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Πηγή: The Sun Magazine
What Did You Dream Last Night?
Marc Ian Barasch On What The Psyche Is Trying To Tell Us
There was a time when Marc Ian Barasch paid scant attention to his dreams. Like many people, he viewed them as intriguing but forgettable, “a nocturnal reshuffling of the mental deck,” as he once wrote. But after a series of vivid nightmares presaged a cancer diagnosis, he had a thorough change of heart. Barasch embarked on a project to explore and document the importance of dreams.
Fifteen years of research led him to the conclusion that dreams play a pivotal role in our lives. After traveling the globe to interview dream experts of all kinds — including scientists, psychotherapists, and indigenous healers — and undertaking an in-depth analysis of the voluminous dream notebooks he’d kept during his illness, Barasch gathered his findings into a book, Healing Dreams: Exploring the Dreams That Can Transform Your Life, which won the Nautilus Award for best psychology title in 2001. His other books include The Healing Path: A Soul Approach to Illness (1992); Remarkable Recovery: What Extraordinary Healings Tell Us about Getting Well and Staying Well(with Caryle Hirshberg, 1995); and Field Notes on the Compassionate Life: A Search for the Soul of Kindness(2005).
Barasch was born in 1949 and grew up in New Rochelle, New York. The son of a television and film producer, he studied film at Yale University, along with literature, psychology, and anthropology. He has been an editor at Psychology Today, Natural Health, and New Age Journal (which won a National Magazine Award under his tenure), and he has twice been shortlisted for the PEN Literary Award. A practicing Buddhist, Barasch helped found the psychology department at Buddhist-established Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, which combines Eastern and Western educational traditions. He has played and recorded with the Rock Bottom Remainders, a rock band whose members are all famous authors, including Amy Tan, Barbara Kingsolver, and Stephen King.
In 2006 Barasch founded the Green World Campaign, a nonprofit organization whose primary goal is to “turn degraded lands green again” by planting billions of trees. He currently serves on the advisory committee of the United Nations Forum on Forests Secretariat for the International Year of Forests 2011.
I spoke with Barasch several times for this interview: twice while he was visiting Los Angeles and once when he was back home in Boulder. I was impressed by his ability to articulate esoteric concepts in a lively and approachable way. Most striking, however, was his passion for his work. The possibilities of the dreaming mind remain largely untapped, he says, and if you approach even a single dream with respect, insight, and tenderness, you might never be the same again.
Platek: Why is it important to pay attention to our dreams?
Barasch: Dreams present to us parts of reality and of the psyche that we often overlook or don’t wish to see. They are concerned with the growth of the soul. The word for “dream” in Hebrew — chalom — is derived from the verb meaning “to be made healthy or strong.” Dreams tell us that we live up to a mere fraction of our potential and that there are great treasures to be found in the unknown portion of our being. If we heed our dreams, they can help us develop new attitudes toward ourselves and others. They can deepen our spiritual impulses, expand our emotional lives, and produce all manner of changes in our careers and relationships.
Platek: The molecular biologist and codiscoverer of DNA Francis Crick said that dreams are simply “cerebral housecleaning,” that we dream in order to store memories more efficiently.
Barasch: From the neurological perspective all learning is a matter of efficient organization, consciousness is simply an emergent property of sufficiently complex matter, and our dreams are just random discharges of the brain sputtering along. But anyone who investigates dreams cannot help but be astonished by their underlying meanings. Personally I think it takes almost an act of will to deny the intelligence that comes through in our dreams.
Platek: Where do you think dreams come from?
Barasch: A traditional explanation might be that a dream is our unconscious recycling or grappling with problems in our life or long-standing psychological issues. A Freudian might say that they are wish fulfillments. Both these perspectives suggest that the content and meaning of our dreams are already contained within the psyche. But [Swiss psychiatrist] Carl Jung suggested that dreams come from an even deeper place — a collective psyche — and so it is possible for us to dream about things that we have never seen or known. Jung also said that dreams attempt to balance us when we become lopsided — when we lean too much toward one side of our personality or the other.
Platek: You had a series of dreams that may have saved your life.
Barasch: I was working as a magazine editor when my dreams began to take on an unusual intensity. In one dream the “greatest mass murderer in the history of mankind” had “escaped from a cell” and was attempting to decapitate me with an ax. In another dream, Death was looking through my basement window. There were quite a few about necks: A bullet was lodged in my throat. Long needles were stuck into my “neck brain.” It got to the point where I couldn’t ignore the dreams any longer. I went to a doctor and was eventually diagnosed with thyroid cancer — basically, cancer of my “neck brain” — and had surgery to remove the tumor.
