Dreaming of Home in the American Civil War

Guest blog by Wanda Easter Burch

Physically exhausted from walking, fighting, and from four days’ detail digging trenches under an unbearable Petersburg, Virginia, sun and “not a breath of air stirring,” Henry Lea Graves, a private in the Macon Georgia Volunteers, wrote to his aunt on August 7, 1862, that it was “…hot as it ever gets to be in central Ethiopia.”  Paying homage to both the imagination and the night dream, he described a dream in which he saw himself standing, not with spade in hand, but eating from a bowl of peaches in the midst of “homefolk” with his coat off, moving across the piazza, enjoying the cool breeze “that almost always is blowing fresh through there with a basket of peaches at my side and all the homefolk around.”[1]

            He told her that he often went into this place in his imagination to pass time swiftly and shared that “soldier mortals” would not survive if they were not “blessed with the gift of imagination and the pictures of hope.” The second “angel of mercy,” he said, was the night dream, which presented him even more vivid pictures of hope than any daydream.           

            The soldiers of both the North and the South in the American Civil War described conflicting emotions of loyalty to their individual causes, but letters describing a dramatic shift in consciousness when the soldier entered the battlefield, and the immense longing for “home” were universal, and the dreams in those letters were described generally as the most “real” dreams ever experienced. These dreams permeated the nineteenth century culture. They were printed as poems, written as songs, painted, scripted in journals and diaries and became the daily “news” in popular newspapers.  They embodied a quality of immediacy and flawlessness of revelation that escalated with the increasing horror of the conditions of the reality of a war that began with hope for a short ending, occasionally seen even as a jolly adventure that would be over before it began, to the waking reality of a lengthy contest of grim terror that brought death, maimed bodies, disease and living conditions that deteriorated as the years wore on. If the soldier or family member could not integrate the dream with the waking reality, the nightmare, called Soldier’s Heart in the Civil War, took on a life of its own, consuming waking reality for those who could not find their way back to a safe and nurturing place.

            Mark Huber, Vietnam combat veteran, wrote that all veterans come home “naked in the dark,” referring to the barren, solitary feelings described by Tolkien’s character in Lord of the Rings who had lost his ability to feel anything. Mark Huber asked questions difficult to answer about those in the Civil War whose lives became a closed book once the war ended and the letters and diaries were packed away, and he couldn’t help but speculate on whether those soldiers in the South who lost their war had feelings close to his own of having lost his war in Vietnam. Did the Confederate soldier whose feelings of a noble cause turned to dust leave him standing alone with nothing left but anger at the human loss “expended in vain” for the wrong cause?[2]

            The simple answer is “yes.” But the dream, then and now, could be the “angel of mercy,” described by Henry of Graves in 1862. Brian Turner, Third Stryker Brigade Combat Team, Mosul, 2004, described that same sense of dream reality as soldiers writing from any war, past, present or future:. “…And finally the dream shifts to where it often goes, a dream I started having when I was in Iraq — I’m back home in the San Joaquin Valley, about 20 miles north of Fresno, out in the country, and I’m sort of a disembodied hovering version of myself, floating over my family’s property where I was raised, drifting in and out of the eucalyptus trees…It’s a dream I like, one that I always want to last longer, drifting between those trees. The clarity of this dream is far beyond most of my dreams, which are often murky, convoluted, fragmented, disjointed.”[3]

            Recognizing the power of dreams of home and family and of the gifts of the imagination could still be the missing piece to returning today’s soldier safely home and to offering families healing from the nightmare of war; a place where souls and hearts can mend and find humanity when horror and terror force themselves into the most protected and private places that struggle to keep body and spirit together and whole. Our culture is not so far removed from the Civil War that we cannot reclaim the power of dreaming as a vital part of healing soldiers and families  experiencing home after a physical nightmare.

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[1] Dear Mother: Don’t Grieve about me, 176-177. See Graves Family Papers, UNC, Collection Number: 02716; http://www.lib.unc.edu/mss/inv/g/Graves_Family.html

Henry Lea Graves to his aunt, August 7, 1862, St. Petersburg.
“Chiefly letters to and from Henry Lea Graves. Letters from Graves discuss routine military life, maneuvers, camp life, and requests for mail; letters to Graves chiefly discuss life on the home front, family news, illnesses, etc. 1861 letters found Henry in the vicinity of Norfolk, Va.; letters in January-September 1862 found him in Wilmington, N.C., and Petersburg, Va.; October 1862-January 1863 letters found him in Petersburg and Richmond, Va.; and letters, 1864-1865, were received by him at Savannah, Ga., and Charleston and James Island, S.C.

