How dreams get us through

 

During an interview I did for Wisconsin Public Radio, the callers produced a harvest of personal examples of how dreams help us to get through life.

A songwriter described how he has woken in the middle of the night with new songs playing in his mind. Sometimes they are complete, with words and music. Sometimes he has to work on them for a bit. He is in a long tradition of songwriters and composers who have plucked new pieces from their dreams. I was reminded on John Lennon's statement that "the best songs are the ones that come to you in the middle of the night and you have to get up and write them down so you can go back to sleep." 

As we discussed diagnostic dreams, the host recalled the case of a man who dreamed a rat was gnawing on his throat. Shaken by the dream, he sought medical assistance, and went from one physician to another until his throat cancer was detected and treatment began that he credited with saving his life. 

David, an IT professional, recounted a situation in which his office was preparing to install a new system. The day before, his supervisor told him to go home and get some sleep. He took a nap and saw himself in a workaday situation. He saw and recognized the code he would be applying. Suddenly the screen in his dream went fuzzy and a voice said firmly, "NO. It should be like this." The code changed. When he went into the office the next day, he checked and found that the code they were working with was wrong. He made the necessary changes, as had been done in the dream. "Good thing you caught that," his supervisor told him. At this point, David explained that he had dreamed the correction. "Never heard of anything like that," the supervisor shook his head. "Maybe I should have my analysts do a lot more sleeping." 

A woman caller spoke of a recurring dream theme whose full significance became clear to her only at the end of a long relationship. She dreamed again and again that her partner was missing. She couldn't find him or couldn't get through to him on the phone. Sometimes she felt he was hiding from her. By the time of the break-up, she had been compelled to recognize a long pattern of deception, and that in fundamental ways, her partner had been "missing" for much of the time they had been together. 

We discussed what is going on when a dream theme repeats over and over. I suggested that it's either because we need to get the message or because we need to take action on that message. We may have a notion what a recurring dream is about, but can't bring ourselves to do what is necessary - which would be very understandable if we dream our partner is missing. Like a helpful (and well-informed) friend who is looking out for us, the dream theme will come again and again until we do something about it.

At the end of the show, the host asked me to share a "big" dream of my own. How to pick one, out of so many? Yet I knew at once which dream I would tell, because earlier in the program - when asked to explain how dreaming can help to move us beyond hatred and war - I had quoted a phrase in the Mohawk Indian language. The phrase is tohsa sasa nikon'hren. It literally means, "Do not let your mind fall". 

We fall into Dark Times, in the traditional Mohawk cosmology, when we forget the higher world - the Earth-in-the-Sky - from which we come. Our ability to heal our enmities and grow as a life form depend on not-forgetting a higher source of wisdom and a higher order of reality. Dreaming is the main link between our ordinary minds and that higher spiritual plane, a way of not letting our minds fall. 

So I told a watershed dream from my ligfe in the 1980s, in which I entered a space where a circle of people who lived very close to the earth were singing and drumming. I hestitated at the entrance of their longhouse, fearing I was intruding. But they welcomed me into a place they had waiting for me. At a certain point, I lay by the firepit, at the center of the circle. 

One by one, the dream people came to me. They took red-hot coals from the fire and placed them over my ears and my eyes, and on my tongue, and over my heart. They sang in their own language, which I could now understand: "We do this to open your ears, that you may hear clearly. We do this to open your eyes, that you may see clearly. We do this to open your mouth, so you will speak only truth. And we do this -" placing the coal over the heart "-so that henceforth you will speak and act only from the heart." 

I did no analysis with that dream. Vitally energized, I jumped in my car and drove to a lake in a state park east of my home. I promised to the lake and the trees and the red-tailed hawk that came knifing through the clouds, "Henceforth I will speak and act only from the heart." 

On the darkest days, a dream like this can be a hearthfire and a homing beacon. Charging us with the power of a deeper drama, inciting us not to let our minds fall - these may be the biggest ways that dreaming helps us through.

Journal drawing" "We do this to open your heart" by Robert Moss

 

Wolf doctor

 

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 have developed.

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. Galen, the most famous physician in the Hellenic world after Hippocrates, wrote a treatise on diagnosis and said that his own life had been saved by a diagnostic dream. In the Victorian era, Western doctors continued to look for diagnostic information in their patients’ dreams.

Sometimes, the dream diagnosis can mobilize us to get the right medical help before a developing illness becomes even more serious.

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, a young woman called 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.

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.

