In the book, Dreams That Can Save Your Life – Early Warning Signs of Cancer and Other Diseases, dreamers, health care practitioners and other professionals outline their amazing experiences with prophetic dreams, as well as their harrowing battles with cancer. Importantly, many of the dreams have been professionally documented and may help convince sceptics that dreams should play more of a significant role in our every-day lives as well as in the doctor’s office.
The plethora of stories contained within this book, with expert dream interpretation breakdowns by Kathleen O’Keefe-Kanavos and Dr Larry Burk, help us better answer a variety of questions related to dreams, visions and the meaning of life. Can dreams predict future and current health conditions and save our lives? Can you dream for others? Can we go back into previous dreams to get more information about our health and other issues? Do spirit guides exist? According to Kathleen O’Keefe-Kanavos and Dr. Larry Burk, the answer is a resounding ‘Yes!’, and the stories contained within strongly back up their claims. This article will look at some of the more resounding implications of these stories to further our understanding of what dreams are for and where they come from and thus shed further light on the meaning and purpose of life.
Fight the Future
Many dreamers in the book saw the future in their sleep as well as in their waking lives through trance and meditation, then went on to discover cancer at an early stage which inevitably saved their lives. However, the book also showed examples of dreams that were prophetic but did not lead to treatment or the discovery of an existent or future cancer. These kinds of anomalies really help us better understand questions regarding dreams and their relation to our every day lives. Finding such apparent faults with the dream process helps us raise questions such as: is the future known by dream weavers (dream-makers)? And: why do we dream in code when more literal messages will be easier to interpret?
Franciscan Monks Came to Visit
One of the book’s authors, dream expert Kathleen O’Keefe-Kanavos, had a series of dreams where Franciscan monks warned her of cancer – not just once, but on multiple occasions. Despite sceptical doctors and tests that were negative for cancer, she pressed on and because of her dreams forced through a medical biopsy where cancer was indeed found at an incredibly early stage in the precise spot where she had been shown in her dreams– much to the shock of her doctors! Her dreams also helped with her treatment. Many of her dreams were incredibly literal and required little imagination to translate the dream code, whilst others were strongly interwoven with symbology. For example, she interpreted tiny bubbles growing larger in her dream to symbolise her white blood cell counts improving, telling her she was recovering and could finally undergo chemo. On return of her newly requested blood tests, it turned out her dreams were right once again.
She Who Dreams
Another dreamer, Wanda Burch, who has also written extensively about dreams, received dream messages about her future cancer – an entire 20 years in advance. She was also shown dreams containing symbolism that advised her on how to treat her cancer, with the cancer being represented by flying bats in her dreams. She also had dreams where music would soothe her body and mind and help contribute to her healing process. The most intriguing dream was when she was shown a life contract where it was agreed she would die in her 43rd year, but was given an extension after pleading with a presence in bright white light for more time to live. This could I’m sure lead many of us to ask; ‘why can she get a life extension whilst others can’t?’ Yet, whether you believe it or not, such dreams also hint to us that in dreams lay the clues to the meaning of life.
Of course, in many cases we are taking the dreamers word on the truth and validity of their dreams, but in the book there are lots of examples where dreamers told of their dreams which were then documented by medical professionals. In a world where you could risk your career for talking about dreams in a way that strays from modern accepted Freudian notions about the meaning of dreams, many health care practitioners that wrote in the book certainly do not appear to have a lot to gain from documenting such cases.
Have I Met You Somewhere Before?
Dreamers not only dreamt about their future cancer, but often dreamt of doctors that they had not yet met, but who they would eventually make contact with in their future life. Those that believe dreams are simply our cells communicating with our mind from a cellular level may have trouble explaining the precognitive aspects of dreaming. Again, seeing a vision may support the view of J. W. Dunne’s serialism – that we subconsciously pass ourselves information from the future that corresponds with our waking worlds to our present selves through our dreams (see article here). However, this theory has its flaws when held up against cases such as some of those mentioned above. Take one example – if the dreamer had not received the dreams in the first place, they may never have met those particular health practitioners that they saw in their dreams and in real life in the first place, and they would not have been able to send the messages back through time! Have you ever seen someone in a dream and then met them in real life?
