Awakening to the Spirit World: The Shamanic Path of Direct Revelation - Sandra Ingerman MA, Hank Wesselman Ph.D. 2010
Dreams
THE MASTER DREAMER
IN THE IMAGINAL REALMS
We have revealed the shaman to be a man or woman who may intentionally dissociate his or her conscious awareness away from the physical body (and this physical world) and enter into an alternate reality—the shaman’s world of “things hidden.” Once there, he or she discovers through direct revelation that this subjective, dimensional level of reality, awareness, and experience is inhabited.
The dream world is also a level of consciousness—the level of spiritual consciousness, and the indigenous peoples universally refer to this timeless archetypal field as the spirit world—revealing that the spirit world and the dream world are experientially one and the same.
In Western psychology, the dream world is interpreted and understood in various ways according to various schools of thought, but most agree that it is a mysterious place we go into when we are asleep—a place where we have strange, numinous experiences and encounter people and localities that we may know, yet are always different in some way. Often elusive, the images from our dreams can evaporate from our conscious awareness shortly after we awake, revealing them to be idiosyncratic or self-determined.
But there are ordinary dreams and then there are shamanic dreams or “big dreams” that we may remember throughout our life—sometimes called lucid dreams in which we become aware that we are dreaming, and yet we remain in the dream, acting and directing the context of the dream. These are literally visionary experiences of the transpersonal realms that may be accompanied by connection with spirits or with soaring feelings of power that may be transformative.
The shaman and the modern visionary alike learn to enter this level of experience while very much awake. In fact, notes Hank Wesselman, from a shamanic perspective we are dreaming throughout our entire lives:
We might begin by emphasizing a point mentioned in the Introduction—a deep insight that I gleaned from my years of living with the tribal peoples in Africa.
Right at the core of their indigenous worldview is the perception that the multileveled field of the dream is the real world, that we are actually dreaming twenty-four hours a day, throughout our entire lives, and that the everyday physical world came into being in response to the dream, not vice versa.
These assertions were always accompanied by a conviction, strongly held, that the dream world is “minded”—that it is consciousness itself—alive, intelligent, and power-filled, and that it infuses everything that emanates from it with awareness, vitality, and life force.
This means that we are always dreaming, even as you read these words, wherever you are. It also means that the experience of dreaming when we are asleep and the experience of the shaman who journeys into the dream worlds while very much awake, are experientially and phenomenologically the same. Both paths give us access to the same levels of reality, awareness, and experience revealing that the dream world serves as both the source of this physical reality in which we live, and yet it can be affected by what we dream as well. This reveals that our relationship with the dream world/spirit world is a co-creative one.
The process involves shifting the focus of our awareness from “here” to “there.” This is a learned skill, and a shaman’s ability to do this through their focused intentionality reveals why the shaman is called “the master of dreaming.”
Because we are always dreaming, Sandra Ingerman notes, we have great power over our lives:
It is with our creative imaginations that we dream the world in which we are living into being. This gift of imagination is a gift of power. We create our lives with our thoughts and words. In our culture, few are encouraged to use their imaginations in a way that helps develop creative abilities. Most of us are taught early on that there are only a few creative geniuses in the world and that we are not among them. Throughout our lives, we were taught to give our power away to authority figures who then determined the shape of our world according to their wishes.
Well, that was what was. We live in a time of great change and now is the time for us as modern visionaries to own our power, to make our lives better, and to use our creativity to find solutions for what is happening in our world. All of this becomes possible through our focused dreaming.
Both shamanic journeying and dreaming are very creative endeavors, and they are experientially similar, yet there are differences between them. According to Sandra, many students of shamanism don’t always see this difference—but it is important to make the distinction:
In a journey, for example, you might choose to go to the Lower World or to the Upper World where you may engage your helping spirits for healing and problem-solving, ask questions, and receive answers. In our ordinary dreams at night, we do not typically have that kind of conscious control. Such dreams are idiosyncratic—unique to the dreamer—and usually quickly evaporate upon awakening. In ordinary dreams, things happen without much conscious choice on the part of the dreamer.
Lucid dreaming, on the other hand, is a kind of in-between state in which the dreamer’s body is asleep, but their mind is awake and aware that they are dreaming, allowing them to direct the dream to some degree. Such dreams, like shamanic journeywork, can be life-changing, with the dreamer remembering all that occurred in great detail, often for the rest of their lives.
