The Power of Healing
Presence in Dreams
All real living is meeting.1
– Martin Buber
If I asked you to describe a loved one to me, a dear family member or friend, you could no doubt readily give me a snapshot description of them, what they look like, how you know them and what you love about them – the many ways you know them by heart. Yet, if I asked you to describe qualities of their presence, how it feels to look into their eyes or to be with them, words may prove more elusive.
The nature of presence shares the ineffability and evocativeness of dreams, conveying a quality of feeling rather than something readily defined. In the Middle Ages, alchemists, intrigued to discover that it takes 800lb of rose petals to create 1lb of rose-scented concentrate, concluded that a person’s soul could likewise be distilled into an essence suggestive of their essential nature – the fragrance of the soul.2
Dictionaries give the derivation of ‘presence’ from the prefix prae, meaning ‘in front of’, and from the Latin verb esse, ‘to be’, and praesentia, ‘a being before’.3 ‘Presence’ impresses itself upon us, touches our souls and draws out previously unrealised qualities from within us. Like a fragrance, the longer a person’s presence stays in our heart and mind, the stronger that sense of presence.
To get in touch with the healing power of presence in a dream, rather than simply describing what happened, we first need to consider how we feel in response to the dream. Just as in human relationships, the feeling nature of presence holds the key. For instance, one woman I worked with told me she’d had a dream in which she was sitting with her younger sister. She hadn’t seen her sister much over the years but had always admired her for her strength and intelligence. When telling me about the dream, she pointed out that she didn’t recall what they had said to each other, rather that, ‘It was more a feeling. Like our souls were touching. That’s what happens in dreams sometimes, our souls touch each other.’ She added, ‘It was a lot like sitting here with you now.’
When two souls touch, something new comes into being in the space between them, a special healing quality of presence that feels different from the more usual exchanges with others we have in everyday life. The psychologist Carl Rogers, exploring the relational quality between client and therapist, said of his own work, ‘Over time, I think that I have become more aware of the fact that in therapy I do use my self. I recognize that when I am intensely focused on a client, just my presence seems to be healing, and I think this is probably true of any good therapist [italics added].’4 In the Rogerian approach to psychotherapy, a therapist embodies healing presence by being genuine, accepting and empathetic – in other words, unconditionally ‘present’ – towards their client.
Drawing on Buddhist teachings, the psychotherapist John Welwood asks, ‘What is unconditional presence?’, and responds simply, ‘Being present to our experience as it is.’5 While this might sound as if it would be easy to do, for most of us that feels hard because we constantly want to avoid situations that cause us anxiety, discomfort or pain. Rather than being curious about uncomfortable feelings, we tend to reject them, building up protective defences against them. In contrast, when we respond to our life experiences, including our dreams, with openness and equanimity rather than fear, we enter into a more compassionate understanding of ourselves and others.
The medieval tradition of icon painting provides an interesting parallel here. Icons imaginatively serve to link the world of the senses and a deeper, more subtle dimension, imbued with qualities of true presence. It has been said that the icon gives us ‘a sacred window onto the invisible world.’6 One icon painted in the early 15th century, attributed to the Russian icon painter Andrei Rublev and prefacing this chapter, conveys this sense of soul-touching presence.
In the icon, we see three figures gathered round a table to share a meal, their heads bent in quiet communion. You may already have noticed that these figures have wings that merge with the landscape and halos that indicate an illumined intelligence, signs that we have entered the supra-sensory realm of angelic presences. Before you begin to analyse, interpret or judge this artwork, take a moment to be truly present to the qualities it emanates, feelings such as serenity, intimacy, harmony, balance, peacefulness and completeness.
Let us approach this icon as if it were a dreamscape. From left to right, the beings sitting round the table wear luminous outer garments of red, blue and green in the original painting, of a richly textured, diaphanous quality. Their unnaturally long arms and necks give them a larger-than-life appearance, foregrounding their importance, whereas the background has less significance. Their wings encircle them. A dynamic energy circulates in a harmonious flow among these elegant yet humble beings as they gaze at one another around the table.
When viewed in colour, the icon’s backdrop shines in gold leaf, illumined as if from within.7 In icons, no external light source is depicted, so no shadows appear. This is generally the case with dreams too. In both, illumination comes from the inner light.
