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Dreaming, VoL 1, No.3, 1991
Dreams, Divination, and Yolmo Ways of Knowing
Robert R. Desjarlaisl,2
Of key interest to the anthropological study of dreaming is the relationship between cultural ways of knowing and the interpretation and sharing of dream accounts. The paper looks at divinatory dreams among Yolmo Sherpa of Helambu, Nepal, to examine how dream images form part of a local system of knowledge which aids in the assessment and communication of personal distress and social conflict. The author explores Yolmo philosophies of dreaming, and how these philosophies are put into practice, in order to show that dream reports span an extensive, intersubjective field of experience: they are a vehicle for social understanding, for they communicate to others experiences of personal distress not readily articulated in everyday life, and are an education into self-experience, for they reveal events deemed "unknowable" through ordinary, secular means.
KEY WORDS: dreams; anthropology; Yolmo; divination.
Soon after I began ethnographic field research among Yolmo Sherpa, an ethnically Tibetan people who live in the Helambu valley of northcentral Nepal, I spoke with Pemba, an elderly Yolmo woman with a gently wrinkled smile, the morning after a bombo or 'shaman' performed a healing on her behalf.3 Exhausted from the night-long ceremony, Pemba told me that for some time her dreams had been filled with visions of darkness, valley descents and terrifying dead men. She subsequently had trouble sleeping at night and often felt feverish with 'piercing' pains (zerka) throughout her body. The shaman divined a few days before that a 'ghost' was afflicting her; the healing was an attempt to exorcise this shindi from her home and body. When I asked if she felt better since the shaman played his drum, she replied that she still felt tired and sore but would have to see how she slept that night; in any event she "felt peace" in her sem or 'heartmind.'4 The next day she stopped by my house on the way to collect firewood in a local forest with friends.
IDepartment of Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts. 2Correspondence should be directed to Robert R. Desjarlais, Ph.D., Department of Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School, 25 Shattuck Street, Boston, Massachusetts 02115.
3Research on which this paper is based was conducted for a total of 15 months in a village to the southwest of Helambu from 1986 to 1989. For further detail on the varied themes of this paper, see Desjarlais (1990).
4rhe sem or 'heartmind,' centered in the chest, is the locus of personal knowledge, emotion and desire.
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1053-0797/91/0900-0211$06_50/1 © 1991 Association [or the Study o[ Dreams
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212 Desjarlais
Smiling from the doorsill, she said she slept well that night and dreamt of reaching a "pleasant place" in the Himalayas where she drank some cold water.
"I'm fine now," she laughed, "the bad dreams have been lost." In listening to Pemba's climb from illness to health, we may note the ways
in which oneiric images map the terrain of Yolmo healings. Dark valleys and alpine snows span the symbolic side of experience, giving image to pain, intent to health, and genesis to the movement between. In the Helambu valley, the physiology of dreaming rests upon the ability of the dreamer's heartmind (sem) to leave the body in sleep and sport about the countryside to visit the place and time envisioned. Through this paper, I wish to examine how the images culled from these travels through cemeteries, forests and canyon trails enable the dreamer to interpret, make sense of, and communicate the experiences landmarked by such journeys.
To develop such an understanding, we must situate the dreams of Pemba and her neighbors within the context of Yolmo epistemology, a local set of beliefs, values and practices which delimits how a person goes about knowing of self, other and reality in the Helambu valley, and the constraints on such knowledge. In so doing, I wish to show how the assessment and communication of Y olmo dreams forms part of an indigenous system of knowledge which aids in the comprehension of events and experiences deemed "unknowable" through ordinary, secular means. In Yolmo society, I suggest, dream reports are a vehicle for social understanding, for they communicate to other experiences of distress and conflict not readily articulated in everyday life. They are also an education into self-experience, for dreams reveal events affecting the dreamer which he or she would not otherwise gain access to. The analytic approach pursued here follows a tradition in anthropology which attempts to avoid working directly from Western presuppositions of knowledge, sensation and symbol, and instead tries to relate cultural understandings of emotion, knowledge and experience to a society's "ethnopsychology."5 The task, in other words, is too sketch out how local values, beliefs and practices shape, and are shaped by, the phenomenology ()f dreaming. To understand the social and personal significance of Yolmo dreams, then, we must closely attend to the relationship between indigenous ways of knowing and the interpretation and communication of dreams.
