Medicine Dream

medicine (from medi, 'middle' or 'center', Latin) 1. that which brings you back to the center. 2. healing agent of the North American Indians....

dream...4. v. to awaken to the numinous powers ever present in the phenomenal world about us and whose powers possess us in our high creative moments....

--The New Age Dictionary

In the mid-1970s, I was an undergraduate student with an interest in ancient languages and religions. At the time, my fiancé was an aspiring Irish poet and author enamored with the "On the Road" experience. We planned a post-graduation free-wheeling train trip across the United States and into Mexico. When he died suddenly and tragically, I felt compelled to continue with our plans and to take the trip in his memory.

As a result, I met the Native Yuman I call John Black Crow in this book. This is not a traditional Yuman name but symbolizes one aspect of his total being. His true Native name carries an unspeakable significance. My association with John did not constitute the long formal apprenticeship others have recounted. Rather, the experience was comparable to being instantly ravished by an ancient sun deity.

In his original language, John would have been classified as a Kwaxot: one who possessed the most potent form of Dream Power. His Dreaming and its revelations drew me into a life-and-death struggle of transformation. His intent was to awaken phoenix-like energies within me, to transform me into a creature like himself, and for us to leave the world together. For this purpose, he called me and then killed me, exploding into the infinite before my eyes.

John introduced me to another type of Dreamer, one with an evolved Dream Power of a different kind. I call him Chon. His is supremely concerned with healing the sacrificial element inherent in the form of human or blood sacrifice, while today it is often the sacrifice of life energy through the formative. It is Chon's Dream that we elevate sacrifice to the status of self-transcendence in which all beings achieve true and total transformation.

Chon beguiled me with his love and with his insights into the knowledge of the Ancients. His medicine invokes simultaneous levels of awareness and dimensions of time. To understand these practices, I was instructed in Dreaming the Tzolkin, the Mayan prophetic calendar. Chon felt that healing is a multi-dimensional process and that it occurs on all levels, in all times, and in all dimensions at once.

Together these two wondrous beings worked their magic on me, harmonizing their energies within me in a kind of Creator-Destroyer dance. To experience their levels of existence, I made crossings into two separate realms and there worked within the mega-drama of evolution. It is my understanding that these realms can become accessible and their energies used for transforming consciousness. With this in mind, I wish the reader to examine his or her own life and dreaming in relation to the manifestation of the Creative Dream and our individual responses to it.

The concept of Healing Dreaming is an extension of the fact that all life and all consciousness is interconnected. Every time is simultaneous and we exist in the ever present and the infinite Now. As when we tune a radio, where we focus our consciousness determines the spectrum of frequencies we perceive and the reality they create. Death is a turn of the tuner, but we continue to exist as does the whole of creation. To truly heal, we must extend ourselves into all levels of creation and into all times.

This is Medicine Dream. It is a gift of transformation. It will place its immortal spark within you and slowly begin to work its magic. You must let it go very deep. I humbly give an example of my own process.

In 1992 the Columbus ships arrived at my seaport home on my birthday. After years of contact with Native Dreamers, I understood this event to be a significant omen. Subsequently I was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to continue my research on the Maya. And then, after returning from a summer in the jungles of Mexico, I became very ill. This illness transmutes the DNA.

To understand my metamorphosis, I had to learn about and experience powerful transmutational energies, to dissolve my being into its primordial state. Upon returning to this realm, I did not bring back whole parts of myself and had awakened new energies that formerly were not utilized within me. I strove to regain balance. I possessed knowledge missing in a stricken world. The transmutation I experienced has the potential to heal the world into a higher vibrational realm.

What is this healing movement? Is it the restoration of a primordial condition, or an evolution within that condition toward an even higher ideal of creation? Does it result in death or new life? Will it summon Divine intervention or demand personal illumination? Will it test our bravery? Dare us to love fully? The answers lie hidden, asleep like time capsules in ancient pyramidal vaults.