Looking closely at Rublev’s icon, we can see that the inverse perspective used in icon painting – narrow at the front and broader at the back – places the viewer at the centre of image, along the axis of symmetry. The empty space at the table beckons each of us to sit and partake of the meal and share in the angels’ intimate gathering and quiet power, one alive with feeling.
Now imagine joining these celestial strangers at their table. Take a moment to consider how it feels to do so. Does the invitation cause you to feel sceptical, unsure, embarrassed, unworthy, unprepared, timid, impatient, disinterested, curious, confident, joyful, grateful, or something else altogether? Are you open to the possibility or do you contract and withdraw? It doesn’t always feel straightforward to accept an invitation like this and to relate to it in a responsive, friendly way. Our reaction tells us much about our emotional response to the opportunities that dreams, just as life, offer us.
Tradition has it that this icon depicts a biblical teaching in which the Old Testament patriarch Abraham receives strangers hospitably, serving them a meal, only to realise after the unknown guests had left that he had hosted angels.8 As onlookers, we too can see the guests through Abraham’s eyes, making these strangers guests at our own table. While portraying a particular time and place, the icon asks us to enter into the universality of the teaching: ‘Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.’9 Abraham finds that the ‘strangers’ bring him good news: his wife, Rachel, although well past her childbearing years, will give birth to a child.
Similarly, in our dreams, when we are able to receive the ‘stranger’ with kindness, we find new life born into our daily living in unexpected ways. A dream reported by a woman interned at the time in Auschwitz during the Second World War powerfully demonstrates this:
I dreamt that I was walking towards a small river with very turbid waters. On the other bank, my eldest brother, Stachu,10 was coming towards me (he had already died when I had this dream). Both of us stepped into the water at the same time. My feet sank into the mud. When we met in the middle of the deep river, my brother handed me a huge, fiery fish. I scream, terrified: ‘Stachu, I can’t carry it, I can’t carry it.’ And he calmly replied: ‘You’ll carry it, you’ll carry it.’
She continues: ‘When [later] I was down with typhus ... his words consoled me in my illness, [and] gave me hope that I would survive typhus. And indeed, I did.’11
Although the fiery fish frightens the dreamer, we know from alchemy that fire also serves as a powerful agent of transformation and purification. That a water creature, a fish, is aflame, causes fear. Nevertheless, we can also notice that this strange blending of the two images has a mysterious quality, like the burning bush of the Old Testament out of which Yahweh spoke to Moses. The fiery fish arises between the figure of the brother and his sister, bearing the numinous quality of an overpowering mysterious presence that inspires both awe and terror – the mysterium tremendum.12 When we perceive the mysterium tremendum as originating from a power outside of us, felt to be ‘wholly other’,13 it can become unbearable, as in this dream. However, although the dreamer feels terrified by the strange quality of the fish, the brother’s reassurance acts as an antidote to her terror, his love helping her to overcome her fear.14
Exactly what the fish signified for the dreamer, she does not say, but she later credits her brother’s words heard in the dream – ‘You’ll carry it’ – with helping her to survive potentially fatal typhus. This Auschwitz survivor reports the dream as being about her physical survival, yet, viewed from a transpersonal perspective, she has also been given spiritual fortitude to ‘carry’ the burden of the camp’s horrors and to survive.
A creature like a dream-fish emanates presence all the more when the dreamer can fully engage with it. As an example, we can turn to a dream had by Angela, whose earlier dream of the Sistine Chapel was included Chapter Five on light. Angela had this next dream during a difficult time in her personal life, when her need to carve out a creative space for herself came to the fore. Only when she shared the dream in waking life did the sense of presence within truly come alive:
I am resting on a bed with my father ... The bed is unusual insofar as it is a water tank! Suddenly a huge goldfish slips out of it and starts circling the room obsessively. My father and I are baffled and startled; ‘Where does that come from?’ shouts my father. ‘Who’s put it here? Small fish are fine but not this monster!’ I jump out of bed and survey the scene. At first, I find the fish kind of alien and scary, but then I realise that, despite its size, it is harmless. The poor creature is simply distressed. It is compelled to come out because it is too big for the bed and can no longer bear such a confined space. On the other hand, it cannot stay out of the bed because it needs the water to breathe, so the fish is condemned to move in and out of its prison in an inescapable, frantic vicious circle. I watch it quietly, thinking with increasing compassion that I will have to capture it and take it to the sea.
