Breast Cancer Warning Dreams: Interview with Kathleen O'Keefe Kanavos

This interview with Kathleen O'keefe Kanavos is part six of my Breast Cancer Warning Dreams Series. The women in these interviews and myself were part of a study that profiled women who were diagnosed with breast cancer in dreams and then in real life.


M&E

Can you set the stage of your life at the time of this dream that suggested you had breast cancer? Were dreams about health issues common for you or did this come out of left field?

Kathleen O'keefe Kanovos

This was definitely out of left field. According to my yearly check –up I was the picture of perfect health. All my mammograms, blood tests and physical exams “proved” to the medical community that my cancer concerns were unwarranted. However, my recurrent precognitive dreams would not be ignored and hounded my every sleeping and waking hour. Nightmares often accompany health related dreams.

My daily routine was to get up-whenever I felt like it- pick out a tennis outfit, join my team for an inter country-club match, decide where to go for lunch, go out with friends for dinner. Go to bed, get up, and repeat. My life was very different from the life I lead in-service today.

It all began one stormy night when my husband and I were in the bathtub together looking up through the skylight at the full Halloween moon when I remembered a recurrent dream that kept telling me to go back to the doctor despite my healthy mammogram because I had breast cancer. That was the beginning of the end of my old care-free life.

Fortunately, I had a husband who supported me in my old life, and still does today, in my new one.

Sometimes you don’t know what you are made of until you start to fall apart and your best parts pop out and hold you together. We are made up of so much more than id, ego and super ego. Often, bad things happen to good people. That’s life. But, you don’t have to be a victim of circumstances. Listening to our dreams can save us from being a victim at all. 

M&E
How did the dream unfold? Did it move you to seek screening right away or did you wait?

Kathleen O'Keefe Kanavos

Three days after my memory of the dream in the bathtub, I had an appointment with my gynecologist, Dr. Wagner, whom I also used as my general practitioner.  “I can’t feel anything on or around your breast, Kathy.”

            “Perhaps it’s easier to feel during my menstrual cycle,” I replied from a contorted pretzel position with my arm held over my head.  He shook his head as he manipulated the area again. I’m torn between relief and concern. Is nothing really there? Did he miss it, or were the voices of alarm in my head just residual anxiety from Mom’s recent death from colon cancer. But, Peter had felt it, too.  

            “You had a blood test and mammogram less than six months ago and everything was fine,” Dr. Wagner said. He helped me up and showed me a copy of the report. “I think what you felt was just a fibrous tumor that is sensitive to your menstrual cycle.  Let’s just keep an eye on it. Come back in six months and we’ll check it again,” he concluded with a reassuring smile, and snapped my chart shut.

            That night’s strange dream sent me scurrying back to Dr. Wagner. I had been enjoying my dream when suddenly it froze, much like the screen on a computer freezes, and a pop-up window appeared, also like one on a computer. My Spiritual Guide/Guardian Angel dressed like a monk in a brown hooded robe belted with a knotted rope and leather sandals stepped through the window and said, “Come with me. We have something to tell you.”  I obediently followed him into a room I call the room between realms; a place that is neither of the earth nor the dead, yet the dead can visit to share information. It is a parallel universe of consciousness. A guide took my hand, placed it on my right breast and said, “You have cancer right here. Feel it? Go back to your doctor tomorrow.  Don’t wait for an appointment.”  I started to cry in my dream and told him that the doctors wouldn’t listen to me now any more than before. “They just keep giving me the same tests over and over.  You help me.” My guide reached into the pocket of his robe and handed me a tiny white feather no bigger than a feather that escapes a pillow and glides to the bedroom floor. “Use this feather as a sword to fence with in your verbal battles with the doctors and you will win against scientific facts. You need exploratory surgery. If you present your case to the doctors as though you were an attorney standing before an incredulous judge that dislikes you, you will win,” he said, then turned and walked out of my dream. I was outside the room between realms as the window disappeared. My previous dream started up again right where it had left off. Time had stood still.