The Mayan prophetic calendar points to their awakening in the year A.D. 2012. According to the Maya, the earth will cease to recycle life force energy shortly before that date; this essence will be withdrawn on a large scale to facilitate major change. The Maya believe in the cyclical nature of time. This will be the fifth such destruction and re-creation they record, bringing on the sixth sun, the sun of consciousness.

This prophetic Dreaming is guarded by beings called Chuch Kahuas, timekeepers in the classic Mayan culture. A Chuch Kahau maintains that there were always those who sought to appease the forces by supplying each cycle with the necessary life force in the form of human sacrifice. One such individual was the Halach Uinic, the highest noble in a kingless, war-based Mayan society, who oversaw the sacrifice of victims of conquest and ritual.

The Halach, my Chuch Kahau told me, is an adversary because he strives to control the transformational forces. My ally is the Mayan god Kukulkan, who empowers true transformation which is achieved through spirituality or sacrifice of self.

My first night sleeping in a hammock in the jungle was an amazing experience. The sensation of nearweightless suspension was very peaceful. A breeze blew through the open doors, gently rocking the hammock. The strangeness of the jungle noises enthralled me. Some were beautiful, including a bird call that sounded like a pebble plunking into the water. Others were supremely distracting. The cicada concert became quite rowdy. And still others were evocative, summoning images of ghosts stalking in the shadows. The howler monkeys were, to say the least, most inconsiderate. Since they sat high in the trees, their cries, akin to animal growls or long horn honks, penetrated and blared from everywhere. The cacophony of notes would quiet down for a moment after they yowled, as if the whole jungle was wondering whether they were sounding a predator alert or just mimicking one another. I was completely enchanted by my night in Eden.

In the morning I felt quite refreshed. After I got dressed and stepped out of my hut, I found Esmeralda in an embroidered tunic dress feeding the chickens before she opened the restaurant for breakfast. Her shiny bronze skin glowed with freshwashed softness and her braids were still wet. Jungle Maya bathe many times a day. Chon was scooping fresh water from the rain barrel with a ladle.

"Good morning!" Esmeralda sang to me as she scattered feed and hens clucked at her feet.

"Good morning to you," I replied, walking over to her.

"We'll have breakfast in a little while. There's a bucket if you want to bathe. I spend all day with the people in the restaurant. You're welcome to come and talk with me, but I think Chon would like you to watch his healing work today. See how we do things in this part of the world. Don't worry, you'll get used to the rhythm around here. I'm sure the pace is much slower than you're used to." Esmeralda smiled at me again and pointed in Chon's direction. "You should go and watch him before we eat. He's getting ready to do the count."

I turned and looked at Chon, who had set up a small table and two chairs under a tree. As I wandered over, I could see that the tabletop had a checkerboard design with about twenty red and black squares. Chon was seated in one of the chairs.

A heavyset man approached him. "Greetings, Chuch!" the man called out. Chon stood up and the two men shook hands. The man sat down in the chair across from him. I went over and sat on a nearby tree stump to watch. Chon emptied a bag of crystals and coral tree seeds into a pile on the board. "What is it you want to know?" he asked.

"My life isn't going well here," the man said. "I'm wondering if I shouldn't take my wife and move back to Piste where her family is from and abandon this area. Or, should I leave her here and take a job as a jungle guide to the ruins of Bonampak, which a friend has offered me? It means that I'll be away most of the time but I'll be able to send money home."

Chon began to group the crystals and seeds into little arrangements within the squares. Making each small pile, he mumbled a few words ending with "ic," as if he were counting or praying. It appeared to be some sort of mathematical divination. When he finished, Chon looked up at the man. "You should do both," he announced. "Take your wife and children home and leave them with her mother in Piste. They can all live more happily for less, and your wife will be able to care for her mother, who'll soon need it. You may then take the job as a guide until something closer to Piste comes along."

The man was elated and thanked Chon profusely, shaking his hand heartily several times. After the man got up and left, Chon swept the seeds and crystals back into his pouch and motioned for me to accompany him to the kitchen hut. "Let's eat before too many people come," he called to me.

