The question of whether dreams can be used for healing purposes is one that has intrigued many people throughout the ages. The Bible, folklore, another recorded elements of history recount many instances of the power of dreams, such as Joseph’s precognitive awareness of famine and pestilence in Egipt and his ability to convince the pharaoh to prepare for the same. Yet the question of whether dreams can be used for actual healing purposes remains. Surely in the sense of self-healing dreams can be used and are often without the dreamer himself being aware of it it since science seems to show that dreaming itself is necessary for health, and the dream-deprived person can incurr serious illness. However the question posed here is on an even broader scale than whether an individual can use his /her own dreams for healing purposes. Can dreams be used for the purposes of healing someone else? The tales in the early Christian church of saints coming in form of dreams or vision for the purpose of healing are almost too numerous to mention. And there certainly does seem to be the propensy for some particurarly talented dreamers to select the desitination of their dreaming and unerringlly attend to some chosen task. When I first moved to Virginia Beach met a woman –let us call her Andrea– a rather ordinary mother of three or four grown children who had returned to college to finish a graduate degree in psychology. At first she kept quiet about her ability to perform healings, but finally found her professors so interested that she began to talk an even submitted to a variety of psychological tests. Which proved she was normal. She had not medical training. Two people with whom I was familiar went to Andrea with medical problems. One had a severe case of herpes, the other a tumor which doctors wanted to remove for fear of malignancy. In both cases the patients went to Andrea asking to be admitted to her”hospital”. Andrea, who seldom admitted when questioned that she was awared of the patients existence in her dream reality and would administer to her patients eitheir at their home or in her dream hospital. In the case of the “herpes”, the individual seems to show improvement until he again began to produce the conditions which had created the disease itself. In the second case, the case of the tumor, the patient recovered completely. In addition to nightly treatments in the “hospital”, Andrea treated her patients regularly in the waking world with a method know in religious communities as “laying of hands”. The primary modern definition of the method used by “holy” persons throughout the ages, is that “the spirit” of God directs energy through the healer to the patient of the individual being healed. Examined by the same doctors who planned to perform surgery, the woman who had daily seen the desintegation of her tumorous growth was told her recovery was strange and miraculous. She did not inform them of her unorthodox treatment. Another man, a Boston-bread healer who worked with Poseida Institute for a time, came to me one day with the question,”Do you think is possible to heal people from the dream state? I asked him why the question. The previous night, he said, his wife has been experiencing a severe pain in her leg. He had done what he could using ordinary relaxation techniques and then had himself gone to sleep. During the night he had the following dream experience. He was examining his wife’s leg, looking at it almost if he has X-ray vision. Once having located the source of the pain, he said, it was seeing balls of energy. Points of light worked upon the pain until it dissappearred. When he awoke his wife was feeling fine. There was no doubt in my mind that this man had a healing ability. Always relatively humble,and questioning, he told the story of his first healing experience which happened among dozens of witnesses. He had been attending a conference on healing where participants were taught and allowed to practice healing techniques on one to another. At one point in the conference a woman had taken the role of patient while my friend played the role of healer. When he finished she said she felt much better, and since it was lunch time he suggested that they oo get some lunch together. As they walked down the drive together talking, he noticed that they were being followed by a woman in a car but not give it much though until they arrive at the restaurant, a short walk away.The driver of the car was the woman’s sister who arrived with tears of joy on her face. It seems that the patient had for some time suffered from a debilatating heart disease and for years had not been able to walk more than a few steps without assistance. And there again, the question of time, space and reality creation of our thoughts and feelings, is it ever possible to cure some one or make them sick? This became a very central question in some research work jointly by two organizations in the Unites States, one of them the Poseida Institute. The process was quite straightforward. During a given period of time the next local person who came to Poseida Institute requesting a psychic reading would be offered the bonus of becoming involved in the Dream Helper Project. This meant that, as well as the requested psychic reading, the individual would receive pre-sessions and post sessions counselling with one of the PI psychologists, would meet a dream team composed of seven members of both institutions, and for at least two sessions of “dream helper” work, and that psychic readings as well would be done on the Dreams Helper process. The purpose of the experiment what two fold: one to determine whether these dreams helpers could intuit what the target individuals’ problem was without verbal assistance.