KNOWING OTHERS
The Yolmo are a Tibeto-Burman people who migrated from the Kyirong region of Tibet to the forested foothills of the Helambu valley in northcentral Nepal in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Clarke 1980). Kinship is patrilineal and residence, patrilocal. Commerce, pastural grazing and the farming of maize, potatoes and other high-altitude crops provide the main sources of food and income, although recently tourism and "factory" employment in Kathmandu and India have offered additional material wealth. The national panchayat system of Nepal officially
5See White and Kirpatrick (1985), and especially Tedlock (1987) and Brown (1987) in relation to the study of dreams.
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Dreams ami Yolmo Ways 213
sets political agendas by regulating district elections, but village politics are often defined by the local power structures of kinship, caste and wealth. Devout practitioners of the Ningmapa sect of Mahayana Buddhism, the Yolmo with whom I worked (of the western perimeter of the valley) also retain a strong shamanic tradition which serves as one of the main vehicles for healing.
The relationship which Yolmo maintain with spirits, deities and demons shapes local notions of human agency, volition and knowledge-notions which must be set within the larger framework of spiritual and cosmic forces. Indeed, to Western eyes, the Yolmo world might seem a mysterious one. Capricious shades haunt streams and crossroads, gods rage in anger if their worshipers treat them, knowingly or not, with disrespect, and the laws of karma encode one's destiny in invisible, indelible ink upon a mirror lodged within the forehead. Living in this land, one is aware of how little knowledge humans possess in their everyday lives. Have I unknowingly offended the gods? Are the planets aligned in a way that will cause me harm? Why is my son sick, and how can I heal him? A Yolmo lives his life with limited knowledge, aware that invisible forces reign but largely unable to monitor or control their effects upon his existence.
Yolmo measure the knowledge that humans do possess against the omniscience of the gods. Deities, Yolmo say, know everything-"they are always looking on you"-and that is why they are divine. Whenever I asked Latu, a witty, wealthy, handsomely dressed lama of forty years, a particularly thorny question, such as why humans forget their infancies, he would respond with a coy grin, "If we were able to know everything, then we would be gods. But since we are only humans ... " Inversely, then, humans know only a little of what the gods do-and much of that through divination, from the shaman's oracular "possession" to the lama's reading of astrological texts.
The limitations inherent in Yolmo epistemology begin with one's neighbors, for it is considered extremely difficult to know what another person is thinking or feeling. Villagers compare the body to a house with one's life-forces dwelling within. As the body hides its contents from the eyes of others, subjective realities are considered largely unknown to the outside world. As one tser-lu, or "song of sadness" laments, 6
When a forest catches fire, everyone knows of it hut when a son's heart burns, only his own self (rang) knows
Explaining the significance of these lyrics, one villager lamented, "You can see a forest fire on a hillside, but how can you see inside the heartmind? Only you can see inside yourself."
Most often, Yolmo strive to maintain an equilibrium in their social lives by controlling the expression of personal desires; they therefore hesitate to let others know what they are feeling. There is also the fear that if others know too much,
6Yolmo 'songs of sadness' are composed of a series of rhyming couplets which are sung alone, in a small group, or upon ceremonial occasions. The songs comment on a form of distress known as Isera, the 'sadness of separation' which 'falls' on the hear! when a person is estranged, for a lasting period of time, from friends and family (see Desjarlais, 1991).
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214 Desjarlais
they may take advantage of this knowledge (through witchcraft, business affairs, etc.). Yolmo thus tend to evince a culture of privacy, revealing little of their inner worlds to others. When 1 asked my field assistant, Karma, how difficult it is to know what is in another's heartmind, he responded, "It is difficult to do that in our society. They hide things, they close things, they are not very open .... They also feel it very hard to express things."
Since a Yolmo keeps private much of his feelings, it is understood that one often just taps into surface knowledge concerning another. While one develops empirical knowledge of a friend by observing his actions and expressions through time, this is at best a shaky science: one never really knows what is in another's heartmind by merely interpreting his behavior. "If 1 were a god," Latu once proposed, "I could get inside your heartmind. But since I'm not, how can 1 know what lies within your heart?" Karma once said something which pertains to the Yolmo capacity for empathy. "It's just the apparent thing they're knowing," he explained, "not the real thing . . .. One doesn't know the true intentions." Y olmo are therefore unwilling to infer another's state of mind or body. As I soon learned, questions pertaining to the thoughts of a third party are often met by the response, "How can one know what is in another person's heartmind?"