Esmeralda set out fresh pineapple juice, papaya, scrambled eggs with fresh chilies and tortillas for breakfast. As we ate, Chon dabbed the perspiration from his forehead with each bite of chili. "Chilies are very good for your teeth," he told me.

"What was all that business with the seeds?" I asked him as Esmeralda brought out more tortillas.

"Chon is a Chuch Kahau," Esmeralda said offhandedly. "That means lineage head or keeper of the sacred count in our language. In Tikal, close to where we come from, all divinatory calculations were done in ancient times and kept. While in a Dream state and using the count, Chon is able to answer questions about the future." She glanced at Chon with pride and smiled. "He's never wrong," she added. "He sees into people, their motives, their energy, their designs. You'll witness that today."

I listened respectfully while stuffing my mouth with papaya. Chon and Esmeralda glanced at each other. At that moment Eligio, Tiofilo, and Ignacio showed up and sat down at the table, greeting their mother first, then their uncle and me in an exaggerated way, almost like an insider's joke. "So how do you like it here? It's beautiful, isn't it?" Tiofilo asked me. "Yes!" I said eagerly, still stuffing my face. Everyone laughed.

"Thought we'd come say hello before we go off to work," Eligio added.

"What do you do?" I asked, grabbing a tortilla.

"We're guides at the ruins but also work in our fields and hire ourselves out for the excavations," Ignacio told me.

"Have you eaten?" their mother asked.

"Yes, thanks Mom," they all said in the same exaggerated manner. The three young men accepted cups of coffee instead. I recognized the custom of allowing someone you visit to do something for you, whether you really want it or not.

"Well," Eligio said, brushing off his white tunic shirt and rising politely from the table when they had finished their coffee, "we're going. The ruins open early. I know our uncle is going to take you there himself, but if you need anything from us during your stay, please let us know. We're all at your service," he said gallantly. With that pronouncement, they kissed their mother, shook my hand and grabbed a few tortillas as they went out the door.

Several young Mayan women arrived to start the day's work at the restaurant. They were dressed beautifully in dark blue ruffled cotton skirts and embroidered offtheshoulder white blouses. Esmeralda went off with them. Chon and I remained seated at the table in the kitchen hut. I felt strangely selfconscious, as certain feelings surfaced inside me. I stared down at my food. I must have been blushing.

When I raised my face, Chon was smiling knowingly. "Chuch Kahau?" I asked him.

This time he turned away. "Yes," he said softly. "You didn't know?" he asked ingenuously, cracking a smile.

"Maybe I did," I mumbled as I nervously chewed on my tortilla.

"We know each other already," Chon assured me as he stood up from the table. "You're a brave girl, Merilyn. When you're finished here, come into the curing hut. I'll have patients by then." He calmly strolled off in the direction of the smaller of the two dwelling huts.

Watching Chon's cures that day was incredible. The hut was filled with dense, fragrant copal smoke. He had unpacked and begun to use bundle after bundle of medicinal plants. The patients would enter, sit down in a chair across from him, and enumerate their maladies. Chon would sit and gaze at them through the smoke until he "saw their energy." The recommended cures took a myriad of forms. Some patients were laid on a wooden table covered with a thick straw mat. They were then massaged with aromatic ointments while Chon recited incantations. Others left with herbs and instructions on how to prepare and administer them, while some were instructed to take baths and/or were put on special diets. People would leave items to be empowered or ask Chon to make them little bundles to carry around. I also saw him give people items to bury, place ignited paper cones inside patients' ears, fan smoke over some, and spit corn liquor around the bodies of others.

Another part of Chon, almost like a hypnotic self, often took over and rose through the smoke to touch sparkling or dull places in the patients' energy fields, which could be clearly seen through the hanging copal vapors as a luminous cloud surrounding them. When this happened, Chon's breathing would change and become very audible, like air pumping into a bicycle tire. It was as though another body came out of him to heal his patients. The overall effect of this phenomenon was extremely graceful, exotic, and thoroughly mesmerizing.