             “You want an exploratory surgery!  I can’t take something out that isn’t there.  An operation is a serious decision, and in your case unfounded and unnecessary.”  My doctor is upset.  So am I, but for a different reason.  His concern is that I’ve overreacted to an “invisible spot.” Mine is that I haven’t reacted enough to this damned spot.

            As a doctor, his war chest is armed with indisputable medical evidence, three mammograms, blood tests and physical exams that all point to perfect health.  In mine I have an angel feather from a dream. I dug into my mental chest, pulled out the tiny feather and imagined pointing it him. His defense is logically indisputable. Yet, I pleaded my case like a lawyer  to convince him to do what I want and not what he wanted –play the “wait and see” game.  Six months from now may be too late. But, since I am the patient and he the doctor, I am at his mercy. I’m taking a giant leap of faith here, so “voices,” don’t let me down! I silently prayed while mentally pinching my feather between my fingers. Then I turned to face my medical opponent, who I must win over to become an ally to live.  

M&E
What was the outcome of your screening?

Kathleen O'Keefe Kanavos

The first warning bell tolled in my brain when my doctor pulled the privacy curtain behind him in the little recovery cubical. The second one gonged when he took my hand. “Pathology didn’t like what they saw when they cut the tumor open,” he said.  That shocked the s*#t out of me and my nausea was momentarily replaced by panic.

            “Is it cancer?” I held fast to the side of the gurney and braced myself for the answer I already suspected.

            “Yes, I’m sorry.  I’ll get your husband and also refer you to a specialist now.”

            The specialist I requested in your office when you told me I was too young for cancer? I thought.

              So my dreams had been right, the doctors and tests wrong.  With my surgeon’s words, the first shot of my ensuing battle had been fired and it is not a warning shot across my bow.  It is point-blank into my breast.  I glance down at my painful wound and weep.

PATHOLOGY HAD JUST CoNFIRMED MY WORST NIGHTMARE.

            This uphill march began my Alice in Cancerland descent down the dark rabbit hole of crisis. The corner has been turned.  There is no going back to my previous life. Like Alice, I was falling, falling with no bottom in sight and little hope of a soft landing.

M&E

Did you tell your physician or his/her staff about the dream? If so, how did they respond?

Kathleen O'Keefe Kanavos

           Yes and no. Five years later two of my New York doctors walked into the examining room with a look of concern on their faces and asked, “Are you psychic?” It turned out that a dream I had had concerning my treatment had been right again. I finally told them the whole story. They told me to write a book ad that they planned to tell the story at every cocktail party they attended. “Your dream story will be the talk of the town.”  I sent my Boston doctors an autographed book.

M&E
Do you believe your dream and subsequent actions you took as a result saved your life? If so, how?

Kathleen O'keefe Kanavos

Absolutely! If I had followed my doctors suggestion the first time and waited six months for a second set of tests my stage 2 aggressive cancer that was also in a lymph node would have had time to grow and spread out of control. Six months would have been too late. If I had listened the second time when my doctors told me was too healthy to qualify for an MRI, my recurrent stage 4, 9x11 cm lobular cancerous area would not have been found in time. I was on the edge of doom.

M&E
How did you come to be included in Dr. Burk's study?

Kathleen O'keefe Kanavos

A friend of a friend of a friend contacted us and we then met by email and later by phone.  Kelly Sullivan Walden was one of those friends, and I credit her with Dr. Larry Burk and I meeting for the first time. We then met in person at IASD; the International Association for the Study of Dreams, where we later did presentations together.

M&E
Is there anything else you would like to share with our readers?

