In one of my workshops, a  woman I’ll call Lois shared a dream titled “War”. She was very agitated and upset as she retold it.

 I am on patrol with six women dressed in green uniforms. We are all riding motorcycles. The stars seem very close. I don’t want to look at them. I don’t know where we are to begin with, then I realize we are near my home town.  Enemy missiles are coming in. Our people are firing missiles to stop them, but their aim is all wrong. I keep yelling to warn them they are missing their targets, but they don’t hear or don’t act. An enemy missile hits the place where I was born and I know it has been obliterated.

Lois connected this dream with a series of “end of the world” dreams, but found this one the scariest. She did not tell us she had been undergoing medical treatment and had been worried about her doctors. This came out only at the end of the process, and we did not ask for details.

After some hesitation, Lois agreed to try to reenter her dream with  the aid of shamanic drumming, and to invite the whole group to come into her dreamspace as trackers and protectors. Her intention was to “heal the dream” by preventing the enemy missiles from getting through. She did not accomplish this, but she made a couple of interesting observations: she found the dream cities full of “pink houses” that she had not seen or remembered before. The stars, once again, were ominously close and she did not want to look at them.

I sought the help of a dream guide to establish whether there was a literal war/terrorism element in the dream. It was immediately clear there was not. I looked for the women in green and found they were dressed in nurses’ hospital scrubs – they were people in the healthcare system who were aware of alternative approaches and could help to temper the allopathic approach. Later  Bear came through and wrapped Lois in healing energy. Other trackers told us after the group journey that they saw Bear at work.

I became aware that the whole dreamscape was the dreamer’s body, that the whole dream was actually unfolding inside her body. The menacing stars were cancer cells, threatening to metastasize. The “pink houses” she saw were her cellular system. The missiles being fired off were her doctors’ efforts to come up with the right mix of chemicals to treat her condition. The threat of missing or misfiring reflected the danger that the doctors would get the treatment wrong.

I tried to “heal the dream”, experimenting with setting up shields. I saw the missile fired at her birthplace deflected so that it landed in the river and was washed out to the sea.

I had the strong feeling that Lois could work with her dream imagery in the direction of healing, that it might even be possible to re-weave the pattern of the stars.

I shared my dream of her dream cautiously, not wanting to project any negative images or scenarios. She accepted what I brought quickly and gratefully, telling us immediately that there was a very real danger that what her doctors were doing – or might try to do – would misfire. She resolved to carry the dream warning as an advisory and to look for help from the “warrior nurses”.

This exercise in dream reentry and tracking brought into sharp focus the need to determine whether the world of the battlefield of our dreams is the world out there, or the world in here, maybe the world inside the body. Because dreams speak on many levels, the same dream can be about all of these.