|
Dream Healing
by Maggie Macary
Originally printed in Raven’s Call Volume 1, Number 2
My head pounds as I gasp frantically for air. Running,
running, running so fast through the darkness, danger in quick
pursuit. I can feel the branches scratch my body as I scramble
through a thicket, hoping to find protection there. I tried to
hold onto my labored breath as I feel him come closer and closer
to me. I feel like a small, trembling animal and he is my
hunter. I close my eyes and wrap my arms and legs around my
body, trying to make myself smaller. My mind focuses on being
invisible, but I can hear his breath now, his nose sniffing me
out, trying to locate me in the mass of branches and leaves.
types of experience.
No, he mustn't find me. No. No. No! A deep breath and I
awaken with a start, my body still trembling. It was just a
dream, I tell myself. Just a dream, but what is a dream? Is it
leftover fantasies and seeping of neurotic material from my
psyche? Is it a vision, an oracle warning me about potential
danger, a message from the Gods? Is it a remnant of past-life
experiences?
The nature of dreams fascinates me. What are dreams and how
do they impact our lives? How can they heal our psyches and
provide us with oracular visions to guide us along our paths? In
the course of investigating the concept of dreams, I looked
deeply into the dream incubation rituals that were a primary
source of healing in the Greek sanctuaries of Asclepius. That
lead me to ask, how did the Greeks viewed dreams and how did
this view lead to the ritualizing of dream incubation as a form
of healing? How do we, who walk ancient paths, acknowledge our
dreams and use them to heal? And finally, how have dreams and
dream healings influenced modern and postmodern depth
psychology. Where can psychology evolve so that it respects the
dream world?
Dreams and waking life are two distinct types of experiences,
neither one more important or significant than the other,
neither one more real than the other. For the ancient Greeks,
the dreamer did not have a dream, but was in fact a witness to
an event, an observer of an experience (Meier iii). The figures,
oneiros, and images, eidolon in dreams are independent of the
dreamer, who is a passive recipient of the message (Dodds 104).
It is difficult for modern people to grasp this concept. Dreams
are not part of the dreamer's subconscious or leftover remnants
of the day, but rather totally separate events that occur
outside our waking world. Oneiros who appear as a
brother-in-laws, or neighbors or bosses are not representations
of these people or aspects of the self, but potentially the Gods
in disguise, walking through our visions. In dreams, the soul is
free to receive visions, divine messages. In dreams, the health
of the dreamer is reflected. In dreams, the Gods speak to us.
As Greek thought and history evolved, so did the concept of
the dream, moving from a mystical to a rationalized explanation
of what dreams are and how they are used in healing. Hippocrates
taught that in sleep the soul (psyche) is unrestricted and has
all the psychological and physiological functions at her
disposal. In this unrestricted state, the soul could perceive
the causes of illness in images during sleep. Hippocrates also
believed that there were two types of dreams; divinely inspired
dreams that come from the Gods, and the dreams in which the soul
perceives the bodily condition, Aristotle (384 - 322 cultures
today. BCE) considered the dream to be the result of the
affectation of the koinon aistheterion, the heart as the central
seat of representations, by those minimal movements during sleep
left over from the waking activities of the senses. Aristotle
believed that the dream is an incentive to the future actions of
the dreamer (Meier 114). Poseidonius (135 — 51 BCE) stated that
the divine has three ways of acting upon man in dreams: (1) The
soul may see the future by virtue of its own god-dreams; (2) the
air is full of immortal souls carrying obvious signs of truth,
which penetrate the sleeper's system through the channels (poroi)
of the senses; and (3) the Gods themselves talk to the sleepers
(Meier 115). Dreams come either from the Gods or from demons or
from the activity of the soul itself.
Regardless of the source of dreams, ancient as well as modern
people have always looked to dreams as a source of answers to
life's problems. And, if dreams can potentially give answers,
then it is natural to seek ways of stimulating the dream state.
Such techniques include isolation, fasting, prayer,
self-mutilation and sleeping on the skin of a sacrificed animal
or in contact with a holy object. In later antiquity, oracle
dream-books suggested sleeping with a branch of laurel under the
pillow (Dodds 110). Laurel is a shrub sacred to Apollo and it
has strong divination qualities conferring the powers of second
sight. The Pythoness at Delphi delivered her prophecies in
Ancient Greece after having chewed or burned laurel leaves.
Dream incubation is one of the oldest healing methods, still
in use in some cultures today. To incubate comes from the Latin,
incubare — to lie down on (Dictionary.com). The earliest forms
of dream incubation occurred when people lay down to sleep in
caves, which were holy places (Dodds 111).
