The corresponding Maya day is Ak'b'al, meaning darkness or night, and by extension the interior of the earth and the underworld. Its glyph is one of the standard signs for darkness, and it is linked to the jaguar as a creature of the night sun, to caves, and to the passage of the sun through the underworld between setting and rising. In the divinatory readings recorded from colonial and modern sources it can carry both the shelter and the danger of the dark. The Dreamspell reading of dreaming and intuition is a plausible modern extension of night symbolism but is not what the Maya sources say; they are concerned with darkness as a place, the underworld and the cave, rather than with dreaming as a psychological faculty.
Akbal is the third of the twenty authentic Tzolk'in day signs, its imagery night, darkness and the interior of a dwelling, a sign the living K'iche' daykeeping tradition knows as Aq'ab'al. In the directional scheme carried by the twenty signs, Akbal belongs to the west and the colour black, not blue; Arguelles's Dreamspell substitutes Blue for this third colour group, one of the clearer points at which the Dreamspell's own colour scheme departs from the traditional Maya direction-colour assignment even while preserving its underlying four-group, five-seal structure. Solar Seal 3, Blue Night, borrows Akbal's name and its association with dreams and the interior, unconscious life.