Dream Gates

When shamans go dreaming, characteristically they operate under the protection and guidance of animal guardians. Forging a close relationship with one or more “power animals” is central to developing the arts of shamanic dream travel and tracking. It is invaluable in maintaining healthy boundaries and defending psychic space. A conscious connection with the animal guardians shows us how to follow the natural paths of our energy. A strong working connection with the animal powers brings the ability to shapeshift the energy body and project energy forms that can operate at a distance from the physical body.

Our ancestors believed that we are born with a connection with a particular totem animal; this was the raison d’être of the clan system. Some Australian Aborigines believe, up to the present day, that when a human is born, its “bush soul” is born in the form of an animal or bird. We may feel that we have a lifelong connection with a certain animal or bird. Others may observe this in our body type, our life styles, our modes of responding to challenges.

But in the course of a lifetime, we may develop many animal connections. Some of these may stem from our relations with the animals who share our homes and habitats, from the family pets to wild animals encountered in nature and in our travels. Animals we have met in the physical world may reappear in our dreams, as allies and helpers.

Here are two personal examples, one involving a dog who had shared our home, the other a bird who had shared our habitat:
After a black dog I had loved was killed on the road, he appeared again and again as a family protector. His presence, for a time, was all but physical. Driving the Jeep he had loved to ride in, a family member saw him in the rearview mirror and told him firmly to “Sit down!” The dog had died, but he was still very much around, watching over the family he had loved fiercely. After a time, I performed a ceremony to release his spirit.

After this, he appeared in a different way. A larger intelligence began to work through his form, and I found a black dog – who sometimes walked upright and even drove an automobile – appearing as a guide and bodyguard in my dreams and journeys. He showed me passages into the afterlife. He played guide and escort for me on a powerful and challenging journey that finally resolved a past-life issue that had shadowed my current life in many ways.

I believe that, in the year after his death, I was dealing with the individual spirit of the dog I had loved. I feel that in later years, the form of my beloved dog has fused with a larger transpersonal source of guidance, linked to the precinct of Anubis, the “Opener of the Ways”.

On the same land where I lived with my black dog, I had a series of physical encounters with a red-tailed hawk who spoke to me in a language I felt I could understand – if I only spoke hawk. In a spontaneous vision one night, when I was drifting between waking and sleep, the hawk lent me her wings, and I found myself drawn to a cabin in the woods, north of Lake Champlain, where I had the first of a series of life-changing visits with an ancient Iroquois “woman of power.” I have written about this at length in my book Dreamways of the Iroquois. The hawk has appeared again and again over the years, to offer confirmation or warning in its flight patterns over the roads of everyday life, and to lend me her wings in dreams and visions.

Animal dreams may be the doorway to developing strong working relations with the animal guardians. These dreams may hold up a mirror to our health or habits. They may show us how we need to feed and attend to our bodies. They may reveal a potential we have not yet developed. They may tell a story about our lives or relationships like one of Aesop’s fables. They may be the place of encounter between our dream self and a spiritual ally or guardian.

Our true spiritual teachers come looking for us in our dreams, and often they come in unexpected forms.The cat in your dreams may be the kitty you remember from childhood, or an aspect of your self that needs to be pampered or walk by night or play hunter, or a guide that has assumed a familiar face.

“Meeting the Hawk”, drawing by Robert Moss.

Cat Huntress, photo by Savannah M. Caitlin

A thought for any day, inspired by a participant in the Dream Teacher Training that I led over the past week on the Connecticut shore.

Savannah surfaced from a night of elusive dreams with little recall, but with this statement clear in her mind:

Stay on the line. A dream will be calling shortly.

This delighted our whole group when she shared it during our breakfast dream-swapping. We thought about the ways a dream can call outside the hours of sleep – for example, through a sudden flash of intuition or a symbolic pop-up or chance encounter in regular life. The birds were notably actively over the land and sea beyond the windows that morning. The flight patterns of hawk and osprey, crow and seagull, punctuated our session and often gave us the sense that a dream was calling, on feathered wings.

I thought of Savannah’s guidance when I woke early this morning with sketchy dream memories that seemed rather bland and dull. I decided to allow myself some extra time in bed and “stay on the line”.

During my second sleep, I came home to a rambling house that seemed to be a composite of two previous homes, one of them a farm. At the back of this dream house was a lovely dappled wood set two stories below the main living area. At the front was a room-sized screen porch that projected from the house like a pier.

