This is the episode transcript to our podcast episode: “Decolonizing the Dream World: ‘Dream Analysis’ vs UNLOCKING ANCESTRAL DREAMING” You can listen to the episode HERE and/or read the transcript below.
Greetings Good Listeners, I’m Storyteller and Spell Weaver, Shaunga Tagore, and you are tuning into my Divination Channel. Welcome to Otherworldly Giants!
[sounds of water]
We are rolling through season 2, in the Ancestors Writers Room.
Today I want to drop in another writer/director commentary called Decolonizing the Dream World: Dream Analysis vs UNLOCKING ANCESTRAL DREAMING.”
When I write and share the stories in this podcast drama, and when I provide commentary on the ancestral teachings embedded in the stories I share, I’m utilizing the signature technology we use here at Otherworldly Giants, called Open Heart Surgery Storytelling. Foundational to this technology is my work as an Ancestral Dreamer, and my practise of UNLOCKING ANCESTRAL DREAMING.
So today I wanted to share my perspective on what exactly that means – and how is unlocking ancestral dreaming different than “dream analysis” or “dream interpretation.” In the process, we are having a larger conversation about how we decolonize the way we think about and approach our dreams.
Decolonizing Dreaming means understanding that so much of our culture around what we know of “Dream Analysis” can be traced to lineages of western psychotherapy, which then can be traced to lineages of thought created by white men, who were part of a larger movement designed to witch hunt our Indigenous, Ancestral, Earth-Based, Multiversal Wisdom traditions.
The Witch Hunting Colonization has created a long standing pattern of going into Indigenous wisdom traditions, stealing parts of that wisdom, watering it down, psychologically and spiritually twisting it around, and selling that wisdom back to us in ways that keep us subordinate.
Over time they created an incredibly strong cultural and energetic forcefield…a shell…a grid around this stolen and corrupted version of our magic. They named themselves as the leaders, the origins, the Fathers of traditions such as the “Fathers of Psychotherapy”, the “Fathers of Dream Interpretation.”
They acheived accolades, awards, public recognition. They were championed throughout generations, and slowly the full-bodied understanding of our Dream World and our relationship to it was more and more forgotten.
Thus, the work of Unlocking Ancestral Dreaming is about retreival, reclamation, and remembering.
This energetic grid of how we understand Dream Interpretation has infultrated into so much of our public consciousness, that it’s the way we intuitively approach how to understand our dreams.
We have a dream, we wake up, and our first thought is: whoa that was weird, what does that mean? Now I’m googling “what does it mean to dream about broken egg shells?” Now I’m on the internet searching for answers: how do I psychoanalyse the symbols, stories, and characters that I dream about in order to psychoanalyse me?
“Okay Google…broken egg shells, broken egg shells. Okay. Ooh found something! Ok, it says, if you dream about broken egg shells, it means that you could be suffering from anxiety. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, I’m anxious. Wait, what am I anxious about? More googling, more googling. What am I anxious about…ah, here it is…I’m anxious about new beginnings and endings. Yeah. No, that makes sense. Cool! Going back to my day now.”
What is that, right? You wake up from a dream and you’re like OH MY GOD, WHAT DOES THIS MEAN, IT’S DRIVING ME CRAZY!!” then you google something, it gives you an answer and you’re like oh cool I feel better now. I think. I can move on with my life at least.
See how this culture around Dream Analysis shuts things down rather than opens things up.
We’re taught to look for answers to explain ourselves to ourselves, and once we find our answer, the burning desire toward curiosity just sort of dissipates.
Or, we have a dream that is just so huge and wild, with so many things going on, layers upon layers, that we don’t even know where to start. So we just forget about it and let it go.
When we do that – we’re sitting on our wealth. We just received a WEALTH of ancestral wisdom, sent to us directly via our dream world, and we didn’t know what to do with it, so we just turned away.
Unlocking Ancestral Dreaming, this technique that we use as part of Open Heart Surgery Storytelling, it gives us a way in. It offers a technology to open up the ancestral teachings, the ancient and modern day wisdom, the collective divination, the holistic healing that we find in our dreams – our daydreams, sleep dreams, our most heartfelt and sincere dreams for our lives and global futures.
Energetic Surgery is not about just opening it up, it’s about seeking to repair. Sometimes there are answers, but not always. But it will always illuminate Direction. Always give guidance. Always move us toward healing, repair, and remembering.
In Ancestral Dreaming, we don’t look at our dreams as mere symbols for our “real life,” we regard our Dream World as another place where our life is happening.
