Inside Dreams

Healing Dreams are what Hindus call satyagraha—soul force, truth medicine. They thrust upon us realities obscured by our propensity to smooth things over, to sell ourselves short, to split the difference between what we know deep down and what we prefer to think. Such dreams disturb us because of their utter refusal to pander to our fondest notions of ourselves.

Healing Dreams often have an otherworldly aura. They tend to sound spiritual themes rather than purely psychological ones; to address not only our personal situation, but also the human condition.

Most important, Healing Dreams, if heeded, can be transformational—creating new attitudes toward ourselves and others, magnifying our spiritual understanding, deepening the feeling side of life, producing changes in careers and relationships, even affecting society itself. After a Healing Dream, one may never be the same again.

Such dreams also have a peculiar persistence. People report waking up with the images still before their eyes. The dream lingers in memory long after common ones fade.

Healing Dreams often involve a sense of the uncanny or paranormal. Within the dream, one may find one has special powers to telekinetically move objects; receive information as if via telepathy; levitate; transform oneself into other creatures; visit heavens or hells. Dreamers report of out-of-body experiences; actual events foreseen; talking with the departed; having a near-identical dream to that of a friend or loved one; and other strange synchronicities. Healing Dreams hum with so much energy that, like a spark from a Van de Graaf generator, they seem to leap the gap between the visible and invisible worlds.

Islamic dream texts refer to the ordinary dream as azgha—literally, “handful of dried grass and weeds,” signifying a lack of arrangement—in contrast to the more coherent messages of ahkam (“genuine inspiration from the Deity, warning from a protecting power, or revelation of corning events”).