Love advice from Icelandic sagas: Don't date someone who doesn't dream

 

“If you don’t dream, don’t bother to call on me again.” 

–   Thyri Haraldsdóttir, a noblewoman, to a medieval king of Denmark who wanted to marry her.

 

Iceland has always been a country of dreamers. Dreaming is important in the Icelandic sagas and in the Völuspa even the gods go to wise women for help with their dreams. A Gallup survey of 1,200 Icelanders in 2003 found that 72 percent found meaning in their dreams, and many reported dreaming the future and sharing dreams regularly within their families. The Icelandic language distinguishes vital categories of significant dreams, such as dreams of the future (berdreymi) and dream visions (draumspa).

The story of Thyri Haraldsdóttir, from the Icelandic sagas, is a beautiful example of how dreaming can make us wiser, and opens the way of the heart. Thyri [written in Icelandic as Þyri] was the daughter of an earl in Holstein, although some say she was the daughter of an English king. She was a dreamer who saw far and deep into the nature of things, and her father consulted her on all important affairs.

Gormur, king of Denmark, wanted to marry Thyri and asked her father for her hand. The earl said that he would leave his daughter to decide for herself, “since she is much wiser than I am.” Thyri told her royal suitor to go home and build himself a new house, just big enough to sleep in, where no house had stood before. In this place he must sleep alone for three nights, and pay close attention to his dreams. Then he must send a messenger to her to report on his dreams.

“If you don’t dream, don’t bother to call on me again,” Thyri told him firmly.

Gormur remembered his dreams, and the content satisfied Thyri, because she consented to marry him. The dreams were recounted at the wedding feast.

 In the first dream, three white boars came out of the sea, fed on the grass, and went back to the sea. In the second, three red boars came out of the sea, and did the same. In the third dream, three black boars with great tusks did the same, but when they returned to the sea, there was such a loud rush of the waves returning to the land that the noise could be heard throughout Denmark.

Thyri's interpretation was that the three white boars represented three very cold, snowy winters which would kill "all the fruits of the ground." The red boars meant there would next be three mild winters, while the black boars with tusks indicated there would be wars in the land. The fact that they all went back into the sea showed that their effect would not be long-lasting. The loud noise as the waves of the sea rolled back on the Danish shores meant that "mighty men would come on the land with great wars, and many of his relations would take part." 

She said that had he dreamed of the black boars and the rushing waves the first night, she would not have married him, but now, since she would be available to provide advice, there would be little injury from the wars. We might wonder whether the writer who recorded this narrative was familiar with the tale in Genesis of Pharaoh's dream and how Joseph's interpretation saved Egypt from  famine. 

In a region of strong women, Thyri became the wisest of queens, remembered as "The Pride of Denmark". Through dreaming, she helped the king to scout the future and read the true factors at work behind the surface of events. Decisions of state were based on these dreams.

 

 

Source: The story of Thyri Haraldsdóttir is in the version of Ólafs Saga Tryggvasónar in the 14th century Icelandic Flateyjarbók. While Thyri is not actually Icelandic, her story comes to us through Icelandic tradition. I am indebted to Valgerður Hjördis Bjarnadóttir, a gifted Icelandic dreamer and scholar who is helping to revive the ancient dreamways, for bringing this wonderful story to my attention, and for the translation on which this summary is based. You can read more about Icelandic dreaming, both medieval and modern. in The Secret History of Dreaming.

Image: Viking queen from "The World of the Vikings" exhibition at the National Museum of Denmark

Getting Out of the Way of the Big Wave: How dreamers have averted collective disasters

Any future we can see (in dreams or in other ways) is a possible future. The odds on any specific event being enacted are constantly shifting, and we want to take a probabilistic, rather than a deterministic, attitude towards our previews. We want to experiment actively with the possibility that we can help to manifest, or avert, an event foreshadowed by a dream by how we use or fail to use the dream information. To foster our understanding that none of this is exactly new practice, but rather part of a basic human survival kit, let me describe four cases from the history of dreaming, the kind of history that is not (yet) taught in schools but is essential to our understanding of the human odyssey. In each case, a dreamer’s ability to scout ahead was used to benefit a community in ways that saved many lives.