After Angela told me this dream, we explored it as a waking dream. In the process, she imaginatively engaged directly with the fish, taking the creature up in her arms. In doing so, she felt compassion towards the fish and an appreciation of its powerful energy. This moved her profoundly. She felt able to contain the energy the fish held and stood absorbed in doing so for a few moments. When I suggested she go ahead and let the experience unfold, she carried the fish to the sea where she let it go, enacting this movement as she narrated the unfolding dream. When Angela released the fish into water, she felt reassured that the large goldfish now had a place expansive enough to swim in unencumbered.
Reflecting upon the dream and dreamwork, she viewed the fish as both herself and as a spiritual symbol.15 Angela added, ‘So, for me the dream is not just a re-enactment of the pain and claustrophobia that made me leave home when I was in my twenties, but it also tells me that the needed leap, right now, is at a spiritual level.’ She understood the movement from the ‘waterbed to the seabed’ as moving towards her transpersonal Higher Self, explaining that ‘this road passes through the heart, with compassion that doesn’t reject the fish as the odd one out, as the wrong thing in the wrong place, but embraces it and makes the effort of the journey to freedom.’ In so saying, she spoke for a more positive masculine archetype, a fatherly quality in herself that could provide her with guidance and forceful energy.
In both dreams reported here, a fish has associations with healing presence: the first with life-saving emotional reassurance and the second with direct awareness of empowerment to take action. The psychological and spiritual elements within each dream overlap and inform one another, a dual psycho-spiritual perspective, in which personal and transpersonal elements combine.
A being in a dream may also bring physical healing, as I personally experienced when a severe sinus infection incapacitated me for weeks. I had recently moved to London from Switzerland during a troubled time in my life, and I felt despondent. Then, I had this dream:
I stand in the afternoon light. A being who reminds me of the angel Gabriel from a dream I had many years before approaches me and says, ‘I hear you haven’t been feeling well.’ As he speaks, he lifts his right forefinger and touches my sinus areas under each eye. In the dream, I instantly feel better, and I realise that when I wake up, I will begin to get well. As he turns and walks away, I cry out to him, ‘Can you heal my spirit?’ He turns and comes up to me again. He looks at me with a great deal of love as he raises his finger to the point between my eyebrows. His fingertip seems just a hair’s breadth away from me, and I can feel its heat and power. Then suddenly he looks at me very tenderly and with deep regret slowly lowers his hand. It feels as if he suddenly got a message not to heal me this way. We look long at each other, and I realise with disappointment and resignation that whereas the healing of my body would be rapid, the healing of my spirit would take years – at least another seven years, if not longer. And then I wake up.
Although my meeting with a healing presence in this dream felt timeless, the dream itself held a very earthy sense of time. Specific intervals of time given in dreams often turn out to have a literal application. In this case, seven years after this dream, I started training in the psychotherapy programme that would lead to my working more closely with dreams. It was then that my inner healing truly began.16
Dreams, like icons, also reveal time as existing on two levels – chronos and kairos. The former denotes chronological time, the continuum of past, present and future, named after the Greek god Chronos, ‘the father of time’. The latter, named after the Greek god Kairos, describes the quality of time experienced, for example, when we come into real presence. In such moments, time becomes fluid, and may even seem to stop altogether, as when we are fully in the ‘now’.
To return to Rublev’s icon, both chronos and kairos are in evidence. The icon’s background locates the historical event in time (Abraham’s house, the oak tree standing next to it and a nearby mountain), yet the emphasis is on the participation of three figures in communion together – the sharing of kairos over a humble meal also expresses the Christian understanding of Divine presence as a trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost. (In this icon, coming from the Eastern Orthodox tradition which Rublev followed, the Trinity is sometimes pictured with female representations.) Kairos infuses everyday actions, such as breaking bread together, with a sacred quality.
Thus, a sacred encounter can leave a lasting impression of a deep communion with healing presence, as in the following dream, had by the dreamer at a time of great personal distress. He describes the dream as the shortest but most powerful he’d ever had, adding that, even many years on, it remains as vivid and heartfelt as when it first took place. He relates:
I am walking along a path or track when I suddenly become aware of a person beside me on my right. I turn to look and there is a man of around 30 years. His face and eyes shine with love and he smiles, a smile that seemed to go right inside me and fills me with joy! Then I awake and know instantly that my companion was Jesus.