So, from a Western perspective, dreams and journeying are different activities. From a shamanic point of view, nighttime dreaming while asleep is not viewed differently from the shamanic journeys we take while very much awake. Shamanic journeywork is, in short, a form of dreaming—but dreaming while awake. A shaman thus places great value on the world of dreams. According to Hank, there are many names for the dream place, and the world of dreams is honored throughout all shamanic cultures:
As we have mentioned, the dream world is the level of reality called the Dreamtime by the Australian Aboriginals, the Other Worlds by the Celts, the Po by the Polynesians, and the Spirit Worlds by the shaman. It is often simply referred to as The Sacred, and, as such, it is the astral level in which our personal oversoul, our higher self, lives as an immortal being of pure energy rather than as form.
This is the plane of realization in which there is nothing to gain and nothing to experience. Yet it is also a level of consciousness in which the knower, the knowing, and the known are one. It is in this manner that perception, knowledge, and action can occur simultaneously, and in these dream worlds, all space is here and all time is now. This is why it is often referred to by the indigenous peoples as The Timeless and why we here are often referred to as “the people of Time.”
THE DREAM ASPECT OF
SHAMANIC JOURNEYING
The great three-leveled world system of nonordinary reality is the shamanic dream world. As discussed in Chapter 2, these beautiful, awesome regions in which the shaman connects with the spirits are perceived in every shamanic tradition, and all shamanic cultures agree that these worlds exist in layers. The various levels are distinguished by their density, as well as by who and what may be found within them. And as we have already mentioned, they are commonly known as the Upper Worlds, the Middle Worlds, and the Lower Worlds.
Right in the center of the stack is the Middle World, the locale of human dreaming. This is also where we find ourselves right after the death experience—the postmortem bardo states of the Tibetans and the Purgatory of Judeo-Christianity—regions populated largely by the souls of recently deceased humans. The Tibetan Book of the Dead 1 reveals that when we die, it’s like going into a dream and not waking up. And the dream that we go into is our own unique dream—the one that we create for ourselves during our soul’s transition from the physical world into the dreaming of the spiritual worlds. This reveals that the Middle World has two aspects, an ordinary physical aspect and a nonordinary dream aspect. And everything that has a physical aspect here seems to have a corresponding dream aspect there. Nobody really knows why this is so. It just is, and as such, it is part of the great mystery of existence.
Our Sacred Garden, discussed previously, is usually found on this dream level of the Middle World. As we remember places in Nature where we have felt connected, at home, or at ease in a spiritual sense, we are actually connecting with the dreaming of that place—and this dreaming is a fluid and ongoing process associated with that place that emanates power.
Below the Middle Worlds, we find the Lower Worlds, which are formed by the collective dreaming of the spirits of Nature. This is where the shaman journeys to connect with the spirit of wolf or bear, raven or tiger, eagle or deer, oak or corn, healing herb, or even with the elementals—the spirit of fire, water, earth, or stone. As we have discussed, shamans and visionaries of all traditions across time have discovered that many of these spirits are willing to come into relationship with humans as spirit helpers, providing us with protection and support, and by association, with the power that they possess.
The shaman as the master dreamer may work with everything in creation dreams or even manipulate “the dreaming” to create effects in this world here, revealing the accomplished shaman to be the master of dreaming as well as the magician who can manifest a wide variety of effects—healing for example.
Above the Middle Worlds are the Upper Worlds, which are formed by the collective dreaming of the gods, goddesses, angelic forces, and the spiritual heroes and heroines of the past. These dimensional levels were brought into existence by these highly evolved beings or organizing intelligences. Within these luminous, light-filled regions, we may find connection with our spirit guides, ascended masters, and the members of our council of elder spirits.2 Many of the beings who exist in the Upper Worlds may serve us as spirit teachers, and it is among them that we have a very special connection indeed—our personal oversoul.
Interestingly, these imaginal realms are perceived in much the same way by visionaries of all cultural traditions, everywhere, implying that all human beings may be linked by a basic psychic unity, as some anthropologists and psychologists have claimed. It also suggests that these dream worlds are separate from the one who perceives them and that they have their own autonomous existence, a claim that shamans and visionaries everywhere affirm with confidence.
In our time, it is remarkable how the spirits who reside in the dream worlds—Upper, Middle and Lower—may often appear spontaneously to Westerners in psychotherapeutic sessions. Using guided visualization and various hypnotherapies, increasing numbers of therapists are encouraging their clients to interact with and learn from these imaginal beings.3
KAHUNA INSIGHTS INTO DREAMING
According to the Kahuna of Hawai’i, the spiritual worlds of the Dreamtime operate under three distinct assumptions: 1) everything we experience within the dream worlds is symbolic; 2) everything we encounter there is part of a pattern and exists in relationship to everything else; and 3) everything at this level means what we think it means.
