Almost exactly a year ago I had a very detailed dream that featured lots of Native American cultural symbology. I knew that I would eventually write about it here, and comments recently posted by @vestralux and @jeanne-mayell in the "situation unravelling" thread about Native American prophecy have finally pushed me to go ahead and share it. So here it is (get ready to read a novel!):
My cousins from both sides of my family and I were gathered in my parents' backyard in Connecticut for a family gathering. None of the aunts and uncles were present: it was just us younger folk (we're all in our 20s and 30s in real life). Then from the woods behind the yard, a group of young men and adolescent boys in breech clothes and armed with bows and arrows approached us and started asking us questions in a language we didn't speak. We immediately knew they were Native American and somehow figured out they were inviting us to come hunting with them. The youngest member of the hunting group, who looked to be about 15, was shy and wouldn't speak. But then he locked eyes with me and started trying to tell me something in his language. And this was a legitimate language, not gibberish. It had its own syntax and repeating patterns. As he was speaking, the knowledge came to me that this was the Munsee dialect of the Lenape language (it just so happens that where I grew up in Connecticut is at the edge of Lenape traditional territory). I also understood that I had some sort of soul connection with this boy, and he wanted to form a rapport just with me.
My cousins and I agreed to "go hunting," and so the hunting party started leading us through the woods. At one point we walked through a small clearing where another Native American man dressed in brightly colored ceremonial garb was dancing vigorously. Our guides indicated to my cousins and I that what the man was doing was none of our business, so we continued on. As we were walking through the woods, I realized that we were no longer in Connecticut - we were now in southern New Jersey in the heartland of Lenape territory (and also the ancestral heartland of my maternal Euro-American lineage. I don't have any indigenous blood that I know of, btw).
Soon after I sensed this change in geography, we emerged from the forest into a vast Lenape settlement - an entire city. Our guides continues to lead us through the city's dirt streets, which were lined with closely-packed dwellings that looked like crosses between traditional thatch wigwams and 1950s American bungalows. The whole place had a festive air: families were cooking over open outdoors fires, half-naked children were playing in the streets, and everything was just so colorful (that's right, Vestralux ? ). At one point we passed a horseshoe of bleachers where it looked like an athletic or dance competition was about to commence. I was in awe, and thought "How did I never know about this place? An entire Native American city has persisted right in the middle of New Jersey?!"
Then we were led inside a modern, Western-style building with high ceilings. The building consisted of one big room, at the center of which was a long table set with roasted root vegetables and ears of red-and-black flint corn. Next thing I knew, our guides were gone, and my cousins and I were arrayed standing throughout the room. It was silent and solemn, and a man who I understood to be a Lenape elder was addressing us, but not with words (more like intuition). He made us understand that even though we were thoroughly Euro-American in terms of blood, we also possessed spiritual Lenape lineage, and that we were being inducted into the tribe. But the solemnity was broken by piercing, distraught wailing that came from all directions. The wailing was coming from my aunt, who was calling out for my youngest cousin, Lainie (who is also the baby of the extended family): "Oh Lainie, Lainie, where have they taken my little girl!" I could read my aunt's mind, and she wanted to "save" her daughter from those "red savages" (my aunt is not a bigot in real life, btw). The dream ended there.
In the dream, my cousins and I (the younger generation) seemed to represent the new, fresh energy humanity needs if we are to survive the coming centuries. The ancient ways need to be synthesized with modern technological discoveries, and the Lenape city and our induction into their culture symbolized that synthesis. But my aunt's protests at the end of the dream indicated the persistance of the old, outmoded ways, and how aspects of our contemporary culture are actively resisting this change.
One more thing. When I had this dream, I was sleeping with a clear quartz crystal in my pillowcase. I bought it at a powwow at Akwesasne, a Mohawk nation that straddles the St. Lawrence River between New York and Ontario. Not long after the dream, I lost the crystal when I changed my sheets. But I read somewhere online that when you lose a crystal, that's usually because it has performed its task and is no longer needed.