Chon appeared to have a strong effect on babies, and many mothers came with children who had stopped suckling or cried a lot and did not sleep well. He would slap the babies on their bellies but they never cried, smiling back at him instead. He then massaged their little bodies and rubbed their palms while he cooed Mayan prayers over them. The babies always seemed gleefully animated afterwards, and the mothers left ecstatically happy and thankful.

Payment was varied. There was a cylindrical basket outside the hut where people dropped money, or they would leave fruit, vegetables, candles, incense, chickens . . . whatever they had and could afford. The length of cure also varied. Some mothers brought their babies back for several visits before they were completely healthy and recovered.

There was one elderly woman who could not walk. Her children carried her to Chon that afternoon for a healing, and she was asked to stay and ended up sharing the curing hut with me for nine days. After receiving massages and instructions, she was able to walk feebly on the third day by holding onto her daughter's arm. By the seventh day, she could support herself with a cane, and on the ninth day was tottering around slowly without any aid.

It was true what his nephews had said about people lining up for the cure. By late afternoon every day, there was a line all the way to the restaurant. When Esmeralda was short on customers, she would bring out the metal folding chairs from the restaurant for the people to sit. They could also help themselves to the cool water in the rain barrel.

With all this activity, Antojitos Mayas did a very good business. It was popular with tourists looking for that "real local" place and for the "real locals." The restaurant was open from eight in the morning until ten at night, and the young Mayan women would work the entire day with alternating lengthy breaks and their three meals. Esmeralda supervised and cooked the food, as well as tending to things at the house and providing support for her brother when needed.

This first afternoon, like those that followed, one of the young women from the restaurant brought our lunch to the kitchen hut. We had chicken lime soup and red and blue corn gorditas, corn masa breads shaped in inchthick ovals and stuffed with various ingredients such as cheese or vegetables and served with assorted sauces. The diverse colors of this dish were very appealing.

After lunch Chon stretched his arms at the table, no doubt tired from his strenuous morning schedule. He had changed into a light blue tunic shirt and a freshly pressed pair of the area's white cotton pants. He now fiddled with one of his jade ear plugs. There was a hole about the size of a slender drinking straw in each of his earlobes.

"Where did you get those? They look old," I asked, referring to the earrings.

"Oh, a friend of mine found them at a site and gave them to me as payment for a healing. I had to pierce my ears so I could wear them," he remarked casually. In a more serious tone, he turned and said to me, "Merilyn, I'm thinking of stopping early today so we'll have the rest of the afternoon for exploring the ruins."

"That sounds great, if you can spare the time," I said eagerly, and then asked, "How much do you charge as a guide?"

Chon actually shuddered and looked back at me with great patience. "This is not a money arrangement. I thought you understood that. You can invite me and do things for me whenever you like and vice versa. Here," he said and sweetly handed me a flat, dark green stone, "it's a jade. Somebody threw it in the payment basket."

Chon stood up and left to treat the last of his patients for the day. I sat back in my chair and watched him walk away, pondering his extraordinary offer. Giving me the jade was a superb gesture. I should have been paying him not only for showing me the ruins but for the rare glimpses into his healing practice, a line of study that now interested me immensely. All this given unconditionally. It made me wonder what strange fate had brought us together.

Later in the afternoon, Chon donned a baseball cap turned backwards, picked up his machete, and said it was time to start out for the ruins. We headed into the jungle behind the huts. He hacked his way along a path, staying about a hundred feet ahead of me. The deep green foliage reached out and enveloped us like a desperate lover. After a while we approached a cool, rocky stream. The birds greeted us with a song.

"If we follow the stream down, it'll take us to the ruins behind the Temple of Inscriptions," Chon said, standing next to the rushing, gurgling water. "Going in the other direction would take us to the waterfall. This is the water that the ancient Maya diverted for their underground sewer system."

We tromped down the stony green ground toward the site. The water flowing beside us was cold and bubbling. A sensation of timelessness amid the emerging sunlight was building within me. I began to see a break in the jungle, a clearing, and then . . . the back of a monumental limestone pyramid.

