Everyone Who Dreams Partakes of Shamanism Stanley Krippner, PhD

 
Early humans accepted all perceptions as reality, whether they were waking images, visionary images, or dream images. Once early humans began to discriminate among various types of "reality," shamans emerged to negotiate the shift between worlds and interpret images that occurred in non-ordinary reality. This role gradually was taken over by psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors, and other professional dreamworkers. But the "grass roots dream movement" of the latter 20th century began to return this function to dreamers, especially those trained to work with their own dreams. The Paratinin Indians of the Amazon remark, "Everyone who dreams partakes of shamanism," and this is exactly the function of the grass roots dream movement, as exemplified by the International Association for the Study of Dreams. An example of this function is illustrated by the paintings of the celebrated Canadian artist, Rob Van de Horst, whose surrealistic paintings have been evoked by dream images for several decades.