Mysticism, Dreams & Shamanic Journeys
One of the questions I'm asked quite often in my work as a spiritual counsellor is whether dreams are "just dreams" or whether they can actually tell us something about ourselves. I've never thought the two possibilities have to be completely separate. Plenty of dreams probably do involve the mind sorting through the ordinary clutter of the day. Then occasionally we have a dream that feels different. We wake from it but don't quite leave it behind. An image stays with us over breakfast, an emotion follows us into the afternoon, or we find ourselves thinking about the dream several days later. People have been puzzled by experiences like these for thousands of years. In cultures with shamanic traditions, dreams could be understood as journeys into realities beyond ordinary waking experience, places where ancestors, spirits, animals, healing and knowledge might be encountered. Whether we understand that literally, spiritually or psychologically, I think there is something fascinating about the idea of entering another landscape in order to return knowing something we didn't know before.
Before going much further, though, it's worth being careful with the word "shamanism." Shamanism isn't one religion with a single set of beliefs or practices. The word "shaman" itself comes to us from the Tungusic-speaking peoples of Siberia, particularly the Evenki, and was later applied by outsiders to practices found in many other parts of the world. Traditions involving altered states, spirit communication, healing and ritual specialists can be found across very different cultures, but that doesn't make them all identical. The ceremonies of Siberia, Mongolia, the Americas, Africa or Northern Europe belong to their own histories and communities. There are similarities, certainly, but also enormous differences.
Who/What Was A Shaman?
The popular image of the shaman as a mysterious figure sitting somewhere outside ordinary society can also be misleading. Traditionally, such practitioners were often deeply involved in community life. Depending upon the culture, a person we might describe as a shaman could be a healer, storyteller, counsellor, ritual specialist, keeper of traditions or mediator between the human community and a spiritual world. People might seek their assistance during illness, bereavement, conflict or important transitions. Their role wasn't simply to predict what would happen next. Often it was concerned with restoring some kind of balance when things had gone wrong.
Dreams could form part of this process. In some traditions, a particularly vivid or recurring dream wasn't necessarily dismissed as an odd product of sleep. It might be remembered, discussed and considered carefully. A dream involving an ancestor, an animal or an unfamiliar landscape could acquire significance within the beliefs of that particular community. Importantly, interpretation wasn't necessarily an entirely private exercise. An elder or experienced practitioner might help the dreamer understand the experience in relation to traditions, stories and symbols they both recognized.
The shamanic journey is probably one of the best-known ideas to emerge from these traditions, although its modern popular use can make it seem much simpler and more universal than it really is. In various traditions, practitioners deliberately entered altered states of consciousness using methods that might include rhythmic drumming, chanting, dancing or intense concentration. This differs from ordinary dreaming because the experience is intentionally entered and usually has some purpose behind it. The practitioner isn't simply waiting to see what happens during sleep.
Accounts of these journeys sometimes describe movement through different spiritual landscapes. Modern discussions frequently use the terms Upper World, Middle World and Lower World, although we shouldn't assume that every culture organizes spiritual reality in precisely this way. I find it more useful to think of these as maps. A map gives structure to an experience that might otherwise be extremely difficult to describe. Depending upon one's beliefs, these places can be understood as spiritual realities, symbolic landscapes or ways of navigating unusual states of consciousness.
The Lower World is a good example of how easily modern assumptions can confuse things. "Lower" sounds sinister to Western ears, but descent doesn't necessarily mean punishment or evil. In some shamanic frameworks it is associated with animals, nature, instinct or ancestral knowledge. The Upper World may be associated with teachers or spiritual beings, while the Middle World resembles ordinary existence experienced from another perspective. I'm less interested in insisting that these places have one objective meaning than in noticing how effectively human beings use landscapes to organize experiences that are otherwise difficult to put into words.
Animals naturally occupy an important place in many of these traditions. Wolves, bears, eagles, ravens, snakes, deer and countless other creatures appear in stories, visions and dreams. I think we need to be particularly cautious here because modern spirituality sometimes reduces this rich material to the idea that everybody has a conveniently assigned "spirit animal." Traditional relationships between people and animals are usually far more culturally specific than that. The meaning of a bear, raven or eagle depends upon the stories, environment and traditions of the people interpreting it. Animals can act as teachers or symbols, but their significance isn't interchangeable from one culture to another.
Dreams & Symbolic Figures
Dreams, of course, produce their own extraordinary collection of animals and landscapes. Someone may repeatedly dream about crossing a river, climbing a mountain or being followed by a particular animal. My instinct isn't to reach immediately for a list of meanings. I would rather ask what the image suggests to the dreamer. A river might make one person think about change and another remember a childhood home. A mountain could represent a challenge, but it might equally evoke freedom, isolation or a particular person. Symbols become interesting when we begin exploring our relationship with them rather than treating them like words in a secret dictionary.
