Julie – In dreams we are not simply looking at a series of images and drama, but are witnessing the most powerful activities of our being – our being meaning our body and consciousness and its struggle to survive and grow.
The animals are your own natural energies that are not working according to their integrating properties, but are tearing themselves apart. In the healthy body the enormous number of different processes all work in a common direction, but in cancer the integrative forces are out of harmony. As you dream suggests you are eating yourself alive.
As you wrote, you were in shock witnessing this.
I have only been involved with four people with cancer, three of them survived. I don’t believe it was anything I did, but I do see a way you might do some good in your illness.
When my father died suddenly – not from cancer – I had a wonderful experience that showed me that at every moment we are meeting death and life. In fact we are taking place in an enormous drama of creation and destruction, but most people are not aware of it, and so feel safe. But you are facing it and so are in the middle of the drama. And in your dream the drama is depicted as nature itself attacking and tearing itself apart.
What might help is to imagine yourself in the middle of that drama in your dream. The aim is to slowly bring change to the situation. That may sound a strange thing to do, but if you can actually fee; the enormous struggle and begin to deal with it you are changing the forces active in you.
Dear Julie, in trying to understand your situation, I imagined myself in the middle of those crazed animals – it caused me to weep. I didn’t have the power to change what was going on. But I stayed with it and a change happened. I saw that cancer is a very ancient beast, and is primitive and to change it one has to get down beyond the mammal level of our being to the prehistoric.
To help you understand this please read
https://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/brain-levels-and-dreams/ and also
https://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/brain-levels-and-dreams/#wherebegin The change was that I became the prehistoric powerful predator which simple ate the mad dogs and digested them bringing peace. I then had to bring that primitive level of my being slowly to the mammals and then to human life. It takes time but can be done. See
https://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/acting-on-your-dream/#BeingPerson -
https://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/active-imagination-and-dreams/ I didn’t do it with cancer, but at birth when I wanted to die, being born eight weeks prematurely in a world that at the time didn’t deal with a baby such as me and let them die. But here I am 80 years later.
Tony