Because of such limitations, language becomes the prime medium through which friends bridge empathy and understanding. "One can know about another's feelings only if he tells about it." But even here Yolmo tread cautiously, for while two individuals may agree in conversation, such accord may be lacking within their hearts. "Our tongues are the same," Cansa once told me, "but not our hearts. Only with words do you show yourself, in words you agree, but there is not necessarily agreement in the heartmind." Karma put it this way, "You might be agreeing with a friend, suggesting things, but in the heartmind, you're asking, 'chhi yimba, chhi yimba? (what is there?)." As a result of this ethos of emotional restraint and limited knowledge, Yolmo find it difficult to convey personal distress to others, and so lament the limits of human empathy. As one 'song of sadness' puts it,
If I stay sadness falls to me, if I go my little feet may ache the sorrow of little feet hurting, to whom can I tell?
TO KNOW ONESELF
It is almost as difficult to know oneself in Helambu as it is to know one's neighbor. While the sem, centered in the chest, is the locus of personal knowledge, affect and memory, the experiential world of Y olmo selves encompasses much more than what this 'heartmind' itself can know, for there is a great deal that occurs in a villager's life that it is not privy to. While one can attain awareness of any information stored within the heartmind, one can never know all that happens to one's self. There is much to self-experience, especially events of a distressful, fateful nature, that one cannot 'know' in the heartmind. "You did not see with the eye, you did not know in the heart," I have often heard divinatory gods sound through a
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Dreams and Yolmo Ways 215
shaman's mouth in divulging the reason for a hitherto unknown malady. And while a "mirror" lodged in the forehead bears one's fate (Ie) and constitution, its owner can never obtain knowledge of what is stored there. "Humans cannot find out what's written there," one man conceded. "When we will die, we cannot know, not even the scientists." Yolmo cite a Nepali proverb that catches this dilemma-Babile lekheko, chalele chekheko, kosari nadekheko: "Written by gods, covered by skin, how can it be seen?" Covered by skin or invisible to the eye, many of life's vicissitudes pass unnoticed by the self.
These limits to self-knowledge directly affect Yolmo understandings of illness. As much of one's existence is hidden from the heartmind, it is often difficult to discern the cause and nature of distress. Until painful symptoms signal an illness (business goes bad, blisters sear the skin, a cat prowls through one's dreams), a person remains unaware that something has gone wrong in his life. Only after a sick person divines the cause of an illness-through dream interpretation, astrology, pulse readings, or oracular possession-can he know for sure what has happened and how to ameliorate it.
At the heart of Yolmo epistemologies, then, lies the sense that a person cannot fully realize, through ordinary, secular means, much of what is going on in his own life or in a neighbor's heart. It is for this reason that dreams bear great significance for Y olmo. They provide a symbolic charter for experience, and offer inroads into aspects of human existence considered "unknowable" through waking consciousness. Yolmo thus carefully attend to the messages encoded within their nightly visions and often convey them to others, particularly if they witness a "bad dream" foreshadowing an illness or other misfortune. An exploration into the mechanics of Yolmo dreaming-how dreams embody knowledge, what and how they come to mean, and how they are interpreted-may shed light on the nature and import of this communicative process.
THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS
In everyday conversations, Y olmo tend to divide dreams into three categories: those which are "good" or auspicious (ascending a mountain, sighting a rising sun); those which are ''bad'' or inauspicious (descending a hill, envisioning a fragmenting moon); and those which do not seem to bear significant import. All villagers are familiar with inauspicious dreams (terrifying encounters with streams, graveyards and dark strangers), though elders, lamas and shamans are thought to know more about what particular dream omens signify, from a deity's wrath to a lost 'soul.' Indeed, I found in Helambu an implicit 'dictionary' of dream symbolism, a finite index of dream images and what they mean. Villagers rely most upon this oneiric code in times of distress. It is wise not to treat dreams lightly, since illness often first "shows" itself through "bad" ones. And so many Y olmo strive to remember their dreams, particularly those of a distressful nature, and share them with friends and family in the hopes of deciphering their meanings.
