Dreamspell (overview)

The Dreamspell is a calendar and divinatory system devised by Jose Arguelles (1939-2011) and Lloydine Burris Arguelles, first announced around the Harmonic Convergence of August 1987 and released in its worked-out form, as a boxed kit with a board and cards, in 1990. Its two components are a count of 260 kin, generated by running thirteen Galactic Tones against twenty Solar Seals, and a solar calendar of thirteen months of twenty-eight days plus one extra day, the Day Out of Time, on 25 July.

The system is presented through the slogan 13:20 against 12:60, in which the twelve-month sixty-minute Gregorian and clock regime is said to have imposed an artificial timing on humanity and the thirteen-twenty ratio is offered as a natural one. Arguelles founded the Foundation for the Law of Time to promote calendar reform on this basis, and the system acquired a substantial international following.

This is the point on which everything else depends, and it is not a matter of opinion. The Maya Tzolk'in, a 260-day count of thirteen numbers against twenty named days, is genuinely ancient, attested in Mesoamerica for well over two thousand years, and it is still kept, unbroken, by ajq'ijab' or daykeepers in the Guatemalan highlands, among the K'iche', Kaqchikel, Mam and other Maya peoples.

The Dreamspell count is not that count. It is anchored to the Gregorian calendar by a fixed correlation of Arguelles's own choosing, and, crucially, it skips 29 February, so that its kin and the traditional kin drift apart by one day every leap year and cannot be reconciled. The Day Out of Time has no Maya precedent. The thirteen-moon 28-day year is not a Maya calendar at all; the Maya solar count is the 365-day Haab of eighteen months of twenty days plus five. The seal names are also not translations of the Maya day names: several, notably Wizard, Warrior and Skywalker, replace the attested meanings with new ones.

Mayanist scholars have consistently described the Dreamspell as a modern esoteric invention that borrows Maya vocabulary, and Maya organisations and daykeepers in Guatemala have on several occasions objected publicly to it being taught and sold as Maya tradition, since it displaces the count their own communities maintain.

Critics have also noted that Arguelles derived elements of the system from his own numerological and I Ching speculations rather than from the epigraphic record, and that his most widely publicised claim, the reading of the end of the thirteenth bak'tun on 21 December 2012 as a galactic transition, was not what the Maya inscriptions say; the date is a calendrical rollover, and the handful of Classic-period texts that mention such dates do not describe a world transformation. None of this makes the Dreamspell worthless as a modern contemplative practice, which is how many of its users treat it. It does mean that presenting it as Maya is a factual error, and a well-documented one, and the atlas records it under its own name for that reason.