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25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dreams as Personal Revelation, October 27, 2000
What could be more welcome than a guide through the inner world of one's dreams? I found Marc Barasch's Healing Dreams extremely compelling, particularly in its exploration of the relationship between the dream and dreamer. Before reading this, I'd never thought to ask what a dream might be asking for, never mind had a way to go about it. The book is well organized into motifs, for example, dreams about animals, that make it easy to reference and yet all of a piece. Of special interest is Barasch's insight into how dreams cast light on what's going on in the physical body. His elegant writing style makes the depth of his insights accessible even to those without a background in the art and science of dream analysis. This is a great contribution to the literature of wholeness--the integration of the entire experiential self.
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18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Learn to Appreciate the Healing in Dreams, January 3, 2001
In the epilogue to his latest book, Healing dreams: Exploringthe dreams that can transform your life (Riverhead Books) Marc Baraschrelates the story of his editor trying to envision a simple sound-bitepromotion for his book. The editor asked, "How would a healingdream help the average person be effective in their daily lives?"Barasch, was, in his own words, "flummoxed" by thequestion. He had spent years researching the subject, through his owndreams as he dealt with cancer, through interviewing countless peoplewho had received dreams of Great Mysteries, and through in-depthscholarship on the vast spiritual traditions pointing to dreams as achannel by which God might speak and redirect our ignorant andsleepwalking lives into the pursuit of wisdom. Yet the editor wantedsomething simple to explain it all to the consuming public. Baraschsaid he was reminded of the saying that when a thief meets a saint,all he sees is the holy man's pockets. Later, when the editor had adream about struggling to land an extremely large fish, Baraschsuspected that the fellow had finally gotten the idea: dreams, andhealing dreams especially, take us beyond our narrow categories andconcepts into a much larger world. As he puts us, healing dreamsdon't come to make it all better, but to help us live the truth.Iknow from my experience that it is difficult to take a healing dreamand turn it into a nifty formula for rescuing others.... Iappreciate Barasch's new book for the rare and worthy achievementit is: Through beautiful, even poetic language, integrated with thegrounding influence of the facts from the lives of those heinterviewed, he gives us a glimpse of a holy World Order that inspiresus to try to empathize with something that we can not fullyunderstand. In that sense, Barasch's book is the next best thing toa personal encounter with a healing dream itself.Among the varioustypes of healing dreams he explores, he includes his experiences withthe "Dream Helper Ceremony." Perhaps the most far-flungexport from A.R.E.'s summer camp, where it was first invented,Dream Helper involves a group of people volunteering to donate theirdreams to help someone in distress, doing so without knowing inadvance the nature of the person's problem. What began as anattempt to put a spiritual spin on traditional dream telepathyexperiments soon evolved into a potent healing ritual that many peoplehave used to their benefit....On the basis of his dream helperexperience, Barasch draws two important conclusions about healingdreams. First: if you want to have one yourself, offer to have ahealing dream for someone else! That's the closest to a healingdream formula he offers in the entire book.Two: there is some kind ofliving, spiritual fabric that unites all of us with a life beyond thephysical and to which we have a important relationship, acknowledgedor not. Healing dreams, he has discovered, come to pull us back fromthe abyss of isolationism into a more conscious relationship with thatunifying lifeforce. There's more to a saint, in other words, thanwhat can be found in his pockets.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A transformative work!, July 24, 2001
By A Customer
"In his fascinating, well-organized and lucid book, Marc Ian Barasch carries us along with him on a brave night journey through the dream world. He challenges the doubting reader with impressive charts of this realm and logs centuries of prior research and discovery. It is a courageous task, as many of the charts he uses belong to times and value systems that do not conform to Western scientific experimental psychology. If you want your science to be businesslike and hard, or, as William James wrote in his textbook on psychology, the researcher to be "studying the elements of the mental life, dissecting them out from the gross results in which they are embedded, and as far as possible reducing them to quantitative scales," this is not the book for you. Healing Dreams is a book for readers who can let go of preconceptions, immerse themselves in the vast lore of dreams and, above all, can savor stories of other people's experience. That dreams can be precognitive and serve both as warnings and point to cures, comes as no surprise to depth psychologists, who continually heed both the outer and inner realms of their patients' psyches and pay serious attention to their dreams. Nor will it come as a surprise to anyone who writes down and ponders his or her own dreams. We learn just what Barasch wants to share with his reader: that we are much more evolved, interconnected and subtly knowing than our little egos would have us believe. We also come to apprehend that our dreams come in various sizes and levels of importance, and can have a wisdom far beyond the personal ego's. Barasch, the author of The Healing Path and Remarkable Recovery...eagerly enters the imaginal world of dreams in a way that required him to commit the "subversive" act of taking his "dreams seriously -- enough to act on them, to live by them" and thus to obey their teaching "to live truthfully. Right now. And always." ...Barasch, using his own big dreams as an example, separates the healing dream from the more mundane variety. He describes the big dream, or healing dream, as one with "a singular intensity of purpose: to lead us to embrace the contradictions between flesh and spirit, self and other, shadow and light, in the name of wholeness." From here he goes on to explore the vast realm of dreams, packed into 11 chapters that never fail to capture the reader's interest thanks to Barasch's own enthusiasm, his profound research and his poet's eye for the heart of the matter. The chapter "The Dream of the Body" is especially full of intriguing stories, particularly of cancer survivors and the way dreams figured into their healing. It is followed by a survey of "Dreams of Personal Calling," which illumine the struggle to find a vocation in life. A chapter on dreams and how they can help relationships comes next, followed by equally compelling chapters on healing past wounds and on compassionately attending to our own dark, or shadow, sides. The chapters on dreams and spirituality make trail-blazing contributions to dream research. Barasch also offers a remarkable interpretation of Tibetan Buddhism's ancient system of dream yoga as a spiritual practice....[It] differs from New Age-type lucid dreaming, which is characterized by typically Western ego-driven themes and controls and alters what the dream psyche presents rather than developing that material as a means for spiritual growth. The Tibetan dream yoga system subcategorizes dreams into those of events that occurred while still awake but that need more attention; "message" dreams of people alive or dead; dreams showing forgotten parts of one's psyche now emerging into consciousness; symbolic dreams and ones with archetypal content; dreams that contain precognitive elements, omens or warnings, or might otherwise be termed extrasensory; and, finally, radiant dreams of great spiritual teaching or blessing. The spiritual component of the book as well as its sometimes poetic intensity add a depth to a subject that is all too often treated as a sort of parlor game. Healing Dreams, based as it is on over 15 years of research and on a profound personal investigation, is saved from both the Scylla of New Age psychobabble and the Charybdis of a true-believer's pomposity by the quality of the author himself. In these days of journalistic sensationalism and excess, Barasch remains an honest reporter with a respectful tone of gentle inquiry into the mystery of his subject. It is clear that he has grown and deepened along with a book that is as wise and healing as a dream....
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