According to the first assumption, the symbols we perceive reveal dreams to be the archetypes that are well-known to mythologists, psychologists, and shamans alike. According to the second assumption, the pattern is the great tapestry into which these archetypal forces are woven. The fabric of this tapestry, spread out across the continuum of the dreaming, is the spirit world. Part of the great mystery of living involves the realization that the dream world and the spirit world are actually one and the same.
Last, the third assumption presumes that everything in your dream means what you think it means. Thus, each of us must interpret our symbols, as well as our dreams, for ourselves. No one can do this for you with accuracy, because your dreams, visions, and symbols have come to you for a reason and often from many sources. Your job is to figure them out, a task that will deepen your awareness of your self, as well as just about everything else.
Hank, who studied shamanism in Hawai’i among other places, stresses the fact that we are the weavers of this fabric:
We accomplish this extraordinary task of weaving our lives though our actions in the physical level of the Middle World—which the Hawaiians might call the First Level of Reality—through our thoughts, intentions, emotions, and dreams. Everything that we have become and accomplished on our long voyage across time is woven into the tapestry.
Considered from this perspective, the spirit world can be thought of as a level of relativity, in which space and time, galaxies and stars, animals and plants and humans achieve meaning only through relationship with each other.
DREAMS FOR HELP AND GUIDANCE
We can also begin to learn how to ask for help in our nighttime dreams just as we do in setting an intention in a shamanic journey. Sandra, who receives a great deal of guidance from her shamanic journeys, gets the same kind of information from her night dreams as well:
This began when I was a child, when I regularly received a tremendous amount of information in my dreams to help me find solutions to issues in my life.
In 1998 I started to write my book Medicine for the Earth: How to Transform Personal and Environmental Toxins just before taking a travel group to Egypt. When I returned, I had a very powerful dream in which the Egyptian god Anubis introduced himself. He shared with me that the missing piece of my work in reversing environmental pollution was “transfiguration,” and then he disappeared.
I woke in the morning and discovered that transfiguration means “shapeshifting.” Transfiguration became the foundation of my work in Medicine for the Earth, using light for healing others and the planet. I will share more about this in Chapter 8 on sound and light. This is just one example among many of how my work was guided by information that came in a dream.
Hank adds that with this perspective, consciousness becomes “geographied” when journeying—it becomes the spirit world in which the shaman will travel. And shapeshifting? In this case, consciousness becomes objectified in some other thing or being. Shapeshifting is consciousness as object; journeying is consciousness as landscape.4
How to Ask for Guidance and Healing in a Dream
When you begin a new project or need some advice, you can simply ask for a dream to provide you with guidance. Before you go to sleep at night, set an intention that you would like to receive helpful advice in a dream.
Many of Sandra’s students have reported that a helping spirit they already work with comes into their nighttime dream or that a new spirit they have never met gives them the help they requested.
As with a shamanic journey, write down a dream you have received that gives you guidance. Sometimes the answer will be very clear to you, and sometimes you have to sit with the message you received in order to understand the meaning. As with a journey, keep working with how the symbols or message answer the intention you set for your dream.
Dreams can help you solve major dilemmas, and they can bring on healing—even on the physical level. Sometimes you need to be patient with your dreams; they don’t always bring healing right away, teaches Sandra:
In the 1980s I had a physical condition that created a great deal of pain. Many medical doctors told me I was going to have to learn to live with the pain. I went to my helping spirits and asked for help. I had others journey on my behalf. I collected quite a lot of spiritual information, but no relief came.
Every night before I went to bed I asked for a healing dream. I was very persistent and did not give up. And after months of asking the dream finally came.
A Native American man wearing blue jeans and a blue denim shirt came out from behind my couch. He said he had always been there. Then he proceeded to show me a beautiful blue rattle—a blue that was very vibrant and I had never seen such a hue before. The man pointed to the place in my body where I was in pain and said, “You have a pain right here.” He then shook the rattle over that place on my body, and in the dream the pain disappeared. When I woke, the pain was gone and has never reappeared. You can imagine my gratitude over this healing.
Ever since that dream I have instructed people dealing with an emotional or physical issue to ask for a healing dream. The key is persistence. You must ask every night.
It is quite extraordinary how many of my students share that they had a soul retrieval or some other spontaneous healing like the one I had. You simply need to ask for a healing dream.
When you go to bed at night, hold the intention that you are seeking a dream that can give you guidance and healing. Many of my students report that one of their helping spirits has appeared in a dream to offer healing, but as in my dream, it is also possible that an unknown being may come to offer help.