Illustration: "Wolf Doctor" by Robert Moss

 

 

Doctors in Dreamland

 

One of a set of documents received through oneiric channels that describe a future commonwealth known colloquially as Dreamland.  Internal evidence suggests that the Dream Commonwealth was established as a "Switzerland of the mind" - and its independence and neutrality guaranteed by the world powers - after after an earth catastrophe known as the Singularity. 

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.

Text adapted from Active Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Journal drawing: "Wolf Doctor" by Robert Moss

 

 

My father came back decades after his death with a health warning

On this day in 2016, after surgery, I raised a glass of fine Oban whisky to toast and thank my father. He had died nearly nearly thirty years earlier, but he had turned up for me again, in the most vivid and helpful way, with a health advisory I acted upon.
    Early that month, in the liminal space between sleep and awake, I found myself on a high rooftop with sweeping views over a great city. In a corner of the rooftop terrace, standing near the edge, I saw my father.
    This was a tremendous surprise. Let me clarify. The reason for my surprise was not that my father was deceased. We had seen a lot of each other since his death. At his funeral, I felt his loving presence and his joy at being released from the confinement of an ailing body. Not long after, I was blessed by his direct intervention to make peace between family members.
    Soon he was able to present himself, in dreams and visions, in a youthful new body, resembling the one he had had as a dashing young cavalry officer, the equestrian champion of the Australian Army.
    Over several years, he often came to me in dreams and visions with specific guidance for the family, playing counselor and protector, As he moved through his transitions on the Other Side, he was able to share his experiences. As he remembered more about the multidimensional self and the relations between members of soul families across time and space, he was able to talk to me about our identities and connections in other life dramas. Eventually, he explained to me that he had graduated from his current life school on the Other Side and had made his choice about his next life experience. It was clear that we would no longer be able to see each other so frequently, if at all.
    Hence my surprise when I saw Dad on that high rooftop. I know he has been fully engaged in life adventures in another time. I did not expect to see him again this way in my own time..
    As soon as I saw him, I found myself standing in front of him, as if one or both of us had traveled without moving.
 . My father pointed a finger at my upper lip, at a spot on the right side. He said, "Go to a doctor and get that checked out."
    This was our entire exchange.
     I acted on Dad's counsel right away. I had had a spot just above my upper lip for a couple of years that did not look like a regular mole. It had started bothering me after I cut it while shaving and it took a long time to heal. However, I tend to avoid doctors and had not mentioned it to my general practitioner.
    Because of my father's intervention, I called a dermatologist when his office opened that morning. "That is something," he declared when I pointed to the spot above my lip. He did a biopsy. Wearing a Band-Aid mustache over the hole this opened in my face, I went ahead with my plan to make a personal odyssey to Yeats country in the west of Ireland. I got the results of the biopsy on the morning I caught a plane back from Dublin. The spot was what the skin doctor suspected: basal cell carcinoma.
    I was scheduled to lead two weeks of trainings, and went ahead with these, allowing my students to guess about why I was sporting a Band-Aid mustache. When I met the surgeon for a consultation, he told me that the procedure would leave a scar. We agreed that I could tell people that this was the result of a close encounter with a bear.
    The surgery was a complete success. It took a little while for the wound to heal and the sutures to come out and my lovely new "baby skin" to bloom but I felt absolutely fine.
    Problem solved, because my dead father found a way to get my attention.
    My father was a Scot by ancestry, and whisky was his preferred drink. The whisky in the glass looked like liquid sunlight.
   "Thanks, Dad!" I said aloud. "Here's to life!"

Drawing by RM

The dream diagnosis Dr Freud missed

The most famous of all the dreams Freud analyzed was one of his own, the Irma Dream. In The Interpretation of Dreams he gives a lengthy account of this 1895 dream and his work with it. In the dream, he inspects the mouth of a patient called Irma and discusses her condition with several doctors.

     His work with this dream, by Freud’s own account, led him to invent psychoanalysis. He wanted a “marble tablet” to be placed at the house where he analyzed the Irma Dream, with the following inscription:

IN THIS HOUSE, ON JULY 24th, 1895,
  THE SECRET OF DREAMS WAS
REVEALED TO DR. SIGM. FREUD

 The tragic irony is that in all his work on this dream, Freud may have missed a health warning that could have saved his life. Dr. José Schavelzon, a cancer surgeon who is also a psychoanalyst has concluded, after careful review of Freud’s personal medical records, that the Irma Dream contained an amazingly exact preview of precise symptoms of the oral cancer that killed Freud 28 years later.

The night before the dream, Freud received a visit from a junior colleague, “Otto”, with whom he was in the habit of sitting up playing tarok (a card game related to Tarot) and smoking cigars. They discussed the case of “Irma”, whom Freud had been treating for hysteria. Freud was irritated when Otto reported, “She’s better, but not quite well.” He spent part of his evening writing up Irma’s case history.

