The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence, and Imagination (22 page)

Active
images, in the same lexicon, are those that are developed or suggested. They may be borrowed from a dream, or from one of those pop-ups, or offered from the healer's own store of scripts and stories. Say you dreamed you went to a church for your wedding, but were horrified by mating spiders who multiplied and grew huge. So what do you want to do about the spiders? Can you visualize bringing in a team of cleaners with brooms big enough to sweep the place clean?

Other types of images recognized in the healthcare community include
process
images, which help a patient to decrease anxiety about a medical procedure by mentally rehearsing for each phase, and
end-state
images, which encourage patients to see themselves in a state of wellness after treatment is finished.
General healing
imagery focuses on a personal symbol or inner ally — perhaps a spiritual figure, or an animal guardian, or a natural force or landscape — that builds inner resources and a sense of confidence.

Imagery used with patients may be “concrete” and “biologically correct” — based on providing a full and clear picture of a set of symptoms and the treatment procedures — or “symbolic.” Barbara Dossey, who has played a leading role in winning acceptance for healing imagery in the medical context, offers some very instructive comments on the relative power of these alternative styles. “Symbolic imagery tends to be more powerful than concrete because the creation of symbols more fully engages the patient in the imagery process. And the patient often feels his own symbolism is more meaningful to him or more relevant to his life than a biologically correct image.”

Sources of Healing Images

Where do we find the best images to help our bodies get well and stay well?

We can get them from childhood. Go back, in your mind, to a time in your early life when you felt happy and full of wonder, maybe a time when your imagination was all fired up. I think of skinny-dipping in a brown-green waterhole under the gum trees in New South Wales. I think of looking into a crackling fire and seeing knights and castles and valiant quests. I think of dressing up as Robin Hood for a costume party and feeling that I had the magical power to always slip away from the bad guys or take them by surprise. I think of swimming five miles in an Olympic-sized pool on a morning so cold you could see the steam rising from your breath as well as the water — and being cheered by a whole mob of people who knew that I had just come out of the hospital and that this was a big moment of healing and recovery for me.

I can grab any one of those memories and use it as a healing image. You have your own. Once, in a dream, I met a mysterious guide in a smoke-colored robe in what seemed to be an Oriental bazaar. He showed me a Persian rug on the ground and asked me if I recognized the objects on it. I saw they were toys and mementoes from my boyhood — a mounted knight in silver armor, a cardboard periscope for peering around corners, a pair of opera glasses set in mother-of-pearl that had been handed down by a grande dame in the family. My guide told me that if I chose one of these objects — magical because they carried the power and wonder of childhood — it would become a key I could use to open a great corral and claim a magnificent horse who would carry me anywhere I needed to go: to a place of healing or a place of vision. I understood, in the dream, that we can
all
find our way to our own place in the magic market. I have led many people here, in guided imaginal journeys, to claim their own keys to healing from among half-forgotten childhood things.

Our childhood memories may include superheroes or even cartoon characters that we can invoke. The Green Lantern, Batman, Wonder Woman, Prince Valiant, the Lone Ranger, Sir Galahad — pick your character. If that character ever excited your imagination with his or her special abilities, or roused you with the boldness of their quest, that connection still has a charge you can use to tone up your immune system or fight a disease. And you're not too old or jaded to develop a
fresh
connection. In the early days of television, oncologists were intrigued to discover that a White Knight who rode out in detergent commercials was also riding to the rescue, killing off cancer cells in the imaginations — and thereby the bodies — of cancer patients. Then Pac-Man arrived, and soon he was gobbling up cancer cells in thousands of imaginations.

The images that can heal and sustain you may come from any part of your life. Sometimes we need help to find and believe in these images.