The Iroquois Dream Scout

Living on the edge of survival, threatened by constant warfare, hungry winters and white men’s diseases and land-stealing, the Six Nations of the Longhouse Indians of the American Northeast – known to anthropologists as the Iroquois – made it the first business of the day to scan the dreams of the community for clues to the future. The term “dreamer” (atetshents) was a title of honor that also meant “doctor” and “healer”. While everyone dreams, some people dream stronger and truer than others, and those are the ones – when their insights have been tested and proven repeatedly – when you need to make a decision on which the safety and well-being of the people depends.
    I spent several years studying the shamanic dreaming practices of the Iroquois after I started dreaming of an ancient Huron/Mohawk “woman of power” (arendiwanen) who insisted on communicating with me in her own language, which I was then obliged to study. My favorite documentary source on early Iroquois dreaming was the Jesuit Relations, a vast compilation of reports from the blackrobe missionaries who lived among these peoples in colonial times.

Father Bruyas, a Jesuit living with the Oneidas in the 17^th century, left a striking account of the practice of an Iroquois dream seer and how the community used her information. The Oneida dreamer reported that she had dreamed that an enemy tribe from the South would try to wipe out her village in a surprise attack. She described the place where her own warriors could ambush the enemy, and predicted that the enemy war chief would be captured and burned to death. Following her directions, the Oneida war captains set an ambush at the place she described, so confident of their victory that they fired up their kettles in advance for the celebration feast.

The English Minister Who Saved His Congregation

In 1558, under the reign of Catholic Queen Mary I, the Protestant minister John Rough was "sore troubled" when he dreamed that he saw two of the Guard leading the deacon of his congregation, Cutbert Simson, off to interrogation. Rough was especially troubled because, in the dream, the deacon was carrying a book listing all the members of the underground Protestant community; if this fell into the hands of the authorities in this age of religious persecution, all of them would be at risk. In the middle of the night, Rough told his dream to his wife and then tried to calm himself by reading. When he fell asleep, however, he "dreamed the like dream again."

Now profoundly agitated, Rough prepared to pay a visit to the deacon and to tell him the dream, certain that it was a warning. In the way of synchronicity, the deacon turned up at the minister's door first. When Rough told his dream, the deacon dismissed his fears, insisting that dreams are "but fantasies, and not to be credited." Rough had to call on his full ministerial authority, ordering the deacon in the name of Almighty God to place the book in safekeeping. The deacon, protesting, gave the book to Rough's wife. Soon after, Cutbert Simson was arrested and interrogated. The Reverend Rough's dream - and his insistence that its warning must be heeded - saved the whole congregation from exposure to the authorities. 

The Armenian School Teacher Who Saved Her Class

In 1988 Sofia, a school teacher in the Armenian mountain village of Shirokamud, dreamed she felt the earth trembling while class was in session.  In her dream, she instructed the children in the classroom to join hands and follow her. She led them to safety, without hesitation, through a maze of mountain trails and woke with clear recollection of the path she had followed.
   The dream felt so “real” and so menacing that Sofia recounted it to fellow-teachers, who scoffed at her. She decided on her own course of action. Without mentioning the dream, she instructed the children in her class that if anything “bad” ever happened they were to join hands and follow her without question. Three days later, two earthquakes measuring 6.9 and 5.8 on the Richter scale destroyed the school. 112 children died immediately; others were burned to death in the aftermath. The only children who survived were the members of Sofia’s class. When she felt the first tremors, she immediately acted on her dream guidance, leading her pupils to safety, joined hand to hand, along the complex mountain trail she had dreamed.

The Island Dreamers Who Got Out of the Way of the Tsunami

The Andamans, a hunter-gatherer people who live on islands of the same name in the Bay of Bengal, have a traditional practice of community dreaming. They grow a nightly web of dreams to produce life-supporting information for the community. In their communal big houses, they enter dreaming together with a shared story or intention. They may want to scout out where the best supply of fruit or game or fish, can be found to feed the people the next day. They spin a shared web of dreaming and travel out along its skeins, like human spiders

The terrible Asian tsunami of December 26, 2004, brought home that the web of dreaming can be essential to survival. In late December, the Andamans are usually to be found in their seasonal fishing settlements along the coast. After the tsunami roared through that year, their shelters were gone. The Indian government, which claims possession of the islands, assumed that the Andamans along the coast had been drowned. Then the islanders reappeared on their forested hills. They knew the tsunami was coming, and got out of its way by quietly abandoning their fishing huts and taking to the hills. They knew because they observed the movements of animals, and listened to the voices of wind and water, and because they know how to dream as and for a community.

