My system has been overtaken with a cold this week. I find it very interesting that with this cold I have lost my voice. I like to believe that when one gets a virus, it is an opportunity to sweep out what is no longer serving and upgrade into the more evolved version of you. This certainly helps my mood when I am sick, and the timing of when I get sick becomes something that I reflect on and glean meaning from. As I'm embarking on this journey of seeing myself more clearly and recognizing the deep viral load of colonialism that has parts of my system intoxicated, indoctrinated and exiled, what fascinating timing to experience losing my voice. The way I have shown up and expressed myself in the world has been blindly colluding with the multifaceted aspects of colonialism, and perhaps losing my voice this week is an opportunity to let go of these old ways of expressing and create space for the evolved version of me.
The blog I began writing for this week was almost done as of yesterday, and after a series of events that began on Thursday, I have shifted my focus and what was originally written will be explored and expanded on to share at a later date.
On Thursday I began to read an article entitled Shedding of the Colonial Skin: The Decolonial Potentialities of Dreaming by Kimberly L. Todd (2019), and finished it yesterday morning. In it she uses the dreamscape world as an example of ways of knowing and connecting with ancestry and inspiration as valid and full of wisdom, and as such, a direct act of anti-colonialism. Referencing the work of Mignolo (2011) who expanded the framework of the Colonial Matrix of Power first outlined by Anibal Quijano, she explores the four areas that this matrix steadfastly remains as foundational within modern society (Todd, 2019).
“Colonization has sought to sever bodies from land, history, ancestries, languages and spiritualities. It has sought to take the myriad ways in which people commune, connect and participate in the world and to dismember them. Colonization is an ongoing process that continually recreates itself utilizing the four pillars of the colonial matrix of power (Mignolo, 2011).” (Todd, 2019, p. 160)
One pillar of colonialism is found in the economy, as what “generates and grows wealth and resources, sustaining the ongoing colonial structures” (Todd, 2019, p. 162). This reminded me of the countless times I have heard someone refer to the “golden handcuffs” when expressing disdain for their corporate job yet feeling trapped and seduced by the pay cheque. Or, the general “hustle” required to make a living, especially at lower economic positions, which keeps one so tied up and busy that there is not much time or energy left to advocate for foundational change.
Another pillar appears as the dehumanizing of the “other” in comparison to the standard of a white, middle-upper class male, which means that race, gender and sexuality remain as means for invalidating and oppressing (Todd, 2019). Another rabbit-hole I have been exploring is the connection between fat phobia and racism. In the book Fearing the black body: The racial origins of fat phobia (2019), Strings takes her readers on a historical journey beginning in the 16th century through art, culture, eugenics, food industry, science and medicine to showcase how narratives on body size, curated by white European and American men, have been used to coerce “elite” white Christian women into a certain aesthetic while using fear and degradation of the black body to do so. This is something I am deeply moved by and will be exploring and sharing more as time passes.
The final two pillars are around authority and knowledge, both of which use violence and erasure to dissuade and invalidate “other ways of knowing and being in the world” (p. 16) that are outside the EuroWestern standard of accepted science (Todd, 2019). This prompted me to look back into a book I read recently titled The hero with an African face: Mythic wisdom of traditional Africa by Clyde W. Ford (2000). This book is a landmark experience for me in recognizing how far spread and in plain sight the exclusion of certain cultures and peoples remains in Western Society. It is referencing another pivotal book, The hero with a thousand faces (1968) by Joseph Campbell, which I read in my mid-twenties and used as the main framework for the book I published a few years later about my life’s journey up to that point in time. While Campbell is inclusive of several cultures outside his own, he deliberately makes reference to African mythology as being “mumbo jumbo” (Ford, 2000, p. 12). Ford (2000) eloquently details how there are thousands of languages and distinct population groups within Africa that all have unique history and mythology, and he shares much of what he has discovered through his lifetime of learning and researching such stories.
One such mythology and symbology that arises from the Kongo, dated to before the invasion of European influence and Christianity, which bears striking similarities to both the medicine wheel that has been credited to many Indigenous groups in North America, and to the hero’s journey. Our blind acceptance of exclusion is a cruel act that keeps us in the delusion of separation. Yes we are all unique and it’s important to honor our differences, but the equal and opposite truth is that we are interconnected and have more in common than some may realize.
