This article introduces my Healing Dreams homepage and discusses the
benefits of internet technology. In the second half of this article I'll
also tell something about what I learned about healing and dreams as a
result of this homepage.
The wonder of websites
Healing Dreams is a personal homepage that enables me to meet people
while in real life I'm usually too sick to meet anybody. Even if my
health weren't a problem it's very unlikely I would ever have met as
many dreamers as I've done so far.
With webpages you don't have to look for people but instead they will
come looking for you. It almost seems that the more obscure your
interest, the better your chances are that people will find you and are
willing to share all kinds of information.
Website visitors have various options for providing feedback. The
most personal option is email: this is easy to implement, just mention
your email address somewhere on the website and encourage people to
write. Another option is a guestbook where visitors can leave their
names and short messages. Or you can even provide a webboard where
visitors can discuss various topics with one another. Both the guestbook
and the webboard are technically more complicated, but there are many
free and convenient third party solutions available on the internet that
will help you to get started.
To get answers to specific questions it's possible to set up a survey
on a homepage. Processing the results of such a survey is easy because
everything is electronically stored from the beginning. In addition
everything runs pretty much unattended.
On the downside there are some limitations. If you want to learn
something about a more general population, the whole idea of websites
attracting its own audience can work against you. There is also some
concern that that those comfortable with the internet and computers will
be over-represented. However, the responses to the Healing Dreams site
indicate that more women than men are interested in dreams. Even in the
early years when the internet was mostly a men's thing, women made up
the majority of visitors to the site.
Some background on CFS
To
give a short explanation of what my health problem is I usually drop the
CFS word. That's a fancy way of saying "nobody knows" without
having to go into too many details. CFS stands for Chronic Fatigue
Syndrome and is in some countries better known as ME or Myalgic
Encephalopathy. The definition most commonly used for CFS involves a
disabling fatigue for the last six months or more, complemented by a
specific minimum score on a checklist of additional complaints. The
etiology of the disease is unknown and treatment is generally
impossible.
I use the word CFS a lot on the homepage, because others with similar
complaints are searching the web on this keyword. The reality is that -
and I know this now a lot better than a few years ago - CFS is probably
a collection of all kinds of yet to be identified diseases, varying from
unknown viruses and auto-immune diseases to complex psychosomatic
problems. In my case it initially developed so gradually that I find it
hard to identify a starting point. I was (mistakenly) diagnosed with
mononucleosis and advised to take a good rest. I took the advice and
simply collapsed. From that moment on I've been in a kind of state
between a coma and that of a zombie. The progress I've made over the
years is that I can read and write again but realtime social events are
still a huge problem.
The disease also affected how I had to work with dreams. Normally my
dreams regularly depict parts of my day-to-day life, making dreamwork
grounded and practical. With me the physical world had pretty much gone
and the dreamworld was all I got.
The survey
I received a lot of email from CFS sufferers and at some point
decided to do a survey. The nice thing about a homepage is that offering
different feedback options to visitors will increase the chance that
people will respond. Sending an email takes quite an effort for most
people, whereas an online survey will get people involved who otherwise
would have remained silent.
The survey directed at encouraging people to tell their story. My
primary interest was in dreams and subjects like disease-related
imagery, the use of dream incubation in the healing process, finding
clues in dreams that would help to promote healing and dreams that heal.
Questions about sleep problems were included because I had heard that
this was a serious problem for many patients. I ran the survey for over
a year and during that period 107 people participated. A year may seem
to you like a long time, but at the time I wasn't exactly energetic so
it suited me quite nicely. However, if I had to do it again I'm sure
that some promotion would help a lot to speed things up.
Generally, the impression I got from the results was that most
patients had lots of complaints but few shared the same set of
complaints. What they did have in common was the dream imagery. Violence
was the main theme of the dreams and according to some the violence got
worse during bad episodes of the disease. What I had hoped for was
something more specific, like dreams pinning the disease down to a
specific body problem or, alternatively, some insight about typical
psychological makeup that would make certain people more likely to
develop the disease. No answers here, however.
Many patients complained about sleep problems: problems falling
asleep and all kinds of problems of staying asleep. Interesting here is
that many people complained about vivid dreams interfering with their
sleep. I had the complete opposite experience of simply being blacked
out for a year or two, but that's rather exceptional. So I find it
difficult to relate to vivid dreams as being a problem; on the contrary
I welcome them. Some of the respondents were experienced dreamers. Why
experienced dreamers could have a problem with vivid dreams is still a
question to me, though I can imagine that complete nights of vivid
dreaming can be emotionally exhausting.
No quick solutions
What I learned through the homepage (as well as other sources) made
me drop several ideas. I started out with the idea that a disease is
something you fight and get over with. As in my case there was a sudden
collapse, it didn't seem such a strange assumption that you could
recover relatively fast as well. However, the "Chronic" in CFS
is there for a good reason.
Normally, if you have some personal problem or issue, an incubated
dream can do wonders. It doesn't work so well for CFS, however. I tried,
I spoke with others who tried, respondents to the survey mentioned it.
Whereas patients may consider recovery the very first priority, dreams
seem to have their own ideas about priorities. In my own experience
dreams do give away valuable pieces of information, but only when the
time is right for it. I'm still puzzled about what determines the right
moment.
To me the holy grail of dream healing is healing within the dream.
One respondent reported such a dream, though it concerned healing a
complaint that was particular for this patient and it was not clear to
what extent it improved the general condition. Still, there are usually
so many things going on with CFS patients that healing one of the
complaints already is quite significant.
Potential projects
A
lot of time has passed since I did the survey. An aspect that I never
much discussed on the Healing Dreams website is the useful advice dreams
give on revalidation. With the experience of many years I can now say
that my dreams guide me on when to speed up, when to take rest, when to
take up a specific form of exercising, etc. It could be interesting to
find out whether other patients share this experience.
A more burning question is the origin or reason of the disease, the
meaning of it. What makes this question hard to answer is that there are
rarely easy answers and it's very likely that it involves very personal
and complex stories taking many years to unravel.
I've played a lot with the idea of facilitating an ongoing online
discussion group focusing on the significance of non-violent dreams in
the healing process. That's where I expect the really interesting things
are going on.
Especially for CFS patients, an online group should work rather well
as they don't need to leave their home, and can participate at their own
pace and at a time of the day that fits them best. Additionally it's
technically possible to guarantee complete anonymity, which could
certainly help with discussing very personal and sensitive topics. Once
a number of participants has been reached, an online discussion group
changes into a small community that will stay alive even if the
facilitator is not around for a while. That is what I'm waiting for. I
haven't found enough interested dreamers to join this CFS discussion
group, but with the continuing growth of the internet this may very well
change in the near future.
I hope this article has given you some ideas about the possibilities
of a homepage. To take a look at the Healing Dreams website yourself,
point your browser to http://www.xs4all.nl/~hbosma/healing_dreams/
(one line, no spaces). For any comments feel free to write me at hbosma@xs4all.nl
-----------------
Harry Bosma is the author of the Alchera Suite, software for dream
recording and interpretation. The Alchera homepage is at http://mythwell.com/
