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Dream Gates

Ruby Modesto’s first personal experience of soul recovery came when she was ten years old. She went so far and so deep in a dream odyssey that she could not find her way back to her body. As she tells it, she went through no less than 13 levels of dreaming (compare that with the…

Yesterday I wrote about Ruby Modesto, a shaman of the Desert Cahuilla in southern California whose calling and guidance came to her through dreams. Listening to her voice, as mediated by anthropologist Guy Modesto, is to be in the presence of a wise woman of great common and uncommon sense. She tells us, as her…

Ruby Modesto grew up on the Martinez reservation in southern California. Her dreams called her to become a pul, or shaman, introducing her to the eagle that became her ally, giving her wings for flight. She did not need the medicine plants used by some shamans among her people, the Cahuilla, because she had her…

One of the classic accounts of how shamans are called to their practice by dreams comes from Isaac Tens,  a Gitskan halaait (shaman) in the Pacific Northwest. The French Canadian scholar Marius Barbeau  recorded his narrative and his songs at Hazelton, British Columbia, in 1920. This is a fierce story, in which dreams spill over…

It’s a saying of the Kagwahiv, an Amazonian dreaming people: “Everyone who dreams is a little bit shaman.” Or, in an alternate translation: “Everyone who dreams has a little bit of the shaman in them.” I remember vividly when I first heard this quoted by an anthropologist who had lived with the Kagwahiv, when I…

For many indigenous peoples, dreaming is a highly social activity, in several senses. You go places and meet people when you travel in your dream body; they may be people in the next village or campsite, or beings in another world. You also have interactive dreams in which you meet and share adventures with other…

Oakland airport The Taoist immortal “will have a garment of feathers, will ride on a beam of light or saddle a star…His bones will shine like jade, his face will glow, a halo will surround his head, all his body will emit light and will be as incandescent as the sun and the moon.” I…

Dreaming, we choose events that will be manifested in our waking lives. The fact that we dream things before they happen does not mean everything is predetermined. People who are not active dreamers can get quite confused about what is going on when they wake up to the fact that we are dreaming future events,…

A note from my 1999 journal: After a long work day, I sat up with Tenzin Wangyal’s book on Tibetan dream yoga. Quite a lot of it appeals to me, especially the guidance on using dream states for emotional clearing, which he calls the “self-liberation” of grasping and desire and “karmic traces”. The Tibetans associate…

“How does one learn to tell stories which please kings?” – Fatima Mernissi, as a young girl. In Dreams of Trespass, a beautiful memoir of a harem girlhood in Morocco, Fatima Mernissi gives us a stunning example of how storytelling can facilitate soul healing. Her text is one that everyone – in the West and…
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