Could it be that multiple theories that attempt to explain how we dream could be correct? Serialism, a shared consciousness, and external dream weavers in the form of spirits and/or a God, could all be acting at the same time in various ways through different dreamers. Are some of these particular aspects stronger in some dreamers more than others? Are some of these ideas simply patently false? All in all, this just brings home to us why our own personal experiences of dreams, no matter our backgrounds and appearances, are so important – pay attention to your dreams! The more commonly accepted ‘illusion’ of dreaming offers us clues about the illusion of the waking world and what lies beneath the veil.
It seems that if dream weavers do indeed know the future, then surely they would know that certain dream messages and symbols may cause confusion in the dream receivers. Dreams can often be confusing. Considering that, according to Dr Burk, the stranger the dream the more memorable and often more important the messages, we must accept that the strangeness of such dreams may likely cause confusion in many, which is partly why so few people in the modern world easily wake up to the everyday importance of dreaming. This leads back to one of the important questions about dreams – why do we dream in code? (See article here).
Some dreamers had dreams that were not easy to interpret at the time of their dream, and such warning dreams only made sense after a diagnosis had occurred. In dreamer Aisha Umar’s story she dreamt of faeces being in inappropriate places. Her dreams were extremely vivid and memorable, and it later turned out she had colon cancer which would have developed around the time of her dreams. Dr Burk draws attention to how her dreams would have been open to a wide number of interpretations at the time, particularly as she was then going through a bad divorce. I wonder why her dreams could not have been as obvious as seen in other dreamers: i.e. someone telling her: “You have cancer! It’s in your colon.” Perhaps, like other dreamers, she could have been shown a crab, which many dreamers in the book recognised as a universal symbol for cancer. Another dreamer, Patricia Rose Upczak, had a dream starring one of her friends about a broken bone in an x-ray, leading her to believe a friend would have an accident. It wasn’t until later on that hindsight allowed her to realise that the warning dream about a broken bone in an x-ray was indeed about herself, after she saw the same dream x-ray in waking life after an accident. What does seem to be clear is that these dreams seem to be comforting and may give the dreamer evidence that there is more to only this life. Hindsight can be an important thing when interpreting dream symbology and realising that at least parts of the future are somehow known by ourselves or others.
It is also clear in the book that there were cases where people received dreams where they were not able to correctly interpret their dreams or where they did not go the extra mile to get help – where cancer was prophecized but the dreamers did not act and died. These kinds of cases go against the grain of my thinking that dream givers (dream weavers, i.e. God, angels and or spirits, if there are any) know some of the future. For me this is troubling because with my missing people dreams the thought that the future is known by dream weavers gives me comfort that I would not be blamed for crimes I uncover by following my dreams.
If the dream weavers know the future, then why is it that some people receive the dreams in the first place, but then they do not act upon their dream messages? What would be the point in sending the dream if the sender knew the future – were these prophetic dreams passed on not known to be futile in the first place? Or did they reassure the dreamer that the soul survives death by giving them and those around them a glimpse of the future? Perhaps some people are just not as receptive to such dreams or are too tired and wired to make logical and rational interpretations of dreams and their various symbolisms because of where the dreamers are in their lives – they might be facing lots of stress, and everything in their lives may seem like a rush – even their dreams.
Maybe, dream weavers can make mistakes and are not infallible. It may even be that dream weavers do not exist and we are simply utilising new evolutionary abilities, tapping into a shared consciousness that supersedes time and space, or subconsciously passing ourselves messages back through time, as with serialism – possibly an imperfect process. Personally, I cannot vouch for the latter ideas as I have seen shapes in the sky that my dream had predicted, that I would otherwise not have seen if my dream hadn’t sent me to that particular location at the precise time that I went (see article here). So to me at least, dreams can know the future due to external sources outside of these explanations.
Interestingly, Dr Larry Burk asks whether such negative dreams can become self-fulfilling prophecies by helping create negative mind patterns that cannot always be escaped from without a conscious re-wiring of our own thinking patterns. This is an important point. The research and theories of individuals like Dr Masaru Emoto, which have been dubbed a pseudoscience by some, show that positive words and thoughts may impact water when frozen into crystals. The so-called Japanese rice experiment similarly shows that positive and negative words can impact the development of bacteria in jars with rice and water differently. Try it for yourself! I tried 10 times using various jars and glasses and retrieved the same results time after time – those spoken too lovingly showed much clearer water after a week, with much less mould and bubbles on the surface of the water than those which I spoke negative words to on a daily basis. Evidently, this was around the time I began to see 1111 often (see article here).
