mossdreams.com
FEATURES & ESSAYS
 

AWAKENED BY FIRE LEOPARD
A Personal Experience of Trans-Temporal Healing through Active Dreaming
By Jane Carleton

Introductory Note: Jane Carleton is a wonderfully gifted dreamer, dream teacher and jewelry designer who embarked on a journey to support and help heal a wounded teenage self at a Soul Recovery Training I led near Seattle. Her deeply moving experience suggests that it is possible for us to travel across time – through our Active Dreaming techniques – and play mentor and friend to our younger selves in their own time. The potential for healing here is immense, though it is barely beginning to be recognized in our society. – Robert Moss

When I was fourteen years old, I decided to cook a batch of French fries.  I filled a saucepan with cooking oil, set it on the stove, temperature was turned to high, and the phone rang.  It was a call from a friend and we began talking.  I forgot about the oil until I looked up and saw thick black smoke coming from the kitchen.

I ran to the stove and saw the pot had ignited, transformed into a lit torch, the flame reached to the ceiling.  The kitchen cabinets were on fire.  I thought if I could get the saucepan with the burning oil out into the garage, it could safely burn if isolated on the cement floor.  I grabbed the pot by the handle, opened the door to the garage and in my hurry, tripped on the two steps there.  Much of the flaming oil in the pot spilled onto my hand and up my arm almost to my shoulder, igniting the bare skin.  My arm was in flames.  The saucepan with the rest of the oil fell onto a substantial pile of laundry that was on the garage floor, turning the clothing into a bonfire which I fell onto.  I opened my eyes and saw fire all around me.   My neck, part of my face, and my waist-length hair were burned.  My brother saved me from the fire by wrapping a blanket around me. 

My parents had left the house only for an hour to get coffee.  They came home to a fire truck and their daughter severely burned.  I had second and third degree burns on about 45% of my right arm and hand, part of my left arm, my nose, lips and chin, and most of my neck. I was in surgery all night as the doctors meticulously removed the charred skin with tweezers and scrubbed the wounds with antiseptic soap.

I was burned badly enough that I had extensive plastic surgery.   I received daily outpatient hospital treatments at a military hospital for almost two months.  I was on morphine and Demerol 24 hours a day for over six weeks.  I had a handful of doctors and corpsmen that cared for me every day, and the hospital clergyman often held my good hand during the painful treatments.  The wounds were open, gaping flesh.  Daily, the doctors scrubbed the wounds with antiseptic soap, then laid fine cloth on the wounds and covered them.  During the night the cells grew and attached to the cloths, and in the morning the doctors would rip the cloths off the wounds, reopening the wounds, never allowing a scab to form, which caused the new skin cells to slowly regenerate from the sides of the wounds.  It was a new treatment, used to help burned veterans returning from the war in Vietnam.

I was drugged, and left my body for much of this period, especially during the treatments.  I remember the fear of being scarred for life, the darkness of my mood and the feeling of being lost.  My life consisted of the daily morning drives to the hospital, the morphine injections, the pain of the treatments, the return home to sleep and to wake just enough to take more pain medication. I didn’t go to school during this time and saw only my family and closest friends.  My father once tried to take a photo of me during this time and I was horrified.  I didn’t want anyone to see me.  I looked hideous.  It was a dark time.

Around six weeks into this, I was lying on my bed after returning from one of my daily trips to the hospital.  I was sleeping, and suddenly I felt something pulling on my right leg, violently jerking my leg.  I looked down and saw a huge leopard with my leg in its mouth, pulling at me.  I screamed and the vision left.  I had the impression it was trying to wake me up.   We told the doctors about this the next day, and they said it was a hallucination from all of the pain medication and they changed my medication at this time. 

Somewhere around this time, my mood improved.  I was no longer as afraid of being scarred and I was more present during and after the treatments.  Of course, the treatments were becoming less painful because the wounds were shrinking and healing.  I was on lower doses of pain medication and was less drugged.  But I also had a feeling that everything was going to be alright, even though I could barely look at myself.  I was able to endure the healing period with less anxiety and was present in my body again.  I found the patience to be with the healing process.