Kathleen O'keefe Kanavos

What is truly amazing Suzanne is that we all spend one-third to almost half of our lives sleeping. Whether we remember them or not, we dream...every night, and even during the day with Daydreams. Yet, for many people, dreams remain an "X" file because in our Western culture they are looked upon as useless, nonsensical, random firings of an over-active, over-stimulated brain. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Your dreams can save your health, wealth, relationships and love-life. We often forget that we go to bed each night with the smartest person in this world? YOU! And, the only person who can answer all your questions and in some ways, save your life.

Here are my 4 tips on how to live a fulfilled and happy life:

Don’t take no for an answer. “No!” means start again at the next level up. Think YES! Don’t be dismissed. Stand in your power and speak your truth.  Be the squeaky wheel until you are heard.  Learn to dance in the rain, sing in the wind, and make lemonade out of a storm. 

M&E
Tell us about your life now.

Kathleen O'Keefe Kanavos

After surviving breast cancer three times that was missed by the medical community and the tests on which they relied, but uncovered in my dreams, I spend much of my time in the service of others, helping women, and men, learn how to believe in themselves and their dreams, so they can stand in their power and speak their truth when facing adversity. My missed recurrence was stage four, considered terminal, yet here I still am, sharing my experience in your interview.

I turned my lemons into lemonade and have often found others, like yourself, who turned their rotten potatoes into vodka, and we party with wonderful people like Dr. Larry Burk, to celebrate life and the power of our life-saving dreams. I used my experiences to write an International Best-Seller and multi award winning book titled; Surviving Cancerland: Intuitive Aspects of Healing. I am a Dream, Health, Wealth & Relationship Expert who believes dreams can diagnose your life and often ask guests on my radio and TV shows, “Did you have a déjà vu or did a dream come true?” Inspirational/Keynote speaking is one of my loves, along with being a multi magazine columnist and avid blogger. I guess you could say sharing dream-health information is a big must for me.

My story is in many books including Chicken Soup for the Soul: Dreams and Premonitions. My columns are in Cape Women Online Magazine as a Cancer Q&A, Wellness Women 40 and Beyond- Dream Queen columnist, Women Voices Magazine where I have two columns, one on cooking based on my recipes written during treatment that take 15 minutes or less and are organic. The second column is SOUL and is dedicated to dreams and spirituality. It is with great pride that I tell EVERYONE I will be on the cover of the June issue of the magazine, & R.A.Bloch Cancer Foundation Hotline Counselor & Mentor. My weekly TV and Radio shows require much planning but are worth every second. It is my hope to interview the women you have interviewed on my live streaming skype radio show Wicked Housewives™  Club.

When Epoch Times did an article on my dreams and about being in Dr. Larry Burk’s study we were contacted by other doctors doing similar studies and research, which is very encouraging. We plan to add some of the information in the book we are busy writing together, Dreams That Can Save Your Life.  My focus right now is fulfilling my destiny; sharing that we are never alone and our dreams are Sacred doorways to Heaven.

You can learn more @ http://AccessYourInnerGuide.com 

Other Interviews In This Series:

Wanda Burch

Dr. Larry Burk

Sunni Ingalls

Diane Long

Paulette Wyssbrod Goltz

My Story

Breast Cancer Warning Dreams: Interview With Paulette Wyssbrod Goltz

This interview with Paulette Wyssbrod Goltz is the 5th in my Breast Cancer Warning Dreams series. The women featured in this series and myself were in a study profiling women  diagnosed with breast cancer in dreams and then in real life. The study, authored by Dr. Larry Burk M.D., was published in the May/June issue of Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing.

M&E

Can you tell us about yourself?

Paulette Wyssbrod Goltz:

I live in a small town on the Texas coast. I moved here when I went on permanent disability from cancer treatment. I also went back to school at that time and finished a BS in Psychology.  Currently I am a freelance writer. I write for three online platforms. I have a pen name I use to self-publish on Amazon, and I have written two novels (fiction) that have been sent to publishers. Basically, I am a writer/author!

M&E:

Can you set the stage of your life at the time of this dream that suggested you had breast cancer?

