Ancestor Dreaming: a portal for inner and outer world peace when dreaming for and with the ancestors

EXCERPT

THE PUZZLE PIECES OF AN ANCESTRAL DREAMER

When I was a young girl, my father purchased a set of the World Book Encyclopedia. I

ripped through the volumes like a house on fire, as if I were looking for something. A

clue that I, and only I, would recognize. I found it further down the alphabet in the picture of a South African miner. His face was covered in dust so he no longer had his black skin. In his outstretched hands were diamonds. The look on his face, the placement of his hands, as if in supplication, the new color of his skin – it spoke to me and I tore out the picture. I had to give it back when one of my siblings ratted on me, and I was severely punished.

But I knew there was something in that photograph that was me on a soul level. That touched me in a way few things in childhood had. And, that I should pay attention. Also, I knew that this, too, would be my job in this lifetime: to mine and mind the underground of my family’s history to unearth the gems of my ancestral line. To heal, if I could; to help, if asked.

Once I had left the confines of my mother’s house, slowly I began to remember dreams again. Thus began 40 years of dream journals. What I realized was that I had been mining my own dreams, so that at some point, more attention could be paid to the dreams of the ancestors.

POSTSCRIPT

Something unexpected came through in my DHC experience. This is the unexpurgated sentence: “Remember that you are a healer, and accept and bless what heals you.”

I believe that we all have the potential to heal and be healed by our dreams, and by the

dreams we dream for others. When you add the ancestor component, the possibilities

for inner, and outer world peace become profound, life-saving, and a blessing.

Another unexpected epiphany came through a few months after the DHC’s.

I consulted with an herbalist about, among other things, my fairly consistent waking between 2-3AM, and, what I was doing with that time because I did not like to toss and turn. I had stumbled upon a solution, and why, with my meditation practice that began in the early 1970’s I hadn’t thought of it sooner, was a mystery. When I was awakened at this hour, I would fall myself back into sleep by visualizing or imagining something good in my life – a kind of active meditation. My imagination had a field day with this. I relayed this to the herbalist.

His response, without missing a heartbeat, was that he had been told by a Lakota Medicine Woman that 2-3AM is the Time of the Ancestors, that the noise from the Collective Unconscious is quieter, and more subdued. Static is low, and thus it is a more subtle time to tune in for clarity, insight, and visioning. This made consummate sense, and I could see how it was thus easier for the dreams of the ancestors to slip through.

So not only had I stumbled into a sacred time, but that wider wisdom of mine, rooted in my meditation practice, taught me how to utilize that time, and how it linked with the ancestors.

It also taught me that certain visualizations/meditations “felt” better than others, calmed me down, infused me with a welcome peace, and soon shuttled me back to sleep. I can now better identify these “better feeling” visualizations/meditations. I must add that I don’t exactly know where they are coming from. I do not recognize any of them as events from my past. Are they my dreams, hopes, and wishes hidden deep in a memory well that had been cemented over with family and cultural verbotens? Was it extending back to forbidden desires and thoughts from my ancestors? Are they a thread on the loom of my life that is asking to be heard, and healed? Is it me dreaming my life forward? Are the ancestors dreaming through me? Am I participating in ancestral healing? Alas, I don’t have an answer. But I feel that I don’t need to know right now, and maybe never. Bottom line? Over 90% of the time, it helps me to go back to sleep!

I will say that there are certain visualizations/meditations that I return to time and time again. And that if I try to go back to one I’ve already have and I have visited there recently, sometimes the door is not opened and I have to conjure another visualization/meditation. I have learned that there are plenty of them to choose from!

CLOSING THOUGHT

I think it is possible that this ancestral dreaming doorway is another way for the ancestors to communicate what they knew and could not (some of them) never tell us. After all, they had dreams too.

CITATIONS

Reed, Henry, PhD. Let’s Normalize the Paranormal: A Revolution in Dreamwork. Venture Inward (the magazine of the A.R.E. Foundation), July-August-September 2016.

Weller, Francis. The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief. North Atlantic Books, 2015.