Big Dreams and Ondinnonk: when a dream changes something

Le dernier territoire souverain. On y entre par les plantes, par le silence, par le retour aux songes des anciens.

tagline · path

Le dernier territoire souverain. On y entre par les plantes, par le silence, par le retour aux songes des anciens.

— Le dernier territoire souverain. On y entre par les plantes, par le silence, par le retour aux songes des anciens.

An embodied opening

Léa has had dreams since she was a child. She notes them down sometimes, she forgets them often. She knows how to tell the "routine" dreams apart — her ex coming back, a meeting gone wrong — from the dreams that stay. But that night was different. She woke at 3:47, fully present. She could not describe exactly what she had lived — a light, an old man, a sentence she had not yet understood. No narrative plot. No obvious meaning. But the absolute feeling, of a solidity nothing in her waking life had, that something had just happened. That this dream was more real than the room where she lay.

She took no notes. Three days later, she still remembers it word for word.

That is a Big Dream. Not the ordinary dreams — the ones that mirror the week's worries, tomorrow's fears. Something else. A distinct category. A dream of which one says, on waking: "That was no ordinary dream."

The researcher Kelly Bulkeley devoted a whole book to documenting this distinction. Robert Moss named it from the Iroquois sources, where it had carried a name for centuries: ondinnonk — the soul's secret wish, revealed in dreams. Marie-Louise von Franz, after sixty-five years of Jungian clinical practice, said the same thing: certain dreams are "numinous, unforgettable, often experienced as more real than waking life."

Three traditions. Three languages. A single phenomenon: the dream that changes something.

In 30 seconds

Big Dreams are a category empirically distinct from ordinary dreams, documented by neuroscientific research (Bulkeley) and across the traditions of the whole world. They are recognised by their lasting memorability, their emotional intensity, their narrative complexity, and above all their carry-over effects: measurable effects that persist into waking life. The Iroquois tradition names them ondinnonk — the soul's secret wish — and grants them a communal dimension: the dream is not a private matter, it can call for a gesture in the world.

Voices of the masters

Bulkeley — the scientific definition

Kelly Bulkeley, in Big Dreams: The Science of Dreaming and the Origins of Religion (2016), gives the most precise definition available in the contemporary literature. His thesis: "Big dreams — rare, intensely vivid, highly memorable dreams — are not cognitive misfirings but peak expressions of the brain's evolved capacity for creative pattern recognition, emerging from the same neural architecture that generates waking consciousness at its most adaptive."

Bulkeley works with the Sleep and Dream Database (SDDb), a base of several million dream reports. His method is quantitative. What he shows: Big Dreams are an empirically distinct category, recognisable by measurable markers.

First marker: lasting memorability. Big Dreams stay. For years, sometimes decades, sometimes a whole lifetime. In the populations studied, subjects recall Big Dreams thirty years old with a precision of detail that ordinary dreams from last week do not have.

Second marker: total emotional intensity. Not more intense in terms of positive or negative valence — more intense in total amplitude. More fear than fear. More joy than joy. More strangeness than any daytime strangeness.

Third marker: narrative complexity. Big Dreams have an architecture, characters, an internal logic. Even when they are strange, they are coherent in their strangeness.

Fourth marker — the most important — the carry-over effects: "Big dreams produce measurable effects that persist into waking life — altered mood, changed behavior, new beliefs, even physiological shifts. These are not placebo or suggestion; they are the mechanism through which dreaming shapes culture, religion, and individual psychology." A dream that fades without a trace in waking life is not a Big Dream in Bulkeley's sense.

The four prototypes of Big Dreams

Bulkeley identifies four cross-cultural prototypes, present in every sample studied:

1. Aggressive (nightmares, predators, confrontations) → corresponds to beliefs about demonic forces and spiritual warfare
2. Sexual (forbidden desire, revelatory intensity) → corresponds to prophetic vision and ecstasy
3. Gravitational (falling, paralysis, flight) → corresponds to ritual healing practices
4. Mystical (luminous encounter, cosmic unity) → corresponds to contemplative practice

These prototypes are not imposed categories. They are the patterns the brain has produced spontaneously for millennia — and that the cultural traditions have elaborated into rituals, mythologies, spiritual practices.

The Black Swan method

Bulkeley borrows from Nassim Taleb for his method: "The Black Swan Approach: Conventional dream science focuses on the statistical average, ignoring outliers as noise. The rare, extreme, 'black swan' dreams are the most consequential for understanding the mind's full range." Standard dream science mistook its object. Ordinary dreams are dreams of continuity. It is the dreams of discontinuity — the black swans — that reveal the mind's fullest reach.

Moss and the Iroquois — the Ondinnonk

Robert Moss, in Dreamways of the Iroquois (2004) and Growing Big Dreams (2020), passes on what he learned from the Haudenosaunee tradition. The central concept of Iroquois medicine is the ondinnonk (a term attested in the Jesuit Relations in the seventeenth century): "The Iroquois held that the soul reveals its secret desires through dreams, and that honoring those desires — making ceremony, adjusting life, shifting relationship — is the central spiritual and social obligation of the community. The dream is not private entertainment but public spiritual intelligence."

Three essential points in this definition.

The ondinnonk is a wish of the soul, not of the ego. What the conscious self desires (success, approval, security) and what the soul desires (what it came into this body for) can be very different. The dream is one of the rare spaces where the soul can make itself heard over the noise of the ego.

To ignore the ondinnonk causes illness. The aetshents (Iroquois shaman-healers) diagnosed illnesses by searching for which wish of the soul had not been honoured. If the soul wished to create and the person had abandoned their creation — then the illness came.

The ondinnonk is communal. When a member of the community had a Big Dream revealing a wish of the soul, it was a collective affair. The community gathered to help honour it. The dream was not private. It was governance.