I felt powerfully strange. "Chon," I called out. "Wait." My knees were becoming weak. I was all rubberlegged, which was odd given my superb physical condition. I practically collapsed into a sitting position and instinctively stuck my feet, sandals and all, into the cold stream. I stared hypnotically into the clear flowing water.

Chon crept back up to me stealthily. "Don't go to sleep here," he whispered cryptically. "It's time to wake up." A cricket started singing loudly. He tapped my shoulder softly and smiled with concern in his face, removing his cap. Chon then plucked tamarind seeds from the pod of a resident tree and handed them to me.

"Oh my God!" I gasped. "It's the dream!" I cried, holding the seeds in my palm and looking up at Chon. My eyes were tearing. Now, for the first time, I was able to "see" him. His face, though middleaged, had the ancient look of timeless experience. He had taut tan skin, high wide cheekbones. His long and narrow nose was not the classic beak seen in the faces of so many Maya, and yet, for a moment, I saw him standing before me in the traditional white tunic of centuries past. I looked away but his dark eyes bored into me with loving intensity. He was the man I had dreamed of on the first night I stayed with John Black Crow! My body was numb with shock.

"It's all right. Come on," he cooed to me softly, holding out his hand.

I hesitated for a moment, unsure of my willingness or ability to go on, but something shifted in me and I held out my hand. I rose lightly into the air, as if leaving my body's weight below, at the water's edge. We walked on, my hand held softly in his, until we reached the site in the shadow of the big temple.

Dazzling light radiated from the edifices. They sputtered with coiled energy in the sunlight, like the tails of rattlesnakes. The baking white limestone rose in stark geometric shapes, reflecting against the dark green rustling jungle. Massive mirages balanced on the colossal scales of architectural perfection. They towered over us, glaring down at us as if they were gods incarnate.

"Do you know who's buried here?" Chon asked, referring to the towering step pyramid, topped with an oblong temple.

"The Temple of the Inscriptions houses the remains of the Ahau Pacal Votan," I expounded, gazing at a hieroglyph from my somnambulistic state. I perceived in my mind's eye a deep tomb and a mosaic jade death mask. "He ruled in the seventh century A.D., the classic period of the kings, before the postclassic rise of the warriors at Chichen Itza."

"Good!" Chon whispered, tapping my forehead between the brows with his index finger and then pointing to a smaller temple on a far hill with a skyscraping lattice roof comb. "And there?"

"Are housed the remains of his son, Cham Balom," I uttered, in a trance, and added, "which have not been discovered yet." I was taken aback by the certainty of my pronouncement; archaeologists only suspect that Cham Balom is buried there.

Chon smiled. "So!" he affirmed.

He pulled me to the palace across from the temple. I stared at its tall watchtower. We entered a low stone doorwell and could see the bed chamber. Somehow I knew that the slab would be covered with jaguar furs. Outside the sleeping area, I also recognized the steam chamber, a sunken stone room for bathing, with its Ushaped squatting hole, both graced with water flowing underneath.

We strolled into an interior palace courtyard. The four ends had several stairs, each set leading up to columned platforms that were formerly covered by thatched roofs. This palace looked familiar. The reliefs showed a noble in full woven strawandfeather headdress sitting crosslegged in one of the four seats of honor, while in the courtyard below other nobles perforated the tips of their large stylized penises. I could almost see him observing them, sitting elegantly in long green quetzal feathers!

Chon sat down crosslegged on the northerly of these platforms and motioned for me to do likewise on the southern platform opposite him. "This ritual," he said, nodding at the reliefs, "was to induce visions." He spoke loudly enough for me to hear him across the short distance of the courtyard. "There is a species of sacred mushroom that has always grown in these parts. On the night of ceremony, the genital or tongue flesh was perforated with thorns or sliced with an obsidian blade. The spattered blood was caught on paper made of fig bark and read for its design, then offered up burnt to the gods. At that moment, powdered mushroom would be pushed into the wound and sniffed through the nostrils or smoked. The fresh mushroom flesh would also be eaten or drunk in a liquid boiled with water and the blood of the participants."

"What type of visions were produced?" I asked, completely entranced.

