At the moment of sleep, the body stays on the grid of the physical world, while the dreamer's living image [pei utupë] casts off and travels in the time of dreams (mari tëhë). This happens as it does at the moment of death: the image released from the body, becomes a specter (pore) that wanders the shores of heaven (hutu mosi). During the day, the image is confined in the body, at night, during dreams, it leaves its corporeal base and wanders far and wide, taking solid form, able to take other forms. As a living image, the dreamer can enter contact with other beings that inhabit the cosmos - with ancestors and gods, with animal and nature spirits. During the day, people take care of business. The business of the night is different. Around the close of day, the dream image begins to stir, getting ready for flight. The end of the afternoon is also the time of saudade, bittersweet nostalgia for a home in another world. .
This is a summary of the Yanomami view of dreaming. The Yanomami are a people of the rainforest on the borders of Barzil and Venezuela. For the Yanomami dreaming is what happens when the pei utupë is freed from the body at night. Pei utupë is usually translated as “image” but in a sense different from modern English language usage: the image that travels is like the Greek eidolon rather than a representation. It may be the “free soul” the Swedish school looks for in every aboriginal culture. [1] Hanna Limulja, a Brazilian anthropologist who lived with the Yanomami, makes herself their speaker in writing about these excursions:
By day we live and see what our
eyes can see, it’s as if the daylight obscures what is hidden in the density of
the body, the forest and the world. At night, the image, freed from the body,
can truly see afar. Travelling to places where the body has never been, the pei
utupë wanders, always at the risk of getting lost and making the body suffer.
One does not dream during the day, because the day is of the living, of bodies,
of matter that rots upon death. Night is the world of images, of the dead, of
shamans’ helper spirits, the xapiripë. It is in the Yanomami
person’s pei utupë, where what
really matters is found.
You must be alive to dream, yet you must die a little each night in order to dream deep. The death experienced each night when the "image" goes wandering with the spirits is "the simulacrum and anticipation of the ultimate death that reaches everyone, the definitive death that separates the body from the image, the living from the dead." [2]
Here is Yanomami shaman and spokesman Davi Kopenawa talking about relations between humans and ancestral spirits called xapiripë. "The xapiripë dance together on huge mirrors which come down from the sky. They are never dull like humans. They are always splendid."
The xapiripë descend
to us perched on mirrors, which they keep suspended a little bit above the
earth, so they never quite touch the ground. These mirrors come from their home
in the sky.
In a shaman’s house of spirits, these
mirrors are propped, hung, piled and placed side by side. When the house is
big, the mirrors are big. As the number of spirits increases, the mirrors
multiply, one on top of the other. The xapiripë don’t mix with each
other. They have their own mirrors on the beams of the house: mirrors of
warrior spirits, bird of prey spirits, and cicada spirits; mirrors of thunder
spirits, lightning spirits, and storm spirits. There are as many mirrors as
there are spirits, they are beyond number.
We live among mirrors. Our forest belongs to the xapiripë and is made from their mirrors. [3]
Mirrors not only hold and reflect images; they multiply
them. Thus an ancestral spirit may reappear in many images:
When the name of a xapiripë is spoken, it is not a single spirit we evoke, but a multitude of similar spirits. Each name is unique, but the xapiripë it designates are very numerous. They are like the images in the mirrors I saw in a hotel. I was alone, but at the same time I possessed many images. Thus, there is just one name for the image of the tapir turned into spirit, but the tapir-spirits are very numerous...This is true of all the xapiripë. People think they are unique, but their images are innumerable. They are like me, standing in front of the hotel mirrors. They seem alone, but their images overlap each other as far as infinity. [4]
This makes us reflect on the importance of mirrors in many
shamanic and magical traditions. Looking into a reflective surface may reveal a world
beyond the world. A shaman's mirror may be a soul catcher, or a shield, or a
place in which to see.
The night before I read this passage,
a man told me he dreamed that his departed mother appeared to him, offering sage counsel.
He described her as standing on a "glassy river" that went up into the
sky.
In
order to see and interact with the spirits, Yanomami shamans
inhale yakoana, the powder of the yãkõanahi tree, "the food of the
spirits".The snuff is prepared
from resinof the virola elongata treewhich
contains a powerful hallucinogenic alkaloid, dimethyltryptamine (DMT). It is said that by blowing yakoana snuff into a novice's nostrils,
the shaman initiating him transmits the xapiri spirits with his "breath of
life", wixia. [5] However, the spirit food is taken only during the day. Night is for dreaming, pure and simple.
Kopenawa says, "When we truly want to know things we people of the forest try to see them in dream. This is our way of studying." There is a basic distinction between the dreaming of the maritima, one who dreams strong, and others. "Someone who is not looked upon by the spirits doesn’t dream. They just lie around in dumb sleep like an ax abandoned on the ground." The dream shaman flies with the spirits. [5]
References
1. Ernst Arbman, Untersuchungen zur primitiven Seelenvorstellung mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Indien in Le Monde Oriental, vol. 20 (1926) pp. 85-226; and vol 21 (1927) pp.1-185; Ake Hultkrantz, Conceptions of the Soul Among North American Indians: A Study in Religious Ethnology Stockholm: The Ethnographical Museum of Sweden. Monographic Series. no. 1, 1953.
2. Hanna Limulja “Notes on the Yanomami's Dreams” Revista de Antropologia. vol. 65 no.3. (Nov. 2022) p.17
3. Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, "Les ancêtres animaux" in B. Albert and H. Chandes (eds)Yanomami - l'esprit de la forêt Paris: Fondation Cartier / Actes Sud, 2003, pp.72-3.
4. ibid, p.73.
6. Davi Kopenawa, "Sonhos das origens" in
C.A.Ricardo (ed) Povos indígenas no Brasil (1996–2000), São Paulo:
ISA, 2000.
Ilustration: RM with NightCafe
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