| This inquiry, entitled Personal Dreamscape as Ancestral Landscape , participates in the contemporary revival of traditional knowledge and lifeways of tribal peoples, combining two ancient but neglected sources of wisdom---dreams and the ways of knowing of indigenous peoples. Affirming the epistemological value and validity of dreams, it employs dreams in a reformulation of personal concepts of being.;The central thrust of the inquiry, undertaken as heuristic study using native research methods, is to track the process of recovering indigenous ways of knowing, re-membering what has been dis-membered, through intention and attention to one's dreams. Transformation of perception involves overcoming the dissociation inherent in socialization into the (post)modern Western paradigm, to arrive at a place of embodied perception, of psychic kinship with a living world.;The basic research design consists of three phases. Following indigenous science methods, phase one is grounded in small corpus of the researcher's visionary dreams. Recognizing the centrality of oral tradition and elders for the transmission of native knowledge, phase two brings elders into conversations about the dreams. Phase three involves deepening reflection on dreams and conversations, and the creation of a narrative encompassing the story of the inquiry.;Several innovations to dream practice are offered: the somatic understructure of dreams is explored, as the visceral dimension of dreaming. Jungian dream amplification through collective myth and symbol is extended in two ways: myths of the researcher's ancestral Germanic heritage are given special consideration, and indigenous traditions and practices are consulted as an older layer of meaning.;The ancestral landscape unfolds through the personal dreamscape, in the following way: First orientation is established to Earth and Sky. The outlines of an ancestral creation story appear. Then the human ancestors come, initially the personal grandmothers, then the primeval ones. A journey of return to the primordial past brings an encounter with aboriginal terror, revealing contrasting modes of cultural adaptation through human history. Then, a numinous encounter with the most ancient planetary ancestors, the stones, unfurls, awakening vital kinship. Finally, journeying to the stars, the cosmic web as a whole comes into view, revealing one's unique place within it. |