He then dreamed that Irma arrived in a large hall where he was receiving guests. He immediately took her aside and told her. “If you still get pains, it’s really only your fault.” She was pale and puffy, and told Freud she was suffering dreadful pains, especially in her throat: “It’s choking me”. Freud was alarmed, and began to fear he had been missing “some organic trouble” in his approach. He took Irma to a window and peered into her mouth. He had a hard time getting it open because “she showed signs of recalcitrance, like women with artificial dentures.” When he got a good look inside, he found very disturbing symptoms – “a big white patch” inside the mouth on the right side, and also “extensive whitish grey scabs.” Freud gave an oddly specific description of these scabs; they reminded him of “the turbinal bones of the nose.”

He called for a second opinion on his patient. His senior colleague Dr. M. appeared looking pale and clean-shaven, repeated Freud’s examination, and gave a positive prognosis; there was certainly an “infection” but “the toxin will be eliminated.” Another medical colleague, Leopold, was less confident; he found infection had spread to the patient’s left shoulder and that there was “a dull area low down on the left.”

The dream scene became a medical gathering. Freud’s associate Otto was there too. All four doctors – including Freud himself – had no doubt of the origin of the patient’s illness. Otto had given her an injection of “a preparation of propyl, propyis…propionic acid…trimethylamin”. Freud saw the formula for the last chemical printed in heavy type, underscoring its importance. He concluded his dream report: “Injections of that sort ought not to be made so thoughtlessly…And probably the syringe had not been clean.”

In commenting on his dream, Freud began by noting that he had been thinking and writing about his patient the night before. Yet this left the content of dream totally mysterious to him, since his actual patient did not have symptoms anything like the ones that concerned him in the dream. “Constriction of the throat played scarcely any part in her illness. I wondered why I decided upon this choice of symptoms in the dream but could not think of any explanation at the moment.”

Freud wondered whether Irma, in his dream, was actually a stand-in for another patient, who had experiences of choking. Freud’s analysis wandered off through many other associations. When he pondered the names of the chemicals in his dream, he recalled a conversation in which a colleague suggested that trimethylamin might be an element in sexual arousal. This carried him away into “Freudian” thoughts about the probable source of hysteria in sexual frustration.

He wrapped up his interpretation of his Irma dream by declaring that it was a text-book example of wish fulfillment in dreams. He had been jarred the night before by Otto’s suggestion that his patient had not been fully cured. In his dream he got his “revenge” on Otto by establishing that her pains were Otto’s fault, not his own.

In all his discussion of “substitution” – how a dream character may stand in for another person, or several other people – he paused for only a heartbeat to consider the possibility that the real patient might be the dreamer himself. He wondered whether the “scabs” that resembled nasal structures could be a warning to him about the possible effects of his excessive use of cocaine – but moved briskly on from that thought without considering other substances and their possible effects.

Twenty-eight years after the Irma dream, Freud’s oral surgeons were looking at the precise symptoms he had dreamed – in Freud’s own mouth.

Early in 1923, a surgeon performed an excision of a cancerous growth resembling the “big white patch” on the right side of Irma’s mouth “at the right anterior palate.”

In a series of surgeries and treatments over the next fifteen years, Freud’s doctors worked to excise “proliferative papillary leukoplakia” inside his mouth resembling the unusual “scabs” in the 1885 dream. His many surgeries produced further scabs.

     In the Irma dream, the patient had difficulty opening her mouth. After Dr Pichler performed radical surgeries on Freud late in 1923, Freud - like the patient in his dream - had to wear "dentures", actually a removable prosthesis. Because Freud developed lockjaw during his multiple surgeries there was often difficulty inserting the prosthesis. Towards the end of his life, there were times when he “could not open his mouth.” 

     The reference to structures of the nose in the 1895 dream report may have been a preview of Freud's condition after surgery left the nasal cavity visible from the oral cavity.

     What about all the doctors who figure in the Irma dream? Stripped of their pseudonyms, they were medical colleagues who gave Freud differing advice on his smoking habit.  “Dr  M”, who gives a cheerful but wrong prognosis for the patient, was  actually Dr Joseph Breuer, a friend and mentor who was persuaded by Freud - despite misgivings - to drop his opposition to Freud's heavy cigar smoking.

   “Leopold” was a “slow but sure” medical colleague who had cautioned that smoking could contribute to serious diseases.

   “Otto” was Oskar Rie, a friend who shared Freud’s taste for cigars and may have brought him a gift of cigars the night before the dream.

