BUY THE BOOK ABOUT THE BOOK CHAPTER EXCERPTS REVIEWS TOUR SCHEDULE MEDIA APPEARANCES PRESS KIT JOIN DREAM LIST AUTHOR BIO AUTHOR INTERVIEW READERS' COMMENTS DREAM FORUM CONTACT   Introduction Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Epilogue

Chapter 7 (Excerpt): THE INVISIBLE COMMUNITY "The recognition that the psyche is self-moving, that it is something genuine which is not yourself, is exceedingly difficult to see and to admit. For it means that the consciousness which you call yourself is at an end.You discover you are not master in your own house, you are not living alone in your own room, there are spooks about that play havoc with your realities, and that is the end of your monarchy." ----Carl Jung If dreams reflect society as a whole, they also are a society unto themselves, inhabited by a teeming populace. Most of the time, they are familiar figures of our lives--friends and enemies, parents and spouses and children and neighbors. Sometimes, however, astonishing, living images---beings---flood in from a source that seems beyond the dreamer's own psyche. The accounts are no less dramatic than the visions which appeared to seekers in the Greek healing temples, of gods whose powers were said to range from guidance and diagnosis to outright cure. We often think of these as moldering dispatches from some long-ago Age of Miracles, their eyewitness accounts ancient versions of Elvis sightings. Where are these gods now? Why do they not make themselves known and speak to us n to our better angels," or behave badly when the devil gets into us, or imagine our conscience perched on our shoulder, but these seem a far cry from the titanic encounters in our religious texts. Our dreams, at least the ones we tell each other, overbrim with what Freud called Tagesreste---the "day-residue" of our jobs, the psychic aftertaste of relationships, the rustlings of quotidian angst. Most of us profess bewilderment over reports by people of other times and cultures that an array of deities, demons, angels, ancestors, celestial teachers and healers once made nocturnal housecalls. But more people have such experiences than may feel comfortable admitting it. The door between the worlds stands as open as ever. I have interviewed a suprising number of individuals who attest to it (often with reluctance, and needful of assurances their sanity will not be questioned). A typical comment is that such dream figures seem "autonomous, acting on their own; they weren't like anyone I'd ever met, or could even make up." Some describe their experiences as blissful. Other times, they inspire the dictionary's definition of awe--- "fear mingled with reverence" ---as in those Annunciation paintings where Mary has her thrown across her face in a vain attempt to deny the bright angel. Members of traditional cultures may have an easier time assimilating such spiritual incursions, for the Otherworld and its denizens have not been banished. When Sylvia was a six-year-old girl on the Cree reserve in Alberta, Canada, she had a searing dream that singled her out, hollowed her to be filled with the age-old wisdom of her tribe. In her dream, she saw an uncle die in a car crash---heard the sickening crunch of metal, the brittle rain of glass on pavement, the man's last, dying groans. A few days later, the tragedy came to pass. Terrified she had somehow caused it, she waited for days before plucking up the courage to tell her beloved grandfather. He responded in the way her tribe's elders have for centuries when a child was discovered to have such a gift. The time had come, he gently told her, to teach her "the way of the dream." Chapter 8: Binding the Wound of Time