I’ve been doing a lot of “active learning” lately on the concept of menstrual huts, and how they were used as communal places for women to share their dreams and intuitions. When I’d first heard about them, in passing from a friend of mine years ago, she implied that girls and women were sent to these huts because their tribes believed they were “polluted” or “dirty” in some way, but when I did some research on the subject myself, I found out that this wasn’t always the case. Often, especially in more primitive cultures, the huts were considered to be positive place where women could rest and reflect during menses. In some cultures, the dreams girls and women had during their menses were considered particularly important and prophetical to their tribes.

Women outside a menstrual hut. Photograph from Lessa (1966)

It’s equal parts sad and mystical that there is still so little we understand about menstruation, particularly psychologically, hundreds and hundreds of years later. I’ve always felt sort of detached from my periods as a feminine event. I never struggled with guilt or feelings that it was dirty, but I’ve never felt a swell of feminine pride or rage where it’s concerned either. Like most things tied into my gender/sexuality, I spent most of my more formative years being completely ambivalent toward it and still am, for the most part. For a greater chunk of my life, my fertility was nothing but a vague cloud that hung over me disproportionately.

I began puberty very early and reached it’s pinnacle (menstruation) when I was just 9 years old. This affected the development of my reproductive system, (“stunting” was the world a gyno used once) to such a degree that my periods were never regular- light when they came at all.  One of my ovaries is also much smaller than the other as a result of my early development, and so it was always unclear whether I would be capable of carrying a child to term at all. I suppose this allowed (or maybe forced) me to detach myself from the event of menstruation. It was something that came and went, not of any particular important aside from brief joy at not being pregnant falling away into passing annoyance.

But since I had my son (whose gestation set right a lot of the wayward hormones that had kept me just outside of having “correct” sexual physiology for so long), I’ve had to confront my menstrual cycle in an entirely new way. Is this what womanhood feels like? I’ve started to get terrible, terrible migraines the week of and the week after my period. They’ve also been kicking my ass into short but excruciating depressions- “take to your bed” kinds of depressions all tied up in a beautiful bow of paranoia. I wonder if this onset of psychological trauma is somehow tied into the lack of time, introspection and respect I’ve given the more unknowable side of my (now “proper”) menstrual cycle? Would I suffer as much if I was able to go away during these times, to be with other women in a similar state, communing and prophesying our dreams?

The chemical in your brain that some folks theorize creates the dream state, DMT, is also believed by some scientists to be the chemical your brain releases right before you die. It’s also available as a recreational drug, which I’ve tried and actually didn’t enjoy. I had what I call a “Nikki Sixx moment” one night in Oregon, which I won’t even get into here, where I feel I truly came close to death and can vouch (now that I’ve ingested DMT recreationally) that the experience was identical. If the human body releases the same chemical during dreaming that it does moments before “death,” is dreaming a form of dying? Or, likewise, is dying a form of dreaming?

“Each month women go through a cycle very similar to (the Moon’s). We ‘die’ at menstruation; a part of us that hasn’t come to fruition or conceived dies off and is released.” – Felicity Oswell

If this line of logic is followed, menstruation bring us closer to the “feeling” of death. Is that why so many women struggle (with depression, fatigue, rage, extreme emotional sensitivity, insomnia, migraines) during their menses? Similarly to my near death experience, the onset of my monthly migraines (complete with aura) also remind me of the beginnings of a DMT trip. Could this also explain the emotional changes and deep melancholy girls go through during the onsent of puberty, changes so severe that Denis Diderot once wrote of women “You all die at 15″?

It’s not hard to see, then, why the dreams of menstruating women were once considered to be so prophetical, and somehow closer to a unknown spiritual layer than others’. Menstruation IS a form of monthly death, and for some reason I never considered the spiritual ramifications of that until very recently. If dreaming is connected somehow to the act of dying (or vice versa) then it does follow easily that dreams which occur during a mass monthly cycle of life/death would be particularly other worldly and, well, non-”living” in nature. How much damage have we done to ourselves, psychologically, by forcing ourselves to “act normal” during our periods, going to work, wearing tight jeans, going to the gym and whatnot? Are we smothering something fundamental in doing so?

I’m going to approach my period next month completely differently, I think. I might even take a vacation by myself and head down to the water with a dream journal in my hands. I’ll let ya’ll know how it goes down.