The Experiment Continues-Two dreams
In his comment Juan suggests that healing would be necessary in his vision of a multi-cultural community. As a therapist and member of a community I resonate with that.
I remember two dreams from last night:
In one there were two men, maybe in their late 30s. Burly guys in flannel shirts. Not of shred of “sensitive new age guy” about them. Guy guys. One began talking. I listened attentively and then said something that conveyed my understanding of the grief he was carrying. He was visibly moved by my understanding and regard. Then I saw a look of recognition and compassion and resonance on the second man’s face. Both faces showed the deep grief they were feeling. I encouraged them to hug each other, really hold and contain one another, to allow themselves to weep and sob together. It was hard for them to do that. They tried but there was a lot of resistance. The need to grieve together deeply, to fully support each other to do that was palpable to me.
In the second dream I am standing at the end of a huge concrete bridge over a giant ravine between two mountains. It had once been a car bridge but now there were no cars on it. I was somewhere on a supporting structure, above the road, and decided to crawl out across it. It was massive and seemed perfectly safe. But as I got a little way out I began to think about a recent bridge collapse, about how infrastructure can look solid but then unexpectedly fail. So I turned around and began to crawl back to solid ground. The way back was somehow more precarious. The wind began to blow. I had to be very clear and focused to get back or I would be blown off the bridge and surely fall to my death. I found that I was not that far away from solid ground but I had to be very aware to get there.
These dreams feel like gifts to me. I want to notice and support the grief in men and in the masculine in all of us. I want to encourage men to fully embrace the grief in themselves and in each other. I want the full expression of grief to be seen as every bit a masculine activity as a feminine one. And I know and accept the understandable resistance to that, that is it hard to move into that full acceptance.
And the way back off of the precarious concrete structures of Empire will require great focus as the winds blow. They seem so stable, these massive structures. But they are not. The good news is that I am not that far away. This is doable. But it will take great focus and the dangers are real.
Are you having dreams that are connected to the times?
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December 14th, 2007 at 1:52 pm
I am having dreams connected to these times nightly. A little background then I’ll share my dream. I have no insurance and make very little money. This fall I sliced open two fingers and had to go to the emergency room to get them stitched. I filled out paper work asking for a discount. I was denied because I didn’t give them all the necessary information and I have no idea what that information is. So here’s my dream. I go talk to a representative at the hospital about my bill. I feel a little nervous and perhaps angry. The man I meet with looks like a hippie dressed rather raggedy and has very messy hair. He’s dark and not very big. I tell him my situation that I was rejected for a discount because I didn’t provide the required information. I need to know what information they want. He seems angry and he talks so low that I have to lean in to hear him and ask him to repeat himself. He seems irritated and mad with me. He asks how much I make a month and I tell him. He asks if I grow my own food. Rather ashamedly, I say no but that I want to. I ask if he does. He says yes and looks at me suspiciously. We talk awhile about the situation, he remains irritable. The he says, Come on. Follow me. He gets into his car and I get in mine. As we pull out he says, Wait a full minute before you follow me. I agree. I watch him pull off and out of sight. I wait then follow. I can’t see him but think he’s turned right so I turn right. I’m traveling down a road with hilly landscape, somewhat suburban. I see traffic, houses, businesses, churches. Then I see two guys on the side of the road dressed like the hospital guy so I slow down but it’s not him. Then I see him sort of hiding in the woods. He motions to the other two guys and says, Let her in. I back up and pull in. They let me through the gate. The place looks like no other place I have seen in this area. It is very simple and basic. He shows me around and tells me a little about it. I am soon fascinated because I see that they were living simply and sustainably as I long to live. They invite me out to the fields where they grow food. As we start out I can see a huge suburban home right beside their property and apparently this was a suburban subdivision. I ask how their neighbors feel about them living there with their alternative lifestyle. He says they just ignore them. We walk to a church full of suburbanite people who look at us with discomfort. We crawl through a passageway that is under or through the church, leaving the churchgoers in the foyer. We come out into vast, beautiful and rich fields where they grow their own food. I can’t believe it. The land seems to go on and on. The hospital guy says, Get her an orange. I begin crawling beneath some trees, happily and comfortably as evening creeps in.
December 14th, 2007 at 2:26 pm
I haven’t had dreams about this time for a long time. I used to have them regularly - all the way through the 70s and 80s, but then those “prophetic” kinds of dreams stopped. I wonder why.
