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Dreams Guide Us to the Necessary Past
By Robert Moss
The Akan peoples of
West Africa have a mysterious and intriguing symbol: a bird-like creature
that is moving forward while looking back over its shoulder. This is the
Sankofa.
The literal
translation of the Akan proverb associated with it says, “It is not taboo to
go back and fetch what you forgot.” A contemporary version runs: “We must
go back and reclaim our past so we can move forward.” Sometimes the Sankofa
is depicted with an egg in its beak, evoking the power to hatch a better
future by taking good care of the past.
The Sankofa reminds us to claim the best from the past, which
requires us to discern what we take from history – to recover what empowers
and supports life, and to leave behind what burdens us and holds us back.
I believe that claiming the necessary past and releasing the
histories that bind and confine is essential to living fully and creatively.
This involves not only our personal stories, but ancestral history.
Our ancestors – going all the way back through the bloodlines, perhaps – and
the ancestors of the land where we live often appear in spontaneous sleep
dreams. Sometimes they come looking for us. As dream journeyers, we may
choose to go looking for them. We may even develop the skills to become
dream archeologists.
While “archeology” is often understood to be the science of unearthing and
studying antiquities, the root meaning of the word takes us deeper: it is
the study of the arche, the first and primal, chief and essential
things.
Dream archeology involves melding the best tools of analysis and
scholarship to the experiential techniques of Active Dreaming. Through
conscious dream travel, dream reentry and mutual visioning we can enter
other times and gain first-hand knowledge of conditions there that we can
proceed to research and verify. We may assist both scholars and
practitioners to go beyond what was previously understood. We can reclaim
the best of ancient traditions and rituals in authentic, helpful and timely
ways.
As we enter deeper levels of past and future history, we may be able to
re-vision the linear sequence of events from the standpoint of
metahistory, an understanding that transcends linear time.
We can enter the life
situations of personalities in the past or future who may be related to us
in various ways – as ancestors or descendants, as members of our larger
spiritual families, as embodied aspects of ourselves or as counterpart
selves actually living in other places and times. And we can experiment with
direct communication with personalities living in other times, for mutual
benefit, in their “now” time as well as the spacious Now of the
Dreamtime.
Amy Brucker’s personal account of exploring
the world of her New England ancestors is a fine example of a dream
archeologist on the job.
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