Black Elk The American Indians have always believed in in the healing power of dreams and one of the best-known Indian. Historical figures is Black Elk, an Oglala sioux immortalized by prize winning author John Neihardt. When Black Elk was nine years old, he said, he became ill with sickness that started with a weakening of his legs and then his entire body became swollen and puffy. At first, when the tribe was moving, he carried in a ponny drag: and finally, when the tribe settled, he was sick in his family tepee. For twelve long days and nights he lay in a delirium and was not expected to live.. It was during this time that Black Elk had his greates vision of his tribe, one which would sustain him for the rest of his life. During this vision he perceived himself to be in his body, but his legs did not hurt him and his body was very light. In this vision Black Elk saw the Powers of the World. These Powers imparted their powers to him and he saw the history of the hoop of the indians nations, an event which led him to visionary historical predictions troughout lifetime. Finally, his vision completed, he found himself alone on a broad plain. He could see his family’s own teepe village far ahead and began to walk toward it, finally entering his own teepe where he saw his parents bending over a sick boy who was himself. Someone was saying,” The boy is coming. You’d better give him some water”. In typical Indian tradition, Black Elk had been attended by the tribal medicine man, Whirlwind Chaser, and Black Elk’s parents insisted that it had been Whirlwind Chaser who effected the cure. The medicine man was given the family’s best horse and there was much talked about his power and ability. “I knew it was the Grandfather in the Teepe (of his vision) who had cure me” Black Elk is quote that saying, “but I feel afraid to say so “. An this bring us to the important question of who does the curing. Is it the healer, the doctor, the surgeon, the medicine man? Or is the patient? Ordinarly our answer would be, as it was in the case of Black Elk’s parents, the medicine man.Yet, according to Black’s Elk’s insistence, it was the curative power of the dream itself that made him well. Once the individual, a young college girl, was selected the dream team met with her one evening for meditation. Introductions were made (Some of the dream team members were also previously unacquainted.) and the group meditated together for a brief period of time. Each member of the group was then asked to go home, write down any intuitive impressions of the target individual and then record whatever dreams came during the night’sleep.The next day being Saturday, the group, would again meet and discuss their dreams and impressions. Prior to dreaming at all, five picked up the problem involved a trauma or risk, out of the seven dream helpers recorded no intuitive feelings(The other two dream helpers recorded no intuitive feelings). Four felt that this trauma had to do with difficulties in the pelvic area and two saw this as having to do with children or the lost of a child. The group was later to discover that the girl was facing a traumatic conflict of involvement with an older married man, about whom her family knew nothing and would certainly not approve; that she had indeed been experiencing difficulties with her reproductive organs for which she had been seing a physician; and that earlier, in high school, she had experience a traumatic abortion which very few people were aware of outside other immediate family (including tha man in question). Bear in mind then that even before hearing the dreams, the girl found herself somewhat surprised by their intuitive impressions the group forth. During the discussions of the dreams (which were too numerous to report here in full) the dream team found their dreams centered around several themes which included: 1: cars with broken engined, 2:fires or explosions, 3: earthquakes or earth splits, 4: foreing objets, 5: other dream team members, 6: children at play or young people, and 7: energy in a circular motiion. As the discussion of the dream proceeded, the dream team members also discovered that there were certain philosophical and emotional conflicts between them which were stimulated by the target individual’ problems and depicted in the dreams. The Dreams Helper Project was about and what be accomplished in terms od healing; yet the project certainly reiterated what to me seem to be important concepts such as: 1. There is no healing exept self-healing. 2. There is no self except that which includes all of us. Pesonally self is, in the final analysis. illusory. 3. We exist in what is called here “the mind of God”, a timeless, spaceless universe where in all things available to us. 4. Working within this concept, within this approach to dreaming can aid in the healing not only of someone who consides himself/herself to have a serious illness, but in the whole universe since we inter-connected. 5. Projects such as this are a new and unique method of approaching the ills of the world. I feel that something should be said about the problems of research within a structure such as the Dreams Helper Project outline here (and any similar project). This problem was encountered almost immediately by the scientific in the group, and it is the problem of how to statiscally record and analyse the results of such work. First of all, from the pre- dream intuitions of the dream helpers, it was obviuos that many of them perceived upon first meeting, without dreaming and without conversation, some or all was troubling the target person. Secondly, may of the dreams semed to center around these focal themes, and the target person seemed to be helped, but how could one ever prove it? The answer given to this question is that one cannot prove it.Further, one cannot “prove anything” by current statistical methods, that depend on the desires of the researchers and the participants. In a psichic reading about the Dreams Helper Project, and example was given. Two dreams, the reading said, might talk about chairs. One of the dreams might symbolize the matter discussed in the healing project: the other might symbolized something entirely different. Later one of the directors of the project, reported a conversation with Dr. Rober Van de Castle of the University of Virginia Sleep Research Laboratory. The two had spoken for over half an hour, using quite different words to express the same concepts. The later agreed that, had their conversation been recorded and then analysed by a researcher for symbolic content, there search might not have been able to tell that they were talking the same subject. Recognizing that this is some what distressing thought for researchers, the psychic went on to say in a further reading that, since scientific, methot is so respected, and indeed almost worshipped by many who feel nothing is reliable without it, it is certainly possible to devise research which proves scientifically whatever is desired. The pragmatism comes off some what easier in this situation with belief that “if works use it”.Undoubtely the Dreams Helper Project and experiments like it are powerful tools for group interaction and for the healing which can result.
Jean Campbell is a moderator for the Association of the Study of Dreams online Bulletin Board - www.asdreams/org- and co-chairs the ASD Development Comittee. An educator, dream worker and writer. She conducts individual sessions and workshops in Dreams/Body Work.. She is a moderator of the World Peace Bridge and CEO of the Image Project. www.imageproject.org. JCCampb@aol.com