    Whether Freud’s dream doctors represented aspects of himself – or their actual personalities and positions – their role in the dream held up a mirror to the dreamer’s behavior and attitude. Unfortunately, he was able to see in that glass only darkly.

   Freud thought the syringe (the German word also means “squirter”) was a penis and that the cure for the patient's symptoms was sexual intercourse. But a “dirty syringe” could also be a nicotine delivery system - one of the cigars Freud was almost certainly smoking the night before. All the chemicals named in the Irma Dream are found in cigar smoke. Though trimethylamin is not regarded as a carcinogen, when mixed with nitrites in an acidic environment (such as the smoker's mouth) it can be “nitrosated” into a very toxic carcinogen, dimethylnitrosamine (DMNA).

     The evidence suggests that Freud’s dream gave him a rather exact picture of both the origin and the histology of the oral cancer that subjected him to a painful and protracted death. Although Freud became interested in the idea that dreams can contain messages from the body, he missed this one - unlike Jung, who gave up smoking because of a dream.

     An important question for our understanding of the nature of diagnostic dreams is whether the Irma Dream may have contained a warning message from inside Freud’s cellular system, as it was at the time of the dream. In other words, could the Irma dream have been a “tumor marker”? It is possible that a single affected cell could trigger a dream, sending a distress signal out via neighboring cells, or via the endocrine system, that was shaped into a dream by the production company in the brain.

Freud may have paid an enormous penalty for forcing his own dreams to run along narrow-gauge rails of interpretation. Since the bigger story of the Irma Dream has such large resonance for dream interpretation, it seems appropriate that the pseudonym Freud chose for his patient means “universal”.

Somehow this tragic episode has escaped most of the legion of students and biographers of Freud. It suggests that Freud may have paid a terrible price for ignoring both the premonitory and the somatic aspects of dreams, and it offers a cautionary message for all of us as dreamers: let’s remember to check for diagnostic content in dreams.

Adapted from The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library. All rights reserved.

Dreaming to heal our lives

In our dreams, we have access to a personal doctor who makes house calls, provides an impeccable diagnosis of our physical, emotional and spiritual condition, and doesn’t charge a cent. If we are not in touch with our dreams, we are missing out on a tremendous resource for self-healing. Here’s why:

·         The body talks to us in dreams. It shows us what it needs to stay well and previews possible symptoms long before they manifest. If we recognize these messages from the body, and act on them, we may be able to avoid painful and costly medical intervention further down the trail.

·         Dreams are also experiences of the soul, and show us the spiritual sources of wellness and illness. The Iroquois say that dreams reveal the “secret wishes of the soul” – as opposed to the narrow agendas of the ego. If we honor the soul’s purpose, as revealed in dreams, we move towards health and balance. In traditional Iroquois practice, it is the duty of the community to listen to dreams in order to help the dreamer to identify and honor the wishes of the soul.

·         Our dreams provide us with fresh imagery and energy for self-healing.

·         By going back inside our dreams and consciously reshaping our inner dramas, we may be able to help shift the body in the direction of health.

·         Dreams invite us to reclaim vital soul energy lost through pain or grief or addiction. Absence of dream recall is sometimes a symptom of soul loss. Dreams in which we encounter a younger version of ourselves or return again and again to earlier scenes from our lives may be invitations to bring home parts of our energy and identity that went missing.

·         We can bring through dream guidance for others as well as ourselves.

·         Dreams give us a direct line to sacred sources of guidance and healing. In sacred sleep, the ancients not only sought diagnosis and healing images; they sought a direct encounter with the Divine Healer. We can ask for dream healing in the same way.

Here’s how to bring the energy and magic of dreams into daily life, in four easy steps:

1.       Make a date with your dreams

Before you go to sleep, write down an intention for your dreams. Make this a juicy intention – “I would like to be healed” or “I want to meet my soulmate” or simply “I want to have fun in my dreams and remember.” Have pen and paper ready so you can record something whenever you wake up. Write your dream in a journal later, give it a title and see if you can come up with a personal motto or “bumper sticker” distilling the message or quality of the dream.

2.       Share dreams with a partner

Regular dream sharing is wonderful fun, builds heart-centered relationships, brings us fresh perspectives on our issues and helps to nudge us towards taking appropriate action to honor our dreams. You’ll want to begin by creating a safe space where you and your partner will give each other undivided attention. Whoever is sharing a dream should tell it as simply and clearly as possible, giving the dream a title. The partner then asks a few simple questions. Start by asking how the dreamer felt when she first woke up – the first feelings are usually an excellent guide to the general character and urgency of the dream. Ask the dreamer whether she recognizes any of the elements in the dream in waking life, and whether any parts of the dream might possibly be played out in the future.