It’s another dimension of reality in our multidimensional way of experiencing life.
Yes there’s a way of looking at the symbols, doing a systems analysis of all the data, exploring different interpretations of meaning, in the same way we can do that with signs and symbols around us all the time.
But here we’re looking at the entire dreamscape as an Altar, and treating it with such reverance. Just like we can treat our whole entire life as an Altar.
Here, we’re looking at our Dream Self as a version of us that has a unique way of communicating, that will experience their world in a particular way, and that will relay information back to our holistic body in a language that makes sense to them.
In other words, your dream self is speaking to you in your Ancestral Tongue.
I don’t just mean language like for me, English verses Bengali. I mean, your dream world is speaking to you in the language of Ceremony. Yes, the same Ancestral, Earth-Based, Multiversal CEREMONY that was genocided out of how we understand and approach our dreams, by these modern-day “Fathers” of western psychotherapy and “Dream Interpretation.”
So, when I wake up from a dream about broken egg shells, it means there is some place in my life, some place in my quantum energy field, some place on my collective Altar, where there are broken egg shells. Those egg shells have a story. They are sitting somewhere intentionally. They have medicine. They have questions and answers, and most importantly they have a life. They are a sovereign presence, and they are also a part of me.
To unlock my Ancestral Dreaming, I might say to myself, okay, let me just sit with those egg shells. Where are they? I see them sitting in a wide open field, yellow grass, stained from a hard winter and recently melted snow. I see a soft wind gently rocking them back and forth. I feel them as survivors. I feel their ALIVENESS in ways that their aliveness was not guaranteed.
You see that in order to “interpret” their message I utilize my unique Ancestral communication technologies, in other words, my unique way of QUANTUM WHISPERING, including clairvoyance, clairsentience, and claircognisance.
I’m looking at those eggs with my 3rd eye, and I’m seeing the setting around them. I’m feeling in my body – clairsentience – how they felt in my dream. The immediate moment I felt their emotions, I knew, I just had a knowing that they were survivors. They survived something that wasn’t guaranteed. That’s claircognisance. You hear, see, feel, remember something and you just KNOW IT. You just know the truth in your bones.
This is the difference between the “give me the answer” of Dream Analysis and “how can I figure myself out” of pop psychoanalysis, verses, can I sit in good relationship with this part of me, with this part of my world, and with this land that I am honoured to respect and steward?
Instead of trying to ‘figure myself out’ let me inquire into this dimension of my holistic body and ask questions. Let me just listen, for the purpose of gaining a deeper connection with myself, a stronger understanding of my life, in relationship to the life around me.
What do these broken egg shells mean to me? Now let’s bring in some interpretation.
Okay, well I have a long standing ceremonial relationship with eggs. Magical people in my lineage have use egg shells for divination and ritual for generations. I myself did a HUGE collective ritual with eggs a few years ago, planting seeds for my 12 foundational relationship principles for the new paradigm.
Because I have this ceremonial established relationship, I know that if I’m seeing egg shells in my dream, it’s a big deal. So one interpretation is that the ritual I performed in 2021 is coming full circle, breaking open and coming to life. This might be my Ancestors giving me another confirmation, among many, many confirmations I’ve been receiving that it’s just time. It’s time now to start experiencing the physical reality of the prayer, the dream, the seeds that I/we have been planting.
I also know that when you divine with egg shells they are PROFOUND protectors. This could also be saying, with the broken egg shells, that my old protection mechanisms in intimacy and relationship have been officially dismantled, broken open. It’s time to experience new love, new ways of being close to people again.
See how this dream is an unlocking, and unfolding from the last two podcast episodes I released. In our previous episode called “don’t touch me” we listen to a story about two people, Gemini and Aries, who are learning to fall in love again after lifetimes of trauma, hard lessons and ugly truths they earned through their spiritual journey.
These are two people who are survivors, and probably whose survival was never guaranteed, but here they are, little hatchlings, very seasoned and also innocent. A true blank slate in front of them after a cold, hard winter. Having to confront those old protection mechanisms in intimacy, in relationships, that probably kept them alive without any exaggeration.
But they realize that what it will take to love each other, and get to experience their prayers of love in full bloom, in the 3D, in physical reality, they do have to let those old protection mechanisms break. They do have to let each other break each other’s rules.
What’s Amazing about Unlocking Ancestral Dreaming: the egg in my dream is telling me that this sweet, seemingly inconsequential love story between myself and my future partner, is not just about me. It’s also about an egg. It’s about the sweet life and death of a sovereign egg that is equally precious and sacred to the world just as any other human life.