In one of those dreams, there was a large group of people. I was “supervising” those playing in the lake. My mother was supervising those working at the cabin. I looked up and saw a mushroom cloud off to the west. Then I looked to the east and saw another one. I looked over at my mother. She was watching both mushroom clouds. But none of the people playing in the water or those working at the cabin had noticed the mushroom clouds. I ran over to my mother and we started dancing for joy in a circle, crowing to each other, “isn’t it wonderful that we’re all here, we’re all safe!” I woke up from the dream wondering why no one else had noticed the mushroom clouds.
Every time my anxiety begins to overwhelm me, I think about this dream among others. I think to myself, I have been given the assurance that we will all be here. When I think of my daughters and grandchildren living in the city, I ask inner voice, or the voice in the mountain, or Snowflower, my guide - will they be here? And every time I am told, yes, relax, prepare, they will come when it is time. In my more anxiety filled moments, I worry that it is my strong desire and imagination, nothing more, speaking to me. But then I ask again, in sweat lodge, and I’m always told the same thing - relax, be happy, prepare, they will be here when it is time.
Lua
December 15th, 2007 at 2:21 am
Hi Sally,
A few weeks ago I watched Carl Jung’s video series on good video “Wisdom of the Dream.” My middle name, Carl, is named after Carl Jung and Carl Sandburg. To Jung, the dream is special because it is the time where ego meets the shadow at a place called the “self.”
I had a dreamed about a month ago that is similar to your second one. I was climbing this very high ancient tower from some past civilization. Perhaps is was Mayan, because their was a rainforest that seemed to be taking over around the tower. I climbed this ruined tower with three other people. When we reached the peak, I looked down at the wilderness that was far down below. I got scared, thinking that this old tower might collapse at any moment. I asked one of the people that climbed with me, “Wouldn’t it suck if this old tower collapsed?” He was indifferent, as if it was a stupid question.
“Someday it will,” he replied. I was still scared and panicky, and didn’t know how I would get down. He then said something of much wisdom, and I paid attention because I felt the significance of the moment.
“When you climb down, if you have any fear and anciety in your stomach you may fall. But you see there is really nothing to be afraid of at all, because joy, beauty, and love always exists in any circumstance. If you realize that, then you realize that there is no real reason to be afraid.”
December 15th, 2007 at 10:13 am
It moves something in me that these dreams you share all have a comforting message that seems profound and beyond the operation of ego. As True quotes Jung, they seem to come from the Self.
Another dream that relates is one that someone shared at a circle that convened last summer of people who were all up to speed, 13 of us. That dream has been a guiding one for me. What I recall of the dream is that it was of fish who were swimming at the depths of a river while at torrential flood of water from a huge storm rushed at the surface. The message I got from that was to swim at the depths while the storms rage overhead.
Thanks for sharing your dreams.
December 15th, 2007 at 6:19 pm
I just connected in to “the experiment”
I love how you got the ball rolling Sally and how Tim jumped in with his support and how so many good folks have opened up and shared. You asked Sally about the best way to go as far as setting up a forum. I feel like it’s already working.
You have shifted the set up of the blog from one where we respond to your wisdom and Tim’s to one where we all contribute. It already feels to me like a big conversation that I can have with many others who share the same longings I do. It feels like a big book which we can all write in and connect through our words.
Just last night Nic and I found ourselves balancing our dinner knives just for fun, it felt silly and yet it was fun and maybe a good metaphor for how we both feel, as if we are balanced on a razor’s edge.
This morning I lost myself in cutting out images to make a birthday card for our one year old niece. Then I found myself thinking about a mosaic I’ve been collecting pieces for for many years. It felt dangerously subversive to be considering play when Rome is burning then I went onto the blog and read Sally’s thread and chuckled to myself. Oh indeed we are all connected, they may be in the Carolinas, you may be in Kansas or Hawaii or I may be in British Columbia but we are creating a new vision wherever and whenever we take our consciousness out of the realm of Empire and productivity and what our culture expects. What if this is the true work?
On the Full Moon I hold Circles. The theme for the next full moon on December 23rd is the wisdom and guidance of our dreams so I’ve been thinking a lot about mine since I sent out that invitation. The first one I received after the invite was sent out was this one:
I was supporting young men on the banks of a muddy brown torrent of a river. I was encouraging them to jump in and go to the other side. I coached tthem to say “strength & honour” loudly and then jump in. I told them to just jump and trust they would survive the rushing muddy torrent. Secretly I watched to make sure. I watched as the first one clambered out on the bank on the other side.
This dream as I recalled it spoke to me of the Hopi prophecy and it’s call to stop haning onto the shore for safety and instead to jump into the river and celebrate with the others who are in there with you. .
I’m grateful to be swimming with all of you.
