Rock art and dreams
Defocalizing Western vision
I ran my fingers over the flat boulder. The tropical heat was thick, and sweat dripped off my glasses. My fingers seeking what my eyes could not see. Then I felt it; the rough stone was suddenly smooth, and my fingers followed a slight depression in the basalt. The depression curled around in an invisible tight circle. Suddenly my eyes could see: a large spiral motif materialized on the flat stone like a concentric ripple on a still pond of water.
Now I saw it plainly: a pecked design that is over a foot wide, and hundreds of years old. Moments before my trained eyes had detected nothing, but not until my skin had made contact with the ancient rock art design was I able to see it. The effect was magical; it broke up my default way of knowing into new territory.
I photographed and recorded the rock art—a petroglyph—in my field notebook. Then our team began the long hike back to the lower slopes where we were staying on Isla Ometepe, a volcanic island in the middle of Lake Nicaragua.
The night after the “appearing petroglyph,” I realized that the manner of the field discovery had occurred in a dream about a week before.
In the dream:
I see a pecked petroglyph – a long meander that I follow with my gaze. It’s not on a rock, just an image of a line that snakes around, coming into being as I follow it. Also, there is a strong feeling of texture, as if I am tracing it with my finger. But there is no dreambody-- best I can describe it is as if I am “seeing” the texture, or feeling the vision. It is synesthesia.
Whenever an event repeats itself, that’s a signal to pay attention.
This time I was given a lesson on how to become a better archaeologist. The message seemed to be “Don’t look with just your eyes… make contact with all your senses.” We had been recording petroglyphs on the island for weeks now, but this moment was the first time I glimpsed the multi-dimensionality of ancient art in the field. It seems my nightworld self knew it long before my dayworld self caught on.
Our crew had arrived in Nicaragua in January 2006 and traveled by bus to the shores of Lake Nicaragua. Even from a distance, Ometepe Island cuts an impressive profile across the horizon where its two enormous cone volcanoes jut out of the lake. From above, the island is a double spiral, with a small spit of land connecting the two volcanic slopes. The northern volcano is still active, and occasionally erupts smoke, ash and debris onto the cloud forest below.
Many tourists know Isla Ometepe as dramatic place to stay for a few nights before heading off to Costa Rica. But the island is more than a backdrop to the eco-tourism industry and the army of backpackers that support it. Ometepe boasts one of the densest collections of undocumented petroglyphs in Central America.
The island has been occupied by human groups for eons. The region is known archaeologically as Greater Nicoya. At the time of Spanish conquest, the Indigenous Nicarao people spoke a language similar to the Aztec language. Based on associated pottery, some of the rock art is at least as old as the Sinacapa phase (200BCE).
Ometepe is known as the island of spirals.
The rock art consists of petroglyphs, deeply grooved designs pecked into the large basaltic boulders that dot the forested volcanic slopes. The designs include human figures, animals and insects, although the largest portions of them are abstract designs, meandering lines, whorls and swirls.
The entire island can be considered an archaeological site and much of it is legally protected, but the petroglyphs are still endangered from commercial and subsistence agriculture. Ometepe Island has entered the world economy and local industry clears ground by burning vegetation for coffee, bananas, and dry rice farming.
The fires damage the stones, causing the top layers to exfoliate and peel off, taking the ancient art with it. As a result, between 1997 - 2006, the Ometepe Petroglyph Project recorded as much of this vanishing cultural heritage as quickly as possible. My time volunteering was at the end of this project.
But this essay is not about the archaeology of Ometepe—I am not an expert on Central American rock art—as much as how the living landscape forever changed the way I see rock art.
The night world and day world experiences of the magically-appearing petroglyph revealed one of my unchecked biases about rock art: that it is visual art, meant to be primarily seen. This is a old Western perspective rooted in centuries of history. Rock art is not necessarily even “art,” something to be admired as a final product, and from a distance. In the Story of Art, historian Ernst Grombrich suggests, “There is really no such thing as art. There are only artists.”
Who knows, perhaps the act of making the petroglyphs was most important and its continued presence merely a reminder of ritual celebration, a memory in stone.
To investigate prehistoric sites such as rock art locales, we have to relearn how to see the world. Our techno-militaristic worldview has a laser focus but cannot account for the depth of the sensuous self. At the same time, the scientific method hides the qualitative aspects of our decision-making, and sweeps under the rug data from sources other than the rational mind. So we are doubly blind as we miss out on many sensory clues that are right on the edge of consciousness. We are not trained to recognize those we do manage to see because the world is overlaid and interpenetrated with our own projections and assumptions.
Don’t just look with your eyes…
This reminder came in many forms, including one of the first dreams on the island:
I am standing on a boulder and I see a rock art design out of the corner of eyes, but it disappears when I focus on it. Then I think I see another, a small spiral design, but it too disappears when I look directly. I notice what’s happening, that the designs are everywhere, all over the rocks, but only at the periphery of my vision. They blip in and out of existence at the edges of my visual field as I scan the rock faces – an amazing effect.
The dream showed me how, to see correctly, I must defocalize my vision. Stop looking so hard, and start seeing. Defocalization is crucial to the practice of nature awareness as well. Naturalist Jon Young calls such defocalized sight “owl vision” and teaches the practice as a core nature observation skill.
Defocalizing is difficult to do. Our entire culture is set against it.
We are accustomed to valuing a hard singular focus, but clarity often comes at the expense of the fluttering multiplicity all around us. To break free of this way of envisioning the world, we must lose focus so we can gain ground.
In a future essay, I can explore the lucid dreaming protocol I used in the field to complement archaeological investigations. Let me know if that’s of interest!
This piece was adapted from an essay first published in Craig Chalquist’s 2010 collection Rebearths: Conversations with a world ensouled as well as my peer-reviewed article in Anthropology of Consciousness
A lucid dreaming protocol for archaeological fieldwork?? Yes my friend, that would very much “be of interest.”
His main treatise is "The Master and His Emissary." But he wrote a 30 page synopsis of it called "Ways of Attending - How our Divided Brain constructs the World," which is really helpful and quite clear in stating that the left brain has taken control of our world, when it is the right side that should lead instead. I think you'll love it.