Dreams.Earth.Remembering.
"Each of us has a responsibility to all the other animals and plants and to the process of evolution that created us. All of us alive now are members of the most important generation of human beings who have ever lived, because we're determining the future, not just for a hundred years, but for a billion years. When we cut a huge limb off the tree of natural diversity, we're forever halting the evolutionary potential of that branch of life. That's what it fundamentally comes down to. Nobody has ever lived who is more important."
- Dave Foreman in Listening to the Land
Contrary to the dying myth of Progress, we belong to Earth. While this becomes obvious with a little intellectual effort, as a species, we don’t generally feel or experience the depth of that belonging. The ways we evolved to hold conversation with life - the way only humans can - are nearly forgotten beneath the onslaught of colonialism’s cancer. Each day, we cede more of our imaginal terrain to the literalized screens and dead stories of the “rational” and lose the only dependable ground we’ll ever call home. And yet.
And yet. Every night, no matter how numb we’ve become to the imagination and the images that are the soul’s central language, we can’t help but be visited by the poetics of the deep self. Despite the trivialized position dreams hold in modernity’s narrative, nearly everyone I talk to about them feels a sense of their importance. I see the interest in their eyes and I can tell that this “figment of imagination” the person across from me is reliving in passionate detail has something important to convey.
In fact, I’m coming to recognize just how much folks long to share their dreams even while being confused or distrustful of them and their own yearning. The myth of separation runs deep and communication from a mysterious transpersonal intelligence leads to uncomfortable dissonance that can be easier to simply avoid. However, as the clock ticks and the old linear narratives about our lives get exposed for the illusions they are, we might just find our way through the chaos by turning to dreams, which are sourced and sustained by the Gaian mind.
According to the archetypal psychologist James Hillman “The world, because of its breakdown, is entering a new moment of consciousness: by drawing attention to itself by means of its symptoms, it is becoming aware of itself as a psychic reality. The world is now the subject of immense suffering, exhibiting acute and crass symptoms by means of which it defends itself against collapse.”
Because we can’t actually be separate from Earth, our destruction of it must show up somewhere in our experience, and if we are numbed to the very real screaming of the wild world, we will be forced into our own internal screaming and call it neurosis, depression, anxiety, psychosis. These symptoms carry into our dreams - so much of what my night-world points at are the wounded places and beings asking for my attention. Sometimes traumas I’ve worked for years to access in therapy just arrive one night - an unfolding story revealing itself, offering immediate and direct access to the imaginal and somatic realms that must be engaged for real healing to occur. By saying yes to these beings, walking with them on the land, bringing them to my teachers and guides, and sometimes even embodying them, I allow their energy, including the gifts they carry beneath their wounds, back into my life. Dreams offer a bridge between the inner world and physical reality and clarify the context of how individual suffering is actually a symptom of Earth herself.
Based on the intensity of our collective imbalance, dreams often point to the painful places. However, they also sometimes point us to the center of who we actually are, beneath the trauma. To paraphrase ecopsychologist and soul guide Bill Plotkin, dreams and soul, originating in the earth, guide us to and in fact, ARE the ecological niche we came here to inhabit. The wild world speaks to us through the imaginal realm - that stream of images, feelings, and intuitions that flows when we open to it. From this perspective, our wounds aren’t accidents and our gifts aren’t random - in fact, they are intimately entangled and intentionally seeded to evoke our unique way of belonging to the world. It is this authentic belonging that we must recover if we’re to again inhabit our true place on Earth.
As a global community, we have a chance to remember how to listen. There’s time yet to uncover and offer our most authentic selves in service of the Great Turning. The wisdom of our ancestors still lives in our bones, and Earth continues sending us messages of our (and her) deepest yearnings. Through the magic of her wild wholeness, Gaia persists in seeking human participation in her unfolding mystery and despite accelerated ignorance and destruction of the planet, we’re still invited to become ourselves every single night.
On November 15th, Climate Change & Consciousness team members Jennifer Comeau and Kristopher Drummond are offering a two hour dream cafe as part of the ongoing Community Cauldron series. If you’re interested in learning more about dreams and the practice of dreamwork, we hope you attend this pay-what-you-can offering! For more information, go to www.cccearth.org/wilddreams