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There was a time when author Marc Ian Barasch (
The Healing Path) treated dreams as "nocturnal reshufflings of the mental deck; as fantasy and wish fulfillment; as psychic leftovers; those emotional coffee grounds and crumbled up impulses toward sex and violence ditched nightly down some inner Disposall." But then the vivid, ominous dreams began in which Barasch saw his neck being probed, tortured, speared, and even removed. Convinced something was terribly wrong, he went to a doctor who eventually confirmed what Barasch's dreams had been telling him: he had thyroid cancer.
That's when Barasch's fascination with the power of dreams began. The result is a breakthrough book that calls upon 15 years of research as well as hundreds of real-life dreams to expertly explore this mysterious frontier. Readers can expect excellent, poetic prose (Barasch is the former editor in chief of New Age Journal) that speaks to the transformative powers within the bizarre, shape-shifting landscape of the dream world. He helps readers see when a dream reveals a personal calling, a warning from a diseased body, or an insight that can help dreamers overcome the wounds or beliefs that hold them back. Barasch reaches far beyond the typical dream analysis into the more ambitious realms of spiritual turning points, personal relationships, and mystical opportunities. For many readers this will be a life-altering book, one that forever shifts the dreamer's approach to dreams as well as the conscious world. --Gail Hudson
From Publishers Weekly
"Healing dreams," posits Barasch, a National Magazine Award-winning writer who transformed the once-obscure New Age Journal into a prominent national magazine, are startlingly memorable, displaying "Technicolor realism... gleam[ing] with mysteries both opaque and insistent, their meaning tantalizingly beyond [our] grasp." Such dreams demand considerable time and effort to discern their meaning, and force the dreamer to take a hard look inward. His provocative and thoughtful new book, the final entry in a trilogy (The Healing Path and Remarkable Recovery) he began 15 years ago, is one of the most compelling and convincing accounts of the significance of what Jung called "big" dreams. Delving deeply into Western psychology (particularly Jung and Freud), literature and Native American culture, ancient mythology and Eastern beliefs, Barasch illuminates his life-changing ordeal with informed and pertinent insights. Barasch began his study of dreams after a series of intense, bizarre dreams (an "all-night creep show at the inner drive-in") sent him to the doctor and eventually led to a diagnosis of cancer that seemed strangely prefigured by the dreams. His study is distinguished by his reluctance to claim to have the answersAhis ego takes a backseat to the enormous cross-cultural evidence he offersAand by the quality of his prose (he draws readers in from the get-go, opening with "Fifteen years ago, I was abductedAthere is no other word for itAinto the realm of the Dream.... I was cast away in a far country from which I've never quite returned"). Despite the book's occasional redundancies, Barasch has the gift of making readers want to journey into that realm with him. They need to be willing to venture into some fairly New Agey turf to do so, but that means, of course, that this title has the potential to break out within the New Age readership. (Nov.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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