Dreams and Healing

All dreams come in the service of health and wholeness.

Jeremy Taylor, D.Min.

The emphasis in the previous blogs has been about dreams and illness; dreams are images of a path towards wholeness.


The next blogs will focus on one type of dreams, the dream of flying.

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Links

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Jeremy Taylor

http://www.jeremytaylor.com/

The Black Panther and Melanoma

Created at www.nga.gov/kids/zone/jungle.htm

A patient had come to him with a terrifying dream in which a black panther had attacked him and sunk its claws into his back “between my shoulder blades just to the left of my spine.” Dr. Royston was nonplussed when the man later developed a melanoma (melanos means “black”) in precisely that same spot.

Healing Dreams, Marc Barasch; Riverhead Books, page 66.

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Once again I came across the theme of aggressive animals, blackness, and cancer.

This particular dream was told to Robin Boynston, M.D., a Jungian analyst in England. After he heard this dream, he started collecting other dreams related to illness. He reportedly has collected approximately four hundred dreams related to illness. He told Barasch, "These are not ordinary dreams, but big dreams, archetypal dreams, so laden with powerful emotional affect that the dreams is forced to take them seriously."

If you have any dreams that foretold medical conditions, please contact me.

The Dream of Henri Rousseau

Henri Rousseau: The Dream; 1910, The Musuem of Modern Art

6'8" by 9'9"

I am writing in response to your friendly letter to explain to you why the couch in question is where it is. The woman asleep on the couch is dreaming she has been transported into the forest, listening to the sounds of the instrument of the enchanter.

Letter from Henri Rousseau to Andre Dupont, 1910

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This blog has focused up to now on the diagnostic aspects of dreams, with some particularly disturbing vivid dreams and nightmares.
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Dreams also contain tremendous healing imagery, and the blogs soon will focus more on the dreams and healing.
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Henri Rousseau was considered a "naive" artist. In spite of his lack of formal art education, his paintings convey a powerful immediacy of experience, as if he is painting from the level of the Unconscious.

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Art has to do with making the invisible visible far more than it has to do with perfect technique. Painting from dreams, whether "naive" or not, can be both healing and powerful. Images drawn from dreams will be featured in latter sections of this blog.

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Henri Rousseau Images

www.artchive.com/artchive/R/rousseau.html#images

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Draw your own Rousseau

www.nga.gov/kids/zone/jungle.htm

The Nightmare

Johann Fussli: The Nightmare; 1781, Detroit Institue of the Arts

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The Old English word mare ('spirit'), from which the latter half of 'nightmare' is derived, eventually came to mean 'succubus'. The connection with the modern notion of a terrifying dream arises from the idea that the nightmare (or night hag, as she was sometimes called) was actually a succubus or an incubus (depending upon the sex of the dreamer) which sat on the breast of the sleeping person and induced such dreams. The etymology of the word has frequently been misunderstood, for the latter half has been taken to refer to the equine 'mare'. This has given rise to images of the nightmare as a demonic horse or horserider.”

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Dictionary Of Demons, by Fred Gettings

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Most of the dreams reported so far in this blog relating to severe physical illness have taking the form of nightmares; however, just because you have a nightmare obviously does not mean that you have a physical illness.

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The average person has one or two nightmares a year. About five percent of the population have frequent nightmares. (Frequent and recurrent nighmares are also a sign of post-traumatic stress disorder.)

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Again, as mentioned in an earlier blog, there is a Naitonal Nightmare Hotline, run by the folks of Cydreamwork:

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1-866-376-7911

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www.cyberdreamwork.com/nat.nightmarehotline.html

Attacking Dogs and Cancer

Cerebrus and Hercules (Sebald Beham, 1545)

A illustration of recurring nightmares comes from the professional practice of a Jungian analyst, Dr. Hal Stone.

Cancer patients, who were engaged in medical treatment, were often referred to Hal by progressive physicians for his dream work, as it might be helpful to their patients in their healing.. One patient was a woman who was being treated for stomach cancer…After suggesting to the patient that she begin recording her dreams, she replied, “Oh, I’ve been recording my dreams for years.”… Dr. Stone and his patient began to look for patterns in the past, as well as revelations in the present.