GROUP DREAMS
When a group gathers to do spiritual work together it is sometimes noted that the different participants begin to have dreams that overlap in meaning and have relevance to the entire circle— not just to the individual who had the dream. Sometimes participants will receive a message or information that is for the entire group.
Carol Proudfoot-Edgar, who encourages group interaction with dreamwork in her workshops, notes the value of sharing dreams in a community:
In every workshop I teach, no matter how long, I ask participants to journal and then share their dreams in Circle during the next morning’s session. In workshops of more than fifteen participants, we form Dream Clan groups. Within these groups we speak and draw our dreams. Each Dream Clan has a Dream Keeper who notes the similarities among the dreams. The last full day of the workshop, a major portion is given to mapping the whole Circle’s dreams and working to both understand and enact these dreams (when appropriate).
As images appear in our dreams, it is helpful to draw the images in the same colors as they appeared in the dream. Once the drawings are completed we can see where images overlap.
For example, if a bird shows up in the dreams of five different participants we will discuss or journey on the significance of what the bird has to share with the group. One time I was teaching in Montana in a location where there were caves sacred to the Native people of the area. When a cave appeared in the dreams of three of the group’s participants, we made a decision to actually go visit the caves. Through journeying, we all received very important messages from the ancestral spirits who lived there.
From sharing our dreams in a circle, we are shown the work we are doing as individuals and as a group. Our dreams are a major way that the spirits are speaking to us—informing, guiding, requesting. The dream drawings become part of the published material available to participants after the longer workshops. They record journeys much the way writing in a journal does, and we reflect on them to see how they have impacted our life as time goes on.
I encourage participants to do this dreamwork at home, too.
We also construct “dream gatherers,” usually using natural materials in the landscape where we are meeting. Dreams are a doorway into another world, and the dream gatherer is the door. Think of the wreaths that people make at Christmas and hang on their doors. There is a circle within the wreath. The dream gatherer is made from things from Nature and has a circle that represents the doorway into the dream world. These are then placed somewhere close to each dreamer and used to entice the dreamer and the dream spirits to join one another in mutual collaboration.
EXERCISE: MAKING YOUR OWN DREAM GATHERER
Carol Proudfoot-Edgar has been impressed by how the dream gatherers that each person makes seem to promote stronger dreaming. It can be very valuable to make your own. You can gather materials from the landscape or from your home. For example, tie twigs together with feathers between them or tie some thread around a simple piece of wood. The thread represents the fringed pathway that may reach out and draw the dreaming world to you.
Try using your dream gatherer for a period of time, such as a month, and see if your nighttime dreaming world becomes more active, vivid, and informative. It is important to make note of your dreams, and for some of us, it is very helpful to draw our dreams because the image world speaks to us in ways words do not. It is also important to be willing to follow through on teachings you receive from the Dreamtime—otherwise this gateway may close until you are ready to respond accordingly.
INTERPRETING NIGHT DREAMS
Many therapists study for years to learn the symbolic interpretation of dreams. You can write them down, or draw them—and even then the meaning might be unclear. Shamanic practitioners have found journeying to a power animal or teacher to ask for the meaning of dreams to be a great way to work. One such journey, which Sandra suggests, is a journey to the Land of Dreams:
Years ago I discovered a territory in nonordinary reality called the Land of Dreams. It is a wonderful place where you can enter into a dream that you have had before to learn the interpretation of the symbols.
To begin, think of a dream that you would like to work with and ask a power animal or teacher to take you to the Land of Dreams. There you will find a guide who will help you to understand the important elements and meaning of your dream.
Another way to uncover the meaning of a dream, suggests Tom Cowan, is to utilize the power of a group:
A dreamwork process developed by psychiatrist Montague Ullman more than thirty years ago has been used by groups of lay people as well as professionals to study, reflect on, and interpret their dreams. I’ve created a shamanic adaptation of this process by incorporating it into drumming circles and other shamanic groups since the 1980s.
First, a dreamer tells a dream. Others take notes for two reasons: For one, it helps the others remember the key parts of the dream. Second, it slows down the dreamer in the telling so there is more time for elements of the dream to sink into everyone’s unconscious.
Next, people can ask the dreamer clarifying questions. These help the others “see” the dream more accurately. Examples of clarifying questions are: How many people do you think were in that “crowded” room? What kind of street were you walking down in the dream? What did the man/woman/child you saw look like?
Clarifying questions are not interpretive questions, such as: What do you think the crowded room means? Did the man remind you of anyone that you know? What is your relationship with your mother? At this point in the process, the people in the group do not want to know how the dreamer would interpret the dream or anything in it. Such interpretations from the dreamer will cloud and confuse the others working with the dream. Furthermore, the point of working with a dream is to find ways to interpret it; the dreamer will probably not be sure at this point what the dream means.
