Senoi, the folk of natural lucid-dreamers

[Zoob]

I'll just paste here an interesting little article, mrs. U.K. Le Guin wrote once. A few years ago, a few years after the first publication in America of The Word for World Is Forest, I had the great pleasure of meeting Dr. Charles Tart, a psychologist well known for his researches into and his book on Altered States of Consciousness. He asked me if I had modeled the Athsheans of the story upon the Senoi people of Malaysia. The who? said I, so he told me about them. The Senoi, are, or were, a people whose culture includes and is indeed substantially based upon a deliberate training in and use of the dream. Dr. Tart's book includes a brief article on them by Kilton Stewart. Breakfast in the Senoi is like a dream clinic, with the father and older brothers listening to and analysing the dreams of all the children . . . When the Senoi child reports a falling dream, the adult answers with enthusiasm, "That is a wonderful dream, one of the best dreams a man can have. Where did you fall to, and what did you discover?" The Senoi dream is meaningful, active and creative. Adults deliberately go into their dreams to solve problems of interpersonal and intercultural conflict. They come out of their dreams with a new song, tool, dance, idea. The waking and the dreaming states are equally valid, each acting upon the other in complementary fashion. The article implies, by omission rather than by direct statement, that the men are the "great dreamers" among the Senoi; whether this means that the women are socially inferior or that their role (as among the Athsheans) is equal and compensatory is not clear. Nor is there any mention of the Senoi conception of divinity, the numinous, etc.; it is merely stated that they do not practice magic, though they are perfectly willing to let neighboring peoples think they do, as this discourages invasion. They have built a system of inter-personal relations which, in the field of psychology, is perhaps on a level with our attainments in such areas as television and nuclear physics. It appears that the Senoi have not had a war, or a murder, for several hundred years. There they are, twelve thousand of them, farming, hunting, fishing, and dreaming, in the rain forests of the mountains of Malaysia. Or there they were, in 1935—perhaps. Kilton Stewart's report on them has had no professional sequels that I know of.* Were they ever there, and if so, are they still there? In the waking time, I mean, in what we so fantastically call "the real world." In the dream time, of course, they are there, and here. I thought I was inventing my own lot of imaginary aliens, and I was only describing the Senoi. It is not only the Captain Davidsons who can be found in the unconscious, if one looks. The quiet people who do not kill each other are there, too. It seems that a great deal is there, the things we most fear and therefore deny), the things we most need (and therefore deny). I wonder, couldn't we start listening to our dreams, and our children's dreams? "Where did you fall to, and what did you discover?" Note 1. "Dream Theory in Malaya," by Kilton Stewart, in Altered States of Consciousness, ed. Charles T. Tart (Wiley & Sons, 1969; Anchor-Dou- bleday, 1972). The quotations are on pp. 164 and 163 of the Anchor second edition. Now there's more modern scientifical article: http://www2.ucsc.edu/dreams/Library/senoi.html And they do seem to still exist, though if the globalisation had any effect on their peace is uncertain to me. To spend sometime in their society as one of their own, I think that'd be so cool.