A practice I learned from Sara, my great grandmother, was to speak my dreams aloud in the morning. I now realize that by my saying this out loud my dreams were carried into my waking time and became a part of my waking life. Sara left life shortly before I was six and she never told me why I was to speak of my dreams each day.
My parents and grandparents were not as tolerant of encouraging my dream time as Sara was; I imagine this was too ethereal for their practical minds. Sara visited me in my dreams after her death but I sensed this was not a topic my parents or grandparents were comfortable with so I didn't share this with them. I kept these dreams close to my heart and did not speak of them as Sara had taught me to do.
The Christmas before my grandmother, Sara's daughter, died we had gone home to visit my family. My grandmother called me into her room and told me of a dream she had. She said that Sara had come to her in a dream and told her that all was well and she would soon be coming home. It was not like my grandmother to share something like this and I just listened and said little. My grandmother died suddenly about a month later.
The summer before my grandmother passed away I experienced what I eventually came to understand was a waking dream. I was attending a seminar at Tulane University in New Orleans. I was signed up for a class in "alternative realities". It was the summer of 1980 and for a Midwesterner this was quite a leap from my current reality. The professor for this class was an aging hippie and his ease of relating to the class and his presentation of his subject matter immediately drew me in. I was hooked.
The first night after I began this class I dreamed of Sara. I had dreamed of her after she died and until I became an adolescent. As I awakened to my adult dreams of her I was reminded of the wisdom she left with me. It seemed this class on alternative realities might pick up where she left off. This idea excited and frightened me. Like a moth drawn to a flame I circled these teachings hesitant to commit.
At that time I recorded in my journal that I felt my slumbering shaman had been awakened from her twenty year sleep, stretched, and stood right in the middle of my life. I thought that when the seminar was over I would pack my bags, fly home, leaving her behind, and my life would return to what it had been before she awakened. I was wrong; she came along for the ride.
I began to experience her presence in everything I did. My dreams were crystal clear; my waking thoughts were often of Sara's teachings. I realized that I was young and she was old and her dreams were spun in gold. I quested for the wisdom that Sara had opened me to as a very young child. I longed for her presence and found she was a regular visitor in my dreams.
The weave of my dreams taught that I no longer needed to seek knowledge but rather to open myself to wisdom. Wisdom was everywhere if I had eyes to see, ears to hear, and the awareness to perceive it. Sara taught me as a child that life itself would be my teacher if I would become its student. This had worked for me until I reached adolescence; hormones then kicked in and wisdom flew out the door. So that summer in New Orleans I was thirty-three and the path to wisdom reawakened along with my inner shaman.
Following my time in New Orleans I came to understand the meaning of synchronicity; the simultaneous occurrence of events that appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection. I realized how Carl Jung's patient dreamed of a golden scarab and the following day in her session with Jung, as she was describing her dream, a golden scarab flew into to room.
As I "awakened" in my waking mind I saw, understood, and accepted synchronicity in my life. Only I could awaken to, understand, and accept this happening. Until I had the experience in New Orleans with "alternative realities" I was sleeping and unable to find my way back to the foundation of Sara's teachings. The class at Tulane brought me awake; now I had to learn to take advantage of past teachings while I sought out new teachers and paths to explore.
The old combined with the new to become my journey to self. There is no finishing point or end there is just the weave of life living itself. We each have a slumbering shaman within ourselves who is waiting the call to wake up. I learned to not ignore my intuition, to look, listen, and learn from all manner of life, to realize that life, as Sara taught me, is always there to teach if I will show up to learn.
This is my teacher today as much as it was thirty-four years ago in New Orleans. I must each day show up to learn. There are days that I am a star student and other days that I am not. The only thing that matters is that I just keep showing up. In this classroom of life there is no failure, only lessons that I learn from or I get to try again. The Dream Weaver is continually weaving and reweaving life as we move along.
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