Caves or caverns are symbolic of the world in Greek
initiatory traditions and are a symbol of the womb and of
rebirth (Chevalier 166-169). The linking of caves to the
chthonic appears in many myths, where the cave is the opening to
the underworld. Caves and openings in the earth are places where
the Kens, small winged creatures, the angry ghosts of the
underworld, could escape. The primitive Greeks believed that the
Keres could cause disease including nightmares (Harrison 167).
The concept of the Keres is important in understanding the role
of dreams in disease and healing since in Olympic times, the
Keres were the ghosts of the underworld, sprites who, in fact,
brought disease. In earlier times, prior to the rationalism of
the Olympic age, the Keres were also magic creatures that seemed
to present fates or destiny to mankind. (Harrison 163-165).
Perhaps Keres are related to the di manes of Roman belief, the
spirits of the underworld that can be both demon and daimon. If
that is the case, then dreams of all kinds can be caused by the
Keres, both dreams that bring illness and dreams that bring
health and goodness. As the more rational Olympian gods emerged,
only the thunder of Zeus or the arrows of Apollo could slay the
Keres (167). In a like curing like situation, the ancients
sought out caves where disease and nightmare originated, in
order to provoke cures. The Greeks brought the concept of dream
oracles and dream healing to a new level, linking the god of
healing, Asclepios to dream oracles. Asclepios is himself linked
to the underworld by his mythos. The son of Apollo, the god of
divination and prophecy, Asclepios, as a mortal, learns healing
from the centaur Chiron and begins to heal so well that he soon
begins to raise the dead. Zeus strikes Asclepius down for this
affront but raises him again, conquering death to become
immortal (Edelstein 140). The mythical association with death
and healing is implicit in linking Asclepius to incubation
cures. For who better to cure those who are afflicted by ghosts
of the underworld, than a god-healer who has experienced death
and the ghosts of the underworld?
The healing temples of Asclepius numbered in the hundreds,
but Epidaurous held the highest distinction. The sanctuary at
Epidaurous was a distance from the city, marking it as a holy
place - apart from the profaneness of city life. The temple was
not only sacred to Asclepius but also to Apollo, indicative of
the role that divination plays in healing. High hills, unusually
well wooded circle the plain. This puts the temple in a natural
omphalos, at the center of the world with surround by sacred
groves (Meier 68). To be truly spiritually, truly attached to
the sacred, is to live as close as possible to the Center of the
true world, in sacred space. In the Center, the spiritual person
finds orientation and reality. Life has direction, meaning and
focus. The spiritual person is called "centered," meaning well
balanced and aligned. It makes sense that to find healing, one
must go to the center, to the navel of die world where there is
sacred space. At Epidaurous, mere was a theatre for pleasure, a
gymnasium for healthy exercise, baths for rituals and cleansing,
and of course, the Abaton where patient went to experience the
ritual of the dream oracle. The Abaton, a special temple
building means "place not to be entered unbidden" (Meier 52).
Only those who are called can seek the cure. Perhaps modern
psychotherapy reflects this in some way, since one needs to feel
a call in order to seek out a therapist and in fact, maybe the
therapist's office is a "place not to office is a "place not to
be entered unbidden?"
The dream ritual was simple. The patient or a person acting
in his or her behalf came in quest of the god's help, bathed and
offered sacrifices. If a sign or a vision called them, the
patient went to the Abaton, dressed in their usual apparel. The
patient then proceeded to a ritual bath whose purpose was to
free "... the soul from the contamination of the body and thus
set the soul free for communion with the god" (Meier 50).
Entering the Abaton the patient laid down on a kline or couch, a
foreshadowing of the Freudian use of the couch in analysis
(Meier 51). The healing dreams did not need to be interpreted,
so there were no interpreters in the Temple. But often the
patient would dream of a snake or dog (sacred to Asclepius) or
would dream of the god himself. In the morning they would wake
and tell the priests what dreams occurred. If they did not dream
of the god or a cure in the first nights, they were often deemed
incurable (Meier 54). Once they had experienced a cure, they
were expected to make a sacrifice to Asclepius in gratitude.
