I was in the mountains in a sort of cañon. On the top of the mountain there was a plane. I found an old arrow sticking in a bush.

While looking at the arrow I saw something flying towards me from the South. It landed ten yards from me.

I thought it was an eagle, but the eagle changed into a white lady who started walking up to me. She was wearing a white gown. In her left arm she was carrying something that looked like veils.

She walked up close to me and every time she came close to me, I tried to protect the arrow.

Then the lady spoke to me. When I was a boy, I used to have an eagle pet and the lady said to me, "I am the eagle you used to have."

She said she wanted one turquoise bead with a hole in it. But when I looked for my beads, they weren't there. I started for home to get it, but I woke up before I got there.

COMMENTS

Both these [Eagle Woman and Plane over Oraibi] are good dreams. I thought I might get sick but nothing happened to me. I don't know what that means. Maybe sickness may come later on.

EDITOR'S NOTE

I first came across references to Hosteen Hal's dreams in Dream Interpretation Ancient and Modern by Carl Jung. I can see why they made an impression on Jung; around the same time as Eagle Woman, he dreamed of a Dove Girl--though Jung kind of patronized her, and when he woke, sanitized her into an abstract idea: the Anima.

In contrast, Hal didn't spin scholarly theories about his bird girl, just tries to get her the bead she wants--even if he feels a bit weird that she's grown from pet to person.

My own big dreams often try to tell me they're more than psychological. So I wonder if that plane atop the mountain at the start was a reminder of his predictive plane dream, a hint that this one too was psychic or shamanic.

I can't recommend The Dream in Primitive Cultures, Jung's source. It's even worse than the title sounds; not just condescending toward the Diné and other peoples, but the scientific enlightenment it's so smug about turns out to be (raise trumpets)... Freudian dogma! She's just out to steal his cigar arrow. Darn those women eagles anyway!

But Sigmund Jackson, why'd she ask for a vagina pierced stone bead, not his dick arrow? Could it possibly be that there's more to dreaming than dicks? (Now ethnography... maybe there are only dicks...)

--Chris Wayan

SOURCE: The Dream in Primitive Cultures edited by Jackson Lincoln, 1935, p 227 in 1970 reprint. Primary source: interview by Lincoln through translator, May 1932. Picture: Eagle Woman by Susan Seddon Boulet, 1988; from her book Shaman. Her bibliography only lists ethnographic sources she quotes directly, but they're similar; I suspect she read this book and knew Hal's dream.

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