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Aztec advances in health (21): dream interpretation

3rd Aug 2023

Dreaming in ancient Mexico: illustration by Felipe Dávalos

This is the twenty-first in a series of entries based on information in the Encyclopedia of American Indian Contributions to the World by Emory Dean Keoke and Kay Marie Porterfield (2002). For Mexica ritual specialists the interpretation and discussion of dreams was a key element in their healing toolkits... (Compiled by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore)

‘Dream interpretation is an important technique some modern psychologists use as part of therapy or psychoanalysis. Analysts trained in Freudian psychology believe that dreams reveal a person’s hidden desires. Those trained in Jungian psychology believe that dreams often offer important guidance for the dreamer. [Native American peoples] held the same beliefs and made dream interpretation an integral part of their emotional, spiritual and social lives...
’[Native peoples such as the Iroquois and Huron] believed that the deep desires of their souls were often hidden in the unconscious mind. When those “soul desires” expressed themselves in dreams, they could be acknowledged and interpreted by talking about them with a shaman, a more enlightened and experienced practitioner of indigenous medicine. When the unconscious longings were ignored, [they] believed the soul reacted angrily, so members of the community helped in whatever way they could to provide support for meeting the needs that the troubled person’s soul had expressed.’

Centuries before the introduction of psychoanalysis in Europe, Mesoamericans not only recognised the power of dreams - and hence their sacred quality - and their ability to influence the actions we take in our everyday waking lives, but they sought help from ritual specialists in order to interpret, understand and learn from dreams, as key elements in healing processes.
This tradition continues to this day. Anthropologist Timothy Knab, who spent decades researching Nahua ritual customs, explains:-
’A dream can: be the portent of future disaster, telling the dreamer to avoid certain activities; reveal the past perpetrator of harm, telling the dreamer to avoid a certain individual; conceal revelations or prophecies of the supernaturals of both the sky and the underworld, which can change the actions of individuals; reveal the true nature of events or be a complete falsehood. For this reason, the events of dreams are widely discussed, interpreted, and recounted’ (2004: 43 - emphasis added).

Immediately we see in Knab’s text important connections between dreams and awareness and understanding of the underworld, of ancestors, of the divine in general. In ancient Mexico there was a general belief that not only gods but also humans could ‘cross over’ between (physical and spiritual) worlds - the latter via dreams; indeed humans could engage in conversations with divine beings during sleep (López Austin 1988: 1: 223). For the Aztecs one of our three key ‘souls’/spirit centres - the tonalli that resides in the head - could easily leave the body and wander around during sleep, traveling to supernatural places where our ancestors dwell, to the heavens and the underworlds... This we experience in our dreams. This could be dangerous, since a person can only live without their tonalli for a short period of time.

Something of these beliefs is reflected in the rich gamut of terms in the Nahuatl language relating to dreams and sleep. Temiqui means to dream (something); combined with the verb namictia (literally, to adjust) temicnamictia means to interpret dreams. cochi means to sleep; cochtemiqui to dream; cochtlahtoa to sleep talk; cochitlehualiztli also means to dream, but literally it means ‘arising when one is asleep’; hualiza is ‘awaken’ but it literally means ‘to come to be here’ (this lends support to the idea that the tonalli journeys during sleep); cochitlehua means ‘to start up in one’s sleep’ and also ‘to see in dreams’ (Maffie 2014: 81, López Austin 1988: 224).
The use of this terminology dates back to the Mexica and beyond. A list of dream subjects - all with negative consequences for the dreamer! - is given in the chapter titled ‘The Heavens and the Underworld’ of Fray Sahagún’s Primeros Memoriales (pic 4). The Nahuatl word ontemictlamati (‘they know in dreams’) is telling ‘for it strongly suggests the Aztecs regarded dreams as a potential source of knowledge, and in addition... suggests they regarded dream experiences as at least sometimes truthful’ (Maffie 2014: 81).

With terms to denote both ‘truthful’ and ‘untruthful’ dreams, ‘the Aztecs apparently regarded the ability to dream, to see in one’s dreams, and to acquire knowledge through dreams as a sacred gift’ and they devoted great energy to interpreting and understanding them (ibid). The Nahua informants of Sahagún record that prior to the Spanish invasion - and the burning of indigenous libraries en masse - the Mexica, inspired no doubt by the wise Toltecs before them who recorded their knowledge of dreams in their books, compiled specialised texts of different types, that included ‘books describing dreams and explaining their meaning, all set down in figures and characters. There were also masters who interpreted these books as well as similar ones for marriage’ (Boone 2007: 19 - quoting the Franciscan missionary Toribio de Motolinía). As mentioned in the Florentine Codex (Book III, referring to education in the élite calmecac school), a book of dreams was called temicamatl and ranked in importance with books of days, years and other ritual counts (Maffie 2014: 62). Sadly not a single ancient special-function book survives today.