The precision and accuracy of dreams though seem to rule out the explanation that negative mind patterns are entirely to blame for predictive dreams that show health afflictions. What’s for sure though is that dreamers can on occasion influence their own dreams. One dreamer, Ann Charles, asked for clarification of information in a previous dream before sleeping to get clearer answers to her questions. Asking a question about your dream before sleep can help answer it in that night’s dreaming sequences. This is further explained by Kathleen O’Keefe Kanavos in a dedicated chapter. Whilst a dream may possibly be created by us without external influences, as some dream research has shown (See the book Why We Sleep, my review is here), (sending us our own cellular information telling us we are sick), we cannot explain how we see people never met before, and in the case of missing people in my dreams – strange items, landscapes and buildings never seen before that turn out to be eerily accurate in the real world (See one of my articles about this here and here).
If stuck attempting to correctly interpret dreams, dreamers can use a variety of mechanisms to try to make further sense of their dreams. There are a variety of ways to tap into our dreams and to even re-enter them. Kathleen notes how she can view a: ‘…dream pop-up window…’ in her mind, much like when I saw the London and Manchester attacks on a television screen in my own dream. After reading You Are Psychic by Debra Katz, I learned that this kind of vision involved what has been labelled a viewing receptacle (in my case the old fashioned looking T.V.), and it can be accessed through meditation as well in your dreams. When tied up with synchronisities and other experiences, dreams can have a much wider impact on our waking lives too, as mentioned also in Kat’s and Larry’s book. This could throw up important answers to our questions in the world around us. In one experience a woman spoke to a lost relative on a plane whilst in a waking state. Her dreams had told her to get a mammogram. Kathleen noted that this experience could also represent an ‘…extension of her inner voice,’ (p.97) another source for obtaining important information about our dreams.
One of the most important takeaways I gained from this book was the power of setting dream intentions. Before going to bed, write down on a piece of paper or in your dream diary a question that you would like answered in your dreams. Then simply write down your dreams after you sleep. After trying this myself for the first time I was astounded when I asked for a name of a victim and received their nickname in my dream. However, later attempts did not prove so fruitful. In the past I had simply asked a question in my head, but by the time I woke up I had forgotten that I had even asked one. When your dreams have multiple ongoing topics that constantly recur, this technique can really save you a lot of time trying to figure out which one of your dream themes they refer to.
Spirit Guides and Dreams Upon Waking
Other dreams in Dreams That Can Save Your Life present spirit guides or totem animals who bestow advice upon the dreamers. Not only did Kathleen O’Keefe-Kanavos meet her own spirit guides who passed on important information, but she also met other people’s spirit guides who passed on details that helped them. In one case, a friend had been given the wrong kind of stitching for a wound which had caused an infection – through her dreams Kathleen immediately knew what the problem was, which was later proven to be correct. Kat also used meditation to tap into her dream world, and received useful information from these resources whilst in the waking state. Some people dreamt dreams for others and met the spirit guides of people they knew, bypassing the person who the message was intended for. Aguirro Rocio’s dreams related to someone else in her family falling ill. To make matters more confusing, Dr Burk also refers to a number of people who had organ transplants that had dreams related to their donors. So what is it that attracts guides to us? In some ways blood and family appear on the surface at least to have some kind of significance – however, the guides are not limited to only communicating with those they may have had living contact with in the past.
Whilst I believe there are entities outside of us that care for us, I have only ever tried to meet my spirit guide once through meditation; in my vision I saw a tree! In my dreams I also remember a child helping me. Yet, I am unsure about the phenomenon and at present can really only go on what other people tell me about it.
Who are our spirit guides? Are they human? Who decides who our spirit guides are and why do we need them if our life is supposedly predetermined through a soul contract? Many interesting questions arise when considering spirit guides, and especially when thinking outside of the established agreements held between many in the more spiritual community. The answers are within us all.
What do you think dreams are for and where do they come from? I’d love to hear from you all.
Thanks for reading!
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