Healing Dreams: Exploring the Dreams That Can Transform Your Life (Hardcover)

~ Marc Ian Barasch (Author) "Most of us have had (or, inevitably, will have) at least one dream in our lives that stops us in our tracks..." (more)
Key Phrases: healing dream, invisible community, dream yoga, Healing Dreams, Black Elk, Dreams of Personal Calling (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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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Product Details

• Hardcover: 356 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover (October 19, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1573221678
• ISBN-13: 978-1573221672
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 5.9 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #336,250 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dreams as Personal Revelation, October 27, 2000

By	Gail D. Storey (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Learn to Appreciate the Healing in Dreams, January 3, 2001

By	Henry Reed "Creator Spirit" (Mouth of Wilson, VA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great overview of dreamwork, February 16, 2005

By	Mike Reeves-McMillan (Auckland, New Zealand) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Healing Dreams: Exploring the Dreams that can Transform you Life (Paperback)

Here's a guy who's really put in the research, not just by reading other people's books but by talking to people, many of them from other cultures (Tibetan, Australian Aboriginal, Native American) - and not just in a one-off interview but in a continuing friendship with several of them.

In addition he has a powerful personal story to tell about his experiences of various kinds of dreamwork, starting from the time when vivid and frightening dreams alerted him to early-stage cancer in his throat.

He is a bit dismissive of lucid dreaming but otherwise I don't have a complaint to make about the book.