How the System Has Been Received

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.