One assembly in high school was a speaker whose area of expertise was dreaming. Or at least that’s what I remember it as. He started off by asking how often the audience remembered dreams. He started off with some sort of fairly infrequent number, like a few a year and went down from there. As expected, fewer and fewer students raised their hands. By the time he got to a few dreams a week, there were a handful of us, including me still raising our hands. At that point, I was generally remembering a few dreams a night.
He explained that remembering even a single dream each night was unusual. In retrospect, having a (paid) speaker come in to give a lecture about dreaming for an assembly removed a fair amount of the magic (and power) of the dream state.
What does it mean if you dream that you break a bone? Does it matter what bone it is? Is it an omen? A portent? A sign of weakness? If I break a bone in a dream, can I break a bone in real life?
Three books that might hold the answers to these questions and more about dreaming and also might reacquaint dreaming readers with the power and magic of the dream state.
The Dreamblood duology by NK Jemisen. (Comprised of The Killing Moon and the Shadowed Sun.)
This is Why You Dream: What Your Sleeping Brain Reveals About Your Waking Life by Rahul Jandial
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From an interview with Jessica Johns (with Ayesha Rascoe) on NPR.
RASCOE: So I understand you started writing this story after an instructor told you that writers should not write about their dreams. Like, that wasn’t a good thing to do. So why did that comment send you in the absolute opposite direction?
JOHNS: For Cree people, and the way I was raised, the knowledge that I have about dreams, is that they’re incredibly important. They’re a way of communicating with our ancestors. They’re a way of knowledge production. My whole life I’ve been taught to listen to my dreams and interrogate them and to, you know, know that they’re very valid forms of knowledge and forms of storytelling as well. So to have a prominent professor who has been, quote-unquote, “successful” in so many ways in the writing and publishing worlds, give this advice to a roomful of aspiring writers – and, you know, he was a white man – it really – it made me mad. I mean, I don’t think in writing there should be any hard and fast rule anyways. But I was just like, you have no idea what you’re talking about. Dreams are valid. In fact, I’m going to write a story about dreams that validate them in all their beauty and wonder and knowledge.
I hadn’t read this interview until after I read the book, but it makes sense to me now that I connected to this book in the way that I did. I’ve had similar experiences of having my culture and life experiences dismissed in a classroom or by an “expert”. Probably most people from marginalized groups have. I’m just grateful that Johns was strong enough to dismiss this comment and carry on with the work. The result is stunning.
Two passages from Bad Cree:
“‘Whenever I used to see a crow and proclaim bad luck, kokum would give me trouble,” Auntie says. ‘She said crows bring good or bad messages and I was an ass to assume.’”
“How did all of these dreams lie between us? In all our sleepovers at Kokum’s house, in our own basements, in all the hours we stayed up talking and laughing, we never talked about our dreams. How deep is this denial of ourselves that even as children playing pretend, we didn’t want to talk about them?”
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The entire mythology of the Dreamblood series is based around the power of dreaming. Check out the summary here.
I had finished Bad Cree and The Killing Moon (the first of the Dreamblood duology) and so I was focused particularly on how my dreaming state might be a place of healing. A thing that I was struggling with in my waking hours was that I was hyper fixated on mistakes that I had made in my past, moments of cringe, times I felt I had misspoken, or otherwise done something that might be construed as embarrassing. All these moments were like a rotten, pained tooth that I could not keep my tongue from poking. I asked myself what I should do in these moments.
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After The Killing Moon, I carried on with The Shadowed Sun.
Here’s a short passage describing how the “healers” in Jemisen’s created world enter into dreams to do their work:
“To heal a man, we touch his soul and teach it to crave wholeness. To hurt a man, one must teach the soul to crave its own torment.”
And a slightly longer one:
“What you feel is balance,” said Hanani. “Peace. Remember it. When that feeling shifts or fades, come back to this place and do what you just did. Or create a different place; it doesn’t matter. When you invoke your souname, you shed the artifice of your waking self. When you create a realm in this empty place, everything — all that you see — is you. Change it, and change yourself.”
“He took a deep breath, savoring the sensation of rightness. It amazed him that he had not noticed its absence before. Did that mean he had been slowly slipping into madness? A frightening thought, ‘I don’t understand how this works.’
“You don’t need to. No one else does.” When he looked at her in surprise, she smiled. though there was little humor in it. He had the sense that the expression was more of a reflex, ” This is dreaming, Prince. These are the realms of the gods. Only the strongest Gatherers have any hope of understanding: they are born to the Goddess’s power in a way the rest of us can only struggle to imitate. This is why they lead us — and why we have such hope for you, Avatar of Hananja.”
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And it was some time in the midst of reading all of this that I had a very specific dream. In it, I was at a vacation house and I was sitting around a table with various people from my waking life. It doesn’t really matter who they actually were because, as I realized upon waking, they were all just avatars for different parts of myself, different internalized voices. One of these avatars was sitting at the table repeating over and over to me that I had made mistakes. I knew that she was about to start listing all of them. The other people at the table knew that this was unkind behavior but they just remained silent. My dream self, the one that I had control over suddenly shouted in a very loud, clear voice almost as if it was amplified through a megaphone: “I AM HUMAN!”
Everyone else was silent. And I woke up.
And that’s how I got one of my mantras.
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I listened to This is Why You Dream, so I don’t have any specific passages to post here. One thing that stood out to me was that he affirmed that dreams are unique to the dreamer. In other words, there are no “universal” symbols in dreams. It’s all bound by context. I think that kokum (from the passage from Bad Cree above) would agree. A crow can bring a mad message or a good message after all.
So what does it mean if you break a bone in a dream? Only you know.
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I’ve been keeping better track of my dreams lately. I tuck a small notebook and pen next to me as I sleep and try to remember to jot down a few notes of remembered dreams. Sometimes, I look back at them to see what kind of self-healing I might have been doing. But this is just for fun. I trust that my mind is healing itself in dreams whether or not I’m aware of it.
A few weeks ago, I came across someone who apologized to me for a mistake that she’d made that meant a delay in me receiving services. She clearly felt really bad and was apologizing to the point that I was starting to feel bad too. Finally, I found a break in her explanations to interject:
“We are all allowed to be human.”
She visibly relaxed. “I’m going to have to remember that.”
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So back to the question: have I ever broken a bone?
Never. Not one.
Not even in a dream.
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