Even if you do not consider yourself a particular expert in Native American culture, you could probably identify a dream catcher. They dangle from rearview mirrors of cars and their image graces the front of t-shirts and posters. A chosen few still inhabit the space for which they were originally intended: hanging just above the bed.

The first time I saw a dream catcher, as an East Coast high school student visiting the home of a California friend, the beauty of its simple form captured me instantly. I also loved the idea behind it: According to the lore of the Native Americans who invented them, the dream catcher filters out any bad thoughts and dreams, allowing only good dreams to pass through and slide down the feathers to the sleeper.

Since then, I have wondered, “Were dream catchers actually common objects in the households of our Native American ancestors and forbears?” If so, who invented them and what were they used for exactly? Did everyone have one, or just certain people?

It turns out that dream catchers are indeed quite old.  They have definitively been used for over a thousand years, with relics found in the archaeological record dating as far back as 700 AD. Some authors attribute the creation of dream catchers to the Ojibwe (Chippewa) tribe of the Great Lakes region, while others credit the first dream catchers to the Sioux Nation of the Great Plains. Regardless of who made them first, many First Nations cultures adopted the practice and the craft of making them has spread far and wide among people of both Native and non-native American descent.

Common to all stories and legends about the dream catcher, its web-shaped design symbolizes power of the spider and its web, which catches things that fly into it. One of the Ojibwe words for dream catcher, “asabikeshiinh,” is also the inanimate form of the word for “spider.” The Lakota legend of how the dream catcher originated tells of Iktomi, the Spider, who visits an old shaman in his vision and spins a web in his sacred hoop of willow, horsehair, beads, and feathers. The spider tells the shaman that the web is to help people follow and use the good ideas that come to them during their journey through the circle of life, and the hole in the middle is to allow the bad thoughts to fall through.

In old times the web was woven of cordage made from nettle fiber, and the hoop was often made from the flexible twigs of the willow tree. American ethnographer Frances Densmore observed in the late 1970’s that Ojibwe parents protected their infants by hanging dream catchers on the hoop of their cradleboards. The dream catchers were made of small wooden hoops filled with an imitation of a spider’s web made of fine yarn, usually dyed red. Two spider webs were usually hung on the hoop, and it was said that they “caught any harm that might be in the air as a spider’s web catches and holds whatever comes in contact with it.”

So, do dream catchers really work? While some nay-say dream catchers as superstition, other experience suggests that it is quite possible. Several members of an online message board report bad dreams stopping with the use of dream catchers. One mother reports, “Yes they work (they stopped my daughter’s bad dreams).” And, she advises, “a proper one should have a ‘spider’ on the web somewhere to ‘eat’ the nightmares and keep the web clean.”

According to several others, dream catchers work better when you make them yourself as opposed to buying them, “Even if they turn out …’not as good’ as one you’d buy they still work better because you are concentrating on what it is for and that energy is going into the construction of it. I have used purchased dream catchers that were basically just pretty things that hung around my room. When I made my own I felt that it actually worked. It wasn’t as professional looking but it seemed to work much better.”

So are you interested in making your own dream catcher or making one as a gift for a friend of loved one? As part of its Backyard Skills Series at Center for Living Peace, The Ecology Center is hosting a Dream Catcher making workshop on Saturday, February 4th at 1:00pm. For more information and to sign up, visit Center for Living Peace.

Written by Meg Hiesinger

Resources

For Children:

Here are some titles of children’s books about dream catchers, including how to make them and the legends and practices surrounding them:

Dream Catchers by Sylvia and Donald Tso. Troll Communications. Bk&Kit edition (August 10, 1996). This Illustrated instruction kit by a Navajo couple teaches children some of the lore behind dream catchers and instructions on how to build them.

Dream Catcher by Audrey Osofsky and Ed Young. Orchard Books; 1st edition (March 1, 1992) This beautiful picture book depicts in an impressionistic and dreamlike way the story of an Ojibwa baby’s first dream catcher.

Grandmother’s Dreamcatcher by Becky Ray McKain and Stacey Schuett. Albert Whitman & Company (January 1, 1998).

This picture book tells the story of a contemporary Chippewa girl learning the dream-catcher tradition.

Sources:

“Dreamcatchers.” http://www.native-languages.org/dreamcatchers.htm. Accessed 1/24/12.

Terri J. Andrews, “Living by the Dream”, World & I, Nov. 1998, p. 204.

Frances Densmore Chippewa Customs (Smithsonain Institutuin Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin) [Hardcover]. Kessinger Publishing, LLC (June 13, 2008).

“The Legend of the Dreamcatcher.” http://www.dreamcatchers.org/dcat16.html. Accessed 1/24/12.

Yahoo Answers “Does a Dream Catcher Really Catch Your Bad Dream?” http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070901200127AA6haUI

http://www.ask.com/answers/52481401/do-dream-catchers-work