Chapter 1 |
Chapter 1 (excerpt):
What is a Healing Dream? Defining the Indefinable
Most of us have had (or inevitably, will have) at least one dream in our lives which stops us in our tracks. Such dreams tell us that we're not who we think we are. They reveal dimensions of experience beyond the everyday. They may shock us, console us, arouse us, or repulse us. They take their place alongside our most memorable life events because they're vivid and emblematic. Some are like parables, setting off a sharp detonation of insight; others are like gripping mystery tales, drawing us into the unknown; and still others are like mythic dramas, or horror stories, or even uproarious jokes. In our journey from childhood to age, we may count them on one hand; yet once they have flared in the soul, they constellate there, emitting a steady, pulsar-like radiance. The number of people I have discovered grappling with these powerful inner experiences, often well below the social radar, has astounded me. In a time when the individual psyche is increasingly colonized by mass culture, when media images with little real bearing on our lives seem intent on replacing our dreams wholesale, here is an interior beachhead, an unvoiced parallel existence dreamers may not share even with their closest loved ones. I noted how often they described striking dreams in a self-devised lexicon: deep dreams; vibrational dreams; strong dreams; flash dreams; TV dreams (a South African priestess); lucky-feeling dreams (a dog breeder in Quebec).A black folk artist named Sultan Rogers, famous for his fancifully erotic woodcarvings, refers to his most powerful dreams as "Futures," so filled are they with the urgency to be manifest in the world. (He makes a point of carving them immediately upon waking, while the images are still fresh.) A Zulu traditional healer (sangoma) I met in a Johannesburg coffeeshop told me about his "talking dreams." A Salish Indian healer in Oregon described her "true dreams" over a formica kitchen table crowded with kin. Yet many I spoke with displayed a genuine reticence about discussing their dreams, as if exposing them to daylight might stunt a final germination still to come. Famed Jungian analyst Marion Woodman declined to share a dream that she believed helped heal her of a serious physical illness, because, she murmured, "I cannot let others into my holy of holies." Some said they feared the professional consequences of being seen as overly attentive to dreams. "I'm in the midst of putting together a multi-million dollar deal based on a dream I had ten years ago," one man confided. This shattering vision had given him his spiritual and temporal marching orders. It became the polestar of his life. "But it wouldn't do," he said, shaking his head,"for my partners to think I'm relying on invisible consultants." In the fifteen years since I began my exploration, a nascent field of research has arisen, along with a host of terms--- "impactful," "significant," "transformative," "titanic," "transcendent"---to differentiate big dreams from ordinary ones. I have coined the term Healing Dreams, because they seem to have a singular intensity of purpose: to bring the dreamer into greater harmony with what Jung called Totality, the goal of psychological development; to embrace our deepest contradictions---between flesh and spirit, self and other, darkness and light---in the name of wholeness. The very word for dream in Hebrew---chalom---derives from the verb "to be made healthy or strong.'" With remarkable consistency, such dreams proclaim that we live on the merest outer shell of our potential, and that the light we seek can be found in the darkness of a yet unknown portion of our being. Jung labeled them "numinous" (from the Latin numen, meaning divine command), but often just used the to-the-point shorthand, "big." While most dreams, he wrote, were "nightly fragments of fantasy," thinly veiled commentaries on "the affairs of the everyday," these big dreams were associated with major life passages, times when the old self was dying and a new one was yet to be born. I have discovered that most cultures have an awed terminology for dreams of surpassing power. The Greek New Testament, for example, contains more words for inner experience than Eskimos have for snow: Onar (a vision seen in sleep as opposed to waking); Enypnion (a vision seen in sleep that comes by surprise); Horama (which could refer to visions of the night, sleeping visions, or waking visions); Horasis ( a supernatural vision); Optasia (a supernatural vision that implies the Deity revealing Himself); and so on).By and large the English language has been impoverished of a working vocabulary; we have little at hand beyond "dream" and "nightmare." Given our cultural paucity, I have had to struggle to define and describe these signal experiences, relying at first on my own dreams, then upon extensive personal interviews and scattered written accounts in the literature of anthropology, psychology, and spirituality. "How do you know when you've had a special dream?" I once asked a Choctaw Indian acquaintance named Preston, a humorous man whose rubbery features can somehow provoke laughter with the tiniest shift in expression. His role in his tribe, he told me, was as a "backwards-person"---a trickster and comedian---but he grew uncharacteristically serious at my question. "These vision-dreams are things that you follow," he said. "Things that you do. They show you a situation that needs to be taken care of, and how to turn it around." ... few forces in life present, with an equal sense of inevitability, the bare knuckle facts of who we are, and the demands of what we might become. Healing Dreams are what Hindus call satyagryaha---soul force, truth medicine. They thrust upon us realities obscured by our propensity to smooth things over, to sell ourselves short, to split the difference between what we deep-down know and what we prefer to believe. Such dreams disturb us because of their utter refusal to pander to our fond notions of ourselves. |
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