Oh, Coyote! I had a very emotional response to your dream. It seems to me the dream was both symbolic and real. I would think you really do have a soul connection to a Lenape "boy" and you really have been inducted into the Lenape tribe. Your description was beautiful; thank you for sharing.
@Coyote I feel your dream is telling you the truth of your lineage. The detail of your memory of this dream is astonishing.
Your inner eye seems to be wide open. The fifteen year old boy feels like a long lost friend and brother and a part of yourself that possibly emerged during your own fifteenth year. He could be an older brother. But of course your own view is the one that is true for you. Mine are just my own reaction.
The hunting foray that the fifteen year old boy invited you to join seems like a coming of age ritual and possibly an induction into the Native brotherhood. As an older brother he has already graduated so he’s inducting you.
@vestralux’s post, together with @coyote’s dream has reminded me of my Native American visions throughout the years. I posted some of this stuff years back before I started the forum but the times are more appropriate now.
In 1989 during the early years of giving readings, the Harvard Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, called me to make predictions for the coming decade. The reporter asked me to predict the future of the Massachusetts economy as well as the US economy. I had never done a reading on an economy, just a person, so I decided to imagine that the economy was a person I would read and I did a timeline reading of this person’s future.
When I first closed my eyes to imagine the Massachusetts economy as an individual, I saw to my astonishment a Native American head feather. It might have been just a single feather or a full headdress, I can't remember now. But I knew the headpiece signified a chief. Furthermore I somehow knew that he was still on my property.
I have a barn on my property that is attached to our house. It was built before 1878 but we don't know how old it is. The walls of this structure are filled with dried leaves for insulation and the nails were hand pounded by a blacksmith.
I realized as I was doing that reading that the land of this state is Native land with Native consciousness rising from it. The land upon which my house sits was occupied by white Europeans for just three centuries. The Native Americans were here for 10,000 years. State Route 16 that is the route of the Boston Marathon that runs through my town started as a deer path that the Natives used. So this land’s human vibe is Native.
You could probably say this same thing for anywhere in the world. It's all Native land with native consciousness.
I remembered that as a young child, I galloped through the woods pretending to be something half human half horse. My friends and I would gallop and whoop and whinny and happily soak up the fragrance of the pines.
Throughout the nineties I’d see this native guide in my mind's eye warning about the environment. I’d tell some clients, but no one was interested.
Fast forward to 2012 when a blind and intuitively gifted woman attended my Tarot classes in my home. She suddenly one night "saw" the Native chief on my property. She later channeled him for me and he inducted me into the brotherhood using a long stick from a maple tree and dried leaves. After that, he came to me for several years during readings along with another female spirit.
He showed up when I was leading meditations to groups online.
It was silent and solemn, and a man who I understood to be a Lenape elder was addressing us, but not with words (more like intuition). He made us understand that even though we were thoroughly Euro-American in terms of blood, we also possessed spiritual Lenape lineage, and that we were being inducted into the tribe.
...But the solemnity was broken by piercing, distraught wailing that came from all directions.
Oh, dear @coyote, this was a powerful and beautiful thing to read and I'm overcome.
I've extracted the above words from your post because from the very beginning, right as I started to read, I was hit by a sense of absolute recognition about a few key things.
[Caveat: I hope it goes without saying that your own soul's certainty matters much more than mine, so please bear that in mind as you read this.]
First, what you were describing was no dream in the traditional sense. You journeyed—to a sacred yet very real place. Second, that journey was a rite, an initiation, a ceremony of conscious re-membering. Reading it, I saw that in the years and months leading up to your dream, you'd been steadily unlocking necessary key codes, which finally opened the door over that threshold. This allowed you to walk lucidly (read: fully awake) into that dimension—which is right here, on top of us now—and bring back the richly detailed memory of what you experienced there.
It was a bold and propitious step in your life story.
