We crave a world of either/or, but the Dream says, Both/and. We build a wall between our social persona and our inner selves; the Dream bids us, Demolish it. We wish to believe we're separate from one another, but the Dream insists, We are in this together. We are pleased to believe Time is a one-way river from past to present to future, yet the Dream reveals, All three times flow into one. We wish to seek pure virtue and avoid all stain, but the Dream avers, The dark and the light are braided and bound.

A Healing Dream can never be completely "interpreted," or fully understood. Healing Dreams want us to stop making sense; not just to crack the case, but to enter the mystery.

Big dreams are risky business. The psyche can be fiendish, puckish, exalted, imperious, tender, sardonic, faithful, pestilential--whatever rivets our attention upon the task of psychic growth. It is not so hard to find at least a little sympathy for theologian Martin Luther, who prayed to God not to send him any dreams at all, fearful he could not distinguish between those of divine origin and those sent by the Devil.

For at the center of all spiritual traditions is the beacon of a truly radical proposal: Open your heart to everybody. Everybody.

Every now and then, I'll meet an escapee, someone who has broken free of self-centeredness and lit out for the territory of compassion. You've met them, too, those people who seem to emit a steady stream of, for want of a better word, love-vibes. As soon as you come within range, you feel embraced, accepted for who you are. For those of us who suspect that you rarely get something for nothing, such geniality can be discomfiting. Yet it feels so good to be around them. They stand there, radiating photons of goodwill, and despite yourself you beam back, and the world, in a twinkling, changes.

Our dreams disturb us because they refuse to pander to our fondest notions of ourselves. The closer one looks, the more they seem to insist upon a challenging proposition: You must live truthfully. Right now. And always. Few forces in life present, with an equal sense of inevitability, the bare-knuckle facts of who we are, and the demands of what we might become.

Nelson Mandela once remarked that he befriended his jailers, those grim, khaki-clad overseers of his decades of hard labor in a limestone quarry, by "exploiting their good qualities." Asked if he believed all people were kind at their core, he responded, "There is no doubt whatsoever, provided you are able to arouse their inherent goodness." If that sounds like wishful thinking, well, he actually did it.