There is a communication system between the brain and the rest of the body that functions without our conscious awareness. Hormones whiz back and forth carrying biochemical messages between the brain and the cells of our body. The brain sometimes processes that information as images, and some of the images I dreamed turned out to be accurate diagnostic information that was not initially reflected in medical tests. At the same time, the dreams were not just a functional scan of the body, like an MRI; they portrayed the meaning of the ailment and pointed toward a path to greater wholeness. For example, I dreamed an iron pot was suspended under my chin, burning my throat. Three holes had been drilled in my head, and a voice said, “We are going to boil your brains out.” Naturally this was terrifying at first. It wasn’t until later that this image of the pot began to resonate with me. My brains were being “boiled out” because I had to relinquish an old way of thinking to discover a new one not based solely on my preconceptions. There is a notion in many spiritual paths of the sacrificium intellectus, the setting aside of the purely rational function to access the intuitive mode. In actuality there was nothing wrong with my brain. That is why we can’t simply regard dreams as a diagnostic device. They contain other material of significance to the soul, the personality, the larger self, and so on.
Platek: How did this experience change your view of dreams?
Barasch: When these dreams came initially, I probably had the same relationship with them that most people do with their dreams: I viewed them as sort of hazy psychic leftovers. But these particular dreams could not be easily dismissed. I felt that they were urgently trying to tell me something, but it all seemed like gibberish. This was before I learned to take my dreams seriously, to regard them as messages from what Jung called the “two-million-year-old self.”
Platek: Why do you think signs of illness might show up in dreams?
Barasch: It could be an evolutionary trait, a survival strategy in which we experience subliminal cues from the body that all is not well. The waking brain is geared toward daily activities and doesn’t get the message, but on the dream stage things that were in the background can come into the spotlight. So it is possible that we have been feeling something in our bodies that we just didn’t register, and the dream brings it forth. Bear in mind that neuropeptides are generated by every cell in the body, and the brain has receptors for them. So activity in the cells can create images in the brain. It’s a two-way street, of course: we envision a delicious meal in our visual cortex, and our stomach growls.
Platek: How do we recognize when we have had a “healing dream”?
Barasch: First of all, the emotions accompanying these dreams tend to be powerful and vivid — terror, awe, joy. When we have what Jung called “big dreams,” we know that we have experienced something out of the ordinary. In all the cultures where I did research, people made a distinction between big, healing dreams and regular dreams. Tibetan Buddhists talk about “clear dreams,” which are said to be the unobstructed voice of wisdom. The sangomas — traditional healers of South Africa — call them “talking dreams.” They told me that you have to treat these dreams differently, because they are more literally true. They can be prophetic and have social or cosmological implications.
Frequently the sensory aspect of the dream is heightened. The colors may be jewel-like, the spaces vast. There can be experiences like hearing some great voice making proverb-like pronouncements. They often sound like poetry or headlines — words that want to be remembered. The quality of light in the dream may be different. People describe a kind of cinematic vividness. Such dreams have complex plots and subplots and dramatic narrative structures. Like ancient Greek theater, they seem designed to produce a catharsis, to lead us to metanoia — a change of heart. They make us realize that we are in the presence of something larger than ourselves.
I suspect that the memory traces for these dreams are stored differently so that we can still remember the dream vividly after we wake up. They might be processed differently in the brain as well, the way a traumatic memory is processed by the amygdala. Regular dreams are simply less memorable.
Platek: How often do people have healing dreams?
Barasch: I can say it’s more common for people to have them during periods of crisis. When we are at a crossroads, the psyche seems to respond with meaningful dreams. Of course, shamans may have a great many more of these dreams than the rest of us, and every society has shamans, regardless of what we call them.
On the other hand, there are people who tell me that they have never had this kind of dream. I don’t think this tells us anything detrimental about them. Perhaps they are more awake in some other way.
Platek: How would you advise someone to respond to a healing dream?
Barasch: I think it’s important to talk to someone who knows about dreams, such as a good therapist. I admit I’m partial to Jungians. Jung’s work was based on his own experience of this archetypal realm, and he counseled respect for the living quality of images and circumambulation rather than straight-line analysis. I also recommend a dream group. A healing dream needs to be shared. For example, Gandhi had a dream at a crisis point during India’s fight for independence. There was infighting going on, and the whole independence movement was in danger of falling apart. In his dream all the different factions were marching in the street together in celebration. Nehru, who later became India’s first prime minister, dismissed this dream, but Gandhi wrote to all the leaders of the different factions until, through his lobbying, the march — called a hartal — actually took place. It was considered the turning point in the fight for Indian independence.
A healing dream often requires some kind of action. It is a piece of the psyche that has presented itself to us like a flaming meteorite that has landed on earth — or, maybe more apropos, a deep wellspring bubbling out of the rocks. We don’t want to sequester these dreams in an ivory tower and look at them as objects of interest. We need to reenact them somehow: draw them, dance them, tell them. When we do this, we make our outer lives more consonant with the inner life of the soul. If you believe that dreams are in service to growth, then you will want to do something — even something small — in response.
Platek: You refer to dreams as “advocates for the soul.”
Barasch: Yes, the dreams uphold the soul’s values. They tell us that we — our ego selves — are not who we think we are. They encourage us to live truthfully, right now and always. Of course these messages might not be what we want to hear. Sometimes dreams may advocate for life changes that are challenging, to say the least. Dreams really have no time for niceties or for the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. In dreams our narrow selfhood is expanded — the dreams will not allow us to be so small — and we experience ourselves as part of something larger. They thrust upon us realities that are too often obscured, either by our tendency to sell ourselves short and smooth things over or by the gap between what we know deep inside and what we prefer to believe on the surface. Healing dreams are straight from the source. They are realer than real. They stay with us.
