Partnering With Water to Cleanse Your Dreams

Dreams can be described as the bridge between the physical realm and the spiritual realm. We owe it to oral traditions and knowledge systems indigenous to communities of color all over the world for this type of acknowledgment. Dreams can both awaken and disturb us, sometimes even in the same breaths. They tend to be packed with information and offerings, ones we may have never asked for but have needed in the end anyway. To process or to practically apply in the material world. Not all dreams make us feel at peace either. There are times when traumatic memories find their way to resurface while we are asleep, times when those who we love but no longer have access to in the material world show up, and we may feel sadness afterwards as a result. There are times when we are given information and histories in dreams that we strongly feel we’re not ready for, and wish to reject them. And all of those ways that we may feel and engage with these dreams are understandable, especially if we continue to lack tools on how to deal with them and follow them in a way pushing us closer to our best selves.

Our current reality is that we do lack, as white supremacy violently continues its legacy of disrupting our ancestral homelands, current homes, families, and experiences with our bodies. White supremacy and all of its creations (capitalism, queerphobia/homophobia, transantagonism/transphobia/the gender binary, ableism, etc.) utilize both the destruction and violation of Black and Native communities, and other communities of color as fuel to continue its project.

Regardless, when we do dream and if we can remember, it becomes up to us what we choose to do with them. Occasional periods in my life, I make the choice to partner with water for the sake of cleansing my dreams.

From Flint to Detroit to Standing Rock to Palestine, we understand that water is life and is not to be tampered with, or in other words exploited for profit. Indigenous peoples, those still existing on their lands and those displaced, all across the world still recognize and understand this. It is imperative to honor and defend water as much as we can. We all have completely different accesses to water (whether that water is healthy is another conversation), and many Black, brown and Native communities are still fighting systems that are actively and intentionally working to keep this life from us. White supremacy works to strip away every form of life there is for us.

But water is sacred, y’all. It always bounces back and we need to support its resiliency the way it supports ours. There is a video with Pat McCabe (Weyakpa Najin Win, Woman Stands Shining; personal website is here), who is a Diné (Navajo) elder, phenomenal mama, artist, writer, ceremonial leader, and international speaker. In it she offers a story in which she developed a relationship with water unlike she had ever had before. But first, she begins with:

“In the Lakota way of prayer, which has by now become almost a global saying…‘Mni Waconi’, they said. That has a lot of meaning, but a kind of shorthand is to say that water is life. Not only is water life, but it is also alive. So it has consciousness. The water is listening to us.”

Figures of white science and logic are always slow to accepting ways of knowing that are native to our pre-colonial, ancestral, and diasporic cultures...especially when they are unsure of how to profit from it. But we have always known, even if we gave it different language or none at all.

When you consume water, thank it. Speak intentions over it if you would like. Pray over water just as we are sometimes taught by our families to pray over our food for nourishment. As Pat McCabe (Weyakpa Najin Win, Woman Stands Shining) stated, “The water is listening to us.”

With that being said, to bridge us back to dreams, my intention with publishing this was to offer one way of partnering with water that I use to help myself. Whenever I am having nightmares or simply dreams that I do not want to have anymore, an easy way of clearing them and working to reset them is sleeping with a clear glass, cup, or bowl under my bed. Right where my head should be.

I pray over it and ask the water to cleanse my dreams and then go to bed.

First thing I do when I wake up, I pour it out into the toilet and flush it. You can also pour it outside on the ground, if you wish to. The earth transmutes much of what we put it into it, in terms of energy.

Depending on how bad or exhausting the dreams are for me or how fed up with them I am, I will do it a few days in a row. Usually if I am doing it more than one day in a row, it means that those particular dreams and the exhaustion were weighing on me more than I thought, therefore was not able to go away immediately. However, as they gradually become less intense, less long, less worse, I continue do it until fully resolved. I believe the maximum days I have ever had to do this was maybe three or four consecutive times. But please follow your intuition/first mind/first gut and do whatever feels best for you. Or just ask your spirits. If for whatever reason you are not able to put it under your bed, try to put it as close as possible.

I tend to contextualize it almost as a Black Conjure dreamcatcher.

Let the water be your net and your friend.

There are so many different methods that you can do this. I was taught this as a Conjure/Hoodoo trick by a friend’s godparent, who is both a conjureman and Lukumí priest. But working with water and working with our dreams are things that we all have cultural ties to, even if not apparent at this point in time or with the language we currently have. So again, please do what feels best for you.

FEEL FREE TO EXPERIMENT WITH DIFFERENT STONES, SUCH AS:

black tourmaline - repels and blocks negative energies and psychic attacks. Black tourmaline is described as a daily disinfectant for the soul, and cleanses the aura of thought patterns that don't serve you.
amethyst - said to be natural stress relieving stones and ideal for people struggling with burnout and anxiety.
chrysoprase - good for promoting stability and peace, countering nightmares, and being an aid in easing depressive states.

You can also partner with different herbs like lavender (whether in plant form, oil, or tincture) or chamomile, or even different scriptures and offerings like Quranic verses, poems, songs, or anything else you can think of or feel called to work with. Also a pouch of mint for under the pillow, as an aid of refreshment and purification.

The term “partner” is used intentionally. This is to reject desires to be in a harmful relationship to what we consider to be resources to us on this planet, if we can help it. Just because majority of us have been colonized by white folk, don’t mean we got to do the same to the other forms of life we share this planet with. Again, if we can help it. Capitalism makes it extremely difficult to do anything ethical in this world (which is why it must be destroyed, but that’s for another day). But it is necessary to not only challenge that and the value system it trains us to have, but also replace it with one that encourages us to exist in a more harmonious fashion where we are not replicating the same systems that harm us.