Next each person journeys into the dream as if it were his or her own dream. So if the dreamer sees his mother in the dream, each person journeying would see his or her own mother in the dream, not the original dreamer’s mother. This way the dream becomes personal for each individual. On the journey, each person can talk to anyone or anything in the dream because everything is conscious and can communicate.
For example, we can ask the elements of the dream why they are in the dream. We can extend the dream beyond where it ended for the original dreamer to see what happens next. Similarly, we can journey to the events leading up to the dream to see what happened before it began. And if the dreamscape shifts into something very different from the original dream, that is okay also. Dreams are alive and become even more alive inside a shamanic journey.
After the journeying, each person relates his or her journey and speaks of it as if it were based on his or her personal dream, not the original dreamer’s. This is important to make the dreamer feel safe. In other words, no one tells the original dreamer what his or her dream means. No one plays psychiatrist here to psychologize the dreamer or the dream. Everyone speaks about the dream in terms of what the dream and journey mean for themselves. But as the original dreamer listens to all the various ways that the dream unfolded for others, the dreamer begins to see possible interpretations. From this smorgasbord of interpretations, the dreamer will find those meanings that make sense. Ultimately only the dreamer knows what the dream means. This process respects that.
After all the dream journeys are related, then the original dreamer (who also journeyed into the dream) shares with the group what he or she thinks the dream is about, based on what happened in the dreamer’s journey as well as from the possibilities that emerged in the dream journeys of others in the group.
WORKING WITH NIGHTMARES
People in indigenous traditions take nightmares and dreams of tragedy and great difficulty very seriously. One way to work with a dream of this nature is to gather a group of friends or peers and then tell them the dream in great detail, leaving nothing out. Then you may ask your friends to create a drama in which various people take an active role in the dream and then act it out like a play. According to the shamanic path, once the dream is acted out, it is done, the prophesy fulfilled, the objective accomplished.
For example, if you have a dream that your house is burning down, you might engage your circle of friends to build a miniature representation of your house using cardboard. Once it is done, have someone light a match to it. Have some people act out being the fire crew coming to put it out. Dowse the fire with water. Feel your emotions and say out loud all the words that go along with seeing your house on fire. Breathe a sigh of relief when the fire is out. The act is now done and you no longer have to worry that the prophetic dream will come to be, that your actual house will be destroyed. The dream has been manifested and it is done.
A Healing Nightmare
If you are struggling with a serious illness, addiction, or chronic affliction, you might encounter it in your dreaming in the form of a nightmare. This experience can be disturbing to say the least, or terrifying at its most extreme. However, the shamanic perspective allows us to take a more informed look at what the message of the dream may actually be. It also allows us to take an active role in our own healing. You can turn the tables, so to speak, by meeting with the spirit of your illness or affliction in your journeywork—in your Sacred Garden, for example—and there, you can confront it directly. This could also happen spontaneously as a healing dream.
Hank is one of many who has been able to resolve an issue through a vivid and potent dream:
I remember a nightmare I had almost forty years ago—an extremely vivid dream in which I was in Africa, wading along the edge of a shallow, jungly river looking for fossils in the eroded silty clays of the riverbank above me. This is also what I do as a scientist (I search for fossils), so this experience was not unfamiliar to me. As I slogged along, knee-deep in the muddy water, I suddenly turned a corner and found myself face to face with a crocodile. It was a really big one, a fifteen-footer at least, and it was much too close to me.
After a moment’s hesitation, it started to close in. Not surprisingly, I began to panic, and as I desperately tried to escape up the steep riverbank, the sticky brown mud impeded my progress. In no time at all, the croc was almost upon me. Perhaps the shock of knowing that I could not possibly get away triggered what happened next.
While my physical body continued to sleep, I “woke up” in my dream, which means I entered a state of lucid dreaming, and I realized that the whole scenario—the African river, the mud, the crocodile—was a dream. With that understanding, I swiveled around and, raising my arm, I pointed at the giant reptile and shouted “Stop!” The croc slid to a halt an arm’s length away.
I stared into its yellow eyes and demanded to know why it was pursuing me. A telepathic response came immediately: “I am your tobacco addiction.” Stunned, I stared at the creature and noticed for the first time that the brown mud caked all over it looked like the tar I cleaned out of my pipes. Suddenly, I smelled that familiar, rancid tobacco odor emanating from the croc.
