Many years ago I learned to pose a question before going to sleep, asking to receive the answer in my dreams. This idea initially came from a little book called Teach Yourself to Dream. The very first exercise describes a process for choosing the winner of a horse race by making two columns of the hopefuls and then editing either the right or the left list according to messages or images favoring the right or left side in that night’s dream. The next night the remaining horses are again split into two columns and again one side is edited until the winner is revealed.
Although it seemed a clever exercise upon first reading, it wasn’t until a friend told me, after returning from a shamanic drum journey, that the spirit world wanted me to know there was “something I was not using,” that I remembered the dream exercise, and decided to make a list of all my magical tools, frame drums, oracle cards, and teaching stones. It was quite a list. My inventory at the time contained 54 items, which I assigned numbers and then randomly separated into two columns. In trying to answer this life question in my dreams, many evenings were spent shuffling numbers into columns and waking to write about peculiar images of glasses vertically half full and pastures with horses all on one side. My dreams ultimately chose a pipe I had made years ago by hollowing a small bowl from a piece of chert and fitting this to a shard of pre-Columbian flute for the stem. I understood that this and its smoke were to be offered in gratitude for this gift of receiving answers to questions in dreams.
I never did use the technique to bet the horses, but over the years I have learned to see and remember my dreams in great detail, and more importantly, I have come to realize that my dreams do contain the answer to my questions, and that just like shamanic drum journeys to the unseen world, I can journey in my dreams for insight and advice to help myself and others.