References 

1.Robert Moss, Dreamways of the Iroquois (Rochester VT: Destiny Books, 2004) p.35.

2. John Foxe, Acts and Monuments of the Church Containing the History and Sufferings of the Martyrs (1563) cited in Carole Levin, Dreaming the English Renaissance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) p.2.

3. Robert Moss, The Secret History of Dreaming (Novato CA: New World Library, 2009) p. 270. For an account of Andaman dream webbing (written before the tsunami, see Vishvajit Pandya, “Forest Smells and Spider Webs: Ritualized Dream Interpretation Among Andaman Islanders” Dreaming 14:2-3 (June-September 2004) 136-150. 

Image: Satellite photo of Little Andaman island on January 2, 2004 (Reuters)

The currency of Harriet Tubman

What wonderful news: that Harriet Tubman will be honored where most Americans will see her every day, on the face of a new $20 bill.

    Harriet Tubman is a heroine in American history, the most successful “conductor” on the Underground Railroad that helped escaping slaves to gain freedom before the Civil War. Yet the secret of her achievement has rarely been told. She was a dreamer and a seer. In her dreams and visions, she could fly like a bird, over landscapes she had never seen with her physical eyes. From her aerial maps, she was able to find the right roads and the river fords and the safe houses to get escaping slaves out.

   Her gift was related to a terrible wound: a blow from an angry overseer that nearly killed her. Surviving her near-death experience, she came fully into the power of the Ashanti dream shamans in her ancestry.
   Her life story is a model of how dreamers can contribute to the liberation and progress of a whole community.
   I wrote a chapter about Harriet Tubman's dreaming in my book The Secret History of Dreaming. I was also inspired to write this poem for her:

Glory Falls: On Harriet Tubman

Because you could fly

you made us stand up and walk

and become self-liberators

even when fear tore at our souls

rougher than the spikes of the gum nuts,

winter’s nail bed of pain.

You rode the wind on hawk wings

and saw roads out of the shadow lands

and made maps for us from your flights.

When we were too scared to trust you,

you sang courage back into our hearts.

You guided us through the night woods

on leopard feet, vanishing and reappearing,

never bound to one form. Through your pain

and sudden sleeps and the terrible wound

that branded you, you taught us

that gifts of greatness are in our wounds.

You led us into the province of wonder.

The engine of your fierce intent carried us

to where glory falls on every thing.

   People are dreaming of Harriet Tubman today. Sometimes she appears as a messenger. I dreamed I found her on duty in the window of a very special post office: a place where you can go to pick up your lost or undelivered dreams. In these troubled times, we need to go to that window, collect our lost dreams, and learn two great and essential things: that we can claim a gift from our deepest wound, and that we can dream the way to a brighter future, for ourselves and our communities.

Lick the sky and rule China: dreams and shamans in imperial Chinese history

The imperial future of a dowager empress of ancient China was foreshadowed by a dream in which she rose to the sky and drank from it. The crucial role of dreams and shamanic experience in imperial China is another chapter in the history we weren't taught in school, the.Secret History of Dreaming. 
   Deng Sui(81-121) who ruled China as dowager empress in the Later Han Dynasty. As a young girl, she dreams that she rises up to the sky. It is beautiful, flawlessly blue. She touches it, moving her hand lightly across the smooth, rounded surface. Her exploring fingers find something shaped like “the nipple on a bronze bell”. She puts this in her mouth and sucks on it like a baby, feeling herself fed and nourished. 

