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The Wisdom of Island Woman

“The memory of a dream is the memory of a journey. It may have been a short visit to a neighbor’s place or a date with the lover you will meet three years from now. It may have been a journey to the spirits on the moon, or into a universe inside a stone that is as big as the universe out there.When you hold on to the dream, or let it gently return, a road opens before you. Move toward the dreamspace, and you travel between the worlds. Step fully inside the dream, and you are there.”

                              -           Island Woman, Mohawk arendiwanen (“woman of power”)

These are the words of an ancient Iroquois woman of power who started communicating with me across time when I moved to a farm in upstate New York and also entered a deep visionary encounter with my own Celtic ancestors. She insisted in speaking her own language, which proved to be an early form of Mohawk, laced with Huron, the language of her birth-people. I was required to study both these languages to bring through her teachings. The story of Island Woman is told in my new book, Dreamways of the Iroquois (Inner Traditions, February 2005) which also carries her teachings on dreaming, healing and honoring the soul’s purpose.

 The following book excerpt describes my first encounter with Island Woman.

 

Called by an Ancient Dreamer

One night, the hawk lent me her wings. As the lightning bugs danced over the fields, I drifted in the twilight zone between waking and sleep. One of the images that rose spontaneously on my mental screen was a double spiral. I had studied one like it, carved in stone thousands of years ago, on a guardian stone at the great megalithic tomb at Newgrange during a recent trip to Ireland.  I thought of it as the Eyes of the Goddess, containing the whirling patterns of creation and destruction. I was drawn to the double spiral. The shapes swirled and pulled me through. I found myself lifting effortlessly out of my body. I flowed toward a window, and its texture stretched like toffee to let me pass. I reveled in the sense of flight as I lifted above the tree line, traveling north over the village in the direction of Lake George. The sense of flying was vividly physical, and, as I enjoyed it, I realized I was neither disembodied nor confined to my regular form. I had sprouted wings. They were those of a hawk, but scaled to my human proportions. I enjoyed the sensation of riding a thermal, and of swooping down to inspect the shoreline of the lake—and then the small stab of discomfort as one of my wings scraped the needles of an old dried-up spruce.

I noticed that the scenes below me seemed to be those of another time. There was no development around the lake, no modern roads, few signs of settlement. I flew over primal forests. I felt a tug of intention drawing me ever north. I chose to follow it, without any sense of compulsion. I was drawn down to a cabin in the woods, and I felt I might be somewhere near Montreal, though in this reality the modern city of Montreal did not exist.

I was welcomed by an ancient woman of great beauty and power. She held a wide beaded belt. One end was draped over her shoulder. She stroked the belt as she spoke in a musical cadenced voice, wave after wave of sound lapping like lake water. I noticed that the beads were cylindrical and were mostly shining white, so bright they cast a glow between us. Human and animal figures had been outlined in darker beads – a wolf, and the silhouettes of a man and a woman holding hands.

I was thrilled by this encounter, but mystified. The ancient woman’s language was more foreign to me than the hawk’s. In subsequent dreams and visions, I was drawn deeper into the world of the ancient woman. Though she spoke in a language I did not know, she spoke—like the hawk—as if I should understand her. I wrote down bits and pieces of her monologues, transcribing the words phonetically as best I could. Then, I sought out people in the ordinary world who might be able to decipher them for me. Native  speakers eventually identified my dream language as an archaic form of the Mohawk Iroquois language—"the way we might have spoken three hundred years ago"—laced with some Huron words.

In time, I was helped to understand that the ancient woman who had called me was an arendiwanen, or woman of power, an atetshents, or dream shaman, and a clan mother of the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk nation, and that she was speaking to me from another time as well as another dimension. I came to call her Island Woman, partly because she was born among the Hurons, whom the Mohawks called the Island People.

In contact with her, I became vividly aware of the possibility of time travel in dreaming. We can travel into the future to scout out challenges and opportunities that lie ahead on the road of life. We can also reach into the future—as Island Woman seemed to be doing—for solutions to problems that cannot be resolved with the tools available in our own time. Most exciting, as conscious dream travelers we can enter the now time of people living in other eras, past or future, and bring one another mutual support, guidance, and healing. The people we can visit through timefolding in this way may include our own younger or older selves.   

Excerpted from Dreamways of the Iroquois by Robert Moss.