Dreaming Bodies
Diagnosing, Healing, and Living with Illness
People sometimes ask me, as a gerontologist, what is aging? I tell them in three words: diminished reserve capacity. When they ask me, what is positive aging, I also give them three words: decrement with compensation. The idea of “compensation” means both adaptation
to loss, but also discovery of positive things. A primary task for the second half of life is to discover, or rediscover, unexpected possibilities in ourselves. As we age, we are more likely to experience chronic and/or life-threatening illnesses, as both patients and caregivers. Dreaming
can be a source of insight and adaptation to these experiences. With advancing age, our dreams may show us that “health” and “sickness” are a false binary, a false opposition. As the Chinese idea of Yin and Yang reminds us, the two are not in opposition but are intertwined in life.
Fig. 6.1. Classic Chinese Image of Yin and Yang, a
symbol of the intertwining aspects of life
Source: JohnLangdon
As the great Jungian psychotherapist Marie Louise von Franz said about her own illness in later life, “It needs a lot of readaptation, it poses a lot of outer problems, and reorganization of my life, because one gets invalid. Then it poses inner problems—’Why do I have that illness? What for?’ and so on. Naturally I look at the dreams for an answer.”1 Dreams consistently demonstrate that our mind and body are not separate, but rather intimately connected.
Since ancient times, and in cultures around the world, dreaming has been understood as a means for diagnosing and healing physical illness. A variety of classical Western texts repeatedly acknowledge the diagnostic value of dreams, including Hippocrates, Aristotle, the Roman physician Galen, and into the Middle Ages when physician Arnald of Villanova compared dreams to magnifying lenses which could detect and report the first symptoms of physical disease long before the conscious mind noticed that anything was wrong. Since the mid-twentieth century, allopathic medicine has demonstrated a renewed interest in the role of dreams for diagnostic purposes.2* This is, again, a welcome recovery of something long been known but forgotten.
In light of all that we have learned about this intimate connection between brain and body, it is time to recognize again that brain activity during sleep—namely, dreaming—can be an important tool for detecting signals of health and illness at levels not yet recognized by consciousness or by explicit signs of pathophysiology.
Our dream life reveals how physical illness and our mental condition can be two sides of the same coin. Edward Edinger tells of a middle-aged woman who was suffering from a chronic and painful illness. She also perceived herself to be a victim. Then she had the following dreams:
Killing Snakes
I am talking with friends. Something we talked about caused snakes to start crawling about the room. It was as though they had been inanimate objects on the wall that had been brought to life by something I said. I wanted to kill them but a friend said I shouldn’t.
A few days later, she dreamed she went to the kitchen sink to clean it up, but found it was only wet. Then, in her dream:
As I looked at it, the drops of water separated. Each drop had a center in it like fish eggs or eyes. I did not throw them away.
In her psychological stance, this woman had been understood herself to be a victim, a passive role. But the dreams told a different story. The snakes that came to life represented some kind of psychic force that, once awakened, could become threatening. Yet her “friend” in the dream (of course another part of herself) cautioned her not to kill the snakes. In the follow-up dream, the dreamer is trying to “fix” things in her life: to “clean up” the kitchen sink. But the kitchen sink was just wet and, upon closer examination, the water separated into drops and the drops became points of living energy: eggs or eyes. As Edinger points out, in ancient Egyptian mythology, the Eye of God could be turned into a serpent. The serpent, although threatening at one level, thus also symbolizes a latent power, perhaps to overcome illness and victimhood.
Dreams can also reflect physical pathologies. For example, a fiftysix- year-old man suffering from peptic ulcers had the following dream:
Fire Escape
I am at my office in the bank when there is an air raid alarm. It isn’t the usual fire alarm we have in our building, but a siren like you would hear in the bombing of London films. I go to the back staircase of the building and now the setting is no longer familiar. There is a red door with a white EXIT sign on it. I enter and there is a down staircase. I go down straight for what appears to be a very long time. There is only emergency lighting and it is red. Then the stairs begin to spiral, twisting, in irregular and narrower.
The dream continues as the dreamer descends into a nightmare world where the passages become narrower until he reaches a small cave deep in the center of the earth:
I start inspecting the wall, which looks to be blue and yellow streaks in the glass. When I touch it, I realize that it is soft and delicate, and that its outer layer is only as thick as a tissue. I become worried that it would not support me. Looking down at my feet, they seem to be sinking into a red ooze.
The man was later brought to the hospital after an attack of bleeding ulcers that woke him up vomiting blood; this dream was actually reported by the hospital emergency room staff. It is a striking example of physiological details reflected in dream imagery, even down to the image of soft tissue and sinking into “a red ooze,” reminiscent of the bleeding ulcers that prompted this dream.
Although this man’s condition was already diagnosed, dreams can also reflect physical pathologies not yet identified. I got to know author Marc Barasch when I lived in Boulder, Colorado. Marc Barasch’s books on dreams and illness were provoked by his personal experience. Barasch told me that he never paid much attention to his own dreams until he started having recurrent dreams of being chased by an ax murderer. He wondered: What could be the meaning of such horrible imagery? Many of the dreams that came to Barasch seemed to focus on one part of his body: namely, on his neck. He eventually had a powerful and disturbing dream about a Mayan “necropolis,” which ended with a neon sign announcing “cancer.” An examination by a physician turned up nothing wrong. Perhaps, he thought, it was “all in his mind.” But Barasch persisted, even engaging in the venerable practice of “dream incubation:” that is, deliberately seeking dream guidance. Dream incubation is a method that was familiar to the ancient Greeks and Romans, but somehow became long forgotten in our culture. In his own case, Barasch wanted to know where to look for a cure to what he began to suspect could be a condition demanding serious attention. He began to pay attention to and to cultivate dreaming. Then one night he had the following dream:
The Way Out and the Way In
Under the ground a white, snakelike worm is turning in upon itself in a perfect spiral. When its head reaches the center, blinding rays of light shoot out, and a voice solemnly intones: “You have been living on the outer shell of your being—The Way Out Is the Way In!”
This dream proved helpful in attracting more serious clinical investigation, which confirmed a malignancy for Marc Barasch. It may have even saved his life. Dreams of illness, we have seen, point to something beyond the conventional dichotomy of mind-and-body. They may also point us toward the wider world around us and disclose unexpected lines of causality, which could be termed “environmental illness.” This pattern is well illustrated in the case of Nancy Ryley, who achieved great success as a television producer with the Canadian Broadcasting Company. Then she experienced a variety of physical ailments that radically disrupted her life. First came excruciating attacks of bladder pain, which spread to joint pain, making it difficult to walk at times. Then followed lower-back pain, which doctors interpreted as the result of a stressful career. Within a few years came further problems, including severe allergic reactions and a disabling response to toxic chemicals in the workplace. Over time, her immune system seemed to be on the verge of collapse.
About the Author: Harry R. Moody, PhD, is a gerontologist and the author of The Five Stages of the Soul. A former Vice President at AARP, he has taught at Columbia and Fielding Graduate University and writes widely on aging, dreams, and spirituality. A longtime member of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, he lives in San Mateo, California.
The Power of Dreams in Later Life by Harry R. Moody published by Inner Traditions International and Bear & Company, © 2026. All rights reserved. https://www.InnerTraditions.com. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.
