{"id":5098,"date":"2012-08-23T03:04:43","date_gmt":"2012-08-23T07:04:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/dreamgates\/?p=5098"},"modified":"2012-08-23T03:14:41","modified_gmt":"2012-08-23T07:14:41","slug":"dreaming-is-good-medicine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/2012\/08\/dreaming-is-good-medicine.html","title":{"rendered":"Dreaming is good medicine"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
R.M, Serpent Staff in the Sky<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Most human cultures before the modern era have valued dreams as a source of healing.<\/p>\n

It was widely understood, for starters, that dreams can diagnose what’s going on inside the body. One of the ways to understand dreams is that they might be messages from inside the body – reports from the front on what’s going on there. The great Greek physician Galen always used to look at dreams with the idea that consciousness is traveling inside the body during sleep and brings back, through the vehicle of dream reports, accounts of what is right or wrong with it from which a sensitive physician may diagnose a complaint, or which the dreamer can simply use to stay well.<\/p>\n

The connection between dreaming and healing goes far beyond diagnosing physical symptoms. Dreams give us a picture of our condition on all levels – \u00a0emotional, physical, mental, spiritual – beyond the scope of any technology. So most cultures across most of human history have valued dreams as x-rays or pictures of the state of body, mind and spirit. Dreams can show \u00a0whether you’re missing part of yourself because you lost vital soul energy somewhere on the roads of this life.<\/p>\n

One of the ways I work with dreams is to look for clues as to where someone might have lost a part of their vital energy through pain, abuse, trauma, addiction, wrenching life choices, and for the right direction to follow to get missing soul parts back in the body. For example: you keep dreaming of a younger version of yourself or a place where you used to be with a former partner, a former house where you keep going back again and again and again. Maybe the dream is saying to you that \u00a0part of you is still invested in that time and place and isn’t with you because it didn’t follow along the roads you subsequently took. \u00a0 Dreams answer the question, “Where’s the rest of me?” And they do more: they lay roads for us to recover our missing pieces and become whole.<\/p>\n

Dreams also give us personal images that can be a source of healing. Research in sports psychology and later in immunology and \u00a0neuroscience confirm that the body can’t distinguish between a strong image, thought or feeling and a \u00a0physical event. So we want to learn to give our attention to images and stories that move the body in the direction of health. Where do we get the right image or story? Our dreams are a treasury of\u00a0 personal freshly manufactured spontaneous images and stories we can use to work on the body in the direction of health. This is ancient understanding, but we lost it for a while. It is time to get it back.<\/p>\n

When people come to me in quest of healing, I tell them, “I’m more interested in the state of your soul than the state of your body.” This is the shaman’s way. \u00a0I want to know the state of your soul \u00a0and whether you’re following the soul’s \u00a0purpose in your life, whether you’re in touch with your bigger story. If you live with the sense of a deeper drama, a larger story, you find courage and driving purpose to get through the stuff that might otherwise knock you down. Where do you recover your sense of what your life mission might be? Dreaming is one of the ways. Your larger self is hunting you in dreams, seeking to recall you to the memory of why you came here in the first place. Awaken to that, and your life will be different, I promise you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Most human cultures before the modern era have valued dreams as a source of healing. It was widely understood, for starters, that dreams can diagnose what’s going on inside the body. One of the ways to understand dreams is that they might be messages from inside the body – reports from the front on what’s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":224,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,78,10,18,5,46,19,20,7,22,42,43,32,29],"tags":[1813,1455,142,1454],"class_list":["post-5098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-active-dreaming","category-ancestral-traditions","category-conscious-dreaming","category-dream-diagnosis","category-dreams","category-healing","category-healing-dreams","category-history-of-dreaming","category-lucid-dreaming","category-shamanic-dreaming","category-shamanism","category-soul","category-soul-recovery","category-story","tag-dream-diagnosis","tag-galen","tag-imagery-for-healing","tag-medicine"],"yoast_head":"\nDreaming is good medicine - 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\/2012\/08\/dreaming-is-good-medicine.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Dreaming is good medicine - Dream Gates\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Most human cultures before the modern era have valued dreams as a source of healing. 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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\/5098","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=5098"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5098\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5107,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5098\/revisions\/5107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}