Applied Concepts of Holistic Nursing The Spiritual Art of Working With Dreams

As a holistic nurse, the author uses the concepts and processes of exploring clients’ dreams to provoke in them an understanding of life’s issues, including illness and in-jury. Dreams hold information about spiritual realities, self-development, mythologi-cal archetypal themes, and the health of mind and body. Dream research and contem-porary techniques for remembering and analyzing dreams guide the author in the work necessary to help her clients achieve health and wholeness through a deeper un-derstanding of themselves through dreams. Did you ever wake up in the morning with a strange dream fresh in your head and say to yourself, “Now, where did that come from?” Then you dismiss the phenomenon as “only a dream. ” You are not the only one; for the past 400 years or so, people have widely dismissed the dream as a meaningless jumble of images or seen only in terms of telling the future. But in the not so distant past, dreams held special meanings for the dreamer. To primitive tribes, the individual dreams were and in some place still are shared with the whole community as having special meanings for the tribe. Some people in our own culture have noticed the value of dreams. Freud thought dreams held sexual meaning, Adler believed they rep-resented a struggle for identity, and Jung saw universal archetypes o