Book Review: Sidewalk Oracles

Playing with Signs, Symbols, and Synchronicity in Everyday Life

Bk_SidewalkOraclesBy Robert Moss

You know a book is good when you see it start to influence your thoughts and patterns. About midway through Sidewalk Oracles, I noticed that my dream life had suddenly become not only more active, but often exquisitely clear in what I perceived to be the meaning of various dreams.

As I started paying more attention to my nighttime ramblings, and thinking about the threads they might represent in the whole of my life, I began noticing other clues in my daily activities, considering what relevance they had and how they could explain things that were puzzling me. I’ve even pulled out old journals to use as sources in what the author calls “kairomancy,” the art of observing and appreciating “messages in special moments when synchronicity is in play.”

Robert Moss has made his reputation in the study of dreams, but this new guidebook weaves dreams with journals, snatches of random conversations, bits of trash and a host of other small objects, and incidents that are no less effective than tea leaves or the I Ching, but rather, since they mine the user’s own history, perhaps even more so.

At the very least, Sidewalk Oracles has brightened my interest in daily neighborhood walks, shown me how to create an entertaining and useful homemade oracle, and restored my understanding of continuity in the universe. Perhaps most important in the long run, it’s also reinvigorated my neglected habit of scribing dreams, knowing they may prove useful not just in solving today’s puzzles, but possibly those of a decade or so hence. (New World Library)

 

This article is a part of the Relationships 2016 issue of Whole Life Times.