Doom dreaming: Dreams in the Age of Apocalypse

It’s been a week now since the waters have mostly receded from the twin hurricanes of Helene and Milton. A lot of my family live in Florida: they escaped with some water damage and a few hours of power outage. My peoples in the mountains of North Carolina, however, lost entire communities of people. “It’s like a bomb went off in our neighborhood,” one of my friends said to me yesterday.

So much death and destruction, and the fragility of the American infastructure was revealed, again.

There’s a sense of shock we collectively feel, and then the news moves on, to the next disaster. The next atrocity. The next political gaffe.

We saw this in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

In Paradise, California.

In Lahaina, Hawaii.

One town at a time destroyed by extreme climate events, and the attention span moves on while it takes years for folks to pick up the pieces, and rebuild, if they choose to rebuild. If they have the resources to rebuild. Meanwhile, our friends are left with the infuriating task of trying to figure out how to literally find shelter, water and electricity again, while still making their rent payments on time, while still paying this month’s insurance premium.

That’s how the climate apocalypse is going to go: not all at once, heralded by trumpets, but one community at a time.

So what is the point of dreaming in times like these?  Are we just navel gazing and spiritually bypassing reality for comfort and nostalgia while the world burns?

And to this I say, no. That’s not how it works.

In times of hardship, humans turn to dreams and other intuitive ways of knowing. In novel times, we must turn to novel thought, not for  comfort, but to find creative and healing breakthroughs which can be applied to waking life.

This is the power of doom dreaming.

As you might have noticed, we tend to dream of the relationships to people, places and symbols that were forged in the first 25 years of life.  That’s why you still dream about being late to class even though you haven’t been a student in ages.

Dreaming takes these well-worn tracks laid down in the neural pathways of the mind, and then brings in some novel players to see what happens next. Bizarreness, new people, new places, and new ideas enter the scene and are tested against our default worldview.

We have a couple choices for coping with the paradigm clash:

1. Fit the novelty into our mental model and cloak it in old clothes,
2. Ignore the novelty completely as irrelevant, reject it as a threat, or…
3. We can court the bizarre and wake up to a fresh reality.

Enter the dawn of the Anthropocene, the era where human existence has affected the climate, perhaps irrevocably. This is the definition of novelty from an evolutionary perspective.

There’s even a new stone recognized by geologists: plastistone. I am not making this up. Plastistone is exactly what it sounds like: human-made plastics that have been chemically bonded with natural sedimentary stone. Humans have officially entered the geological record.

This is a stony metaphor for what is happening in our very tender lives. Especially since the COVID19 pandemic began, everything is novel, everything is different. From how long and how often we wash our hands, to the social structures that support our lives, our work, the number of our sick  days, even our sperm counts. (Not to belabor the point, but increasing levels of novel disease is also correlated and intermeshed with climate change)

Our remembered dreams are snapshots of our attempt to make sense of this new reality. In the early days of the (ongoing) pandemic, there was a 35% increase in dream recall. A lot of it was nightmares, of course.

But dream researchers Kelly Bulkeley and Deirdre Barrett have noted that artists and creatives and those who were already good dreamers were also dreaming of post-apocalyptic scenes. They are imagining new futures. They are dreaming of new growth and creativity and feelings of hope that we can find our way through this challenging time. Bulkeley suggests that being prepared for creative dreaming is actually a form of resilience at times of crisis.

In one impactful dream collected by Barrett in her excellent book Pandemic Dreams:

“An object appeared—a large spacecraft, dark metallic and octagonal in shape… I could hear my neighbors screaming “OMG Aliens are landing!” But I felt calm, I knew it was coming to us from the future, and was piloted by humans with good intentions. … One told me that they were here to warn us that the we needed to take this virus seriously, and welcome it as a teacher. We were killing the planet and the ecosystem we need to survive as humans’’ (p. 72).

Our apocalyptic dreams are not just illuminating potential threats to survive, but to thrive, to grow, and to imagine new realities. Doom dreaming isn’t submitting to defeat or a morass of helplessness. Rather, it exhibits sentinel intelligence.

I’m grateful for Jessica Wildfire, author of Doomer: How to live at the end of the world, for this description of sentinel intelligence as the ability to “aggregate and sift through extraordinary amounts of information in a very short period of time, especially when it comes to seeing latent or hidden dangers.”

Sentinel intelligence is intuitive and holistic knowledge gathering, and it’s been cited as a sort of spooky and prophetic phenomena in military defense circles. It’s also correlated with anxiety, empathy, altruism, and neurodivergence.

Dreaming, as an intuitive way of knowing, naturally aligns with this ability. Indeed, vivid dreaming reliably emerges in times of social upheaval and unrest, isolation and environmental stress.

When our collective stress begins to boil, big dreamers and visionaries come out of the woodwork. It’s the dreamers who capture the zeitgeist, motivate followers, and organize the resistance. Honestly, the history of apocalypse is also the history of visionary dreams.

Dreaming is a practice, not something that happens to us. Dreaming is active. Your dreams are a powerful altered state of consciousness that can be developed and applied to help us live more in tune with ourselves, and each other.

Dreaming is volitional, and it’s volatile.

So this is the perfect time to pick up the practice of dreaming again.

A good place to start?

Share your apocalyptic dreams with your loved ones, in a ceremony, around a campfire, or around the dinner table. Have curiosity and openness to what emerges. Sometimes sharing a dream can alleviate its “big-ness” – because sometimes our apocalyptic dreams really are reflective of our personal changes in life. But other times they contain information for our community. And sometimes, BOTH, as our inner turmoil is the inroads to understanding collective suffering.

These are the sorts of dreams we often keep to ourselves, because they can be scary and overwhelming. But we can only act once we find out that others have had similar dreams … and perhaps, a new shared vision that is as-yet unrecognized.