What I'm calling "key codes" are powerful symbolic totems, such as recognizing your connection to Coyote, and every initiation point you've had throughout the experience of difficult physical illness. You've likely also met (or soon will meet) certain people who were key codes for you. I believe that, at a certain point in our progression, our Higher Soul, in tandem with our particular Soul Collective/community of spiritual origin, selects certain key codes or awakening codes in advance of an incarnation. Each one we touch is an activation—for remembering who we are and why we've come.
Which brings me to this:
When I first read your NDE post, I was overcome with the sense that you have an indigenous, or rather, a Shamanic Spirit lineage [looking at you too, Jeanne!]. And to me, you appear to have made a choice to enter the Euro-American ancestral body in this lifetime/timeline, or series of lifetimes/timelines in order to work with its wetiko** energy directly, perhaps in hopes of assisting in its healing, and therefore, in the healing of the larger human and Earth body. This would traditionally be considered a service of higher spiritual "sacrifice," which belongs very deeply to shamanic and mystical traditions in all human cultures and timelines. But sacrifice is perhaps a misunderstood concept because nothing is actually forfeited or lost—except for the illusion (mind virus) of separation. This kind of spiritual service is done in the effort to repair (or create anew) the condition collective unity, which is the higher consciousness state we must start to awaken in order to give birth to the Earth community. And as scarce as it may seem, I have very good reason to believe that unity consciousness is already very well-seeded. (You saw it in New Jersey yourself!)
So, as @Lillinoe and @Jeanne-Mayell also saw, it is clear that you have a soul lineage with the Lenape. And I believe that your dream journey was as much an initiation and (re)induction into your spiritual community, as it was a welcome home celebration. It's potently symbolic that you woke out of the dream, or rather, were escorted out of the journey, by the piercing cries of racial fear and terror. That intensity of emotion is physically present in your current genetic sequence (and mine), and energetically lodged in our mass cultural unconscious. That means that it's a very real "object" in our environment; it may be in shadow, but it colors and influences everything it touches. As an unresolved cultural artifact, it doesn't exist in the "past." It's still here, part of the fabric of the so-called "waking" reality we all share in the United States today. But as all mystics know, what we call consensus reality is in fact a mass dream, an inversion. We're in the Upside Down, you might say. As long as our cultural traumas/karmas remain unprocessed, we forever recycle and reenact them in a billion iterations on the theme. See: mass incarceration, resurgence of fascism, detention of migrants and asylum seekers, separation of children and families, etc, ad nauseam.
The dream you had about the Lenape village is perhaps akin to what the Buddhists call Nature of Mind—it was a glimpse into the True Nature of Things. The Upright World. And even the ancients knew: time ain't linear. The future world we long for is already here. It's glimmering and faint at times, and often completely invisible to us, but it is more real than anything we can imagine.
** In case it helps: "Wetiko" is a Native American term for what shamans and others identified as a mind virus. Specifically, it refers to the darkly parasitic and collective psycho-spiritual disease they saw affecting the white race. Wetiko is the spiritual condition which has allowed for the proliferation of dominator hierarchies, imperialism, colonialism, institutional slavery, the destruction (and utter lack of reverence for) nature, etc.
P.S. Sorry for the length of this, but I feel compelled to tell you something else, Coyote, which actually came to me very powerfully in December (tried to send it more directly then, but I think it got lost).
It's this: You are a writer.
And although being a thing and being recognized for a thing are two different—and often irrelevant—adventures, I see you publishing works of writing over a lifetime. Here, I'm referring to something different than research papers or other work related to your education or chosen field, which you might also do. I'm referring to writing that you will do from absolute joy and purpose.
So, I'll say it again: you are a writer. That is your gift—I'm sure, one of many. Do not ever doubt it.
So, I'll say it again: you are a writer. That is your gift—I'm sure, one of many. Do not ever doubt it. --@vestralux to @coyote
True, so true about Coyote.