Vivienne Ladner, B.C. Canada
December 15th, 2007 at 11:38 pm
When I was a small child I had a long period of recurring dreams in which I was struggling to cover ground through an endless sea of bombed-out urban ruins, feeling terrified and hunted. There was never any resolution, just the same struggle. Perhaps this imagery was put in my head by WWII documentary footage, but it felt very real and personal.
In 1961 Theodora Kroeber published _Ishi in Two Worlds_, about the last pre-contact “wild” Indian in North America who came out of a long hiding in 1911 when the last of his relatives were dead. Ishi’s story had a profound effect on me because my bedroom window at the time looked up into the mouth of Deer Creek Canyon where Ishi’s tribe had lived for thousands of years. The knowledge of how the Yahi tribe had lived sustainably in that beautiful canyon (now a designated wilderness area) was probably my dreamwriter’s source material for the single most powerful dream of my life when I was sixteen.
In this dream I was at the county fairgrounds when a lovely teenage girl approached me and introduced herself to me as Tourmaline. She took my hand and asked me to follow her. We walked for miles, finally heading up into Deer Creek Canyon. There, farther up the canyon than I had ever been, was a hidden village no one in the outside world knew about. It was filled with happy people living off the land the way Ishi’s tribe had for so long. Tourmaline told me that she was allowed out of the canyon just once in her life, to choose a mate, and she had chosen me. Secrecy was essential to keep the larger world from discovering the village. I was delighted to accept this honor and woke up feeling that if only the dream had gone on I would have lived happily ever after with these people, with a wife, children, and community just as my species was intended to live. That dream has stayed with me the rest of my life as a wistful vision of how I really wanted to live as this civilization forced its hollowness and exploitation on me.
December 16th, 2007 at 5:09 pm
Tom, of all the letters so far, yours is the first to make me cry! How I wish you could have remained in your dream! I sincerely hope that you find the actual reality of your dream within your life.
Lua
December 17th, 2007 at 1:30 pm
WOW. I am blown away by the depth of feeling and expression going on here since Sally started this forum/experiment. I got excited when I saw Sally’s first post about it, and there were a few comments, but I got chicken about posting right away, so I waited a few days and now there are all these amazing comments. Feeling less chicken now.
Juan, I so heard you about wanting to live in a multicultural tribe but feeling very fearful about scapegoating and targeting. I fear that too, so much. One thing I have learned from living in cohousing is that everyone brings all their baggage right along and we are still immersed in this larger culture of Empire that seeks to turn us against each other. I think my neighbors want, in their deepest hearts, to change this, but they are so stressed out from working all the time and driving all over the place and essentially still living “the American way” that it is too daunting for them to face it. Or am I just buying into that excuse? I don’t know, I just desperately want to believe that they do have similar values to my own, even when they get sucked into the vortex of “regular” life.
Sally, how I loved your comments about work, and others’ comments about what “real” life consists of. Work sucks. As a child I remember thinking, okay, most people seem to think The Economy is what reality is, but I know it isn’t true, I know it! And I will have to remind myself when I’m an adult and forgetting the truth! I am listening as hard as I can to the child I once was, because she was so very smart. Also sad and lonely, but so insightful and profound.
I find myself worrying a lot about tenuous employment (my own and my husband’s) while simultaneously wishing we could all be unemployed together so we could do fun and important things.
I miss playing. Life has felt like a hell of a lot of work lately. My baby daughter is 8 months old and just barely learning to crawl, and I want to spend the whole day rolling on the floor with her and tickling her, and I can’t much because of all the Work that needs to get done, both paid and unpaid. I wish there was a tribe around me so we could hang out AND play with and nurture the babies AND get the cooking and cleaning done AND give me a chance to focus on paid work so I can earn money (focus is hard because the baby comes with me to work…) You would think that I would have a tribe since I moved into cohousing two years ago, but it’s not so, everyone is entangled in their own frantic lives.
Still, I have visions of things being radically different here, with people gardening their hearts out, playing, eating, building, and just plain being around more, rather than on the hamster wheel that is The Economy. I don’t blame the others for their getting caught on the hamster wheel, I’m stuck there myself a lot. If I felt I could support my family without The Economy, I’d be outta there in a heartbeat. Still so much to learn about food, permaculture, water catchment and purification, herbal medicine…
Sally, you asked if it was better to have an online forum or to encourage people to see each other face to face… I think there is a huge need for both. I know I need both. Does anyone know how to do those Google Maps mash-ups, I think they’re called? where people can indicate where on the map they are? I’ll try to look into that and see if I can figure it out. But I’m sure there are folks for whom the internet is their lifeline in terms of finding folks who are on the same page and they need this badly. At the same time we need real, live social connections.
Ok, I’ll wrap up for now but I just wanted to express my profound desire to connect with each one of you, take your hands in mine, look into your eyes, and say, “I hear you, I will be your witness, you are amazing and resilient, and I care about you tremendously.”