[2] http://backstoryradio.org/civil-war-call-in-show/ Wanda Burch interview; Comment by Mark Huber, Vietnam combat veteran; J. R. R. Tolkien, Book Six, Chapter Three. “Mount Doom,” The Lord of the Rings.

[3] Brian Turner served seven years in the Army, most recently in 2004 as an infantry team leader in Mosul with the Third Stryker Brigade Combat Team, Second Infantry Division. His 2005 book of poems, “Here, Bullet,” challenges others to record and share their dreams, many of those responding by sharing the dreams of home that got them through the most difficult days. A young soldier reported on Turner’s blog dreams of home mixing with scenes in Baghdad but bringing him back home again in the terror of war.

Text adapted from by The Home Voices Speak Louder than the Drums:Dreams and the Imagination in Civil War Letters and Memoirs by Wanda Easter Burch, just published by McFarland.

The letter at the top was sent by Charles [Charlie] Tenney of the 7th Ohio Volunteer Infantry to Addie Case, dated April 11, 1862.The stationery is an example of a kind that could be purchased at that time, featuring a popular Thomas Campbell poem titled “The Soldier’s Dream.” Campbell was a Scottish poet who died in 1844, but his poem found its way on letter heads and in soldier’s letters on both sides of the conflict. The actual letter is one of hundreds of letters between Charlie and Addie, many of them with dreams. Addie's dreams were extraordinary dreams of presentiment of Charlie’s death, the last one an out-of-body dream experience that crossed at the same period of Charlie’s actual death in a make-shift hospital in a church in Bolivar Heights, a community outside Harper’s Ferry.

