ANCESTRAL WISDOM · PUBLIC HEALTH · METAPHYSICAL WELLNESS
You are not quite asleep. You are not quite awake. Your body has stilled but your awareness has not—it has simply changed channels. In this between-place, you hear your name spoken in a voice you recognize. A face arranges itself in the dark behind your eyelids. A presence settles beside you with the particular weight of someone you have known, someone who is, by the world’s accounting, gone.
What you do in the next few seconds matters — reading these dream visits as open doors, not intrusions, changes what you carry forward into waking life.
African traditions across the continent and the diaspora have been preparing people for this moment for thousands of years. They mapped this terrain. They named it. They built entire sciences of engagement around it—protocols for receiving what arrives here, for understanding what it means, for responding with the full seriousness the encounter deserves. They were not doing mythology. They were doing what we would now call consciousness science, with methods refined across generations.
In 1848, a French psychologist named Alfred Maury gave this state a name: hypnagogia. The African traditions had simply been working with it—deliberately, systematically, reverently—for far longer.
"The between-place is not a belief. It is an address. And the ancestors have always known how to find it."
The Yoruba Cartography of the Between
Yoruba cosmology divides existence into Aiye—the visible, physical world—and Orun, the invisible spirit realm. These are not locations separated by distance. They are states of existence that are concurrent, layered, permeable. Orun is not above Aiye in any geographic sense. It is with Aiye, always, accessible through specific thresholds of consciousness.
The ancestors—Egungun, the collective of those who have returned to Orun—are understood to remain genuinely present in the lives of the living. They are not memory. They are not symbol. They are beings who retain interest, intention, and the capacity to communicate. And the threshold they most consistently use for that communication is the between-place.
In Yoruba tradition, it is the Ori—one’s personal spiritual intuition, the divine guardian of the head—that becomes most receptive during this liminal passage. The Ori is understood as the mediating intelligence between the individual and the ancestral realm. When the gatekeeping functions of waking consciousness begin to loosen, the Ori can receive what waking awareness cannot.
The Ifa corpus—the vast divination system that encodes Yoruba philosophy, medicine, history, and cosmological wisdom across 256 odu (sacred texts)—contains extensive instruction on dream states, on the kinds of transmissions that arrive through the between-place, and on the protocols for receiving and acting on ancestral communication. This is not folk wisdom. It is a body of knowledge with its own epistemology, its own standard of evidence, its own community of trained interpreters.
The Akan Science of the Traveling Soul
In Akan cosmology—practiced across what is today Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, and among diaspora communities globally—every person carries multiple soul components, each with distinct function. The Kra (or Okra) is the divine life force given by Nyame, the Supreme Being: the spark that constitutes being alive at all. The Sunsum is specific to the individual—the personal spirit, the seat of character, will, and what we might call personality.
During sleep, it is the Sunsum that leaves the body and travels.
This is not metaphor. Akan elders are precise about this: the Sunsum navigates the same landscape that the body cannot access while it is awake. Dreams, in this framework, are not symbolic narratives generated by a subconscious. They are the direct reports of where the Sunsum went, what it encountered, who it met.
When an ancestor appears in an Akan dream, the meeting is understood as a literal encounter—two Sunsum in the same between-space. The message delivered carries the full weight of the sender’s intention. Nothing is lost in translation, because there is no translation. What was said was said.
Ancestral communication in Akan tradition follows protocols even in the dream space: the tone used, the specific words chosen, the physical objects or landscapes that accompany the ancestor’s presence—all of these carry interpretive weight. Families that maintain strong ancestral practice pass down the knowledge of how to read these details, how to remember accurately what arrived, and how to respond with appropriate ceremony.
The Igbo Line Between Chi and Dreamer
In Igbo cosmology, Chi is often translated as "personal god" or "guardian spirit"—but both translations flatten something that the Igbo language holds with far more precision. Chi is better understood as the portion of the divine assigned to you specifically: your unique, direct, irreplaceable line to Chukwu, the great supreme source. Your Chi was present when you and Chukwu negotiated the terms of your life before your arrival in the world—the concept of Uwa (this world, this lifetime) carries within it the understanding that nothing about your existence is accident. It was agreed to.
Chi communicates through dreams. When an Igbo elder says m’Chi gwara m’anya—my Chi spoke to me in a dream—this is not poetic language for intuition. It is an account of direct contact, no different in character than a phone call, distinguished only by the medium.
