"In his fascinating, well-organized and lucid book, Marc Ian Barasch carries us along with him on a brave night journey through the dream world. He challenges the doubting reader with impressive charts of this realm and logs centuries of prior research and discovery. It is a courageous task, as many of the charts he uses belong to times and value systems that do not conform to Western scientific experimental psychology. If you want your science to be businesslike and hard, or, as William James wrote in his textbook on psychology, the researcher to be "studying the elements of the mental life, dissecting them out from the gross results in which they are embedded, and as far as possible reducing them to quantitative scales," this is not the book for you. Healing Dreams is a book for readers who can let go of preconceptions, immerse themselves in the vast lore of dreams and, above all, can savor stories of other people's experience. That dreams can be precognitive and serve both as warnings and point to cures, comes as no surprise to depth psychologists, who continually heed both the outer and inner realms of their patients' psyches and pay serious attention to their dreams. Nor will it come as a surprise to anyone who writes down and ponders his or her own dreams. We learn just what Barasch wants to share with his reader: that we are much more evolved, interconnected and subtly knowing than our little egos would have us believe. We also come to apprehend that our dreams come in various sizes and levels of importance, and can have a wisdom far beyond the personal ego's. Barasch, the author of The Healing Path and Remarkable Recovery...eagerly enters the imaginal world of dreams in a way that required him to commit the "subversive" act of taking his "dreams seriously -- enough to act on them, to live by them" and thus to obey their teaching "to live truthfully. Right now. And always." ...Barasch, using his own big dreams as an example, separates the healing dream from the more mundane variety. He describes the big dream, or healing dream, as one with "a singular intensity of purpose: to lead us to embrace the contradictions between flesh and spirit, self and other, shadow and light, in the name of wholeness." From here he goes on to explore the vast realm of dreams, packed into 11 chapters that never fail to capture the reader's interest thanks to Barasch's own enthusiasm, his profound research and his poet's eye for the heart of the matter. The chapter "The Dream of the Body" is especially full of intriguing stories, particularly of cancer survivors and the way dreams figured into their healing. It is followed by a survey of "Dreams of Personal Calling," which illumine the struggle to find a vocation in life. A chapter on dreams and how they can help relationships comes next, followed by equally compelling chapters on healing past wounds and on compassionately attending to our own dark, or shadow, sides. The chapters on dreams and spirituality make trail-blazing contributions to dream research. Barasch also offers a remarkable interpretation of Tibetan Buddhism's ancient system of dream yoga as a spiritual practice....[It] differs from New Age-type lucid dreaming, which is characterized by typically Western ego-driven themes and controls and alters what the dream psyche presents rather than developing that material as a means for spiritual growth. The Tibetan dream yoga system subcategorizes dreams into those of events that occurred while still awake but that need more attention; "message" dreams of people alive or dead; dreams showing forgotten parts of one's psyche now emerging into consciousness; symbolic dreams and ones with archetypal content; dreams that contain precognitive elements, omens or warnings, or might otherwise be termed extrasensory; and, finally, radiant dreams of great spiritual teaching or blessing. The spiritual component of the book as well as its sometimes poetic intensity add a depth to a subject that is all too often treated as a sort of parlor game. Healing Dreams, based as it is on over 15 years of research and on a profound personal investigation, is saved from both the Scylla of New Age psychobabble and the Charybdis of a true-believer's pomposity by the quality of the author himself. In these days of journalistic sensationalism and excess, Barasch remains an honest reporter with a respectful tone of gentle inquiry into the mystery of his subject. It is clear that he has grown and deepened along with a book that is as wise and healing as a dream....

In the epilogue to his latest book, Healing dreams: Exploringthe dreams that can transform your life (Riverhead Books) Marc Baraschrelates the story of his editor trying to envision a simple sound-bitepromotion for his book. The editor asked, "How would a healingdream help the average person be effective in their daily lives?"Barasch, was, in his own words, "flummoxed" by thequestion. He had spent years researching the subject, through his owndreams as he dealt with cancer, through interviewing countless peoplewho had received dreams of Great Mysteries, and through in-depthscholarship on the vast spiritual traditions pointing to dreams as achannel by which God might speak and redirect our ignorant andsleepwalking lives into the pursuit of wisdom. Yet the editor wantedsomething simple to explain it all to the consuming public. Baraschsaid he was reminded of the saying that when a thief meets a saint,all he sees is the holy man's pockets. Later, when the editor had adream about struggling to land an extremely large fish, Baraschsuspected that the fellow had finally gotten the idea: dreams, andhealing dreams especially, take us beyond our narrow categories andconcepts into a much larger world. As he puts us, healing dreamsdon't come to make it all better, but to help us live the truth.Iknow from my experience that it is difficult to take a healing dreamand turn it into a nifty formula for rescuing others....