Burkert, in writing about mystery traditions, seems to have
summed up the experience of Asclepian cures:
There is an agonizing experience of distress, the search for
some escape or help, the decision of faith; not rarely, votive
inscriptions refer to supernatural intervention in decision
making to dreams, visions, or divine command; and after all
there is the experience of success. (13)
Despite the medical world's need for scientific rationality,
this above description is not unlike what analysands sometimes
experience in psychotherapy. The concept of dream and miraculous
cures, the whole realm of theurgic medicine slowly began to fall
away from the medical community with the Enlightenment, as the
medical establishment moved away from the mystical to the
scientific (Ellenberger 197). Becoming skeptical of any kind of
miraculous cure, scholars around the middle of the eighteenth
century no longer accepted the omnipotence of the Gods or the
interference of demons. Miraculous healings could be explained
in rational terms. Dreams became something to analyze and
interpret by breaking them down into residues of the day or
repressions or wish fulfillments (Freud) or by examining them as
one-sided compensations (Jung) or an opposite looking to waking
life for it's counterpart (Hillman 77-79).
The concept of a dream experience in of itself as a
significant event that does not need interpretation or
dissecting to become valid has been missing in modern life and
in psychology. It is in James Hillman's work with archetypal
psychology, that we begin to see once more how dream experiences
can somehow enrich our lives and cure our ills.
We work on the dream, not to unravel it as Freud said, to
undo the dream-work's undoing, but to respond to its work with
the likeness of our work, all the while aiming to speak like the
dream, imagine like the dream (Hillman 130).
Hillman says we can have analysis without deconstructing and
tearing apart a dream (130), without losing the depth of this
chthonic experience (140). Imagine a scenario in which a patient
approaches a healing place. Perhaps it is the therapist's
office.
Perhaps it is a healing resort. Perhaps it is a hospice. He
or she finds himself or herself in a place of exquisite beauty.
There is music and incense, lovely trees and flowering plants.
"Sanctuary," comes into ones mind, sacred space. The patient
finds a place to lay down in the sacred space: safe and serene,
ready to receive a dream or a daydream or a vision of hope, a
vision of cure, a vision of promise. No one breaks it apart. No
one tells the patient about repression or compensation. The
point of the dream is the experience. And the experience of the
dream is in fact the cure.
Dreams are important experiences, ones that we should pay
attention to with the equal devotion we pay to waking life. They
bring us insight and knowledge, wisdom and forewarning. Dr.
Skafte, a noted psychotherapist, author, and professor has
developed a modern version of the dream oracle experience,
utilizing ancient methods. Her process divides the experience
into distinct phases:
-
Decision: Having a clear
question or need in mind.
-
Preparation: Separating from
the normal routine by ceasing daily activities, including
eating for 12 hours before going to sleep, and then bathing
in salt water. Dr. Skafte suggests sleeping somewhere
besides your own bed, outdoors in a sacred space if possible
and utilizing bedding that might have some spiritual
meaning.
-
Sacrifice: Providing offerings
to the unseen forces as a way of establishing reciprocity.
-
Asking: Using tones of sound
and letting the words resonate.
-
Dreaming: Allowing the dream
to happen and then recording it immediately upon wakening.
As in ancient times, don't try to interpret the dream,
experience it for its message.
-
Thank Offering: An extremely
important act of reciprocity, which completes the experience
(Skafte 123-133).
It is important to remember that as Jung says, we do not have
dreams, dreams have us. These nightly events are deep
experiences that enrich our waking lives.
Though we seem to be sleeping
There
is an inner wakefulness,
That
directs the dreams,
And
that will eventually startle us back,
To
the truth of who we are. - Rumi
References:
The Encyclopedia of Religion. ED. Mircea Eliade. Vol 1.4
York: Macmillian, 1987.
Chevalier, Jean and Alain Gheerbrant. A Dictionary of
Symbols. Trans. John Buchanan-Brown. Oxford: Penguin. 1996.
Trans. of Dictionnaire des symboles. Paris: Editions Robert
Laffont S. A. et Editions Jupiter. 1969
Dodds. E.R. The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkley: U of
California Press, 1951.
Edelsrein, Emma J. and Ludwig Edelstem. Ascleptus Collection
and Interpretation of the Testimonies. Baltimore: John Hopkins
UP 1998.
Hamiliton, Mary. Incubation or The Cure of Disease in Pagan
Temples and Christian Churches. London: W.C. Henderson & Son,
1906
Hillman, James, The Dream and the Underworld. New York:
Harper, 1979
Meier, C.A. Healing Dream and Ritual: Ancient Incubation and
Modern Psychology. Einsiedln, Switzerland: Daimon, 1989
Skafte, Dianne. Listening to the Oracle: The Ancient Art of
Finding Guidance in the Signs and Symbols All Around Us. San
Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1997. |
Raven's Call Magazine
Only $5.95 per issue |