Platek: Is there a danger of placing too much emphasis on our dreams? Could they lead us astray?
Barasch: Well, Jung was quick to point out that it is naive to think the unconscious can solve our problems for us. There is a reason we have consciousness. We can’t simply hand over our decisions to our dreams. We need to have a dialogue with them. Jung spoke about engaging with the unconscious. A patient once came to him with a dream about climbing a mountain and stepping out into thin air. The dreamer felt exhilaration, but Jung was concerned that the man was in danger, that this was not transcendence but inflation and hubris, and counseled him against scaling any literal peaks. The man was later killed in a mountaineering accident. There are plenty of cases in which someone assumes naively that a dream is sanctioning certain erratic behavior. Dreams can help us connect to the realm of the soul, but if we have a dream in which we shoot someone, it doesn’t justify doing that in real life. We are better off first looking diligently for the symbolic meaning of a dream.
Platek: What would you say to those who think that interpreting dreams is an escape from the real issues of life?
Barasch: There is a part of us that has contempt for the psyche and, in a sense, for the truth, because the truth is often disturbing. When we say a dream is just a trifle or a fantasy, we insulate ourselves from reality. We are actually defending ourselves from the wisdom of dreams and their tendency to challenge our beliefs.
Platek: Would you tell someone who has just lost a job or a home to pay attention to his or her dreams?
Barasch: I think that is exactly the sort of moment when we should pay the closest attention. Inner guidance seems to come to us in a crisis, because the crisis creates a gap for it to pass through. What keeps us from listening to our deeper knowing is our daily routine. If we cherish our dreams, they will guide us through the dark. Mythology tells us that when we are lost in the dark woods, guidance appears from unexpected — often humble and overlooked — sources. The alchemists said that the philosopher’s stone, which turns base metals into gold, is “the stone the builders cast aside.” Dreams are like that. They point to what we’ve overlooked — often something that seems weak, small, or quiet. When our lives fall apart, we are more open to that part of the psyche that wants change.
Platek: What happens if a dream doesn’t speak to us during a crisis?
Barasch: Sometimes it is simply left up to us to decide what to do. We can’t rely on dreams to provide all the answers. Even when a dream does come, we still have to make choices.
Platek: You’ve referred to your illness as a “calling.”
Barasch: First, it’s important to point out that nobody wants to be ill, and there are plenty of other ways to be “called.” But let me back up and speak about what I see as a kind of new-age Calvinism that blames the sick for their own illnesses. The Calvinists were Christians who believed that if you were healthy and whole, it was a sign you were in God’s favor. The new-age version tells us that if we fall ill, we’ve brought it on ourselves through negative thinking, wrong living, and so on. But many of our health problems are not personal at all. They are just biology, and their causes might be civilizational and collective.
That said, I think some illnesses do ask us to change. There is evidence that persistent emotional patterns create stress in the body. States of disharmony can make us more vulnerable to disease. They are not the cause, but one factor, perhaps. So the disease might be approached as a catalyst for greater harmony.
In our culture we are asked to view illness as a kind of mechanistic failure, but our dreams may contradict that as too simplistic. When I was ill, my dreams pointed toward other issues in my life. For example, my cancer was in the throat, so there were images having to do with the voice, with expression, with creativity. The dreams implied that a journey was underway; they hinted at a spiritual process linked to the illness. Before I even understood that something was physiologically wrong, I had a sense of being summoned. Many shamanic cultures understand these moments of crisis or descents into the underworld to be a period of inner growth. Mythologist Joseph Campbell, who spoke of “the hero’s journey,” pointed out that the journey often begins with a wound. The hero or the protagonist is suddenly impeded in his or her progress through the outer world. He or she has to undergo a period of hardship in order to fulfill his or her destiny. Heroes are obliged to leave behind the comforts of life as they know it and undergo a series of trials, after which they reemerge into the world more whole.
Platek: Can you imagine a time when a patient’s dreams might be recorded in his or her medical chart?
Barasch: Absolutely. In Healing Dreams I write about a woman who had been diagnosed with benign fibroid tumors. She had a dream in which she was on a plane that was waiting on the runway, and she saw a woman outside the plane trying to warn her about something. The woman was banging on the window, but the dreamer wasn’t paying attention. As the plane taxied, the woman ran alongside, still trying to warn the dreamer about some danger, running until, horrifically, her feet were worn down to the bone. After the dreamer awoke, she began to work with the dream and discovered that it felt as though something was wrong with the “belly of the plane.” She went for a second opinion about her fibroids and discovered that, in fact, she had cancer “in her belly,” so to speak. So this dream alerted her to a life-threatening situation that her medical exams hadn’t detected.
It’s not only dreams that need to be interpreted. If we applied the same interpretive process to our waking lives, we might perceive a layer of meaning that is otherwise hidden. In other words, we could see that our experiences have psychological and spiritual dimensions to them and that what are sometimes called “synchronicities” are not random, meaningless occurrences. When we do that, we connect more deeply to life.