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30 The Journal of Shamanic Practice VOLUME 5 ISSUE 2 FALL 2012 Neihardt felt shivers of recog- nition when Black Elk got to the point in his narrative the following spring where he described himself ying through space in a vision when he was in Paris with a Wild West show in the same style as the 11-year-old poet. Neihardt wrote near the close of his life that he was convinced that there were times when we had more than the ordinary means of communication.5 I am sure of it. Dreamers know each other and where people value dreaming the right dream is a passport to essential things which are shared on more than one level of consciousness. Two Shamans and Dreamers The encounter be tween the La- kota holy man and the Nebraska poet reminds us that rst and last the shaman is a dreamer. Shamans typically receive their calling in dreams and are initiated and trained in the Dreamtime. The heart of their practice is the intentional dream journey. They may incubate dreams to diagnose a patient and select the ap- propriate treatment. They travel wide awake and lucid in their dream bodies to nd lost souls to intercede with the spirits to ght sorcerers and to guide spirits of the departed along the right roads. Among the Lakota the most power- ful shaman healers are the members of the Bear Dreamers Society who are called to their vocation by the Bear in dreams and visions.6 In North America as a whole the most common term for shaman translates as dreamer. In Mohawk a language I had to study because of my dreams the word is ratetshents one who dreams.7 The special province of the shaman is the care and relocation of souls - souls of the living and of the deceased. In order to bring soul energy of the living back into the body where it belongs and to guide lost souls of the departed to where they need to go the shaman must have rst-hand knowledge of the geography involved. This comes through dreaming strong and also through an intimate rela- tionship with Death. The true shaman is someone who died and came back - I am not speaking metaphorically - and there- fore knows rst-hand about conditions in the adjacent world of the afterlife. The shamans who interest me are sto- rytellers dramatists poets. They change the behavior of the body and the experi- ence of the world by telling better stories about them. They entertain the spirits with fresh words and fresh songs. I would add that shamans are of use to a community and that their skills are recognized by that community. True shamans are up to speed with the science and scholarship of their societies. In indigenous cultures the working vocabu- lary of a shaman may be ten times that of the average person. So the model of a shaman of the West may not be a wild man or woman in the woods but some- one like C.G.Jung who I have described as the dream shaman of Switzerland.8 The essence of the shamans power to travel and to heal is the ability to dream strong to scout out the future for the benet of others to enter someone elses dreamspace to bring healing to enter the dreamstate intentionally at any time - a skill far beyond those associated with the now-fashionable term lucid dreaming. In our everyday modern lives we stand at the edge of such power when we dream and remember to do something with our dreams. I have always been a dreamer and I learned in boyhood in crises of illness and through friendship with Aborigines that our dreams can take us into the Dreamtime into a deeper world where we may be able to discover the origin and purpose of our lives. I am a boy who died and came back. As a child I lost vital signs three times in hospitals and remembered adventures I had had in other realities in one of which I seemed to live a whole life before being thrown back into the body of a nine-year-old boy who had just been under the surgeons knife for emergency appendectomy in a Melbourne hospital. A doctor told my parents The boy died and came back. We didnt have the term near-death ex- perience in those days and I still prefer the older language. There is an exact term in Tibetan for someone who had my kind of experience the delog is one who died and came back.9 So you might say that I started out as a dreamer whose default reality was the kind that you get to know in a shamanic state of consciousness. I knocked around the world in various ways trying to be fairly discreet about what I knew of the multiverse while using the skills of a dreamer to make choices and stay alive. Then in the mid-1980s I had what Jung called a confrontation with the unconscious after I moved to a farm on the edge of traditional Mohawk land and started dreaming in a language I did not initially understand which I learned to be an archaic form of Mohawk. My vision- ary encounters with a Mohawk dream shaman of long ago combined with other events in nonordinary reality deepened my understanding of what dreaming can be and led me to a complete re-evalua- tion of what matters in life. Those visionary adventures set me on a path for which there is no career track in our society that of a shamanic dream teacher. I devoted myself to mak- ing a synthesis between contemporary dreamwork and shamanic methods for journeying and healing an approach I call Active Dreaming.10 I nd it curious that in the contem- porary teaching of shamanism in the West dreaming and dreamwork are still rarely accorded a central role while many dreamworkers are unaware of shamanic practices that could greatly vitalize their process and take dream exploration to much deeper levels than discussion and analysis.