“God sleeps in stone, breathes in plants, dreams in animals, and awakens in man”  – Hindu Proverb

Let’s widen the circle a little.  When dreamwork is usually discussed, the assumption is that the dream reflects back my issues, my concerns, and my life. After all, it is my dream!  But of course dreams reflect so much more.  Not only do they reveal our family dynamics, but they also expose socio-economic class, regional affiliations, and the frameworks of our culture-at-large.

Finally, dreams reflect our humanity, and how we are embedded in the natural world, or what eco-philosopher David Abram calls the “more-than-human-world.”  The reason this perspective is not often talked about is because one of the frameworks of our culture-at-large is that we are each individual cogs in an unthinking machine called Earth.

So it takes a little work to do eco-dreaming – which I loosely define as dreaming as if the earth is alive and trying to communicate with us. I am convinced that part of dreams’ evolutionary advantage is how they not only reflect our embeddedness in nature, but also provide warnings of probable dangers and opportunities for our community.

Humans Manage EcoSystems

Let me make a small anthropological diversion here.  We humans are smart and adaptive creatures with a defined environmental role of optimizing the ecosystem we live in.  That’s what we do, and we have been doing this successfully for millennia.   (The last six thousand years are a trickier matter – the self-serving needs of civilization have largely co-opted this role, leading to widespread environmental degradation around the globe.)

In prehistoric times, before the population explosion and the widespread domestication of grain, the earth’s peoples (hunter-gatherers, horticulturalists, marine farmers, and pastoralists) left the land better than they found it most of the time.  Yeah, they screwed up too: Easter Island being a good example of prehistoric deforestation.  However, cultivating food forests, sculpting estuaries and reefs, fertilizing soil, preventing wildfires, and keeping herd populations in check is how our ancestors spend most of their time: improving on nature’s design.

Speaking anthropologically, land management is probably the closest thing to a collective purpose for human society.  This is our deep nature, and it is reflected in our dreams.

Contemporary Ecodreaming Societies

Not everyone has forgotten the connections between dreams and nature, of course.  Many indigenous peoples today view dreams as a voice of the earth, too many to list here.  Here are some recently published ancedotes:

The Orang Asli tribes of Malaysia. Indigenous healers/dreamers transform into animals in their vision and dream states to gather information about the forest they live in. According to anthropologist Diana Riboli, these dreams result in the discovery of new healing plants, as well as information about the best time to move the seasonal villages before the rain seasons begin.

The Beaver Indians of British Columbia, Canada. According to Hugh Brody in his book Maps and Dreams (2002), Hunters, until very recently, incubated dreams before the hunt, made a kill in the dream, and soonafter would find the “dream trail” and the animal, collecting the kill in waking life.

The mountain villages of Peru. In the 1990s, during the genocide of mestizo villagers by the Maoist Shining Path (who are making a comeback, btw), dreamers were consulted about the best time for entire families to leave camp and hide in the forests.   More recently, according to anthropologist Arianna Ciconni, villagers claim that dreams led them to the locations of their relatives’ mass graves.

For more information on the anthropology of dreams, I heartily recommend Barbara Tedlock’s edited volume.

Are ecological dreams psychic?

Don't forget the crystals

Our Western worldview is continously tested by native and anthropological accounts of their dreams.  Personally, I’ve found that the more I study my dreams, the more opportunities to say “that’s impossible” emerge.  Not that the anthropologists I referenced are not saying that ecological dreams are psychic.

Perhaps these accounts are artifacts of what we may already know, but have actively repressed or not consciously noticed.  These dreams could bring to the surface of consciousness all kinds of “submerged observations,” such as  complex bodily intuitions about weather patterns and the location of game (or mass graves), or auditory threat factors that literally “ride on the wind” through the myriad of animal signs in the forest.

Or maybe they’re psychic.  Again, just like the mystery of dreams that predict illness, I think the most important thing is that we just get the message.

How to Invite the World back into your Dreams

1. Pay attention to animal dreams. In your dream journal, tag dreams that have animals with an icon or image.   According to dream researcher Bitsy Broughton, simply noticing when animals are present will actually increase their participation in our dreams. It’s a feedback loop, like any natural system.

2. Listen to what animals have to say. In dreams, our job is to listen, and to facilitate their needs. Sick animals need attention, and hungry animals need food. Angry and violent animals need to be calmed… remember that the ability to establish order is humanity’s gift to the natural world.

3. Map your dreams! Many of the locales we go to in our dreams are relatively constant (depending on your dreaming style). We take this “psychogeography” with us in waking life too, adding levels of depth to our home environment — and sometimes muddying the waters with our personal past. Noticing this can clarify how we react to new situations and ease tension when out of our element.  Innovative dreamworker Jennifer Dumpert, a scholar at Pacifica Graduate Institute, teaches a method for directing our natural ability to “dream map” where we live.

