We dream, then wake up and usually forget our dreams quickly or cannot remember them at all.

For the Mayans, however, dreaming is another way of experiencing life. Dreams are taken very seriously. They are believed to guide one along life’s path. Through dreams God speaks to us. The voice of your heart can be heard in dreams. Sometimes Mayans even dream collectively, as when a village wants to divine a new design for the women’s blouses. Many women of the same village will see the identical new style in their dreams. Then they make the dream reality. Weavers dream their patterns. I remember a teenage Tzeltal Mayan boy who told me he had dreamt he should be a traditional healer. In his dreams plants instructed him of their healing powers.

Once I visited a woman in a Mayan community who had been a midwife most of her life; she began at age thirteen. She was bedridden with a fever when her older sister went into labor. The village’s midwife was collecting firewood far away in the mountains and could not be fetched. The girl’s mother cried desperately, repeatedly wailing, “The midwife cannot come. They cannot find her to help my daughter in her difficult hours. My daughter will die!”

The sick younger sister heard her mother’s wailing and dreamt of everything that was needed to attend to her older sibling during her difficult hours. She told me when she got up from her bed, her fever was suddenly gone. She calmed her mother. “Mother, I will attend to my sister. She and the baby will be fine. I just dreamt what I have to do. Stop crying! Help me!” Soon after the baby was born without any problems and her sister held it happily in her arms.

One day I was with a friend, a Jesuit priest working in a Tzeltal Mayan community, when a campesino he knew approached him. A long conversation between the two in Tzeltal followed. Later my friend explained that the man had wanted help deciphering the message of a recurring dream. The man was sure he had received a message from God and trusted the priest’s opinion.

Most Mayans do not share their dreams with a kashlan (non-Indian). But my priest friend had excellent relations with tribal members. The next day he introduced me to an elderly Tzeltal Mayan nun. I wished to interview her about her life. She did not speak Spanish and a young Tzeltal novice translated for us.

I asked the elderly woman about her childhood and how she had decided to become a nun. She spoke of her family’s poverty and her mother’s hard life and continued, “When I was about eight, I had a dream. In the dream my younger sister and I were tending our sheep in the mountains. Suddenly the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared to me. There she stood, huge, in all her splendor against the deep blue sky. I was awestruck. In that very moment, a huge boulder loosened from the mountainside. I realized to my dismay that it was falling exactly to where my sister was standing. I screamed an alarm but the rock had already hit her and she lay dead on the ground. Now I was desperate and in deep pain. I cried out to the Virgin. She looked at me with her lovely smile and said with a warm, melodious voice, ‘This tragedy is to show you that life is short. It may end at any moment. That is why you have to choose wisely what you want to do with your life.’”

The nun kept having this recurring dream, finally understanding that the Virgin was calling her to use her earthly life to serve her. This woman has spent her life organizing weavers’ cooperatives and training health workers among the poorest of the poor in Chiapas. The manner in which she spoke, her many smiles and the laugh wrinkles around her eyes told me that it had been a good and deeply fulfilling life.