Return of Asklepios: reclaiming ancient arts of dream healing

He is the archetype of the wounded healer. He is both human and divine, the son of Apollo by a mortal woman. He is deeply connected to the realm of the animal spirits. His familiars are the snake, the dog and the cock. The name of his mother, Coronis, suggests a link to the family of crows and ravens.  He is mentored by Chiron, the centaur.
    His symbol is a long staff, shoulder high, with a snake wrapped around it. We see this everywhere today, on the sides of ambulances, on the doors of hospitals, as medical letterhead. Our doctors still take the oath that ancient physicians dedicated to him, and his divine family, though the god-names have been removed. Western medicine begins in his precinct, though it no longer honors his name and often omits the essentials of his way.
    His name is Asklepios, Latinized as Aesculapius by the Romans when they floated his statue up the Tiber to make him at home in Italy. I had the pleasure of talking about him today on my “Way of the Dreamer” radio show with Dr. Edward Tick, a gifted and compassionate therapist who has labored for many years to revive the way of Asklepian dream healing. As Ed Tick noted, the  name Asklepios evokes “a tradition of holistic healing that was prized in the ancient world for two thousand years, a tradition in which dreams are regarded as epiphanies through which communication is opened between humans and divine powers.”.
    Pilgrims journeyed to more than three hundred temples of Asklepios around the Mediterranean and (according to recent archaeology) as far west as Britain. The helpers of Asklepios – the original therapeuts, or therapists – and his followers looked to dreams for diagnosis, prescription and an invitation for direct contact with the sacred guide and healer. The pilgrims traveled in hopes of a big dream that would be a “showing forth” of the god or one of his family and might, in itself, deliver healing from complaints that human remedies could not cure.
    Ed Tick evokes Asklepios and his way with passion and eloquence, scholarship and deep familiarity with the ancient sites. He is the author of an excellent book on the Asklepian tradition, The Practice of Dream Healing and of two important and profoundly moving books inspired by his work to heal wounded warriors and bring them home, War and the Soul and Warrior's Return.
     In our conversation, Ed recalled how the Asklepian tradition was suppressed by the Christian authorities and disappeared or went underground after the fifth century, to revive, under extraordinary circumstances, in the aftermath of World War II. A world catastrophe of that order, Tick suggested, calls forth tremendous archetypal powers. The return of the god was heralded by a curious incident involving a company of British troops bivouacked at Epidauros, the site of the most famous Asklepian temple in the Hellenic world, at the end of the war. As Ed tells it, soldiers came one by one to their commanding officer to request that the unit should be moved to another camp site. Why? They told their captain the place was haunted. They had all seen the same “ghost” – a bearded man carrying a long staff with a snake wrapped around it.
    Asklepios entered modern psychology in the same period through the dream of a patient of Jung’s student and colleague C.A. Meier. She gave Meier a one-line dream report. She heard the words, “The best thing he ever created was Epidauros.” Meier did not recognize the Greek place name, but he embarked on a search that eventually led him to write an important work on the ancient practice of dream incubation and dream healing. As Tick tells it, there was an Asklepian touch in the play of synchronicity between Jung and Meier. When Jung was reflecting on who would  do most to continue his work as they walked and talked together by the lake, a snake rose from the water and slithered between Meier’s legs, which the ancients would certainly have taken as a numen, a nod of approval from greater powers.
    A key principle in Asklepian practice, as Ed presents it, is that “you do not ask the gods for help until you have run out of human options.” Another, quite foreign to modern medicine, at least in the United States, is that “you do not put the patient under financial pressure.” This mode of healing is open to everyone who is ready to make the journey to the temple and to dream with the god. “Fees are paid only after healing, and in proportion to a person’s resources. A slave may give an apple, an emperor may pay for a new temple or theater.”
    The practice of Asklepian healing begins as a quest. You go on a pilgrimage, when you have failed to find other remedies for what ails you. You travel to a holistic center. You pray. You are shown images of the gods, and evidence of what happened before”. You see hundreds, maybe thousands of votive offerings and inscriptions depicting healings that have taken place. This stirs up the psyche, fires the imagination, primes you for a big experience in the sacred night. The temple helpers will ask you about your dreams, looking for a dream of invitation, noting when the caliber of your dreams indicates that you are not ready for the big experience.
    Quoting the ancient documents, Ed recounts the case of a rich man who was denied entry to the abaton – the place of encounter with the god in the sacred night – because his dreams suggested that his character was so defective that he was unready and unworthy. He was told he must dedicate himself to the care of the sick and the poor, even of lepers, for a year before he could return to try again.
    Pilgrims hoped for night visitations from figures resembling the statues and paintings they had been shown – from Asklepios, or one of his three daughters, or one of his animal familiars. “Collective images will help produce archetypal dreams,” Ed observes. A visitation of this kind could deliver full healing in a single night. The ancient testimonies include the account of a soldier who came to the temple with an arrow embedded in his body that could not be extracted by surgery. In his night vision, Asklepios himself deftly removed the arrow. In the morning, the soldier was fully healed, the arrow extracted.
    Such experiences must be honored. Dreams require action. As Ed Tick puts it, “once you have the dream you have to bring it into the world.” This sometimes meant taking actions that would seem crazy to most people and certainly most doctors. We discussed the case of Aelius Aristides, a famous orator who turned to Asklepios many times for guidance and healing. When he was in the grip of a raging fever, he was ordered by the god in a dream to obtain a horse and ride to an icy river and plunge in – which he proceeded to do.
     Contact with animals and animal spirits is a vital part of this tradition. The snake is a primary healing ally of Asklepios. There were snake pits in the Asklepian sanctuaries, and seekers of big dreams often had to brave up to serpents (non-venomous, but still scary for many) slithering over them in the night. In the testimonies, healing was often delivered by the experience of a snake licking or biting or coiling round an afflicted part of the body. Ed talked about how he experimented with a modern reenactment of this by inviting a woman snake dancer to bring some of her serpents to one of his retreats. He was fascinated by how the snakes behaved differently with different persons, sometimes as if they understood where someone was experiencing a problem. The same snake would coil on the head of one person, and wrap around the belly of someone with intestinal complaints.
    The dog, the second Asklepian animal ally, is the guide of souls and guardian of passage to the Underworld in many traditions, the friendliest of animals to man, and a primary “bridge to nature” in many lives, ancient and contemporary. As we discussed the dog of Asklepios, my mind flew to an experience I had when I attended a workshop with Ed in the Bahamas when we were co-presenters at a conference there last January.
     Ed had described how the philosopher Proclus received relief for his gout after he invoked Asklepios. When he was sitting with his leg up, swathed in bandages, a sparrow landed on his foot and proceeded to strip away the bandages. His gout was gone. I was keenly interested, since I suffer from occasional flare-ups of gout, and my left foot was feeling very sore that day.
     Ed gave us a short meditation – to go to a place in the body where we felt aches or pains, and ask any of the divine figures mentioned in the Asklepios story (including his animal triad of snake, dog and cock) for healing. I went to my aching left foot. I tried to visualize Proclus’ sparrow. Instead, a beloved black dog who shared my life and often appears in my dreams, leaped on me, licking my toes, rubbing joyfully against my body, licking my face. This was all but physical. I saw again the great craters made by that big dog’s paws as we walked on a Sag Harbor beach in winter. My heart swelled to bursting with love. Dogs love you no matter what, and they may be healing gods in disguise.
    The rooster, or cock, is the third Asklepian animal familiar, the animal of sacrifice – and also the liminal creature that heralds the transition from night to day, from sleep to waking. The famous last words of Socrates after he drained the hemlock were, “Crito, we owe a cock to Asklepios”, reminding us that the most famous voice of Greek philosophy was also deeply immersed in the Asklepian way.
     We need this practice today, in our lives and our world. Ed and I discussed how to apply the key elements of Asklepian practice, both at special places and healing centers, in small groups and in our individual lives. Ed gently insisted that gentleness is a primary requirement. Though the derivation of the name "Asklepios" is disputed, Robert Graves suggested that it means "unceasingly gentle."
    I proposed that a vital principle from the Asklepian way to be applied in our lives today is that help from greater powers is always available, and that we want to remember to ask nicely. I quoted Aelius Aristides, the ancient orator who asked for healing by speaking to his god along the following lines: “I ask for the measure for the measure of health my body requires to serve the purposes of the soul.”
    Ed reciprocated by reciting for us lines from the Homeric Hymn to Asklepios:

