What makes me dive in headfirst, and other words for dream

If you want to know more about what dreams can be, consider what the words for “dream” mean in different languages. You’ll find clues here to what dreaming meant to our ancestors, before we lost respect for dreamers and contact with the Dreaming..

      How about these:

- a dream is “a journey of the soul” (adekato) for a dreaming people of Venezuela, the Makiritare.

- a dream is a “zephyr”, a gentle breeze slipping through the keyhole, or the crack between the door and the lintel, to breathe in your ear, in ancient Assyria

- a dream is an “awakening” (rswt) in ancient Egypt

- a dream is also a spirit messenger (oneiros) that travels from the Commonwealth of Dreams (Demos Oneiron) in archaic Greece.

     In good Old English, a dream is “merriment” and “revelry” of the kind you might encounter from downing too many goblets in a mead-hall. But by Chaucer’s time, the same word, with a different, Northern derivation, can also imply an encounter with the dead. As in Northern Europe (German Traum, Dutch droom etc) the word “dream” we have inherited is linked to the Old Germanic Draugr, which means a visitation from the dead.

     As explained by the great Tuscarora ethnographer J.N.B.Hewitt, the old Iroquoian word katera’swas means “I dream” but implies much more that we commonly mean when when say that phrase in English. Katera’swas means I dream as a habit, as a daily part of my way of being in the world. The expression also carries the connotation that I am lucky in a proactive way – that I bring myself luck because I am able to manifest good fortune and prosperity through my dream. The related term watera’swo not only means “dream”; it can also be translated as “I bring myself good luck.” 

       Early Jesuit missionaries reported that the Iroquois believed that neglect of dreams brings bad luck. Father Jean de Quens noted on a visit to the Onondaga, that “people are told they will have bad luck if they disregard their dreams.” So if you want to get lucky, you want to dream a lot.
      In the Mohawk language, the word we translate as "shaman" is ratetshents, which literally means "one who dreams". Typically, across the indigenous North American cultures, we find the same thing. By definition, the shaman is a dreamer, one who dreams strong.

       Among the Dene, the same linguistic terms are used to designate dreams, visions and spontaneous apparitions and trance states, suggesting that they can all transport the dreamer into the same space, the space where shamans operate.

      Among the Wind River Shoshone, the word navujieip means both “soul” and “dream”; the navujieip “comes alive when your body rests and comes in any form”
       In Scots Gaelic there is a prolix and specific vocabulary for many forms of dreaming and seership and paranormal phenomena. The best literary source on these things is the work of John Gregorson Campbell, a minister of Tiree in the late nineteenth century who gathered the oral traditions of Gaelic speakers and wove them into two books, Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (1900) and Witchcraft and Second-Sight in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (1902).
     The term da-shealladh (pronounced "dah-haloo"), often translated as "second sight", literally means "two sights". It refers to the ability to see apparitions of both the living and the dead. The taibshear (pronounced "tysher") is the seer who specializes in observing the energy double (taibhs). A dream or vison is a bruadar ("broo-e-tar"). The bruadaraiche ("broo-e-taracher") is more than a dreamer in the common sense; he or she is the kind of dreamer who can see into the past or the future. That's a nugget worth close evaluation. The depth of the practice of dreaming in any culture is reflected in its working terminology for such things. I'm not sure that current English offers a single word as rich as bruadaraiche but I doubt that we can import the Scots term since (at least as it comes off my tongue) it sounds like something boiled up in a sheep's stomach.

     The Hawaiian language contains a rich vocabulary for dreaming that makes a delightful study.    A general word for dreams in Hawaiian is moe’uhane, generally translated as “soul sleep” but better understood as “night experiences of the soul”, since for traditional Hawaiians, dreaming is very much about traveling. The soul makes excursions during sleep. It slips out of the regular body, often through the tear duct, described as the “soul pit” and travels in a “body of wind”. During sleep the dreamer also receives visitations from gods (akua) and ancestral guardian spirits (aumakua) who may take the form of a bird or a fish or a plant.

     Like all practical dreamers, the Hawaiians recognize that there are big dreams and little dreams. You don’t want to pay too much attention to a “wild goatfish dream”(moe weke pahulu), which is caused by something you ate or how fast you ate it. The colorful term is derived from popular belief that eating the heads of goatfish – at other times a delicacy – in the wrong season, when bad winds are blowing, causes sickness and troubling but meaningless dreams. On the other hand, you want to recognize that a dream may contain the memory of a trip into the future that can give you information of the highest practical importance. Especially helpful is the “straight-up” dream (moe pi’i pololei) that is clear and requires no interpretation.

    There are “wishing” dreams (moemoea) that show you something you are pining for, which may or may not be attainable in ordinary reality. There are “revelations of the night” (ho’ike na ka po) that carry the power of prophecy.

     A most interesting category of Hawaiian dreams are those – believed to be gifts of the guardian ancestral spirits – that are given to promote the healing of relations within a family or community. Dreams are also given by the aumakua to promote personal healing.

The ancestral spirits also deliver “night names” (inoa po) for babies that are on the way, and cautionary tales are told of misfortune that comes when the parents ignore a baby name delivered in a dream.

    The Hawaiians pay special attention to visions that come on the cusp between sleep and waking (hihi’o) believing that these are especially likely to contain clear communication from the spirits and “straight up” glimpses of things that will unfold.

    In our dream travels, we may be united with a “dream husband” (kane o ka po)or a “dream wife” (wahine o ka po). This can be pleasurable and even compelling, but Hawaiian lore teaches caution. Spend too much time outside your regular body in your “body of wind” and the physical organism may start to weaken and languish. You also want to be alert to deceivers who may take on the form of alluring sexual partners but are actually something else, like tricky mo’o, a kind of water imp.

     We want to bring energy from our juiciest dreams into embodied life and not leave it out there. A favorite Hawaiian legend tells how a goddess accomplished this. Pele, on her volcanic island, was stirred by rhythmic drumming from far off. She left her body in her lava bed, charging her attendants not to rouse her for three days on any account. She traveled far in her “body of wind” and finally found the source of the magical drumming is a luau being held by a handsome prince. The goddess and the prince fell for each other and spent three days making love before Pele returned to the body she had left in her lava bed. Being a goddess, she was then able to arrange for her prince to be transported to the Big Island to live with her as her consort. Humans may find this kind of transfer harder to effect, but it’s always worth a try!
     My favorite word for "dream"comes from the special vocabulary of the Inuit angakok ("one who sees with inner light") or shaman. The word is transcribed like this: kubsaitigisak. It is pronounced "koov-sigh-teegee-shakk" with a little click at the back or the throat when you come to the final consonant. It means "what makes me dive in headfirst". Savor that for a few moments. A dream is something that makes you take the plunge. It takes you deep. Doesn't this wonderfully evoke how, dreaming, we may escape our consensual daily hallucinations and dive into a deeper world?

Text adapted from Dreaming the Soul Back Home by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library. Audio version narrated by Robert now available from audible.com

Art: "Broad Bands of Dreaming" by Robert Moss