December 17th, 2007 at 5:17 pm
Thanks Jen,
for finding the courage to post
Vivienne
December 19th, 2007 at 4:04 am
dear Sally,
I am following your writing only from one month ago,..I didn’t see your movie(it is not known in my country),…but I am very familyer with the subject of the Global collapse,since I am studing it(on my own)for 15 years now,…I have many ideas to share with you and others,but as it is my first writing I will only write short points,waiting for a response,…
1) you are very romantic in your way of thinking,I am not againest that(I am a music composer myself),but I believe that it is the best that the mind controls our feelings,…romantic ideas maybe the best way to open new ideas but it is not right to let it have the uper hand.
2) most of the ideas going around are about a matirialistic collapse(lack of food,energy,..wars,..)
in my believe all this will not happen,simply because there is a weaker point in Humans that will beark down first,..that is thier minds,…we simply will not reach the point of food shortage or Global wars…etc.,…simply because people will die before that.
3) people who will survive,are not those who prepare them selves matirialisticly,but those who prepare thier minds properly,…so this is my idea about the ARK that any one has to build now.
thank you so much,
sorry for my weak English.
Magdy
December 27th, 2007 at 8:54 pm
Hi Sally. I am not sure what to say about a Vision, because the game has so changed.
From age 17 onward, my Vision was directed toward the question of how could humanity spiritually evolve to the higher, mature level necessary to stop the train from crashing.
Now, it seems we have passed the point of no return and that the best we can do is to try to slow it down and attempt to minimize the damage.
Somewhere inside of us is the feeling/knowledge/intuition that no matter how hopeless things seem, we still have some kind of moral obligation to at least try to live and respond to The Situation with as much spiritual integrity as we can and with a healing attitude toward the earth, other people and all of life.
But on a practical level, the first step seems obvious, and will be painful for many: we need to try, no matter how futile it seems, to begin a global level dialogue about human beings ceasing and desisting from reproducing for say…at least ten years.
Step 2 is the need to begin to redirect the tremendous amount of wealth being pissed away on weapons and war, and direct it toward all the necessary prerequisites to creating a sustainable earth-community.
We need to continue to engage in the total delegitimization of the power elite world view and totally delegitimize this crazy idea that it is somehow *normal* that we should allow ourselves and this planet to be ruled by seriously sick individuals at the highest levels of business and government.
Continuing from where I left off with Tim, I think it is necessary for the *power progressives*, the wealthy progressives, to put their wealth and media power on the line in service to The Great Turning, and turn up the heat on them and criticize them for not doing so.
Some of them have begun to stand up and be vocal about some important issues, but they have got to go much, much much (did I say much?) further.
I f we are going to delegitimize the ruling elite/pathological hierarchy, we need to envision a new value-system for a new kind of leadership.
It is all well and good to talk about “spontaneous self-organization” as David Korten does, but the fact is that people are generally too damaged to do it, and need to learn how to accept the advice and leadership of those more Self-actualized than themselves.
An unfortunate side-effect of excessive feminism/egalitarianism has been to oppose ALL hierarchy (hierarchy is part of nature, sorry) in relationship to the issue of leadership, not distinguishing between healthy and pathological hierarchy, leaving much of the progressive community foundering in egalitarian impotence.
Anyone who has faced the challenges of intentional community knows EXACTLY what I am talking about.
So here are a few ideas. To be continued. Warm regards, Joseph
January 9th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
I’m new and have been dithering about posting, but am glad to find like-minded people here.
It was fascinating to read that others have dreams about travelling through ruined landscapes, as this is a regular theme of my dreaming too. I’m nearly always with a small group and we are usually walking through areas of semi-collapsed city, though sometimes we’re in open countryside on a horse-drawn wagon. There are nearly always obstacles to figure out - broken pathsways, exposed girders or big lumps of concrete. I’ve wondered for a long time if this is a reflection of my state of mind, so it’s interesting to see that others share the same theme.
Up till the late ’80s I had regular nuclear holocaust dreams. One that stays in my mind is of going down a long stairway into an underground shelter. There are lots of us going down. As has often happened in my dreams, a transparent overlay appears; it’s a diagram showing more information and this one shows a cross-section of the shelter. The concrete shell has a deep and undetected crack running from the surface into the shelter area, and I know that radiation will seep in and being in the shelter won’t help us much.
I’d like to add that another dream theme is of dying. I’ve been having these death dreams since I was about 11 and have ‘died’ in many circumstances. It’s happened so many times that death no longer worries me, but I really do wonder sometimes where these dreams come from. Does anyone else have them?