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sklepios was the reigning healer of the ancient dream world. People who were ill would ask him to heal them in their dreams—or at least tell them how they could be healed. Half god, half mortal, Asklepios lived in the dreamy astral world of the gods. To see him required dream astral travel. This was accomplished through ritual and prayer, often at a special, secluded place.Asklepios could heal because he had been gravely wounded and had healed himself. The dream healer may have been based on a real person by that name—Asklepios means “unceasingly gentle” in Greek—who lived around the eleventh century bce.
According to myth, Asklepios’s mortal mother, Coronis, was unfaithful to her husband, the god Apollo. Outraged, Apollo sent his sister, Arte- mis, to kill Coronis by shooting her with an arrow. Her body was placed on a funeral pyre. Before the body burned, Apollo snatched the baby Asklepios, fathered by Coronis’s lover, from her womb. He gave Asklepios to the centaur Chiron, who raised him in the mountains and taught him the healing arts.
Asklepios became such an excellent healer that he could even raise the dead. This threatened the immortal gods, so Zeus struck him down
with a thunderbolt and killed him. Zeus placed him in the sky, where he became the constellation Orion.
In the dream world, Asklepios became even more popular and power- ful as a healer. At the peak of his cult, about 400 dream temples were built to him. He was also worshiped in sacred groves and caves. He held his office hours at night, seeing patients who journeyed to him through the pathways of the dream world.
How did a person know for certain he met Asklepios in his dreams? The healer had a specific appearance. He looked like an old man with a beard, carrying a staff entwined by a single snake. He was sometimes accompanied by a dog or by a boy dwarf named Telesphorus. The snake symbolized regeneration, wisdom, and healing. The dog symbolized death and rebirth. The dwarf symbolized fertility.
The best healing occurred if a person was touched by Asklepios in a dream. Next best was a prescription: instructions for healing. Sometimes the instructions had to be interpreted by dream priests. Testimonies about miraculous dream healings were recorded at many of the god’s temples.
Asklepios still appears in dreams today. Sometimes people do not rec- ognize who he is. Sometimes people in need of healing dream of an old man with a snake-entwined staff and a dog: Asklepios, still on the job in the astral realm.
Dreams that Heal
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he had saved many lives as a result. His own experience made him a believer in the diagnostic and healing powers of dreams.
More recently, in the twentieth century, the psychologist Carl G. Jung recognized diagnostic dreams in some of his psychotherapy cases. Like the Greeks, he called them prodromal dreams, from the Greek term prodromos, or “running before.”1 Jung described cases in
which patients had dreams alerting them to life-threatening illnesses before they knew they were sick.
He noted that some patients who dreamed of destruction or in- jury to horses—an archetypal symbol of the human body—later were
The Doctor Is In: Astral Travel Walk-ins Welcome
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sklepios was the reigning healer of the ancient dream world. People who were ill would ask him to heal them in their dreams—or at least tell them how they could be healed. Half god, half mortal, Asklepios lived in the dreamy astral world of the gods. To see him required dream astral travel. This was accomplished through ritual and prayer, often at a special, secluded place.Asklepios could heal because he had been gravely wounded and had healed himself. The dream healer may have been based on a real person by that name—Asklepios means “unceasingly gentle” in Greek—who lived around the eleventh century bce.
According to myth, Asklepios’s mortal mother, Coronis, was unfaithful to her husband, the god Apollo. Outraged, Apollo sent his sister, Arte- mis, to kill Coronis by shooting her with an arrow. Her body was placed on a funeral pyre. Before the body burned, Apollo snatched the baby Asklepios, fathered by Coronis’s lover, from her womb. He gave Asklepios to the centaur Chiron, who raised him in the mountains and taught him the healing arts.
Asklepios became such an excellent healer that he could even raise the dead. This threatened the immortal gods, so Zeus struck him down
with a thunderbolt and killed him. Zeus placed him in the sky, where he became the constellation Orion.
In the dream world, Asklepios became even more popular and power- ful as a healer. At the peak of his cult, about 400 dream temples were built to him. He was also worshiped in sacred groves and caves. He held his office hours at night, seeing patients who journeyed to him through the pathways of the dream world.
How did a person know for certain he met Asklepios in his dreams? The healer had a specific appearance. He looked like an old man with a beard, carrying a staff entwined by a single snake. He was sometimes accompanied by a dog or by a boy dwarf named Telesphorus. The snake symbolized regeneration, wisdom, and healing. The dog symbolized death and rebirth. The dwarf symbolized fertility.
The best healing occurred if a person was touched by Asklepios in a dream. Next best was a prescription: instructions for healing. Sometimes the instructions had to be interpreted by dream priests. Testimonies about miraculous dream healings were recorded at many of the god’s temples.
Asklepios still appears in dreams today. Sometimes people do not rec- ognize who he is. Sometimes people in need of healing dream of an old man with a snake-entwined staff and a dog: Asklepios, still on the job in the astral realm.
0 Dreams anD astral travel
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shown to be in the early stages of serious illness, such as cancer. In at least one case he documented, the illness was caught early enough to be treated successfully.
In his book Healing Dreams, author Marc Ian Barasch tells how his cancer of the thyroid was first revealed in disturbing and bizarre dreams. In the dreams, he was chased by an axe mur- derer trying to decapitate him and was stared at by the figure of Death. A number of his dreams had a neck theme: primitive tribes- men stuck long needles into his “neck-brain”; a World War II bullet was lodged in his neck and removed by a Chinese surgeon; and he found himself crawling about a Mayan “necropolis,” a temple to the dead.
These and other dreams caused Barasch to seek medical help ear- lier than he might have otherwise, possibly saving his life. The doctor at first was skeptical about the dreams and reluctantly ordered tests. The tests revealed early stages of cancer in the thyroid gland (also called the “neck brain”), which is near the larynx.2
Diagnosis by dreams is valued in traditional Chinese medicine, which holds that all dreams, pleasant and unpleasant, are produced by imbalances in the body. Thus, by understanding the images and sym- bols in dreams, one could know the state of one’s physical and mental health and gain understanding on remedies for correcting the imbal- ances. For example, deficiencies in the vital organs produce specific dream images, such as a depleted heart produces dreams of flames, hills, and mountains, while depleted lungs yields dreams of flying and things made of gold and iron.
Unlike traditional Western medicine, which separates mind and body, Chinese medicine makes no clear distinction between the two.