I opened a recent talk for World Dream Day with a single question, and I want to set it down in front of you before anything else. Sit with it for a moment:
What is the world dreaming through you?
It is a stranger question than the one we usually ask. We are trained to think of dreams as personal property — the career we are building, the family we picture, the better life we are reaching toward. Those dreams matter. They are the fuel of a single human journey, and no one should be talked out of them.
But wisdom traditions everywhere — from the deserts to the tundra to the rice terraces — speak of another kind of dream. A larger one. An older one. The dream of the land itself: the original instructions for living in balance, a blueprint that does not live only in our heads but in the pulse of the rivers, the silence of the stones, and the memory carried in the voices of elders. Different peoples name it differently. The dream is the same.
This is the heart of the work we do at Red Road Journey. Our journeys are not really about documenting stories. They are acts of listening — listening for the echoes of that ancient dream, which has never stopped speaking, and which grows louder now, in this time of great turning.
And there is no better companion for this moment than Arkan Lushwala and his book The Time of the Black Jaguar. Arkan offers the Black Jaguar as a figure for our era: a predator that hunts not flesh, but fear, separation, and the ignorance moving through the collective dark. The Time of the Black Jaguar is not something coming. It is now. It is a season of immense difficulty that also carries an unprecedented opening — a call to dream a new world into being from connection rather than from panic.
So what does it mean to be a dreamer in the Time of the Black Jaguar?
1. We must become listeners of the old dreams
Before we can dream anew, we have to quiet the noise of modern life and listen to the dreams that were already here. This is the work of deep reverence. When I have the honor of sitting with elders — keepers of memory in nations and villages the world over — I am not merely collecting oral history. I am receiving living fragments of a cosmic dream: a dream of reciprocity, of respect, of kinship with all that breathes. World Dream Day, at its depth, is an invitation to remember that we are participants inside this vast living dreamscape, not spectators standing outside it.
This is the same listening I try to carry into everything I write — into Stone Breath, into The Council Fire. The old dream is patient. It waits to see who will finally go quiet enough to hear it.
2. Dreaming is an active, fierce practice
In many of the world's Indigenous worldviews, the dream world is as real as the waking one. What we dream, we feed. What we feed, grows. The Black Jaguar's hunt is not passive; it is fierce, awake, and compassionate all at once. It is the work of facing the ecological and social crises of our time and transforming them — not with violence, but with clarity and courage.
This is the ground-level work of healing. It happens every time we choose dialogue over debate, connection over alienation, love over fear. Each of those choices is a stitch — a real one — in the tapestry of a new dream. And here is the filter I keep returning to: will this choice make the great-grandchildren whole, or hollow them out? Dream toward the ones who are not born yet, and you will rarely dream wrong.
3. True dreaming asks a sacred sacrifice
To answer the call of the Black Jaguar requires a sacrifice — the surrender of the small dream of the separate self for the sake of the larger, shared Dream. It asks us to offer our particular gifts — our voice, our hands, our compassion — in service to something far greater than any one of us. This is the essence of the Red Road: a path of humility, of service, of remembering that each of us is one vital thread in the great weaving of the Earth.
It is the same through-line I follow in all of this work — helping people and nations move from systems that extract to systems that nurture, keeping wealth and wisdom at home, in the hands of the great-grandchildren. The dream is not decoration. It is infrastructure. It is how a people chooses what kind of future it is willing to build.
As we move through this World Dream Day, I leave you where we began. Don't only ask what your dream is. Ask the more urgent, more searching question: What is the world dreaming through me?
How can you, in your own life and your own community, embody the spirit of the Black Jaguar? How can you listen for the ancient dream of the land where you actually stand? How can you take up the needle and add your stitch to a new story of healing and connection?
The time is now. The Black Jaguar is on the move. You are not alone in this — the circle holds, and it is wide enough for all of us. It is not too late. The fire is still lit. And the one it is waiting for is you.
Let us have the courage to dream together.
Let the conversation continue. What does the "Time of the Black Jaguar" mean to you? How do you listen for the world's dream? If this resonates, I invite you to explore the recordings and insights from the World Dream Day 2025 Summit, where voices from across the globe gathered to explore these themes in depth.