The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence, and Imagination (7 page)

In the dream mirror, we not only see how we are driving, but when to take a different road. Our dream mirror offers us the great gift of
objectivity
. Its pictures do not lie. They carry us beyond the illusions and idées fixes of the little everyday mind. This is especially true of the dreams we do not ask for or do not want.

Mirror dreams not only compensate for lopsided attitudes and offer course correction; they serve the role of conscience. Dostoyevsky's
Crime and Punishment
is a marvelous case study in the dreams of conscience. While the demented student Raskolnikov is growing fantastic daydreams as he plots a terrible crime, his true dreams hold up the mirror that shows him the evil of his designs.

4. DREAMS SHOW US WHAT WE NEED
TO DO TO STAY WELL

Dreaming is medicine. This is true in ways that are easily evidenced by medical data. For example, clinical studies strongly suggest that people suffering from symptoms of depression start to recover when dream function increases — as monitored by brain waves and/or the length of the phases of rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep — and that they experience a decisive shift for the better when they increase their dream recall and their sharing of dreams. One of the physicians who works closely with me, Dr. Robert Weissberg, sometimes says to depressive patients, “I will be happy to prescribe medication for you, if it is needed, but I also want you to bring a dream or two to our next meeting.” He has noticed that the patients who are most successful in remembering dreams are often the ones who experience the most rapid improvement in their condition.

Let's be clear about what dreams mean for our health.

We have a personal physician who can give us an
impeccable
diagnosis of our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual condition and can tell us what we need to stay well. If we are ailing, the same doctor will give us the right prescription — and in addition to this, can offer us powerful images our body can use in the direction of self-healing. This personal physician is also a healer, therapist, and friend who works tirelessly to support our wellbeing. This doctor, amazingly, is also a movie producer who stages brilliant dramatic productions that show us how to follow the natural path of our energy.

The dream doctor is willing to make house calls at any hour and doesn't charge a cent.

Why would we ever refuse the service and friendship of a physician like this?

Dreams Diagnose Possible Problems
Before Physical Symptoms Are Detected

Our bodies know what is going on inside them, and they speak to us about this in dreams, which often diagnose developing illness before physical symptoms are detected. By working with these diagnostic dreams, we can often deal with a problem before it has reached a critical phase — and sometimes avoid painful and costly medical interventions.

Some of our dreamscapes are living dioramas of what is going on inside our bodies. Conflicts taking place in our dreams are sometimes dramatic portrayals of how our immune system is trying to cope — or failing to cope — with disease. Dreams can take us deep into the cellular structures of the body. For thousands of years, gifted physicians have recognized that such “bodytalk” dreams can provide accurate diagnosis of our ailments, often long before physical symptoms can be observed.

Reading somatic messages in this way was central to traditional Chinese medicine, as well as to medical practice in ancient Greece and in many other cultures. In the Victorian era, Western doctors continued to look for diagnostic information in their patients' dreams.

In her late thirties, Ellen dreamed that a threatening intruder walked into her dream house and pointed a gun at her breast. She was sensitive to dream imagery and knew intuitively that the dream was warning her that she might have developed breast cancer. She immediately sought medical help. Ellen's cancer was discovered in its earliest stages, thanks to the fact that she remembered her dream and acted on its warning, and her problem was solved with a simple lumpectomy.

Sensing that her dreams were telling her about a serious health problem, Carol made repeated visits to a physician who was initially baffled by her punch list of vague and elusive symptoms. The doctor began to question whether there was really a physical problem. Then Carol dreamed a very simple dream — a large wolf appeared and spoke to her: “I am Lupus Wolf.” Carol called the next morning, snagged an appointment, and told her physician the dream. Now he went to work and soon confirmed that her dream diagnosis was exactly correct; she had lupus.

Dreams Show Us the Natural Path of Our Energy

The dream of Lupus Wolf gave Carol more than diagnostic information her physician could work with to help her get well. Lupus Wolf became a guide and partner in her dreams, helping her to become an active participant in her own healing. He showed her the foods she needed to eat, warned her away from a medicine that would cause anxiety, and led her in further dreams to a healing garden, a place she found she could revisit to relax and imagine herself well.

