Birds at War
Dreamed 1973/12/11 by Martín Painemal
On the eve of the atrocious military coup that toppled the Chilean president Salvador Allende, on December 11, 1973, the Mapuche leader Martín Painemal had a premonitory dream:
I dreamed, at that moment I saw millions of birds that were at war. The birds were tearing one another apart. It was out of control, thousands and thousands of birds destroying one another like in a war. The birds were broken apart to bring down Allende. I dreamed before it happened, I kept thinking about it and understood that's what it was, it was a warning.Alerted to imminent disaster, Painemal took a number of precautions to escape persecution by the pro-coup forces. He went into hiding and survived.
EDITOR'S NOTE
Sidarta Ribeiro uses this dream to bolster his theory dreams run scenarios to help us decide on action. Elsewhere he claims dreams only speculate or extrapolate from known facts; good guessing, not magic. The coup that killed Allende didn't strike from a clear blue sky; anyone could feel the storm coming. Sometimes what'll save your life is seeing the obvious.
Yet some dreams do see distant or future events that are unlikely--less prone to extrapolation or guessing. I side with the Mapuche on this one. Just as science-based skeptics think we mistake extrapolation for vision, we shamans think skeptics sometimes mistake vision for extrapolation. Not always--both types are real--and confusable.
Dreams are vastly diverse--more diverse than all waking experience. Most dream theories are a one-size-fits-all dress. The very idea's wrongheaded. Even when, as here, it chances to fit--more or less.
More or less. What Painemal saw, after all, wasn't just a relatively bloodless palace coup--it was thousands torn apart. And thousands were. Jared Diamond, in Upheaval, argues that a brief coup was inevitable, but that years of torture and murder were not. That was Pinochet personally. And only after he had absolute power, and clung to it year after year, did his full evil bloom. To say "anyone could extrapolate this" is easy in hindsight--but thousands didn't. And paid for it.
--Chris Wayan
SOURCE: Sidarta Ribeiro's The Oracle of Night: the History and Science of Dreams p.358. Primary source: R. Foerster's Martín Painemal Huenchual: Vida de un dirigente mapuche, 1983.
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