Most indigenous people believe that dreams are scripted by our ancestors to instruct us, and are every bit as real as the waking state.
In South Africa, sangomas (indigenous shamans) use dream interpretation to make diagnoses for a patient’s waking life based on this ancestral instruction. Because dreams are most often expressed in the subtle language of metaphor, and are also vulnerable to pollution by trickster spirits, the sangomas’ ability to interpret dreams makes it a mastered skill. Learning how the ancestors reach us and how to distinguish true dreams from those scripted by dark spirits, opens us up to a source of wonder and sometimes even life-saving information.
The African Wisdom traditions offer deeply significant insights for practical living in the western world, and have many correlations with Jungian psychology. Carl Jung could be regarded as a western medicine man who had a worldview similar to most indigenous healing traditions. Collective unconscious and the world of dreams, for example, would be synonymous for the indigenous view of the Other World.