Sarah dreamed she was at her family place with her therapist, a Tibetan Buddhist, and a team of monks. She wanted to cook up a meat dish and needed more beef. Her therapist and the monks refused to supply this. A huge wildcat — a cross between a tiger and a panther — irrupted into the scene and ripped the back off a silly little spaniel. In discussion, Sarah realized that the Big Cat was attacking the part of her that had a tendency to behave like a “pet” — and she needed to be fed and nourished in ways that her current practice and family situation did not provide. She resolved to “get to the meat” by feeding her Big Cat at lunch, and she would then see what happened if she called on that energy in family situations.

Whatever our condition, the state and behavior of animals in our dreams is often a remarkable guide to what we need to do to follow the natural path of our energy — what we need to eat, how we need to move (or lie still), and how we need to read and interact with others.

Dreams Give Us the Right Prescriptions

Dreams offer us prescriptions that may or may not require a doctor's signature, and they help us to make good choices between alternative practitioners and practices.

A woman dreamer asked her night dreams for guidance about whether she should have surgery for a herniated disk. In her dream, she saw a zippy fifties roadster, painted red and white, with a huge ultramodern sound system in the back. A mechanic told her in the dream that mechanical repairs were not necessary and would be excessively costly. Waking, she recognized that her body was the fifties roadster, and that a sound system is also a disk player. She proceeded to experiment — with very healing results — with the power of toning and vibration to help with her back problem.

Five months before she was diagnosed with a serious form of breast cancer, Nancy dreamed she was searching for three white tigers that needed help. A man in law enforcement helped her track them down. Following Nancy's intuition, they located the tigers, while the man used his formal training and strength to help the animals. Nancy met the law enforcement man from her dream in waking life five months later; he was her oncologist. The dream guided her to work with his formal skills while continuing to draw on her own intuition.

Dreams help us to tell the difference between what is medicine and what is poison for our system (and a particular Rx may be either or both) — sometimes quite literally.

When my friend Wanda Burch was a child, her father dreamed that a prescribed tonic was poison. When her mom came home with the prescription, her father grabbed the bottle and drove back to the pharmacy, demanding that it be tested. There had been a mix-up; the tonic was rat poison.

An elderly woman named Mary received an equally serious warning about a prescription. In her dream, she walked into a pharmacy and watched the druggist pouring pills into a bottle. Mary opened the cap and tumbled one of the pills into her hand. She turned it over and was horrified to see a skull and crossbones on the back.

A few days later, a physician changed Mary's usual prescription to one he thought would work better for her. When she went into the pharmacy with the prescription, she found she was inside her dream. She opened the bottle she was given, examined the contents and felt certain she was looking at the poison pill from her dream. She went back to her doctor and insisted on returning to her previous medication.

Sometimes the dream Rx is for a natural remedy. Troubled by hypertension, Cara dreamed that a charming chef appeared in her kitchen and cooked her a delicious breakfast of oatmeal with raspberries on top. Inspired by her dream, Cara went to the grocery store the next day, purchased the necessary supplies, and started eating oatmeal with raspberries for breakfast — and her blood pressure came down.

Dreams Give Us Imagery for Self-Healing

Dreams are a wonderful source of fresh, spontaneous imagery for healing — imagery the body believes because it comes from deep within ourselves. Dream images are more powerful than prefabricated visualization scripts because they are our own material, produced especially for us.

Dreams show us our conditions — physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual — in a different language from the medical profession (though they may also incorporate medical language and medical procedures).Dreams offer us the power of visioning and
naming
our symptoms in ways that help us to become well.

In Dreams, We Have Access to Direct Healing

Wanda Burch, whose book
She Who Dreams
is the best guide I know to dream healing, had a recent experience of direct healing through a dream. A doctor looked at amole on the sole of her left foot and determined that it needed to be removed. This would require minor surgery that would cause some residual pain for a few days.

