Fifteen years ago, Marc Barasch had a series of dreams you wouldn’t wish on anybody. Yet Barasch says the dreams likely saved his life and most definitely changed it for the better.
The first dream involved a mass murderer who had “escaped from a cell” and was chasing Barasch with an ax to decapitate him. The next featured a gaunt face staring into his basement window.
Other dreams in the sequence focused on necks. One night six long needles were stuck in his “neck-brain” by a circle of primitive tribesmen. Another night, a “World War II bullet” was lodged in his neck and a kindly Chinese surgeon removed it.
The dream that finally forced him to seek a doctor’s attention–because all of this nocturnal creepiness led Barasch to conclude he had cancer–was one in which torturers hung an iron pot filled with red-hot coals beneath his chin.
He went to see the physician with only a “fistful of nightmares” as symptoms. The doctor listened, felt nothing unusual in Barasch’s neck and quickly diagnosed job-related stress.
Barasch was indeed feeling stressed at the time in his role as editor in chief of New Age magazine, which through his leadership and writing skills won a much coveted National Magazine award. But these particular dreams–and his steadfast instinct that the mind-body connection is vital to healing–prompted Barasch, if awkwardly, to ask the doctor if there was anything remotely close to a “neck-brain” in the body.
The doctor said, sure, the thyroid, and ordered blood tests that showed normal hormone levels. Barasch continued having horrible dreams about his neck. He convinced the doctor to perform a more complete thyroid exam. This time, the physician found a hard lump that was malignant. Barasch took a leave of absence from his job. Many family members, friends, medical sources and other well-meaning folks offered remedies and advice. Nobody seemed to attach importance to his dreams, at least not until months later when a Chinese-American surgeon and top thyroid specialist removed his tumor. It was enough for Barasch to act. He embarked on 15 years of research that has spanned the globe and more cultures, past and present, than seems humanly possible to juggle. The result is a trio of books, recently completed with the publication of “Healing Dreams: Exploring the Dreams That Can Transform Your Life” (Riverhead Books, $26.95). The first two widely acclaimed books were “The Healing Path” and “Remarkable Recovery.”
“Before I knew that there were dreams and there are dreams,” he writes, “I treated them as most people do: As nocturnal reshufflings of the mental deck; as fantasy and wish fulfillment; as psychic leftovers, those emotional coffee grounds and crumpled-up impulses toward sex and violence ditched nightly down some inner Disposall.”
These days, Barasch is a firm believer that dreams can diagnose illness or predict it or heal it. He presents evidence that the brain and body have hormones and “messenger molecules” that communicate in images, the lifeblood of dreams. “I prefer to talk about wholeness,” said Barasch during a recent phone interview from his home in Boulder, Colo. “It goes beyond healing the body.
“Healing dreams can lead us inward if we let them. Our society is so outward. Dreams are a chance to break out habits and show the other side of ourselves to ourselves.
“Maybe that’s why we have a culture [and medical system] that tends to resist and disparage dreams. We are comfortable in our cocoons even if we are suffocating in them.”
In many ways, dreams are the one thing we can take for our inner selves every 24 hours, says Barasch. That’s not to say our dreams are stand-alone. He points out that Carl Jung, a protege of Sigmund Freud, treated dreams as less the “libidinal rebus of his mentor and more like a labyrinth leading to humanity’s `collective unconsciousness.'”
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Barasch says we all have (or will have) at least one healing dream in our lives that stops us in our tracks. He says we’ll know it when we dream it, particularly from a sense of depth. Jung called them “big” dreams, while the Zulu term is “talking dreams.” Tibetans call them “clear dreams.”
Paying attention to your dream life starts with welcoming dreams, says Barasch. He suggests “incubating a dream” by asking for guidance on a personal issue before falling asleep.
“The more you look at dreams, the more dreams insist you live truthfully,” says Barasch. “One congruity from my books is people who got well and overcome a crisis found a way to live from the inside out. It’s no great stretch that aligning your inner- and outer-self will grind fewer physiological gears.”
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Marc Barasch is speaking at the Crossroads Center, 711 W. Monroe, at 7:30 p.m. Friday (admission is $10; call 312-831-9350). On Feb. 11, he will speak at 7 p.m. at Transitions Bookplace (1000 W. North Ave.; 312-951-7323).
TO CONTACT BOB CONDOR or find an archive of his columns, visit: chicagotribune.com/go/health
His e-mail is [email protected]