Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths — Joseph Campbell
Dreaming, and what we learn from our dreams, are a fundamental part of being human, part of every culture on earth, but we are not the only dreaming animals.
“Spiders. Rats. Cats. Dogs. Zebra finches. Humans and other primates. Dreaming happens among many animals,” writes Jay in How Animals Heal Us.
You can watch baby jumping spiders dream when, in the first ten days of their lives, their exoskeletons are see-through and their dreaming eyes have “flurries of rapid eye movement (REM)”, rats relive the experiences of their day in dreams, cats dream of hunting and jumping, and zebra finches sing in their dreams: “They experience the REM state and then their forebrains fire neurons in a distinct pattern, one that also takes place when they are awake and singing. It seems that their sleeping brains replicate the pattern of their singing, suggesting, say researchers, that these songbirds are moving their vocal muscles to the music of their dreams.”
Jay, Joanna and John discuss how, for Indigenous Australians, “the soil contains the Ancestors, not only the human ones but the Ancestor spirits who travelled the land in the Dreaming, and the earth is alive with them still.” As Jay writes in Why Rebel, “Indigenous cultures very commonly assert that the land has consciousness. More: the land, they say, dreams us. This beautiful, enigmatic idea contains a vastness of vision, seeing our place on Earth as a kind of dream.”
Lack of sleep damages our cognitive functions, but dreaming “opens us to a wider consciousness and understanding. Each dreamer is connected to a subconscious wisdom extending far beyond themselves, like roots extending into a communal shared intelligence under the soil.”
“Sleeping,” writes Jay, “is the subsoil of the mind, the darkly luminous place for insight beyond obvious sight.”
Jay also tells of her meetings with Amazonian shamans, who, she recounts, shared a certain expression, “something I saw in all their eyes, something long-sighted and intense: they were magnets to dreams. If you were a dream, it’s their sleep you’d swim towards, their minds you’d yearn to be dreamt in.”
“In the forests,” she says, “you see the tenderness of darkness, for all good things are cradled in darkness first: seeds and babies, compost, healing and dreams.”
You can order any of Jay Griffiths’ books from her online shop at Bookshop.org