   You are not going to tell each other what your dreams mean. You don’t want to steal the dreamer’s power, or to lose the energy of the dream in verbal analysis. You can offer helpful, non-intrusive feedback by saying to each other, “If it were my dream, I would think about such-and-such.” Finally, you’ll want to ask the dreamer, “What are you going to do to honor this dream?”

3.       Act on your dreams

Dreams require action! If we do not do something with our dreams in waking life, we miss out on the magic. Real magic consists of bringing something through from a deeper reality into our physical lives, which is why active dreaming is a way of natural magic – but only if we take the necessary action to bring the magic through. Keeping a dream journal and sharing dreams on a regular basis are important ways of honoring dreams and the powers that speak through dreams. Here are some more suggestions:

·         create from a dream: turn the dream into a story or poem. Draw from it, paint from it, turn it into a comic strip

·         take a physical action to celebrate an element in the dream, such as wearing the color that was featured in the dream, traveling to a place from the dream, making a phone call to an old friend who showed up in the dream

·         use an object or create a dream talisman to hold the energy of the dream: A stone or crystal may be a good place to hold the energy of a dream, and return to it.

·         use the dream as a travel advisory: If the dream appears to contain guidance on a future situation, carry it with you as a personal travel advisory. Summarize the dream information on a cue card or hold it in an image you can physically carry.

·         go back into the dream to clarify details, dialogue with a dream character, explore  the larger reality – and have marvelous fun!

4.       Go back inside your dreams

When I started living in rural New York, I dreamed repeatedly of a huge standing bear. Though the bear never menaced me, it made me uneasy because it was several times my size. I realized that I needed to face the bear and find out why it kept appearing in my dreams. I made it my intention to go back inside my dream, and “brave up” to whatever I needed to confront. I stepped back into the dreamspace – as you might step back into a room you had left – and the bear was there, vividly real and tremendous.
    There was nothing cute or “made-up” about this encounter. I had to push myself to approach the bear. When I found the courage to step up to the bear, he embraced me and we became the same size. He showed me we were joined at the heart by something like a thick umbilical, pumping life energy. He told me he would show me what people need in order to be healed. I later discovered that the bear is the great medicine animal in Native American tradition, and that the most powerful healers of the Lakota are the members of the Bear Dreamers Society, composed of those who have been called by the Bear in dreams and visions.  Today, when I lead a healing circle, we call in the spirit bear.

    Our dreams may offer us gifts of power and healing that we can only claim by going back into the dreamspace and moving beyond fear or irresolution. We may need to go back inside a dream to overcome nightmare terrors, to clarify whether the dream is about a literal or symbolic car crash, to talk to someone who appeared in a dream, to reclaim our own lost children, to use a personal image as a portal to multidimensional reality – or simply to have more fun!

   Dream reentry is one of the core techniques that I teach and practice. If you would like to experiment, start by picking a dream that has some real energy for you. It doesn’t matter whether it is a dream from last night or from 20 years ago, as long as it has juice. Get yourself settled in a comfortable, relaxed position in a quiet space and minimize external light. Focus on a specific scene from your dream. Let it become vivid on your mental screen. See if you can let all your senses become engaged, so you can touch it, smell it, hear it, taste it. Ask yourself what you need to know, and what you intend to do inside the dream. And let yourself start flowing back into the dreamspace…

    In my Active Dreaming workshops, we use shamanic drumming - a steady beat on a simple frame drum, typically in the range of four to seven beats per second –to help shift consciousness and facilitate travel into the dreamspace. The steady beat helps to override mental clutter and focus energy and intention on the journey. If you are doing dream reentry at home, you may wish to experiment with a drumming tape or soft music. I have made a recording of shamanic drumming specifically for dream travelers.

    The applications of the dream reentry process for healing are inexhaustible. In this way, for example, we may be able to travel inside the body and help to shift its behaviors in the direction of health. In her wonderful novel for kids of all ages, A Wind in the Door, Madeleine L’Engle describes a journey into a world inside one of the mitochondria of a sick boy; when things are brought into balance inside a particle of a cell, the whole body is healed. As we become active dreamers, we can develop the ability to journey in precisely this way. Our dreams will open the ways.

Illustration: "Serpent Staff in the Sky" by Robert Moss

When we become a dreaming society

I have a dream: that we will again become a society of dreamers. In a dreaming culture, dreams are valued and celebrated. The first business of the day, for most people, is to share dreams – dreams from the night, and dreams of life - and seek to harvest their guidance. The community joins in manifesting the energy and insight of dreams in waking life. In a dreaming culture, nobody says, “It’s only a dream" or “In your dreams, mister.” It is understood that dreams are both wishes (“I have a dream”) and experiences of the soul.

