Patricia A. Nugent: Healing Japan

I dreamed Peggy invited me to go to Japan with her. That’s all I remember, her asking me. I don’t know how I responded. It was just another nonsensical nocturnal vignette. I get those frequently now. I can’t recollect much detail upon waking because they’re too vivid, too busy. Like a Dr. Seuss book in which you can’t logically explain the goldfish in the bowl balanced on top of the cat’s hats. I expend a lot of energy chasing that sacred REM state and often wake up exhausted.

I’d always been grateful, though, that my dreams were never prescient. I didn’t want responsibility for knowing what might happen to me or someone else – good or bad. I wouldn’t know how to separate my own self-imposed anxieties from a legitimate download from the Universe. But over the last year, I’ve started to get messages – both in waking and sleeping states – that I feel obliged to relay. Nothing very significant; perhaps a visit from a friend’s deceased parent with a message for them, which sometimes resonates and sometimes doesn’t. When that happens, I usually let the subject know, while making it clear I have no idea what it means. I try not to interpret and even advise recipients not to put much stock in what I report because I’m not sure I’m a reliable medium. 

I didn’t intend to tell Peggy about my dream. She’s an executive trainer who travels extensively. We’re longtime friends, but she’s never invited me to go on a trip; I didn’t want to seem like I was angling for an invitation. 

But the next day, horrific things began to happen in Japan – an earthquake, a tsunami, and an airplane crash. That night, I felt compelled to stream Oppenheimer, which served to magnify past horrors visited upon the Japanese people. The United States had not warned the Japanese government of the cataclysmic inferno to be unleashed if they didn’t surrender. The timing of our evacuation warnings to the two densely-populated cities was inadequate – in fact, too late for Nagasaki. The next generation suffered from birth defects, cancer, and other severe health ailments caused by the mushroom cloud, not to mention the radioactive contamination of their farmlands and other food sources. 

I’ve never had any desire to visit Japan nor had given Japan much thought outside of history courses where I learned about the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Yet now, the deep pain Japanese people had experienced made me take notice of their plight – right after Peggy, in my dream, had asked me to go there. 

I reached Peggy at her New York City apartment, not far from Ground Zero, relieved she wasn’t traveling. I told her I’d dreamed she’d invited me to go to Japan, admitting I didn’t understand the significance yet wondered if it was meant to warn her of an impending travel disaster. She assured me she had no plans to travel to that part of the globe anytime soon, seemingly unconcerned. We chatted for a few more minutes before she asked, “Hey, you know that thing you do, that healing thing? I can’t remember what it’s called, but I was telling a friend whose sister is dying about the power of energy healing and that it can even be sent long distance. Remember you did that for my dad? What’s it called again?”

I’d forgotten I’d sent distance healing to Peggy’s father a couple decades ago as he lay in a stroke-induced coma. “Reiki,” I answered, thinking it an odd digression until she elaborated, “Yes, Reiki! Isn’t that a Japanese healing practice? Maybe you’re supposed to be sending Reiki to Japan to help it heal. Maybe that’s why I invited you in a dream to go there.”

I’ve been a reiki master for decades, bearing witness to the healing it has facilitated for myself and others. I’d highlighted its benefits in two memoirs. But I’d strayed from my reiki practice for a while due to time constraints and a growing sense of futility that I’d be able to heal anything in this messed-up world. Myself included. 

That evening, I went to Japan. Energetically. Like Peggy had asked.

I lit a candle, invoked the reiki symbols, repeated the mantras, and directed healing energy to the troubled island. “I bless the divine within you,” I incanted. “I offer you this gift of healing energy with love….” 

I held the island and its inhabitants in my hands. I felt the shaking of Japan’s earth, the shaking of the people so frightened by what had happened. When the shaking stopped, my hands collapsed, limp onto my lap.

It wasn’t enough, but it was a start. I will do more, and so will others. So many of us are being called to be healers because there is so much pain everywhere. In the earth, in the air, in our bodies. Crippling our spirits. 

A nocturnal messenger had invited me to Japan, and Peggy helped me figure out why and how I needed to go. 

In weeks to come, I would be dismayed that no Golden Globe recipient for Oppenheimer used their bully pulpits to caution us about the omnipresent threat of global annihilation, which was, for me, the crux of the movie. Yet, the Doomsday Clock now reads 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it’s been since created in 1947. 

According to the Japanese distributor, Oppenheimer will be released there in March “following months of thoughtful dialogue associated with the subject matter and acknowledging the particular sensitivity for us Japanese.” (Unlike the United States, the banning of controversial art is rare in Japan.) This would be a good time to send healing to those who will cinematically witness an origin story of their multi-generational trauma. We bless the divine within you. 

Copyright 2024 Patricia A. Nugent

Patricia A. Nugent writes to give voice to those who might otherwise be silenced, following a career as a school district administrator and adjunct professor. She’s the author of the memoirs “They Live On: Saying Goodbye to Mom and Dad” and “Healing with Dolly Lama: Finding God in Dog.”