The existence of the temicamatl is further confirmed by the testimony of Fray Bartolomé de las Casas: ‘Many things were done or ceased to be done because of dreams, which they examined a great deal and about which they had books where meanings were set down in images and figures’ (López Austin 1988: 1, 223). Whilst it remains tragic that the Spaniards destroyed them, it is in part thanks to the early European missionaries that we are aware today of just how constant the practice of dream interpretation was in Aztec times - perhaps because the interpretation of dreams was already a popular subject in European literature at the time (Boone 2007: 20). As we all know, dreams are archetypically transient things in our lives - for the Mexica they reflected perfectly the ephemeral nature of life on earth (‘We come only to dream’); as Miguel León-Portilla writes: ‘It is [also] stated on these [rites of passage] occasions that this life is like a dream, that it is difficult to find in it root and truth’ (1992: 207).
Clearly a dream was considered a valuable path to knowledge - but this knowledge required the intervention of a specialist, whose job was - and is today - to ‘make the world of the ancestors seen in dreams intelligible to his or her client. This is done by transforming the dreams into a metalanguage that uses dreams to discuss the world of everyday life in terms of the traditions and values of the world of the ancestors, talocan’ (Knab 2004: 64).

Interestingly, the word for ‘shaman’ in the Nahuatl of the Huasteca is tlamatiquetl or ‘person of knowledge’, and one sign of curing/healing being one’s calling or destiny is (was?) ‘a repeated dream involving ritual themes, encounters with spirits, or curing experiences’ (Sandstrom 1991: 233). The task required spiritual talent of a high order. ‘The ancient Nahua... believed they could see the gods in the other time-space during a dream, and in these visions they could see the future. Upon returning [ie, awakening] their recollection was not always clear, because the passage changed the order of the images’ (López Austin 1996: 68). Hence, as Knab explains, ‘the first act [of the healer/shaman] is to transform the dream into a journey into the underworld using the metalanguage of dreams to fashion the dreamtale... the experience of the dream merges the known and the unknown, the natural and supernatural, the conscious and unconscious’. In other words, the dream is used as a ‘projective mechanism in curing to restore imbalances perceived in the human soul’ (2004: 142, 135, 3).

Central to Nahua dreamwork is the re-ordering of events in a dream by the shaman in order to make them more understandable to the client. Interestingly, a metaphor commonly used in this field to create a meaningful dream narrative for the client is the term ‘bearing the dream on one’s back’, implying that the dream is the individual’s burden or load that has to be carried from the dark underworld into the light of the waking world. Inevitably some are better than others at bearing - and later recounting - their dreams. The techniques employed by healers are ‘highly sophisticated... drawing on their specialised knowledge of the traditions of the ancestors and the underworld to recount dreams. Dreams are a vital part of the everyday life of the village, yet only a few initiates can travel in their dreams to the underworld of their ancestors at will in search of a lost soul. This is the duty of specially trained practitioners’ (Knab 2004: 8).

The simple fact that these healing practices have endured the test of time over centuries and are still used by shamans today shows that they remain effective ways to confront and resolve the problems of everyday life.
Finally, we should note that the challenge of interpreting dreams in the past was not limited to ‘the person in the street’: rulers frequently consulted their deities through dreams, ‘transforming the sacred into the normal’ (López Austin 1996: 312). A classic example of this is recorded in the Florentine Codex which tells how Motecuhzoma Xocoyotzin (Moctezuma II) reportedly imprisoned and abandoned Mexica elders who prophesied impending doom in their visions. This episode was to feature later in Fray Diego Durán’s History of the Indies of New Spain: in chapter 68 ‘which treats of how Moteczoma ordered the authorities to investigate the dreams of the old people regarding the coming of the Spaniards’ Durán records that the emperor told his chieftains ‘to reveal these dreams even though they might be contrary to his desires, since he wished to know the truth in this much-talked-of matter’ (1964: 258 - emphasis added).

Sources/references/recommended reading:-
• Boone, Elizabeth Hill (2007) Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate, University of Texas Press, Austin
• Durán, Fray Diego (1964) The Aztecs: the History of the Indies of New Spain translated by Doris Heyden & Fernando Horcacitas, Cassell & Co. Ltd., London
• Knab, Timothy J. (2004) The Dialogue of Earth and Sky: Dreams, Souls, Curing and the Modern Aztec Underworld, University of Arizona Press, Tucson
• León-Portilla, Miguel (1992) The Aztec Image of Self and Society: An Introduction to Nahua Culture, University of Utah Press
• López Austin, Alfredo (1988) The Human Body and Ideology: Concepts of the Ancient Nahuas, vol. 1, translated by Thelma Ortiz de Montellano & Bernard Ortiz de Montellano, University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City
• ----- (1996) The Rabbit on the Face of the Moon: Mythology in the Mesoamerican Tradition, trans. B. R. & T. Ortiz de Montellano, University of Utah Press
• Maffie, James (2014) Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion, University Press of Colorado, Boulder
• Sandstrom, Alan R. (1991) Corn Is Our Blood: Culture and Ethnic Identity in a Contemporary Aztec Indian Village, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.

Image sources:-
• Main & pic 7: illustrations courtesy of Felipe Dávalos, scanned from Las Visiones de Yax-Pac by Federico Navarrete, Historias de México, vol. II, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico DF (2000)
• Pix 1 & 2: images downloaded from/courtesy of and thanks to Joseph Johnston/Arte Maya Tz’utuhil (artemaya.com)
• Pic 3: image scanned and adapted from Codex Laud, facsimile edition, ADEVA, Graz, Austria, 1966 (original in the Bodleian Library, Oxford)
• Pic 4: image scanned from Primeros Memoriales by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, facsimile edition, University of Oklahoma Press (1993)
• Pix 5, 6, 8 & 9: photos by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore.

Aztec limerick no. 51 (ode to dreams):-
Hundreds of years before Freud
Psychoanalysis was widely employed.
The Aztecs, it seems,
Wrote books full of dreams.
Come the Spaniards, every one was destroyed...