Sacred encounters in dreams and icons convey a sense of presence that transcends religious dogma, restoring the original meaning found at the heart of the word ‘religious’: ‘To heal, to bond, to join, to bridge, to put back together again’ – capacities that the Jungian analyst Robert Johnson calls ‘our sacred faculties’.17
Most people today are more familiar with icons as graphic images on their computers than with religious icons. Yet computer icons share certain attributes with their medieval counterparts. For example, to access the internet, we click on the image of the chosen ‘icon’, initiating software that extends the reach and capacity of our minds, revealing previously unseen worlds to us. By means of a simulated world, effectively a virtual reality, we enter into the technological cathedral of the mind, an architectural space ‘housing’ an intelligence that seems vastly greater than that of the individual mind.
In so far as the internet connects us in positive ways, bridging the distance between individuals and widening our field of consciousness, it has the potential to nourish our sacred faculties and emotions in our waking and dreaming lives. However, it is essential that our hearts also be engaged and for us to be mindful enough for thoughtful reflection, or else the constant flow of images entices us into the world of sensation rather than the Imaginal World within.
In 2017, the film director Werner Herzog made a documentary about the internet entitled Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World.18 Herzog’s opening expression ‘Lo and Behold’ alludes to both chronos and kairos. The word ‘Lo’ in the title comes from the first two letters ever transmitted using the internet, briefly linking the University of California at Los Angeles with Stanford University near San Francisco (before the computer system crashed). ‘Lo and behold’ are words traditionally reserved for angelic messengers who herald a Divine presence. In this context, the title ironically refers to the almost worshipful esteem with which the public views the internet and the power it holds.
Herzog speculates, ‘Can the internet dream of itself?’ In one sense, the internet has fast become a new field of dreams, a global platform for what the visionary Teilhard de Chardin called the ‘noosphere’, ‘the thinking layer’ of an evolving planetary consciousness.19 On the negative side, Herzog uncovers an internet used for nightmarish purposes: sexual harassment, cyber bullying, political propaganda and unbridled consumerism, devoid of empathy or compassion.
Most of us now spend more than a full day a week online,20 far more than we spend in dreaming, looking outside for ‘information’ rather than seeking it within. Around 75 per cent of teenagers in the United States check their messages on social media as soon as they wake up, before doing anything else.21 How differently might they feel if, upon waking, they first spent time checking in with their nightly dreams! The ‘online world’ stimulates the imagination and can also create a superficial sense of presence and intimacy. Yet without physical connection and emotional support – the human touch – spending long periods of time online may deepen a feeling of disconnection, isolation and loneliness.22
Computer programs like Google’s DeepDream use algorithms and layered networks to turn familiar objects into fantastical creations. In one instance, when asked to distinguish patterns in photographs of clouds, the computer’s layered network, attempting to mimic basic patterning structures of the human brain, produced a bizarre hybrid creature floating in the sky with the head of a dog and the body of a fish.23
Such computer-generated images, although they may stimulate new ways of seeing patterns in everyday objects, do not arise from an individual’s life and so fail to enrich meaningfully our subjective sense of being. The CGI dog-fish does not emanate the living presence of a ‘dream being’. Derived from a compilation of web-based imagery, it belongs to everyone and no one! In contrast, dream imagery comes tailored from the fabric of our own lived experiences and personality, fitting our nature and our need, and cultivating empathy towards ourselves and others.
While reflecting on the CGI dog-fish, the image of a dream-fish I had first met in my teens surfaced from the depths of my memory. The marvels of CGI pale into insignificance when I recall the numinosity of my dream-fish:
I stand alone in the empty playground where I went to school between the ages of eight and eleven. I feel unhappy about being back in a place that I do not remember with much fondness. The playground’s emptiness reminds me of how I long for a different way of life. When I look up, I am amazed to see an unusually large angelfish – a few inches thick and about five feet long – swimming in the air at eye level, peering into my eyes intently with its bulbous, dark eyes. The fish moves its full lips silently as its beautiful, translucent body shimmers with ever-changing colours. I gape in surprise at the fish as it looks at me intently. Initially, I feel frightened, but then I realise it means me no harm. On the contrary, it appears to be speaking to me. Then I awake.
