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Robert Moss
WAY OF THE DREAMER
mossdreams.com

Becoming a Frequent Flier
By Robert Moss

Your departure lounge for dream travel is open to you anytime you are ready for adventure. Do you want to go on a dream vacation or engage in a steamy romance with an astral lover? Would you like to communicate with a spiritual guide or experiment with your ability to make intentional journeys beyond the body? Or scout ahead through time to prepare for the job interview next week? Or get your own close-up view of the surface of Mars? This is the right place to begin.

You departure lounge is the twilight zone, the half-dream state on the cusp between waking and sleep, and between sleep and waking. Frazzled by the pressures of everyday life, many of us tear through this zone without pausing to notice what is there.

The easiest way to become a frequent flier is to spend more time in the twilight zone, watching the images that come and go. The twilight zone offers optimum conditions to develop your ability to make intentional journeys beyond the physical body to learn the nature and conditions of other orders of reality. As you spend more time in this luminal state, you’ll discover a notable increase in both your creativity and your psychic awareness. Going with the flow of spontaneous imagery in the twilight zone puts you into the stream of the creative process. It is no accident that highly creative people are very much at home here.

In the language of the sleep scientists, the twilight zone is the realm of hypnagogic and hypnopompic experiences. Hypnagogic literally means “leading toward sleep”; hypnopompic means “leading away from sleep.” You may enter the twilight zone before and after sleep, but you may also enter it wide awake, with no intention of sleeping. It is not the relationship to sleep that defines the twilight zone; it is its character as a border county. In this borderland, you will find the gates to other worlds opening smoothly and fluidly — if you let them and are prepared for what may follow.

From this departure lobby, the great explorers of the imaginal realm have used many gates and flight paths. This is why the twilight state has such vital significance in dream yoga, in shamanic training, in the Western Mystery traditions, in the “science if mirrors” of the medieval Persian philosophers, and in other schools of active spirituality.

According to Tantric teachings, it is by learning to prolong this “intermediate state” and to operate with full awareness within it that you achieve dream mastery and, beyond this, the highest level of consciousness attainable for an embodied human. In the Greco-Roman world, the twilight zone was a place of rendezvous with divine messengers and even the gods themselves.

First and last, experiment in the twilight zone is wonderful fun. Think of this as your cosmic playground. If you are ready to play, here’s how you might start:

 Beginner’s mind, please. You are simply going to have fun and open yourself to an inexhaustible source of creativity that is available to you any day of your life. If there is any area in your life where you feel blocked, this exercise may help you to get round those blocks by getting into flow.

 1.      Lie down or sit comfortably in a quiet, protected space. Follow the flow of your breathing until you are quite relaxed.

2.      Cover your eyes, shutting out all external light.

3.      Notice how long (if at all) your inner screen remains dark.

4.      Allow shapes, patterns, colors, to rise and fall spontaneously. Maybe you’ll get the sense of forms shaping in the grainy dark, curving like the wall of a cave, or the eye sockets. Of a tunnel or trapdoor emerging within the dark. Of phosphene patterns flashing off and on. Luminous dust, points of light, spiral whorls, waves, and streamers of color. Of more complex and stable patterns like tree bark or webbing or woven cloth or embroidery. Or waves of color, dancing spots. Perhaps a rush of cartoon images, childlike drawings, photos.

5.      Notice changes in your perception of light. What do you suppose is the source of the light that brings images into resolution and bathes the scenes that emerge?

6.      Notice changes in your perception of depth and texture. After a time  you will probably be looking into scenes that appear to have autonomous life.  You can step into one of these scenes and explore it from within or interact with its characters. You may allow your consciousness to merge with one of the players or stand apart.

7.      You will come to a point where you either pull back into physical focus or go further in, along the path of a developing dream. As you go deeper into the dream — or into dreams within dreams — you may lose the awareness that you are dreaming. But there is a good possibility that, staring from this entry point, you will be able to embark on a conscious dream journey and bring back a full travel report.

 © Robert Moss. Adapted from Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and Life Beyond Death (New World Library, 2010)