precognitive dreams – follow your nose

For several nights now I’ve dreamt of a temple of death.
Apropos for the Halloween / Day of the Dead season I suppose – the skulls and skeletons are everywhere, sticking up out of the ground, in and around a kind of pyramid rising up into a darkened sky with segmented sections, the lower levels somewhat gorier and grisly, the staircase up to the upper level flanked with lithe dancing young people.
The dreams seem sort of natural for the season, or like maybe they’re a by-product of the new moon / eclipse action happening in the sky, but I also suspect they’ve been brought on by this breathing exercise thingy I’ve been doing.
The exercise is an extended 5-month project, 40 minutes a day of combined breathing and visualizations, taught or guided by Sergio Magaña of Mexico City. He has a school in Mexico for teaching spiritual mastery and healing techniques of the ancient Toltec and Mexicas, or Aztec as we would call them.
Here’s some music to set the tone (the video has Maya imagery, but gives that ancient Mexico feeling) –

This guy Sergio has a book out, and someone on the book jacket blurb calls him “the new Carlos Castaneda”, really a most unfortunate and misleading reference because for one, his writing is not the lush fiction of Castaneda, but a more impenetrably cryptic mathematical and culturally localized explanation of things that made no sense to me until I went to a workshop he gave a couple of months ago in Owen Sound.
Secondly, there is no sign of a creepy Castaneda cult around him – he is a funny, laid back, lovely, helpful guy, and works with the UNESCO Heritage Club to preserve the Nahuatl culture.
Nonetheless, at the workshop in Owen Sound I found I was having some serious resistance – doubts or hesitations or reservations about being open to a teacher, a healer from outside my own cultural tradition. Maybe it was because I hadn’t dreamt about him before he appeared – something that has happened to me more than once, where I’ve dreamt of a wise person, then met them later, a phenomena which made me trust the wisdom, the prescience of the dream to have led me to them.
With Sergio there was also a question for me of cultural appropriateness – I worry over the kind of mix & match version of spiritual grab-baggery that seems to plague New Age type ventures. Even though I am fascinated by all things Mexican, have spent a lot of time there, still I hesitated.
I kind of wanted to ask him directly about these questions, about why we Anglo-Saxon types should feel free to saunter into the study of ancient Mexican culture, but I felt awkward and maybe like an insensitive brute, cause in the back of my mind was also the thought that it seemed a bit bizarre to be learning spirituality from the tradition of the Aztecs? I mean heck, those guys were INTENSE!

But I waited, didn’t raise any questions, just learned what I could, and then back at home one night reading, I stumbled on these words:

…if you go back far enough you can probably find that all our ancestors practiced human sacrifice. It was part of the religion in the old days and seems like it was practiced all around the world…” ~J.M. White

Right. Of course. Abraham and Isaac. Not quite the same scale but yes, the idea being that human moral codes are constantly shifting.
And the joke I always remember of how they say the Aztecs and the Spaniards deserved each other in terms of their mutual capacities for cruelty.

So being charmed by his lovely personality and the remarkable amount of success he’s had with his practices, and because it’s free and I find myself totally unable to stick with traditional meditation, I committed myself to the 5-month project of Sergio’s breathing exercises. And things are definitely starting to shift internally – some seismic cracks that have left me without much impulse to write.
The fundamental point of this breathing exercise is to “cleanse the shadow”, or in Western psychological terms, clear the unconscious.
It’s a technique that proposes to bypass all talking cures and do away entirely with the “story” of the self.
The idea is to let go of all the elements of what we tell ourselves about who we are.

The challenge lies in understanding and accepting that human beings are simply an idea, an illusion in motion, and that the only truth is the energy of the essence, which is pure potential. As long as we are aware that this is the case, then our idea of ourselves can easily be replaced by a better idea. ~ Sergio Magaña

The more weeks and now months that pass of doing this exercise for 40 minutes a day, the more I seem to be dreaming of death.
But later, as I get towards the end of it, I wonder what new imagery might wait for me there?

What do you dream of, dear reader?

