• Both were snatched from death.
• Both were healers.
• Both are mortal and immortal.
• Both died, resurrected to live forever.
• Both provided healing for all mankind.
• Both shared a divine - human birth.
• Both were closely associated with the feminine element not only in their personal, charismatic gifts of sensitivity and relatedness, but also via their many women associates and friends.
• Both are clearly associated with water.
• Both use serpent symbolism.
• Both call for pilgrimage, purification, catharsis. introversion, incubation, and healing dreams.
• Asklepius was born of Apollo, Greek god of music, harmony, the movement of the sun, and sender of disease and healing, and Cronis. She was unfaithful to him and in anger he killed her. On the funeral pyre he remembered the child in her womb and as the flames were licking away her body, he ripped open her womb and drew out his premature son, Asklepius.

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1. C.A. Meier. Ancient Incubation and Modern Psychotherapy. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois, 1967.

Apollo gave the baby to Chiron, a physician gifted in healing and steeped in medical lore. He brought him up close to nature, earth and animals and imparted to him his knowledge of healing. He was given the gift of the Gorgon’s blood (Medusa). The blood that flowed from the left side brought death, and from the right side brought healing. This reflects paradoxical quality of the unconscious that both wounds and heals. Asklepius became a highly successful physician and people loved him. Hades, king of the underworld, hated him and got Zeus to kill Asklepius with a thunderbolt. People were so upset by his death that Zeus raised Asklepius from the dead, a divine healer. So twice he was at the door of death and then returned to life.

Healing in Asklepiads followed the following steps :

1. You had to be invited in a dream to go to the temple, you never went unbidden.
2. You’d be welcomed by the priests, who were not therapists, healing was done by the direct intervention of the god in the soul of the patient.
3. If the god invited, you were put in the "abaton", a place not to be entered uninvited. A patient must never be at the point of death, as none should die in the temple. Pregnant women were forbidden entrance to the temple.
4. Then came rites of purification: catharsis or confession - without this you can’t expect healing, you must be right with yourself, Ritual bathing is next, body and soul cleansed in the healing waters of springs or streams near the temple.
5. Go to the special chamber, the abaton : on a couch you sleep alone waiting for the god to appear in a healing dream. The period of waiting was called incubation. It may take several days and results in an altered, state of consciousness.
6. When the dream comes, you go to the priests and report it and they help determine if it was from the god. They did interpret it for the healing came out from the interpretation but from the dream experience itself.
7. Patients who were healed recorded the stories of their healing in plaques that were placed upon the walls of the temple.
8. A fee was paid to the priests to maintain the temple, if not paid, a relapse would occur.

The most important figures for Asklepius were the ladies of his family, --- this emphasizes the feminine principle if healing is to take place. The feminine principle of eros, relatedness, and nature-- is an essential ingredient of a spiritual or psychological healing process. Feminine powers of warmth, concern and intuitive understanding are needed, Water is also important with ritual purification. Water also has a feminine significance. It is like a container of life, a womb from which life springs in which it is nourished. Life began in the water of the ocean, in our dreams, water is the most common symbol of the unconscious and often refers to the life giving qualities of the soul. The symbol of Asklepius was the serpent. Ancients saw the serpent as the symbol of renewing, transforming energy that lies at the heart of life. The serpent symbolises a beneficient power. The serpent is associated with the power to renewing its own life, the symbol of Asklepius coming to heal.

Modern Dream Research
As temples of healing gave way to hospitals with modern medical practitioners, we saw many medical colleges set up Dream Research Labs to satisfy a growing public interest in the field -- often called the third state of existence . Here subjects volunteered to have electrodes on their heads to measures EEG waves and to do wakened during REM (Rapid Eye Movement) periods to record dreams. Dreaming periods alternate with non-REM periods in regular cycles occuring on an average of 4-7 times a night. The REMs last from a few minutes to over an hour, increasing successively in length during the night, while non-REM periods become progressively shorter. Dr. William Dement, while a research fellow in Psychiatry at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, had made intensive experiments on dreams. He assures us that all people dream several times a night whether they remember it or not. He has not found a single aimless or meaningless dream. He found that preventing dreams can lead to sign of a mental breakdown, as shown by people who have been deprived of sleep for inordinately long periods of time. Dement sees dreams as the guardians of sanity.
There are many people who say they never dream. This is not true; everyone dreams 6-8 times a night, but most people don’t value their dreams so they immediately forget them. Dreams can be recalled by quiet reflection before sleep, by programming yourself to remember the dreams, and by sleeping with a torch, your Dream Journal and pen under your pillow so that you can write it as soon as you wake up. Dreams are impeded by extroverted activities. See the box to strengthen recall.
REM sleep is crucial to keep brain tissue in good working order. Alcohol and also certain drugs like sleeping pills, Dexadrine and the barbiturates have been found to suppress dreaming, and it is suggested that dream deprivation may play a part in delirium tremens. One thing is clear from these studies -- the human organism has a need to dream for healing and wholeness.

Symbols
There is living within us an unconscious sources of wisdom which helps us to see ourselves in a different perspective. This wisdom uses dreams to communicate through symbolic messages. These symbols are either individual -- coming from our personal experience; or universal, from the collective unconscious. Religious symbols give meaning to the life of man and they are useful and to be cultivated even if they can never be proved. They enable us to find a place in the universe. Dreams are to help us harmonise all qualities to transform our personality.
Dreams speak to us in symbols. To understand them we need to learn the meaningful of the symbols. It is good to keep a section of your Dream Journal to work out the meaning of your individual symbols and universal symbols which occur in your dreams.
How do dreams help in healing? What is healing ? We need healing when we are hurt, when there is a wound, a conflict , a lack of harmony with others and self. We need healing when our bodies are sick, our minds in turmoil, and our spirits unable to tackle fear, guilt , helplessness, and hopelessness. Dreams can heal sickness that are physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. They are a powerful engine of transformation to bring harmony in us and our environment. In section 4 we give examples of how dreams help in healing.