Paulette:

I was working as a manager for a large multi-family housing company. It was a high stress job because it was a rather new concept called LIHTC and there was so much more to the job than normal management. I called it working for Corporate America. I was single. I just moved back to Houston, Texas from southern California. I was making good money. Basically it was a time in my life when everything was going my way and I had the freedom to do whatever I wanted with friends, etc.

M&E:

Were dreams about health issues common for you or did this come out of left field?

Paulette:

This dream came out of left field. I have always had message dreams but never about health. In the dream a voice said to me “your mother has cancer, she has three months to live and you have a tumor in your right breast.” I remember waking up, turning on my bedside lamp, looking around my bedroom to see if anyone was there, and then at the clock. It was just after 2: a.m. I told my sister about the dream the next day.

M&E

How did the dream unfold?

Paulette:

A couple weeks later my mother did have cancer and was given three months to live. She actually lived six months though.

M&E

Did it move you to seek screening right away or did you wait?

Paulette:

I got regular mammograms. I did the yearly thing without fail because two of my older sisters had breast cancer.

M&E

What was the outcome of your screening?

Paulette:

All of my mammograms for the next five years were supposedly OK. I found the cancer. I was getting dressed one morning and noticed a patch of skin on my right breast that looked like an orange peel. It was the size of a silver dollar. The minute I saw it I knew. I went directly to my regular doctor and she said “it’s probably nothing” she did a breast exam. Also I had just had my annual mammogram and it came back OK. I told the doctor “I need to get another mammogram, I know what this is, I don’t care what the last mammogram said. I dreamt about this five years ago.” She kept trying to push the mammogram came back clean thing and she could not feel anything during the breast exam but she finally relinquished. So, she referred me to a hospital clinic, and they did a different type of mammogram where they put sticky things around the area of the orange peel skin. I waited for the results, and when they sent me in for an ultra-sound and tissue removal I knew I had breast cancer. Three days later it was confirmed. Cancer in my right breast.

M&E:

Did you tell your physician or his/her staff about the dream? If so, how did they respond?

Paulette:

Both my regular doctor and my oncologist did not respond to the dream when I told them about it.  I saw the same oncologist my mother had and I did tell her about the dream. She was a feisty old doctor and she listened but did not say anything. But, after the surgery, it turned out that the tumor had been growing for about five years, was grade 2, stage 2, and in three lymph nodes. The dream was in the late summer of 1998 and the diagnosis was November 2003. So the dream was correct. They only listened but did not respond.

M&E:

Do you believe your dream and subsequent actions you took as a result saved your life?

Paulette:

It would have been nice had it been discovered earlier because my treatment plan would have not been so aggressive. I took the right actions by following through with mammograms yearly and doing breast exams but none of that helped in finding the cancer. I have often thought that perhaps I should have told my doctor about the dream but then I seriously wonder what her response would have been since the mammograms came back clean.

M&E:

How did you come to be included in Dr. Burk's study?

Paulette:

I saw a CTA on Dr. Northrop’s FB page about being told about breast cancer in a dream.

M&E

Is there anything else you would like to share with our readers about your experience?

Paulette:

If you have a dream that warns you about a health condition, push it until someone listens to you. Regardless of their response.

M&E:

I couldn't agree more.

Other Interviews In This Series:

Wanda Burch

Dr. Larry Burk, M.D.

Sunni Ingalls

Diane Long

My Story

Breast Cancer Warning Dreams: Interview with Dr. Larry Burk, M.D.

In 2013 I was diagnosed with breast cancer in a dream, then shortly after, in real life. My experience and those of other breast-cancer-warning-dreamers, were published in the May/June 2015 issue of  Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing.

This is part 2 in a still evolving series of interviews with my co-participants in the study. It is my pleasure to introduce you to Dr. Larry Burk, M.D., the paper's author.

M & E
Can you please tell us about your medical background and how you eventually found interest in parapsychology research?