Last night I forced my husband, O, to watch ThunderHeart, Michael Apted’s movie from 1992 based on a bunch of things that happened in the 70’s at Pine Ridge and the Black Hills involving uranium mining and the murder of activist Annie Mae Pictou (for a serious discussion of environmental issues in the 70’s in the Black Hills, check out Peter Matthiessen’s Indian Country). These historical incidents are used in the film in a fictionalized way as a backdrop for a murder mystery and a kind of identity story of the main character, Ray, played by Val Kilmer. His awakening happens in part through a series of dreams and visions he begins to have.

I wanted him to see it, cause I’d been telling him about some dreams I’d had and how I believed they were showing me something in the future, or were showing me things that exist that I should know about, pay attention to, or be ready for. He was unfamiliar with this idea, unfamiliar with the concept of dreaming the future or dreaming as indicating the way forward, and unfamiliar with the notion of visions.

One of the first times I really noticed a precognitive dream, where my attention was captured and held, was many years back when I dreamt of a woman who lived in the last house at the end of a pathway down a little hill. She had straight grey hair to her shoulders and glasses that hung on a string around her neck and she was very very wise.

When I woke up I thought, Oh how strange, I don’t know anyone like that, and put it out of my mind.

But then a few months later I was in Mexico with a friend, and my friend insisted we spend the weekend with this woman she knew, the mother of one of her childhood friends who’d moved to Mexico years ago. This woman, Gilda, had a house in Tepoztlan, just outside of Cuernavaca.

So we went there for a long weekend and took turns preparing and sharing meals and this woman Gilda talked a lot about things like astrology and how much the energy of Uranus and Aquarius was influencing our behaviour that weekend, and I was not in the least bit interested in astrology at the time, and I thought to myself, Wow, what a flake.

On the Saturday we all piled into the car to take a little day trip to Taxco where they have lots of silver shops, and wound our way through the dry hills leading to Taxco, and in a moment of confusion in a left turn from one small highway to the next, Gilda hovered in the intersection just long enough for a policeman to notice some minor infraction she was making in her turn and come over and point out her mistake.

Now maybe you haven’t heard, but the police in Mexico are rather famous for extreme corruption and violence, and in fact the running joke that actually wasn’t a joke at all but some pretty serious advice not to be ignored was, If you get robbed, do NOT call the police, things will only get worse. Sometimes at night in the city you’d see police cruisers carousing the streets with drunken policemen hanging out the windows whistling at girls and yelling obscene whatevers into the night.

So when this policeman by the side of the road on the way to Taxco said to Gilda she was trying to make a left turn from the wrong lane and asked to see her papers, the rest of us girls all huddled in the back of the car began to shake with fear. Gilda pulled her papers out of the glove compartment and got out of the car to show him. The policeman glanced at them, then said, These are photocopies, I need to see the originals.

This we knew was the signal for the bribe. This was him finding the one little thing, even a pretend little thing with which to make her feel like she was about to have a big big ugly problem that could only be made to go away by giving him money.

In the back of the car, we held our breath.

There was a brief moment as Gilda pulled herself up to her full height and then she slammed her hand down hard on the hood of the car and said, No señor! Conmigo no te metes. You will not intimidate me, I am doing nothing wrong, and my papers are fine. You will let me be.

No one made a sound.

The policeman’s face remained impassive, as he made a little show of looking at her papers one more time. He seemed to pause and think about his options before declaring the papers good enough after all. He then indicated to her how she should make her left turn out onto the highway before turning and lumbering slowly, thoughtfully back to his cruiser. Gilda got back in the car.

From that moment, I wanted to know everything Gilda knew. I listened to all her observations on astrology or cooking or silver or anything else with rapt attention. I knelt at her feet. I was amazed to discover a fascinating world of very provocative serious authors on astrology – especially the Jungians Liz Greene and Howard Sasportas.

Finally on the Monday, late in the afternoon before we were about to drive back to the city, I realized that, here we were in the last house at the end of a little path down a hill, and Gilda wore her straight grey hair to her shoulders and her glasses on a string around her neck. Just like the unknown woman in my dream several months before – here she was.

And boy was she wise.

Tag: precognitive dreams

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