Head Shrinking and the Power of Dreaming
July 21, 2008 by Ryan Hurd
Filed under Lucid Dreaming
To start off my review of this year’s International Dreams conference in Montreal, here’s a fun factoid: head shrinking in the Amazon is alive and well.
Know to the West since the 1940s, head shrinking is an important ritual for the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin (the Jivaro clans, especially the Shuar). The vengeful spirit of the dead warrior, known as the Muisak, is disempowered through this ritual. But according to dream researcher Rosa Anwandter, herself a Mapuche healer from Chile, the practical application of this process is the stifling of the dead’s dreams.
Anwandter gave a fascinating review of the dream societies of the Amazon, pointing out at least 20 relatively intact communities throughout the Amazon basin, and another half dozen or so in southern Peru, Bolivia and Uruguay. In most of these societies, dreaming is key to living in completeness. Those who are unlucky and can’t recall their dreams are called “miserable.”