Great to humanity, soother of cruel suffering…
You are welcomed, Master. By this song I beseech you.

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My conversation with Ed Tick on my radio show can be downloaded from the Way of the Dreamer archive. Ed's website is Soldier's Heart.

I highly recommend the following books by Edward Tick Ph.D.: The Practice of Dream Healing, War and the Soul and Warrior's Return: Restoring the Soul After War

Wanda Burch on Healing Soldier's Heart

Wanda Burch is one of those who is working to heal our wounded warriors. For the past three years, she had been leading healing retreats for women veterans of America's wars, using the core techniques of Active Dreaming. She reports notable success in using the dream reentry technique to guide veterans back through the dark forests of recurring nightmares to a place of healing and resolution.
     In today's conversation on my radio show, Wanda gives moving examples of using both dream reentry and dream theater - my favorite element in all of my workshops - to help heal our soldiers' broken hearts. There is a template here for others to follow. Wanda is an adept of our Active Dreaming techniques, and in some cases was present at their creation. I have shared dreams with her for a quarter century, and she describes the development of our dreaming friendship in her book She Who Dreams, an inspiring personal account of her healing and recovery from breast cancer with the help of Active Dreaming. She has completed my three-year training for teachers of Active Dreaming.
    In today's radio show, Wanda also discusses her research into the dreams of soldiers during the American Civil War, and explains why in that era what is now diagnosed as PTSD was described as "soldier's heart". She is writing a book on this subject, and I believe this will be a significant contribution to making the Secret History of Dreaming less secret. In our conversation, Wanda recalls how she was drawn to her Civil War there after discovering a letter from a Georgia soldier named Henry Graves in which he not only describes a vivid astral dream adventure but insists on the vital importance of dreams and imagination in getting soldiers through the traumas of war.
     The key section of Henry Graves' letter, written to an aunt from Petersburg, Virginia, on August 7, 1862, reads as follows:

"Standing with a spade in my hand on top of a big bank of red clay or with a mattock in a deep broad ditch, I would, in order to pass off time, imagine myself at home with my coat off, sitting out in the east end of the piazza at home, enjoying the cool breeze that almost always is blowing fresh through there, with a basket of peaches at my side and all the homefolk around. This is the way I employ myself when I get into an unpleasant place, and, by this means, the time passes much more swiftly and pleasantly.
    "I don’t know what poor mortals and especially soldier mortals would do if they were not blessed with the gift of imagination and the pictures of hope. There are, besides these two angels of mercy, others fully as welcome and kind, which now and then visit the poor soldier.

