Exploring the Power of Healing Dreams

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I took a sabbatical from my job. My days filled with a procession of friends, relatives, colleagues, and medical experts, each bearing conflicting advice, none willing to give my dreams their due. I could scarcely blame them. If I couldn't understand my bizarre visions, how could anyone else? But I felt doubly a pariah, self-exiled from an inner world I could not comprehend, yet regarded with suspicion by those who thought I was giving my dreams too much importance. I drove people to distraction trying to explain how these dreams were different—deeper, wider, higher, more real—but they didn't seem to know what I was talking about.

One evening before falling asleep, I scribbled, in some desperation, a formal request in the dream notebook I'd started to keep: What is the direction of a cure? That night, I had a startling vision: Under the ground a white, snakelike worm is turning in upon itself in a perfect spiral. When its head reaches the center, blinding rays of light shoot out, and a voice solemnly intones: “You have been living on the outer shell of your being—the way out is the way in!”

The image was as repulsive as a moldering grave (“The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out” goes the childhood sing-song). I would come to understand much later that the worm was an ancient, archetypal image of the spiraling inner journey often framed as a kind of death and rebirth. But at the time, if I sought anything from my dreams, it was specifics: I wanted status reports on my illness, with symbols as clear as those on a TV weather map, not these mysterious hieroglyphs. My medical quest—finding the most accurate diagnosis, the best doctor, the ultimate cure—was tough enough. Now, when I was feeling that I needed to stay outwardly focused, my dreams were pulling me deeper within. In the weeks and months that followed, the conflict became ever more maddening. In the end, I chose surgery as much to still my dreams as to save my life.

The operation was more traumatic than I had anticipated. My cure left me wounded in body and spirit. I was unable and finally unwilling to step back on the merry-go-round of ambition. Driven by a journalist's curiosity and a need to feel less alone, I spent a decade interviewing hundreds of patients and doctors, plunging into the literatures of medicine and mythology, seeking new compass points for the healing process, and a new map of my soul. I eventually wrote two books on the mind-body connection, and found myself in a new career as a quasi-medical expert. But even after years of conscientious probing, I was haunted by a mystery. What had been the source of the torrent of images that had threatened to submerge me even as I struggled for my life?

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