...Papi dreamt of a white man who pointed a finger at him. A warning, Papi said as he looped a yellow tie around the collar of his white shirt, getting dressed to go to work. We stared at him, perplexed. I thought you didn't believe in that stuff. Papi put on a jacket, one trembling arm at a time. I don't.

It was after we heard his car start downstairs that Mami told us she'd had a dream too: Papi was dead, in a casket, wearing the same yellow tie he had just knotted around his throat.

Papi began to be visited by a recurring nightmare. In it, he had an aerial view of himself. He was at the oil site in Chitasuga, on the metal walkway, arguing with a worker. A large piece of machinery high above, creaked with wind. Papi was standing just beneath. At always the same point in the dispute, Papi fixed his hands on his hips, and the piece of machinery tore loose, plummeted, crushed him under its weight.

The nightmares made Papi nervous. He departed for Chitasuga looking ashen, his hands worrying the steering wheel. Months went by; then, soon after he had forgotten about the nightmare, Papi found himself in Chitasuga arguing with the same worker as in his dream.

On the metal walkway, Papi placed his hands on his hips. The unpleasant familiarity of the gesture racked his body; he stepped back, his knees buckling. In a second, a heavy blast of wind blew back his hair. Before him, on the spot where he had been standing, a heavy chunk of steel machinery had fallen. It was denting the metal flooring, just as if it had amassed straight from his dreams.

SOURCE: pp 298-9 of The Man Who Could Move Clouds by Ingrid Rojas Contreras (Fernando and Sojaila's daughter). I added title to aid searches.

EDITOR'S NOTE

I posted this partly because Fernando's dilemma is one I've lived. He believes in science, but he married into a large family with a multigenerational history of Colombian curanderos--shamans who had to keep their training quiet or face violent religious persecution. Over time, despite himself, his inlaws' successful use of dreams and intuitions rubbed off. Here he does exactly what you should with shamanic warning dreams--not try to interpret symbolism, or suspect emotional ambivalence about his job, but simply to watch for the nightmare scene. What saved his life? Partly the dreams, but just as much credit goes to his open mind--in that crucial instant, he took his nightmares literally. And lived.

I come from a family full of shamanic traits quite similar to those in Ingrid Rojas Contreras's family, but we had no surviving native tradition at all. No context. My sisters and I all faced Fernando's dilemma--taught that to heed such intuitions is superstitious, yet our experience was that heeding them works.

My motto, acquired the hard way: "better a live kook than a dead skeptic".

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