The Dibia—traditional healer, diviner, and keeper of medicine knowledge—commonly receives their calling through sustained dream communication with their Chi or with ancestral helpers. The diagnostic knowledge a Dibia brings to a patient does not come entirely from observation or from inherited tradition, though it draws on both. Part of it arrives through the between-place. Particular remedies are confirmed or revealed in that liminal state. Particular presences make themselves known as guides.
This is a system. It has its own training, its own standards, its own accountability. That it operates differently from Western clinical epistemology does not make it less rigorous. It makes it differently rigorous—rigorous according to criteria that have sustained communities through centuries of disruption.
What Neuroscience Found in 1848
Alfred Maury’s naming of hypnagogia—from the Greek hypnos (sleep) and agōgos (leading)—gave Western science a label for the threshold state that African traditions had been systematically navigating for millennia. Contemporary neuroscience has since developed a richer picture of what happens in this in-between.
During hypnagogia, the brain transitions into theta wave activity (4–8 Hz)—the same brainwave state documented during deep meditation, during states of expanded awareness that contemplative traditions across cultures have cultivated deliberately. The prefrontal cortex—the center of rational filtering, of the mind’s gatekeeper function—begins to relax its hold. The default mode network, the brain’s internal activity system most active when we are turned inward rather than outward, lights up.
In this neurological loosening, what is usually screened out becomes accessible. Voices are heard with the clarity of voices in the room. Faces appear with the specificity of faces on a screen. Presences are felt with the physical particularity of someone sitting beside you. Researchers have documented these experiences across cultures for as long as they have been asking the question.
Thomas Edison reportedly used the hypnagogic state as a productivity tool—sleeping in a chair holding steel balls that would drop and wake him when sleep deepened, so he could capture the ideas that arrived in the between. Einstein, Beethoven, Poe, Tesla—the list of people who worked the threshold is long. Western culture has treated the hypnagogic state primarily as a resource for creativity and problem-solving.
What Western neuroscience has not adequately addressed is the question that African traditions center: why, across cultures and centuries and geographies, the presences that appear in this state are so often specifically the faces and voices and presences of people who are dead. Not random imagery. Not strangers. The people you knew. The people who knew you.
The Ancestors Knew What the Lab Is Still Catching Up To
African traditions did not stumble upon the between-place. They mapped it. They built technology for entering it with intention, for receiving its transmissions clearly, for returning to waking life with what was given intact. They built community practices around it—ways of holding the knowledge collectively, of verifying and interpreting what arrived, of integrating it into the decisions and health of the living community.
The Ifa corpus addresses dream states across hundreds of verses, naming the conditions under which different kinds of ancestral communication arrive and the protocols for response. Akan traditions of Adae—the sacred ancestral celebration days—are timed according to a forty-two-day cycle, reflecting an understanding that ancestral access is rhythmic, tied to cosmic patterns, not random. Igbo practices around the Chi include specific ritual preparations that open the channel of communication, understandings about when the Chi will speak and when it will not, and forms of reciprocity that keep the relationship alive and clear.
These are not metaphors for psychological processes. They are independent systems of knowledge that reached conclusions about consciousness and ancestral relationship through rigorous practice over long time—practice that was tested, refined, transmitted through initiation and lineage, and held accountable to community outcomes.
When we say the elders knew, we are not speaking romantically. We are noting an empirical fact: communities that maintained these practices navigated hardship with resources that communities without them did not have. The between-place is not a belief. It is an address. And the ancestors have always known how to find it.
What Colonialism Disrupted—and What Survived Anyway
When colonial missions arrived, they brought two instruments simultaneously: the theological and the medical. Ancestral visitation was reclassified as either demonic encounter (the missionary frame) or delusional symptom (the emerging psychiatric frame). The between-place was pathologized. The Dibia was called a witch doctor. The dreamer who received ancestral visits was instructed to rebuke what arrived, to pray it away, to see a doctor.
This worked, partially. It produced generations of people who entered the between-place afraid—who, when an ancestor arrived in that liminal state, responded not with receptivity but with the prayer of protection. Who woke from visitations disturbed rather than informed.
Sleep paralysis—the experience of waking awareness while the body remains temporarily immobile, often accompanied by the presence of a figure in the room—has specific names and detailed interpretive frameworks in many African and African diaspora traditions. It is often understood as an ancestor who has not been acknowledged, who carries an unreceived message, who needs something the living have not yet provided. In Western psychiatric literature, it is classified as a benign parasomnia, occasionally associated with anxiety.
