A prodromal dream is one that anticipates a medical problem not yet clinically detected.
- This “diagnostic power of dreams” is hardly mysterious.
- A person with a disease of the lungs would dream of suffocation
- It is believed that such images arise from subliminal physiological cues amplified in sleep
The immune system may start signaling the brain about a subliminally perceived change in the body’s condition.
- But others seemed weirdly predictive, even precognitive, sometimes providing more accurate information than the most sophisticated medical tests.
- “These are not ordinary dreams, but big dreams, archetypal dreams, so laden with powerful emotion affect that the dreamer is forced to take them most seriously.”
To try to reduce such a dream to a single, fixed diagnosis may be to miss its other hidden meanings.
- I has been found that the course of an entire health crisis may be told through dreams, heralding its imminent arrival, providing descriptions of disease processes, bulletins and updates, comments on decisions made, guidance, and repeating themes.
When we are ill, our reasonable goal is to get better; but dreams seem to insist, over and over, that it is not enough to cure attenuation of limbs and maladies of organs.
- Become well to what purpose?
- They inquire sharply, persistently.
- To what end?
- They inquire sharply, persistently.
The Dreamweaver often seems to care as much, or more, for our spiritual growth as for our physical survival.
- We wish to be free of ailment, but the dream adds a contrapuntal line: that illness is also a call, although from what, and to where, may be unclear.
- “It made me ponder the ways that I was afraid of growing, and the notion that emotional blockage, in some schools of thought, is contributory to disease.”
Whether we are sick in soul or physically ill, Healing Dreams may show us a vision of wholeness at a time when we feel most imprisoned, trapped, mortal.
- This might fall under the banner of compensation, the psyche’s innate drive for balance, but a powerful vision of health can itself have the force of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Re-source: Re-embellish
There are many classic features of Healing dreams:
- The graphic images of biological processes where, cancer cells being exploded (the actual method used by natural killer cells)
- Their remains gobbled up (the clean-up role of macrophages)
- The “booming voice,” a typical representation of greater forces in a dream.
Medical science has confirmed the physiological power of emotion, and Healing dreams often feature emotional states of unprecedented intensity.
- Leaving aside theological aspects of “miracle” cases, we might speculate that in dreams the mind-body connection is more direct, more able to slip past the routinizations of waking thought.
- Perhaps the currents of the psyche become, as it were, more “hot-wired” to the engines of the body during dreaming.
- It has often been suggested that the imaginal realm is the meeting ground between the physiological and the spiritual.
How dreams may offer their healing wisdom:
- “First there’s a ‘presentation stage,’ where you’re shown the problem, symptom, or challenge.
- Later, there’s an ‘information-gathering’ stage, where the dreams reveal more about the illness, and give clues to its healing.
- Then, after months or even years, there’s a ‘processing stage’ in which images of a helpful individual or group often appear.
- Then finally, dreams offer some resolution of the problem.”
- Such healing journeys proceed most effectively when physician and patient collaborate in this feedback loop between drams and reality.
craving and resource from “Healing Dreams” by Marc Ian Barasch
