{"id":3420,"date":"2011-10-30T04:17:04","date_gmt":"2011-10-30T08:17:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/dreamgates\/?p=3420"},"modified":"2012-03-23T19:23:57","modified_gmt":"2012-03-23T23:23:57","slug":"angry-ghosts-ofvietnam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/2011\/10\/angry-ghosts-ofvietnam.html","title":{"rendered":"Angry ghosts of Vietnam"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Food offering for hungry ghosts<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

At night, Sam shakes so violently in the bed that his girlfriend is thrown out. He screams in a language not his own, “Give it back, give it back, give it back, motherfucker, or I’ll eat your mother’s soul.” He isn’t willing to believe what he becomes in his sleep until his girlfriend tapes one of these screaming nights. He listens to another man’s voice coming from his vocal chords. He knows the stranger’s language only slightly, but he has a notion what this is about.<\/p>\n

Back in 1968, he was a combat G.I. in Vietnam. After a firefight in which he lost an arm, he was flown out of Khe San. As he was carried onto the plane, one of his buddies pressed a souvenir into his remaining hand. It was the blood-spattered ID card of a Vietcong fighter, retrieved after he was gunned down at the perimeter of an American base; the name has been scratched off.-<\/p>\n

For decades after the war, Sam holds onto this grim memento. through the nightmare years when he is thrown back, night after night, into the hot savagery of the war and is tormented by the searing pain of a phantom limb that – strangely – is not his missing arm but what feels like an extra leg. He takes the Vietcong ID card with him when he returns to Vietnam as a tourist in the mid-1990s, falls in love with a Vietnamese girl and decides to settle in Hanoi with her and work as an electrician. In Hanoi, his nightmares are no longer inside him; they are spilling over into the waking life of his bedmate.-<\/p>\n

Her culture has prepared her to recognize this kind of problem. Her Texas boyfriend is\u00a0bi benh<\/em>\u00a0ta<\/em>, “made ill by a ghost.” There is a name for this type of ghost in Vietnam. It is called\u00a0con ma<\/em>\u00a0or “angry ghost”. There are a lot of them. Five million Vietnamese died in the several phases of war in Indochina, and a further 300,000 are missing. Many of the war dead were never buried, let alone accorded the traditional funeral rites and food and honor at family altars. There are bodies that were literally obliterated by B-52 carpet bombing. The result is many restless, raging souls that envy the living and take out their frustrations in ways that cause illness, depression, crazy behavior and temporary possession.-<\/p>\n

Next:\u00a0the remedy for ghost sickness<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At night, Sam shakes so violently in the bed that his girlfriend is thrown out. He screams in a language not his own, “Give it back, give it back, give it back, motherfucker, or I’ll eat your mother’s soul.” He isn’t willing to believe what he becomes in his sleep until his girlfriend tapes one…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":224,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,1,23,19,47,21,42,43],"tags":[688,691,693,105,104],"class_list":["post-3420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ancestral-traditions","category-childrens-dreams","category-dreams-of-the-dead","category-healing-dreams","category-nightmares","category-psychic-health","category-shamanism","category-soul","tag-angry-ghosts","tag-ptsd","tag-shost-sickness","tag-spiritual-release","tag-vietnam-vets"],"yoast_head":"\nAngry ghosts of Vietnam - Dream Gates<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/2011\/10\/angry-ghosts-ofvietnam.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Angry ghosts of Vietnam - Dream Gates\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"At night, Sam shakes so violently in the bed that his girlfriend is thrown out. 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He is the creator of Active Dreaming, an original synthesis of dreamwork and shamanism. Born in Australia, he survived three near-death experiences in childhood. He leads popular seminars all over the world, including a three-year training for teachers of Active Dreaming. A former lecturer in ancient history at the Australian National University, he is a best-selling novelist, journalist and independent scholar. His nine books on dreaming, shamanism and imagination include Conscious Dreaming, Dreamways of the Iroquois, The Dreamer's Book of the Dead, The Three \"\"Only\"\" Things, The Secret History of Dreaming, Dreamgates, Active Dreaming and Dreaming the Soul Back Home: Shamanic Dreaming for Healing and Becoming Whole. His most recent book is The Boy Who Died and Came Back: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse. Over the past 20 years, he has led seminars at the Esalen Institute, Kripalu, the Omega Institute, the New York Open Center, Bastyr University, John F. Kennedy University, Meriter Hospital, and many other centers and institutions. He has taught depth workshops in Active Dreaming in the UK, Australia, Canada, Costa Rica, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Brazil and Austria and leads a three-year training for teachers of Active Dreaming. He hosts the \"\"Way of the Dreamer\"\" radio show at www.healthylife.net. He has appeared on many TV and radio shows, ranging from Charlie Rose and the Today show to Coast to Coast and the Diane Rehm show on NPR. His articles on dreaming have been published in media ranging from Parade to Shaman's Drum.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.mossdreams.com"],"url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/author\/rmoss"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/224"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3420"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3420\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4460,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3420\/revisions\/4460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}