Dreaming with the People of Amber

Suvalkija district, Lithuania

I am out in the woods, in the rural part of western Lithuania where I am staying. I come to some wide, shallow steps, just packed earth with wood at the edges. I notice two snakeskins, tied in knots that resemble figures of 8, then a larger one, tied in a slightly more complex knot, on a higher step, and know these were left as signs and also that the snakes were not venomous.
    Now I see vivid, brightly colored scenes of ancient battles - of Teutonic Knights who invaded these lands, and Lithuanian Grand Dukes with their knights and men at arms, struggling against great odds to force them back. This living history unfolds into times where local people took to the forests and the mud to carry on their resistance against invaders. I see people who lived with wolves and bears and tried to call on their energies in the fight. I see huge mystery beasts in the woods that look like elephants and wonder whether these are the shades of extinct prehistoric creatures, or entities created by the country''s defenders in an effort to equalize a conflict through psychic means of attack.
    I wander deeper into the woods. I am conscious that sticky mud is everywhere, and getting deeper, just as I found it roaming fields and ancient hill forts the previous day. I come to the house of a ragana - a witch - on one of the sloppy forest trails. It is just a hut among the roots of a crooked tree. I see the face of the witch before she scuttles away into hiding. She has painted the upper part of her face, from the hairline to the cheekbones, chalk-white so it looks like part of a death's head, or perhaps a venomous spider. While she avoids me, nasty slithering things rise from the mud.
    I'm willing to fight her allies, if need be, and am glad to see that an enormous Bear is with me, as a bodyguard. Yet I'm thinking that the witch is merely defending herself; I have wandered into her territory, and she has reason to fear intruders. Instead of starting a fight, I call down Light, and a bright shaft of amber light immediately descends.
    I am happily surprised to find that it serves as a traction beam. It pulls me straight up into the air, far above the mud and the dark woods. I find myself inside what seems to be an egg-shaped amber the size of a spaceship, with female presences who remind me of ancient priestesses of this land I have met in previous dreams and journeys.
    The leader tells me, "You must understand that there are the Mud People and the Amber People, and here you belong to the People of Amber. Your duty - and that of those you train here - is to build bridges and wooden pathways so people can get across the mud safely. You must avoid allowing yourself to be sucked down into the mud. You must remember to call on the power of Light Amber to heal and to guide, and on the power of Dark Amber to remove the darkness."

As I surface from this mostly lucid dream, the moon shines bright in my face for a moment, like a spotlight. Then a cloud blows above the apple trees and mountain ash outside my window, and I lie back in the gentle dark, savoring my latest encounter with the "understory" of the Baltic country where I am traveling.
    I am staying at the country place of a "good witch" in the Suvalkija district in Lithuania. She invited me to learn practices of healing and divination handed down in her family from mother to daughter and never written down (until I took notes, with her permission). She made the invitation after she heard me speak words of ancient Lithuanian after a shamanic journey I led at a workshop she attended in Vilnius. During that journey, I met a  priestess of Žemyna, the Earth goddess of Lithuania, who brought me inside a chamber like the inside of an egg-shaped amber, a smaller version of the space I was in last night. It glowed with golden light. The priestess instructed me that I could use a pocket size version of the amber egg as a place to see.
    The wood witch burned amber in a ritual in her house the night before my new dream of the Amber People. In the morning, after hearing my dream, she continues my instruction. She demonstrates how to move light amber over the body in a spiraling motion to heal. Then she shows me how she uses a dark amber (also called "vampire amber" here when used in this way) in a different pattern to extract disease and "strangers" in the body.
     Over a breakfast of dark, nutty "grandmother's bread", homemade cheese and butter and coffee chewy with grounds, we talk about the significance of "Mud People" in the literal history of Lithuania, whose name means "Rain Country". Lithuania has no real natural borders. Its main defense against invaders and occupiers, across the centuries, has been the mud. When the cities fell to enemies, people "went into the mud".

From the Journal of a Dream Archaeologist  2009

Seeking redemption with the Lady of the Beasts

Zamaitija, Lithuania

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"I came here for redemption." Petras Dabrišius' blue eyes glint under his watch cap. "All my life I was a hunter. Then I learned that the wild animals are dying off. So I came here to help bring them back, to return what I owe them."