As with Pemba's visions of darkness, dead men and valley descents, dream omens presage many Y olmo illnesses. If a dog snarls or a cat prowls in a dream,
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216 Desjarlais
then a witch (bokshi) or vampire (sri) is sucking the sleeper's blood to weakness. A vengeful 'serpent-deity' (lu) slithers in a snake's skin while wrathful deities animate the hides of bears, yaks and buffaloes. The astrological plight of dusa graha or 'ten-planets' causes houses to collapse or a dreamer to fall down or walk naked. While the ghost of greed (son 'dre) comes in the guise of a policeman, 'madness' (gomba) afflicts a person through visions of a "shaking" (possessed) shaman. If a ghost attacks, a person dreams of walking through cremation grounds or conversing with the dead as if they were alive. Streams flow through various dreams of 'soul loss:' if a dreamer walks along a riverbed, visits a watermill, or comes upon a river that proves difficult to cross or return upon, it is a sign that his 'spirit' (bla) has quit his body. Darkness, strangers, falling from cliffs, and simple fear enshadow other Yolmo dreams of illness. Health, conversely, comes in the guise of new houses, clothes or hats; snow falling upon the body; consuming "sweet" white foods such as milk; witnessing the rising of the sun, the waxing of the moon, or a bright, clear light; ascending into the Himalayas or crossing a river and being able to return upon it-the f1ipside, that is, of omens of iIIness.1
Many dream images predict an event which will affect, in waking reality, not the dreamer himself, but those around him: Y olmo epistemologies of dreaming embrace the lives of others. If a Yolmo experiences a "bad dream" foreseeing illness, it may bear consequences for another. If a tree falls in a dream or many men are seen cutting wood, a close relative will die: if an old tree, someone old; if a sapling, someone young. If an upper tooth falls out, then a relative will die, whereas the loss of a lower tooth foretells the imminent death of a sibling or parent. A setting sun signs the death of one's mother; a waning moon, one's father. While a landslide or a burning, dilapidated house reveals a death in the family, dancers and band music forecast a villager's funeral. A friend sleeping in one's dream, hunched beneath a white cloth, will become gravely ill. The "bad" dreams visited upon shamans never refer to themselves but to their patients. And if a Yolmo witnesses a dream signifying that he will quarrel soon and then, in reality, comes upon someone fighting, he thinks "My bad dream has now gone away, and will not affect me." The detrimental consequences have been "cut" by "falling" upon another. In turn, a dreamer's well-being often relates inversely to another's in an image of limited health: if, in a dream, snowflakes fall not on the dreamer but on another, the dreamer's life-sustaining tse or 'life-span' will decrease while the other's increases.
In encountering images of missing teeth, weathered houses and fallen friends, we learn that an implicit cultural "aesthetics" of experience shapes, and is shaped by, the form and content of Yolmo dreams. I use the term in a slightly irregular fashion, not to define any overt artistry or "high culture" -art, music, poetry-but rather to grasp (and tie together) the tacit leitmotifs which contribute to cultural constructions of body, self and soul (Desjarlais, n.d.). While a sense of fragmenta:. tion, imbalance and weariness often haunt Yolmo bodies in illness, images of
7Much of the imagery, both auspicious and inauspicious, parallels Tibetan beliefs, where "Of all the categories of divination, that of dreams is invested with the greatest degree of religious authority (Ekvall 1964:272)." See especially Lessing (1951:275), Nebesky-Wojkowitz (1956:465), Wayman (1967), and Beyer (1973:370).
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Dreams and Yolmo Ways 217
integration, balance and fortitude tend to implicitly define them in health. In tum, the intimations of bodily decay and spiritual erosion that scar the body in illness haunt the dreams prefiguring these same ailments. Indeed, it is likely that the recollection of dreams offers a creative forum in which Yolmo aesthetic sensibilities are continuously formed and reformed. While tattered clothes and decrepit houses signify a lost soul, full moons and mountain ascents commemorate its return. The symbolic associations marking other dream images reflect similarly meaningful aspects of Yolmo life. The son'dre's ghostly greed depends on a policeman's thirst for bribes, a dog's skull represents the sri vampire in exorcism, a loss of blood drains the body of evil, and airplanes convey the flight of the dreamer's 'spirit' (bla) to the land of the dead. In tum, if a sick person dreams that she gives birth, vomits, bleeds from the body or hands money out to another, health is imminent, for such images forecast that 'harm' (nepa) is leaving the body. And finally, the water imagery coursing through many Yolmo dreams ties to the fact that when a corpse is cremated its ashes are deposited into a nearby stream.
A PHILOSOPHY OF DREAMING
But what is the course of these images? How do dreams convey knowledge and why do they represent such information through symbols? How, in short, do dreams embody knowledge? While most villagers are content to map the heartmind's nightly travels to learn what they "show," the philosophers of Helambu explore the underlying assumptions of such beliefs. A pre-dinner conversation with Latu, the lama quoted above, and his wife Nyima, a spirited middle-aged woman, elicited many of these ideas.
