What Is Dreamwork?
Virtually every culture has believed dreams carry important messages. To the
ancient Greeks, dreams were great healers. People who were sick slept in special
healing temples in hopes of receiving therapeutic dreams from the gods. The Talmud,
the Hebrew sacred book of practical wisdom, states clearly that the Jews gave great
importance both to the dream and to the dream interpreter. Mohammed began writ-
ing the Koranafter an angel visited him in a dream.
Tibetan Buddhists see no distinction between dreaming and waking and consider all
of life a dream.
Plato saw dreams as a release for fervent inner forces. Hippocrates thought dreams
were windows on illness and that normal dream content indicated a state of well-
ness and bizarre content a state of illness. Aristotle believed that the beginning of ill-
ness could be felt in dreams before actual symptoms appeared. Likewise,
Artemidorus of Daldi, a physician in the Middle Ages, believed that dreams were like
magnifying glasses that detected the small beginnings of physical illness.
Artemidorus wrote the first Western dream book in the second century, and the
dreams recorded were remarkably similar to contemporary ones. Ghengis Khan is
reported to have received his battle plans from his dreams, while Hannibal attrib-
uted the battle plan to attack Rome over the Alps with elephants as something that
came to him in a dream.
During the late Middle Ages, dreams began to fall into disfavor among Christians in
spite of the fact that throughout the Bible, God spoke directly to people through
dreams and visions. St. Francis of Assisi founded the Franciscan Order as a dream
directive from Christ.
In the United States, the traditional Iroquois were (and are) a people of dreams.
Children were taught that dreams were the most important source of practical and
spiritual guidance. The people of an Iroquois village began each day with dream
sharing. The entire village became involved in dreamwork, especially if a dream
seemed to contain a warning of death or disease. “Big” dreams were thought to
come about in one of two ways. During sleep, the dreamer would have an out-of-
body experience and travel to many places, past, present, and future. Alternatively,
the dreamer could receive a visit from a spiritual being. Dreams were considered to
be central to healing by providing insight into the causes of illness, often before
physical symptoms appeared. Dreams continue to be important tools for many tra-
ditional healers in the Native American population.
Among indigenous peoples, shamans are recognized as dream counselors but not as
“experts” in the Western sense. They are often called to their vocation by dreams.228 ABSOLUTE BEGINNER’S GUIDE TOALTERNATIVE MEDICINE