The Dreaming Bones

By Christina Donnell

The night that gathers us up into its sleep, is it not an ocean of still waters? Such is the temerity of still waters, in which active elements, elements that stimulate matter, sufficiently turn it into a new light. The powers of the soul often come strangely up out of the night, unabashedly free in the pure solitude of the dream. Like a musician, it draws from the silence, an exact rhythm, in which harmonies culminate, from the deep undulating waves poured forth by creation. In the night in which the soul springs, like live water, it surrenders itself to the architect of the future.

The twentieth-century French philosopher Gaston Bachelard once said, “When we begin to open our eyes to the visible, we have long since committed ourselves to the invisible.” Indeed, events occur in us long before the mind perceives them. Seemingly, there are times the “feelers of our soul” show up, active elements in still waters, and a presentiment is accorded. The following dream is one of those presentiments — a synergistic moment when the rational mind is rendered useless and our consciousness of the irrational becomes the success of thought — turning both soul and body toward a sonorous wave rising forth by creation.

In 1991 a dream visited me in the night about a mummy adorned in gold. In the dream I find myself sitting with three men and a woman at a table in an English pub at Heathrow Airport in London. I’m waiting to connect with an international flight to the United States. One of the men asks me if I will deliver the package under the table to the U.S. Looking under the table, I am surprised to see a wooden box — five feet long, 18 inches wide, a foot in height. While pondering the size and what possibly it contains, I remark, “The box is quite large. I need to see what is inside.” I have no intention of honoring the request.

Then, one man wanders off to find a restroom, the other moves closer to the woman he is sitting by, and I note the expression on her face. I can see beyond time in her eyes — that motionless hour, unmarked by a clock, or a self — vast as space. It sung the places inside me where linear time didn’t exist.

Meanwhile, the man who made the request bends down underneath the table. He unlatches three wood fascinators and slowly opens the box. Inside, on top of an old, delicate, tan textile with an obsidian design in the weave, lays a mummy adorned in gold jewelry, one foot slipped under the other, body and head perfectly straight, the eye sockets seemingly a presentment for the future. I awaken from the dream trembling, as if I had eaten a piece of it.

Coleman Barks remarked about such dreams: “Whatever it is that gives us such dreams, and also what receives and remembers them, I love all that. But it is with the mystery that gives dreams that I often have more conversation.” I too, often have more conversation with the mystery that gives such dreams. Since childhood, dream images and people met there have been crucial for me in numerous rites of recognition, initiation, and acts of bidding farewell.

Shortly after the dream, I traveled to the high Andes of Peru and met the Q’ero Indians, descendants of the Inca. The Q’ero live between 17,000 and 20,000 feet elevation in the mist-shrouded mountains of Peru and until recently have lived monastically, in isolation. The Q’ero do not live in linear time, do not recognize a self, and live in a world in which the energy realm is primary; the material world, of little importance. They are the keepers of the Incan oral body of spiritual knowledge, considered by some to be the keys and processes to who we are becoming as a species.

Two years passed before I realized the mummy in the dream was probably Incan. By then, I had resigned my position as a Director of an Anxiety Disorder clinic at a Trauma I Medical Center, my adjunct assistant professor position at a university, and found myself steeped in the Q‘ero’s mystical ways, teaching the oral body of knowledge in the U.S. Fourteen years after the dream, upon writing my first book, Transcendent Dreaming: Stepping into Our Human Potential, I see a photo of my editor and recognized her to be the woman with the eternal gaze, sitting close to one of the men in the dream.

Today, more than a couple decades since dreaming the mummy adorned in gold, I remain deeply connected to the Q’ero— a dying culture according to prophecy. Indeed it is. I have born witness to the unfolding, including the death of the elder medicine people, my Q’ero companion (who died from a lightning strike), my Q’ero godson’s family, and him too, another unripened fruit on a dying vine. It seems the contents inside that wooden box indeed came

back with me to the U.S. — a foreshadow of the future.

From time to time over the years, this dream has risen up like a moon shadow — some great thing from out of those live waters, and lets me see again and again into a world that is a great deal more than any of us suspect it to be. I now accept the prophetic dream and it me. I know that I cannot cut my life out of the fate with which it has grown intertwined. Even as I come to the end of teaching the oral body of knowledge, a remnant of an Incan mummy cloth was gifted to me — the same thin, delicate tan color and design from the dream.

Does one become the passing womb for something that wants to be born, wants to become visible and live independently in the world? Seemingly, a prophetic moment claims its own future — it illumines, it awakens, it disturbs, and it brings transformation. In such a knowing invisible forces and the senses cross at a frontier. In that threshold of exposure, something becomes known. It becomes born. It becomes possible. It becomes visible. It becomes.

I feel a growing strength to accept and to know we bear our mysteries. Although time does not console between the deaths of my companions or a culture, it does put things in their place and in order. Ironically, the new trust left me want-less, goal-less, and desire-less. A growing emptiness has occurred and I feel the grace of preserving my equanimity, a measure for the inexhaustible layering of our nature. My sorrow may succeed in breaking what is young in me, but no more than that. It is nothing compared to the immeasurable expanse of my faith in the vast silence in me that continues to grow. There are wide plains inside me beyond time and space, where everything is played out. The more I grow silent, and empty, it seems a supreme intelligence comes forth within; free of the things that thought has created.

If one can succeed in remaining still down to the quiet composition of the bones, there comes an extraordinarily quiet and luminous light. It is a curious thing. Sometimes, there isn’t a word in my head, nothing; other times I see and know what’s happening in many places and am a part of the unfolding and there are no time divisions. These are absolutely marvelous moments and without thought.

Knowledge seems replaced by something that has nothing to do with thought and less and less with vision, something of a different order which is a new type of perception. We simply know. It is far greater than thought and wider than vision. It is a sort of global perception. It replaces knowledge with a precise perception of a larger reality, always in motion. It isn’t something we see or understand or know, it is something we are. So much becomes certain as though the “feelers of the soul” are now within the body’s limits.

With keen lucidity I understand the silent superabundance of our manifestation, this fleeting, unconditional use of forms of earthly origin, pure potentiality. It is as though we are capable of being a syntax of the silence, in which the ineffable within us communes with the ineffable beyond us. Perhaps this is the soul’s recessed certainty in the body of its beingness in the immense script of creation’s eternal speech.

I credit the mystery, and the night and its work for the gift of new perception: surrendering us to its enveloping waves, its veils, and its living waters. It is from here, the mystery delivered the dreaming bones that truly synergistic moment when the rational mind was rendered useless, the irrational became the success of thought, permitting the soul to be recessed more deeply in matter.

Christina Donnell, classically trained as a clinical psychologist, is an award-winning author, prophetic dreamer, and gifted teacher. She has spent over two decades studying Eastern traditions and the shamanic energy practices of the Q’ero Indians of Peru. Combining her interest in cultivating the human spirit with her formal training in shifting perception, Christina conveys a simple yet profound message: through deepening receptive awareness the participatory nature of perception unfolds and the transfiguration of our consciousness occurs.

Christina devotes herself full time to her teachings through The Winds of Change Association, an educational organization dedicated to cultivating the potency of the human spirit. She maintains a consultation practice and travels extensively, conducting workshop intensives and giving public lectures.