    If dreams were honored throughout our society, our world would be different, and magical. Let me count the ways:

1. Dream Partners.
Personal relations will be richer, more intimate and creative. There will be less room for pretense and denial. Sharing dreams, we overcome the taboos that prevent us from expressing our real needs and feelings and open ourselves to those of others.

2. Family life and home entertainment.
“What did you dream?” is the first question asked around the table in a family of dreamers. In our dreaming culture, families everywhere will share dreams and harvest their gifts of story, mutual understanding and healing. Parents will listen to their children’s dreams and help them to confront and overcome nightmare terrors. Best of all, they will learn from their children, because kids are wonderful dreamers. This might be bad for TV ratings but it would bring back the precious arts of storytelling, helping us learn to tell our own story (a gift with almost limitless applications) and to recognize the larger story of our lives.

3. Dream Healing.
In our dreaming culture, dream groups will be a vital part of every clinic, hospital and treatment center and doctors will begin their patient interviews by asking about dreams as well as physical symptoms. Health costs will plummet, because when we listen to our dreams, we receive keys to self-healing. Dreams often alert us to possible health problems long before physical symptoms develop; by heeding those messages, we can sometimes avoid manifesting those symptoms. Dreams give us an impeccable nightly readout on our physical, emotional and spiritual health. When we do get ill, dreams are a factory of images that can help us to heal on every level.

4. The Care of Souls.
As a dreaming culture, we will remember that the causes of disease are spiritual as well as physical. We will use dreams to facilitate soul recovery. In dreams where we encounter a younger version of ourselves, or are drawn back to a scene from childhood, we are brought to recognize a deeper kind of energy loss, that shamans call soul loss. Through trauma or abuse, through addiction or great sadness, we can lose a part of our vital soul energy. So long as it is missing, we are not whole and the gap may be filled by sickness or addiction. Dreams show us what has become of our missing parts and when it is timely to call them home.

5. Dream Incubation.
In a dreaming culture, we will remember to “sleep on it,” asking dreams for creative guidance on school assignments, work projects, relationships and whatever challenges are looming in waking life. When we seek dream guidance, we must be ready for answers that go beyond our questions, because the dream source is infinitely deeper and wiser than what Yeats called the “daily trivial mind.”

6. Using Dream Radar.
Dreaming, we routinely fold time and space and scout far into the future. As a dreaming culture, we will work with dream precognition on a daily basis -- and develop strategies to revise the possible futures foreseen in dreams for the benefit of ourselves and others.

7. Building Communities.
When we share dreams with others, we recognize something of ourselves in their experiences. This helps us to move beyond prejudice and build heart-centered communities.

8. The Art of Dying.
The path of the soul after death, say the Plains Indians, is the same as the path of the soul in dreams -- except that after physical death, we won’t come back to the same body. Dreamwork is a vital tool in helping the dying to prepare for the conditions of the afterlife.

9. Walking the Path of Soul.
The greatest gift of dreaming is that it facilitates an encounter between the little self and the big Self. Active dreaming is a vital form of soul remembering: of reclaiming knowledge that belonged to us, on the levels of soul and spirit, before we entered this life experience. So much of the harm we do to ourselves and others stems from the fact that we have forgotten who we are and what we are meant to become. Dreaming, we remember, and encounter authentic spiritual guides who will help us on our paths.

The Dreamer's School of Soul

In the cause of assisting the rebirth of a dreaming society, I am launching a new online training called The Dreamer's School of Soul. Over seven months, you'll be traveling in the company of spirited and creative dreamers from all over the world map who will support your soul odysseys. Take a look at what's waiting for you in the Dream Clinic, Flight School, the Faculties of Divination and Kairomancy, of Co-Creation and Dream Archaeology, the House of Healing and more

Photo: Active dreamers in a workshop in Romania led by dream teacher Ana Maria Stefanescu.

"Pick up, Sunshine": when our dead become family angels

Once they are free of their physical bodies and physically-oriented assumptions about the rules of reality, our dead can become extremely helpful and reliable psychic advisers, since they can see across space and time quite easily. We have this ability too, but while we are encased in physical bodies and self-limiting beliefs about physical laws and linear time, we often forget to use our ability to see beyond these things.
      Departed friends and loved ones very frequently turn up in dreams to pass on health advisories. They are especially sensitive to health problems that tend to run in families. I have heard hundreds of reports of dreams in which deceased family members have given specific health warnings, some of which have almost certainly saved lives. I have had this experience myself.

