The Healing Path

.

The top of my head has been drilled with three, neat bloody holes. An iron pot filled with red-hot coals has been hung under my chin. My arms are tied with a length of clear plastic tubing. “We are going to boil your brains out”, one of my invisible torturers announces. His voice is flat, matter-of-fact; he is a technician, not a sadist. I feel the heat sear my throat and I scream, the sound becoming hoarser, a raw animal desperation, as the coals gnaw my larynx. “Please God” though I can’t now believe in God—“ Please..." I feel an emotion I have never known in my waking life – complete hopelessness; a black, no-exit despair…..

I have cancer, I blurt out, before I can think about it. I have cancer growing in my throat….

When I told the doctor I had cancer, he looked at me quizzically… I told him of the increasingly weird dreams I had been having... It was then he found the lump…. A few weeks later the tests showed thyroid cancer.

The Healing Path, Marc Ian Barasch

I came across this dream, in the prologue of Barasch's book, a week after I started this blog about dreams and diagnosis. Carl Jung claimed that when he started working on an essay about the aborigines of Australia, he suddenly started all sorts of related material in the mail; this was part of his belief in synchronicity.

There are a lot more dreams in Barasch’s book; it is quite a story about dreams and healing. I am at a loss for words.

.

For more in depth material about dreams, go to:

.