Then something unexpected happened. The reptile shifted somehow, transforming itself from pursuer into pal, appearing more like a pet or a harmless circus animal, but it was too late. I had seen it for what it really was. My resolve formed, and I proclaimed with absolute authority, “You’re outta here. I no longer need you in my life,” and instantly the croc was gone.
This was the turning point in my battle to give up smoking. From that day forward, I never had another cigarette and I never looked at crocs in quite the same way either. From the perspective of the shaman, I confronted the spirit of my addiction in the dream world, battled it, and won. Even though it tried to shapeshift into an ally, I saw it for what it really was and remained steadfast. I have not smoked tobacco since that dream.5
A fantastic dream perhaps? Then again, maybe not. If you are dealing with an addiction or illness and you haven’t found solutions through your dreams, here’s a suggestion for how to journey to its spirit. While listening to the audio that accompanies this book, go to your inner place or your Sacred Garden and practice relaxation. Feel the tranquility of this wonderful place. Allow it to calm you.
When you feel settled, call for your most powerful spirit helpers to come. If you are not sure about who your spirit helpers are, you should journey to find them first. When your spirit helpers arrive, tell them that you plan to confront the spirit of your illness (or addiction) and that you need their support. We are not meant to go through things like this alone. Ask them to provide you with power, protection, and support.
When you feel yourself become power-filled, find a trail at your garden’s edge, one that leads off through the foliage or trees or grasslands down into another lower area that is clearly separate from your personal place of refuge. This will be your battleground. Ask your helpers to accompany you, and then go there. This is where you and your helping spirits will confront the spirit of your illness.
Hank stresses the fact that the more vividly you envision everything in your dream, the more powerful your battle with your addiction or illness will be:
Pick a spot that appeals to you in some way, a place of advantage, perhaps a large stone with a flat summit upon which you can stand high up above the ground. Then, call for the spirit of the illness to come. Remember, everything that has a physical aspect here in this world has a dream aspect there in that other world, and this includes illness.
When the spiritual aspect of your illness or addiction appears, observe it closely. What is it? How does it look? Does it seem threatening? Friendly? Remember, your helping spirits are with you, and so there is nothing to fear. You are safe and just about to reverse the course of your illness or addiction.
Enter into brief conversation with it, just as I did with the crocodile, but don’t be fooled if it shifts to appear charming or amiable. This is not a good guy. This is not someone you want connected with you. Think about your spirit helpers and how they have filled you with power. Allow your inner director, your inner chief, to emerge.
Bring up your full power and confront the illness spirit. Order it to leave you. In your mind’s eye, see it diminished, beaten down, and defeated, and banish it from your life forever. If there is any resistance, ask your spirit helpers to flex the spiritual muscle for you, and they will. Don’t be surprised if someone unexpected shows up to assist. If your illness spirit has chosen to manifest itself to you as a crocodile or a dragon, the new ally could be St. George—or even Archangel Michael with his sword of light.
This doesn’t mean that crocodiles or dragons are evil, by the way. It is simply a form that your illness has chosen to take in confronting you. The spirit of your affliction could appear as anything, even as a sacred being, a saint or a prophet or an angel. Your task lies in seeing through its shape-changing trickery—in seeing it for what it really is and remaining firm in your resolve.
When the sickness spirit has vanished, return up the trail to your garden. Does anything appear different? Ask your defenders to join you and have a talk with them. Express your gratitude and ask them to remain on guard until all vestiges of the illness have left your body.
There is one more aspect of this healing dynamic that needs to be considered. Since your subconscious body-soul is the self-aspect through which you journey into your garden, it has witnessed all that transpired, and it takes everything literally. So while you are still in your garden, address your body-soul directly, in the same way that a kindly, wise chief might speak to one of his or her servants. Ask your body if there is anything it needs or wants. You may get a surprise. It could be an espresso at your favorite cafe, a long hug with your lover, a swim at your favorite beach, or even a hot fudge sundae.
Use your mental egoic soul to create a thoughtform— a visualization of whatever it is your body-soul has asked for and offer it, right there in your garden. Take your time and allow the experience to be savored, like a fantasy. Remember, your body-soul does not distinguish between reality and illusion. So from the body’s perspective, the visionary experience that you just had is real, and so is the thoughtform of the gift you have created for it.
This is active dreaming, or what Jung called “active imagination.”
Next, when your body-soul is sparkling happily, instruct it to start restoring your energetic matrix to its former undistorted state. One of the primary functions of your body-soul is memory, much like the hard drive of a computer. It can remember the original pattern of your energetic matrix before any distortions occurred, and it can rework your energy field accordingly now that the illness intrusions have been removed. As the blueprint is repaired, your inner healer will go to work once again with a clear pattern to work from, and your health will be restored. In this way, utilizing the shamanic journeywork method, you can infuse your own inner healer with an enhanced sense of purpose as well as with power and support from your helping spirits. Knowing this, you might adopt a healing meditation, repeated at regular intervals, to reinforce your command—to heal the body.