Both bodies of knowledge have something true to say about the experience. But only one of them asks about the relationship. Only one of them considers that the figure in the room might have arrived with purpose.
Harriet Tubman navigated the between-place as a working instrument of liberation. The visions that arrived in that liminal state were not comfort or metaphor — they were coordinates. She moved on them with the trust of someone who had learned, through practice, that what came through in the threshold was reliable. The routes she traveled, the timing she chose, the people she returned for — much of this emerged from a channel that she understood as divine and direct. What the traditions would recognize as ancestral guidance, she received and acted on. The land routes across the Eastern Shore bear witness to what happens when someone takes that guidance seriously.
The traditions that were suppressed survived precisely because they were held in the bodies of people who had no reason to believe the suppressors were right.
The Between-Place Is Being Reclaimed
Across the diaspora, the between-place is being re-inhabited. Black and Brown dreamworkers, spiritual directors, ancestral healers, and community practitioners are reclaiming the cartography their traditions maintained through every attempt to erase it.
Dream circles with African cosmological rather than Freudian frameworks. Ancestral altars with specific dream preparation—herbs, prayers, and practice designed to open the channel before sleep and to receive what arrives clearly. Babalawos, Okyeame, and Dibia working within communities to restore the understanding that the ancestors are available, that the between-place is real, and that sleep is one of the primary doorways.
This matters for mental health in ways that Western psychology is only beginning to understand. Ancestral visitation—in communities that hold the framework for it—provides something that no medication can replicate: the direct experience of continued relationship with those who have died. The specific words that needed to be said. The confirmation that the person still exists, still loves, still pays attention. The practical guidance that arrives at the exact moment of need.
These are not symptoms of complicated grief. These are experiences of an ongoing relationship in a different medium. The between-place is not where we go to remember the dead. It is where we go to meet them.
A Note from Ubuntu Village
Ubuntu Village did not bring these practices to Kenya, to Uganda, or to Nigeria. The practitioners were already there. The traditions had survived. The dream knowledge was being held—sometimes quietly, sometimes defiantly, sometimes in forms that had merged with other traditions under pressure—but held.
What Ubuntu Village is committed to is the condition that allows what communities already know to be expressed and transmitted without shame or interruption. The condition in which a grandmother can tell her grandchild about the visit she received last night without the child being taught that the grandmother is superstitious. The condition in which a community health worker knows that when a community member describes ancestral contact in the between-place, the right response is not referral but recognition.
The ancestors have always known where to find us. The between-place has always been there, waiting.
What changes now is whether we are willing to be found.
What has arrived for you in the between-place? What do you do with it? We want to know. Reach out.
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Ubuntu Village is building the conditions for communities to reclaim what was always theirs — ancestral wisdom, spiritual sovereignty, and the tools for communal healing. If this resonates, we invite you to stand with us.
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- Maury, L. F. A. (1848). Des hallucinations hypnagogiques. Annales Médico-Psychologiques. Gallica (digitized)
- Mavromatis, A. (1987). Hypnagogia: The Unique State of Consciousness Between Wakefulness and Sleep. Routledge. Internet Archive
- Watt Smith, T. (2015). The Book of Human Emotions. Profile Books / Wellcome Collection. Publisher page
- Bascom, W. (1969). Ifa Divination: Communication Between Gods and Men in West Africa. Indiana University Press. Publisher page
- Opoku, K. A. (1978). West African Traditional Religion. FEP International. Open Library
- Achebe, C. (1958). Things Fall Apart. Heinemann. Publisher page
- Wiredu, K. (1980). Philosophy and an African Culture. Cambridge University Press. Publisher page
- Hufford, D. J. (1982). The Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions. University of Pennsylvania Press. Publisher page
The knowledge in this piece comes from what we have been told, what we have read, and what has been passed down. We hold it carefully and without claim to completeness. If you have information you believe should be added, corrected, or attributed differently — please reach out to us at info@ubuntuvillageusa.org. These traditions belong to living communities, and we are always listening.
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Michele Mitchell is the Founder, President & CEO of Ubuntu Village Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with programs in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria. A writer, advocate, and community strategist working at the intersection of ancestral wisdom, public health, and community power, Michele leads Ubuntu Village’s work to center communities as the protagonists of their own healing. She writes from the conviction that science and spirit are complementary, that healing is relational, and that community is the medicine. Read more about Michele, or connect with her on LinkedIn.