Let Nature be your guide.1
Epigram 42, Michael Maier
(physician and alchemist, 1568–1622)
Why write or read a book on dreams at a time when environmental crises threaten life on Earth, a time when children ask, ‘Why go to school to learn facts when the most important facts about the planet are not taught?’2
We might also ask why one of the essential aspects of our existence, our ability to dream, does not appear on school curricula or in our daily conversations. Dreams tell us about ourselves, our relationships with others and the natural world we inhabit. Dreams play a vital role in our physiological and personal development. Like myriad leaves that link a tree to the light-filled atmosphere and which, by means of photosynthesis, breathe life into the world, dreams bridge our inner, subjective experience and the outer world, breathing new life into us. When we ignore our dreams, we disregard the nature of our consciousness, rooted, as it were, in planet Earth.3
Our vision sees for the Earth, our voices speak for it, and our hands extend its reach. In our sleep, Earth dreams. And each night, if we pay attention to our dreams, we awaken to new potentialities both in ourselves and the mysterious ground of life itself. Our appreciation of the dream world hallows our awareness of life.
In modern life, we have little time for reflection, for sleep and even less for dreams. We have become accustomed to living without regard to the natural rhythms of night and day, seasonal change, or the balance between taking and giving, doing and being, mind and heart, body and soul. The day begins out of step with Nature when we waken unnaturally to the sound of the alarm clock – the only species that does so!4
The accelerated warming of the planet reflects our ‘over-heated’ lives. Pollution of the natural world parallels a profound imbalance of the human psyche. The desecration of Nature mirrors the unthinking worldview of humankind towards both the waking and dream worlds. Cultural neglect of the inner world becomes a living nightmare as it finds expression in the decimation of the Earth’s natural landscape.
Consider how the global deforestation of Earth reflects a collective one-sidedness in our species’ approach to life. Before the Industrial Age, forests covered half of the planet. Now, less than half of those forests still exist, and only one fifth remain untouched.5 As the human population increases and the pace of our lives and our technologies speed up, so does the pace at which we deplete the planet’s resources, especially trees, putting ourselves and life on the planet at risk. Each tree absorbs up to 48lb of carbon dioxide per year.6 Without trees, we lose Nature’s most efficient way to counter the increasing levels of carbon dioxide that contribute to global warming. Yet we continue to fell trees at an ever-increasing rate. With an estimated 800 million of us in the ‘developed world’ struggling with poor sleep health,7 might these alarming statistics correlate with a symbolic ‘felling’ of dreams, a destruction of the very environment needed to nurture our dream life – in other words, a good night’s rest?
In such a world, should we be surprised that by 2016 doctors in the United Kingdom were writing more than 64 million prescriptions a year for antidepressants, a 108 per cent increase over the ten previous years?8 Globally, one in seven people have a diagnosed mental health or substance abuse disorder – an estimated 1.5 billion of us in 2019.9 In developed countries, mental health expenditures and losses in productivity represent at least 4 per cent of the Gross National Product,10 some £100bn for the UK economy alone.11
In 1983, scientists first hypothesised that life on the planet keeps the Earth’s atmosphere at a dynamically steady state, primarily by mediating levels of carbon dioxide.12 By 2001, 1,000 scientists boldly declared:
The Earth System behaves as a single, self-regulating system comprised of physical, chemical, biological and human components. The interactions and feedbacks between the component parts are complex and exhibit multi-scale temporal and spatial variability. The understanding of the natural dynamics of the Earth System ... provides a sound basis for evaluating the effects and consequences of human-driven change.13
Dreams provide one of Nature’s most effective ways to recognise our need for balance.14 We have only just begun to appreciate the contributions of sleep and dreams to our personal wellbeing and, on a larger scale, to that of the Earth. In 1954, one year after the first scientific studies that linked rapid eye movement in sleep to dreams,15 and long before brain imaging studies revealed important links between dreaming and healthy human development, Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, proposed that the psyche acts as a ‘self-regulating system that maintains its equilibrium just as the body does’.16
In this book, I ask you to imagine how our lives – how we treat ourselves, others and the Earth – would change if we drew on our dreams to live more gracefully. A prayer of the Native American People’s implores, ‘May I walk in balance.’17 To this we might add, ‘May I dream in balance.’ By attending reflectively and appreciatively to our dreams as we would to a tree newly planted, we learn how to restore balance in our lives as we move towards the collective harmony so badly needed by humanity.
