When I was younger (I believe around 9 or so) and living in Central Virginia, I had a very weird dream. In the dream, I was Native American, living in a longhouse in a village, with the rest of my family. I remember that, at night, there was a "floating" head that would come through the village and terrorize us all, killing people and eating them pretty much as it pleased. Long story short, after many nights, I figured out that the only way to "kill" the floating head was by getting hot stones inside of it (stones that had been sitting in fire, pick them up and throw them, trying to get them in the mouth of the thing). The head was a pretty creepy sight, taller than any human I've ever seen...but I digress. I remember commenting about the dream at school, but didn't think anything of it (I think we had just covered Natives in class, and some of their gods were bizarre, but I don't remember anything quite that bizarre being covered...)
Fast forward another 10 or so years, one of my friends is Cherokee, and I love reading books dealing with werewolves/shapeshifters. Both of those make me interested in Natives and make me do research behind some of the stories (who doesn't love a hot woman who can shift into a coyote and kick butt at the same time?! Mercy Thompson
).Doing some research on Coyote a couple days ago (who is quite an interesting fellow), I came across a website that talked about the different gods of the different tribes...I browsed through, and one struck me as very familiar:
Iroquois Gods
Big Heads
Demon gods. Giand heads without bodies which fly about in storms. They find men very tasty.
http://www.firstpeople.us/glossary/nati ... quois.html
So, I just did a little more research, and things get even...weirder?
FLYING-HEAD
Also known as BIG-HEAD, GREAT-HEAD
FLYING-HEAD: Not a nice thing to be heading in your direction. A huge winged head with flaming eyes, and hair streaming in the slipstream. With huge fangs for munching up livestock, he was forever hungry as there was no body to fill.
An old woman roasting chestnuts caused his downfall. "Aha — hot stones" said the FLYING-HEAD to itself, "they smell delicious." And being so gapingly greedy he bypassed the tiddly little things the woman was baking and took the great big ones, along with the fire they were cooking in.
Big mistake — these were hearthstones containing all the heat of the fire. It was all too much and the FLYING-HEAD internally combusted. And that's an old Iroquois chestnut.
http://www.godchecker.com/pantheon/nati ... LYING-HEAD
http://pyramidmesa.netfirms.com/iroquois2.html
I had almost all the details of what happened right, yet do not remember ever hearing of this demon until a couple days ago. How is that even possible? I can't say I had a vision quest...for one, I never fasted, secondly, I'm not even Native (that I'm aware of)! I just find it very odd that a dream I had one night, I find out later on about matches a legend. Some things are left better as a figment of my imagination!