[Extract from chapter 13]

Early every morning, all village families gather round the warm, fragrant open flames of the cooking hut's heart... and each person begins recounting his dreams. By skilfully reading the family dreams every morning, a grandma or grandfather can help all the members of the compound navigate through the many dangers of this hard earth-oriented struggle for life...

No Tzutujil disregards his dreams. If the dreams are overly disturbing or more powerful than usual, or if they startle you awake, then shamans are approached for a ritual interpretation. To the shamans, dreams are the backbone of their way of life, influencing every decision in the most powerful fashion. Dreams are rarely taken literally, and must be read properly. Moreover, certain kinds of dreaming help Tzutujil shamans divine illness, allowing them to see inside a client's 'wilderness body' into his or her spirit life, to find the true personality of their souls and thereby understand the nature of what has befallen them.

Inside the Earth Fruit level of creation, there are two simultaneous faces of reality called the Twins: the world where we dream, and the world where we work. To a shaman, a dream is not a creation of the mind, psyche or soul. It is the remembered fragment of the experience of one's natural spirit in the twin world, the dreamworld. The twin world of dreams, like this world, never ceases living, forming as it does a parallel continuum to a waking world. It actually forms one half of the substance of our lives.

Although the landscape of dreams may seem different than the landscape of the awake world, it is actually the balanced opposite, reversed version, where our souls live out our bodies' lives reenacted as if in a complex kind of mirror. Like the two opposing wings of a butterfly, the dreamworld is is one wing and the awake world is the other wing. The butterfly must have both wings connected at the Heart in order to fly and function.

Neither wing - dreams or waking - contains all of life. Real life occurs as a result of the interaction of the two. The life is in the butterfly's heart, and both dreaming and awake working life are necessary to keep the heart alive. Our lives, like the butterfly's heart, are kept alive by two opposing mirroring, twin-like wings. This heart is the third thing, the 'Rukux' heart that all ritual seeks to feed and keep alive.

As novices, we shamans were taught to read messages from the spirits in how candles burn, how birds sing, in animal tracks, in weather formations... in our own premonitions and gut feelings. But above and beyond all of these, we learned to listen and read dreams.

... Dreams are a direct, incorruptible expression of the mysterious nature of life and are considered to be free of human connivance. Because of this, people trusted dreams more than they trusted people.

The term for reading a dream was 'n Tzikij', the same word used for calling animals and weather. Dreams call upon life to move and live. Dreams read life back to us like a storyteller, reading life just as shamans read people's dreams! Some shamans' main aptitude is their quality of being able to read life, to listen and interpret all that went on, especially in dreams.

------------

'Secrets of the Talking Jaguar'

Memoirs from the Living Heart of a Mayan Village

by Martin Prechtel

Visit my other links:

Book

Return