In The Secret History of Dreaming, world-renowned dream expert and author Robert Moss explores the vital role dreams, coincidence, and imagination have played throughout history. The following are excerpts from this inspiring new book that offers both a manifesto and a challenge, showing how people have interacted with their dreams and changed the course of history, and how it is possible to reclaim our past relationship to them and use that power now. We will explore the past and the present, come join us.

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Long before the first Europeans arrived, the Woodland Indians of North America taught their children that dreams are the single most important source of both practical and spiritual guidance.

We have a remarkable source for the dreaming practices of the Iroquois and their neighbors at the time of first contact, in the reports of Jesuit missionaries collected and translated in the seventy-three volumes of the Jesuit Relations. Though sometimes blinkered by religious intolerance and fear of demons or sorcery, the Jesuits were keen and intelligent observers. One of them, Father Joseph-François Lafitau, the superior of a mission near Montreal, has been viewed as the father of modern anthropology. Culling the Jesuit reports for clues to the dreaming practices of the First Peoples of North America at the time of first contact is a fertile exercise in dream archeology, and was one of my passions for several years. Since I have discussed the Iroquois dreaming traditions in previous books, I’ll confine myself to a brief summary here.

The first business of the day in an Iroquois village was dream sharing, as dreams were messages from the spirits and the deeper self and might contain guidance for the community as well as the individual. The early Iroquois believed that, in dreams, we routinely travel beyond the body and the limits of time and space, can visit the future or the past, and may enter the realms of the departed and of spiritual teachers on higher levels.

Dreaming was a survival tool. In the depths of winter, the community looked to powerful dreamers to scout out the location of game and to negotiate with the animal spirits to provide sustenance for the people. For the Iroquois, dreaming is also good medicine. The Mohawk word atetshents, which literally means “one who dreams,” is also the term for a doctor or shaman.

The early Iroquois were not fatalists about the futures perceived in dreams, for they developed rituals and practices designed to divert – or reinforce – future episodes observed in dreams. By enacting part of a dream, under controlled circumstances, they might be able to prevent the dream from manifesting fully in the future.

A dream of impending disaster or tragedy that felt close to fulfillment in physical reality might inspire radical enactment; for instance, a Mohawk warrior who dreamed that he was captured and fire-tortured to death by his enemies once arranged for his fellow villagers to bind him and burn him with red-hot knives and axes—but not to kill him.

The Iroquois recognized that the spirits sometimes send certain individuals “big dreams” with major revelations about the soul’s purpose and the environment. While big dreams may contain information of vital importance to the dreamer’s personal health or physical survival, many of these powerful dreams seem to be directed at benefiting the community as a whole. This is why, among Iroquoian traditionalists, the first business of the day for the whole community was to share and tend to important dreams.

Father Paul Ragueneau wrote in 1648, “The Hurons believe that our soul has desires other than our conscious ones, which are both natural and hidden, made known to us through dreams, which are its language. When these desires are accomplished, the soul is satisfied. But if they are not, the soul becomes angry. Not only does it fail to bring the body the health and well-being it might otherwise have done, but often it even revolts against the body, causing various diseases and even death. So most Hurons pay careful attention to their dreams! If, for instance, they have seen a javelin in a dream, they try to get it; if they have dreamed that they gave a feast, they will give one on awakening. They call this secret desire of the soul expressed by a dream, ondinnonk.”

It was a social duty to help dreamers read the language of the soul, as revealed in their dreams, and take appropriate action. If someone experienced a particularly troubling or obscure dream, a strong dreamer, an atetshents, might be consulted on its meaning. Sometimes, if a dream seemed to contain a warning of impending death or disease, the whole community would become involved in unfolding and enacting the dream.

Two centuries after the missionary reports collected in the Jesuit Relations were written, Iroquois elders told ethnologist Harriet Converse that you can lose your soul if you won’t listen to what your soul is telling you in dreams. The punishment for failing to heed repeated dream warnings is that the “free soul” may abandon the dreamer, leaving him to live out his life on earth as one of the walking dead, “bereft of his immortal soul.”

The early Iroquois regarded someone who was not in touch with his or her dreams as the victim of serious soul-loss. A specialist might be called on to bring the lost dreams – and the missing vital energy – to the sufferer.

Honoring dreams, in early Iroquois tradition, required action. Ragueneau explained, “They say that these feasts are given to oblige the soul to keep its word. They believe the soul is pleased when it sees us take action to celebrate a favorable dream, and will move faster to help us manifest it. If we fail to honor a favorable dream, they think this can prevent the dream from being fulfilled, as if the angry soul revokes its promise.