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We are talking on a snowy trail deep among the pines and birches of Samogitia, the old Baltic name for a region of western Lithuania shown on contemporary maps as Zamaitija. The 3-hour drive from Kaunas took us off the A-1 through Telšiai, an old Samogitian town dedicated to the Bear. In the town square, a standing black bear with gold-painted claws capers above the clockface atop the clock tower. From here, we took bumpy, unplowed back roads to a weathered sign that read Žvėrinčius. The word means "zoo", but is a little more lively than the English version; this is the Place of the Beasts.
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The Bear featured again in an unusually handsome wooden sculpture of Medeina, Lithuania's goddess of the woods and guardian of animals, by Petras' gate. I had chosen her image as etched by Arvydas Každailis the day before - in warrior mode, with the Bear at her back - to illustrate my last blog piece, without knowing how deep and how quickly I would be going into her realm. It struck me now that through the whole of my conversation with the artist Kazdailis, his design for the coat of arms of Telšiai - a standing Bear - had been directly in my line of sight.
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Petras insists that I should start by meeting the bear. Timofejaus is a big Siberian brown bear, still dreaming in his long winter sleep, his head and great shoulders just visible through the door of his house. Petras explains that he brought Timofejaus a mate, but they did not get along. A pity. He muses on how the she-bear gives birth, in her winter cave, in a state of dreaming. A bear cub is a dream child. Petras asks me about my own dreams of the Bear. I tell him about the giant bear that appeared in my house, again and again, after I started living on the land in upstate New York, and how I finally felt called to go back into one of those dreamscapes to confront the bear and find out why he was in my space. "When I found the courage to step up to the bear and enter its embrace,"I recall, "Bear showed me we are joined at the heart and signalled that I must call on him for healing." Petras nods. You need different tickets to go to different places. It seems I have told him the right kind of dream.
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Approaching a place where forest trails meet, we hear the caw of kranklys, the raven. Petras reproduces this perfectly from down in his throat and two - no, three - huge ravens come winging low towards us along a forest alley, wheeling just in front of us to speed off over the main trail. Three for a message. The three black birds against the white snow seem like a living badge of heraldry, the key to a story from the time of campfires and sagas. Petras speaks of the keen sight of the raven, and of how "the raven carries death under its wings".
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He leads us to the lynx enclosure, a section of the forest surrounded by a high wire fence. Two lynxes are sleeping high up in the branches of a pine tree. Others prowl close to us, their amazing high ears twitching as they check us out. Good at hunting and at hiding, a master of surprise, the lynx is a liminal creature. "I built this fence," Petras shakes the wire, "in order to open it again." He is helping lynxes to breathe and replenish their numbers. In time, he''ll release many of the current pack back into the wild.
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Back on the trail, we see a red fox who stops to stare at us. Petras takes us up on a viewing platform while he goes to fetch his wolf pack, whistling for them. We are thrilled to watch the silver wolves loping across the snow.
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"Now I will drum for you and you will meet the animals in a different way." Petras guides us to a yurt he has constructed in the simplest style, pointed like a tipi. Inside, the walls are lined with pieces of carpet and hung with fox tails - dozens of black fox brushes, with the whole skin of a red fox in the place of pride, opposite the door. Petras swears by fox tail for protection against bad spirits.
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When he has gotten us seated on a little bench near the stove, facing the red fox skin, Petras beats a deerskin drum. He starts very slow, making it clear that he is calling in the spirits, building only gradually to the kind of beat we use for sonic driving (i.e., inducing and powering a visionary state of consciousness). With the first drumbeats, in my perception, a great Bear enters the space, and is soon joined by many bears. A great white she-bear assumes leadership. Some of the bears take up guardian positions behind our backs, rather like the bear in the Kazdailis image of Medeina. The wolves come next, and I witness the meeting of different packs of Wolf People. A pure white she-wolf asserts her ascendancy, and I look into her vivid blue eyes. From now on, in my sight, a feminine power is primary in these woods. I see it again in the form of a woman who comes out of the trees in a long hooded robe that appears pearly gray in the indistinct light.
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Petras nods when I report my sightings. "A female spirit rules these woods," he reports. "And I answer to her. She wears the robe you saw. It is white in the sunlight, gray in the shadow. And a she-wolf leads the wolf pack."

Over herb tea and sweet grainy honey from his own bee houses, Petras tells us about the signs of the old ways he has found in these woods, of sacred springs and threshold stones. He shows us the Buryat shaman robes he brought back from his visits to Tuva and Mongolia. He brings Mongolian shamans here, to the Place of the Beasts, to drum for the land. His big face breaks into a warm grin. "They say it is so clean and sweet here in these woods, it is like sleeping in honey." He pushes the honey pot my way again and I spoon a little onto a chunk of peasant bread. "Medus,"he smacks his lips. "When the bear is awake, I give him this honey too."