Dreaming the World into Being
A Series Introduction: Ancestral Dreams
Somehow, I always manage to be on a road trip during a significant shift in my life: leave a job, visit a friend across the country; turn thirty, drive the length of the California coast; go through a breakup, make a quick five-day trek through Oregon to the California redwoods and back. Being physically transient while in a major life transition just feels right. This is a way I put myself into something that feels like an extended dream-state, the horizon long enough to allow me to keep journeying.
About halfway into this last trip, I found myself camping several nights in a row during a cold snap in the high elevation of southeastern Utah.
This is where I had the dream: two ancestors, great-grandparents to me, are standing with me on a hill between two mountains and we are watching a storm bellow over the valley. It moves swiftly– rain, then rainbow; sleet, then sun; cracks of lightning into blue sky.
They tell me this is our inheritance, our legacy. This is ours, and this is mine.
When was the last time you (and here, I really mean we, as a community of humans creating with each other nearly constantly) sat and actually considered deeply the role of dreams and dreaming in the realization of your life? It’s easy to splash around in the entertainment value of a fantastical dream (you know, that one in which you become a talking dog or manage to lead a revolution in your underwear), and by all means, I think we should share the playfulness of pleasure of these dreams. But I also wonder about how easy it becomes to dismiss our dreaming, to make it into a silly story, a fantasy, or a “just a dream.”
When I actually think about the people we as a culture call dreamers, I find myself in a humble kind of litany. The names of so many dreamers come to mind here: Martin Luther King Jr. is a very apparent and accessible choice. But also Marcus Garvey, Fannie Lou Hamer, Grace Lee Bogs, the spiritual warriors of the Haitian Revolution, the protectors of Standing Rock, the Dreamers journeying across borders pursuing the human birthright for life. And so, so many more…
These are the dreamers we recognize as visionaries, creatives, and activists. These are the dreamers we speak about with admiration for their capacity to envision change and possibility, who can see a world different from the one we currently inhabit and even some ways to help us get there. These are dreamers many of us are familiar with, whose dreams walk about in the daylight of our waking world.
There are also the night-dreamers, those who dream in the dark, in the taut hours between deep night and dawn known in some circles as “the witching hours.” I personally hold in high regard these dark-dreamers, who fall asleep and move through realms, take astral walkabouts, visit other countries, other pasts and other futures, who pop-call on other dimensions as they dream.
Even while most of us live in an overculture that doesn’t openly talk about dreams and dreamers, there are telltale signs for recognizing a night-dreamer: a kind of rumpled look in the morning, eyes that seem to be gazing far-off, a muffledness in the movement from sleeping place to uprightness. I myself have a bumpy, grumpy transition from the dreamworld to awakeness. I don’t like a lot of words or sounds to happen right away. My body moves like it’s lifting through layers of gauze. I don’t always remember what dreams I’m waking from but I have the distinct feeling of having gone somewhere.
When I feel dreams moving in my body that way, I remember a learning about dreaming from Aboriginal Australian cosmology. In this cosmology, there is a distinction between The Dreaming, or Dreamtime — and dreaming: the former being a continuous reality of creation, another plane of existence, with the latter being a vehicle to visit this generative realm. “Night dreams,” then, are a special way of “connecting with the ancestral spirits of the land, of learning about the world and of keeping the Dreamtime alive.”
Many, if not all, Indigenous cultures the world over express similar sensibilities about dreaming and dream practices. For instance, Ashanti dream-tracking, is a West African practice of engaging dreams by being able to operate outside the body. It’s speculated that Harriet Tubman practiced this form of dreaming, as she was known to go into deep sleeps in which she received visions of maps, warnings, even specific houses she had never seen, all information to usher her people to sanctuary.
Ancient Egypt was also one culture of many in which dreaming practices were cultivated in healing temples and sacred sites. Recalling and working with dreams was understood to develop the art of memory, tapping into knowledge that belonged to us before this lifetime and awakening our connection with other life experiences.
I think of these practices as ancestral dreaming: opening the psyche so that other beings, realms, or ancestors can visit us; whether those ancestors are bloodline humans or whether those ancestors are our earth-kin, animals, oceans, forests, plants, weather.
In fact, these are the kinds of liminal spaces that make me wonder about dreams themselves as beings.
For instance, looking back at my dream while camping, I wonder: If I had never met those great-grandparents in this lifetime, how did I know who they were? What in my psyche or my body knew– because I did know, with certainty– that these were my kin? I call this ancestral dreaming, but how does that feel different from other wise dreams? What does it even mean to be ancestrally dreaming, especially if we consider that ancestors show up in all forms? What and who, then, are we considering to be ancestors? Are they a cosmic force we have long been connected to, with or without our conscious knowing?
If so, then is dreaming itself an ancestor?
The dreams have been talking quite a lot lately. Not just for myself but for other dreamers I know as well. There are allusions to grand shifts in collective consciousness — planets and astrology carrying us through cosmic portals, whole sociocultural structures crumbling under their own weight, the thin veils between realms that accompany transformation. Something big is happening, dreamers say, though we don’t know what. Just a sense of muchness, swirling around in a space we can’t quite see, like a glimpse of motion just outside the peripheral vision, the tail of a fish already swimming into deeper water. Maybe this is also what dreaming is– a silvery glimpse into an ocean more expansive than our range of vision can take in all at once.
I can’t help but wonder what might happen if we shared these glimpses with each other, if we kept these portals into other realms open with each other just a bit longer. If we sat each morning like the Temiar, indigenous people of Malaysia (like I’ve heard my own grandmothers did), and spoke our dreaming aloud over tea and toast. How may our brief glimpses, our unique vantage points in the sea of Dreamtime, combine to grant us a bigger view? How much more might we perceive when we put our dreams together as a whole, if we let all our ancestors share with each other through us? How big might our world be then?
Here, listen…I’ll share my dream first. Then you tell yours and we’ll sit with them together. We’ll listen with our whole bodies and our whole lives and our own ancestors and see what sense may be made. Perhaps the sense made for you will be different than the sense I make for me. Still, we’ll hold them up to the light side by side to see what colors we can glimpse. Between us, I’ll bet we can see a brilliant spectrum of light, one ray glittering to the surface after another, a rainbow of a world coming into being.
As if of myth, she was born from a rainbow. Before she entered, we held her between us atop the mesa overlooking the plains. We held her between us as we were held between the mountains and let her watch, let her see, how it is that storms move. Gray thunder, crackle of lightning, wet snow–-all a swift swathe across blue sky, sun, the twinkle of stars and dark space beyond. “This is ours, this is yours,” we told her. “This you need to remember.”
Dreaming the World into Being is a specialized series of blog postings as part of the Reverb blog fellowship for Resonance Network. The series will feature writings and artistic offerings from community dreamers curated by Lisbeth White, and is rooted in the premise that dreams and dreaming are intuitive, ancient, and ancestral ways of knowing that have much to offer our changing world.
