"To take dreams seriously — enough to act on them, to live by them — is potentially subversive. Dreams smash down the barricades: they admit all, proscribe nothing, view life through a different moral aperture," writes Marc Ian Barasch in the third and final work in a trilogy (The Healing Path, Remarkable Recovery). The former editor in chief of New Age Journal, where he was honored with a National Magazine Award, has spent 15 years researching the impact upon people of what he calls "Healing Dreams." He begins with a big one that "abducted" him into this far country and prefigured a health crisis in his life. Anyone who has experienced dreams of surpassing power will know exactly what Barasch is talking about here.

He see these nocturnal parables and gripping mystery tales as windows enlarging our perspective, as works of art, as worthy opponents, as wise teachers, and as dramatic journeys to another world with its own peculiar geography. Barasch believes that Healing Dreams cannot be completely interpreted or fully understood. In the Talmud-based tradition of Jewish dream interpretation, a single dream is said to have at least 24 possible meanings. Barasch opens our eyes to the multidimensional meanings of dreams with quotes and illustrative material from Carl Jung, R. D. Laing, Mohandas Gandhi, Australian aboriginals, Native Americans, Sufis, Taoists, and many others.

This watershed work reveals the soulful qualities of these journeys through the imaginal realm: "Healing Dreams, if heeded, can be transformational — creating new attitudes toward ourselves and others, magnifying our spiritual understanding, deepening the feeling side of life, producing changes in careers and relationships, even affecting society itself." By the time you finish this book, an exotic adventure in itself, you'll be ready to welcome your dreams with fresh hospitality and a deep respect for their mystery, contradictions, and healing powers.