The Shaman’s Dreams: An Introduction to Shamanic Dreamwork

Image by Garrett Jackson

Your body has sunk into the surface beneath you like a hefty rock. Your eyes may be moving rapidly behind your shut eyelids. The world around you is dark, lit only by a seemingly-endless tent cover of stars, and is in near-total quiet, save for the flapping of a hungry bat's wings or the sprinting of a wind still wide awake. 

And suddenly, something happens. A revelation arrives - a symbolic display that carries valuable guidance, a literal foretelling of something to come, or a visit from beloved Grandma long-departed. 

You've experienced a different kind of dream than usual - a "big dream." And as shamans know, it is worth paying attention to.

Shamanic work done with dreams - which I here call shamanic dreamwork - is a powerful, multifaceted, and incredibly rich aspect of shamanic practice. And through the shaman's eyes, there are different kinds of dreams that can be acknowledged. Here, I'd like to very briefly share about three of them.

Sleeping Dreams: Getting Guidance Under the Stars

One type of dream is the sleeping dream. This noctural or nap experience is what most of us may think of when we hear the word "dream."

Anthropology professor David R. Samson has noted that dreams that occur while we are in the altered sleep states of consciousness are universal human experiences (even those that would classify themselves as "non-dreamers" have still been shown to exhibit dream-like behaviors during sleep). And these nighttime dreams have quite a history of holding significance. 

Sandra Ingerman, a world-renowned shamanic teacher of 40-something years, shared in her talk, Prophetic Dreams and the Land of Dreams, that (emphasis mine) "[t]here were very strong dreamers in shamanic cultures," and that the community "really depended on these dreamers for being able to give information. They would get where food sources were, when to move, climate changes that were happening...so the dreamers were so important."

And today, sleeping dreams hold no less importance. With your head on your pillow, you can receive requested or spontaneous profound revelations about your health, relationships, and recommended steps to take in your life from transpersonal forces, such as your soul and your helping spirits. Sleep dreams are also wonderful openings for experiencing healing of all kinds from compassionate spirits, including the advanced classic shamanic healings of extracting blocking energies, releasing possessing spirits, and retrieving lost soul energy.

Daydreams: How We Create Our Lives - and the World

A second type of dream is the daydream.

Daydreams are those experiences that you have while awake, but maybe not fully focused on the moment happening around you in the physical world. Awareness of one's daydreams is important in a shamanic way of life, as daydreaming is how we create our world. Collectively, we are literally [day]dreaming our world into being.

Shamans often say that we in the West are "dreaming the wrong dream." Rather than an admonishment about the content of our sleeping dreams (which we all know can get pretty wild!), this is a teaching about how what we are dreaming into being through our daydreams is often not of beauty, harmony, and blessings. In her article “Medicine for the Earth,” Ingerman writes that “[a]ll spiritual traditions teach that everything manifests on a spiritual level before manifesting on the physical.” Thus, if we change what we are daydreaming, we can change what we are creating for ourselves and our planet.

Although some of us were ridiculed for daydreaming as children, daydreaming at the appropriate times as an adult is not only healthy - it is shamanically encouraged! In fact, Mark Rego, M.D. wrote that daydreaming is a "mental vitamin," saying that, "[i]n our era of misplaced attention, much of the time that might have once been spent daydreaming is devoted to following a thread on our phones or listening to a podcast. We leave little time to let our minds wander. This is unfortunate as daydreaming enables[ c]reativity, emotional processing, and planning, and can be a release from boredom."

Further, following the logic that daydreams help to sculpt reality, it stands to reason that daydreaming is a wonderful way to stimulate self-healing. 

This knowledge of daydreaming begs the question: What are you daydreaming for yourself? For your community? For all of life? 

You are a reflection of the creative force(s) of the universe. You have creative power. Your imagination helps to create your reality. How are you using it? And how would you like to use it now?

Start with one area of your life, such as your health or professional life. Focus your conscious daydreaming on it. Make it a regular practice to dream something different - something better - for it. Use all of your senses to do so. Experience it as being here now, not in some distant future. 

The Waking Dream: Conscious Journeys to Another Reality

The final type of dream that I would like to mention here is what we could call the “waking dream.”

This is a visionary experience, very often containing evidentially-verifiable information that the recipient did not know prior to sharing it with the verifier, that we have in altered states of consciousness, much as we are in when we are asleep (although, in the waking dream altered states, we are "expansively" or "restfully awake").

The example of a waking dream that I will present here is the shaman's most important ceremony - the shamanic journey, in which we embark on an embodied spirit flight into another reality - the spirit world - to consciously access knowledge, guidance, and healing assistance for ourselves and others from our helping and compassionate spirits. The state of consciousness in which we journey is the theta state, which itself could be described as a dream-like state. Other types of waking dreams could include the visionary experiences that we have whilst in meditation, conducting oracle or tarot card readings, or even spontaneously on a walk, doing the dishes, or vacuuming our home.

Making Sense of Our Dreams

In our conscious daydreaming, we control what we experience. But when one has a waking or sleeping dream, where there are some aspects that are not within our control, it can be a knee-jerk reaction to rush to a dream dictionary or Google and ask what the meaning of something that you experienced in the dream is. 

But Google is not a good shaman. 

Shamanism is a path of direct revelation, meaning that you would go directly to your helping spirits and ask them what the meaning of an experience that you had in a waking or sleeping dream was. As the symbols, displays, metaphors, and experiences in your waking and sleeping dreams are for you, their meanings for you or your client could be worlds away from the meaning that same symbol or experience has for someone else. When puzzled about the significance of an experience, in order to not miss out on the true meaning and magic of what the universe is trying to convey to you, it is important to go back to the universe to ask for interpretive help. Enter…

…the Mistress or Master of Dreams

A Mistress or Master of Dreams is a helping spirit often met in a spirit realm called the Land of Dreams. For those who are versed in the shamanic worldview, the Land of Dreams (and the Master or Mistress) can be found in either the Lower, Middle, or Upper Worlds. In journeying to this land, or intending to connect with them in meditation, card-reading, or automatic writing, you can dialogue with these compassionate beings not only to ask for a sleeping dream to be interpreted, or advice on how to further move yourself out of the way in your waking visionary work, but to be shown what it is that you are daydreaming into creation on a regular basis...and how you can change it, for the betterment of yourself and all of life. 

This is an exercise that I will lead you on in my upcoming free online experience, entitled The Shaman's Dreams: Shamanic Approaches to Sleeping Dreams, Visionary Experiences, and Daydreaming Your World into Being, on June 25th, 2024, hosted by the Free Thinker Institute. I am so looking forward to further exploring the rich subject of dreams in this sacred circle.

Again, this article, as well as my aforementioned class, are only very brief introductions to shamanic dreamwork. There is much to learn about the effective and ethical use and application of these different kinds of dreams. And short articles like this are not the place to grasp the full power of shamanism - it is through your training and firsthand spiritual experiences that true knowledge comes in.

But whether it is motionless under that never-ending ceiling of stars, or in a deep yet wakeful state of consciousness, or with expansive music "carrying you" into the daydreaming of brilliant new aspects of life into being, dreams are there, waiting for you to harness their power. So let us use them, together, to dream a better world into being.