Nightmares can be skirted around by dreamers who are experienced and well trained, as in this dream reported by the shaman Davi Kopenawa, an important leader among the proud Yanomami people on the Brazilian-Venezuelan border:

I was also often frightened by an enormous jaguar in my dreams. It followed my tracks in the forest and got closer and closer. I ran from it with all my strength, without ever succeeding to put it off the track. Eventually I would trip in the tangled forest and fall before the fierce jaguar. Then it leapt on me, but just as it was about to devour me, I would suddenly come to my senses, crying.

Other times I tried to escape it by climbing up a tree. But it chased me, scaling the tree trunk with its sharp claws. Horrified, I hurried to the tree's highest branches. I did not know where to run anymore. The only escape was to throw myself into the void from the top of the tree where I had sought refuge.

I started to flap my arms in desperation, as if they were wings, and suddenly I could fly. I glided in circles, high above the forest like a vulture. In the end I would find myself standing in another forest, on another shore, and the jaguar could no longer reach me.

SOURCE: Sidarta Ribeiro's The Oracle of Night: the History and Science of Dreams, p.272-3. His primary source: The Falling Sky by Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, p.37; but read the whole chapter, "The Xapiri's Gaze."

EDITOR'S COMMENT

I saw this in Sidarta Ribeiro's The Oracle of Night. Ribeiro wants to show nightmares are pancultural and that we can change their outcome with practice--as Ribeiro did in own childhood nightmares. Of course he's right that nightmares are universal, and learning to overcome fear is useful. But...

Ribeiro picked a dream of Kopenawa's that resembles his own so he needn't wrestle with the shamanic ones! Kopenawa's autobiography tells of strange, intense dreams all through childhood--spirit women who live in the river, a bird who dances for him, the terrifying moon spirit.. Such dreams weren't expressing childish fears to be learned away, but a sign of inherent difference to be heeded--indeed, cultivated. In the end Kopenawa not only became a shaman, he founded a school for shamanism. His culture, like most, recognizes some dreams are of everyday concerns, but some are shamanic, otherworldly. And some kids are born strange--with extra sensitivity--and responsibility.

Those distinctions have practical consequences. When I and three other relatives simultaneously dreamed of ax-murders, it didn't express hidden wishes, anxieties, nor even (as Ribeiro theorizes nightmares do) ancestral fears of predators; we were dreaming of real ax-murders near us that night. My nightmare made me alert all next day, for the killer was armed, crazy, on the run, and near us. My knowledge aided my survival. And when I saw the headlines about the murders, I learned dream ESP was no superstition; I'd sensed real, external danger. My nightmare had a second pro-survival effect: it blew away the pseudo-scientific brainwashing that urged me to ignore a compelling and accurate sixth sense.

Western society denies any serious innate differences in ability (and responsibility), denies any senses beyond the common five, and denies dreams can mean anything more than a mirror for inner fears.

This society is wrong. Learn to banish my nightmares? No thanks. There was a monster in the woods.

--Chris Wayan

World Dream Bank homepage - Art gallery - New stuff - Introductory sampler, best dreams, best art - On dreamwork - Books
Indexes: Subject - Author - Date - Names - Places - Art media/styles
Titles: A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - IJ - KL - M - NO - PQ - R - Sa-Sh - Si-Sz - T - UV - WXYZ
Email: wdreamb@yahoo.com - Catalog of art, books, CDs - Behind the Curtain: FAQs, bio, site map - Kindred sites