Two Dreams and a Sleepless Night
A Night in a Mayan Dream House
This started innocently enough. It started by waking up, and right after a dream so that the whole thing was clear in my mind. I was in a Mayan house – sticks and thatch – and an ancient Mayan father was saying that I had to come back and sleep in his house. “No,” I said, “I’m leaving in a few days. I have meetings. I’m too busy.” The old man smiled. “You must come back and sleep in my house.” Again I told his I could not return. “You must come back,” he smiled, “and sleep in my house.” It was like he wasn’t listening. Maybe it was my stinky Spanish. Anyway, I did what anyone would do after having a dream like that. I emailed it to a friend, a Kaqchikel Mayan spiritual guide in Guatemala. “You must come,” he wrote back, “and sleep in my house.”
The Mayan dream house, or lineage shrine, is not a regular house. In some areas it has been described as a shack built where a significant person had lived, allowing that ‘ancestor’ to influence dreams. In Guatemala, the shrine is an altar room where the fire ceremony is held. Nahuals, guardian spirit-companions associated with your birth date in the 260-day Mayan ceremonial calendar, inhabit the ‘house.’ Within the Mayan Cosmovision, nahuals can communicate with us in dreams, and that our nahual can communicate with the spirits of other people. A dream house is in concept similar to a Catholic postinia, or hermitage cabin, where God is experienced in sleep.
The night of my departure for Guatemala I had a vivid dream where I was in the company of two lovers. One was young and very beautiful and one was old but experienced in love-making. We spent the dream, the three of us, searching for places to have our privacy.
The evening I was to spend in the altar shrine in Guatemala, I was told that there had been a delay. Spirits had been consulted, and it was not the right time. The next night would be better, the day 7-Ta’ikin. That night in my hotel room I had another dream and it was horrible. My wife and children were in bed, and I saw a Guinea pig run out of a hole in the wall beneath the stairs, and then run back in again. For this image I thank my friend Bill, who at dinner that night had told me about a mural he had seen in Cuzco, Peru a few weeks earlier. They eat Guinea pig in Peru. The mural was a painting of the last supper, and in front of Jesus was a fried Guinea pig on a plate.
Anyway, in the dream I went to my basement and brought up a squirrel trap, a box with spring loaded doors, and I was setting the trap, using chocolate as bait, when the Guinea pig ran out of the hole and into the trap and just sat looking at me. ‘That was easy,’ I thought, and headed out the front door holding the trap.
Just then, two huge white rats came running out of the hole in the wall and jumped onto my back, biting me through my sweater. I was terrified. I ran, falling on my back in the snow, rolling in the snow, trying to knock it off. One rat did fall off, but the larger on held fast. I ran down the road and found a neighbor, asking her to hit the rat with a stick. She beat me on the back, but I was still being bitten. Finally, I fell on my back again, so hard that I felt the rat being crushed and it fell off, bloody in the snow. The white rat and the red bloodied rat walked off together.
The following night my friends and I gathered around the altar. Kaqchikel spiritualist Ronaldo Similox burned black copal incense and prayed, then my friends were asked to leave. Ronaldo and I built up a fire on the stone altar using designs of sugar, large discs of copal incense and candles of different colors. Ancient stones, carved with nahual faces, stared at us from the corners – male faces and birds from the north, females and fish from the south, sun faces from the east and death masks from the west.
The next hours were spent in a kind of meditation while Ronald carried on what could only be called a conversation with the spirits in the fire. He was talking about me, my wife and boys, my patients at home and my work in Guatemala. He was introducing me. The flames towered between us, creating a vortex swirling counter-clockwise. A bad omen. They wanted me to return in 15 days with a blood sacrifice. Ronaldo explained. He argued that I would be gone. We added more candles. The vortex slowed. We heard an owl outside, a potential omen of death. We paid the fire small copal incense ‘coins.’ The smoke turned black, rising above us and blackening the metal roof. Another bad omen. Ronaldo looked concerned. It wasn’t going well. He beat out the Jaguar song on a wooden box drum. Slowly, the smoke lightened. And on it went, until water was poured on the fire, the windows and doors were opened to let out the smoke, and Ronaldo said it was time.
I woke up the next morning with the roosters crowing, the geese honking and the neighbor cranking his radio, and I knew I had failed. I didn’t know what I had expected. If I was supposed to have any meaningful dreams, visits by ancestors or nahuals, I had totally dropped the ball. The floor was hard, the air cold in the highlands without the fire. It was like camping. I had a sleepless night, waking up and turning and waking up again. I was quiet at breakfast. Later that day I told Ronaldo about my two dreams, and the disappointing night I spent on the ground in his backyard.
Ronaldo called dream lovers ‘gifts.’ The young woman was Q’anil, my own birth date nahual and the female spirit of fertility (health), the sign of doctors and nurses. The older woman was Ajpu’ (Ahpu), my other nahual, bearer of my birth year. Without my knowing this, Ahpu became the main character of my book 2012: Under the Witz Mountain, a story based on Mayan allegory. I chose the character after a conversation with a bumblebee, but that’s another story. “Your gifts come to you as girlfriends,” he said, “because girlfriends are more jealous than a wife. They are warning you not to use them without giving back.”
At the story of the rats, he smiled but in a way that showed concern. “Ajpu’ has two animal forms,” he said. “One is a coyote, and the other is like a rat.” He explained why the rat was biting me, that Ajpu’ is one of the few nahuals that require blood sacrifice (usually a dove or chicken at a fire ceremony). Ajpu’ is responsible for feeding creation, so we give back all that we eat. “He is your nahual,” said Ronaldo, his expression becoming serious, “and if he’s attacking you that’s very bad.”
Then I explained my failure the night before. I had had no real dreams. I would see an image that was so vivid it would wake me up, but awake when I tried to draw it in my notebook it was gone, distorted, a mental blur. It happened over and over again. I lost count of how many times. I would sleep for half an hour then jump awake again. “Do you remember any of these images?” he asked. “Circles,” I told him. “All circles. The sun against a night sky. The fire in a circle. A face. Always a circle, coming right up to my face and then gone. I was never asleep long enough to have a dream.”
Ronaldo smiled. He said that’s what it’s like. It is their house. I was a stranger there. They were coming to see me. “The nahuals were coming to check you out,” he said, “to see what you are about.”