Medicine

Healing influence; meeting experiences we might not like but need to change a negative situation; positive changes that can be brought about; actual drugs we are taking.

Some medicines can actually make things worse, so if your dream suggests this try stopping taking the medicine.

Dreams depict our inner processes as intelligent and responsive, not just as chemical actions and reactions as modern medicine so often does. Therefore your conscious attitudes influence these fundamental living processes in you – processes that maintain health, digestion, your heart, rebuild damage and fight infection. Negative feelings or attitudes can cause these ‘animals’ or natural processes in you to despair or lose motivation, and thus lead to depression or illness.

We need to remember that our experience of self, our personality, is capable of being radically shifted simply by taking a drug or medicine – as with antidepressants, ecstasy or cocaine. This often reshapes the way we see ourselves, so an evolution in the process of identity building has occurred in our society. Identity in the end is not a set of beliefs or behaviours. The self is not limited to these.  In today’s world our identity is often shaped by chemicals/medicines/drugs.  The consumption of drugs, alcohol, sleeping pills, and certain medicines including anti-histamines tend to keep our awareness in the deep levels of Delta sleep, thus depriving us of the REM sleep so necessary for balance and sanity.

 Example: My doctor suggested I take a statin based medicine. At first there was no problem, but I gradually got so weak I couldn’t even turn over in bed. I suggested to my doctor that I stopped taking it and he supported me in the decision. Within days I began to gain strength again and am about my normal strength now.

Example: In my dream I was in the hospital giving birth I could feel the strong pain medicine working and I assume I had been given an epidural.

Considering that dreams are actually a creation out of ones own feelings, this dreamer has a strong belief that she needs pain killers, even though she has never had a baby. Many media films often act out a very painful birth, which give women the idea that all births must be painful. But here is another woman’s description of her actual birth experience.

 Example:  It was my first child and as my baby started it appearance I was in agony. But instead of tensing against it I surrender to it and it became a wonderful ecstasy of birth without any drugs. See A Method to Shorten Labour

 Example: ‘My father was giving me and another woman some medicine. Something was being forced on us. I started to hit and punch him in the genitals and when he was facing the other way, in the backside. I seemed to be just the right height to do this and I had a very angry feeling that I wanted to hurt him as he had hurt me.’ Audrey V.

Example: Frank Takes Gun, national president of the Native American Church, says: At fourteen, I first used Father Peyote. This was on the Crow Reservation in Montana, and I was proud to know that my people had a medicine that was God-powerful. Listen to me, peyote does have many amazing powers. I have seen a blind boy regain his sight from taking it. Indians with ailments that hospital doctors couldn’t cure have become healthy again after a peyote prayer meeting. Once a Crow boy was to have his infected leg cut off by reservation doctors. After a peyote ceremony, it grew well again.

Idioms: Taste of ones own medicine; take ones medicine.

Useful Questions and Hints:

If I take the medicine out if its symbols, what was it?

Do I associate anything with the dream medicine?

What was I doing with or feeling about the medicine?

See Self Help – Dealing with Fear – Summing Up – Processing Dreams – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams