She Who Dreams: A Journey Into Healing Through Dreamwork

Dreaming is healing. Our bodies speak to us in dreams, giving us early warning of symptoms we might develop, showing us what they need to stay well. Dreams give us fresh and powerful images for self-healing. Dreams are also the language of the soul; they put us in touch with wells of memory and sources of creativity and energy far beyond the clutter and confusion of the little everyday mind. Beyond this, dreams are experiences of the soul, and can take us - sleeping or hyper-awake - into realms where we can have direct access to sacred healers and teachers. These themes and possibilities come vividly alive in Wanda Burch's brave and beautiful book She Who Dreams, which is both the narrative of a personal journey into healing through dreaming and an incitement to bring the gifts of active dreaming into our everyday lives. I have been sharing dreams with Wanda since early in 1987, and I know the depth of experience and the deeps of dreaming from which this book flows. Her dreams diagnosed a life-threatening illness (breast cancer) a year before the doctors found symptoms. Her dreams guided her choice of treatment, gave her powerful imagery for self-healing and recovery, enabled her to grow a creative relationship with her physicians and awakened her to a deeper life and a vital engagement with the world as a dreambringer - one of those who creates a safe space for others to open to the gifts of dreaming, and can bring a dream to someone in need of a dream. Her personal story is quite fascinating. Her first dream mentor was her Irish-American grandmother, a "wise woman" of the Alabama hill country. Later she met the dreamers of the Iroquois, one of whom appeared at her back door in the form of a white wolf. But it is the story of everyday trials, more than the extraordinary elements in this book, that will touch the hearts of many readers and bring them practical guidance that is urgently needed. Wanda shows how dreams can get us through. One of her most valuable contributions to the literature of healing and recovery is to show us how we can use the self-healing tools that flow from dreamwork to support conventional medical treatments, smoothing the process and reducing adverse side-effects. For this alone, She Who Dreams is an invaluable resource for healthcare professionals, therapists, healers and caregivers.

SHE WHO DREAMS is a powerful book. Wanda Easter Burch gives us a beautiful portrait of a life lived on many levels - as we all live - and, by offering the harrowing and hopeful details of her life, inspires us to look at our own lives with the same degree of curiosity and compassion. With the quality of pacing and skillful foreshadowing that a seasoned novelist would offer, the author lays out her personal story. On one level it follows her roots in the American South to travels in Africa, important interactions with the Mohawk tribe and her home in a rural New York hamlet. We follow her struggle with cancer including her mastectomy, the emotional despair her chemotherapy induces and, ultimately, her path as one who heals. On another level it follows the story of her dreams. Her childhood is guided by a grandmother who understood the power of dreams to foretell and bring healing. Her adult life is blessed with the incomparable friendship of well-known author and dream explorer, Robert Moss - whom she first met in a childhood dream. The author's dreams insistently foretell of a cancer her doctors repeatedly ignore. As insistently, her dreams predict her death at age 43. By actively following guidance her dreams provide, the author is led - and leads us - through a healing process that proves, beyond a shadow of doubt, the power of the spirit and the mind. And, even more profound, it leads to a rewriting of a life contract that, in its extension, offers us a writer whose unfolding talents provide unique inspiration that inside each of us lies the ability for our dreams to reveal our own infinite wisdom. Reading SHE WHO DREAMS may well change your life.

She Who Dreams: A Journey into Healing Through Dreamwork by Wanda Easter Burch is a deeply inspiring story of a woman's brave battle with breast cancer, an illness first revealed in dreams and later healed through dreams. She sets the stage early on with rich imagery of her experiences as a southern child whose beloved grandmother is a locally famous healer and dream appreciator. Later in life, Wanda Burch draws on the strength and wisdom of this childhood training as she journeys far and wide in her waking world and her dreamtime. Mystical experiences on an African sojourn precede her passage through the difficult medical treatments she faces, a journey in which four men play important roles as fellow travelers and guides--her dream appreciating husband and son, her deceased father, and her mentor and dream-sharing partner and friend, the well-known author and teacher Robert Moss. We accompany Wanda Burch on a treacherous healing path, and we empathize as she honestly discloses her fears and feelings--her dread of impending death that a recurring dream portends, her anger at delayed medical interventions and her bouts of deep depression. Yet these stormy seasons of her soul are tempered with an indomitable will to be healed at all levels of her being. Experiencing surgery and then chemotherapy with its dreadful side-effects never stops her from turning to her dreams for help and healing, and she recounts dreams, her ways of sharing and working with them, and using the wisdom she reaps from them. Tested to her depths, she emerges as a beacon to others, a Wounded Healer whose example offers the greatest hope of all to those of us who face life challenges. Her illness may have stolen her breast, but it didn't harm the caring heart beating beneath it, nor her sharp mind, nor her glowing spirit all of which are put to use as she rewrites her life contract and now walks on a new path as a Dream Guide and Dream Bringer to others.I highly recommend this book and its practical and purposeful exercises and advice, as well as the forward and appendix by Robert Moss, reminding us that we can heal ourselves and reach out to help others and our world if we follow the wisdom and guidance our dreams bring each and every night. ...

I truly enjoyed reading Wanda Easter Burch's excellent new book, She Who Dreams. This is a book you definitely want to read if you or someone you love is trying to heal from cancer or any serious illness. It's also one you want to read even if you're not in that position because it's an amazing chronicle of the healing power of dreams. With genuine Southern charm and deep spiritual insight, Wanda takes us through the experiences, in waking and sleeping, that presaged her disease, helped her get a correct diagnosis and proper medical treatment and supported her through the intense physical, emotional and mental roller coaster of treatment to recovery. I found myself buoyed by her honesty and humor in the face of such an immense personal challenge. I especially loved reading it at bedtime, just before I entered the dream world myself. I'd go to sleep full of wonder at the possibilities for healing and guidance available in dreams because Wanda's experiences are sparkling examples. With help from her long-time friend and mentor, shamanic dream counselor, Robert Moss, Wanda has developed a healing path for others to follow into the dreaming. I highly recommend this book for anyone from teens on up.

I'm one of the lucky ones - no breast cancer in my immediate family - yet. So this is not a book I would have expected to be on my "Must Read" list but it is. I do dream and found compelling Burch's unsentimental and honest account of how in her dreams she was given clear images of her cancer, where it resided, and what she needed to do to get rid of it before doctors were willing to make the diagnosis. As her treatment progressed, the dream images changed to fit her need and she found ways, described in the book for others to follow, to create "prescriptions" based on them that she took many times a day. Her oncologist was amazed at her rate of healing and told her: "It was you who brought yourself to this amazing state. The rest is still up to you; it always has been." This is an inspirational story and a great read.