Healing Dreams

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

"Healing dreams," posits Barasch, a National Magazine Award-winning writer who transformed the once-obscure New Age Journal into a prominent national magazine, are startlingly memorable, displaying "Technicolor realism... gleam[ing] with mysteries both opaque and insistent, their meaning tantalizingly beyond [our] grasp." Such dreams demand considerable time and effort to discern their meaning, and force the dreamer to take a hard look inward. His provocative and thoughtful new book, the final entry in a trilogy (The Healing Path and Remarkable Recovery) he began 15 years ago, is one of the most compelling and convincing accounts of the significance of what Jung called "big" dreams. Delving deeply into Western psychology (particularly Jung and Freud), literature and Native American culture, ancient mythology and Eastern beliefs, Barasch illuminates his life-changing ordeal with informed and pertinent insights. Barasch began his study of dreams after a series of intense, bizarre dreams (an "all-night creep show at the inner drive-in") sent him to the doctor and eventually led to a diagnosis of cancer that seemed strangely prefigured by the dreams. His study is distinguished by his reluctance to claim to have the answers--his ego takes a backseat to the enormous cross-cultural evidence he offers--and by the quality of his prose (he draws readers in from the get-go, opening with "Fifteen years ago, I was abducted--there is no other word for it--into the realm of the Dream.... I was cast away in a far country from which I've never quite returned"). Despite the book's occasional redundancies, Barasch has the gift of making readers want to journey into that realm with him. They need to be willing to venture into some fairly New Agey turf to do so, but that means, of course, that this title has the potential to break out within the New Age readership. (Nov.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Barasch (The Healing Path) bases this work on 15 years of research and his brush with thyroid cancer. Exploring the relationship among time, dreaming, and healing, he argues that time is mutable, that the past, present, and future blend together. Dreams break down the barriers of linear time, and precognitive dreams may often save one; Barasch himself dreamed that he had cancer before doctors were able to detect it. He goes on to claim that everyone has an intuitive ability but that only some of us are preordained to become powerful dreamers/healers. Each chapter is filled with specific personal examples of dreams and how they relate in small snippets to our lives, and there are many examples of the universal connection among humans, such as the woman from Iowa who dreamed of Baby Jessica's being trapped in Texas weeks before the event hit the news. This title is a little more academic than most books on dream interpretation but would be great for psychology classes or readers who want to obtain a deeper understanding of the psyche.--Lisa Wise, Broome Cty. P.L., Binghamton, NY Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.