Heavy, uninterrupted sleep is dangerous, reports Roberto Romero Ribeiro, a Brazilian ethnographer who lived with the Maxicali (aka Tikmũ’ũn) of Minas Gerais. [1] In common with most if not all indigenous peoples, the Maxicali believe that in dreams the soul (koxuk) goes wandering. It can fall into bad company, or get lost, or even be taken captive. You don’t want to wake a sleeper because the soul may still be out there and could have a hard time getting back.
On the other hand, you don't want to sleep like white folks who go out for the count for seven or eight hours. If your soul is away too long, you’ll get weak and sick. The ideal is to sleep lightly and wake several times and share the dreams that are with you with those close to you.
When Roberto, exhausted by native rituals, grabbed a few hours' extra sleep, his hosts were worried about him. "Are you sick?" they asked when he stirred. “Get up, get up! You’re going to get sick! ã yok, ã yok! ã pakut ax!"
The striking vocabulary of dreaming among the Maxicali reflects the view that in dreams the soul is projected from the body. Their word for "dream" is yõnkup The root yõn means “to throw”.It also appears in the verb mõ’yõn, “to sleep", a combination of mõ, “to go” and yõn. During lively football matches in the villages, you hear all the time: Nũy ã yõn! So, to sleep is to go throw the soul. The Maxicali say the dream soul exits through the mouth. It may follow dangerous paths that lead to the villages of the dead. They are uneasy about encounters with the dead, because the departed may be eager to get surviving family or friends to live with them - which would mean that the soul would not return to the body.
In its excursions, the dream soul may meet many other spirits, of the forest or the waters, of sorcerers or allies. Forgetting your dreams is bad because you lose track of your soul and miss what it can show you from the future. You need t remember where your dream soul went because this can reveal sources of illness and potential for healing.
When you tell a dream to relatives or shamans, they will want to know whether you heard singing. The spirit people called yãmĩyxop are famous for their songs. They can be wonderful allies, but they may also demand rewards for their favors, for example in the form of feasts and rituals. The language of debt and payment is used by the Maxicali to describe their relationship with spirits. Someone who is cured by the shamans “owes” a debt to the spirits and must “pay” by performing a new ritual. In this context the shamans are called “collectors “for the spirits.
Early chroniclers noted that the habit of sleeping light related not only to the need to keep track of the wandering soul but to scan whatever was going on in the external environment at night. "The sleep of these people is not like, in general, that of civilized people, continuous and long...They sleep poorly and their precautions are constant, whether day or night, throughout the occupied area. A dry leaf that falls, a branch that breaks off from the trees, as soon as the care is heard, it is carefully observed, examined; Stopping what you are doing, you listen while the incident lasts.” [2]
[1] Roberto Romero Ribeiro Júnior “Numa terra estranha:
sonho, diferença e alteração entre os Tikmũ’ũn (Maxakali)” Revista de
Antropologia. vol. 65 no.3 (Nov. 2022).
[2] Jacinto Pallazollo. Nas Selvas do Mucuri e do Rio Doce (São Paulo: Companhia
Editora Nacional, 1973) p. 118
Picture: Text-to-image, RM with DALL-E 3
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