Throughout the challenges of my teens, the dream memory of that ‘air-fish’ stayed with me, offering encouragement. Looking back, I wish there had been a dream guide to help me use my imagination to speak with the fish or to touch it. Closing my eyes today, I still feel the air-fish’s creativity and magical spirit.
In my early twenties, the air-fish took on added significance when I studied English literature. As part of my studies, I came across a fairy tale called ‘The Golden Key’, written by the Scottish writer George MacDonald. In this story, a similar air-fish appears to a little girl named Tangle when she becomes lost in a forest. MacDonald paints an enchanting picture of this air-fish: ‘It was a curious creature, made like a fish, but covered, instead of scales, with feathers of all colours, sparkling like those of a humming-bird. It had fins, not wings, and swam through the air as a fish does through the water. Its head was like the head of a small owl.’24
Numerous air-fish accompany Tangle on her journey, helping to nourish her by allowing themselves to be cooked in a pot and eaten. A kindly woman reassures Tangle that ‘they are not ... destroyed. Out of that pot comes something more than the dead fish, you will see.’25 When Tangle eats the delicious meat, she is able to understand the sounds of the forest creatures as speech, and the chatter of insects too. Afterwards, a little fairy flies out of the pot – the air-fish has transformed!
The air-fish of my own dream similarly fed my soul with the sustenance I particularly needed then – a taste of magic and beauty that spoke of unrealised possibilities. The air-fish brings to life what George MacDonald himself said of dreams: ‘I believe that, if there be a living, conscious love at the heart of the universe, the mind, in the quiescence of its consciousness in sleep, comes into a less disturbed contact with its origin, in the heart of the creation ...’26
The magnificent presence of the air-fish in my dream also reminds me of John Welwood’s teaching on ‘unconditioned awareness’:
Pure awareness is direct, unfabricated, knowing, clear and fluid like water. Although we swim in this sea of pure awareness, our busy mind is constantly hopping from island to island, from thought to thought, jumping over and through this awareness which is its ground, without ever coming to rest there. Meanwhile, our unconditioned awareness operates silently in the background, no matter what our busy mind is doing. Everyone has access to this. It is our most intimate reality, so close that it is often hard to see.27
Our dreams give us a natural means of waking up to this awareness more directly, never more important than in today’s world, where an array of technologies immerse us in an impersonal digital reality and so easily distract us from knowing ourselves.28
To reconnect with a healing presence from one of your own dreams, find pen and paper and a quiet spot, close your eyes, take a few deep breaths, and then bring the presence-bearing image to mind. Spend a minute or two silently sensing the qualities that the healing presence evokes in you. Perhaps, like my dream air-fish, it puts you in touch with a magical quality of wonder and offers calm reassurance or, as Angela felt when she held her goldfish, you may sense a powerful creative force. Alternatively, you may feel tremendous awe, even fear, like the woman who dreamed of a fiery fish in Auschwitz, yet somehow better able to carry life’s burdens. Whatever you feel, stay with the feeling for a few moments. Then, with your next out-breath, release that feeling into the world. Now take up your pen and give yourself a few minutes to write down what the dream presence has to tell you.
This is what my dream fish recently ‘said’ to me:
From whence have I come? From within you and from without. Find the magic in me. You are not alone, you are loved. Learn to see my beauty in each moment, even amidst what feels hard and ugly in yourself and life. Like me, you swim in the air of Earth and Spirit, immersed in an invisible world that gives life to all you see. Remember me when the world feels colourless and grey and I will bring new colours to your life.
When we re-engage with the power of real presence in our dreams, a healing touch becomes available to us, no matter if the dream occurred many years before!
Consider the words of the Taoist master Lao Tzu, written over 2,500 years ago:
The Way itself is like something
Seen in a dream, elusive, evading one.
In it are images, elusive, evading one.
In it are things like shadows in twilight.
In it are essences, subtle but real,
Embedded in truth.29
‘Subtle but real’, the images and essences in our dreams may take many forms, ranging from inanimate objects to living creatures – plants, fish, birds and animals – from personifications of human or ideal beings to abstract light and colour-based imagery.30 All invite us to leave the glare of blue-lit technologies, to slow our frenzied pace of life, and open ourselves to the healing power of true presence illumined within our dreams.