Dr. Burk
My story begins in my hometown at the University of Pittsburgh where I did my medical school and radiology residency training. There I was fortunate to get in on the ground floor of MRI just as it began to flourish in 1985. While doing some of the early research in MRI of the knee I developed a mysterious pain in my shoulder which was unrelieved by arthroscopic surgery. This experience inspired me to pursue research in MRI of the shoulder at Thomas Jefferson University after doing a musculoskeletal fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, eventually leading to the first study of MRI in professional baseball players with the Philadelphia Phillies.

After this very conventional beginning, I was unexpectedly launched into a multifaceted adventure into holistic healing in 1987. It was prompted by a perfect storm of events including my father being diagnosed with metastatic renal cancer, discovering my first metaphysical bookstore, and joining the national MRI safety committee to address concerns about claustrophobic patients and the health effects of electromagnetic fields. The safety issues led me to become interested in hypnosis and acupuncture, taking my first hypnosis training in 1990 while beginning to explore alternative cancer therapies for my dad including acupuncture.

The next stop on the journey was private practice in Virginia Beach where I was introduced to the Edgar Cayce material and medical intuition. Experiences with a number of talented intuitives caused a significant paradigm shift in my worldview, and in 1993 I moved to Durham, home of my alma mater, Duke University, and the Rhine Research Center, formerly the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory. I took a job as section head of musculoskeletal radiology at Duke and also pursued parapsychology research in intuitive diagnosis, eventually becoming a founding member of the American Board of Scientific Medical Intuition and Rhine board president for a year.

Upon arriving at Duke I discovered a number of like-minded colleagues and started the Mind-Body Medicine Study Group. The deaths of one of those friends and my father led me down a spiritual rabbit hole into the world of dreams and shamanic journeying, including a healing encounter with my first power animal, the jaguar. Following these unusual forms of guidance I co-founded the Duke Center for Integrative Medicine in 1998, became the education director and took the UCLA Acupuncture Course for Physicians. I left full-time radiology and began to practice acupuncture along with hypnosis and dream work at a variety of clinics at Duke.


A fortunate twist in the story occurred in 2002 when I was introduced to EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques), the perfect combination of my hypnosis and acupuncture training. Through a series of magical synchronicities in 2004 I was guided to leave Duke to set up Healing Imager, PC, to offer consulting services in MRI musculoskeletal radiology for NationalRad and in EFT and hypnosis for Oriental Health Solutions, LLC.  I became a Certified Energy Health Practitioner through the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology in 2010 and was certified in hypnosis by the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis in 2011.

After telling stories about all these healing adventures for many years, I was finally inspired to publish Let Magic Happen: Adventures in Healing with a Holistic Radiologist in 2012.  Along the way the journey has continued to unfold in mysterious ways. I’ve explored my own various musculoskeletal ailments through the lens of symptoms as metaphors and have gained valuable insights that I enjoy sharing with patients in my practice as well as with healthcare practitioners through workshops. In 2014 my first medical intuition teacher Winter Robinson, MA, invited me to co-facilitate Medical Intuition and Symbolic Disease workshops with her at The Monroe Institute in Faber, VA.

My use of EFT has expanded to include working with symbolic grief-related illnesses such as sinusitis and post-nasal drip in conjunction with After-Death Communication using imagery and dream work. Health-related dreams have expanded as a focus inspiring me to publish a research paper in 2015 on women who have warning dreams about their breast cancers before diagnosis.

M&E
How did this breast cancer dreams study come together?

Dr. Burk

I first heard of the dream breast warning phenomenon from a physiologist-turned-mediation teacher friend who had a series of vague dreams about cancer culminating in a precognitive dream of having surgery on her breast by a woman surgeon. This startling dream prompted her to go for a mammogram which was normal. Unsatisfied by this result she pressed the radiologist to do an ultrasound. The radiologist refused saying it was not standard practice to do ultrasound to search for a cancer that was not palpable or visible on mammography. She pleaded to have it done exactly where the dream indicated, and the radiologist was stunned to find it. 