Something I particularly appreciate in shamanic traditions is the emphasis on relationship. Modern approaches to spirituality can become preoccupied with the question, "What is going to happen to me?" A relational worldview asks different questions. How am I relating to my family? My community? The natural world? My ancestors? Myself? If something feels wrong, perhaps the question isn't simply how to remove the problem, but what relationship has become neglected or unbalanced. Dreams can provide a surprisingly rich space in which to think about those questions.
Healing has historically been closely connected with these ideas. In many traditional cultures, illness wasn't necessarily separated neatly into the physical, emotional, social and spiritual categories familiar to us today. A person's wellbeing could involve all of them at once. That doesn't mean traditional spiritual practices should replace evidence-based medicine, and I would never suggest that they should. What they do remind us of is something contemporary healthcare increasingly recognizes as well: illness happens to a person, not merely to a body. Relationships, community, meaning and emotional wellbeing matter too.
An interesting example is the idea sometimes translated as "soul loss." In certain traditions, trauma, bereavement or profound distress could be understood as causing some essential part of the person to become separated or diminished. Rituals might then seek restoration or wholeness. Psychology uses very different language to describe trauma, and we shouldn't pretend the concepts are scientifically equivalent. Even so, I find the comparison thought-provoking. Both recognize the experience people sometimes describe after trauma: "I haven't felt like myself since it happened." Different cultures have developed very different languages for talking about that loss of continuity.
Dreams can become unusually vivid at precisely these transitional moments. Bereavement, illness, retirement, becoming a parent, ending a relationship or changing careers can all disturb the familiar shape of life. Jung was particularly interested in the way dreams seemed to present material overlooked by the conscious mind. He wasn't a shaman, of course, and Jungian psychology shouldn't be confused with Indigenous spiritual traditions. Nevertheless, his fascination with mythology, symbolism and the unconscious provides an interesting bridge for modern Western readers trying to understand why dream images can sometimes feel so significant.
Shamanic Practice for Modern Life
There has been considerable modern interest in adapting ideas associated with shamanic practice, and this is an area where I think both curiosity and restraint are useful. We don't have to borrow somebody else's ceremonies in order to become more attentive to our own inner lives. Keeping a dream journal, sitting quietly with an image that has stayed with us, walking without distraction, meditating, painting or simply spending time in silence can all create room for reflection. None of these needs to be dressed up as an ancient ritual to be worthwhile.
Nature itself may be the most accessible place to begin. Most of us now spend an extraordinary amount of time looking at screens, surrounded by information and demands for our attention. There is something wonderfully uncomplicated about walking through woodland, watching birds, noticing the tide or simply becoming aware that the seasons are changing. Human beings spent most of our history paying far greater attention to these things than many of us do now. Perhaps it shouldn't surprise us that forests, rivers, storms, animals, stars and mountains continue appearing so frequently in dreams.
Respect for the cultures from which shamanic traditions originate matters enormously. These aren't simply collections of interesting techniques waiting to be removed from their context and repackaged for modern consumption. Many belong to living Indigenous communities that have experienced colonization, suppression of religious practices and repeated misunderstanding by outsiders. I think genuine interest begins with listening. We can learn about another tradition without pretending it belongs to us, and we can appreciate a ceremony without feeling entitled to reproduce it.
Neuroscience gives us another, very different window into dreaming. We know that vivid dreaming is strongly associated with Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, although dreams aren't confined exclusively to REM. Researchers continue to investigate how dreaming relates to memory, emotion and learning. I don't find biological explanations disappointing or somehow hostile to spirituality. Knowing something about what the brain is doing doesn't tell us what a particular dream will mean to the person who wakes from it. An experience can have a neurological mechanism and still acquire enormous personal significance.
One very simple exercise I sometimes suggest is asking yourself a question before sleep: "What do I most need to understand at this point in my life?" I wouldn't expect a mysterious voice to deliver an answer before breakfast, and dreams certainly shouldn't replace sensible decision-making or professional advice. The value is really in setting an intention to pay attention. Keep something beside the bed and write down whatever you remember in the morning, even if it's only an image or a few words. After several weeks, patterns sometimes begin to emerge that aren't obvious from a single night's dreaming.
Perhaps this is the part of shamanic traditions that speaks most strongly to me: the importance of listening. We live in a culture that rewards quick answers, constant activity and immediate reactions. Dreams operate at a completely different pace. They communicate through peculiar images, fragments of stories and emotions that may take days, months or even years to understand. Sometimes the most useful response isn't to interpret them immediately, but simply to notice them.
Whether shamanic journeys are understood as encounters with spiritual realities, explorations of consciousness or culturally structured experiences is ultimately a question each person will approach differently. What interests me is the very human impulse underneath them. For as long as we can trace our history, people have searched for ways to understand where they belong, what suffering means and how they should respond when life changes unexpectedly. Dreams remain part of that search. After years of listening to people describe them, I've become less interested in providing definitive interpretations and much more interested in encouraging curiosity. Sometimes a dream doesn't need to give us an answer. Sometimes the strange animal, unfamiliar path or distant landscape that follows us into the morning has already done something valuable: it has persuaded us to stop for a moment and ask a better question.