Dreams and social Changes
There is perhaps a possible, but little explored field that is beyond the third state in the use of dreams. In 1935 Kiloton Stewart 1 studied the Senoi tribe of the Malay peninsula. They are the most democratic group in anthropological literature, they had no violent crime or intercommunal

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1. Kilton Stewart. "Dream Theory in Malaya" in Altered States of Consciousness by Charles T. Tart (Ed). Anchor Books, Doubleday & Co. Inc. Garden City. New York, 1969.

conflict for hundreds of years. The Senoi believe that dream images are all parts of the personality and consist of psychic forces diguised in external forms and have no doubt that everyone should learn from childhood to master these internal forces. Children are taught that if hostile spirit are encountered in dreams, they should not only confront them, but actually attack them, calling on friendly "dream spirits" (possibly healthy aspects of the personality) for help if they wish, but taking courage to fight alone until they arrive. If the dreamer kills the hostile dream image it emerges as a servant or ally : dream characters are bad only as long as we are afraid of and retreat from them.
The Senoi also teach their children not to be afraid of falling dreams, but to let themselves go, and it turns into a pleasurable flying dream. Thus anxiety dreams become dreams of joy. Senoi are a delightfully peaceful people, with a rich life of joy. Senoi are a delightfully peaceful people, with a rich life of poetry, music and dancing. Senoi children are taught to return to waking life with some crative idea. If you are flying, fly somewhere, meet the spirits there are shared with the tribe the next morning which either accepts it or tells tehm to go back and do better next time.
The Senoi live without a police force, psychiatric hospitals, or war. They are physically pleasant and psychologically healthy. The key to their harmonious life is the way they deal with dreams interpretation. Dreams belong to everyone in the Senoi community. Halaks were certain persons especially chosen by the spirits for this vocation, but everyone participates in the listening and discussion of dreams. The dream figures represent real spiritual forces that come for a purpose and to which a person can relate. Senoi believe that dreams are the natural way in which your inner spiritual forces contact you, they are meant to be recognized, discussed, and understood. They keep you from getting sick and maintain psychological and social health. Senoi dream work closely resembles many of the ideas of Jungian psychology.
All Senoi, including children, participate in ceremonial dances involving a group trance. Dream characters are invited to visit the dreamer during the dance. A bargain is made in which the dream character agrees to possess the dancer if some condition is satisfied. Typical conditions include learning a dance or song, creating a design, or following some dietetic restriction.
At the climax of the dance, the young dancers fall writhing to the ground as if seized by a fit. Boys, encouraged by the old man, do deep into the violent stage of the trance. Assuming the fetal position, they jabber incoherently while the men talk to them, massage them and slap them with sacred leaves. As the fit passes, the boys become coherent and describe and share their expriences with other members of the community.
The trance dance requires great preparations -- making costumes, gathering sacred plants, collecting flower and resin for the dream characters, rehearsing songs and dances conducting healing creemones, carrying our expeditions and courtships required by the dream companions and attending daily meetings for interpretation of dreams. The mini culture of the Senoi is a fascination antithesis of our technological cultrue. The Senoi use of dreams resulted in a spontaneously creative yet sociologically stable ritual life of dream interpretation and nonviolent acting out of dream expreience. Virtually all community activitues and the great majority of individual activities were determined by the interpretation of dreams. See Technique 3 in for the Senoi Dream method.
The work of Carlos Castaneda describing shamanic dream work and psychodelic practices of traditional Yaqui Indians in northern Mexio is like Stewart’s work, an example of how dreams can help people create the world we all desire to inhabit.
Jeremy Taylor says dream work is a tool not just for helping a few individuals towards greater self-awarness, but for changing the world. It is a powerful nonviolent action tool he uses as a Minister. At the level of the dream we are all one. There is substantial reason to believe that all living things may participate in the dream state. Our collective perils are real and pressing. We have manufactured them ourselves.
Dreams could be a way of reestablishing the ecological inter-connectedness of all beings. Dreams help break down prematurely closed prejudices, opinions, idelogies and world views. Group dream work can create support and understaning to sustain us in reamaking a wiser, more humane and just global society as well as offer speicific creative insight and ideas on how to do it. An example of this is from the San Franciso Bay area where a group of dream sharing people who lived in the Sanusalito house boat community conflict and change. These indigenous people, Coast Miwoks, had an almost, 3000 year history of dream-work and community sharing in peace.

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1. Jeremy Tayor. "Dream Work Techniques for Discovering the Creative Power" in  Dreams. Paulist press, New York, Ramsay, 1983, pp.100-106.

Gates as a Sausalito Waterfront Community, started a Dream Journal begun in 1977. It contains dreams and efforts to resist demolition of the houseboats, land fill, and construction, nonviolently. This periodical helped bring warring factions together to acknowledge their common interests and common humanity. They suffered physical and economic injury - imprisonment, etc., but won the day. Gates created a forum where people could relate as emotional equals. It increased literacy and intellectual exchange that has drawn many severely isolated people into deeper and more sustaining contact with their neighbour and the community as a whole. Even some police and private guard were drawn to share dreams in Gates. This is an effort to make a creative, nonviolent response to a dehumanizing and violence evoking situation. This model was used by other communities also, suggesting that dream-sharing on a community-wide basis can serve to enhance the quality of life and the flow of creative energy wherever it is practiced. It helps creative self-reflection and growth as persons and communities.
See Technique 13 in Section 3 on Looking for the Social Dimension of a Dream.

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