      Our dead may come to us in dreams with warnings and advisories of any kind. The Chinese Book of Zuo relates that the dead father of a general called Han Jue appeared to him on the eve of battle and told him that in the fighting the next day he should avoid veering to either right or left and lead always from the center. The general was victorious in battle, but the enemies' arrows killed all the men immediately to the right and left of his chariot.

       There is a fascinating episode from the history of American show business in which a dceased friend becomes an everyday angel. Lucille Ball was devastated when her good friend Carole Lombard died in a plane crash in January 1942. But their friendship continued after Carole's death. Lucille's decision to take the risk of launching the "I Love Lucy" show on television was guided by her dead friend. Carole Lombard turned up in a very smart suit and said, "Take a chance, honey. Give it a whirl!" Lucille Ball recalled that "After that, I knew for certain that we were doing the right thing." Later, at a party, she told Clark Gable (who had been married to Carole Lombard) that his long-deceased wife kept turning up in her dreams to offer helpful advice. Clark Gable reportedly "stared, gulped, and plowed off in a daze." 

       A young woman I'll call Kirsty lost her grandmother - a proud, creative, take-charge kind of woman - around the same time she developed a rare and serious illness. She then received a dream visitation from her grandmother, who told her, "I've arrange to be around for two more years. You and I have lots of work to do together, Sunshine."
      When Kirsty enrolled for an expensive series of therapy sessions, she dreamed that she heard her grandmother's voice on her answering machine. She did not want to pick up for fear that her grandmother would not really be there. "Pick up, Sunshine," her grandmother's voice encouraged her. When Kirsty did so, her grandmother said, "You can save a bunch on those therapy sessions if you meditate on your nickname. You are Sunshine, right? Be Sunshine! Let it stream through every cell in your body!"

      With the words, Kirsty felt waves of healing light and energy rolling through her body. She proceeded to make it a practice to sit with the sun and invoke a flow of inner sunlight every day, and this felt profoundly healing. In another dream, Kirsty's grandmother called to say she was going to help her arrange a move from her apartment in Manhattan to a house with a garden, and trees, and sunlight.

      Though Grandma was not visible in the flurry of real estate moves that followed, she had been very adept at this kind of thing, and Kirsty was buoyed by the feeling that she was active behind the scenes. It took less than a week to sell her condo, and she managed the house purchase in just one day. Magic.
      Grandma called again to say she wanted to support Kirsty in developing a new relationship. Nothing controlling, just a blessing. Kirsty was thrilled to find herself entering a warm and loving new relationship with a man who was not afraid of commitment. Kirsty's grandmother loved to paint cardinals. At her new house, Kirsty saw them all the time, glorious flashes of bright red among the greens.

Art: Marc Chagall, "Three Angels Visit Moses"

"Your dreams tell you what is needed for the cure"

A dream is a wake-up call. It takes us beyond what we already know. Dreams are the language of the soul, and they are experiences of the soul.

    There are “big” dreams and “little” dreams, of course. In big dreams, we go traveling and we may receive visitations. We travel across time – into the future and the past – and we travel to other dimensions of reality. This is reflected in the words for “dream” that are used by indigenous people who have retained strong dreaming traditions and respect for dreamers. Among the Makiritare, a shamanic dreaming people of Venezuela, for example, the word for dream is adekato, which means “a journey of the soul”.

     Most societies, across most of human history, have valued dreams and dreamers for three main reasons. First, they have looked to dreams for contact with a wiser source than the everyday mind – call that God, or Nature, or the Self with a great big Jungian S. Second, they have looked to dreams as part of our survival kit, giving us clues to possible future events we may want to avoid or enact. Third, they have known that dreaming is medicine, in several important senses. Dreams show us what is going on inside the body, often before physical symptoms present. When we do get sick, dreams are a factory of images we can use for self-healing.

    In indigenous cultures, dreaming is central to diagnosis and healing. From the Otomi Indians of the state of Puebla in Mexico, we have this marvelous account of a shaman named Don Antonio who used dreams as a medical text:

"When I became a shaman, I began to see how to cast out illness in my dreams. It was like looking at a printed page. The shaman receives knowledge, what sorts of illness one person has, what sort another has, in his dreams...
     "Learning how to cure from dreams is like being taught to read as a child, You ask your teacher, 'What is this or that called?' and your teacher tells you...In this way you receive knowledge about illnesses. These things are revealed to you in your dreams...
      "As you're curing the patient your dreams tell you what the problem is and who are the enemies who caused the illness. Your dreams tell you what is needed for the cure."

I know this to be true. My dreams have given me exact diagnosis of what is going on in my body, and they have directed me to the right sources of healing, on the imaginal plane and in the doctor's office.