The Iroquois ontological inversion

Moss also passes on an inversion that asks to be held with care: for the Haudenosaunee nations, "the dream world is the Real World; waking life is the World of Shadows." The soul comes from the Real World before birth, and returns to it after death. Waking life is the crossing through the Shadow World. This inversion does not ask for belief — it invites us to question the assumption that the dream is somehow less real than waking.

Von Franz — numinosity as a clinical criterion

Marie-Louise von Franz, in The Way of the Dream, confirms after sixty-five years of clinical practice: "Big Dreams (Archetypal Dreams): Certain dreams are qualitatively different from ordinary, everyday dreams. They are numinous, unforgettable, often experienced as more real than waking life. They carry transpersonal content and mark major transitions in the dreamer's life. All cultures have recognized these as sacred and prophetic." The central word is numinous — a quality of presence that exceeds the personal.

Why it matters in your life

We live in a culture that treats all dreams the same way: either we note them in a journal, or we forget them. The idea that there might be qualitatively different dreams — dreams that carry a distinct weight, that leave a trace in waking life, that call for a response — is foreign to most contemporary frames.

What Bulkeley shows scientifically and what the Iroquois tradition has known for centuries are the same thing: to treat all dreams the same way is to ignore the moments when something important is trying to make itself heard.

The question is not whether to believe in it or not. The question is empirical: have some of your dreams produced an effect in your life — a shift in attitude, a decision, an opening to something you had not considered? If so, you have already lived what Bulkeley calls a carry-over effect. It was not superstition. It was the process of dreaming doing its work.

The ondinnonk adds something neuroscience cannot measure: perhaps these dreams speak not only about you, but for something that wants to exist. A gesture in the world. A conversation you keep putting off. A letting-go or a beginning.

Stay with that.

The practice

Step 1 — Recognise, do not label. Do not decide that a dream is a Big Dream before you have waited 24 to 72 hours. If you are still thinking about it three days later without having reread it — that is a signal. Spontaneous memorability is the first criterion.

Step 2 — Give it space, not meaning. Resist the temptation to interpret right away. A Big Dream deserves first of all to be inhabited. Note it in detail — not what it means, but what it was like. The texture, the quality of presence, the figures, the sensations.

Step 3 — Watch for the carry-over effects. In the following days, note whether something has changed — an unexplained shift in mood, a new perspective on a situation, a decision that imposed itself. These effects are not necessarily dramatic. They can be subtle.

Step 4 — Look for the ondinnonk. Ask yourself: does this dream seem to express something I want deeply — not what my ego desires, but something more fundamental? A direction, a wish to create, a relationship I am neglecting, a letting-go I am avoiding? Do not force the answer. Let it emerge over a few days.

Step 5 — A gesture of honouring. If something emerges — if the dream seems to call for something — make a concrete gesture, however tiny. Not a ten-step plan. A gesture. A phone call. A written sentence. A choice made. The honouring is always small and real.

Common pitfalls

Deciding too quickly that a dream is "important". If you go looking for Big Dreams, you will find them everywhere. The value of the concept lies in its rarity. Natural memorability — effortless, without rereading — is the criterion, not your wish to live a meaningful experience.

Confusing emotional intensity with a Big Dream. An intense dream is not automatically a Big Dream. Ordinary nightmares can be very intense. What characterises the Big Dream is the quality of the intensity, not its level — an impression of solidity, of a more-than-real reality, that ordinary intensity does not have.

Ignoring the carry-over effects. If you note your dreams but never track their impact on waking life, you cannot identify Big Dreams retrospectively. Tracking over time is what reveals their nature.

Keeping the dream entirely private. The ondinnonk suggests that a dream can call for a communal dimension — a conversation, a sharing. Not necessarily public. But sometimes, sharing the dream with a trusted person is part of the honouring.

Frequently asked questions

How do I tell a Big Dream from an intense ordinary dream? The most reliable criterion is natural memorability at 72 hours. An intense ordinary dream fades within a few hours. A Big Dream stays — often with an unusual precision of detail. You can also ask yourself: did this dream have a different quality, not only a different intensity?

What if I almost never remember my dreams? The regular practice of noting the fragments on waking — even a single word, a single sensation — naturally improves recall. A Big Dream is often the one that wakes you — or the one you remember despite almost never remembering anything.

Does the ondinnonk mean subscribing to Iroquois beliefs? No. Moss's transmission is precise: the ondinnonk is a phenomenological category — it names what the dream reveals about what you deeply desire. You can work with this concept without subscribing to any particular cosmology.

What if the dream calls for something impossible to honour? The honouring can be symbolic. If the ondinnonk reveals a longing to travel that you cannot live out right now — you can look at photos of the place, trace a map, write about what that journey would mean. The symbolic gesture has a real value.

To go further

Books:

• Kelly Bulkeley — Big Dreams: The Science of Dreaming and the Origins of Religion (2016): the most rigorous work available. Neuroscience, phenomenology, comparative religious studies.
• Robert Moss — Dreamways of the Iroquois: Honoring the Secret Wishes of the Soul (2004): for the cultural dimension and the communal protocols of honouring. To be read with the awareness that Moss is an intermediary, not a direct Indigenous source.
• Robert Moss — Growing Big Dreams (2020): more accessible, directly applicable. Chapter 2, on the ondinnonk, is a perfect point of entry.
• Marie-Louise von Franz — The Way of the Dream (1988): for the clinical dimension of Jungian Big Dreams.

Articles in this series:

• Numinous: what the dream carries that diluted spirituality cannot carry
• Active imagination Jung: a dialogue with the unconscious
• Master Events Seth: the dreams that touch Framework 2