I am mindful that nothing is all bad nor all good, and when something is labeled as good that does not automatically mean that it’s opposite is bad. The more we can step out of this dualistic way of perceiving the more information and wisdom we will discover. A lot of good has come from science, and there is value in taking time to research, yet this must also include multiple avenues of research and an understanding that we each come with our own biases that impact how we see and what we look for.
Once I finished reading Todd’s (2019) article yesterday, I began reflecting on some of the impactful experiences I have had around my dreams, and then had such an interesting series of dreams last night. I am going to share a few dream-focused memories that stood out to me throughout my life, and will conclude with my dreams from last night.
As a child I had a recurring nightmare that started with myself and a group of kids, some of which I recognized as my cousins, in our unfinished basement in Vancouver, and two adult strangers holding knives. The adults yell “go,” and a game of hide and seek begins. The first kid found is bludgeoned through the head with a knife, spun on their axis, and somehow turned into a fleshy conehead. Sheer terror shakes through me, and then suddenly the scene changes where I am now on the driveway of my home, yet it appears to be floating in space. I look out at the sky, somehow a horizon is here, yet still the sense of being disconnected and floating in the ether. There was always one person there with me, someone who remains indistinct yet I am not deterred whatsoever by their presence. We look around in the now calm and quiet scene, and while I am on the driveway I am also out of my body and looking at myself and this other person. I had this dream for years.
Looking back on this dream now I have some new lenses to see this through. The terror I experienced in the first half of the dream was so overwhelming that it is as though it catapulted me out of my body and into a vacant and distant space where harm wasn’t near. With all the work I have done to understand the nervous system and the impacts of trauma, this dream now stands out as a recurring traumatic incident that was seeking resolution, and instead continued to re-traumatize me in my dreams.
I began smoking copious amounts of weed as a coping mechanism in my early 20’s, and for almost 10 years either did not dream or simply had no dream recall upon waking. As I began to focus more on this unhealthy relationship with cannabis I began to go through spurts of smoking less and occasionally stopping altogether for a week or two, and I would experience intensely vivid dreams. It felt almost like a water spout had been blocked and suddenly re-opened to have huge waves of water needing to be released and cleared.
In 2021 I stepped into a Buffo (5meo-DMT) ceremony, a plant medicine that blasted me into connection with Source and gifted me an embodied experience of how surrender leads to heaven and resistance leads to hell. I had a similar dream for seven days after. I found out in conversation with a friend when sharing these dreams that when one takes Buffo they are often visited by the medicine in the dreamscape and it is referred to as “night school.” My night school was a progression from night one to six of dreaming that I had ingested the medicine again and was in a public space. I recall resisting the medicine, feeling all kinds of embarrassment, rejection, worry, and fear as the medicine moved through me. On the seventh night, I dreamt I was again in a public space, and the most people around me then any of the previous nights dreams. I ingested the medicine and surrendered. I fell to the floor with a group around me watching, and I felt peace, acceptance, allowance and trust as I convulsed in the hands of the medicine’s will. It became a beautiful and nourishing scene as those around me watched in awe, as I was more immersed and open to what wanted to happen moment after moment. I remember waking from that dream in awe. And night school seemingly concluded as I did not dream anything like that again. One of the surprising results of this Buffo journey was a sustainable change in my addicted relationship with cannabis. It is now something that I can be around without compulsively needing to ingest, and I often go several months without partaking in at all. In fact, I now have a much more respectful relationship with cannabis, as I have also experienced its therapeutic properties as I occasionally engage with it in ritual for creativity or deep rest.
Another fascinating dreamscape experience was something that transpired soon after my Buffo journey. For many years prior, I would have an occasional dream that involved playing basketball. What these dreams had in common were intense frustration as there would always be something that hindered my ability to play or to enjoy playing. Some common ones were a feeling of running through molasses, or the inability to complete a pass as everytime I tried I would turn it over somehow, or miss layup after layup. It was frustrating, and felt like stagnant energy. A month or two after Buffo, these dreams shifted. I remember the first night this happened, and how satisfied and fluid I felt. I now play the best basketball I ever have in my dreams. I feel a sense of flow, joy and connection as I pass with ease, have agency in my vision and movement, and hit almost every shot. This has been such a pleasurable change in my dreams, to the point that sometimes I wake up and feel eager and excited to go shoot hoops that day. Something I haven’t experienced since High School, before the trauma of my mental health struggles impacted my ability to play the sport I loved so intensely.