And if it’s about an egg, it’s also about everyone’s relationship to an egg that is a seed to the prayer, to the dream, that is a protector that is a survivor that is ALIVE…today…awake…seasoned and innocent, after a long, hard winter.
I bet many of you listening to this will have a story in your own life that sounds similar to what I just said. That these broken egg shells might not just be in my Dream World, but in yours as well.
Ancestral Dreaming shows us the Reality of our COLLECTIVE DREAMING. That maybe these egg shells are sitting somewhere in Quantum Time, on our Collective Global Altar, that we all have access to.
What a western, colonized culture of of “PsychoAnalytic Dream Analysis” teaches us is one – our dreams must be wholly individualistic…
[Willow: Okay, what in the frilly heck is going on?
Tara: Maybe we dreamed it.
Willow: Right…right. Wrong! Different Brains.
Tara: Oh yeah.]
…And also, that we must look for “rationality” inside of why we dream the things we dream.
“Oh, I must have dreamt about broken egg shells because I had eaten eggs before bed. Oh, I must have dreamt about rainbow iridescent flying dinosoars, because I just re-watched Jurassic Park two nights ago.”
Look, I’m not saying that there is no connection. I’m not saying to never take into consideration a psychological or practical interpretation of why we dream the things we dream.
But I want to look deeper into the energetic subtext behind our intuitive knee-jerk to explain our dreams with some kind of ‘rational explanation.’
The kind of energy I hear behind this thinking is “don’t worry, I’m not crazy.”
It’s a: panic-panic- something wild and mysterious and otherworldly is happening. Let me soothe my nervous system by offering myself an explanation that confirms “normality” or in other words, an explanation that fits nicely into a paradigm that magic was genocided out of.
In a Witch Hunting World, we are taught to view our Ancestral Selves, our Magic, our Amazing, Awakening and Growing abilities to communicate across worlds, access Collective Quantum Ceremony via the Dream World, is to look for rational answers to convince ourselves and others that we’re not crazy.
Sure there’s a level of self judgement, skepticism, disbelief that all of us are learning to decolonize from in order to welcome and embrace more of our personal magic.
Personally, I don’t have any problem with believing in the Mystery of the Universe, and how wild it can get.
My impulse, as with many of us, to explain things rationally, comes from both the fear and current lived reality of being persecuted because others think that I’m crazy just for being who I am.
And that the consequences of others thinking that I’m crazy, is not innocuous, it’s not fluffy. It actually has real serious consequences on my life in certain circumstances.
This is tied to lineages of queer and trans people having to convince people in positions of authority, including therapists and medical professionals that we’re not crazy for how we experience our gender and sexuality, for who we love and the kinds of intimacy we want to experience.
We panic to find the rational explanation, because we’ve literally been witch hunted through things like fucking conversion therapy, religious indoctrination, community outcasting, ostrasization, whisper campaigns, ruining of reputation amongst the families and communities that are supposed to protect us, that we rely on for our basic needs, while also dealing with the very scary witch hunting that comes through government legislation banning us from ceremony, banning us from gender affirming healthcare, banning us from accessing life saving resources, which of course rages on to this day.
[deep breath!]
So, our fear of being seen for who we are is not some olden days buried witch hunt wound, we’re facing real life and death consequences TODAY.
For many of us, therapy rooms are not safe places. We do need support. We do need care. And sometimes do we need that 1-1 model of back and forth counselling or coaching, or therapy. But we need it with people who actually support us and respect us. Where we don’t have to spend the entire session trying to convince someone that you’re not crazy because we’re presenting yourself in a way that does not align with their perception of reality or rationality.
This has been infultrated into queer and trans communities. Yes we experience from the outside world, but we also do it to each other. I myself have experienced the queer community, whatever that means, as less and less of a safe place, the more that I have awakened further into my magic. We have a big problem in queer, and justice oriented communities with, well magic.
We have a Witch Hunting problem that by and large, many people don’t want to deal with. We look at how fucked up some spiritual communities can be, how unethical, and it gives us further confirmation that everyone talking about our Starseed histories, or engaging in deep powerful rituals cannot be trusted.
We’ve gotten a little bit better at talking about self care, and the need to heal our relationship patterns – but we’re not allowed to be too magical, we’re not allowed to be too crazy. I know, from personal experience, the witch hunting that comes at you when you dare to push the bounds, and break the rules of certain kinds of rationality, and a “this is just the way it is” that we’ve come to accept about what’s “normal” or what’s “real.”
