The Importance of Dreams- Podcast

Heidi Walsh is hosting a podcast about the importance of dreams and the spiritual side of dreaming, particularly incorporating Lakota sources and perspectives. She has a personal interest in dreams due to her family history and experiences. She highlights that dreams have meaning and discusses different types of dreams, such as prophetic dreams and common theme dreams. She also explores the differences between Western knowledge and traditional knowledge when it comes to understanding and interpreting dreams. Heidi shares her own intense and vivid dreams, including one that predicted her ex-boyfriend's infidelity. She also mentions the significance of symbolism in dreams and how they can be used for storytelling in Native American cultures. Hello, you are now listening to the Importance of Dreams podcast by me, Heidi Walsh. When the moment came to choose our final project, I really was interested in choosing Dreams because I've had an interesting history of it by myself. I will touch on that more later, but as of right now, I want to touch on why I chose to do this podcast and my goal from it. My goal for this podcast is to bring attention to Dreams and the more spiritual side that they have while incorporating Lakota sources and perspectives. My family history is covered in random Dream stories and actually Native American sides, so I wanted to kind of touch on that a little bit. My grandma on my dad's side had a huge scrapbook made of all of our ancestry tree before she passed away, and a lot of it had to do with Chippewa and Blackfoot ancestry. When I was younger, she would tell me stories of visiting Minnesota and sometimes visiting powwows actually with her family, and I was pretty intrigued by that. So I do know that that is somewhat in my blood and my ancestry, so it's really interesting to me. Growing up, I've also kind of known it's there, even though it's not really talked about a whole lot in my family, but my dad is more Native presenting since my grandma was somewhat as well, but I have grown up with that somewhat in my culture and knowing that it is a thing. My dad is also a historian, so growing up, he has told me many stories about battles and George Custer and a bunch of different things. So I am kind of familiar with it, and it is kind of part of how I grew up. More importantly, I know for a fact that both grandmas and great grandmas on my family's sides have a history of interesting dreams. What I found interesting is the fact that it skipped over my dad and my mom and only came to me. There's no history or anything said about my grandfathers or my great grandfathers having dreams of this sort. I will touch on that more later in the podcast, but as of right now, I do want to get over my main points for this podcast, at least in the beginning. I really want to highlight the fact that dreams are simply more than a random occurrence. They have actual meaning, and if you look deeper into it and listen throughout this podcast, I'm hoping to open your eyes to that. Based off of an article that I read in Sleepopolis, there are up to 10 different kinds of dreams. From night horrors, nightmares, vivid dreams, prophetic dreams, and common theme dreams, there are up to 10 different kinds. The two specific ones I will be highlighting in this podcast are prophetic dreams and common theme dreams. Prophetic dreams are dreams that end up seeing events, images, or symbols that could end up predicting the future, while common theme dreams are ones that typically are seen by being chased, drowned, cheated on, getting in a car wreck, the usual dreams that you hear about. I'm going to be using Janet Burlow's article, Dreaming of Double Woman, the Ambivalent Role of the Female Artist in North American Indian Myth, to further describe the actual feeling of dreams. She describes the dreaming as, Dreaming is experientially transforms our sense to the everyday world in a holistic and immediate emotional counter, not a logical or abstract sense. I thought this quote perfectly summed up everything that I've heard from our class discussions and from readings over the semester about how dreaming is more than just waking up and going about your day. It's a real experience, to say the least. I felt this way as well. I've had dreams where I've woken up and I've been like, what on earth just happened? And I felt a sense of that was something completely different, which I think that Janet Burlow perfectly sums up. The thing is, growing up, I was always confused because my dreams were so different from what my friends have been telling me their dreams were. I vividly always remembered mine, and some of my friends were just like, yeah, I wake up and it is what it is. My friends would always say how soon they forgot their dreams, while mine typically stuck around. It wasn't just a wake up and it is what it is. Mine stayed in my head for days, or I would consistently be thinking about what happened trying to make sense of it. However, how you make sense of your dreams happens to come from where your culture is and where your knowledge system is from. The two knowledge systems I'm going to be acknowledging are ones that we've talked about every single class period, and that is Western knowledge and traditional knowledge. Western knowledge is from the West and more of the modern ideas that we have in this world. Western knowledge of dreams always pushes that dreams come from your REM sleep cycle and that they can be caused by fluctuation of your hormones while you sleep. Dreams from the Western perspective typically aren't taken seriously or written down after you wake up. I've also found that to Western knowledge, when you wake up and you question your dreams and you're trying to make sense of them, it can also be considered as psychic. However, there typically is always a negative connotation with the word psychic. And it's really hard for me to grasp that people don't see that as a normal thing to wake up and be like, what was that? What was that dream? I don't know what that meant. My great grandma, for example, was typically called crazy or psychic