Dreams and prayer can help heal, says doctor
So, you say, you haven't been feeling well and you've been
having funny dreams. The other night your internal organs had
a conversation in one of your dreams, and the bad news was, there
was no good news. 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
Posted For October 23, 1999