Called by Sea Eagle

 

In traditions where the importance of dreaming is understood, the right dream may be your price of admission to the good stuff.
   It is common in Tibetan tradition for spiritual teachers to ask students to bring them a dream to determine if they are ready to receive important teachings. A student without a dream is regarded as blocked and possibly unclean. He is required to undergo purification and perform practices to reopen his connection with spiritual allies. He is not allowed to continue his studies until he can produce the right dream.

    Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche gives a personal example, from the time of his training with Lopon Rinpoche, in his book Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep. The story is doubly interesting because it involves long-range dream precognition. At 13, as a student, Tenzin dreamed he was handing out slips of paper with the Tibetan syllable A written on them to people boarding a bus.    
    He brought this dream to his teacher, who did not comment, but allowed him to proceed to a further level of instruction. Fifteen years later, waking events caught up with the dream. Invited to travel to the West for the first time, Tenzin found himself assigned to hand out slips of paper with the Tibetan syllable A on them to people boarding a bus. These were to be used in a meditation exercise.
    In 1994, a dream proved to be my admission ticket to the Dreaming of an Aboriginal people in my native Australia. In a lucid dream, starting in the drifty liminal state in the middle of the night, I was joined by a giant sea eagle, an aquatic raptor native to the north-east coast of my native Australia. The sea eagle carried me across the North American continent, then over the Pacific to a reunion with my mother at her home in Queensland. We had been having some difficulties and I wanted to leave the dream excursion at this point to call her.
    However, sea eagle had other ideas. It flew me on , into the hinterland, to meet another animal power: a huge water buffalo. I remembered the water buffalo, too, from boyhood. It had been central to a terrifying shamanic initiation, in another spontaneous lucid dream.
     The bull escorted me to a muddy creek. Something immense was thrashing and rising from the waters. Nearby were Aborigines painted for ceremony. An elder told me, "This is the first of all creatures. This is the beginning of our world."
    When my mother died suddenly, three months later, I was grateful that the dream had prepared me for this event, through our loving exchange in the dream itself, and by how it inspired me to reach out to her and heal some misunderstandings.
     I flew back to my native country. After the funeral, I went "walkabout" for a few days, and found myself at an Aboriginal housing co-op in a dusty town in the hinterland called Beaudesert. When I started talking about dreams, I was told I needed to talk to Frank. Who was Frank? "Oh, he's our spirit man." Frank's place proved to be three days bush walk away, so this lead seemed like a non-starter.
    But Frank walked in as I was getting ready to go; shamans are tricky. He invited me down to the pub to talk. He sipped orange juice and sniffed me, literally, checking if I was another white fella trying to rip off his people yet again. Then I told him the dream. His manner changed radically. He sat very still, his eyes blazing like fire opals.
   "Oh, I guess you've come to me for a reason, mate. You've just told me the start of the creation story of my people, the Mununjalli, as it is told to made men. That thing you saw in the water was the bull eel. We say it is the first of all creatures."
    Yet a dream had taken me deep inside the Dreaming of an ancient and indigenous people. Because of my dream, Frank volunteered to show me the place of the Bull Eel Dreaming. Skirting quicksand and snakes, after many hours I found myself on the bank of the muddy creek from my dream. No bull eel in evidence that day, which was fine with me.

Many years later, I heard from a Kukatja grandmother that "a dream is when the spirit goes on walkabout." I know this is exactly right. 

 

A fuller version of this story is in the Introduction to my book Conscious Dreaming.

Drawing: "Flight with Sea Eagle" (c) Robert Moss