"From where," I began, "do the images that one sees in a dream come?" After staring at my tape recorder for a moment, Latu spoke. "The brain
(klava) knows the truth and tells about it in the dreams-the dream gets its information from the brain."g
"Then how does the brain know about this?" "This information is already known by the brain, and it tells it through dreams.
The brain already knows what to do, and what not to do." "But then why do dreams work through symbols (tags)," I continued, "rather
than directly presenting what it wants to show-as when you say that when a dreamer sees a graveyard in his dream, it suggests he is being afflicted by a ghost (shindi). Why don't you just dream of the ghost?"
"Because we are not gods," Latu replied, "and the gods just give symbols of a crime. If we saw the reality in dreams, then we would be gods, but we are only humans. If we see true dreams, then we could tell the person to die, 'You will die today.' The god shows the 'theatre' to us. So if one dreams of a big storm where
B-rhe klava is thought to work in tandem with the sem in moments of thinking/feeling, for the 'brain' controls the fancies of the 'heartmind.' While the sem desires, the klava or 'brain' commands. While the sem wills actions to be performed, the klava carries out these actions; it strives to find ways to actualize desires-albeit only those deemed appropriate.
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the wind takes something away, then this means the police of Emeraz [the god of the dead] will come to take someone away. Someone will die."
"In the same way," he sipped his tea, "when a god takes the 'life' (tse) from a person it is not known or seen by us, and so the dream needs to express this through a sign (tags).9 You cannot know the specifics about the 'life' being taken, when and where it was lost. But as the brain knows about this, it tells that 'something will happen to you' [i.e., become sick]. Then you see a dream of going downhill, walking in a stream. The brain tells the heartmind this."
''Dreams can be true," Nyima said as she added corn flour to the boiling water, "But they might not come true. Sometimes in dreams we see ourselves diethat is untrue, so not all dreams are correct."
"Yes," Latu continued. "Some dreams are true, some are false, some are opposite. In dreams some undoable things are seen that you don't know about."
"So what would it mean," I asked, nodding towards the food now being prepared over the hearth, "if I dream of being offered some food?"
"If you dream this, you must have felt this in the heartmind during the day, so you see it in the dream at night. Our thinking will be seen in dreams . . . In the same way, if you long to go to America in the daytime, then you will see it in the dream. Dreams, my friend, are not untrue."
"But if so, why is it difficult to remember one's dreams?" I asked, prompting Nyima to quip, "Ah, this guy asks everything from head to foot!"
"Because a dream is like the wind, just coming and going," Latu continued, stirring the fire with a stick. "It is not part of our body; it is like a guest, not staying long, and so it is difficult to remember so well. As with watching a movie, one can remember some things, but forget most."
"So if two people see the same dream, does it mean the same?" "No. My dreams don't work for you, and yours don't work for me. If you see
a fire in a dream, or water, or going to a stream, or drinking milk, you must watch and notice what happens the following day. Then you can decide for yourself what the dream means for you ... Other people may have different meanings."
"But some dreams are true for everyone ... " Nyima added. "-Yes," Latu interrupted. "If the sun becomes black, it means that our
mother will die. If the moon becomes black, then our father will die. This will be true in one month, six months, one year maybe. Whatever you dream, it will become true in the future."
"So then do dreams show what will come tomorrow or what has come yesterday or today?"
"Ah, but now, my friend, it is time to eat," the lama concluded with a smile. What do these words tell us about the language of Y alma dreams? While
Latu's suggestion that dreams derive their knowledge from the brain is an idiosyncratic one (for to most Yolmo the heartmind, not the brain, "knows," while the brain merely monitors and controls this knowledge), he was attempting to account
9In Helambu, one possesses an optimum 'life-span' (tse) as determined by one's 'karma' (Ie). If fate destines a man to reach seventy years of age, he will attain that age if the tse is complete. But if his 'life-span' decreases, or is taken away by Emeraz, the god of death, he is prone to illness and death before that time.
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for a psychological enigma: while the self must know at some level about an encroaching illness if it is able to represent it through dreams, the heartmind, the locus of personal knowledge, should have no knowledge of such events until revealed through dream, for if it did, the dreamer would have no need to resort to divinatory means. But since the heartmind weaves its message from the images encountered through its oneiric flights, how does it learn what to "show"? For Latu, deities reveal what they know through a "theatre" staged in the heartmind and directed by the brain. The specifics of this response seem less important than its message: a person receives premonitory knowledge of his existence even though he is not aware of these actions in the heartmind.