4. Share your apocalyptic dreams.  This is a rich area of discussion, because so many of us have apocalyptic dreams but do not share them publicly. Sometimes sharing a dream can alleviate its “big-ness” – because sometimes our apocalyptic dreams are reflective of our personal changes in life. But other times they contain information for our community. We can only act once we find out that others in our community have had similar dreams that brings a potential danger to our attention. Especially helpful if you live under an active volcano.

5. Honor the dream with ritual.  If you dream of a local place that needs some love, stop by and make contact.  Or read the paper to see if the land is currently under threat of development.  Give thanks to the eagle, and bow to the ocean.  I live in California, so of course I have to extol the virtues of hugging a tree.  Seriously, go hug a tree.

I recommend complementing this dream practice with a regular nature practice too.

So what have I forgotten? How do dreams and nature connect in your life?

The next post in this series about how to work with dreams is about how to start a dream sharing group.

However, the “dreams we remember for the rest of our life” are not the Big Dreams that contemporary dream researchers have demarked, but rather a watered down “catch-all” category that is based on the dreaming public’s perceived importance of particular dreams, rather than a set of features and characteristics unique to the experiences themselves.

Some researchers claim that Big Dreams come from different kinds of cognition than the typical REM dream. These typical dreams are the bread and butter of our dream life: chaotic stories, funny pairings of people from the past with situations of the present, anxiety dreams, etc. These “little” dreams are largely drawn from our personal past and tend to be loosely put together. We use narrative and story to help structure these experiences so we can talk about them.

Features of Archetypal Dreams

Big Dreams, also known as archetypal dreams, seem to be cut from a different cloth. Most importantly, they feel more real than real life, and a strong “felt meaning” is experienced in the moment. I think some visitation dreams definitely fit this description. But the other categories really set Big Dreams apart from ordinary dreams.

The most common elements are:

• abstract geometric patterns and kaleidoscopic mandalas,
• the experience of flying, floating or falling,
• encounters with mythological creatures and strange, intelligent animals
• feeling awe, fascination, fear and terror, and a sense of “Other”

Unlike ordinary dreams, these dreams are not easily picked at with standard dream interpretation procedures like psychoanalysis because very little personal history is encoded in these larger-than-life experiences. Archetypal dreams also have a consistency unmatched by ordinary dreams; in other words, their structure is cleanly focused, and the delivery to consciousness resembles waking visions of shamans and saints more than other nocturnal dreams.

Carl Jung and Big Dreams

The term “Big Dreams” came from Carl Jung, who seemed to dream in an archetypal way much of the time. But he made the distinction after visiting an East African tribe in Kenya, the Elgoni, in 1925. According to Jung, the Elgoni have a strong dreaming culture (80 years ago anyways – they have been successful at staying out of the eye of Sauron for many years since). They explained to Jung that there are little dreams and big dreams. For the Elgoni, big dreams were seen as collective dreams. The dreamer was dreaming for the community, for the landscape, and perhaps for all of the world.

This shamanic style of dreaming matched well with Jung’s own experience, and it gave him further insight into his theories of the collective unconscious (as a side note, later in life, Jung revised his earlier essays about the collective unconscious and moved away from theories dealing with “racial memory”, instead framing these shared experiences in a way that is more parsimonious with today’s evolutionary psychology: as bodily expressions transformed metaphorically into cognitive symbols that all humans share due to our common biological heritage.)

Archetypal Dreams and Mysticism

Consciousness researcher Harry Hunt has studied archetypal dream for 20 years, and has done more than anyone in helping re-frame these experiences in light of cognitive psychology as well as the world’s mystical traditions.

He notes in the Multiplicity of Dreams:

“The archetypal dreams of long-term meditators and other highly intuitive subjects, with their geometric (mandala) designs and forms of luminosity, convey an ineffable portent that when articulated sounds metaphysical and spiritual. These are more abstract levels of imagistic self-reference, based on structurally complex visual-kinesthetic synesthesias, with visual structures predominating. It is exceedingly difficult to see how such dreams could be based on the Freud/Foulkes model of translation from verbal-propositional thinking (p. 132).”

That’s a mouthful, and quoting Hunt is always dangerous because it makes me responsible for translating!  Hunt is suggesting that archetypal dreams may have a different process than little dreams; his main point being that these expressions and experiences are not linguistically based and may not be formed from personal memory sources either.

The Origin of Big Dreams

So where do big dreams come from” And could archetypal dreams ultimately originate from the same cognitive soup as little dreams” John Antrobus, a retired professor of psychology and sleep research from City College of New York, thinks this is the case. His research into big dreams focuses on the emotional intensity of REM dreams that occur in the last part of the night, or early morning. From a recent New York Times article:

Core body temperature rises gradually from its nadir in the middle of the night during slow-wave sleep, the least active brain state. As morning nears, subcortical brain activity tied to the circadian cycle increases. When these cycles coincide in the last and longest REM phase, the study found, the mind produces its most dramatic dreams. Dreams during this active period are more likely to be highly memorable, vivid, and experiential, what Dr. Antrobus calls “superdreams.”