I healed better than the doctors could have imagined.  I really was fortunate.  I had some redness that eventually faded completely after several years.  It all eventually completely healed, leaving no obvious marks.  One would never know I had been in such a fire and had such extensive treatments.  I have only the smallest area of light scarring on one hand and one wouldn’t notice it unless I pointed it out.  Over the years, I’ve thought often of that time in my life, with gratitude that I was so lucky to heal so well.

I’ve occasionally thought of the leopard and wondered what that was all about, feeling that there was more to it than just a hallucination.  This year, with the help of a group exercise during an active dreaming workshop with Robert Moss that focused on Soul Recovery, I’ve gained a much greater understanding of that event, and of my relationship with my Fire Leopard. 

 I invited a talented group of dreamers to re-enter, and track with me, that time and place, and see what we could learn from the leopard.  With the help of drumming, we entered the bedroom of my fourteen-year-old self, where the leopard was pacing at the foot of my bed, waiting, agitated. 

 My notes from that journey:

‘The room was grey, hazy, foul, not a light place.  My fourteen-year-old self lay on the bed in a darkly unconscious state.  She wasn’t in the body, had drifted out and left the room, not to a good place.  The leopard told me to enter her body. I didn’t want to, but I did.  I saw all the pain, felt it, felt the horror of the fire, the fear, the incredible fear and sadness and exhaustion.  I pulled out, understanding why fourteen-year-old me had left too.  Leopard looked me in the eyes, and then, suddenly, tore at her foot and leg, jerking both her and me back into the body.  Then, leopard reached up with both claws and pulled off her/my skin, leaving dry, cracklin’ skin in the bed, out of which emerged beautiful, clean, shiny, precious fourteen-year-old me, new and tender, needing patience to heal further.  She rose, returning to me, and we joined, with leopard wrapping his tail around us.

I doused the bed with coconut oil and set it on fire, then I floated the whole mess up and out the window…poof!  Gone.  Then I noticed the color had returned to the room.

I realize I was there, back again with my young self, when leopard tore at my leg so many years ago.  He was there to bring me back from that dark place, but was waiting for future me to arrive, so he could proceed to shock me awake.  That’s why he was pacing.  He wanted future me there for the ritual, the initiation, the ceremony.  I journeyed today, with the support of the group, back in time, for an appointment with leopard to bring fourteen-year-old me healing.  All these years I knew something important happened then.  Now I understand, and the healing I had then is healing me now.”

I chose this event in my life to work with during the Soul Recovery workshop, not so much out of pain, but out of curiosity.  I knew an event this big, this painful, had to have created some level of soul loss, even if I wasn’t aware of it.  This journey has returned a vital part of myself to me, and has changed my relationship to time.  I feel this was an “appointment with destiny” and that with the aid of my guide, my fire leopard, I was able to travel back in time to give comfort and healing, and “wake up” my past self during a time I really needed it.  Back then, after my “hallucination”, I knew I was going to be OK.  I knew I wasn’t going to be scarred.  Did that lessening of fear happen because future me was able to come back and comfort injured me?

I also believe it’s entirely possible that the healing ritual I traveled back in time to participate in may have caused a quantum healing at the cellular level, which may have affected the outcome of my burn recovery.  In other words, did the love and intention of my fire leopard, myself, and the group, cause my skin to renew itself in this “miraculous” way?  Did this dream re-entry directly affect the course of my physical healing?

And if so, if we can travel through time to heal ourselves and to bring wisdom and comfort to ourselves, what are the possibilities for future healings?  How can we prevent soul loss during future life events?  Can we send a messenger to our wiser, future selves (and our helpers and animal guardians) to come back in time and help us when we experience something in now time that we know may lead to soul loss?  Can our experiences with Soul Recovery be one defense against more soul loss, or at least against too much time being lost before we rescue those split off parts of ourselves?  Can we live a life where we rescue ourselves as we go along?

© 2005 Jane Carleton and Robert Moss