Exploring the Power of Healing Dreams

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I had always been, in an unreflective way, a Freudian when it came to dream analysis. Dreams were elaborate concealments of the sex- and power-hungry id: Rip away the guise and there, invariably, would be the glowering features of our instinctual being. According to Sigmund Freud's “sexual theory,” which he championed over all other interpretive approaches, a dream, whether horrifying, ecstatic, or just plain baffling, had predictable mechanisms and symbols that could be deciphered.

Yet these dreams had made me feel utterly out of my depth. They had almost mystically anticipated events. (Had it been pure coincidence I'd dreamed that a Chinese surgeon took a “bullet” from my neck, and months later, a real Chinese surgeon—a Dr. Wang, the country's premier thyroid specialist and the spitting image of my dream doctor—had operated to remove my tumor?) They had galvanized me to act, almost against my will. What kind of dreams were these?

Most of us have had (or will have) at least one dream that 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. 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 old age, we may count them on one hand, yet they take their place alongside most memorable life events because they are so vivid and emblematic.

In the 15 years since I began my exploration, modern researchers have begun using a host of terms—impactful, transformative, transcendent—to differentiate these big dreams from ordinary ones. In fact, as I had learned, many ancient cultures made the same distinction. I coined the term healing dreams, because they seem to have a singular intensity of purpose: to lead us to embrace our deepest contradictions—between flesh and spirit, self and other, shadow 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, healing 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.

I'd had what psychologists call “prodromal” dreams, which anticipate a medical problem not yet clinically detected. But our healing dreams extend far beyond matters of physical health—indeed, they are a distinct category of experience, with their own special character. Like drama, they often have unusually coherent narrative structures. Islamic dream texts refer to ordinary dreams as azghas—literally, “handfuls of dried grass and weeds,” signifying a lack of arrangement. These differ from the more coherent messages of ahkam (“genuine inspirations from the Deity, warnings from a protecting power, or revelations of coming events”). Storytelling in healing dreams tends to be more artful, containing a rich array of literary or cinematic devices—subplots, secondary characters, sudden reversals and surprise endings, flashbacks and flash-forwards, even voice-over narration and background music.

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