@vestralux, All of my cells came alive as I read your post. I have felt that my Native guide who sits in my side back yard, outside my door, drumming and meditating with the elders of his tribe, is operating in another dimension right now. I have thought about why many of the light workers are here in this physical form in this materialistic culture-- born into this culture, indoctrinated into its materialism and addicted to technology and junk food, to achievement and money.
We are wholly a part of this upside-down world. But our souls come from the other right-side-up world. I have seen streams of light coming here from distant stars and landing in women's wombs.
We grow in our mother's womb. We are thoroughly human and we grow up drinking the kool aide, (literally I drank a lot of kool-aide :-)) but many of us feel a disconnect with our souls. As the timelines here speed up, we feel increasingly uncomfortable, pained, by that disconnect.
If we are lucky then we wake up and begin the journey of syncing with our soul selves in this life right here on this earth. Living in this paradigm is painful. Often we feel alone in our families of origin, even while we love (and clash with) our parents and siblings, our classmates and co-workers. Then a time comes when we begin to awaken and see.
Rumi wrote, "My soul is from elsewhere and I intend to go there someday."
I love this earth with all of my being. I love the trees and the smell of the winds, and the wonder of the animals and creatures. If I can get myself up on an early summer morning, I love seeing all the spiders out with their nets, like fishermen. Everyone is busy making a living in the forest. I never want to leave this place. I want instead to bring that other place here, rather than go there, as Rumi had wished. I think that putting us into those mothers' wombs to grow up here is the divine plan for saving the earth.
@coyote @jeanne-mayell @vestralux
This is absolutely fascinating to read through. Thank you so much for sharing! My late mother was always interested in Native American culture and I am as well. There is a resonance there, somehow, and your dreams and Jeanne's and Vestralux's explanations make so much sense. I have never had nearly the kinds of experiences you all have had, but just that resonance of truth and homecoming really strikes me.
I attended a Pow Wow once that is held annually here at one of the local high schools. When the Grand Entry began with the drums and singing - oh my! I was incredible moved! I was tearing up and it just hit me in my core. What a wonderful experience. I had always wanted to have my Mom up to visit for it since then, but never had the chance before she passed last year. Maybe everyone is so moved, but I do wonder if sometimes that is our soul responding to a truth that we are not even consciously aware of? I am also very drawn to ethnic, world music from many cultures when I hear it - something just resonates and awakens in me so deeply. Really fascinating to me, those reactions. Thank you again for sharing!
I love this earth with all of my being. I love the trees and the smell of the winds, and the wonder of the animals and creatures. If I can get myself up on an early summer morning, I love seeing all the spiders out with their nets, like fisherman. Everyone is busy making a living in the forest. I never want to leave this place. I want instead to bring that other place here, rather than go there, as Rumi had wished. I think that putting us into those mothers' wombs to grow up here is the divine plan for saving the earth.
So. Damn. Beautiful.
...And so gorgeously written, Jeanne. I feel precisely the same: I want to bring that other place here.
You've just articulated something I've not entirely been able to. So many times when I read or hear someone who strongly identifies with a particular starseed community, I notice a little resistance surfacing in me. It's quiet but insistent. Like you, I've seen those very streams of light, the subtlest sine waves ribboning in from distant worlds. My daughter arrived that way and it was an utter and overwhelming recognition. And I recognize those threads in me; I'm not entirely from here.
Very recently, in fact, I saw one of my guides clearly for the first time, and could see and feel how his subtle body—a tall sparkling pillar of blue incandescence—emerges from ... another system. It doesn't seem important to label it even if I could.
But wherever else I've been or to whatever else I may belong, I know that I am Terran. Gian. An earthling (literally, "little earth being," ha!). I feel the deepest, most precious, and abiding love and responsibility for Her, for the Collective Being that we are with Her, which includes every last one of Her countless creatures and plant beings. And of course, our Star.
Your dreams and visions touch my heart in the most profound and compelling way. This is just what we need to hear in this time and place as our world teeters on the brink of war and environmental catastrophe. There is so much more to our existence. No wonder we can feel peace while there’s turmoil all around us. What a gift this is. Thank you from my heart.