I am interested in paying close attention to dreams and their response to our collective challenges.

What guidance does our psyche offer?

What might we learn?

What do we already know?

How might we respond if we listened together to our own dreams and each other’s?

How does the individual and collective unconscious respond to the strain of this moment in history?

In a culture that is too confident in its reasoning capacities I believe that it is necessary to make space for our non-rational, intuitive aspects and responses. Jung calls dreams “the voice of nature within us” and if we don’t value the one area of naturally unfolding phenomena in our psyches how will we ever learn to value the wilderness? Dream work requires encountering the structures of whiteness, colonization, supremacy, domination, and control as they move through the body/psyche.

Sitting with the symbols that our dreams produce at night requires forging some comfort with uncertainty, with not knowing anything definitively. It is a process that requires humility as we encounter natural instincts and archetypes that are more ancient and more powerful than our waking egos.

It requires confronting all the oppressions that lurk in the back of our brains, and in the psychological and scientific systems of Euro-American studies and systems committed to reductive “knowings” about the function of dreams, or to their outright dismissal as “nonsense.” Dream study requires that we look skeptically at a culture that views non-linear spontaneous symbolically told stories as “boring” or merely the detritus of the day. It demands that we respect indigenous communities around the world who have always seen dreams as part of the way that human beings are inherently and inescapably entangled with each other and with the environments and natural world that we are beholden to.  

To value our dreams appropriately, not too much, not too little, not too concretely, not too grandiosely – is to be reminded of all we know that we didn’t know that we knew, and to discover that all we think we know may be unknowable. It is to contact the parts of our own psyche that are not conforming, controlled, certain, or re-ifiable.

It is to find ourselves connected to each other and the earth and other species and yet differentiated from each other – as my dreams beget your dreams and we all dream together about the challenges we face as a global community.

You can read more about the Climate Dreams project in this article at Time Magazine.

You can follow along at the Bluesky dream collection account climatedreaming.bsky.social