Dreaming, we are time travelers. We step outside linear Chronos time into a more spacious dimension, from which we can descend into times past or times future. When we wake up to what is possible, we can travel consciously into the past or future to do very interesting things, ranging from scouting challenges and opportunities that lie ahead to exploring our relationships with personalities living in other periods.

Great healing can become available when we wake up the the fact that one of the thingswe can do, as time travelers, is to visit a younger self within our present lifetime and play mentor, cheerleader, and big brother or big sister at a time when that younger self may have been desperately in need of guidance, protection and encouragement.

In my workshop in Tallin, Estonia last weekend, I was privileged to assist in an adventure in time travel to a yoinger self. All of us involved beliee that it offered deep healing not only for the adult journeyer, but for his child self – in this case his unborn baby self – in his own “Now” time, many decades ago.

I had asked workshop members to bring us a dream or a personal image that could serve as the portal for a wide-awake experiment in shamanic lucid dreaming. The primary dreamer would journey through their own image, and they would be accompanied and supported by two partners or trackers. The journey would be fueled and focused by shamanic drumming.

I worked with Franz, who gave us a dream from the previous night. He had set an intention for the night: “Show me how to heal my heart.” He explained that he suffered from an irregular heartbeat. In his dream, he went down into a basement that was full of smoke and emerged gagging. He surfaced from the dream feeling violently ill. He forced himself to go back inside the dream, through the conscious dream reentry technique that is one of the core practices in my Active Dreaming approach.

He now discovered that the smoky basement was in fact a smoke-filled womb. It came home to him, with full force, that his health condition may have stemmed from the fact that his mother smoked heavily during her pregnancy, as well as throughout his childhood.

Bravely, Franz decided he would now try to journey back to the womb, with our active support, to help the unborn child in the smoke-filled womb. Could there be a way to offer the half-suffocated fetus some breathing room? I recalled that in Hawaiian mythology, there is a god who is immune to smoke because he is the Brother of Fire (the brother of the fire goddess Pele) with whom I had worked in other healings. Franz asked if we could bring the Brother of Fire on the journey. “We can certainly try,” I told him. 

In preparing for the joint expedition, I counseled Franz that his assignment was not to succumb to the physical sense of oppression of his unborn self, and to resist becoming overwhelmed by the emotions of that time. He needed to remain sufficiently detached to play the role of adult mentor to that struggling younger self. At the very least, he could then assure that the spirit fighting for survival in the smoke-filled womb that he would survive. And maybe he could acomplish much more.

During the drumming, all three of us – Franz and I and Pille, a gifted Estonian woman dreamer – were all able to enter the amniotic lake swiftly and easily. This was far from pleasant. Franz found himself oppressed by the sense of suffocating, wanting to throw up. It was nearly impossible to breathe in there. We felt the distress of the unborn child. In her efforts to help Franz, Pille found herself sucking smoke from the space through a straw, and releasing it outside. At Franz’ request, I had invoked the Brother of Fire. I saw him in his shark form, swimming round and around the fetus, creating bubbles of air. In his own journey, Franz also perceived an ally, clearing the smoke, strengthening the lungs and the heart, supplying vital oxygen.

The journey continued, through birth and childhood, all the way to a mutual vision of a joyful possible future for Franz, filled with fresh creative energy. Franz came back charged with energy and promise. We saw it shining in his eyes, and rejoiced with him.

Viewed only as a way of revising bad memories, this was quite wonderful. But our shared experience convinced us what was accomplished extended to trans-temporal healing that reached a struggling unborn child in the womb, as well as the adult self in his current time.

If such things are possible – as I am quite certain they are – what have we got to lose by attempting this mode of healing in our own life stories, and those of the people we are called to support?