Thoughts About Dreamwork with Central Alberta Cree
C. Research on Central Alberta Cree
The research I have been conducting is on the relationship between dreams and waking autobiographical incidents in Central Alberta Cree. It further delineates the impressions of cultural differences I have been getting as a teacher, writer, and friend. The dreams which were collected as part of an in-class activity were factor analyzed separately for Native and nonnative students from two classes on developmental psychology (Gackenbach & Prince, 1992). Dream content categories were generated from the dreams themselves. In a factor analysis items clustered differently as a function of culture. What seemed to distinguish the two cultures was the relationship between transpersonal and emotional/conflictual elements in the dream. Nonnatives associated conflicts with thinking about the dream, transpersonal elements and NOT seeing the dream as concrete. In other words, the transpersonal (spiritual) was associated with conflict and figuring it all out. These things were not seen as concrete or "real".
In stark contrast the Natives associated transpersonal elements with seeing the dream as concrete and with movement. A separate factor showed an association between dream conflicts, communication attempts, and emotional expressiveness. So although for Natives dreams were seen as related to personal problems it was of less importance (third factor) than for nonnatives (first factor) and unrelated to the spiritual element of the dream. However, the first, and thus strongest factor, for the Natives was thinking about the dream and looking for answers in it.
This "Dream Reflection" factor stood on its own, not associated with any other dream dimension as it was for whites. One can conclude that dreams for these Natives, without reference to type are foremost to be thought about and answers to be sought in them. Dream reflection also loaded on the first factor for nonnatives, but the reader will recall, this factor loaded conflicts, transpersonal elements and a lack of concreteness.
Movement elements association with the transpersonal aspect could well account for the felt "reality" of these experiences in Natives. Movement did not load until the third factor for the nonnatives and was associated with conflict, suggesting the classic chase/nightmare scenario.
In sum, among this group of Cree transpersonal experiences in dreams are conceptually different than dreams with personal conflict but these two elements are related in comparable nonnatives. This reflects the Native idea that dreams are messages to be understood from other worlds and the opposite belief in nonnatives that all dream elements are parts of the individual psyche.
When I began to work dreams with Natives I tried to promote the idea that even dreams of spirit were personal. I met resistence. Overtime I have come to more fully appreciate the different dream forms of which they speak and to honor their separateness yet complementarity.
This dream/experience is clearly transpersonal and seen as concrete in that the dreamer was certain this was a visit/message from her dead mother. Yet as the story unfolded it became clear there were powerful emotions involved. These manifested again in a very real transpersonal connection. DM told me of a recurrent dream she had as a child a few days before the class did a dream incubation technique. She wrote:
The dream I had that always made me wonder is a circle of trees and a little opening where a road comes in and my mother walking on that road towards me inside that circle with a rock in the centre, a bag I put my sweet grass in after I had picked it and braided it. The part I can't understand is she disappears just before she reaches me to hold my hand and I wake up. Some day I would like to touch her hand in my dream to see what happens.
DM's mother died three hours after birthing her. DM was raised by her grandparents and physically abused by her grandmother who blamed DM for the death of her mother. DM hated her grandmother and was glad when she died yet the interference of the grandmother into the connection between DM and her mother continued in DM's eyes even after her death. She told me of a time after the death of her grandmother when she tried to contact her mother in a sweat designed specifically for that purpose. DM explained that her grandmother came in spirit to the sweat and blocked DM yet again from connecting with her mother.
DM told me after class that when she told her grandfather about her dream as a child, he said that if her mother touched her she'd die. The dream in his view represented her mother watching over DM. So because of her death and the grandmothers influence DM was never able to truly connect with or "touch" her own mother.
A few days later we did a dream incubation technique for solving problems. DM wrote:
Last night I had been thinking and worrying about my daughter who is in an abusive situation and her boyfriend took her to Saskatoon [in a neighboring province]. He is abusing her out there.
I fell asleep and I dreamt about my daughter sitting in that circle I use to sit in my own dream and I was the mother who was reaching for her hand. And when I touched her hand and she smiled, my phone woke me up and it was my daughter and she was at a police station and said she ran away from [him] and the police were going to take her to a WIN house and bring her home to me in the morning.
With my white cultural hat it seems that the recurrent dream of childhood certainly echoed her distance from her mother, due primarily to the mothers death but also to the rejection of her grandmother. Yet her belief that her mother was watching over her can also be seen in this experience. The second dream with her own daughter showed what she had achieved in her own family which was denied to her in her family of origin, connection with her daughter. In DM's mind the dream experiences had their own reality, their own firmness that plainly said it all. And the "proof" of the spiritual/transpersonal nature of the experiences was that she touched her daughters hand at the moment the phone rang. There was certainly no doubt in DM's mind about the transpersonal nature of these dreams prior to the last one with her own daughter it was more for my benefit that she told the last dream to me. DM new the surrounding psychological aspects of the dreams but did NOT reduce the dreams to those aspects. She always stayed very firm in her belief in the other worldliness of the source of the dreams.
Go to: Teacher: (A). Dreams in Lecture/Discussion
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