Article by Linda Yael

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At the end of the movie, when Dorothy returned from her sojourn in Oz, her aunt and uncle and their 3 farmhands were there to greet her at her bedside. On waking, she was told by her Auntie Em and the kindly doctor (who looked remarkably like the Wizard) that she had been hit on the head during the twister and had passed out for a time. When Dorothy insisted that she had actually been off traveling in a strange and wonderful land “…that was sometimes scary, but mostly very beautiful”, she was assured by all present that it was “just a dream”.

Alice, of Wonderland, and later Looking Glass fame, is described as getting very sleepy while reading a book “without pictures”, and nodding off either just before -or just after- she spies the white rabbit and goes down the rabbit hole after him. Was that a dream too? Or “just a dream”? Curious and curiouser…

Shamans and mystics from cultures throughout the world speak to us of the dream world as a very real place, a parallel universe, if you will. Judeo-Christian mystic tradition tells us that our soul can leave our bodies at night and travel in astro-realms. (Which is, by the way, the reason you are not supposed to wake a sleeper up too suddenly: Because the dreaming soul is connected to the body by a thin silver thread, and too sudden a wakening can snap the thread and the soul would not be able to find it’s way home back into the body.)

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