    When she tells the dream to her parents, her father, a high official and royal tutor, calls in a dream interpreter. The professional draws on precedents. He recalls that two of the legendary “sage kings” of ancient China dreamed of rising to the sky before they rose to take the throne. Yao dreamed that he climbed up to the sky. Tang dreamed he rose to the sky and licked it. Both dreamers became emperors, ranked among the “sage kings” because of their wisdom and innovation. The dream interpreter declared that Deng Sui’s dream was “unspeakably auspicious.”
    For a second opinion, a face reader was called. He studied Deng Sui’s physiognomy and pronounced that her features closely resembled those of the sage king Cheng Tang. Therefore her destiny would be tremendous, as the dream seemed to promise.
    Still in her teens, Deng Sui was selected as a consort of the young Emperor He. A slightly older consort, Yin, was raised to the status of empress. Jealous and scheming, Yin hired sorcerers to attack Deng Sui with black magic. When this was discovered, Yin was deposed and Deng Sui took her place on the throne. When the emperor died, she became the regent for his child successor, and ruled China as dowager empress for several years, fulfilling the dream prophecy.

My source for Deng Sui's dream is an excellent new scholarly study of shamanism, religion and poetry in early China: Gopal Sukhu, The Shaman and the Heresiarch: A New Interpretation of the Li sao. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012). This is the first book-length study in English of the Chinese poetic classic, the Li sao, attributed to Qu Yuan, a high official of the kingdom of Chu in the 3rd century BCE who lost his position thanks to the jealous intrigues of rivals.
    The title is translated here as “Encountering Sorrow”. It might also be rendered as "Departing from Sorrow". In his sorrow, the poet contemplates suicide; according to tradition Qu Yuan drowned himself in a river in 278BCE, an event memorialized by the Duanwu or Dragon Boat festival. Yet the force of the poet's violent emotions is also the departure lobby for vividly described shamanic journeys between the worlds. He rides on dragons and phoenix-like birds, summons elemental powers, talks with gatekeepers of heaven worlds. 

I sent Wangshu, the moon's charioteer, ahead as my herald,
And Feilian, the wind god, to the back as rear guard.
Male huan birds were my fore-runners,
And the Lord of Thunder would warn me of the unforeseen.

    The long poem is full of challenges for modern readers, especially in its elaborate floral codes (have as many flowers and herbs ever been named in another poem?) and in the gender-twisting narrative voice; Gopal Sukhu deftly traces the rival paths of interpretation and contributes a new translation with detailed notes.

The Secret History of My Russians

I find myself quite frequently traveling and teaching in Russia in my dreams. I have yet to teach Active Dreaming in Russia, but perhaps the day is coming nearer, since I am teaching nearby, in the Baltic Republics, and three of my books on dreaming have now been published in the Russian language.

Then there is the latest riff of dream and synchronicity, playing out this week. Here's a summary of events so far:

1

The night before last (Jan 18-19) I dreamed that a charming and elegant Russian man invited me to give a very important lecture in Russia. His initials - or those of the sponsor organization - were "DEH".

2

Yesterday I chatted about this with a Russian friend in New York City. I remarked to her that with all my Russian dreams perhaps I should study Russian. She sent me some website links and I spent half an hour last night trying to master the Cyrillic alphabet.

3.

Also last night, I continued my depth research into Tolkien's dream life and his conviction that dreaming is the key to time travel (he was correct). I had occasion to reflect that, first and last, Tolkien was a philologist with an astounding command of ancient languages and those of his own invention. I noted that at one point he added Russian to his languages.

4

Just now I received a long and charming email letter from a professor of philology in Moscow. He has written three books in Russian on dreams in Russian literature and folklore. He wrote to me because he has just finished reading the Russian edition of The Secret History of Dreaming, of which he spoke with high appreciation. His email address is in Cyrillic. The first three letters are

Д.Не

or "DHE". Compare with "DEH" in my dream. Of course, I know now that the Cyrillic H translates as the letter N in English. But pretty darn close...

Jan 21 Postscript: Baltic dreaming

At my Dream Gates blog, I just posted an account of my experience of leading Active Dreaming workshops in Lithuania, and the deep cultural soul recovery that became available to us in these groups. You can read that article here and if you are not familiar with my Dream Gates blog, you may want to add it to your RSS feed.

The book jacket is from the Russian edition of The Secret History of Dreaming, published by Ves.