Prior to the scheduled surgery, Wanda approached sleep with the strong thought, “Why do I have to go through this? Isn't there another way?”

In her dream, she inspected the mole on the sole of her foot. Then a hand appeared from nowhere — as if out of a cloud — holding a large black pencil. The hand drew a circle around the mole, and the mole popped off and disappeared.

In the morning, Wanda looked at the sole of her foot. No trace of the mole. She looked at her other foot, thinking she must be confused. No mole. She got her husband to look, and he confirmed what had happened: a dream event had delivered immediate physical healing. Her husband insisted she should keep her medical appointment, so the doctors could learn from this.

On several very critical nights in my life, I have received direct healing from a being who appears as a bear. On one of these nights, I found myself in leather armor, leading warriors who marched under the banner of a bear goddess. Exhausted by battles, I wandered away into the wilderness, ready to die. A bear cub came to me and led me to a place of healing where a great Mother Bear cracked my ribcage, cleansed my heart and lungs, and replaced them after lining the cavity with soft green moss. In the morning, I felt deeply cleansed and refreshed — and
blessed
.

Dream healing is available, any night. We just need to ask. The ancients journeyed from all over the Mediterranean littoral to the temples of dream healing associated with Asklepios and his father, Apollo, not just to seek dream diagnosis but in hopes of a direct and full experience of healing in a night vision. Such experiences may happen in spontaneous dreams and are immense blessings. We can
invite
the presence of the sacred healer into our nights and our lives. We can simply say, “I ask for healing.” Or we can say, like the ancient Greek orator Aelius Aristides, who walked very close to his god, “I ask for the health my body requires to serve the purposes of the soul.”

It's always okay to ask for help, in our animate universe — but also always a good idea to ask nicely.

5. DREAMS ARE A SECRET LABORATORY

Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958) was an extraordinary scientist, a Nobel laureate who formulated the “exclusion principle,” which explains why matter does not collapse on itself and which remains one of the foundations of contemporary physics. Fellow Nobel Prize–winning physicist Max Born thought that Pauli's genius exceeded even that of Einstein.

Pauli wrote that, across his whole life, dreams were his “secret laboratory.” When the role of dreams in the history of science and innovation is discussed, we are generally given a sampling of one-off dream images that have inspired or contributed to a major discovery. Inventor Elias Howe had a dream that showed him where to put the hole in the sewing machine needle; scientist Friedrich August von Kekulé had a hypnagogic vision that revealed the shape of the benzene ring; the archaeologist Hermann Hilprecht dreamed an ancient Assyrian priest showed him how the parts of a mysterious artifact fitted together. Such examples are interesting and even extraordinary, but they do not take us where we need to go, which is into that “secret laboratory” where Pauli and other great innovative minds have always worked. The engagement of our greatest scientists with the realm of dream and imagination can be presented as a set of particulars, but it is also a wave function and a constant.

If we want to understand how deep this engagement can go, Pauli's correspondence with Jung is a very good place to start. Between 1932 and 1958, the brilliant physicist and the no-less-brilliant psychologist traded questing and detailed letters in which they helped each other to explore the interweavings of mind and matter at every level of the multiverse. Jung sent Pauli early drafts of his paper on synchronicity, and he rewrote it (not as radically as Pauli would have liked) under the physicist's razor-edged critiques. Pauli sent Jung dream upon dream over all those years, and papers (like his “Background Physics”) in which he discussed how his dreams guided his inquiries into everything. Pauli, who was twenty-five years younger than Jung, first approached the Swiss psychologist for counsel during a personal crisis when he was thirty. In the first two years of their acquaintance, he shared thirteen hundred dream reports with Jung and his assistant. This gives us an idea of the sheer volume of Pauli's remembered dreaming. Tracking the evolution of Pauli's dream symbols and dream characters, Jung developed his own theories of how dreaming opens a path to self-realization (or “individuation”).