because the majority of her dreams towards the end of her life were so intense. However, Western knowledge always pushes that it could be considered crazy or mentally ill. Whereas traditional knowledge is where you gain it through your culture and everything that has been observed and seen throughout time, which is going to be the majority of the Lakota perspective I will be talking about. Dreams are seen as Wakan, which is an idea that they are holy, sacred, and incomprehensible. They aren't seen as a simple dream. From class discussions, I've always pulled that the dreams you have must be honored or fulfilled. And if you don't carry out what the dream proposes, bad things could happen to you. Other examples that I've learned of Wakan are the pipe. The pipe originates from the story of the white buffalo calf woman. Stay with me here because I'm going to try and pronounce it to give absolute cultural context, but I believe it's pronounced Tis-on-Way. The only pronunciation that I can find was on Facebook, so bear with me. But the story of the white buffalo calf woman is considered incredibly sacred because she brings the pipe and the pipe bag to two men that are going through a famine, and she tells them that the people are going to prosper again. It's considered one of the most sacred stories other than the wind cave story, and it's highly regarded in Lakota culture. Suzanne Owen actually talks about the pipe and says that it is used as a symbol uniting all tribes as well as aligning themselves with traditionalist perspectives. As I said before, the pipe is highly regarded and seen as a very sacred item in Lakota culture, especially because it uses tobacco, which is another highly thought of in Wakan idea. Tobacco is given in prayer, in spiritual aspects, in death, in signs of mourning. It is used in a lot of things. Touching on some other traditional knowledge concepts, I just want to reiterate that spirits are real, and that another big concept that they have is Mitakoye Oyasin. It roughly translates to, my relatives all, and it creates a sense of relationship with your ancestors in the universe, and another example of extended personhood, or kinship. I also wanted to say that most traditional knowledge is experimental or observational. For example, constellations and buffalo with large patches of sunflowers. You wouldn't know that buffalo typically are in large patches of sunflowers because they love them, unless you absolutely observe and see that they're either A, there, or B, the patches of the sunflowers that are flattened down from them laying on them. It's kind of like hippos in grasslands. You wouldn't know that hippos are in the grasslands unless you can literally see the divots and ruts in the grass from them laying there. So now that we know about the kinds of dreams and the different ideas between Western knowledge and traditional knowledge, now we can face towards the traditional knowledge side of this conversation. Leaning towards Lakota perspectives, I want to start speaking about the different kinds of visions and dreams that they have, and touch on a dream from Gloku in the Water Lily book that has a lot of symbolism in it. I wanted to say that visions and dreams are both a little bit different from each other. Visions are more of like an absolutely conscious and kind of awake sense of a dream, while an actual dream is you're actually sleeping and actually in an unconscious state. I don't want to say fully conscious, though, for visions, because you still are spiritually enhanced and in the spiritual experience. So you're not really conscious, but you're still there, if that makes sense. You're not laying down, I guess you could say. So pulling from Ruth Benedict's article, The Vision in Plains Culture, the Sundance has talked a lot about between Blackfoot, and I've seen the connections with the Sioux, and how it's a really powerful spiritual experience. Benedict describes it as a self-inflicted torture to the visionary experience. And I think it kind of pushes the idea of sacrifice in the struggle of the Sundance alone, because it's very physically demanding from what I've heard in class discussions. And physically, you're tied through the pegs in your chest that you have to rip out at the end of the dance. And the breaking free of those pegs at the end kind of results and resembles in the breaking free of the experience or the spiritual vision that you're having. And then the other kind of experience I wanted to talk about was Glowcrease's dream in chapter six of Waterlily, pages 44 to 47. This is going to be the quote-unquote unconscious state where she is asleep and having this. To summarize her dream, a Yankton, Dakota medicine man and a diviner who healed her father came to her with a message. And basically, she asked him what the message might be. Four crows flew by her. From class discussions, crows are very highly regarded and incredibly smart animals compared to what Western knowledge thinks. Apparently, they're known to hold grudges and that they have a really good memory. Anyways, so the four crows flew by her and the medicine man clarified that after four nights, she would be in danger and needed to become invisible. Then the medicine man left with a fog and she awoke. Four days later, she was beginning to get really paranoid and knew that something was coming up and knew that something was going to happen at this point. So her friend kind of told her that they should go pick berries and she knew that it was wrong, but she went anyways. And then she ended up getting lured to the river with her friend since her friend wanted to drink fresh river water instead of the salty creek water. As described and summarized in the chapter, she heard three whooping sounds and she turned to run without throwing sand behind her. And when she looked back, she saw that her friend was being beaten and scalped. Pulling from page 47 itself, it says that in After Years, this was Glow-Ku's prized adventure story. Whenever she told it, she began with a graphic dream, which she was sure was a prophecy. And in a describing way, she threw sand behind her. She'd