Where a Dream is the Price of Admission

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.[1]
    When the French ethnographer Jean-Guy Goulet told the Guajiro (a South American people also known as the Wayuu) that he wanted to live with them and study them, they replied that they would only allow him to live with them if he “knew how to dream”. [2]
    In 1994, a dream proved to be my admission ticket to the Dreaming of an Aboriginal people in my native Australia. I dreamed I was carried back to Australia by a sea eagle, to a reunion with my mother, and then guided into the hinterland of south Queensland, to the banks of 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.[3]

 References

1. Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep (Boston: Snow Lion, 1998) pp. 12-13.
2. Jean-Guy Goulet, “Dreams and Visions in Other Lifeworlds” in David E. Young and Goulet (eds) Being Changed by Cross-Cultural Encounters (Peterborough, Ontario; Broadview Press, 1994). p. 22.
3. The full story is in my book Conscious Dreaming. (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1996).

How was your dreamimg?

 

When we study the vocabulary of dreaming, cross-culturally, we come alive to ways of seeing and experiencing the larger reality that I believe were shared by all our ancestors. For example, for the Makiritare, a dreaming people of Venezuela, a dream is literally a “journey of the soul” (adekato). In ancient Assyria, a dream is a “zephyr” slipping through the crack between the door and the lintel to breathe in your ear, like a puff of wind. In ancient Egypt, a dream is an “awakening” (rswt); for me, that is the best of all definitions.

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.

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." One of those early Jesuit missionaries,  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." If you want to get lucky, in this conception, you had better learn to dream.

My understanding of what is possible through dreaming was deepened immensely when I dreamed of an ancient shaman, also the Mother of the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk people, who used the term ondinnonk, which took some decoding. I discovered – after studying Mohawk and some Huron – that the term means “the secret wish of the soul, especially as revealed in dreams”. This, I learned, was the key to an ancient practice of dreaming for soul healing, in which a community task is to gather round the dreamer and try to help her understand what the soul wants, as revealed in dreams – and then to help her take action to satisfy the soul (rather than the ego) and keep it in the body where it belongs.

What a pity we don't greet each other in the morning in the style of another indigenous dreaming people, the Wayuu of the Guajira peninsula in Colombia. They don't say "Good morning" or "Hi" or "How's it going?". They say  jamaya pü’lapüin? which means "how was your dreaming?" or "what did you dream?"

Lapu is both their word for a dream and the name of a deity. 

Michel Perrin, a French ethnographer who lived with the Wayuu and describes their shamans "dream practitioners" - a better term for real shamans than many I have seen - reported a caution from this dreaming people. "“When you no longer dream, that is a sign or consequence of grave illness. You are almost dead because when your dreams vanish so do all traces of the soul.”

Illustration: Assyrian Lamassu in Red by Robert Moss

Dreams, death and second burial among the Wayuu

 
The screen is black for a long time. Then a spectral gray landscape emerges, followed by the leathery face and sticklike arm of an old woman sleeping in a hammock. Now we see the face of a pretty young native woman in a hammock nearby. As they lie in their hammocks, the young woman starts telling her dream. Her voice is full of strange squeaks and sawing noises. We follow the subtitles. She says that in her dream she became lost. Then she found herself among the dead. Her grandfather was there and said he would protect her. On her way back she saw her cousin but her cousin could not see or hear her. This caused great pain. We begin to understand that the cousin is dead.
     The grandmother asks whether the grandfather gave the dreamer a hammock. No? That means she is not going to die soon. Getting lost in a dream is very bad, however. It means that when you die no one will visit you. The young woman - we learn her name is Doris - says she was happy to see her grandfather, and her cousin. She also knows what the dream requires. She must travel across the dry peninsula to her cousin's gravesite, and dig up her body, and rebury the bones.
    The two women discuss this in matter-of-fact tones. There are food taboos that must be respected, the grandmother says. Eat only dried meat the day of the disinternment. Absolutely no cheese, After the second burial, drink some firewater - not enough to get drunk, though - and rest in a hammock but stay awake all day and night until you get home, because this is a dangerous time when you must keep vigil.
    We see Doris' head bobbing in the back of a truck as she makes the journey. We see a laborer chipping away at cement, under a stone cross, at the cousin's gravesite. We may have gleaned by now that the cousin killed herself and has been among the restless dead. The ritual about to be performed seems to be designed to stop her ghost from wandering. But nothing is explained to the viewer.
    We see Doris seated over the open coffin, twisting her cousin's skull loose until she can pull it off the bones, gathering and cleaning all the remains, putting them in cloth bags. We hear voices raised shrill in grief as mourners stage a wake around the hammock where the bags of bones are laid, pending second burial 
    Finally, we follow Doris home and see a old, old shaman woman shaking a rattle and spitting tobacco juice and blowing firewater over her in a cleansing ritual. We hear Doris speaking to the unseen spirit of her cousin. She recalls how, when they were children, they loved to visit the cemetery and pretend they were going to bed there.
    This is a summary of a remarkable 2019 Colombian documentary film called "Lapü", which means "dream" in Wayuunaiki, the language of the Wayuu people, and the only language recorded in the screen version. Often dark and disturbing, the film really requires some background in the traditional beliefs and practices of the Wayuu. They are an indigenous people of northern Colombia and Venezuela, cattle herders who live in a harsh landscape of candelabra cactus subject to drought for nine months of the year and flood for the remaining three.

