Read the legend Tobia loves
The Dreamcatcher
A spider spins her web to protect every child’s dreams, and when her people spread too far apart for her to reach them all, the mothers and grandmothers learn to weave her magic themselves: the Ojibwe legend of the first dreamcatcher.
Long ago, among the Ojibwe people of North America, there lived a spider named Asibikaashi, known by everyone as the Spider Woman. She cared deeply for her people, and especially for the children, and each morning she would spin a delicate web across the doorway of every lodge in the village, so that no harmful dream could slip inside while the little ones slept.
Her web worked exactly as she intended. When the morning sun rose, it caught in the fine threads any bad dreams that had tried to creep through during the night, and burned them gently away, while the good dreams, being far lighter and softer, slipped safely through the small hole woven into the very center of the web and drifted down to settle over the children as they slept.
A Nation Too Wide to Reach
As the years passed, the Ojibwe people grew and spread further and further across the land, building new villages many days’ journey apart from one another. However hard she tried, Asibikaashi found that she simply could not weave her protective web across every single doorway each night, no matter how quickly her eight legs moved.
The Grandmothers Learn Her Craft
Rather than leave any child unprotected, Asibikaashi visited the mothers and grandmothers of the scattered villages in their own dreams, one by one, teaching each of them the pattern of her sacred web. She showed them how to bend a young willow branch into a small hoop, and how to weave sinew across its center in the same careful pattern she herself had always used, always leaving one small hole open at the very middle.
The women wove their own little webs exactly as Spider Woman had shown them, and hung them above their children’s beds each night. And just as Asibikaashi’s own web once had, each one caught the bad dreams of the night and let only the good dreams pass gently through, to settle softly over the children as they slept.
To this day, the dreamcatcher is still woven by hand and hung above beds in homes around the world, a small circle of willow and thread, carrying forward the same gentle protection that Asibikaashi, the Spider Woman, first wove for the children of her people so very long ago.
▶ Watch on our YouTube channel
Ojibwe Lullaby
Play this softly while you read: a traditional Ojibwe lullaby, from the same people this legend calls home.
More stories, more lullabies
This is one tale in a growing collection of traditional stories from around the world, each one paired, where we can, with a real lullaby from the same culture.