Iappreciate Barasch's new book for the rare and worthy achievementit is: Through beautiful, even poetic language, integrated with thegrounding influence of the facts from the lives of those heinterviewed, he gives us a glimpse of a holy World Order that inspiresus to try to empathize with something that we can not fullyunderstand. In that sense, Barasch's book is the next best thing toa personal encounter with a healing dream itself.Among the varioustypes of healing dreams he explores, he includes his experiences withthe "Dream Helper Ceremony." Perhaps the most far-flungexport from A.R.E.'s summer camp, where it was first invented,Dream Helper involves a group of people volunteering to donate theirdreams to help someone in distress, doing so without knowing inadvance the nature of the person's problem. What began as anattempt to put a spiritual spin on traditional dream telepathyexperiments soon evolved into a potent healing ritual that many peoplehave used to their benefit....On the basis of his dream helperexperience, Barasch draws two important conclusions about healingdreams. First: if you want to have one yourself, offer to have ahealing dream for someone else! That's the closest to a healingdream formula he offers in the entire book.Two: there is some kind ofliving, spiritual fabric that unites all of us with a life beyond thephysical and to which we have a important relationship, acknowledgedor not. Healing dreams, he has discovered, come to pull us back fromthe abyss of isolationism into a more conscious relationship with thatunifying lifeforce. There's more to a saint, in other words, thanwhat can be found in his pockets.

What we have here is the living yoga of an inquiry that has opened the author, and now the reader, to the interwoven nature of our reality. We are unavoidably called upon to consider the intelligence of the universe. Marc's passionate pursuit of what he was given has taken the rubies of the inner world and held them up for us to marvel at, and become inspired from.

His personal journey has been the alchemical vessel in which the passion of dream knowledge has been fired and made authentic. Reading this book will change the way you go to bed at night, deepening your life with the ongoing adventure of conscious participation in this mysterious universe. It is an invitation to consider that guidance is a gift to all of us, and that when we sleep, we are in fact making a soul journey.

This book is not another self-help book sprung from some modest good intention and hope for fast money. It is a living document of life lived at the edge of fire, bringing back the heat of our inner world in a way that compels us to wake up, and acknowledge the mysteries at work. We are in Marc's debt for the work he has done, for a way has been opened that can deepen all our lives.

This book came highly recommended to me because my husband has Multiple Sclerosis. I was instantly captured by the title alone. As I dove deeper, I realized these "remarkable recovery" case studies could be my husband. I gained a great deal of insight about beliefs I already had, yet was struggling to fit them into our lives to help my husband heal, to help him get better, and hopefully some day, fully recover.

This book gave it all to me. It is well written and full of humor, which I found very enlightening when you are dealing with disease and death. I strongly & highly recommend this book to anyone who knows or cares about someone with any severe illness or life threatening disease.

I just finished this absolutely wonderful book & am buying 2 more copies for friends. I suggest you read it and do the same.

Here is a book to come back to time and time again... as I have. In the midst of my own cancer journey, I have made it a point to read and re-read portions of this book. In the darkness and uncertainty that accompanies Cancer, this book gave me hope. A guiding light, on a sometimes starless night. My dog-eared copy of this book will forever maintain a cherished place on my bookshelf.

I read this book before ordering it for a friend who has cancer, because I wanted to make sure it was the kind of information she needed. I thought it was absolutely wonderful. I'm a hard-science kind of person, not skeptical at all about the mind-body connection but definitely needing proof, and I got it here. I can't imagine a person with cancer--especially one with a poor prognosis but who's determined to do her or his best to get well again--who wouldn't feel better after reading this book.

It is my fortune to be blessed with good health and it was my great fortune to find and read this book! Like Dorothy, I read my way down this path with the feeling of adventure that one gets when truly being educated. Thank you, Mr. Barasch, for your wisdom and very good writing on this interesting topic. The insights into illness and healing you have presented I have found in none other of the several books I have read on the topic of health/mind-body connection. I especially appreciated the metaphors you used. Perhaps one day my health fortune will change, but I think I will be well-equipped to handle it now that I have your book in the library that is in my brain!

I felt very validated reading this book. When I was very sick with an auto immune illness, I often encountered the mind-boggling paradoxes involved in bushwacking my way through the jungle of the healing process. It's this that Barasch totally nails and affirms in a very supportive way. Kudos to you, Ian Marc Barasch -- and thank you.

I didn't find this book till six years after it was published, which makes me think it has been grossly under publicized. Too bad -- this is a supportive resource many could benefit by. I wish I'd had this book when I first started my healing journey!

Drescher's zany colorful illustrations make this book come to life. The rhyming text is fun, too. A boy unleashes his dreams of having a fantastic nontraditional pet, but in the end he'll settle for one that is all his own. A great book for parents and kids who appreciate off-beat original illustration.