So many of the things that appear in your dreams and journeys can be a source for healing. Hank often shares a story about a particular journey one of his students had, as it reveals how transformative shamanic journeywork may be, as well as how the Sacred Garden in the Middle World of dream may be used as a place of power and healing:
Many years ago during a workshop in Sacramento, California, a woman in her early fifties had a particular place in mind to be her Sacred Garden. When she returned from the journey, she seemed agitated and on the verge of tears, and during the break, she asked if she could share her journey with me privately. This is the essence of what she told me.
She described how since childhood this particular locality was her special inner place where she had daydream-like adventures with her imaginal friends. She spoke of how it resembled an English garden or park with rows of flower beds and trees, including a small thatched cottage where she had teddy bear tea parties with all her stuffed animals (who came to life, of course, in this magical place), and so forth.
On this day, she had journeyed back to this locality, but it was not as she remembered it. For starters, it had thorny, unfriendly looking vines growing all over everything, choking the trees and blanketing the elements that made the place so charming. They were actively growing even as she saw them, and as I listened to her account, a message arrived in my mind, a download from my oversoul/spirit teacher. On impulse, I took courage and asked her if she had cancer.
Her eyes widened as she confirmed my intuition. She told me that she had recently been diagnosed with this dreaded disease and that it was metastatic in nature and dangerous. She was still in the denial phase and only she and her husband (and of course her doctor) knew.
Now, from the shamanic perspective, the unrestrained growth in her garden was symbolic of the out-of-control cell division in her body (remember—everything in the garden is symbolic of some aspect of yourself or your life experiences). I asked her another question, and again her answer confirmed my suspicion. A series of traumatic life losses had recently created a profound sense of disharmony within her. “What shall I do?” she asked me with fear growing in her eyes.
“Well,” I responded lightly with a reassuring smile, “you’ve come to the right person. You could begin by sharpening up your metaphysical machete and then go back into your garden and start chopping the vines out. Or you could do what I do. I was born in New York and lived in an apartment during my early years. I’m great with plants in pots, but I’m not skilled at full-fledged landscaping. So when something really big in my own garden needs my attention, I invite master gardeners to help me.”
She laughed as I suggested that she do the same— invite a team of spirit gardeners into her garden to help her chop all the vines out. And at that moment—her laughter—is when her healing began. She followed my advice in the journeys that followed, yet when the weekend workshop came to a close, she and her gardeners were still chopping. The vines were still growing, and they had barely made a dent.
I then suggested that she go to her garden at least twice each day, as time allowed, and that she continue to work on chopping out the vines with help of her spirit gardeners. She followed my advice, journeying to her garden twice a day, and three times on Sundays, calling in her spirit helpers to help her chop vines (in addition to her chemotherapy).
A letter arrived from her several months later, and it contained good news. She and her spirit helpers had finally succeeded in removing all the vines from her garden. Not a sprout or shoot or sprig remained. Not surprisingly, when she next visited her oncologist, it was discovered that she was cancer-free, and as far as I know, in the twelve years since her healing, she still is.
YOUR LIFE AS A DREAM
So far we have talked about the dream aspect of shamanic journeying, working with nighttime dreams, and how a group can use their nighttime dreams as a way to work on a collective level. As we mentioned earlier in this chapter, our ordinary everyday life can also be seen as a dream.
José Stevens, who says that shamans worldwide believe dreaming is central to their reality, describes how to use the principles that go into working with dreams to navigate our lives:
Shamans see the world as a dream and view the art of dreaming as a tool to be mastered to navigate infinite states of reality. Although the details of dreaming may vary from culture to culture or from shaman to shaman, the overall understanding of dreaming is basically consistent. Shamans hold that all worlds are dreams and that these dreams can be shaped, altered, re-dreamed, and navigated by the dreamer who is also dreaming him-or herself and being dreamed by the dream. Rather than the world being a fixed reality as it is seen by today’s mainstream approach, the shaman’s understanding of the world is much more optimistic and flexible because it holds that since everyone is collectively dreaming, each person can, with awareness and an act of will, change the dream. This understanding allows the shaman the liberty to act with abandon, experience massive freedom, and apply strong intent to whatever he or she wants to accomplish with the certainty that results will follow.
