Teer ne nog & Teer ne mo - "Land of the living, land of the afterlife, surround the tree of life whose roots and branches intertwine" - From the pre-Christian Ireland.
This is the Celtic Tree of life, which connected all the realms. To the ancient Celts, the realms of the Otherworld were in full view all the time, which included the ancestors, the deities, and the sidhe or faeries. In the Scottish Highlands, you find the “two sights”, which denotes the capacity to see both the normal waking world (ordinary reality) and the world of spirit and energy that is intertwined and connected to this one. We find the two sights among certain individuals, who are the dream-seers and the vision-seers.
From my ancestral dream studies in the Indigenous Mind (IM) MLA program at Naropa University, I learned how to receive dream messages from Ancestors, Spirit and Guides, and how to understand them in
the context of the waking world. Much of the post-modern world does not have Elders or intact cultures to link the modern and disassociative way of studying our dreams, with the ancient integrated ways of our ancestors. Indigenous elders guided students in the IM program beyond their individualistic sense of self to recover their indigenous wisdom traditions. In the IM program, we are attempting to reclaim what our indigenous
ancestors did, and that is to use our dreams as guides, and to connect
with our ancestors.
This is a painting of one of my dreams I had, which I used as part of
my “dream data” to guide me to my ancestors. The title of the dream is
“Going on a Boating Trip to the Isle of Dracos with my friend Bear”.
At the time I had this dream, we were also researching the stars and constellations of our ancestors, and after this dream I became obsessed with the constellation Dracos. Now Dracos the dragon winds its way around and between the two bears, the big and little dipper, Ursa Major and Ursa Minor. The Celtic word Art means bear, and King Arthur derives his name from the word Art. King Arthur is symbolically attributed in Druid ceremony and teaching to the Pole Star which is part of Ursa Minor, and Ursa Major is sometimes known as the Great Bear or Arthur’s Plow. The dragon represented the goddess, the feminine, and the dreams, and this took me deeper into my connection with the dreams and the two sights of the Celts, and my own Sight.
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