Gratitude towards the gift of dreams engenders gratitude towards life. Research has shown that if a depressed person writes down three things for which they feel thankful, even just once a week, then before long, they will feel markedly better for it.18 Imagine a world where everyone included dreams on their list of what they feel thankful for! Yet so often people discount their dreams or feel frightened of them, thereby losing out on the positive gift therein.
We can illustrate the modern tendency to neglect both dreams and the natural world with an African legend, retold by the mythologist Joseph Campbell, of a boy who returned to his village from the forest with a small bird. The bird sang a beautiful song and the boy listened attentively. One day, the boy left the bird in his father’s care. But the father resented having to feed what he saw as a useless bird and so he killed it. A moment later the father also died. As Campbell tells us, this tale warns that when we kill the song, we kill ourselves.19 I recall a dream in which Bob Dylan appeared to me saying, ‘Songs are dreams sung.’ When we silence our dreams by dismissing them or simply treating them purely as bio-chemical phenomena, we risk ‘killing’ the dreams’ songs of life within us.
On a similar note, the Jungian analyst Anne Baring retells the story of a king who receives gifts on a daily basis from those seeking his favour.20 Day after day, a beggar approaches the king’s throne and leaves a different fruit – an apple, orange or pear – asking for nothing in return. Each day, the king receives the beggar’s humble gift as decorum dictates, but then orders his servant to throw the offending fruit away. After many years, when the beggar has become an old man, a monkey sitting on the shoulder of an envoy from another land jumps down, steals an apple, takes a bite and tosses the fruit on the floor in front of the king. Everyone gasps as a ruby, hidden in the apple’s core, shines. The king’s servant rushes down to the cellar where for years he had thrown the unwanted gifts. There he discovers a pile of jewels: rubies, emeralds and diamonds left in the wake of the decayed fruit.
This story highlights that gratitude, considered to be one of the highest virtues, also requires humility. Hand in hand with humility, gratitude opens the heart to the rich qualities of the inner world, to the grace that develops our capacity to receive gratefully and, in turn, to give. This book asks us to approach our dreams in the same spirit. As the story of the hidden treasure intimates, dreams, so often neglected or feared, can potentially give us insights of great value.
As a dream researcher, therapist and dream guide, I study dreams, write about them and help people discover the gift of their own dreams. But if someone asks me what I do and I tell them that I co-founded a dream research institute, often the other person will look slightly confused, nod their head, and quickly move on to another topic! Yet, from time to time, someone I hardly know takes me aside, lowers their voice and says, ‘You know, I had a dream last night ...’, or else a person will clutch my arm and, in a hushed, anxious voice, tell me about the nightmare that plagues their sleep.
I remember one such man in his twenties who told me in passing about a bear that rose up nightly in his dreams to attack him. He described how the bear, a grizzly, stood towering over him. I remarked that the Native American Indians viewed the bear as a powerful spirit guide and sought such a bear in their visions. Mastering their fear, they would face the bear, speak to it and receive its message. I added that if it felt hard to imagine doing this on his own, then, when he was ready, he could meet his bear with the help of a dream guide. He went quiet for a moment, then said he had not thought of the dream that way and it encouraged him to think he could do so.
When we share a dream, the dream becomes alive for those who hear it.21 If that had been your dream, would you be ready to meet the bear? What might the bear have said to you or given you? If you can imagine the bear without fear, you will find that doing so puts you in touch with the bear’s powerful, instinctual energy – energy you can draw on to recharge your life. The bear’s message will give you what you need to move confidently into what life holds for you.
These days, the bear may well be telling us, ‘Wake up! You, too, are a child of Nature. Your home, like mine, has come under threat.’ I picture the bear echoing the words of the Native American Chief Seattle in a letter he wrote to the United States government in the 1850s:
This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.22
If by chance I met you at a gathering, what dream might you choose to share with me? I recall at a dinner party some years ago, when I spoke about my work with dreams, a fellow guest asserted, ‘The world needs dreams. It’s good you’re doing that’, upon which the conversation around the table thought-fully quietened. His unexpected words encouraged me greatly, just as I would like to encourage you, the reader, to discover your dreams anew and cherish them, both for yourself and for a world in need of dreams.