ABSTRACT
Sleep is the natural habitat of the dream, but what people call a dream is actually a pale facsimile of the original episode of dreaming. When people pull a fish out of the sea they cannot expect to see it, feel it, and understand its way of life as if it were still swimming about freely, but they can learn something about it before it dies. The remembered dream is like that flapping fish we were lucky enough to have caught. Once awake people have available to them the information that has gone into the shaping of their dream images. By exposing connections between the present and the past, their dreams shed light on both the strengths and weaknesses of their emotional heritage. In this sense, they may be said to be a mechanism for emotional healing. The experience of dreaming is linked to healing by virtue of the honesty that shapes the images.
