Your organs were saying you were about to get sick and there was no way to escape. But, you figured, it was only a dream, and you've been going along day by day getting sicker and sicker.

Is it possible that you've been dreaming about an approaching illness and that your internal organs have been trying to tell you to live differently? Is it possible that you can learn more about your body while you dream than when you are awake?

Well, that might be a stretch, but don't count your dreams out of the picture. Dr. Larry Dossey, in his latest book, "Reinventing Medicine" (HarperSanFrancisco, $24), says dreams have correctly diagnosed some strange ailments.

"A patient came to my office for an unscheduled visit and she told me about a dream she had," Dossey said. "In that dream, she saw three white spots on her ovary. So we did a sonagram, and sure enough, there were three white spots on one of her ovaries. They turned out to be benign cysts but that incident got my attention."

Dossey is an internist who gave up private practice to write books about spirituality and medicine. His first, "Healing Words," explored the effect of prayer on healing. Since then, Dossey has been a busy man, bringing his healing message to the 125 medical schools across the nation. And in those six years, Dossey's work has convinced 60 of the nation's medical schools to add courses about spirituality to their curriculum.

Dossey says dreams are not necessarily the most accurate predictors of disease and sickness. But we shouldn't dismiss them completely.

"If something reveals itself to you - if you have a premonition of sickness - you ought to pay attention," Dossey said during a recent interview. "These are not things you can control or manipulate. We all have wacky dreams. But when something pictorial comes to you, that's not through normal channels."

And Dossey says the trick is to declare ourselves open to it, to invite our dreams.

"I loathe this American idea that we all want to dream the numbers on the lottery," Dossey said. "The secret is, don't shut down - don't foreclose your accounts. We ought to be writing down our dreams, and that will probably facilitate their occurrence."

Dossey says the reason this concept is so difficult to accept is that doctors, scientists - and all people who think in a logical fashion - don't like it when dreams tell us about secret weaknesses.

"Dreams violate how we understand reality," Dossey said. "We're so egotistical. We think we know everything about the world. But we don't."

Dossey's earlier books suggested that prayer can advance healing. He wrote about controlled experiments in which neither the patient nor the doctor knew that consistent prayer was being applied. That kind of study is called a "double blind" study, and it is about the only kind of prayer study now being accepted by researchers and scientists.

For instance, Dossey cites an ongoing study at Duke University in which people admitted to a hospital for cardiac procedures receive regular prayer whether they want it or not. The university recruited people of various faiths to pray for people: Buddhist monks in Nepal, Jews in Jerusalem, Catholic Carmelite nuns and Protestant prayer groups. None of the patients are aware of the prayers.

"The people who get the prayer have 50 percent to 100 percent fewer side effects such as bleeding and strokes," Dossey said.

Dossey said he wants not only doctors to respond to his books, but churches as well.

"I think throughout much of this century, certain religions have lost touch with prayer," Dossey said. "Some churches would benefit from some science, and it just might help to rejuvenate them."

Clark D. Morphew