“The brain is waking up,” Dr. Antrobus said in an interview. “It starts waking up long before you are fully awake.”

Keep in mind that, for Antrobus, big dreams mean “memorable dreams,” and are not necessarily full of the archetypal elements that Jung and Hunt have described. Here, the emotional intensity of Antrobus’s “super-dreams” is the connecting thread. Perhaps the uncanny emotional level is one component that merges with the other, more complex, visual metaphors that comprise the unique characteristics of archetypal dreams.

This intense emotional element is also studied in the sociology of religion, in particular Rudolf Otto’s mysterium tremendum, which he described as the basic of mystical thought.

Archetypal Dreams & Ecopsychology

Returning to the shamanic Big Dreams of the Elgoni, perhaps these intense experiences with “Other” reveal communication with the larger-than-human community through our personal mythic and metaphoric artifacts of dreaming. Those half-human/half-animal dream figures seem to have their own agendas – as such they could be seen as expressions of our connectivity to our present ecological community.

It’s no wonder Westerners describe horrific dream visions as well as benign, given our disconnect from the natural world and our techno-industrial assault on the living fabric of life itself.

Even without assigning “inter-species communication” or “Gaia consciousness” it seems plain that we are resistant to ecological information (and other collective levels of suffering) that comes through our dreams.

That’s definitely one of my strong biases – that ecopsychology (the study of our minds in relation to our environment) has the most inclusive way of looking at our behaviors, our emotions, and our visionary states. From here, we can frame Big Dreams as evidence for a “collective unconscious” that is not rooted in the distant past (or phlyogenic memory) but instead that bubbles up from the present moment, from our present relationship to the Others in our lives.

Ultimately, I wonder: does the world dream through us” And even if this is only a metaphor for our personal and communal journeys through life, how can we learn to listen?

But there’s a lot going on in the consciousness studies community, and I am well poised now to share the latest news, trends, and happenings from my home beneath the redwood trees in Northern California.

For starters, the International Association for the Study of Dreams is hosting its annual conference in Montreal next week. I’ll be there, and I”m hoping to provide timely commentary as I tool around at the hundreds of presentations on everything from clinical research to anthropological narratives. I promised the same during the Anthropology of Consciousness Conference, but this time, I have a laptop that works.

I”m presenting as well, an ecopsychological critique of lucid dreaming and the method I”ve developed that addresses my own split from nature, focusing on receptivity and connectivity within the wilderness of the lucid dream.

I have big plans for the Dream Studies Portal in the next few months: a new look, new features, and more in-depth coverage of the dream studies community. If there’s anything you”d like to see more of (or less of), feel free to drop me a line.

The symposium is titled Ecopsychology, Cross Cultural Big Dreams, and Shamanic Lucid Dreams, also with Mark Schroll, Jorge Conesa-Sevilla, Curt Hoffman, with discussants Stanley Krippner and Judy Gardiner.

My complete abstract below:

Lucid Dreaming: Participating in our Inner Wilderness

In my eco-psychological critique of lucid dreaming, awareness and control are often conflated with one another due, in part, to a deep historical bias in which nature is viewed as a wilderness that is separate from, and at war with, humankind. I will present a phenomenological methodology for lucid dreaming that has helped me bridge this conflict within myself, centered on receptivity and connectivity.

This talk is based on my MA thesis on lucid dreaming, which should be available in May 2008.

“Open Forum in Dream Studies,” hosted by the Dream Institute will focus on “Ecopsychology and Dreaming: Exploring the Depths of Deep Ecology.” The questions to be discussed include: To what extent do dreams reveal the depths of our relationship with the natural world? In what ways are personal dreams affected by collective environmental problems? What is the dreaming response to those problems? Can closer attention to dreams help inspire more people to change their waking world behavior towards nature?

Many of us who believe strongly in environmental causes are frustrated at the lack of psychological depth and spiritual self-reflection among our allies, who seem to be trapped in the same materialist paradigm that lays at the root our unhealthy interactions with nature. This year’s Open Forum gatherings will attempt to develop a deeper understanding of the psychospiritual forces that can help us overcome these challenges and cultivate a better relationship with the natural world.

The first meeting of the year will be Monday, September 10, 7:30-9:30 P.M., and two special guests have tentatively agreed to share their insights with us: Marc Barasch, author of Healing Dreams and long-time advocate for greater environmental awareness; and Ryan Hurd, recent graduate of JFKU’s Dream Studies program with training in archeology and ecopsychology. Please join us for what promises to be a very stimulating session.

Future meeting dates: October 8 and November 5. The Dream Institute is located at 1672 University Avenue, Berkeley; CA, phone ” 510.845.1767.