Chapter 1: Southern Child
Chapter 2: Southern Roots: Healing in the Forest
Chapter 3: Precognitive Dreaming: The Dance Hall of the Dead
Chapter 4: The Yellow Robe
Chapter 5: Packing for Twin Journeys
Chapter 6: A Journey Into the Sacred Forest
At first blink, illness –especially cancer does not look like a spiritual exercise. In the face of a serious illness, we can become paralyzed, suspend judgment and intuition and accept an environment where options seem to no longer exist. When the body is dealt a serious physical blow, doctors often take advantage of the situation, providing healing “options”that define healing within the most narrow of definitions. It is up to the individual to turn illness into a spiritual exercise and to bring dreams—and other alternative healing methods of choice—into the healing process.
In a dream of killing the bats I throw the bat down a flight of stairs where it is impaled on a knife-like tool, but I use poison – chemotherapy – to destroy the remaining bats. This mix of surgery and chemotherapy, given to me in my dreams, became my Healing Cocktail, a lethal syrup of dreams and medical technology, a prescription for a return to health. The dreams for that cocktail came long before I first walked into a doctor’s office.
My own experience led me to study more about dreaming in the ancient world when people routinely sought healing guidance from dreams and from the divine power which showed itself in dreams.
In the original Hippocratic oath, doctors swore by gods of healing, including Asklepius.
