Dreaming Practice as Environmental Practice

Dear Dreamer,

Adrienne Maree Brown posted the picture above in a recent meme round-up post. Call me naive or idealistic, but when I read these numbers, my panic about the future of the world is met by a surging belief that our dreams must be part of the solution.

I took a few introductory environmental philosophy/anthropology courses in college, and I remember one of the readings (sorry, cannot remember enough to cite the source) was talking about anthropomorphism, our tendency to imagine other animals or non-human things having human personalities or attributes. The sentiment was that there was something lacking and self-centered in our imagination, how impossible it is for us to ever really conceive of what life must be like as a fish or a mushroom for example, with a wildly different physical sensory experience of life. And so the limitations of our imagination also meant some kind of limitation in creating a new relationship with the natural world, or saving ourselves from climate disaster.

But sometimes I feel like all we really have are our bodies and our imaginations, and our interconnectedness. And I believe these tools are more powerful than we know. In fact, if there could be any hope for us to even come close to conceiving of what life must be like for a mosquito or a shark, then the intersection of our imagination and our deeply felt bodily sensations is where I would bet the breakthrough could occur. 

And then, I also believe that sometimes our dreams are coming to us to speak on behalf of the more-than-human world. As in, sometimes the ocean might visit you in a dream, begging you to advocate on its behalf to stop deep-sea mining, or at least urging you to reconsider how your consumption as a human is affecting the planet. 
Sometimes the dream doesn’t come from your psyche, but from the soul of the world itself. Sometimes night terrors are less about your past trauma, and moreso the world itself sharing with you how much Palestine is hurting. 

Sometimes our dreams are offering us portals to step through, in which we can combine the sensations of our bodies with the wonder of our imaginations to reach across the web we’re all connected by, and come closer than ever to experiencing another perspective of life.

Imagination is a tool to be honed, a skill to be practiced, a muscle to develop. We can grow our imaginations (rather quickly I would argue) to be less anthropomorphic. 

And though it is true that our imagination will only ever be shaped by our human physical experience, I believe our humble human bodies have a magical capacity to receive information about the physicality of the more-than-human experience too. Because somewhere deep in our bones, we remember that our oldest ancestor could have been a microscopic, bag-like sea creature–or whatever the creation stories tell us about where we came from.  

And our dreams can help us evolve our imaginations to be less anthropocentric. Our dreams can help us re-shape our stories, both individual and collective. 

We need to remember all our ways of listening to the Earth. And Dreams are one place where we can learn and remember to listen to the Earth’s story, the Earth’s soul. 

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