Our doctors are dreamers. No one in
Dreamland would consider diagnosing or prescribing without consulting dreams.
In our medical schools, we learn, as Galen already knew,that the dreaming mind
can travel throughout the body and report on its condition in exact detail. A
change in a single cell can be detected in a dream many years before the condition
has spread far enough to produce detectable physical symptoms.
Many of our
physicians have a sign on their wall that reads “MY PATIENT IS MY COLLEAGUE”. Some have expanded this
into a personal charter. One of the ways doctors and patients learn from each
other is by swapping dreams.
But dream
diagnosis begins long before a visit to a doctor’s office, in regular
dream-sharing and – where the dreamer feels that specialist knowledge may be
required – in wellness or pre-need clinics where the dream helpers are often
nurses.
Imagery
harvesting is central in the treatment of illness. Our approach is that any dream
image can offer a path to healing, if it is worked correctly. This often
requires continuing the dream, often with the aid of a helper who will
accompany the dreamer on a conscious journey back into the dreamscape. Dream
reentry is one of our core techniques for healing. A personal image provides
the doorway for a conscious journey, in which the dreamer may be accompanied by
a friend or guide, even a whole family of dream travelers. Relaxation and
focused intention are the keys to this mode of conscious dream travel. In many
cases, sonic driving (especially when generated by live shamanic drumming) is
used to deepen and accelerate the journey.
Some dreams provide portals for soul recovery, an essential mode of
healing that the ancestor shamans helped us to reclaim, to save at least some
of our kind from joining the march of the husk people, the living dead. Shamans
know that soul loss – the loss of vital energy and identity – it at the root of
illness and despair. We loss vital soul through grief and trauma and
heartbreak, through wrenching life choices that leave us divided against
ourselves, through habits of deceit and addiction that drive our bright spirits
to abandon us in disgust. Soul loss can reduce us to the condition of the
walking dead, passionless and dreary, forever trying to fit in with other
people's needs and expectations, lost to any sense of purpose.
Dreams show us
where our missing parts may have gone, and invite us to reach in and bring them
back. When we dream again and again of the “old place” (maybe a childhood home,
maybe a space we shared with a former partner), we may be learning that a part
of ourselves is stuck in that place, or went missing at the time we lived
there. By going back inside the dream of the old place, we may be able to
locate that lost aspect of our own identity and energy, and find the way to
bring it back into our hearts and our lives.
In the
hearthfire circles where we gather with our intentional families at least one
evening a week, we tend the dreams that show us where the soul has gone and
help each other with fierce compassion to bring it home.
Our flying
doctors work with the souls of the dead as well as the souls of the living. Our
best clues to where we are needed come from spontaneous night dreams in which
sleepers receive visitations from the departed and travel, often unconsciously,
into realms where the departed are at home. Such encounters can be the source
of much-needed healing, forgiveness and closure, as well as mutual guidance.
When they are released from the second body, the departed may become wise
counselors and “family angels”. Prior to that liberation, they may need help
from our healers because they are enmeshed in the sticky stuff of old cravings,
rancor and desire. “The living have the ability to assist the imaginations of
the dead,” as the poet said. Our flying doctors operate in this understanding,
on both sides of the swing-door of physical death.
The First Peoples say that the Big stories – the stories that want to be
told and to be lived – are hunting their tellers, like predators in the bush or
sharks in the water. In healing, as in education and in family life, we are
constantly engaged in helping each other to let the Big story come through.
All of us are
living a story. If we don’t know what it is, it is likely to be a little story,
a limiting one, woven from past disappointments and stitched tight by the
people who are forever telling us who we are and what we can and cannot
accomplish. If we fail to define ourselves, we let ourselves be defined by
others. When we are seized by the Big story, we step beyond limiting
definitions and beliefs. Great healing and great creativity become available
because we can now draw on the immense energy that becomes available when we
know we are serving a larger purpose.
Book excerpt from "Dreamland: Documents from a Possible Future" in Robert Moss, Active Dreaming: Journeying Beyond Self-Limitation to a Life of Wild Freedom. Published by New World Library.
Drawing: "Wolf Doctor" (c) Robert Moss
