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 Dreams give us fresh and powerful images for healing, and open paths to sources of healing and guidance in a deeper reality. We can dream for others as well as ourselves and "transplant" healing and helpful images to them. The Dream Transfer technique is a powerful and innovative way of bringing a dream - a life dream, a healing image, perhaps a path to the next world - to someone in need of a dream (the depressed, the sick, the soul-gone, the dying).

This process has emerged from my teaching and practice over many years and is now a central element in many of my workshops, including the Dreamgrowing and Shamanic Dreaming programs and advanced trainings in the areas of dream healing, soul recovery and death and dying.

Once we have established sacred space and developed deep circle energy, we learn how to bring the gifts of dreaming to others. We find partners, sit quietly with them, and dream for them. We grow a dream for them with the help of gentle relaxation, meditation and shamanic drumming.

The dream we receive for our partner may be one of our own life memories, the returning memory of a personal dream, an intuitive flash, or a series of images born fresh in our space. If the dream involves challenging or disturbing content, we always go through this and beyond it, opening paths to resolution and healing. We allow the dream to develop into a vivid scene and explore it with all our inner senses. Then we share the dream we have found and invite the other person to step inside it and explore its scenery. The dream beneficiary now tells the dream as her own dream, and claims its landscapes and its energy.

This process has proven to be deeply healing and rewarding in many situations. It is easily learned and quickly brings our natural intuitive abilities richly alive. Dream transfer is especially powerful in helping the dying to move beyond fear and approach the last stages of life as an opportunity for personal growth and direct connection with a deeper reality. Here are two examples from my personal logs. The first involves bringing dream imagery for another person’s healing. The second involves bringing a dream to help a dying person prepare for the transition to life beyond death.

Example 1: Killer Shark as Healer

I entered a conscious dream, seeking keys to healing for a woman who was in the midst of chemotherapy for breast cancer. I saw her as a greenish, sickly jaguar in a murky river where she was being mauled by piranhas. I wanted to get her out of the water, but she would not budge. Then a beautiful, elegant silver-gray shark came nosing up the river, indicating, "Leave this to me." The shark began gobbling up the piranhas. I asked if this was safe. The thought came back, "I have no problems with this."

I offered my waking dream to the woman patient, dwelling on sensory details. I asked her to repeat the dream to me, making it her own. She smiled as she got deeper and deeper into the dream, making it her own. She continued working with the dream helper I had brought to her at home, using a shark’s tooth as a focussing tool, and reported that she was making a much faster recovery than had been expected and was in excellent spirits.

Example 2: Waterslide World

A woman asked for guidance for her night dreams on behalf of her elderly mother. In her dream, she saw her mother splashing down into an immense pool where she frolicked with a handsome young man. The dreamer loved the vibrancy of this dream, and its promise. In waking life, her mother had never learned to swim and was terrified of the water. The dream seemed to be preparing her for the transition to a different element. The man in the pool, the dreamer believed, was her father (who had died many years before) as he may have looked at thirty.

The problem was that this was her dream, not her mother’s. After discussion, we agreed she would attempt to transfer the dream to her mother through a long-distance phone call, dwelling on the sensuous details and the fun of the dreamscape. After several tellings, the dreamer’s mother became quite happy and excited. One week later, a spontaneous gift came from the dreaming. The mother called to say she had finally remembered a dream of her own. "Your father appeared to me and told me he lives in a beautiful country where it is always spring and will take me there when the time is right. He looked about thirty."

A fuller version of the second story is in my book Dreamgates. As the "Waterslide World" story indicates, Dream Transfer is not about pushing artificial imagery onto others. It is a method for helping those in our world who do not have a dream – a life dream or a dream of the night – to open their personal doorways to insight, healing and a deeper life.