Exploring the Power of Healing Dreams

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Healing dreams often involve a sense of the uncanny or paranormal. Within the dream, we may have special powers to telekinetically move objects; receive information as if via telepathy; levitate; transform ourselves into other creatures; visit heavens or hells. Dreamers report out-of-body experiences; actual events foreseen; talking with the departed; having a near-identical dream to that of a friend or loved one; and other strange synchronicities. Such dreams can profoundly challenge our reigning models of reality. My firsthand experience with the precognitive power of dreams forced me to give serious thought to the mystical belief that time is an illusion. We may not be as purely earthbound as we think we are, but beings of another sort, plying a sea of past, present, and future.

Most importantly, healing dreams, if we heed them, can be transformational—creating new attitudes toward ourselves and others, magnifying our spiritual understanding, deepening the feeling side of life, producing changes in careers and relationships, even affecting society itself. After a healing dream, one may never be the same again.

Before my illness, this interplay between the dream world and the real one was at odds with my understanding of how dreams worked. I remembered from my college psychology texts that there were various schools of dream interpretation, although they were seldom on speaking terms with each another. There were what might be called the symbolists, who took dream elements as representations of hidden meanings that could be decoded by a skilled interpreter. On the other hand were the phenomenologists, who said there was nothing hidden behind the curtain—dreams were dress rehearsals of new ways of being and doing, experiences that could in themselves lead to personal growth. And then there were physiological reductionists, who insisted dreams were mere neural discharges, “noisy signals sent up from the brainstem” that created random images. Dr. David Foulkes, a leading proponent of this now-resurgent viewpoint, has written, “The reason why dreamers can't understand what their dreams mean is that they don't mean anything.” The dream, he has suggested, has no “message”; moreover, “if we persist in search for one, we're in the angel-counting business.”

One of the great services rendered by Freud was his stalwart insistence that all dreams were meaningful. Severing dream interpretation from religious dogma, Freud attacked the lingering view that dreams with grotesque or “sinful” images were nonsense or worse. To the contrary, he said, the dreams we find most repellent are the very skeleton keys to self-revelation, and even a commonplace dream, passionately inspected, is a “royal road to the unconscious.”

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