As I walked through this house towards the master bedroom, I felt a thrill of excitement because I sensed that my bear was at home. I called for him, and he came bounding in through a side door – a shaggy black bear, maybe 300 pounds. I petted him like a dog and nuzzled his face. We rolled around and played together on the floor. Then I heard voices at the front door. I hurried towards it, in time to catch a couple of mail carriers who were about to leave because they needed a signature and thought no one was at home.They handed over a large bundle of letters, packages and special delivery envelopes on that jetty-like porch. I was keen to read my mail, but first I had catching up to do with my bear. He had gone out into the woods, and I followed him there, eager for adventure. I’ll have a go at reading my dream mail later on, and I won’t have to go to the Office of Lost and Found Dreams to do that. I’ll just imagine myself stepping back inside my dream house, where my bear is waiting.

Stay on the line. A dream will be calling shortly. That’s good advice for any day.

Related posts: How to Break a Dream Drought

Photo of a lighthouse on Long Island Sound by Savannah M. Caitlin.

Our dreams tell us what is going on inside our bodies. This can help us avoid medical problems. When we do have a problem, our dreams can be a reliable source of diagnosis. Here is Janice’s story of a dream that helped to alert her and her doctor to a problem he had missed:

I look forward to the day when our doctors are schooled to look to dreams, along with other resources, for diagnosis of complaints, as they were in the ancient world.

Aristotle noted that the most successful physicians paid close attention to their patients’ dreams. Throughout the Hippocratic corpus – the large body of ancient medical texts attributed to Hippocrates, the great early physician from whom the oath of our medical profession is derived – the diagnostic value of dreams is recognized again and again. The author of the Hippocratic treatise On Regimen [fourth century BCE] tracks dreams that foreshadow physical symptoms and reveal their progress. He maintains that in sleep “the soul becomes its own mistress” and is able to tour its bodily residence without distractions. In the morning, it leaves the dreamer some pictures from its nightly tours. To read the diagnostic meaning of these souvenirs, we need to recognize that inside the body is a whole world. Thus earth, in a dream, may represent the body as a whole. A river may be the blood, a tree (for a man) or a spring (for a woman) the reproductive system.

Second only to Hippocrates, Galen (128-210) was the most important person in the rise of Western medicine. As he recorded medical case histories, Galen paid close attention to the appearances of the god Asklepios in diagnosing and prescribing for different ailments, and in facilitating direct healing. He was in no way superstitious. It would have been irrational, from his perspective, not to work with a friendly god who could fix the parts other medicine could not reach – and demonstrated this again and again. The surviving text of Galen’s essay On Diagnosis from Dreams shows his no-nonsense approach. He explains that dreams can provide accurate diagnosis because during sleep the soul travels inside the body and checks out what is going on.

Notes on dream diagnosis in ancient Greek medicine are adapted from my Secret History of Dreaming (New World Library, 2009).

A quick way of getting a message for any day is to open a book at random and see what is in front of you. The fancy name for this process is bibliomancy. The favorite book that has been used for such purposes in the West, for as long as we have had printed books, is the Bible. Abraham Lincoln used his family Bible – the one on which Barack Obama took his oath of office – to get messages in this way, including second opinions on his dreams.

I’m on the Connectcut shore this week, leading a training for teachers of Active Dreaming, and enjoying the gentle waters of Long Island Sound. One of my travel companions is Coleman Barks’ exquisite edition of The Essential Rumi, translations from the great 13th century Persian poet of visionary experience and direct encounter with the Beloved of the soul.

I’ve been looking to Rumi, as mediated by Coleman Barks, for my morning messages. Yesterday, when I opened the book at random, I got Rumi’s parable poem of “The Three Fish”.

Your real country is where you’re heading,
not where you are.

There’s also this excellent counsel for the spiritual road traveler:

When you’re traveling, ask a traveler for advice,
not someone whose lameness keeps him stuck in one place

This morning, I turned to Rumi again, and was thrilled by his evocation of the nearness of the Guide, the one who is never hidden from us except by the many ways in which we hide ourselves from him.

We’ve come to the presence of the one
who was never apart from us

Then we begin to feel the afflux of a greater power. We are more than we are, in our little everyday selves, stuck in the grooves of habit and self-limiting beliefs: 

When the water-bag is filling,
you know the water carrier’s here.

Encouragement for today – and any day – to open to the presence of  a greater power and to take the creative risks that draw the Greater Self closer.

Seated Angel, Iran, 1575-1600, Opaque watercolor and gold on paper. From the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. Lent by the Art and History Trust LTS1995.2.72