"Sweet dreams."
We tuck our children into bed with those words and whisper them into our spouses ears each night. But how many of us pay serious attention to the night's dream work, asking our children or spouses what they experienced in the dream world the night before?

Since we spend one-twelfth of our lives in the dream state, dreaming must be important for the healthy functioning of our minds and, yes, even our bodies. But, how much do we use our dreams to guide and heal our modern lives?

In ages past, people paid serious attention to their dreams for guidance, warning, prophesy, and even healing. The Bible has myriad stories where dreams and interpreter were treated with grave respect. The Talmud warns, "A dream not understood is like a letter not opened."

Anatomy of a Dream

In this time of external over-stimulation and sleep deprivation, dreams are often ignored or unnoticed. Despite the fact that everyone without a serious brain dysfunction has several dream episodes during sleep each night, many people will say, "I don't dream."

Neuroscientists have learned much about the dreaming and the sleeping brain. They know that dreaming occurs not only in the REM stage of sleep, where rapid eye movement occurs under the eyelids, but also in non-REM stages that occur shortly after going to sleep.

The driving force behind dreams is the mesocortical-mesolimbic system, which includes both our limbic—emotional brain, and the neocortex—our thinking brain. It is the '"seeking" system of the brain that is activated.

In dream sleep, this system gives us a way to investigate whatever our unconscious throws before us without worrying about time, space and other constrictions and inhibitions that waking life imposes upon us. In other words, when you sleep, you cannot go about exploring or seeking what you are motivationally interested in, but in dreams you can.

Along with the "nonsense" jumble of images and sensations that may be produced, our "story synthesizer" in the cerebral cortex is stimulated and fits the dreams into a narrative. What comes out may be a new or confirming way we look at ourselves or our lives. Dreams can guide us in ways the conscious mind cannot.

Ancient Dream Temples

For over a thousand years, from the end of the 6 th century B.C.E. until the end of the 5 th century A.D., people journeyed long distances to the temples dedicated to Asklepios, an extraordinary physician and healer. Some 400 of these dream temples existed; the most famous remaining temple is Epidaurus, about 50 miles west of Athens. Hippocrates, the father of modern western medicine, was one of the pilgrims.

The intent of the journey was healing. People stayed two to four months, purifying themselves in sacred springs and having massage and other forms of what we now call "alternative medicine." The purpose was to cleanse, strengthen and prepare for a sacred healing dream in the temple itself.

They would offer sacrifices, prayers, sing hymns and participate in sacred rituals. During those months, they would watch musicals and plays in the amphitheater—tragedies and comedies with lessons on how to live and learn from the fates of those who chose wrongly.

When the priests deemed the time was right, that the "incubation" of the dream was complete, the "incubant" would walk up the steps of the temple and be led into one of the small sleeping chambers. With the help of the priests, they would enter into a sacred "temple sleep" in which a healing dream hopefully would occur.

If the dream occurred, the dreamer was required to transcribe the contents and its results into a wet stone tablet at the temple to "give testimony" to the healing. If a healing dream did not occur, the dreamer concluded he or she must prepare more effectively.

The dreamer's belief in the process was absolute, which has great implication for the vast literature of the power of belief on healing. (See Who Gets Sick: How Thoughts, Moods, and Beliefs Affect Your Health by Blair Justice). The temples charged on a sliding scale, a satisfaction-guaranteed fee that would challenge today's medical insurance structure. "Incubants" who were cured were only obligated to pay a fee that was comfortable within each person's means and could be paid any time within a year.

There is ample, if anecdotal, evidence the dreamers were often healed. Most of the thousands of clay tablets were destroyed, but some remain. Read the following excerpts:

"Proclus experienced great pain from arthritis. Fearful about having a future with such a dreaded disease, he implored the god and when he fell asleep, he saw, so he thought, the god bend over his legs, and for his love of mankind, not even decline to kiss his legs. And he lived his whole life unconcerned about this disease and arrived at a ripe old age without having experienced again such an ailment."

And another:

"...(name not readable) of Epidaurus, lame. He came to the sanctuary on a stretcher humbly asking for a cure. In his sleep he saw in a dream the god break his crutch and order him to go and get a ladder and to climb as high as possible up to the top of the sanctuary. The man tried at first, then, however, lost his courage, and rest up on the cornice. Finally, he gave up and climbed down the ladder little by little. Asklepios at first was angry about the deed, then laughed at his cowardice. He again dared him to carry out his command. He did and walked out of the sanctuary sound."

Follow Your Dream

Mona Lisa Schultz, neuroscientist, psychotherapist and author of Awakening Intuition , learned to pay attention to her dreams while working simultaneously on her Ph.D. and M.D. At first, she ignored what her dreams kept telling her—that she was so stressed that she was courting bodily danger. Then she began having trouble moving her fingers. An MRI showed two discs had collapsed in her spine. She finally had to undergo spinal surgery.

Schultz now listens to her dreams and uses them to deepen her intuitions and sharpen her diagnostic skills with patients. She has concluded "the soul speaks to the human consciousness through sensations of health or disease in the body" and through intuition, which sometimes is revealed most clearly in dreams.

It isn't necessary to travel to Epidaurus to find a healing dream. Putting a pad and pen by the bed and making the commitment to write any dream or dream fragment is often the beginning of opening oneself to the world of the unconscious.

Dreams often reveal repetitive patterns, recurring themes that point us in the direction of understanding problems or unmet needs. Said the famed psychologist and analyst Carl G. Jung, "In each of us there is another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dreams. When therefore we find ourselves in a difficult situation, he can sometimes kindle a light."

UPDATED: 3-29-2005

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