Now on to last night’s dreams.
I went to bed very early, 8pm. I had not slept well the night before and with being ill, it was clear my body needed sleep. However, with congestion, a cough and a fever, it was difficult to find enough comfort and ease to fall asleep. I tossed and turned quite a bit before falling asleep and woke up several times. What stands out to me most upon reflection is how I felt when I would wake up. The last feeling I would have before falling asleep was relative discomfort as I focused on one aspect of my experience that was undesirable, and I would wake up with a sense of integration, joy and ease.
My dreams were vivid, strange, and included a lot of extended family. My grandpa McCue passed away a few weeks ago, and he was alive in my dream yet the way we all talked with him and about him it was as though he was planning or knew he was going to pass the next day. (Interesting to note as well, I just was reminded this morning that today is my grandpa’s birthday. So his visit in my dreams is landing with even more emphasis and intrigue.) He was in a wheelchair in my dream, and much fuller and buffer than I have ever seen him (which he loved hearing us point out to him). He was responsive and smiling, and it felt so good to see him in this state.
Much of the dream was spent inside a Mormon church, as my Grandma had booked it all day for gathering and celebrating. While much of this dream, upon reflection, was nonsensical in regards to the actual events taking place and the jumping in and out of various scenes, the common thread was there were visceral moments of frustration followed by resolution. Something would happen that I didn’t like for whatever reason and my first reaction was judgment and being bothered. And then something would shift inside of me and I would realize I was not a victim without any choice. I could say something or create a boundary or simply pause and see more of what was here now. From there the scene would evolve in surprising and interesting ways that always led towards a deeper connection with the people around me and a visceral experience of interconnectedness. I would awake after these moments of resolution and have a feeling of a broader perspective and as though I could sense the many threads of the present moment as alive, dancing, supporting each other, and weaving together to create what is. As I write and feel these words, I am reminded that this is very similar to what I saw and felt in my Buffo journey when I reconnected with Source.
Last night however, this feeling of interconnectedness would become more obvious to me as it dissipated. The more I woke up, the more that feeling would wither and my perspective would shrink and narrow onto a feeling of discomfort. Yet, as this happened several times throughout the night, the echo of what I kept being opened to remained present more and more. This reminds me of a notion that I have heard many times before, that there are multiple maps or ways of knowing, and when we can place them together, we see a more full/whole picture of what is true. One of my teachers and friends, Chirstine Wushke articulates this so eloquently when she uses the example of a map of a certain space or location. You can have a map of the streets, roads and paths in an area, but there is also a map of topography, and geological maps, political maps, weather patterns in the area, and how the land has changed over time, etc. All are true and important aspects of knowing that space. And when you place them on top of each other, you may discover something that any one of those individual maps could not expose.
The last part of my dreams last night that I want to conclude this post with, is a moment where I was standing and looking down at my feet. I was reminded by someone, a voice, that I don’t need to know everything about my lineage. I began to slowly walk backwards, watching my feet move with calm and a sense of trust. The voice reminded me, knowing myself more clearly as I walk backwards in time will gift me what I am looking for. It was another moment of feeling the interconnected threads of everything. As I reflect on this moment in my dream I feel as though this was the exact message I needed to hear. I have felt like I am at a bit of a standstill when it comes to learning more about my lineage. I suppose there is a sense of overwhelm here, like it’s too big of a job. But now I feel less pressure, less of an expectation to know everything, and more trust that I can curate a few maps, a few timelines, and then place them on top of each other to see what emerges within the interconnectedness.
References:
Campbell, J. (1968). The hero with a thousand faces. Pantheon Books.
Ford, C. W. (2000). The hero with an African face: Mythic wisdom of traditional Africa. Bantam.
Strings, S. (2019). Fearing the black body: The racial origins of Fat Phobia. New York University Press.
Todd, K. L. (2019). Shedding of the colonial skin: The decolonial potentialities of dreaming. Decolonizing the Spirit in Education and Beyond, 17(28), 153–175. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25320-2_11