Another friend is a physician-turned-consciousness researcher who had two disturbing dreams in one night. The first scary dream was about a serial killer. The second one was about having breast cancer. Those were enough to send her for a mammogram which showed a cancer in the location from her dream. A third friend of mine reported that “I had a dream that I had cancer. I went to the G.P complaining of a lump and spasm-like feelings on my sternum. The G.P. concluded it was normal breast tissue, and the feeling in my sternum was dismissed, a devastating mistake. A year later, a different doctor diagnosed stage 3 breast cancer.”

These three eye-opening stories of dream intuition inspired me to do a literature and Internet search for additional examples. Psychiatrists Vasily Kasatkin and Robin Royston have reported large series of dreams that warn of a variety of health concerns, including cancer. Kasatkin‟s research is described in Robert Van de Castle‟s book, Our Dreaming Mind.

Royston recounted the case of a woman named Nancy, who had a precognitive dream of receiving a stunning blow to the chest by a strange hooded figure. She punched the figure, who turned out to be herself, in the chest and shouted, “Bad Nancy,” which turned out to a be a play on words for Malig-Nancy when she was diagnosed with breast cancer 5 months later.  www.worlddreambank.org/B/BADNANCY.HTM

In searching for recent research, I got more than I bargained for when I hit the "mother lode" by finding Wanda Easter Burch's She Who Dreams. In her book she describes the dreams that guided her to find her cancer after doctors dismissed her nagging breast pain. Wanda also presented Dreaming Well: Harvesting Dream Imagery for Healing in the 2008 Psiber Dreaming Conference. She reported a survey of 19 women from a 2004 breast cancer support group meeting at the Charles Wood Cancer Center in Glens Falls, N.Y. Ten had experienced prodromal dreams of their breast cancers, with warning visits from deceased family members in all but one of them.

I presented many of these cases in my Dream Diagnosis of Cancer and Clinical Correlation talk at the 2013 IASD conference, and the discussion afterwards centered on ways to create a database that would allow scientific study of prodromal dreams in breast cancer. Included in this dialogue was the management team from www.dreamscloud.com, who offered to collaborate in providing a cyber platform to facilitate collecting this important data. This project can be initially approached retrospectively in the short term, beginning with Breast Cancer Awareness Month in October  (including outreach to breast cancer support groups), but ideally it would evolve into a long term prospective study.

For an initial retrospective study, a request could be posted on the Dreams Cloud website for women with confirmed diagnoses of breast cancer to post any prodromal dreams they previously recorded in a dream diary. According to a search of their site, there have only been two spontaneously reported dreams of breast cancer posted since February 2013, without any indication of radiological follow up or a confirmed diagnosis. Beginning to collect more comprehensive data in this fashion would provide some idea of how a prospective study might work, with the goal of establishing a substantial online breast cancer dream registry.

M & E
Post publication you introduced a number of us from the study to one another. Have you noticed any similarities amongst participants in terms of personalities, worldviews, or how we seem to process information? Do you suspect there may be certain characteristics shared by people prone precognitive dreams pertaining to illness?

Dr. Burk
Since I know about 1/3 of the group rather well now including two of my closest friends and have had some personal interactions with most of the rest, I do have a sense about some shared characteristics. Many of you have a long history of intuitive guidance, so the fact that you are breast cancer dreamers may not be that surprising. My one close friend is a cardiovascular physiologist turned mindfulness teacher, and the other is a physician/psychologist synchronicity researcher. Kat and Wanda have both written books about their intuitive development. Carolyn Kinney is an outside-the-box thinking nursing professor who published her article in the 90s even before Wanda's book came out. There are also 3 women from the IASD who have doing dream work for years.