Dr. Colette Aboulker-Muscat, a remarkable teacher of imaginal healing whose approach was shaped by her experiences in military hospitals in French Algeria (where she was a resistance leader) during World War II, believed in borrowing imagery from the patient's embodied experience of life. Asked to work with a writer whose neurodegenerative disease had left him paralyzed from the neck down, she encouraged him to picture the hills of Jerusalem — the city, which he loved, had been the source of much of his inspiration. She invited him to imagine that he was rolling over the many hills of the city and feel his spine being massaged and healed. After repeated visualizations, the writer regained some movement and was eventually able to walk again with a cane.

Then there are the dreams. If you want to learn about harvesting healing images from your dreams, read Wanda Burch's brave and beautiful book,
She Who Dreams
.

Wanda had for many years recorded her dreams and had always recognized their importance in all facets of her life. She grew up in a family that believed in dreams, but a terrifying diagnosis of breast cancer — first delivered in a dream visitation by her dead father — brought awareness that dreaming can literally save our lives. After Wanda received medical diagnosis of aggressive breast cancer, a wise surgeon listened to her when she related dreams culled from her journals. Then he told her, “Go home and do something about this before you return for the surgical biopsy.” Wanda went home and, exhausted, fell asleep, wondering what he meant.

She awoke with a simple dream in which she saw herself holding a cone breast in her hands. A voice in the dream told her to turn it over, and she saw a vial of dark liquid located near the base of the breast. She took the cone and placed it under a faucet of clear cold running water. The water washed the dark liquid away.

Wanda took the image of the cone breast, closed her eyes, and created a meditation for healing — she saw herself over and over again drawing the dark liquid into one place and washing it away. Days later her physician told her he felt she had literally stopped the rapid progress of the fast-advancing cancer and had possibly even pulled the invading cells back into one place, making the surgical biopsy easier for him.

Subsequent dreams guided her very specifically in mixing a “healing cocktail.” While she decided to accept surgery and chemotherapy, her dream images helped her to mobilize her inner healing resources and to speed the work of medical technology while reducing the side effects.

Mind and body conspired to present dream after dream that brought her ever richer and more powerful images for healing and recovery. She developed her own exercises: journaling, taping small messages from the dreams and listening to those tapes in the car, drawing her images, and finding objects to keep their energy fresh in her mind and her senses.

The Gift of Bald Eagle
A San Francisco woman named Stella woke to find that her hair had fallen out on the crown of her head, opening a three-inch bald patch overnight. This was promptly diagnosed as
alopecia areata
— sudden, unexplained hair loss. Gaining a Latin name was a dubious benefit, since Sheila was told there was no conventional cure. Either the condition clears up “by itself” or the sufferer may lose all head and body hair.

Stella decided to ask for dream guidance. In her dream, she met an ancient Hawaiian woman wearing a star amulet, who instructed her to hold an eight-pointed star ornament above her head as she performed an energy healing.

Stella woke with a wonderful sense of possibility. The next day, she tried to imagine herself back inside the dreamscape, holding the star ornament. She found herself traveling among the stars, with a guide that was no longer a Hawaiian kahuna but a bald eagle. She decided to accept bald eagle as an ally in healing. She noticed that though we call it “bald,” this magnificent raptor of course has white feathers on its head.

Day by day, Stella pictured herself traveling with the bald eagle to places of healing and adventure and renewal. And her hair began to grow back. It eventually formed a circle of pure white, five inches in diameter, in the midst of her long chestnut hair. She decided not to color the new hair — at least for a time — to honor the gift of bald eagle.

Harvesting the healing power of a dream image may require us to go back inside the dream and continue on with it. In my workshops, I teach a technique called dream reentry (see pages 86–87) that often leads to resolution and healing.

Swimming to the Day Spa
A woman suffering from fibromyalgia — a condition characterized by chronic pain, stiffness, and fatigue — dreamed that she was at the edge of a beautiful lake. From the far side, a woman was beckoning to her. She was tempted to go across, but she was scared of the distance and not sure whether the crossing could mean death. Later, after learning the dream reentry technique, she willed herself back inside the same dreamscape. She imagined herself getting in the lake and swimming to the far shore, where she found a fabulous day spa with a massage room inside a whimsical grotto. The woman who had beckoned to her proceeded to give her a deeply relaxing and enjoyable massage — after which she noticed that her bodily pain was much less. Now the dreamer imagines herself back inside her day spa as part of her everyday practice, and she has received a series of effective and enjoyable treatments that have not cost her one cent. She has found that imagination works better for her than all the pain medications.

