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Dreamcatchers
According to Indians of the eastern woodlands, The Dreamcatcher ( pictured on left
) catches all dreams, both good and bad, and protect the dreamer from nightmares. The beads on the dreamcatcher web
guide the good dreams through the web through the center hole so that they may gently drift off the feather into the life
of the dream, and be dreamed agian, in an identical or similar form, on another night. The bad dreams, not knowing the
way, become tangled in the web and perish at the light of the early morning sun.
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IROQUOIS DREAMWORK and SPIRITUALITY
In past centuries, the Iroquois indians of the Great Lakes considered dreams to be a guide to their
lives, to dictate their choices in regard to fishing, hunting, war, dancing, marriage and other significant life events.
The Iroquois especially listened carefully to dreams their people had prior to war and hunting - a war party would even turn
back if one of its members dreamed of failure immediately before or during the hunt.
In The Shaman's Doorway, Stephen Larsen quotes the French missionary
Ragueneau's Jesuit Relations, (and material by Ragueneau originally appearing in the American Anthropogist, April 1958) who
carefully documented the Iroquois approach to dreams :
" The Iroquois believe that our souls have other desires, which are, as it were, inborn and
concealed. These, they say, come from the depths of the soul, not through any knowledge .... They have no divinity but
the dream. They submit themselves to it and follow its order with the utmost exactness. Whatever they see themselves
doing in dreams they believe they are absolutely obligated to execute at the earliest possible moment. Iroquois would
think themselves quilty of a great crime if they failed to obey a single dream."
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