There’s a larger multiverse history that I’ve been studying about how did this happen – how did this rift, this earthquake, this split happen between spiritual communities and justice communities? Why are spiritual communities so invested in being apolitical. And why are justice communities so avoidant of magic and healing? What is that story? Because damn, we need to be talking about that something fierce.
I’ll be sharing more about all of that in divine time, but for now I’ll say – if you’re someone who can’t choose, won’t choose between your revolutionary commitment toward abolition and decolonization and justice, AND the more your commitment grows to justice, the more fucking weird and magical and otherworldly you become – WE NEED YOU.
Do not water either parts of yourself down. We need you to step up and show yourself and share yourself in a way that makes sense to you. We need you to follow your heart, follow your spirit.
We need you to not have to put aside justice for the sake of spirit. WE need you to not put aside the justice embedded in your art. We need you to not put aside your art in service of justice. We need you to not water down the magic that your art is infused it, and we need it all to be revolutionary and political. Invest in yourself, those of you, those of us, who cannot, will not choose between these sacred parts of ourselves. You deserve to develop your magic. You deserve to learn and grow and dismantle and share and teach in communities that will support you for who you are.
Decolonizing Dreaming, to me, means regarding the Dream World as part of the Land that we are here to Steward. It’s not a “fake” part of life, it’s not just some weird thing your subconscious makes up…even though sometimes it is some weird shit our subconscious makes up! But truly, it’s part of the land that we’re living with.
Do you see the difference, between how “Dream Analysis” asks us to engage in a kind of extraction of knowledge – going into the mind and extracting meaning, from a part of the land – instead of regarding yourself as a steward of the land, who is tasked to understand, listen, care for, and tend to the land.
Getting the answers in a sentence isn’t as important as building more meaning, understanding and strength of relationship, respecting the sovereignty of the land, and building more interconnectivity.
Let’s take one more visit to our previous episode, called “don’t touch me” and apply today’s conversation to the love story between Aries and Gemini.
Like I said, this love story is about two people who are experiencing an enormous wave of attraction, literally the accumulation of multiple lifetimes and timelines and generations of searching for one another, and preparing themselves to receive the love they’ve been praying for.
When they finally meet, the force of love and grief crashing them together is undeniable. And they’re also fumbling through the every day awkwardness and even discomfort of learning how to be touched again – in all the ways.
In this episode, Aries says:
“You know when you’re talking over text or multiple voice notes per day, and there’s like so much built up tension over the distance that you feel like okay the moment you’re together in person, the physical passion is just gonna explode…but she got here, and it wasn’t like that. Not that there wasn’t attraction. The attraction was off the charts actually, but it was more like…there’s a forcefield around her. An Orb. A shell. Something that’s saying, “don’t touch me.” There were moments where I felt like we might have moved in closer, and gotten physical, but right at that edge her energy would pull back into itself.”
Later, Aries says: “don’t touch me” it goes real deep for you, doesn’t it? What are you protecting? A story, in the Multiverse.”
If you haven’t listened to that episode, “don’t touch me”, I encourage you to – what happens is that Aries sees this Dream World – he goes into his 3rd eye, and he sees a very, very complicated story that lives somewhere in the qauntum reality of this person he’s falling in love with, Gemini. And the story explains why Gemini doesn’t want to be touched. And that explanation is not something you figure out in a sentence. You could literally write a novel and several think pieces about the vision of “don’t touch me” that Aries saw that day.
The way that Gemini shows Aries her story, and the way Aries just welcomes it, watches it unfold without judgement, this allows them both to see so many hidden parts of one another – including the hard and the ugly, and that witnessing creates so much softeness between them. It alleviates the uncomfortable edges around the awkwardness, and they able to just meet each other where they’re at, be vulnerable and open with each other.
And oh shit – look at us talking about those egg shells, again. “The attraction was off the charts, but there was a forcefield around her. An orb. A shell. An Egg. That’s saying “don’t touch me.”
I wrote that story in November or December of 2023. I published it on April 18 2024. May 6 2024 I dream about the broken egg shells.
In this ongoing saga of how Shaunga met her Future Partner, we have a little revelation. We have a little message about divine timing. The egg shell just broke, people! The egg shell just broke.
And if those broken egg shells are not just about me, if they’re also speaking to what many folks are experiencing right now. If this is also something in our collective energy field. If this is a pattern that’s part of a larger fractal that is a larger force of primordial ancestral healing moving through the entire globe…something in the collective field of our dreams just HATCHED OPEN.