Triggers for Imaginal Healing

Because we are so physically oriented in our society, many of us require physical aids and constructs to trigger the imagination and sustain our belief in its creations.

The Egyptians were masters at making talismans and magical objects designed to give a real charge to an intention — such as the intention to heal or protect. Countless Egyptians carried amulets of the falcon-headed god Horus for protection against diseases or trouble on the road. There is a marvelous cippus (amulet) of Horus in the Metropolitan Museum in New York that shows the god as a handsome young man treading boldly on a crocodile and driving away the spirits of disease.

Also in the Met is an Egyptian water vessel shaped like a hollow ankh (the symbol of life). The ankh is horizontal. Someone drinking from that vessel would be encouraged to believe that they were not only having a refreshing and cleansing drink but were taking in the power of the life force.

In traditional Ethiopian medicine, one way to engage the patient's imagination is to lay texts and images, written on skins or papers, over the body. The patient is encouraged to believe not only in the magical power of such texts to attract spiritual help but in the direct transfer of healing power from the writing through the skin.

We want our contemporary versions of such things. I was inspired — at an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in November 2005 — by a fabulous array of tools for imaginal healing invented by Frenchman Matthieu Dehanneau. His tools are designed to help people who require medication to use their imaginations to help the drugs they are given to have the prescribed effect, quickly and without complications. He calls one of these devices the Therapeutic Pen. You use it to write your own Rx with the felt tip on the appropriate part of your body, and as you do that you allow yourself to feel the medication entering your body through the skin.

3. IF WE CAN SEE OUR DESTINATION,
WE ARE BETTER THAN HALFWAY THERE

This is the secret of the ancient Polynesian art of navigation, which is beautifully described as waymaking. The master navigator, or waymaker, speaks the language of birds, finds pathways among the stars, and knows the rhythms of wind and water. But above all he is someone who can see the destination. According to Polynesian tradition, this is how the settlers of Hawaii and Easter Island managed to cross thousands of miles of open water without maps or navigational instruments.

The first human to see Easter Island, according to tradition, was a dream traveler. The story is highly instructive. In a time of savage warfare among the Polynesians, a priest called Hau Maka, who was also the royal tattooist, went scouting for a peaceful home for his kin. In a night vision, he flew across the ocean and discovered Rapa Nui, Easter Island. He inspected the location and decided it would make a good home for his people. In the morning, he described what he had seen in vivid detail to his king. The king trusted Hau Maka's dream, and ordered his subjects to gather their belongings and prepare for a long ocean voyage. Hau Maka's people sailed for two months across waters that were utterly unknown — except from his vision — before arriving safely in Anakena Bay, which looked just as he had described it from his dream. The faces of the dream traveler and his king may be among the enigmatic stone monoliths of Easter Island.

As with the Polynesian navigators, our dreams may take us to the most desirable destinations. The art of waymaking now requires us to follow our dream maps, reenter the space and the energy of the places of joy and abundance that they open to us — and get ourselves there in our physical bodies.

Heart Cord to My Dream Love

Marybeth Gurske, a school teacher, shared with me the beautiful story of how a dream put her on the trail of the man she regards as the partner of her heart:

“I was single and getting ready to reenter the dating world after healing from a broken relationship. One night I dreamed I was standing in my kitchen doorway, facing a being who appeared to me in human form, though I couldn't make out any identifying features. We opened our arms and embraced each other. I looked down to see my energetic heart pulse with red and purple light. Suddenly, an electric blue cord burst through my heart and connected with the being I was embracing, whose heart responded in kind. We became one and were filled with white light and a feeling of pure love.