The thoughts advanced by Latu and Nyima as to why dreams work through symbols are instructive. First, there is the fear of directly seeing in dreams what will happen in reality, and so the visions must be cast in symbolic form. Second, as humans cannot know when, where or how the 'life-span' (tse) is lost, the gods and the brain need to show this through symbols-and this knowledge is the best humans can hope for. Nyima develops a more commonsensical response: since we cannot trust dreams to tell the truth, it is best that they work through symbols to keep their meaning uncertain. Otherwise, dreams of dying would be more frightening than they need be.
At the same time, Yolmo must also account for those 'opposite' dreams that Latu spoke of. While most dreams mean directly, where an airplane foretells the flight of the dreamer's 'spirit,' others forecast the opposite of what is seen in a dream. If someone laughs in my dreams, he will cry in reality. If I see myself dying while wearing a white dress, my 'life' (tse) will increase, while falling from a cliff suggests that I will live long.
The Freudian tic of denial masked in these ideas recalls the belief that dream images reflect the residue of the day's thoughts. Wishing to go to America, hoping to be served some food, or, as Latu noted on another day, desiring a member of the opposite sex-the unfulfilled (and often socially inappropriate) desires of the day reappear at night.
Another common belief expressed by Latu is that, despite some universal portents, dream images hold variant meanings for different dreamers. When I asked my field assistant Karma about this, he agreed. "It depends on the individual. For the same thing, two persons may see two different dreams." A Yolmo therefore needs empirically to deduce the meanings of his dreams by observing what streams and cemeteries successfully predict for his own life. This enabled one debt-ridden man, for instance, to interpret his dreams as reflecting more upon whether he would lose or receive money than upon more traditional ideas of illness and health.
Yet while all Yolmo practice this interpretive creed to some extent, I encountered the same dream images throughout the Helambu valley. While a burning house may symbolize something different for two dreamers, it is a burning house for both nevertheless. This finite vocabulary suggests that Yolmo culture greatly conditions the act of dreaming. As I rarely heard a dream account that did not fit into the "dictionary" of dreams noted above, I suspect that Yolmo select, "dream up" or remember significant images from their field of oneiric vision to fit their
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illnesses. Though a dreamer's heartmind may happen upon a plethora of images during its nightly travels, it only brings back a few, oft-handled souvenirs.
As a Yolmo dreams what his culture dreams, a great deal of learning-how to edit, remember and thus create telling dream images-must go on in the early stages of his life. Indeed, I think the main reason that Yolmo children have difficulty remembering their dreams is that they have not learned the proper language of dreaming. When I asked children about their dreams, what they recalled most (or what they were able or willing to tell me) were a few shadowy images-falling off cliffs, bloodied ghosts coming to eat them-and the fear induced by such scenes. For them, the stream of images floats by with as much distinction as the intricacies of a foreign movie appear to an uncomprehending viewer.
Latu's movie metaphor helps us to develop another point: while dreams in other societies tend to work by way of storied narratives ("I was walking down a road ... "),10 Yolmo reports of dreaming typically involve a handful of simple snapshots (a ghostly graveyard, a burning house). Perhaps related to what Marsella (1985:292-4) calls an "imagistic mode" of representing reality common to several non-Western societies, what a Yolmo remembers and tells another of a dream are just a few, select images known to bear prophetic meaning. l1
As Latu noted, such prophecies may predict an event to come within a year's time. But while the party line is that dreams present a future reality (a setting sun foretells the loss of the 'spirit') rather that represent a past one (the 'spirit' has already been lost), in the practice of everyday life both mechanisms are at work. While one man told me that "When one dreams of a bad thing, it means the 'spirit' (b/a) has already gone," others suggested that a bad dream often predicts an ominous future. Although Yolmo argue both principles at different times, it would be inappropriate to say that a rule exists here. What seems important is that dream images can reveal processes hitherto unknown to the person or verify a suspected change of fortune.
