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32 The Journal of Shamanic Practice VOLUME 5 ISSUE 2 FALL 2012 I asked if she would be willing to share the last dream she remembered. She agreed to do this in the intimacy of a smaller group which I joined. When she was seven she told us she dreamed that a hand came from behind a cur- tain offering her chocolate. She loved chocolate but she was terried by the disembodied hand. She woke up scream- ing. Her parents told her it was just a dream so she should go back to sleep. She could not forget so good Catho- lic girl she prayed to Jesus and Mary and all the saints never to dream again. It seemed her prayers were answered. If it were my dream I suggested I would want to make a journey to go back inside it and see what is behind that curtain. Eva was not initially enthused. If fact she started shaking. Dont worry I reassured her. Well come with you if we have your permission as your body- guards and family support. But we wont do any work unless we have to. Youre the one who will pull back the curtain. Eva agreed that she would journey back inside a dream from 30 years ago with a rm and clear intention she wanted to open the curtain and see who was behind it. Her trackers including me would journey with her during a drumming session. At the end of the drumming Eva was jubilant and astonished. She succeeded in opening the curtain and discovered behind it a being of radiant light. As fea- tures resolved she recognized someone she knew a man she had loved like a fa- ther in her early childhood. He had been a good friend of her father. Unlike her father who had never displayed interest or affection this family friend had told her stories often centered on characters and objects in the toy shop he owned. He apologized for having frightened her reminding her that he had been killed in a car accident shortly before the dream. His face had been horribly mutilated and he had not wanted to frighten little Eva by appearing to her as he looked after the crash. Tears of joy were streaming down Evas face. I told her Now you are a dreamer again I bet you are going to dream up a storm tonight. The next morning she greeted us at breakfast with a happy shout. My dreams were racing all night like a TGV she reported. A TGV is a Train Grande Vitesse a high-speed train. As each dream rushed through me she sped on I felt I was regaining a vital part of me something that was left behind until now. The woman who had been bereft of dreams for 30 years proceeded to regale us with eight vivid dream reports from that one night and we all rejoiced in the light of returning spirit shining in her eyes. I hazarded a prediction based on the fact that the man behind the curtain had been her fathers friend. I wouldnt be surprised if you hear from your father soon. Yeah right. He has never phoned me in his life. But at noon that day the father who had never called managed to reach her on the phone. He wanted to discuss a dream. We saw both soul recovery and the beginning of family healing though a single journey through the portal of a dream. Eva knew how to journey but had never considered using a dream as a gateway. With many dreamworkers the situation is the other way round. They are very ready to talk about dreams but often lack the shamanic journeying tech- niques that can enable them to go to the place where the full meaning and power of dreams is to be found inside the place of the dream and beyond the often bro- ken or fragmentary memory of a dream to deeper levels of the dream experience. Here shamanic practice has many gifts to offer dreamworkers. I discovered this when I rst intro- duced my Active Dreaming approach to an international audience at a conference at the University of Leiden in 1994. I asked 300 academics therapists and oth- ers to nd partners. The partners would take turns to tell each other a dream establish what the dreamer wanted to know and would then travel together into the dreams for shared adventures. This worked like a charm. Two analysts from the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt came running after me when the session was over. SchamanSchaman Tell us how you did that Did what One pointed at the other. I told him just part of my dream. He discovered the rest and then we were together re- ally together in the place of the dream and found things together that went far beyond what I had remembered. Our dreams may offer us gifts of power and healing that we can only claim by going back into the dreamspace and moving beyond fear or irresolution. We may need to journey back inside a dream to overcome nightmare terrors to clarify whether the dream is about a literal or symbolic car crash to talk to someone who appeared in a dream to reclaim our own lost children to use a personal image as a portal to multidi- mensional reality or simply to have more fun Dream reentry frequently opens the road to soul recovery because our dreams show us where our missing parts may have gone and invite us to reach in and bring them back. When we dream again and again of the old place maybe a childhood home maybe a space we shared with a former partner we may be learning that a part of ourselves - a part scared away by trauma or a part that resisted a choice we made - is stuck in that place or went missing at the time we lived there.