Bringing us into the present our newly elected President Barack Obama pays attention to night dreams and isn’t shy about saying so. In Dreams from My Father he recounts two powerful dreams, in one of which he achieved a reconciliation with his father a year after his father’s death.

Obama is not the first elected President of the United States who has found guidance in dreams and been willing to share them. The Founding Fathers were dreamers of the day in the sense that they grew the vision of a new kind of democracy. They included dreamers of the night like John Adams, the second president of the United States.

After Adams left the White House, his friend Dr Benjamin Rush proposed that – given the keen interest in dreams that they shared – they should send each other dream reports by letter on a regular basis. Adams agreed to match Dr Rush “dream for dream”. The remarkable epistolary dream-swapping that followed demonstrated how dreams guided John Adam’s thinking on many political issues. One of his dreams was instructive about the consequences of the French Revolution. Adams dreamed he was in front of the palace of Versailles, trying to lecture on the requirements for a civilized democracy to a vast mob of wild beasts. They howled him down and tried to tear him limb from limb.

In 1809, when Adams was no longer on speaking terms with his former friend Thomas Jefferson, Rush sent Adams a dream containing a summary of a page from a “future history of the United States”. In this future history, it was stated that Adams and Jefferson reconciled and eventually “sank into the grave nearly at the same time.” Every part of this dream was fulfilled. Adams and Jefferson died within hours of each other, an astounding synchronicity, seventeen years after this dream, on July 4, 1826.

Abraham Lincoln was another dreamer in the White House. He believed that we can have knowledge of the future through dreams and “presentiments” and that such knowledge is in no way supernatural but is rather “preternatural” – beyond what we ordinarily know, but not above nature.

It’s well-known that Abraham Lincoln dreamed of his assassination a couple of weeks before he was shot. Few of us know the fuller story of how this dream haunted Lincoln, and how he tried to get a second opinion on it. The source is Lincoln’s friend and aide Colonel Ward Hill Lamon, who was present when he told the dream.

Early in April 1865, Mary Lincoln pressed her husband to explain his prevailing sadness and “want of spirit.” Lincoln responded in a roundabout way, talking about how the Bible is full of dreams and visions. “If we believe the Bible, we must accept the fact that in the old days God and His angels came to men in their sleep and made themselves known by dreams.”

Lincoln then revealed that he had been oppressed by a terrible dream and had used the Bible to try to get a reading on whether the dream was true or false. He opened his Bible at random and found the huge dream vision of Jacob’s ladder in chapter 28 of Genesis. He tried again and again. It seemed that every time he opened his Bible, he found yet another account of a true dream or a divinely inspired vision. “I turned to other passages and seemed to encounter a dream or vision wherever I looked.”

In using the Bible as a book oracle in this way, Lincoln was doing something well understood by the “simple people” of his time, reading “signs” and dreams together.  In the dream that troubled him, Lincoln seemed to awaken into a deathly stillness. Then he heard sobbing. He roamed the White House, trying to understand what was going on. The rooms were all brightly lit but he found no one until he entered the East Room and met with a “sickening surprise”. Soldiers stood guard over a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. When Lincoln demanded, “Who is dead in the White House?” one of the soldiers replied, “The President - he was killed by an assassin!” A great howl of grief rose from mourners in the room. Waking, Lincoln was unable to sleep for the rest of the night and turned to the Bible for help.

After he shared his dream with his wife and friend, Lincoln decided that, despite his feelings and the biblical reminders about dream prophecy, his assassination dream was “only a dream” and should be forgotten. But it haunted him. A few days later, he was still struggling with it, trying to reason that (as he told Lamon) it could hold no dangers for him because it was “some other fellow” that was killed.

We can’t know whether Lincoln could have escaped his appointment with his assassin in Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865 had he done more with his dream. We do know that in at least one of those Bible stories he studied – the story of how Joseph counseled Pharaoh on his dream – clarifying the facts of a dream about the future and then taking appropriate action changed the future for the better.

If we can read “future history” in our dreams, as John Adams’ friend did, then maybe we can use that information to navigate towards the future we want. It’s good to imagine that in the Obama White House they may be open to reading the “future pages” that open in dreams.

Robert Moss is the author of The Secret History of Dreaming and The Three “Only” Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence and Imagination. Based on the book The Secret History of Dreaming © 2009 Robert Moss. Printed with permission.  www.mossdreams.com