"Ecstatic visions of deities and their realms and designs. Visions of time, the now, before and after," Chon responded somberly. "I still collect the mushrooms from around here and perform this ancient ceremony on occasion." He lifted up his shirt and revealed fine line scars on his torso, as if baring his heart. "Someday, I think you will want to participate with me."

The prospect was intriguing. "Is there a Mayan calendar here?" I asked him impulsively. "Not long ago, I dreamt of one in the forest not far from these ruins." I was referring to the stone disk calendar in my dream the first night at John Black Crow's. "You . . . yes, it was you! You threw tamarind seeds . . . ." I opened my pocket and pulled out the seeds given me earlier. "You threw tamarind seeds on two of the dates." I blinked, stupefied, staring at the seeds again. I felt like I was falling through the center of the earth.

"There are three calendars and many calculations, but they're not here. I am, though." Chon said gently. "One calendar is ceremonial and is based on the 260day cycle of the fetus in the womb. One calendar is annual and measures time in eighteen groups of twenty days each, with five days of purging at the end of each year. The last calendar is prophetic and runs backwards from A.D. 2012 to 3113 B.C."

"That's the one I mean!" I called out, feeling that I not only knew something about it but was intimately connected to its prophesies.

"All the calendars were designed in Tikal a long time ago, and the annual was later adjusted in Xochicalco," he continued, peering at me from across the courtyard. "All of them are still used by Maya today. There were also calculations done on the phases of Venus, which is the light in the heavens that represents the prophet Kukulkan and which go backwards from the time of the calendars, some fifty million years, and ahead to 2012."

I experienced a momentary vision of the blue light of Venus in the night sky sparkling and becoming the totality of my right eye. "Why does the prophetic calendar stop?" I asked, and then had the eerie realization that I had nearly repeated, word for word, this question from my earlier dream.

"That's the part of the mystery that involves you, the mystery the mushroom smoke might help you unravel," Chon said.

"Have I been having some kind of prophetic dreams?"

"You could call them that. Or you could say that you have been seeing or remembering."

"How will I know when it's time to try the mushrooms with you?"

"You'll know by your urgent need to understand what's happening to you. It'll be very powerful, more powerful than it has ever been. Even more powerful than it is right now, at this moment," he said, staring off deep in thought.

I told Chon the story of Richard Morrison and John Black Crow. He listened attentively while the sky turned scarlet and then purple. Cicadas and night birds began to call. It was winter, and so the jungle was fresh and fragrant at the twilight hour. Chon's eyes had become slits peering into the vastness of the unknown mystery. "He's very wise, that old Indian. There's more to him than meets the eye. As for your lover, I agree with what John Black Crow told you about him, that he served as a bridge to get you here."

"What's going to happen to me now that I'm here?"

"Marvels. I have counted you," Chon replied solemnly. "It'll be better if we let your designs unfold naturally and I give you guidance as you go along. Just trust in your instinctive power to always do the right thing, in the intent you bring with you to this world, and in your own tremendous energy. Things are going to culminate rather mysteriously." Chon lowered his head again and closed his eyes for a moment, then stood up from his crosslegged position in one fluid movement, brushing himself off. He walked down to the bush level and stepped into the jungle.

It had become quite dark. Chon returned with a torch, crudely fashioned from a thick branch and some dry banana leaves. The light from the flame cast strange shadows on the stones and the reliefs. We withdrew from the palace and walked off the site, our feet mingling with the small moist plants until we reached the trail. Chon said we had better catch the local bus instead of returning through the jungle at night, to avoid the occasional jaguar.

As we waited for the bus in the damp blueblackness of the night, I asked him, "What would happen if I tried the smoke now?"

He smiled and patted me on the head. "You wouldn't understand it yet," he replied gently. "Not quite yet."

Merilyn Tunneshende is a student of nagualist/shamanic and visionary healing practices and a scholar with degrees in Religion/Philosophy and Spanish.

Published with permission of publisher Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc. Copyright © 1996 by Merilyn Tunneshende. $16.95.