One of the many forms of healing that becomes available to us through dreams is the healing of our relations with our ancestors. Sometimes this reaches far back through the bloodlines.

Let me share the story of Aine, a woman of Irish Catholic descent living in my native Australia. Going through old documents relating to her family, Aine discovered that her aunt had mistakenly been buried in a Protestant grave. She was profoundly troubled by this, and asked for guidance. What came was a blessed sense of serenity. She felt her ancestors gathering round, cheering her on for discovering the error – and also reassuring her that nothing needed to be done about it on the physical level, because her aunt had moved on.

This was the prelude to a series of dreams in which she seemed to go back and back, through recent generations of her family to ancestors in a past that was more and more remote – except in dreaming.

In one dream, she found herself in a cobbled courtyard where she noticed a standing Celtic cross. She entered a ruined stone house. She climbed the stairs to a long dusty corridor. An ancient man, very pale, bearded and robes, hurried past her, moving in the opposite direction. He appeared not to see her. She moved on into a room with a magnificent window, though the floor was crumbling away. This dream led her to do more family research. She discovered that her mother’s ancestors had once owned an imposing stone house in Ireland, which had long since fallen into ruins.

Another dream took her into a much earlier time, an an encounter with a feral young woman who wore a coat that seemed to be a patchwork of animal furs. Then she dreamed of walking at the edge of a mountain lake. In the loch were many long-necked dinosaurs. She told her son in this scene that they must turn back before the creatures saw them. 

As in Aine’s story, our dream encounters with the ancestors can not only be a source of healing; they can open an immense voyage of discovery. I was called by dreams and visions quarter of a century ago to learn the ways of the ancestors of the land where I was living, on the edge of traditional Mohawk territory. When I had followed the path of those dreams of the First Peoples of America for a time, some of my fierce Scottish blood ancestors started walking through my dreams, basically saying, “Look here, laddie, we know a thing or two also. Turn around an talk to us.” This led me on a journey into the landscapes of the Scottish Merlin, in Dumfriesshire – the land of my father’s people – and into an adventure across time that is still unfolding.