Dreaming for soul and survival, from the Paleolithic to our times

Most human societies have valued dreams and the dreamers for three principal reasons. They have recognized that in dreams we see the future, and this can help whole communities as well as individuals to make better choices. They have understood that dreams give us a direct line to the sacred, to the God/Goddess we can talk to, to the ancestors, to the animate spirits of Nature. And they have grasped that dreaming can be very good medicine. Dreams diagnose problems before they present symptoms; they offer imagery for self-healing; and they show us the state of the soul and can help us retrieve parts of our vital energy that may have gone missing through what shamans call “soul-loss”.

     In Western society, dreams are undervalued by those the English call the “talking classes”, especially in academe and the media. Yet we all dream, so this is common property. Ever the hardhead who says “I don’t dream” is only saying “I don’t remember” or “I don’t care to remember”. And when life is tough or he is going through a big life transition, his head may be cracked open by a big dream that will expand his understanding and maybe give him sources and resources not otherwise available.  One of the most common types of “big dreams” that can accomplish that is a visitation by a dead family member or loved one.

     All ancient and indigenous peoples that I have encountered, in my studies as an independent scholar and in my travels in many realities, understand that the dream world is a real world, maybe more real than the regular world of our consensual everyday hallucinations. When I told an elder of the Longhouse People, or Iroquois, about my dreams of a Mohawk/Huron  arendiwanen,  or “woman of power”, who walked this earth three centuries ago, he told me “you made some visits and you received some visitations.” There you have a central understanding, forgotten or ignored in much of Western psychology: dreaming is traveling.
     In dreams, soul or consciousness gets around, far beyond the body. In dreams, we may also receive visitations. The very words for “dream” in many cultures reflects this insight. In the language of the Makiritare, a shamanic dreaming people of Venezuela, the word for “dream” is adekato, which literally means “a journey of the soul.”

     Look at what is painted on the walls of the Paleolithic caves and you have evidence of the central importance of dreaming from as far back in the human odyssey as we can trace. The images are portals into a deeper reality, not simply hunting or fertility magic, but ways of connecting with the spirits, of calling through power, and of traveling between dimensions.
     On the most practical level, dreaming has always been a key part of our human survival kit. When we were little better than naked apes, without good weapons, dreaming helped save us from becoming breakfast for leathery raptors or saber-toothed tigers, by enabling us to scan our environment, across space and time, and identify possible dangers.

     We want to learn to meld ways of dreaming and healing that  our ancestors knew with the best of science and scholarship today. The methods of Active Dreaming that I teach and practice are not a "New Age" approach, but the revival of ancient wisdom, adapted to our contemporary lives, and providing essential tools to get us through life's challenges and find and fulfill our bigger and braver stories.

Art: the "Panel of the Lions" in the Grotte Chauvet in southern France.

My new online course "Dreaming into the Dreamtime" draws on the wisdom and practice of seven world traditions; classes start on May 3.

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Cave mind, juniper fuse

“Something in daily and nightly life had to encourage certain people to go into the caves on a quest. There must have been a crisis outside the caves that some people felt could only be resolved inside them." Thus Clayton Eshleman, in his poetic exploration of why our distant ancestors went deep below the earth to make  the first great art on walls that could be viewed, with ordinary eyes, only in the uncertain flicker of hand lamps like those at Lascaux, whose wicks were juniper twigs. Hence the book's title,  Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination & the Construction of the Underworld.
     The oldest theory of the cave paintings is that they are just stone age graffiti, or art for art’s sake. You're sheltering down in a cave when you notice that a swelling in the rock resembles a bison's great body, or a crack suggests a woman's vulva, and then you expand that suggestion into an image.
     Next came the theory that the paintings were hunting magic, that the artists were spreading a magic net to catch the animals they depicted. That version sounded plausible in the abstract, but comes apart when we notice that there are relatively few game animals in the cave paintings (red deer, a prime source of meat in those days, are notably missing) and few explicit scenes of hunting or people with weapons. Side-by-side with the "hunting magic" theory came that of fertility magic, based on the vulvas and abstract Vs (read as feminine sex symbols) and lines (read as phallic).
     As the study of shamanism became popular in the wake of Mircea Eliade's 1953 classic, we heard that the cave paintings were evidence of - and vehicles for - primal shamanic ritual and shifting of consciousness. In Shamanism: The Beginnings of Art (1967) Andreas Lommel issued a passionate manifesto for the cave artist as shaman. In the celebrated painting of an ithyphallic bird-masked shaman and a bison spilling its guts in the shaft at Lascauz, Lommel saw a battle between shapeshifting shamans, in which the loser is stuck in dying form of his power animal, the bison.
    A gentler, more holistic view of the paintings is that they are products of a deep womb experience: the power of being inside the Earth herself. "To draw on the inside walls of a cave is to be part of the potential transforming powers of inside” writes Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, in The Roots of Thinking (1990).