     "Night dreams, for instance, are as a general thing much more vivid than day dreams. The sweetest dream I have had for many a day past I had the other night, sleeping on the top of a fence with a rail, not remarkably flat or broad, for my couch and my gun barrel for my pillow (an iron pillow can hardly be called a “downy” one, do you think?).  My dream, of course, had a “goddess,” a sweet little, hazel-eyed girl who lives away down in Georgia and for whom I feel a “very tender feeling” was by my side, my arm was around her waist and her head on my shoulder, and her soft cheek laid most lovingly against mine (the idea of a soft girl cheek laid against my rough, sun burnt, bearded jaw!) and tender words of love were coming from hearts full of love, when alas! alas! The cracking of a stick near by, by an approaching foot, caused me to spring from the embrace of my darling to grasp the cold steel of my gun barrel and from the gentle accents of love to cry out the rough challenge, “Who goes there?” and, instead of the warm breath of the little girl which I had felt on my cheek but a moment before, I wiped from my face the cold night dew and with half a groan I turned me to my rail again."

You can listen to my conversation with Wanda Burch live today at 12:00 pm Eastern (9:00 am Pacific) at healthylife.net, or download from my archive.

Mending soldier's heart

Soldier’s heart, they called it in the American Civil War. It’s the condition of those who have been traumatized by combat. It was called shell shock in World War I, and treated without sympathy, when treated at all. In Spanish, they say of someone with this condition, esta roto, this person "is broken". Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is the diagnostic term today, and it has reached epidemic proportions. We see that in the Pentagon's own statistics for suicide.  So far this year, on average, five active duty military personnel have killed themselves every four days; the numbers are far higher for veterans in general.
     Edward ("Ed") Tick, Ph.D., is one of those who is working to heal our wounded warriors. He is director of Soldier’s Heart, a nonprofit organization dedicated to facilitating the “safe return” of our veterans. He has practiced as a psychotherapist for 28 years. He knows that healing trauma requires the care of hearts and souls. He approaches combat trauma as a "soul wounding". He brings the skills of the shaman, the mythologist and the storymaker into his work; he knows that we can heal body and soul by helping each other to find and tell better stories. 

     Two of his books are on my desk as I write, and I treasure both. The Practice of Dream Healing is a spirited guide to the ancient temples of Asklepian healing, and a passionate appeal to integrate this tradition of sacred medicine into our modern healthcare, in the understanding that "encouraging patients to be in relationship with the sacred fosters their healing". Ed's recent book, War and the Soul, is a searing and essential work that lays out a road map for bringing our lost soldiers home: through cleansing and purification, through ritual and dream quest, through storytelling and through claiming the gift that is in the wound.
    We are in desperate need of healers like Ed Tick. He knows that anyone who has gone through profound trauma - whether on the field of battle or on the battlefields of life - will not be the same. Those we have sent to fight our wars will not and cannot be the same as before. A man or woman who has been sent out as a sanctioned killer, with a good chance of being killed, does not come back as a person who can simply be restored to normal functioning and dropped back into regular life. The transformation of character caused by combat trauma is profound and its effects are likely to be permanent. The warrior, returning, is something other than what he or she was before.
    We owe it to our homecoming warriors to offer them more than medications and therapies that address symptoms but not the soul, and Ed Tick knows where to find what they need. He borrows tools and resources from traditional cultures, those of our ancestors and those of indigenous peoples who preserve the shaman's ways. To make someone ready for war, in the primal understanding, you make him half-crazy. You seek to call into him the killing power and war frenzy of an animal predator; thus, in northern Europe, ancient warriors called in the wildness of the bear in order to go berserk (which literally means to put on the "bear shirt"). When the battles are over, a fighter who has been a sanctioned beast in the field must be carefully de-possessed of that killer spirit, cooled down, and also released from whatever other spirits of battle may be with him, including the ghosts of slain comrades and enemies. And he must be helped to speak of what he has lived through.
    I'll be talking of all this with Ed Tick on my radio show on 9/11, the anniversary of a tragedy that has send so many to fight on dubious ground, and has bequeathed a national trauma that is far from healed. I am glad to report that his work is now acknowledged by the  Department of Defense, which enlisted his help this year to introduce 2,000 military chaplains to his soul-centered approach.
     I celebrate Ed Tick as one of those who truly carries the staff of Asklepios, of whom the poet Pindar wrote that he healed "with the words that soothe men's tormented souls".

On the air: Ed Tick is my guest on my "Way of the Dreamer" radio show on Tuesday, September 11. Please join us for a powerful and timely conversation. You can hear the interview live from 12:00-1:00 PM Eastern (9:00-10:00 AM Pacific) via www.healthylife.net, or download from my archive after the broadcast. 

Graphic: Francisco Goya,  Los desastres de la guerra #18  Enterrar y callar ("Bury them and keep quiet")