THEORY INTO PRACTICE
Such, then, is a philosophy of Y olmo dreaming. But how is this theory put into practice? Listening to what villagers recount of their illnesses, one senses that dream images serve to both reflect and shape a dreamer's distress. Lakpa, a middle-aged Yolmo woman, suddenly fell ill with a "bloated" feeling throughout her body which made her flesh feel "like boiling rice." Occasionally she felt nauseated, with a searing pain in her legs, arms and shoulders. Though positioned in her body, this "harm" also affected her household, for quarreling and "strange noises" were heard in her home. During the day, she felt afraid; at night, she slept uncomfortably. Lakpa's dreams reflected her distress, for she often dreamed of walking through a graveyard where a corpse lay burning and of encountering unknown, black men
lOSee, for instance, Tedlock (1987:120-122), Basso (1987), and Mannheim (1987:135). llIt is for this reason that I speak of Yolmo accounts of dreams as being composed of distinct "images" rather than of lineal "narratives," though the latter term is more common in anthropological studies of dreams.
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Dreams and Yolmo Ways 221
who gestured for her "to go away." After a shaman healed her of these afflictions, her bad dreams were "lost."
Jegu, an elderly farmer, fell ill from what 1 took to be amoebic dysentery. Along with bloody diarrhea, he felt a sharp pain on the right side of his stomach, a pain ''which never moved." His dreams included streamside journeys and airplanes and automobiles which passed through the village. He himself divined that he suffered from dusa graha; after a shaman healed him of this astrological plight by "throwing" it from his home, most of his symptoms, including the bad dreams, were "cut" from his body.
Nyima, Latu's wife, lost her bla or 'spirit' upon falling down while crossing a stream on her way to participate in a funeral rite for a recently deceased uncle. For a fortnight she did not want to walk, eat or work; she suffered from a fever, a headache and a 'heavy' body. She dreamed of going to a stream, approaching a water mill, meeting police officers, reaching a new, unfamiliar place, and feeling afraid. After a shaman successfully retrieved her 'spirit' (bla) from the "land of the dead," her insomnia, lack of volition, and deathly dreams were 'cut' from her newly lightened body.
Latu's younger brother Cansa suffered from a bout of 'soul loss' several years prior to my stay. "I was so sick," he recalled, "my body felt dizzy, heavy, and 1 kept fainting." He dreamed of darkness, arriving near a stream, and wearing tattered clothes-all sure signs, he said, of a lost 'spirit' (bla). After a shaman "called" the lost 'spirit' back into its corporeal abode, the rejuvenated lama dreamed of walking uphill and seeing a bright clear light.
Mingmar, a tall thin Yolmo elder in his late sixties, suffered from the loss of several life-forces: ghosts "ate" five of his nine srog, stealing these 'life-supports' into "the land of the dead" (shi-yul), and he risked losing the other four and thereby dying. "I'm just ill from old age, getting older, and afraid of dying," he demurred when 1 first inquired into his illness, but later admitted to having lost the life-forces. He had been sick for a long time, he said, with a loss of appetite, pain throughout his body, and difficulty in sleeping. He dreamed of seeing dead people, walking through a graveyard, and descending downhill-all culturally recognized omens of illness.
These "illness stories" (Price 1987) show that the force of dream images lies less with set interpretations than with the overall atmosphere or "mood" which they connote in the dreamer's life. Yolmo dream reports do not necessarily signal particular illnesses, but distress in general. Villagers then use the messages to give appropriate form and meaning to their pain. With Mingmar, for instance, the aesthetics of bodily decay, spiritual erosion, and deathly darkness characterize his descent into 'soul loss.' Hence while Yolmo profess a finite, culturally prescribed and more-or-Iess set dictionary of dream symbols, they also rely on several mechanisms which enable them to make their dreams mean what they want them to mean (cf. Kracke 1979, Hollan 1989). Omens that bear consequences not for the dreamer but for another, images that predict the opposite of what they suggest, prophecies that foresee what has happened or what is to come, and an empirical theory of variable meanings for different dreamers-these ideas, put into practice, permit a
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person to shape not only what he dreams but the meaning of such visions as conveyed to self and others.
