I know first-hand
the power of dreams; they have spoken to me for over 30 years
and are a source I know I can trust. Marc Ian Barasch's well
written and researched book is one of the best I have seen to
use dreams in a real way as part of a practice of self-awareness
and connecting with your destiny. I hope this inspires you to
pay attention to your dreams.
Sandra Cosentino
Excerpts from:
Healing
Dreams,
Exploring
the Dreams That Can Transform Your Life
by
Marc Ian Barasch
In the
end, the task of an examined life--the task Healing Dreams set
vividly before us--is ours alone to reject or embrace; which
way we choose makes all the difference in the world.
To take dreams
seriously, enough to act on them, to live by them--is potentially
subversive. Dreams smash down the barricades; they admit all, proscribe
nothing, view life through a different moral aperture. They do not
always flatter us. They are a mirror of human imperfectibility.
they may scare us, reveal our most private terrors. But even a purely
exhilerating dream stirs a different sort of unease--that we
may harbor an unrealized greatness, a potential that, if we dared
fulfill it, would bring an end to ordinary life.
Dreams seem
to insist: You must live truthfully. right now. And always. They
push at the edge of our limitations, urging us toward the wild boundarylands
of the possible.
Most of us
have had (or, inevitably, will have) a 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. But they take their place alongside our most memorable life
events because they're so vivid and emblematic. They constellate
there, emitting a steady, pulsar-like radiance.
The images
of the unconsious are not just fragments or memory or symbols of
repressed inner drives, but have their own mysterious life and speak
to us if we learn to listen. Healing dreams are soul force, truth
medicine. Such dreams disturb us because of their utter refusal
to pander to our fondest motions of ourselves. Healing Dreams offer
few outright prescriptions. They often require us to live our questions
rather than furnish instant answers.
The dream figure
that bears the denied powers of the self often appears sinister.
Yet he may be our secret ally: in spiritual life, what is merely
pleasant can become the egoÕs friction-free way of sliding by without
learning much of anything. By rubbing us the wrong way, the Healing
Dream kindles an inner heat, forcing us to include our obstacles
and adversaries in our process of growth.
Healing Dreams
might be conceived as visits to an other worlds with its own geography
and inhabitants. We are explorers visiting a foreign land. Dream
images thus are experienced in their own right, not just as self-fabricated
symbols. Dreams de-center us from our everyday identity, pushing
us toward a multiplicity of being. Whatever we deem most ridiculous
upon waking is the fulcrum point of what the dream wants to tell
us. Dreams use absurdity to tell the truth when none else dare.
A Healing Dream often comes to redress imbalance. the quickest way
to the heart of a dream is to ask what one-sided conscious attitude
it is trying to offset. Healing Dreams point to the relatedness
of all things, reveling in the union of opposites.
Tribal cultures
say something is lost if we donÕt take our dreams seriously enough
to embody them--that we ignore them at the peril of our souls, if
not our lives. Little by little, if one doesnÕt do what a dream
has directed, one wonÕt be able to dream well anymore.
A Healing
Dream can never be completely interpreted or fully understood. The
alchemy occurs in our interaction with it. When we take our dreams
seriously, their images and feelings subtly begin to alter our waking
lives. Meaning seeps in through a kind of osmosis. We begin
to glimpse the principle that connects each to all. Any sincere
attention and commitment to our dreams renders us spiritually
combustible. What was once inert now strikes sparks.
Healing Dreams
seem to want something of us and often will not let go until they
receive it. These dreams refuse to go quietly, for they mean to
change us utterly. If we look into their depths, we may behold a
unique destiny struggling from its chrysalis, and watch, astonished
and not a little afraid, as our unsuspected selfhood unfolds a new,
wetly glistening wing.
Healing Dreams
want us to stop making sense; not just to crack the case, but
to enter the mystery. We are being confronted with an ancient,
urgent question: not merely what does the dream mean but what
does the dream want? We're engaged not just in the interpretation
of dreams but an interpenetration, a back-and-forth dialogue
between conscious and unconscious. While it is true that interpretation
can, if we are not careful, insulate us from direct experience--can,
in effect, sidetrack us from what is being demanded of us by
our inner lives--without it, we are lost.
Dreams generally
point to our blind spot. They never tell us what we already
know. The trouble with interpreting your own dreams is that
you can't see your own back.
Animal helpers
come in dreams--they crave intimacy, dynamic concouse; they offer
us communion with powers high and low; they make clear, in visons
of the night, that they consider us ever and always their own. They
call us back to the earth, and to earthiness, to our at-homeness
in our bodies. If you follow your dream, humbly, that is where your
real life begins.
The demons
of our dreams put a face on our full human potential for good
or ill. We feel their presence when we are consumed by a powerful
urge, on fire to manifest an idea, or driven by a talent that
craves embodiment. We don't wish to be taken over, yet who does
not long to be seized by a great passion or a transcendent thought?
I most often
experience my dream-self as a responsible, reasonable, even
aggrieved party. It is the Others, whether dazzling or menacing,
sublime or ridiculous, who seem to make all the trouble. But
the dream ego--the part that feels like 'me' in the dream--is
the point of view that's
already known. It it precisely the 'outsiders' of the invisible
community who contain an unknown portion of being. They bear the
unassimilated parts of our personality of which we are most needful,
yet which the ego often deems least worthy--or secretly feels
least worthy of. They splay out before us our unlived lives; immerse
us in unfamiliar feelings and disturbing new perspective, desire
and terrors and wisdom barred to a narrower selfhood. We may ignore
them if they seem too humble, flee from them if they seem too
awful (or too majestic), distance ourselves form them until we
hear only faint echoes of their voices on the breeze. Yet they
remain awaiting only the ripening of our appetite (and fortitude)
for discovery.
A Healing Dream
is a challenge that demands some kind of response, yet it offers
no guarantees. Perhaps this is why dreams do not just come out and
simply tell us what we need to know: knowing the destination. It
is not given to us to arrive without ever departing. Perhaps the
path, a sincere striving to understand more, is the goal.
Articles Index
for
more articles on:
--Colorado
Plateau, Sedona, Pilgrimage, Mystical Nature...
--Healing,
Wellness...
--Hopi, Navajo and other Native American |
posted
Dec. 9, 2002
updated March 3, 2008