To the patient’s surprise, for the meaning of it had never occurred to her, they discovered a recurring nightmare that began about two years prior to the clinical diagnosis of stomach cancer. The recurring nightmare was of a dog tearing at her stomach!

Healing as a Sacred Path, L. Robert Keck Ph.D; Chryslis Books; page 248.

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This is the third dream that I have come across and written about in this blog of an animal tearing at the stomach area that preceded a diagnosis of cancer. Additionally, these cancer dreams tend to be repetitive nightmares. (I would suggest that having three nightmares about the same thing is a fairly strong message.)

Why would dog attacking the body be a symbol of cancer? Dogs are usually loyal, positive creatures; it is a betrayal of the body for the internal dog to turn on its owner.

Cerebrus was the three-headed dog/monster that guarded the entrance to Hades; Hercules twelfth task was to kidnap this beast. However, the god Pluto told him he could only do this if he did not use any weapons; Hercules wrapped his arms around the dog and wrestled him to ground. Cancer is indeed a type of hell, a battle for the soul, perhaps something that can only be faced heroically.

Rust, Cancer and the Kitchen

Cancer of the colon is shown as mutated and usually slow moving animals. Often they are shown in a dead forest or forest in fall. Snakes or worms under the cooker in the kitchen or rust eating into a kitchen appliance indicate the same thing. Crows or rats eating into the back door of the house indicate cancer of the rectum (the back door of the body).

Michael Sheridan, http://www.dream-analysis.com/

This is the most detailed description of dreams and cancer I have come across. (Note the similarity between his desciption here and the Darth Vader dream mentioned three blogs ago.) Michael Sheridan has a radio show in Ireland where he interprets dreams. He is astoundingly matter-of-fact about his interpretations.

It would be critically important to see this type of material as “evidence-based medicine," which is the new watchword for medical practice. The evidence right now is mostly anecdotal; what are the chances of doctors both asking about your dreams and starting to do medical research about them?

Evidence Based Medicine

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence-based_medicine

Photo credit

www.trekearth.com/gallery/North_America/Canada/photo358117.htm

Dream Images of Cancer

Some time ago, an old man came to me because of my interest in dreams and cancer. His wife had just died of cancer, and he wanted to tell me something that he thought might be important. Prior to his wife's diagnosis, she began to have terrible nightmares filled with conflagrations and vicious, pursuing animals. She woke in the night screaming in response to dream images of dogs tearing at her stomach, fires burning her flesh, and other horrors. These nightmarish experiences lasted about two weeks. Several months later she was diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer. and within three months she was dead. The old man told me: "You know, those dreams were the beginning of it. The cancer was announcing itself. I felt the truth of it in my bones. But people won't listen to an old man."

Cancer in Myth and Dreams; Russell A. Lockhart, in Psychotherapeutic Treatment of Cancer Patients, edited by Jane G. Goldberg, Page 18.

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Similar to other diagnostic dreams mentioned in this blog, there are images of vicious animals, terror, fire often associated with serious disease.

,A Russian psychiatrist, Dr. Vasily Kasatkin, reviewed ten thousand dreams form 1200 subjects. These were his findings regarding common features produced in dreams by physical illness:

• Illness is associated with an increase in dream recall


• Illness causes dreams to become distressful and to include nightmarish or violent images of war, fire, blood, corpses, tombs, raw meat, garbage, dirty water, or references to hospitals, doctors, and medicines.


• These dreams generally appear before the first symptoms of the illness.


• Dreams caused by illness are longer than distress dreams caused by ordinary annoyances and persist throughout the night and throughout the duration of the illness


• The content of the dream can reveal the location and seriousness of the illness.

(Cited in Our Dreaming Mind, by R. Van De Castle, page 363.)

Kasatkin's Theory of Dreams, published in 1967, has never been translated into English. Again, how is it that the medical world is ignoring this important source of information? Could there be something missing in the medical model and treatment of illness?