The Dream-Reality Continuum
I’ve just returned from my second trip to visit and stay with the indigenous Achuar people of the Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest. To call this trip transformative is a massive understatement. There’s no way to describe the cellular rearranging that happens upon immersion in the most biodiverse place on the planet with its’ oxygen pool of primary-growth trees.
Thirty years ago, the Achuar people, knowing they and their land were in danger of being wiped out by the oil and mining industries, reached out in their dreams to the West in the hopes of finding allies who could help them preserve their forest and way of life. They sought help in shifting “the culture of the north from one of consumption, exploitation and extraction, to one that honors and sustains all life”. These dreams ended up reaching the open minds and hearts of Lynne Twist and John Perkins via an astounding dreaming technology, the story of which is too long to share here but is shared in both of their books below. As a result, they, along with Bill Twist, created the Pachamama Alliance with the goal of “inspiring people to regenerate the planet’s ecosystems, bring justice to their communities and restore our relationships with the Earth, each other, and ourselves.”
The technologies of the rainforest are different from most of the technologies of the West but are nonetheless critical to the ways of life of the Achuar and other indigenous groups’ - technologies including dreaming and dream interpretation, shapeshifting, plant medicine journeying, and shamanism.
Many indigenous cultures are dreaming cultures who believe that the spiritual world lives side by side with the material world and can be accessed and realized through dreams. The indigenous nations within the Ecuadorian Amazon use plant medicines like tobacco, datem (ayahuasca), and datura (trumpet flower) as access tools to the spiritual realm which is in many ways more real than what we call the awakened realm. Their connection with nature is absolute and they see themselves as equal parts of the ecosystem, as opposed to supreme humans who have the right to take at will from nature without reciprocity.
One morning during our journey, we were invited by the people in the village of Kutsutku to participate in an early-morning guayusa tea ceremony. We arose at 3:30am and took a boat upriver 45 minutes to join a family around the fire in their palm-thatch-roofed home. The guayusa tea ceremony is a daily ritual for most Achuar. It is a time when they gather as a family, share their dreams, drink the tea and discuss family business. It is sacred, quiet, productive. They will often interpret their dreams and use them to guide or alter the activities of the day. The tea is drunk in large quantities (4 or 5 “bowls”), followed by a purge to rid the stomach of any undigested food or impurities. This leaves them light, clean, and slightly caffeinated to begin the work of the day.
Our group was invited to partake in the tea ceremony and share our dreams which were then interpreted by the elder male of the household. People shared dreams from the recurring to the profound, from the vague to the vivid, and were guided to what they might mean for the day’s activities. My shared dream had a (to me) comedic interpretation, even though it’s a recurring anxiety dream. In it, I’m sitting in the dressing room on an opening night, dressed and ready to take on a role, but have never learned lines or attended a rehearsal. The setting is always different, but the theme and the fear is the same. I’m not prepared but I don’t leave. I somehow try to make it through. While I can’t know exactly how that translated into the Achuar language, I’m fairly certain “dressing rooms” and “theaters” are less-familiar concepts in the culture. As such, I was advised that this day might be a good day for hunting howler monkeys. While my western sensibilities had a chuckle, I also see the importance of being open to how the hunting of howler monkeys might translate to my own culture. I’ll let you know when I figure it out.
But regardless of cultural applications, dreams and the symbols within them can be valuable signposts to truths our deeper wisdom already knows. Sometimes it just requires our waking mind to get out of the way so that our deeper consciousness can come online with information – even if it appears as absurd as becoming an online shopper for stray dogs. (yep, that one happened too).
The Achuar inherently know that our wisdom lies in this spiritual realm, whether accessed through dreams or plants. And that there really is no separation between our waking dream and our sleeping dream. It’s just easier sometimes to access that wisdom when we are in the altered state of dreaming.
What is coming to you in dreams these days?
References:
Touching the Jaguar – John Perkins
Living a Committed Life – Lynne Twist