Spirit Dreaming

I often get spirit visitations in dream world, which is fairly common. It’s easier for our Western minds to be open to seeing someone we know has passed in a world that we expect to be irrational. The spirits always appear different than their surroundings, as if they are watchers of my subconscious theatre, swept up in the story but not of it. They appear to me as if made of a separate quality of film overlaid onto that of the dreaming.

When I see a spirit, I take notice of the things that seem to pull my focus. They are likely to be relevant, whether I understand them or not. Sometimes it’s a word they say or the way they say it. Sometimes it is an item they hold. Other times it’s a reflection of myself in their eye. I bring these images and thoughts out of dream world and mull them over in my meditations.

Last Year’s Dream

I am walking a path in the wood. The forest is old and the trees are thick and tall. There is hardly any underbrush. Our village is in this wood. At the heart of the village is a large stone table. I approach it, alone. There are two people laying on the stone table, head to feet, a man and a woman. They are both naked. They are both old with white hair. They are flickering to fill the shape of themselves and I know they are ancestors of mine.

They take turns speaking, but I only hear their words in my head. On the stone table, their lips do not move. When I look at her I hear seagulls and I smell the cloying scent of sod and sea spray. Could this be a mother of my mothers from Ireland? I look at him and I feel the heft of an axe in my hand, in a younger wood than this one.

They are speaking in my head, overlapping now. I was chosen because I can hear them. The old man is crying; he never thought he would see this done. His relief is palpable. I hold his hand and I tell him that it is okay. I assure him that I’ll see it through. He sighs and passes on, his flesh and bones turning to stardust. Other stardusted spirits and people from my village in the woods gather around the stone table for the funeral.

I am standing at the back of the crowd and the old woman shows me a picture in my head. She is digging up an ancient drumming shield in a place I am familiar with. I think I am watching it backwards. I think she is burying it. There is a secret around this object. It is important to unbury it, even though I don’t know what the darkness around it is.

When I leave my village it is dusk and the shield is slung over my shoulder. In the dream I think of it as “her weapon.” The drumming shield is octagon shaped, with slightly curved edges that makes it’s shape like a bowl. When I strike it, it sounds like a drum. There is a small circle in the northwest quadrant and a crescent around it in the southeast quadrant of the shield…

…then I am standing on a ship. It is modern in appearance, but feels ageless and ancient at once. I see a friend of mine on deck. In the real world when I had this dream, my friend was on walkabout in the Celtic Isles. He does not recognize the face I wear in the dream but when I speak to him he sees me and gives me the biggest hug. I tell him that I am about to fix an 800 year-old wrong. He tells me to journey well.

Bits of the dream cling to me in the waking world, like puzzle pieces that would fit together if only I could see the larger pattern. They are wheels within wheels... the immediate pull to think on my maternal line... the secret with 8 sides... an 800 year-old wrong… the feel of being handed a quest. An 800 year-old wrong would put the ancestral generation somewhere in the 1100s. I meditate on the past, seeking shadows and blocks in the energy flow as I drift backwards through the bloodstream.

I trust in the dream, that there is something there, some secret unknown, lingering in the recesses of my ancestral memory. I understand that it may always remain unknown to me. Just because I don’t know what caused a shadow on the energy flow, doesn’t mean I am incapable of clearing it out so that the energy may move freely again… and perhaps remove the larger hamster-wheel patterns my family has been repeating.

I make offerings to the ancestors to let go of the things they held onto in death. I make offerings to appease the wrongs the ancestors of mine had done. I open my heart to forgiveness and embrace my ancestors for whatever lives they might have led. Good or bad, I would not be here without them. That is the comfort I inhale and the acceptance I exhale.

What is remembered lives. What is remembered never truly dies. What is dead lives on within me.