Animal dream series: The animals are awakening and dusting off their wings

"Elf and Chicken" Photograph by Linda Mastrangelo

The animal envoys of the Unseen Power no longer serve, as in primeval times, to teach and guide mankind. Bears, lions, elephants, ibexes, and gazelles are in cages in our zoos. Man is no longer the newcomer in a world of unexplored plains and forests, and our immediate neighbors are not wild beasts but other humans…(n)either in body nor mind do we inhabit the world of those hunting races of Paleolithic millennia…(m)emories of their animal envoys still must sleep somehow, within us; for they wake a little and stir when we venture into wilderness…(w)hatever the inward darkness may have been to which shamans of those caves descended in their trances, the same must lie within ourselves, nightly visited in sleep.

-Joseph Campbell from The Power of Myth

Image of Goddess from Neolithic Period, 5,900-5,800 BC

In his book Our Dreaming Mind, psychologist, researcher, and professor, Robert Van de Castle cites that adults only dream of animals 7% of the time and that children have a tendency to dream more of animals about 27%; perhaps being more “open” and closer to their true natures. Through personal research, dream groups and interactions with people I find that number of animal dreams in adults is probably higher now and perhaps even growing. Founder and director, Meredith Sabini, and associate director, Richard Russo of The Dream Institute of Northern California in Berkeley in their lecture at John F. Kennedy University noted that during Culture Dreaming TM many of the dreams were of animals wounded, caged, set free or actively engaged with the dreamer. Why is this happening now?

In the opening chapter of Alice Beck Kehoe’s Shamans and Religion: An Anthropological Exploration in Critical Thinking, two beautiful scenes describe men embodying a bird; one in Mexico the other in Siberia. Though we are peering into two very different parts of the world both ‘dances’ carry a remarkable resemblance to one another. Kehoe explores why this is so; perhaps cosmology has a role to play. “They say of religious rituals that ‘real-world objects” become metaphors standing for concepts in the society’s cosmology. Swans stand for an ideal of pure grace embodied in strength…” For a shaman to embody swan’s power using strong emotion she might literally be “beating the illness” with swan energy. Religious scholar, Mircea Eliade writes "All over the world learning the language of animals, especially of birds, is equivalent to knowing the secrets of nature...Birds are psychopomps. Becoming a bird oneself or being accompanied by a bird indicates the capacity, while still alive, to undertake the ecstatic journey to the sky and beyond."

Female "Bird" Figure Paleolithic Period, 23,000 BC

To know a culture is to understand its cosmology and the rituals that surround personal identity, community and knowing where we come from. We Westerners lack a cosmology that shapes who we are as a people and ultimately how we treat the planet. So perhaps it’s through dreaming that animals need to make contact with us:  An indigenous practice we still engage with. And like the darkness in shamans’ caves, as Joseph Campbell stated, the animals are ‘awakening within us’ in the dreamtime and by revering them once again, they may take us "to the sky and beyond."