M & E
Do you think such medical intuition is unique to certain people or can it be developed in those with no such history? I see that you are offering a couple of medical intuition classes in 2016. Can you please tell us about those?

Dr. Burk
Clearly some people are born with more enhanced intuitive abilities than others, and some acquire them as survival skills due to childhood trauma in dysfunctional families. Others have very active left brains whose right brains only come out to play during sleep as intuitive dreams or through guided imagery processes. It is kind of the like Force in Star Wars. Some training may be required for Jedi skills to emerge, while others like Rey in the new version seem to know exactly what to do when the time comes for it. Winter Robinson was one of my first intuitive teachers, and I am thrilled to be co-facilitating a series of medical intuition workshops with her at the Monroe Institute.

M&E

You are working on a book with one of the study participants, Kat Kanavos, who will also be interviewed as part of this series. Can you tell us more about that project? What is the vision or is that still in the shaping process?

Dr. Burk

Kat and I have had fun co-presenting at the last 2 IASD conferences on dreams and breast cancer, so the book idea came from those shared experiences. We have both written books and spend a lot of time working with social media, and it felt right to both of us to collaborate on this book project. The tentative title is Dreams that Can Save Your Life:  Early Warning Signs of Cancer and Other Diseases.  In addition to the dream material already collected for the research paper, we have been gathering reports of dreams of many other types of cancer including thyroid, prostate, skin, brain, lung, uterine, and colon cancers. Thus far we have the outline completed and are working on the first chapters for the book proposal.

Part 1: I Was Diagnosed with Breast Cancer in a Dream: An Interview with Wanda Burch

Dr. Larry Burk's Website

Dr. Burk's book (available in paperback and Kindle version)

I Was Diagnosed with Breast Cancer in a Dream - An Interview with Wanda Burch

Wanda Burch
 

"It's your time to get cancer."

That sentence kept waking me from dead sleep during the summer of 2013. By December, when due for my annual breast screening, I had a nagging feeling that this time I should ask for an MRI. Between getting the scan and receiving the results I dreamed a woman in a white lab coat told me I had breast cancer. Thanks to that MRI  I was diagnosed with Stage 1 HER 2 (+3) breast cancer that previous mammograms missed. I was forty-three years old. That was a very aggressive tumor that had not yet spread.  Would a mammogram alone have missed it again, destining me for diagnosis at a later, less treatable stage? Quite possibly.

More shocking than being diagnosed with cancer in a dream was learning that I was in good company - that this is actually a thing. In 2015 I was part of a study with eighteen other women, Warning Dreams Preceding the Diagnosis of Breast Cancer: A Survey of the Most Important Characteristics,  published in May/June 2015 issue of  Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing.

I have begun an interview series with Dr. Larry Burk, M.D., the paper's author, and several women from the study. This first installment features Wanda Burch.


M & E:
Can you set the stage of your life at the time of this dream that suggested you had breast cancer? Were dreams about health issues common for you or did this come out of left field?

Wanda Burch:
 "I was born in the South in Cullman, Alabama, and grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. My grandmother was a healer in the Alabama mountains and dream sharing was a constant in my life. Keeping a daily journal was not a part of my life until a friend, Robert Moss, encouraged me to do so. The journal saved my life. When I realized I was dreaming the diagnosis of breast cancer, Robert was in the process of developing a set of “questions,” which he called Lightning Dream Technique. In helping me work with and understand the dreams, which were nightly, I worked through the process of diagnosis, surgery, chemotherapy and healing, as Robert refined his technique, assisting me in learning how to mine the dreams for active work with the imagery for healing.

I can’t imagine having “one” dream. Each dream held unique information, crucial to diagnosis; then the dreams changed when I had acted on the information, each one unfolding, as you say, into the information I needed for the next part of the healing process. They addressed the technical aspects of chemotherapy, providing the imagery I needed for a positive experience, providing the words and phrases I needed for the creation of meditations, for drawing, for writing and for actively moving the imagery from the dream to my waking reality.

