Do you have a dream catcher at the head of your bed? At the entrance of your house or in a window? We love to see them suspended around us. According to legend, they allow us to filter our dream world. They channel positive emotions to contain everything negative, that is, all the nightmares we have during the night.
A popular belief based on an interesting myth that we invite you to learn about with us today.
The Ojibwe people and the dream catchers
Dream catchers or “dream hunters” have their origin in a Native American people who, throughout the 60s, began to popularize these handmade objects to sell to tourists on their reservations. Beautiful artisanal tributes that were part of their culture and tradition.
The Ojibwa are native to North America, and it is common to find settlements in the area of Ontario, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. To make them, they used nettle fibers knotted to a kind of circular or teardrop-shaped ring, where they made a kind of web like a spider’s web. They also used willow wood and, in general, the dream catchers had a not very large diameter, about 10 centimeters.
They marketed them under the idea that, thanks to them, people could avoid nightmares and keep them away bad energies and evil spirits. As a curiosity, we will tell you that there were many native tribes that criticized the Ojibwe for selling those objects. They said that doing so lost the true mystical and spiritual value of dreamcatchers, since tourists acquired them solely for aesthetic reasons.
Despite the criticism, throughout the 60s the dream catchers were one of the best-selling objects in America, massively reaching the whole world.
The purpose of dream catchers
Dream catchers should be hung at the head of beds or over children’s cribs. Its purpose is to dispel nightmares or those evil visions that people may have from time to time. For the Ojibwa people, these objects functioned as follows:
- Dream catchers filter our night’s rest. Thus, while we sleep, nightmares or bad feelings are trapped in that central spider web. Meanwhile, good dreams and positive sensations descend through the lower feathers, to flow little by little to us. When dawn comes, the warm lights of the sun make nightmares fade away and disappear forever from our dream catcher. Nice, isn’t it?
In addition, this tradition of the dream catchers was based, for the Ojibwa, on a beautiful legend. Its central figure was a beautiful woman named Asibikaashi. She is also known as the “spider woman” and, far from having a negative or disturbing connotation, what this good lady did was take care of every creature in our world.
She bent down in the crib or on the bed of small children to weave an invisible web, a fine and delicate fabric capable of reaching any nightmare and making it disappear. Nothing bad can happen to that creature if Asibikaashi is with it. All the negative remains attached to their nets, just until dawn, when the brightness of the morning renews all the good, and then vanishes the bad. Beautiful, there’s no doubt about it.
However, we must also add that there is a second version of how dream catchers work. The Lakota people, on the other hand, have another explanation that you will surely be interested in knowing:
- Nightmares and negative energies pass through the network until they disappear, while good dreams are trapped in the center and then gently slide down the feathers to reach us and envelop us with a placid and comforting rest. The bad goes away and the good is trapped.
And now tell us, do you also have a dream catcher at home? They are, without a doubt, a beautiful tradition. We can’t be sure if they really drive away bad energies or not, but either way, it’s always nice to have them with us. It is worth taking into account the origin of their tradition and history, a way also to pay our small tribute to these North American tribes, whose legacies we can continue to keep alive. It doesn’t matter what colors they have or their shapes: it will always be nice to have them around.