[sounds of water]
That’s big news, people.
Stay tuned to Otherworldly Giants, over the next month I will be showing you and taking you through more examples of how I unlock my dreams, my day dreams as well as my sleep dreams.
This is all leading to our Ancestral Artist Retreat, happening all online between June 3 and July 5 2024. I did change the date – if you listened to our last episode I mentioned the retreat would be in May, but I pushed it back to June. Don’t worry, I won’t change it again, I promise. My Ancestors really wanted me to shift things so that the retreat would fall during Pride Month, which is also my BIRTHDAY MONTH.
This theme of unlocking our Ancestral Dreaming, as well as stewarding our dreams that are currently hatching and coming to life will be a major theme for this Artist Retreat. Check out the link in our show notes, it has all the information you need, I would love to have there if you’re called to being there, and experience our dreams coming alive together. Again, we’re starting on June 3 and going until July 5.
One last thing I wanted to mention – while I was writing this commentary, I decided to google the “Fathers of Dream Intrepretation” and of course the two main white dudes that come up are Sigmund Frued and John Allen Hobson.
So I googled them, and I was floored to see the first thing that came up. Their birth dates and death dates. Hobson was born on June 3 1933 and died on July 7 2021.
Listen, I kept saying this to our first cohort of the Ancestors Writers Room – but you can file this on our ever growing list of “you can’t make this shit up.”
First of all you got a major 333 portal here – June 3, 1933. 333 is our Number of the Ancestors Writers Room, in other words, turns out, it was about FRIENDSHIP -333 – all along. He was 88 when he died. In other words 2024 – add up those numbers – we are in the year of EIGHT. And finally June 3 to July 7, is almost exactly the same dates of our Ancestor Artist Retreat, which my Ancestors made sure I shifted into that portal of time.
So basically, the entirety of Hobson’s life, the “Father of Rational Dream Interpretation” his entire life of 88 years, is acting as a fractal of our artist retreat during the year of eight.
Sigmund Frued was born on May 6 and died on September 23. May 6th is the day of my Dad’s funeral – 8 years ago. And September 24 is the day that my parents got married, that’s their wedding anniversary.
Altogether Now: “YOU CAN’T MAKE THIS SHIT UPPPP!!!!”
Let me just say it, clearly: this retreat I’m hosting is holding the birth and death dates of the so-called FATHERS of modern day psychotherapy and dream interpretation.
“WHAT’S THE MEANING OF THIS?”
Okay, here’s the point in our ceremony where I’m going to give you my straightforward interpretation and analysis.
This is the egg shell breaking, people. This is about the energetic grid of dreaming that has been confined in this trap of colonial over intellectualized mentality that so deeply rests on being fucking “rational”…
If you trace our obsession with “rationality” you find the foundation of the Enlightenment Period in Europe, which was the intellectual foundation of scientific racism, creating a foundation of anti-black racism that intellectually justified the stealing and colonizing of land, the stealing and enslavement of Black people, the genocide of Indigenous people, thus creating the conditions of our modern day capitalism and systems of heirarchy and oppression.
This entire SHELL of how we think about our DREAMS is breaking open, and life and ALIVENESS is being handed back to the ANCESTORS, retrieved and remembered by the Starseeds and the Earth Stewards. This is magic rising, rebirthing, learning to love again and be loved, learning to be held and touched, having survived when its survival was not guaranteed.
For me to Host this retreat, and for everyone joining, we are a part of this movement, we are part of this moment. This is the ceremonial space that is actively dismantling this level of Empire.
We are PRESENT in retreieving and remembering our Ancestral Wisdom Traditions together, our ANCESTRAL ways of art making and dreaming, that is so powerful that it just dismantles the old thing that we don’t need anymore.
WOW – do you see what just happened by chooseing to journey with these egg shells in my dream? All these layers of meaning came through: some intimate, some collective, some to just sit in reverence with. Yes there was interpretation, there was analysis, but all of it was held by ceremony. Not just any kind of ceremony, but the CEREMONIAL PROWESS OF AN ANCESTRAL ARTIST.
[cue music theme music: electronica punch]
Thank you for tuning in dear listeners. Remember to check out the links in our show notes to find our website, find all the info you need on our upcoming retreat, sign up to our mailing list, subscribe on youtube, follow us on social media. If you appreciated this episode please feel free to share it, if there are people you know who are looking for what we offer, please tell them! Rate and review this podcast. Do all the things! Thank you so much. We will see you next time – until then, be brave! Be a Giant.