Source for Don Antonio quote:  James Dow, The Shaman's Touch: Otomi Indian Symbolic Healing. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1986. 51-52.

Photo: Otomi protective figure made with amate paper (bark cloth) in Sam Noble Museum, University of Oklahoma

When her dead ex-husband warned she was walking in his shoes

A guest blog by Deborah Dutilh on her remarkable personal experience of life-saving dream diagnosis facilitated by a deceased loved one.

My ex-husband, Jean-François, died from brain cancer in February 2011. And then he came back.

    When he visited me in a dream on August 22, 2013, I wondered if I should be worried or not. In spite of our divorce, we still cared for each other and said we’d always be connected through our children.

     In this dream, Jean-François visits and gives me a picture of a playful seal that he’s drawn. We’re walking along the beach, hand in hand. I’m wearing his hiking boots, the worn leather ones with sturdy thick soles and long red laces wound around my ankles a few times. Then suddenly we’re inside a big store like Target, driving his car down the aisles, looking for an exit.

     I woke up feeling anxious and not liking the meaning of this dream at all! I know the seal represents our pact of being connected. Does walking in his shoes mean I have a health issue, too? Do those long red shoelaces symbolize our forever entwined souls? What does the future hold in store for me? Will I need to be shopping around for solutions?

     Of course not! I don’t have any health issues. I’m in perfect health, I try to convince myself.

     When we don’t want to face the fear of what our dreams might mean, it’s easy for our inner critic to step in with a different interpretation to protect us from what our intuition is telling us.

     Upon awakening, mine tells me, “Of course you don’t have a brain tumor! But, you know how hard you’ve struggled with building your business now? Well, you could have supported him more when he was building his business, I don’t know, 25 or 30 years ago! Remember you said you’d work while he built his business, but after years of still no money coming in, you were getting fed up, you started to really resent it all. C’mon admit it! You should be feeling guilty about that!! “

      “So there you have it! Guilt beats having a brain tumor, doesn’t it,” he concludes. Without any symptoms at this point, this could be plausible, but my intuition knew better. I had no choice but to wait and see.

      On September 14 I got a massive migraine that landed me in Urgent Care. Headaches can have so many causes that the doctors weren’t concerned. They sent me home with pain meds and instructions to rest and drink plenty of fluids. Once again my intuition did not agree.

      Then, September 18, I had another very clear dream that I was at my own life celebration, invisible and easily physically passing through the guests who were telling stories about me and how courageous I was! This dream confirmed that indeed, I had something terribly wrong.

       I saw my doctor that very day. He listened intently when I told him about the recent dreams and what my intuition was telling me. The dates were lining up ironically, too. I had my headache on September 14, exactly 4 years to the day, after Jean-Francois had his seizure. My unusual headache had my sons concerned, too. We’d already been through this once with their dad. We all needed peace of mind.

       “Doctor,” I asked, “do you believe in the power of our dreams to predict illness?”

       Fortunately, he did and referred me to a neurologist to request an MRI to rule out anything serious. Still, I’m functioning perfectly and my only symptoms are three migraines and two very clear dreams that needed little expertise to interpret. No one is overly concerned, yet.

      Six weeks later, to everyone’s great surprise, the MRI showed a tumor the size of an apricot on the surface of my right temporal lobe. I was immediately admitted to hospital and scheduled for brain surgery, two days later, the day Jean-François would have been 60. I was released two days later on my 60^th birthday.

      Thanks to my intuition, dreams and doctors who believed me, my life was saved with early detection. The diagnosis, glioblastoma multiforme, is the most common, deadliest and highest grade tumor. There’s no cure and it’s recurring. Sadly, 8 out of 10 patients will die from this tumor. Fortunately, in spite of the dismal statistics, there are more and more long term survivors. I plan on being among them.

       It took me quite a while to embrace the surrealism of my new “normal.” I am convinced that all the dream work done over the years, my belief in soul recovery and the power of our dreams saved my life with early detection before any diagnosable symptoms. I was also very blessed to have doctors who believed my dreams and intuition.

       Since I did soul retrieval with Robert Moss, Jean-François has visited me in dreams several times to reassure me that all is well. He always tells me he won’t let our sons be without both of us. I believe this implicitly, that his soul is with me, along with Panther, my spirit guide, symbol of death and rebirth.

Deborah Dutilh began studying her dreams in France over 15 years ago with a Jungian mentor. She has attended workshops with Robert Moss and is part of a weekly dream group in Los Angeles. She is a theatre artist sharing her story in a one-woman show called “Into The Panther’s Cage.”

Doctors in Dreamland

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