explain, I was led to create a fog like the one in my dream and it re-entered me invisible. So after her dream, Glow-Ku was literally able to sit there and reflect and be like, wow, this literally happened to me. My friend literally was beaten and scalped and killed. And she was really able to sit and think about everything that had happened. Which in Western knowledge, that's typically something that wouldn't have happened. No one would have thought, wow, this was in my dream or wow, this happened because of my dream or because a menacing man came to me in my dream. Western knowledge would look at it as circumstance or as murderers or they would find some other reason other than a dream. I also wanted to talk about how dreams like that can be used as a form of storytelling through crafts and beadwork. Typically, spiritual experiences like that will result in the storytelling being told through beads or crafts or art, sometimes murals, sometimes paintings on buffalo hide is seen a lot in history. Glow-Ku's dream really reminded me of some of my own and how intense the experience was. I also found in Burlow's article that she talks about Jane, who was a young girl who had very strong dreams and was trying to explain it to her family, but no one seemed to really listen until she started explaining herself. She describes Jane as, Jane has always strongly believed in visions and dreams and having experienced them since childhood, which I personally related to. Since I was a young kid, I would say probably around seven or eight, I started getting incredibly vivid dreams where I thought I was there, I was present, things happened to me and it was so real. No, at the time I had gone through an incredible change in my life. My family and I actually moved to Africa for about four or five years when I was younger and we were missionaries. So not only had I changed physical locations in the world, I also changed a spiritual location. I have a strong feeling that it was a completely different experience living and spiritually being in Africa compared to the United States. One of the first nights we were there, I had a sane dream. No, this is one I can still recall to this day compared to something as simple as waking up. Basically, when you live in Africa, you have to have a mosquito net over your bed or else you can get mosquito bites and potentially malaria. But I had a mosquito net over my bed and I woke up in the middle of the night and I always slept under my covers because I was really scared as a kid so I always would sleep underneath them. But I woke up in the middle of the night and I felt so awake. It was like I felt bare. It was insane. And there was a bright light, a bright beam that was coming straight through my blanket that I was hidden under and across the beam from me was my other smaller blanket, like my childhood blanket, and I had to reach through the beam of light to get my childhood blanket. When I reached through the beam, I looked up through it and there were hidden figures all around the beam. At first they were black, but once they leaned in, they kind of looked like, I want to say alien-like. They were all different and the closest I could explain it to was a scene from Star Wars, honestly. When they're in the cantina and everyone's playing the little saxophones and it's a bunch of different alien-looking things. It was very weird. So when I stuck my hand through the beam to get my other blanket, they pushed their heads down and looked at me through it and that's when I could tell what they exactly looked like. However, they pulled their heads out again and then they went straight back to black figures. So when I stuck my hand through the beam, I saw a hand come back down on me and I remember feeling it and feeling it scratch me and I screamed and I woke up. My parents came out of my room, the lights came on, everything came on and I was in a hysterical state. What I realized though, when I looked down, was that I had a huge claw mark all over my arm. I cannot make this up. It was insane. It's so hard to put into words how real it all felt, but now that I'm sitting here, I'm reflecting on it like I have been for how many years now. It's just so, it's incredibly insane to think about. My mom actually got the house christened after that because she was so scared. For months after that dream, I was seeing black figures all over the house at night. The closest thing I could compare it to would be something from Harry Potter, somewhat looking like a Dementor, but at the same time, it was just so deformed and just floaty. Since then, I've always been incredibly paranoid about things that I'm seeing, but I've always been aware that there is more out there than just us. So since I was a kid, I have had incredibly articulate and intense dreams, but that is it. I will not have smaller dreams. I will not have meaningless dreams. I won't have things about dinosaurs or anything like that. It is just intense and scary dreams or dreams that I get incredible amounts of deja vu from or dreams like cheating. I laugh, but it's true. The reason I really chose this project was because I recently got out of an incredibly toxic relationship that I was in for too long, and I thought this would be the perfect opportunity for me to dive into the dreams that I had while I was in that situation. I've always had a strong gut feeling when things are off, and so I always knew that something wasn't right towards the last few months of my relationship. The way I knew this, though, was through my dreams. I've always known for some reason that I can trust them and that they're never wrong and that they are almost prophetic, as I've talked about before in this podcast. To slowly go over a few of my dreams that I've had, they were mostly involving other girls because my boyfriend did cheat on me multiple times, but I knew that from my dreams, and it feels crazy, and it feels like I have a superpower, but it was really cool being able to tell him that I knew because I was quite literally able to say what the girls looked like, what their names were, and it was crazy. I felt like it was an Avenger