Dream Prophecy

Obijwa Turtle manito

One day when I was four I told her a dream in which a tiny spotted turtle swam across the pond toward me, slithered out of the water, and plopped down beside me on a log. My dream was lucky, she explained, for Turtle was a spiritual being, a healing manito. He had picked me out and brought me a message: One day I would follow him as a healer.

That winter my parents moved to Washington, DC, where I was stricken with poliomyelitis. When my mother called her, my grandmother already knew that I was seriously ill and was preparing to come to my bedside. As I lay paralyzed inside the iron lung, she sat with me, singing songs and knitting socks and mittens for her other grandchildren.

She brought me a beautiful black and gold turtle amulet she had beaded, and hung it on the corner of the mirror suspended above my head. “Now, when you look into the mirror you will see your face with Turtle. And then you will know who you really are,” she whispered.

Eventually she convinced my parents that warm water, herbs, and gentle massage were a better treatment for my nonfunctioning muscles than immobilization in an iron lung. They finally agreed, demanded my release from my iron carapace, and brought me home to a regimen of daily swims, sweat baths, and my grandmother’s herbal compresses and therapeutic massage, which sent bolts of electricity through my paralyzed limbs. In a few months I had recovered enough strength and flexibility to go to school, albeit with metal leg braces.

By the time I was a freshman at the University of California at Berkeley, my leg muscles had recovered so thoroughly that I had only the tiniest limp. I studied and enjoyed myself like any other college student, and tried not to think about my grandmother’s lessons—until one night she appeared to me in a dream.

I was in a misty wood where long silken tendrils hung from the branches and hid my grandmother’s figure. Suddenly she said, “Step where I step.” And, although I could not see her clearly, I followed her purple-fringed shawl up and up into the chilly night sky. At dawn we arrived at a large, messy nest filled with serpent bones and bits of broken eggshell. She stirred the debris with a cedar stick till she found what she was looking for—an unbroken light blue speckled egg—and handed it to me, saying, “Here, take this egg; it will be your medicine power when I am gone.”

The shimmering egg stunned me. My grandmother’s image slowly faded into a fog lined with flickering green and purple lightning. As the mist lifted and the sun streaked across the morning sky, I awoke knowing that she had died. But she had passed on to me some of her energy, her medicine power.

That morning I stayed home from classes, waiting for the phone to ring. When the call came, announcing her death, I cried uncontrollably for hours. As a remembrance, I folded and cut out a paper loon, her clan totem and one of her most powerful guardian spirits, and placed it next to her picture on my desk. In the lonely months that followed, my grandmother often visited me in nighttime dreams and daytime visions. Sometimes she appeared as herself; at other times she appeared as a loon diving into a lake. Once she was a purple coneflower beckoning me to taste her.

A year later, she came to me in a dream as herself. Her long white hair was unbound. She was wrapped in a plaid Pendleton blanket over the shabby housedress she often had worn at the cabin when she wasn’t expecting visitors. Smiling, she reached out and almost touched my hand. Then she looked at me and said, “You, my child, must always be minobimaa tisiiwin [seeking the good life] and never allow the wisdom of old Indian women to die out. Now, you are free to walk the medicine path.”

Yet it would be many more years before I set foot in that direction again.

(continue with Mayan Shamanic Apprenticeship)