I have a friend we all call Doc. He’s a healer and a skilled dreamer. It wasn’t until I met him that I understood what true suggestion was. I visited him in St. Petersburg, and before I’d even dropped my bags, they brought in a young girl, about 13 or 14 years old. She’d been thrown from a moving train by a group of drunken guys. The doctors had done all they could, but the severe concussion was relentless. She’d go five or six days without sleep, then fall into a near-coma, wake up a day later, and start the same cycle all over again. She was terrifying to look at — like a living corpse, with eyes full of terror and pain.

Doc sat her in a chair, took a seat opposite her, and the girl fell asleep instantly. Her parents and I found ourselves pulled into his circle of power. A minute later, they, too, were asleep. I watched Doc’s back — a black, austere jacket. Suddenly, a tunnel opened up before me. The walls had a vibrant texture — the kind you see in dreams when everything is so vivid, colorful, and alive that the tonal becomes oversaturated, causing the dream to rupture. I was pulled forward by some force, wanting to hide, to escape…

Doc broke off the session and gave me a couple of slaps. He told me we had been in the depths of a labyrinth — an archetypal structure that everyone sees in dreams. It appears in different forms — a house with endless rooms, a maze of ravines, dungeons, and so on. This structure shows up in countless video games because it’s the classic quest cliché — find the way out to reach the next level.

Doc healed the girl, and I gained a wealth of insight into labyrinths.

Doc’s interest in labyrinths was a bit accidental. Once, during a “Lifespring” course in St. Petersburg, one of the participants fell into a regressive state. This 28-year-old woman began acting like a 10-year-old girl. As a child, she’d helped her mother at a daycare where her mom worked as a teacher or caretaker. And suddenly, this composed woman began seeing everyone — coworkers, colleagues, family members — as little, soiled children. And she treated them accordingly. She was taken to some of the best doctors, but nothing helped. A dark cloud hung over the course organizers. In the end, they brought her to Doc, but he, finding no way to communicate with her, just shook his head and said, “I’m sorry.”

But thoughts of her troubled him, and then one night, in a lucid dream, he found himself in a labyrinth. Or rather, it happened the other way around — he was in the labyrinth and then became lucid. Standing next to him was that woman. The tunnel walls were closing in around them, and Doc dragged her toward what he thought might be an exit. Long story short, he got her out of the tunnel, and the next morning, ecstatic colleagues called to tell him that the woman had miraculously recovered from her regression. And it had happened that very night.

Later, Doc managed to heal a blind girl in a similar way. Her case involved deformed optic nerves, meaning her sight couldn’t be restored 100%. Yet he led her out of the labyrinth, and she regained her vision.

Why am I telling you all this? To show you how mysterious our consciousness is and the incredible discoveries that dream analysis can lead to. Psychologists believe that the labyrinth archetype represents illness, problems, and unresolved issues from waking life. But those who map their dreams disagree. For them, labyrinths are attention traps. And interestingly, these “traps” grow, evolve, and even serve as dwellings for many types of Ollies.

Imagine a dream map as a tall rectangle, with the boundaries representing the edges of human perception. Draw a diagonal from the southwest to the northeast, and the labyrinth zone will fall along a southeast curve relative to that diagonal.

But exploring a labyrinth is risky. Carlos Castaneda warned about this. Such journeys in consciousness require an innate gift. While an ordinary dream disperses your attention in a few minutes, the labyrinth drains it almost instantly.