 

M & E:

Did you tell your physicians or their staffs about the dreams? If so, how did they respond? Do you believe your dreams and subsequent actions you took as a result saved your
life? If so, how?
 

Wanda Burch:

I will not repeat the entire content of the book. Read it for my story; but I shared my dreams first with my gynecologist and then with a surgeon who “paid attention.” He asked if I had dreamed the location of the tumor. I had. He gave me a felt tip pen and asked me to draw the location on my breast. The location was accurate and he passed along information to my oncologist on the nature of my dreaming and asked him to participate actively with me in the healing process. I had an aggressive cancer that did not show up on a mammogram. One of my dreams warned me of this and encouraged me to aggressively pursue the only information available on the diagnosis - my dreams. I did. Dr. Barlyn shared later that had it not been for my dreams, I would have been dead within a year with almost no symptoms."

 

M&E:
Interesting. Mammogram missed mine, too. How did you come to be included in Dr. Burk's study?

 

Wanda Burch:

I don’t recall exactly how Dr. Burk came to me. I think he was aware of my book and of my friendship with Robert Moss.

 

M&E:

Is there anything else you would like to share with our readers about your experience?
 

Wanda Burch:

I continue to work with women who have diagnoses of breast cancer and other chronic illness, and women veterans, who often have unique health issues. We work together with their dreams, using Robert’s technique for dream sharing and using more advanced work with dreams: dream tracking, dream re-entry, drawing, writing, and dream theater. I plan an eventual book on healing and the imagination, based on the hundreds of stories shared in workshops on dreaming, diagnosis, and healing. My current research is soldiers’ dreams, both historic and current. I believe working with dreams and the arts is a safety net that can bring the soldier home from war with humanity and soul intact.

 

I am a 26 year breast cancer survivor. In 2003 New World Library published the story of my experience of healing and dreams: She Who Dreams: A Journey into Healing through Dreamwork. My book still influences people and I still receive testimonials from those working with healing and dreams. In She Who Dreams, I describe how working with dreams and dream imagery saved my life, not a process of “one” dream, but a process that involves first and foremost keeping a journal, working with individual dream imagery and understanding the ongoing process of diagnosis, action, and healing, using the information and imagery in each dream. I dreamed my diagnosis of breast cancer for over two years before I understood what I was dreaming about. When the dreams became more definitive and more urgent, I paid attention and acted on the dreams, and currently, with the help of a few simple questions, I understand how to approach each of my night dreams and how to work actively with dream imagery and information as it comes. 

I am a retired historian from a 37 year career as site manager of an 18th century house museum. I continue to work in historic preservation and on boards of historic societies and museums. I continue to work with dreams and with breast cancer advocacy programs. I am a peer advocate reviewer with the Department of Defense breast cancer grant proposal program and have articles published on dream imagery in self-help magazines, in on-line blogs, and other like venues. I co-present arts retreats in the Adirondack mountains, one at Great Camp Sagamore for women surviving chronic illness and one at Wiawaka in Lake George for women veterans. These are under the auspices of Creative Healing Connections, Inc.

 

Most recently I have partnered with John Kenosian, singer/songwriter. We offer programs on healing through dreams and music that will allow participants the opportunity to explore the imagery in their dreams and the healing potential of music. Wiawaka will host our first three day program on Healing the Spirit through Dreams and Music, July 8-10, 2016, with one day programs offered at other venues throughout the year. Both John and myself are featured in a newly released CD, “Come Dearest the Daylight is Gone" [the 77th NY Regimental Balladeers], with an accompanying booklet authored by myself, Dreaming of Home in the American Civil War. The booklet includes excerpts from a book manuscript, working title, Soul on Paper: Dreams and the Imagination in the American Civil War, which will be published by McFarland Publishing, Inc. in 2016. Visit my website at www.wandaburch.com.