and tail of the beast. Soon the monster we’ve made is roaring and thumping around the room. Brian, playing himself, darts around, trying to hide behind the furniture; his fate is preordained. He is swallowed by T-Rex. He rolls over and over, playacting his descent into the belly of the beast. Way down deep inside, he finds the eggs and frees the baby monsters, who return the favor by saving him.
This is wild and happy and just-so, and everybody wants more.
We turn other kids’ dreams into theater, and each time a new strategy emerges for dealing with dream monsters. A ten-year-old girl tells us a dream in which she’s at school, on her way to lunch, when a “short monster” appears and starts eating her classmates. “He couldn’t eat me, because I kicked him in the face.”
Playacting that one produces a stampede as a very small boy, thrilled to be playing the short monster, pursues the dreamer’s classmates until he is laid flat by a pretend kick to his face. Everyone laughs as the dreamer dabs at the slime the short monster has left on her foot.
A thirteen-year-old girl in the group is menaced in her dream by people behaving like monsters. She puts on bat wings and flies off to a special place where she can be safe. The scariest adults in the dream are the ones who remain strangely frozen, as if they have been encased in blocks of ice, while she tries to avoid the attackers. In a later scene, she is at a wild ocean. When she plunges in, she becomes a killer whale and swims with delight with an orca friend who comes to join her. When she shape-shifts back into the form of a teenage girl, the grown-ups are no longer a threat to her. She has brought power back from the place of the killer whales.
THESE ARE SCENES FROM A SINGLE AFTERNOON of dreaming with kids and their families, the way our ancestors used to do it and some indigenous peoples still do. We had started out right, by drumming and making cheerful music to call up the dreams that wanted to play with us. Then everyone grabbed art supplies from the center of the circle to make a drawing of a dream.
Also at the center of the room, we had placed a huge toy box full of stuffed animals and puppets and plastic lizards. I invited the kids to grab any animal they liked. Then, since we were on traditional Mohawk Indian land, I had them join hands and voices in singing a simple Mohawk song that calls in the Bear — and with it, all of the other animals — as helpers and protectors.
Don’t cry, little one.
Don’t cry, little one.
The Bear is coming to dance for you.
The Bear is coming to dance for you.
We discussed how, if you have a scary dream, it’s good to know you have a friend who can help you out and take care of you. Little Abby came over to me and whispered confidentially, “I have a bear. And I have lots of dream friends.”
We broke every half hour for snacks of orange slices and chocolate chip cookies.
Toward the end, I opened my dream journal to a page where I had drawn a picture of Champie — the cousin of the Loch Ness monster who reputedly lives in Lake Champlain — swimming in the East River in front of the island of Manhattan, with delighted kids riding on his back. This was an image that had come to me spontaneously in a recent drumming circle.
I told the kids and their parents and grandparents: “A journal like this, where you draw your dreams and write down your stories, is a treasure book. I hope everyone here will now start keeping a treasure book. Ask the grown-ups who brought you to help you find the right one. They can help you write down the words if you like. But there’s one thing about a dream journal everyone should know. It’s your special book, and if you don’t want Mommy or Daddy to read it, you should tell them: ‘This is my secret book.’ And they must respect that.”
I asked if there were any questions.
Hands went up all around the room.
“Can we do this again?”
“Can we do it every month?”
“Can we do it every week?”
“Hey,” I responded, “you can do it every day at home or at a friend’s house now that you and your families know how much fun it is.”
When Kids Dream the Future
Children don’t have to be told that we are all psychics in our dreams. They know this, because they have psychic experiences in their dreams all the time. They see into the future, they encounter the departed, they see things happening at a distance and behind doors that are supposedly locked against them. The problem is that very often the adults around them won’t listen, sometimes because they are afraid of what the child may be seeing.
I once led a series of dream classes for sixth-grade schoolchildren as part of a “talented and gifted” program in a school district in upstate New York. At the start of each class, one of the questions I put to the kids was: “Has anyone dreamed something that later happened?” On average, nine out of ten kids said they had had this experience. A tough young boy who looked like Rambo in the making shot up his arm, eager to tell his story. “We went on family vacation in Myrtle Beach. I dreamed the whole ride from the airport, turn by turn. I kept trying to tell Dad which way to go, but he wouldn’t listen to me. So we spent an hour getting lost and doubling back, because Dad doesn’t believe in dreams.”
My friend Wanda Burch, the author of She Who Dreams, remembers what her son Evan saw in a dream when he was just three years old. Although this is a family of dreamers, the parents did not understand the dream until it began to play out in waking life — at which point the dream prompted the quick action that may have saved mother and child from serious injury. Here’s how Wanda told me the story that unfolded at their home in the Mohawk Valley of New York:
My son was just a bit over three years old and already sharing great dreams. He told me he had dreamed about “the dogs” and was terribly frightened of the dream, but seemed unable to express why they terrified him so much. My husband was working very hard and was really exhausted on the evening of a board meeting, so I offered to drive him the fifteen miles from our home in the Mohawk Valley.
Just as we closed the door of the house, Evan began screaming, “The dogs, the dogs!,” pulling on my hands. I had to pick him up to get him in the car, and told him over and over again there were no dogs. He calmed down. When we dropped off my husband and prepared to drive home, Evan got agitated again, looking out the back window and telling me there were growling dogs. We spent a few minutes discussing nightmares and things he could do with the dream in order to work with it. I don’t recall what I told him at that time, but he was usually quite capable of dreaming his own solutions to his nightmares, so I was surprised this one was scaring him so much.
We drove back home. The same scenario began again. I had to carry Evan into the house. This time he was screaming so hysterically I could barely pick him up. He calmed down again in the house. Time to pick up my husband. Again, Evan was hysterical, thrashing around in a desperate attempt to avoid getting in the car.
When we returned to our home with my husband, Evan started screaming. I was struggling to get him from the car to the house. When we were just feet away from the glass-enclosed porch, I heard the most terrifying barking and growling. I turned in that instant to see a pack of wild dogs coming over a slight rise just yards away from the cottage. I literally threw Evan into the porch, screaming at my husband to close the door and stay in the car. I barely made it through the door to slam it against several of the dogs as their bodies lunged against the porch. Several crashed