movie or something. But the reason I'm going over these dreams is to point out the important symbolism in them. Glocu talks about the fog from her dream, right, and how she was led to create a fog just like the one that it rendered in her dream from the medicine man. He quite literally told her to become invisible, which is what she did with the sand, which made me think more about the symbolism in my dreams and how they were so important. I also learned in my human cultures class this semester with Dr. Castaneda that symbolism is much more than people think it is. There's a difference between circumstance and symbolism, but I will get into that after I explain my dreams. One of my dreams basically was I was attending the wedding of my ex-boyfriend and a different girl. His whole family was there, and I was sobbing my eyes out, chasing him through this huge flower field. This was right before my birthday, and little did I know that he was cheating on me the whole time because we went to different schools. It's a long story, but it's for context. So I chased him through this huge flower field that he said that he planted for the girl, and basically, I also saw the girl in my dream. She was wearing a white dress, pale, very long brown hair, blue eyes. It was insane. It was very, very vivid of what she looked like. And my dream ended by me running back to the wedding venue and looking at his grandma. She hugged me and said, Honey, he doesn't love you anymore. And I woke up. The next day, I'm scrolling on my Instagram, and a recommended person pops up on my feed. The recommended person was the exact spitting image of the girl I had a dream about the night before. Same dress, same hairstyle, everything. It was her. And then the next day, my ex-boyfriend showed up to my room with bunches of flowers. Not only was I like, one, you probably cheated on me, but two, it was the circumstance that he had to have the flowers, which I now know is a guilty thing for men, well, should I say boys, to do something wrong and try to make up with it with flowers or gifts as a love-bombing technique, which is wrong. Another crazy dream I had was the fact that he also got with another girl who was one of my friends, and then the next day, I'm on the phone with him, and I get a text from her saying, Hey, what do you want to write to so-and-so where I'm trying to get a new one for my little brother, which I quite literally the night before had a dream about them together, and I was like, Are you kidding me right now? Circumstance or possibility he was cheating on me? Most likely both, but I'm not sure. And the latest one that I've had, which was quite literally one of the craziest ones, was about him and another girl on a beach. There were fireworks in the bathroom. It was very brief, but basically, I could tell that there was something about this girl, and then I remember looking at his arm, and he had written, Me plus you equals never again, and I woke up. Come to find out, the next day, one of my friends sends me a picture of him and this girl on a beach, listening to fireworks. Well, the song fireworks, and then there was quite literally fireworks in the background. You cannot tell me that is just circumstance. So my dreams have quite literally added up to me having proof that my ex-boyfriend cheated on me, being able to prove it with, you know, my dreams. I definitely was called crazy a few times, but I was right. This entire experience has pushed me to think deeper about why that was possible for me to know those things. Was it the universe trying to tell me something? Was it already on my head, as Western knowledge would say, or an imbalance of my hormones? I do not know, but I do know for a fact that the universe was looking out for me, which makes me lean more towards the traditional knowledge side of Lakota culture, because they vividly talk about how important dreams are, and how that the universe will quite literally look out for you and tell you when you need to know things. So I urge you as a listener to please pay attention to important symbols in your life and things that you see, because they are there for a reason. The whole point in my goal of this podcast was to open your eyes to the fact that there is more out there on the spiritual side. It's not just circumstance. It's not just, oh, it is what it is. The universe is looking out for you in ways that you will never know. I'm urging you, as soon as you wake up, if you have a dream, write it down somewhere. Point out key symbols and things that you remember from the dream. People, colors, images, anything. Having dates down for it. Having times you woke up down. Anything like that. It is absolutely helpful. Because I've done that lately, and I will be in the middle of my day in classes or whatever, and I will sit there and be like, no way I had a dream about that. No way this happened. And I know that it's not just circumstance, because my grandmas and my great grandmas have all had these kinds of dreams and these experiences. So it has to be something else. Lastly, I will reiterate that I'm just going to urge you to pay attention to traditional knowledge and to really hone in on the fact that dreams are more than just a wake up and go kind of thing. They are spiritual. They are powerful. They are intuitive and insightful. And they are meant to be paid attention to. If you keep your eyes open and you keep your mind open, there are going to be things pointed out to you that you would not have seen to begin with. And I hope that through this podcast, I've been able to give you insight and knowledge from Lakota culture to explore your dreams and to try and decode them yourself. Hopefully, if you've been in the spot that I've been for a long time and been questioning why you have dreams and what they mean, and how do you go about that, that now you have some kind of closure and comfort on that. So I just wanted to say thank you so much for listening to my podcast, The Importance of Dreams. I've learned so much from doing this research project and overall taking this course this semester. So stay tuned and keep your dreams dreaming.