DMNE KNOWLEDGE
But this semiotic freedom does not create a world of private visionaries; rather, it gives a person experiencing distress the ability to make sense of and communicate pain-the significance of which, no less, makes itself known through a shared and often voiced connotative language. Dream sharing thus ties directly into Yolmo epistemology, for dream images offer a valuable medium through which a person can know more of a neighbor than usually possible. We learned above that it is difficult for a Yolmo to know what another is thinking or feeling; the sharing of dreams offers an indirect forum to communicate distress to otherwise nescient neighbors. By telling friends and family the portent of certain dreams, Pemba, Mingmar and Nyima express dimensions of self-experience which they cannot readily articulate in everyday social life. 12 But it should be stressed that dream reports are not mere reiteration, simply reflecting what lies hidden within the heart; they engage an active interpretation, forming and so reforming a person's experience of self and body. By articulating a person's silent subjectivity, the recounting of dreams transforms this subjectivity, moving experiences of distress from the realm of the inchoate into a world of meaning and social relations.13
Yolmo dream images thus help to disclose the private reaches of the self. They are a vehicle for social understanding, for they communicate the dark fires of the heart, and are an education into self-experience, for they chart domains of body and soul which the dreamer would not otherwise have access to. The telling significance of a dream's ill omens suggest that Yolmo know much more of themselves than they think they do. Although Y olmo say that the heartmind cannot fathom all realms of one's life (ghosts may attack and souls may be lost without the victim being aware), it certainly knows what to look for in its nightly escapades. Time and again, villagers like Pemba tell of how they learned of illness through dreams haunted by tattered clothes, shadowy rivers, and dead men who came to speak. And time and again, when shamans come to recover lost souls and exorcise ghosts, patients experience newfound health through visions of sunrises, full moons and mountain ascents. Healing narratives of this sort suggest that dream images span an extensive, intersubjective field of knowledge that ranges from the silent fires of the heart to the distant musings of the gods. The grounds of experience, for both self and other, are selectively mapped: a felled tree signals a relative's demise, an ashen graveyard tells of one's own.
We may elucidate this divinatory system by counterposing it to a Western cybernetic model. "The total self-corrective unit," Gregory Bateson (1972:319) wrote, "which processes information, or, as I say, "thinks" and "acts" and "decides,"
12As Herdt (1987) points out. which dreams are shared-and with whom-also influences how a society communicates personal experience.
13See Levi-Strauss (1950). Ricouer (1970). Fernandez (1984).
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Dreams and Yolmo Ways 223
is a system whose boundaries do not at all coincide with the boundaries either of the body or of what is popularly called the 'self or 'consciousness'." If we compare Bateson's epistemology to that of the Yolmo, we find that Yolmo "self-systems," though more expansive than Western versions, include aspects of personal experience exceeding the boundaries of the "conscious" heartmind. There is much that a Yolmo cannot know in his heartmind, but the "self-system" still knows about such matters at some tacit level, particularly if we include in this system the workings of the gods and what they reveal through dreams: when distressed, the system communicates to the heartmind and others what it "knows" through the dreamer's nightly rounds. The function of dream images, then, is to help breach the boundaries between apparent and tacit realms of knowledge and experience; images of burning houses and alpine ascents form part of "the total self-corrective unit" (Bateson 1972:319) known as Yolmo culture.
As dreams come most into play when one is sick, it is evident that the gods are telling Y olmo most about the corrective mechanisms necessary for health. Indeed, local cures are in large part epistemological ones. To dream is to heal. For while it may be "healthy" and perhaps necessary for Yolmo society to inhibit certain understandings of self and other, these same limits can spawn pathological sideeffects. Y olmo, cut off from certain realms of personal and social knowledge, are at a loss when their bodies become burdened by the sorrows of little feet hurting. Illness is thus triggered when the larger, embodied self fails to express distress to others or to the ill person's own heartmind. In the end, Pemba's dreams of darkness tell us this, if anything, about Yolmo ways of knowing: that the landscape of the night gives image to pain by voicing the language of the gods. The same culture which imposes harsh limits to personal and social knowledge also provides mechanisms through which this knowledge can be tapped into, for oneiric revelations of self and other enable Y olmo to gain some sense of those experiences considered unknowable through ordinary means.
Hence Yolmo dreaming ties into an indigenous epistemology. A way of knowing shapes a way of dreaming. Yet it also appears that a way of dreaming helps define a way of knowing: how Y olmo experience and make sense of their dreams influences how they experience and make sense of their lives. Children learn of cultural symbolism through dream reports, ashen streams and mountain snows mark the geography of Yolmo experience, and glimpses of divine knowledge delimit what and how a person can know in waking life. The interpretation and communication of dreams aids in the creation and recreation of Y olmo culture, a culture forged by the presence of opaque pains and dark images.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Research on which this paper is based was supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Program for Psychocultural Studies and Medical Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Earlier versions of the paper benefited from comments by John Kennedy, Tracy McGarry, Douglass Price-Williams, Kenneth Lincoln, Barbara Tedlock, Nancy Levine, Carole Browner, Bonnie
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Glass-Coffin, and three anonymous reviewers. Special thanks to the citizens of Helambu.
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