Read a wonderful book recently, Healing Dreams by Marc Ian Barasch…
Enthralling and entertaining, Healing Dreams is worth the price of admission for the dream accounts alone. For me personally, it brings to light a number of parallels between dream interpretation and how a homeopath prescribing for his chronically ill client goes about interpreting her remedy state. My own manner of doing so, based on an integration of three healing modalities, homeopathy, Traditional Chinese Medicine and Biomedicine (conventional medicine as it is known) is described in my book, Interpreting Chronic Illness.

Here are some of the parallels I’ve noted:

• Certain dreams and specific remedies are transcendent and transformative;
• A healing dream’s impact can consist of a question posed in symbolic language. Remedy states too pose a question. The symptom complex they present represents fallout from an unresolved existential question. In both dreams and chronic illness the question lacks a logical answer while possessing powerful emotional charge;
• Both the dream and the impactful remedy pose an open-ended challenge to the tyranny of the ego, our ordinary waking consciousness;
• Directionality is imparted to a broad range of normally not considered possibilities, some of which may not make sense until a future date. Jung has referred to these nether wishes as our Shadow. Chronic illness can be viewed as the Shadow venting its frustration;
• Healing dreams and remedy states are realms where double meanings, puns, and idioms run rampant. Both dreams and case-taking can illuminate the literal manner in which a metaphor is playing itself out within an individual’s life;
• Dreams and remedy states (such as when the distant past or family history legacy dominates) often reflect a seemingly irrational but nonetheless true unity within time: the irrelevance of separate and distinct past, present and future divisions;
• There exist lucid dreaming states sometimes called hypnagogic reality. This is the realm Immanuel Swedenborg explored to find his truth reflected in the dictum, As Above So Below. A similar nether reality is found in non-resolution of Sense Dimensional quandaries described in Interpreting Chronic Illness: Isolation vs Synchrony; Anxiety vs Challenge; Disorientation vs Centeredness; Entropy vs Consolidation; and Chaos vs Creativity.