Perhaps the greatest enemy or obstacle to a man or woman of knowledge is the belief that one can be victimized by outside circumstances or trapped by fate. By definition, this is an admission of intolerable weakness where all power is projected externally onto outside forces. A shaman can never afford to take this stance because the results of doing so are disastrous. Shamans therefore study the art of dreaming, the art of influencing the collective dream in order to accomplish what to others seems impossible.
Clearly you do not have to be a shaman to adopt this powerful approach to your life. However, you would do well to study the shamans’ understanding of the dreamscape because this will grant you a measure of freedom not provided by mainstream thought. Here are some shamanic notions about dreaming that you may find useful:
• In the deepest of terms, all of life consists of a range of dreams, some with more solidity than others. Your house and your car are dreams of great solidity, whereas your daydream about winning the lottery is more fluid and may or may not take physical form. Your house or car is more of a collective dream because your neighbors and friends dream that you have a house too, but they may not dream that you have won the lottery so that is more a personal dream. Sometimes, with enough intent and focus, a personal dream will become a collective dream; this in fact happens all the time.
• Shamanically speaking, dreams have so many functions that they cannot be lumped into one or two categories. Dreams are communication highways through which much information is exchanged and processed at all levels of reality. This information from all parts of the universe moves about through “wormholes,” or pathways, that make travel over great distances in the universe possible and that connect everything to everything else. When you dream, you make use of these wormholes, and this is often accompanied by a rushing feeling.
• Dreams connect your everyday personality with your soul. And soul is defined as your essence. Dreaming carries the experiences of the body to your soul and conveys your soul’s guidance to the body personality. These very same dreams can be influenced by your allies and spirit helpers to assist with plans or visions. Dreams also connect individuals separated by space and time. They allow you to maintain friendships with beings who are not currently physical or may never be, to communicate with friends who are a long distance away on this planet, to exchange information with your own other personalities in other time frames and probabilities. Through a dream you can receive help from a future “you” in this lifetime or a future “you” in another lifetime.6
• You can also send help to a “you” in trouble in a past lifetime. Through a dream, you can retrieve lost parts of yourself or restore that which has been temporarily misplaced by another. In fact, conscious dreaming is what makes soul retrieval possible.
• Dreams are a projection of consciousness via the language of symbols. As with shamanic journeying, it is important to learn how to work with and interpret the symbols you receive in your dreams. The better you understand the symbols, the better your exchange of information via dreams. However, even under the best of circumstances, some dreams fail to communicate information because the symbols used are obscure or not understood. That is why you often have recurring dreams or dreams with similar themes but different circumstances. They are being re-sent by your spirit self, your oversoul, in hopes that the communication will be gotten right this time.
• The symbols of your dreams are the alphabet of consciousness, the art of thinking in images, vessels of energy, the language of emotions, multileveled carriers of information, transforming agents, magnetic in their ability to draw attention to themselves. Dream symbols draw things together of like rhythm and frequency, unite paradoxes, shape and determine perception, and are used throughout the universe. Symbols unite the spiritual with the physical, as in the age-old statements “As above, so below” and “As without, so within.”
• Symbols can become worn out or go out of date with changing times. On the other hand, new symbols may appear with the advent of new technology, fashions, or customs. For example, the symbol of an old man or woman with a scroll may be replaced by a computer or cell phone revealing a text message for you from Spirit.
• Symbols are the language that your spirit self uses, and for the average person, they are largely confined to the subconscious mind. Shamans make it a point to take charge of the subconscious and make it conscious, so they learn to direct symbols and utilize them to advantage. For example, a shaman may communicate with the spirit of eagle and arrange for a physical eagle to fly over a ceremony at a specific moment. Everyone there may look up in amazement to see the eagle, but the shaman knows the eagle is part of the dream and both Spirit and the shaman have dreamed the event.
EXERCISE: SEEING YOUR LIFE AS A DREAM
During your waking hours, practice looking around you and seeing everything as a dream symbol, suggests José Stevens. Remind yourself often that what you seem to be taking for reality is actually an amazingly detailed and solid-appearing dream. Practice realizing that you are dreaming yourself and that all sensations coming from your five senses are actually hallucinations of the highly symbolic dream state you find yourself in. This will not only keep you busy in a highly entertaining way, but it will begin to unravel your concrete and reactive way of being in the world. It will put you more in the driver’s seat of your life because, shamanically speaking, you are in fact the dreamer at all times.
The more you practice this exercise, the more powerful you will become. You will gain tremendous insight into your everyday activities, your worries and concerns, and the bigger themes of your life. More importantly, you will begin to see solutions to many of the things that stumped you before. Simply changing your perspective is enough to transform many of your patterns in a beneficial way.
