center of the universe is wherever we are.

I have a dream: that we will again become a society of dreamers. In a dreaming culture, dreams are valued and celebrated. The first business of the day, for most people, is to share dreams — dreams from the night, and dreams of life — and seek to harvest their guidance. The community joins in manifesting the energy and insight of dreams in waking life. In a dreaming culture, nobody says, “It’s only a dream” or “In your dreams, mister.” It is understood that dreams are both wishes (“I have a dream”) and experiences of the soul.

At the end of the deep adventures you have shared over seven months, it is Robert’s hope that you will feel inspired and empowered to go among others as a dream ambassador, sharing the gifts of what you’ve learned and helping to midwife the rebirth of a dreaming society. If dreams were honored throughout our society, our world would be different, and magical.

Here’s how: