When your dream soul goes flying

 

From the Teachings of Island Woman:

The memory of a dream is the memory of a journey. It may have been a short visit to a neighbor's place or a date with the lover you will meet three years from now. It may have been a journey to the spirits on the moon, or into a universe inside a stone that is as big as the universe out there.

When your dreamsoul goes flying, it visits the future and brings back memories of things that haven’t happened yet in the Shadow World. Sometimes you can stop those things from coming to pass. Sometimes you just have to live them out. Sometimes you can tame a future you don’t want by acting out a little piece of it, enough to contain the event that is trying to come through.
   Life is full of crossroads. Often you don’t even notice them until they are behind you, unless you know how to dream. Through dreaming, you can scout out the different trails you might follow and see where they lead. Through dreaming, you are already choosing the events that will take place in your waking life.

There is limitless power and beauty and healing available to us in the dreamworlds. To keep body and soul together in the surface world – and to live from the purposes of the soul – we need to bring that dream energy through. This requires action in the Shadow World.
    The first part of that action may be speech, but not the chatter of idle birds or village gossips. The speech required is an act that brings something new into a world. Dreaming gives us the songs and the magic words that can bring something up from a soupy ocean of possibilities to take root in the earth. That is why real men and women of power are poets, singers, storytellers, performers. With skeins of song and dancing needles of magic words, they reweave the fabric of reality.
   When we do this, we know that we are entertaining the spirits: our own vital spirits, the spirits of the ancestors, the great ones who reach to us from beyond space and time, the ancient and shining ones.

Nothing happens until it is dreamed. When we bring something good from the dreamworld into the surface world, we do the work of the Creator. We join in dancing a world into being, as Sky Woman danced on Turtle’s back.

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"Island Woman" is the name I gave to an indigenous arendiwanen ("woman of power") who was born Huron and raised Mohawk some 300 years ago. She became Mother of the Wolf Clan of the Kanienkehaka, or Mohawk people, and a revered healer and dream shaman. She called me in lucid dreams in the late 1980s, after I moved to a farm on the edge of traditional Mohawk country and I had to study the Huron and Mohawk languages to understand and record her teachings. For her fuller teachings and my discoveries about her in historical records, see my book Dreamways of the Iroquois

Drawing: "Island Woman" by Robert Moss