    The cave paintings can bee seen as testimonies to experience, of the powers that appeared in vision and during ritual in the dark of the cave. If a power manifested as a horse, then paint a horse. If indeterminate, then a hybrid. Maybe some paintings were done to evoke the powers of the deeper world, and others to contain them.
    How can we know what the "cave mind" was like? We can learn from the experiences of those who have put themselves inside the cave world. One of the most interesting passages in Juniper Fuse is a report by Barbara MacLeod, who spent 48 hours without light or timepieces, “an hour’s scramble” from the mouth of a cave in Belize:

At first I perceived the darkness as two-dimensional – a flat screen spattered occasionally by drifting, bluish cloudlike images whose edges continued to unfold…These images were the same whether my eyes were open or closed…The most striking feature of the early phase, beginning within some four hours, was synaesthesia.

Slight sounds generate images, starting with brilliant geometric patterns, becoming vivid scenes from memory. There is the impression of being in “an eternal hypnopompic state.” Waking from her first sleep in the cave, MacLeod finds herself in interstellar space, frightened until she feels the ground and hears her companion’s breathing. Now

The darkness had acquired three-dimensionality, and seemed to be illuminated by a light behind and above my head…The infinity of the field before me seemed to take me into itself, such that I was no longer contained in my skull

There are inexplicable auditory phenomena, a tinkling on the ceiling overhead, like a small bell, and later, howls. "There was something else in here with us…I had an image of the “presence” as an amoeba-like consciousness which was the cave, rather than some spook flitting around in it."

     She had the sense of an invitation to apprenticeship from the cave itself. 

     I return to Eshleman's hypothesis that  "a crisis outside the caves" encouraged certain people to go down into the caves on a quest in order to find the means to resolve it. What was the nature of that crisis? he suggests, with poetic insight, that it lay in the separation of the world and the mind of humans from those of the animal powers. In the caves, with the aid of the "breathing images" (I am borrowing a phrase from the Greeks), the connection between human, animal and deeper powers could be re-forged.
     In our lives and our world today, how do we begin to count the cost of our disconnection from the animal powers and the Earth herself? We may not choose, or be able, to spend 48 hours in a cave in Belize - and will not be permitted to do that at Lascaux - but we need to find ways to renew the connection and spend some time in "cave mind", below and beyond our surface preoccupations. We do that in shamanic dreaming, when we learn to travel to the world-beneath-the world, through the mouth of a cave or the roots of a tree.

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What do you see here?

This figurine was carved from mammoth ivory some 32,000 years ago. It is 11.7 inches tall. It is said to be the oldest zoomorphic (animal-shaped) sculpture in the world, and one of the oldest of all sculptures. The pieces of the body were found in the Stadel cave of Hohlenstein Mountain, in the Swabian Alps in Germany, in 1939. The lion head was discovered, restored and set on the shoulders nearly sixty years later, in 1998.

      In German, the figurine is called Löwenmensch, a word that is gender-neutral in meaning (though grammatically masculine) and can be translated as "lion person" or "lion human." Some scholars think the figure is female: a woman's body surmounted by the head of a an ancient cave lion.

     To contemplate this little statue is to be transported into the era of Cave Mind. It is a state of being and consciousness in which human, animal and god are not set apart from each other. Waking and dreaming stream together. Fluidity of consciousness is matched by the mobility and mutability of the energy bodies. A bear may become a man, a woman may become a lion, appearing in two places at once, as animal and as human.

      There is little doubt in my mind that the lion-human of Hohlenstein-Stadel is a shaman of Old Europe, with the shaman's ability to shapeshift, to meld forms, and to operate on multiple levels of consciousness.

       In a provocative essay, William Irwin Thomson suggests that

One of the skills of the shaman that contemporary Everyman does not possess is the ability to separate the vital or etheric body from the physical body and to project it to take possession of an animal—a lion or a jaguar—as was dramatized in Val Lewton’s classic 1942 horror movie, Cat People. Contemporary Everyman often has experience of astral projection, or out-of-the-body travel, but this skill of animal possession is much rarer. Modern man as a geek alienated from nature is much more likely to project his etheric body into a computer or an avatar in a computer game

I won't mourn if contemporary Everyman has lost the power to "possess an animal" (that is to say, to possess an animal body) in the manner of the horror movies. But in a gentler mode, the power of transfiguration - to reshape and project energy bodies - is still with us, though dormant in most people, in a time when the Cave of Mind is an electronic cloud of geek projections.