     I discovered the film in the midst of rereading Michel Perrin, a French ethnographer who lived with the Wayuu and gave us valuable reports on their shamanic dreaming practices and their beliefs about the soul and its itinerary after death. He uses the older word for the Wayuu, Guajiro, in most of his books. His most accessible work, Les praticiens du rêve - a condensation of a 1,000 page PhD thesis - is distinguished by its clear recognition that the true shaman is , first and last, a "dream practitioner". He explains with great clarity how and why dreaming is central to the practice of real shamans, and to how they model and navigate reality.
      Perrin informs us that lapü is not only the Wayuu word for "dream" but the name of a "divinized personality", a "god " of dreaming whose functions extend to the reception of souls after death and to bringing a "little soul" to newborn babies. "Lapü gathers the souls of the dying and brings little bits of soul (petits bouts de l'âme) to little children. He gives dreams to the living, prescriptive dreams, premonitory dreams...from him emanate the auxiliary souls of shamans and, according to a great origin myth, he delivers the keys to dream to humans.” [1]
     As in so many ancient and indigenous traditions, dreams are understood to be excursions of the soul. “The dream is often conceived as nocturnal wandering [by the soul], illness as a long walkabout, death as a definitive departure.” [2]
     Another Wayuu word for dream, ei’pahaa, could be rendered as “an experience of the double”. Perrin calls it an “encounter with the double” after noting that the root of the word,  e’piha, means part of something or its complement. “Every being has its double and every event is anticipated in the form of reflections or shadows out of reach of ordinary conditions.” [3]
    “Many say it: the dream is inspired by the Otherworld (monde-autre)...The truth of this world is found in the Otherworld, to which it is subject. Everything happens as if there is a temporal shift between the two worlds. The Otherworld anticipates this world, of which it is the double – 'the soul', I was told one day.” [4] 

Perrin's informants explain second burial to him like this:

We die twice
and twice we bury our dead
one time their flesh and body
one time their bones, several years later
this puts things in order  [5]

Second burial may lay to rest the yoluha, the spectral form in which the dead continue after death. It has its own land, Hepira, where the dead indulge their appetites – especially for sex – voraciously.

In another of his books,  The Way of the Dead Indians Perrin brings together the insights of five Wayuu elders on the nature of soul, dreaming and death  

To each of us is attached a soul.
it is like a bit of white cotton fluff,
like smoke.
But no one can see it.

Everywhere our soul follows us
like our shadow…

Everything that happens in our dreams
is what happens to our soul.
If a Guajiro starts dreaming that he is elsewhere,
near a well or in a house,
or if he sees birds,
this means that his soul has left his heart…
by way of his mouth
to fly over yonder.
But his heart continues to work…

When a Guajiro is sick,
it’s as though his soul were a prisoner in Dream’s abode.
It’s there that the spirit of a shaman
can find it and bring it back to the sick man… 

It is the souls of the dead who come back to earth
by way of our dreams.
They are the ones that are met by our souls
when we dream of the dead. [6]

A cautionary theme running through the narratives collected by Perrin echoes what I have heard in other indigenous traditions: when you lose your dreams, it is because you have lost a vital part of your soul. This can bring illness, even death.
     The Wayuu say that “when you no longer dream, malapuinwaa, that is a sign or consequence of grave illness. You are almost dead because when your dreams vanish so do all traces of the soul.”
    An elderly, sad Wayuu man, said this:

I just sleep because of my illness
I have been without dreams for a long time
I can’t dream any more, I don’t know how to dream,
because now I am close to death. [7]

References

1. Michel Perrin,  Les praticiens du rêve: Un example du chamanisme (Paris: Quadrage/PUF, 2011) p.11

2. ibid, p.43

3. ibid, pp 44-5

4. ibid, pp. 53, 78

5. ibid, p.47

-    6. “Guajiro Death”, recounted by five elders  in Michel Perrin, The Way of the Dead Indians: Guajiro Myths and Symbols trans. Michael Fineberg (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987) pp. 7-9  

7.  7. Les praticiens du rêve p.46

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