A positive example:

“I go to a wedding in a big room with a high ceiling, large gallery boxes filled with brightly and colorfully dressed people celebrating in a sort of medieval style . . . After the ceremony, they pass out large boxes of food—all vegetarian/vegan. A serving woman passes me a large container of yams.”

 

A negative example:

“I’ve thrown chocolate Hershey’s kisses into the toilet. When I return to the bathroom later, I find that I can’t use the toilet as it has become covered over and backed up – out of service. The Hershey’s kisses have clogged the system.”

 

Lucid Dreaming Variation:

In a lucid dream (when you know that you dream while you dream), use the Lucid Dream Information Technique⁽⁵⁾ to generate an answer to the following question: What foods can I eat to optimize my health? For example, when lucid first focus your intent on this question, and after waiting a bit, open a refrigerator or go into to a grocery store, and see what foods show up. Pay attention to how they look, and whether they show up in positive or negative contexts. Record your experiences and/or the answers that you receive in your dream journal in as much detail as possible – make drawings to illustrate your dreams as appropriate. Also, look for optimal diet information in all of your dreams. Often, after rehearsing the LDIT as you go to sleep, answers will show up in other dreams whether you become lucid in them or not.

 

An example:

“While flying in a lucid dream, I remember that I wanted to ask which foods I should eat for optimal health. I intone aloud, “Let me now see, healthy food for me!” Below me the dreamscape changes. I now fly over plates of brown-green pasta, then lots—and lots—of bananas. I also see a few plates of pineapples, and what I can best identify as pinecones (with pine nuts).”

 

Why do a Dreamatarian Diet?

Dreams have served as a source of healing for thousands of years, perhaps even tens of thousands of years. Through the centuries and across cultures people have reported on the healing power of dreams. In ancient Greece, the sick visited the temples of Aesclepius, with the expectation that they would either receive information in a dream to aid healing, or that they would receive a direct healing from the divine in the dream itself. These healing modalities reportedly remain effective today, even for serious conditions like cancer.⁽⁶⁾

 

Of course, many might argue that given the rapid development of modern medicine, and the increased availability of new diagnostic methods and treatments, that dream healing modalities have become obsolete and irrelevant. Such a conclusion seems unwarranted⁽⁷⁾, as the commercialization of the medical industry⁽⁸⁾ and the corruption and falsification of medical research⁽⁹⁾ has severely compromised the integrity and efficacy of both modern medical diagnostic techniques and therapeutics.

 

Although conventional medicine seems very effective in keeping patients alive in emergency situations, for curing chronic conditions it has an abysmal record. For example, the official NNT’s (number needed to treat for one person to have significant benefit) for the ten highest grossing drugs in the United States drugs ranges from 4 (only 1 out of 4 benefits) to 25 (only one out of 25 benefits).⁽¹⁰⁾ On the other hand, rigorous research in the last twenty years has abundantly demonstrated that changes in diet and lifestyle can not only prevent diseases— such as diabetes, heart disease, and cancer—but can reverse their progression and even cure them.⁽¹¹⁾

 

Medical care now officially rates as the third leading cause of death—but this statistic only includes deaths resulting from a limited set of acknowledged medical mistakes.⁽⁷⁾ If one included all deaths resulting from medical treatments, including conventionally accepted but in fact harmful treatments, I expect iatrogenic deaths would earn the number one spot by a wide margin. It does not help that for the medical industry financial gain, and not the health of patients, has clearly become the main motivating factor.

 

In the early days of computing, the phrase “garbage in, garbage out” (GIGO) became deservedly popular. Feed false information into a computer, no matter how advanced, and false conclusions will come out. Garbage in, garbage out applies not just to computers, but to humans. Intentional frauds routinely perpetrated by the pharmaceutical industry, from which the FDA has failed to protect us,⁽¹²⁾ added to numerous other problems in scientific research⁽¹³⁾ has undoubtedly and unfortunately filled the heads of today’s medical professionals with a great deal of garbage.

 

Dr. John Ioannidis, a professor at Stanford University, summed up the situation as follows: “There is increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims. However, this should not be surprising. It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false.”⁽¹³⁾ Dr. Richard Horton, the current editor-in-chief of The Lancet, perhaps the most respected peer-reviewed medical journal in the world, agreed. He wrote: “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.”⁽¹⁴⁾

 

We unfortunately now live in a post-truth world. Invalid but compelling misinformation has become increasingly abundant, and trustworthy information has become ever harder to find. Developing effective ways of enhancing our ability to discriminate between the two, through tuning into our own inner guidance, becomes increasingly important. Research into the effects of diet and lifestyle have made it clear that our bodies have the ability to heal almost anything, so long as we give them what they need to heal, and so long as we stop doing what makes them sick. Of course, in practice this can prove rather tricky, as many people don’t have a clue to what their bodies need to heal, and have become sadly out of touch with respect to what they’ve done that made them sick. In my experience dreams, especially lucid dreams, can serve as an effective means of bringing this kind of information to light. For those with an interest in optimizing their own health and healing, developing an individualized Dreamatarian Diet makes an interesting and useful place to begin.

 

References

¹Sechrist, E. (1968). Dreams: Your Magic Mirror, With Interpretations of Edgar Cayce, chapter 8, Cowles Books, New York.

²Goldberg et al, (2004) “Advanced Glycoxidation End Products in Commonly Consumed Foods,” J. Am. Diet. Assoc., 104, pp 1267-1291.

³Howitz, K.T. et al, (2003) “Small molecule activators of sirtuins extend Saccharomyces cerevisiae lifespan,” Nature 425, pp 191-196, September 11.

⁴Sinclair, D.A. and Guarente, L., (2006) “Unlocking the Secrets of Longevity Genes,” pp 48- 57, Scientific American, March.

⁵Kellogg III, E.W. (2004), “LDE Quarterly Lucid Dreaming Challenge: The Lucid Dream Information Technique”, The Lucid Dream Exchange, pp 8-9. 19, Number 33, December.

⁶Kellogg III, E.W. (2015), “Radical Healings: A Role for Dreamwork,” The Lucid Dreaming Experience, 4 #2, pp 12-17.

⁷Starfield B. (2000) “Is US health really the best in the world?” JAMA, 284(4):483-4. Jul 26.

⁸Rosenthal, E., (2017) An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back, Penguin Press, New York.

⁹Freedman, D.H., (2010) “Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science,” The Atlantic, November.

¹⁰Schork, N.J., (2015) “Personalized medicine: Time for one-person trials,” Nature News 520 #7549, April 29.

¹¹Greger, M., and Stone, G., (2015) How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease, Flatiron Books, MacMillan.

¹²Turner E.H. et al, (2008) “Selective publication of antidepressant trials and its influence on apparent efficacy.” N Engl J Med., 358(3), pp 252-60, Jan 17.

¹³Ioannidis, J.P.A., (2005) “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False,” PLoS Medicine, 2(8), pp 0696 – 0701, August

¹⁴Horton, R. (2015) “Offline: What is medicines’ 5 sigma?”, The Lancet 385 (9976) p 1380, April 11.