Dreams Matter
What would happen if we gave them weight?
One way in which our civilisation is historically highly unusual is that it does not take dreams seriously. I don’t just mean by this that nowadays we don’t usually give enough weight to vision, as in MLK’s famous ‘I have a dream’ speech, which was given over 60 years ago now. I mean literal dreams: what we undergo every night.
Since undergoing a serious psychological crisis many years ago, and studying with a teacher how to elicit what any given dream that feels meaningful to me can actually mean to me, I take seriously the astounding creative process that my brain enacts every single night. Don’t get me wrong: I am not asserting that dreams can literally predict the future. Though I have experienced many dreams that seem accurately to resonate with - and sometimes to move ahead of - the ‘field’ of what is culturally present and emergent: for instance, in the many - sometimes overwhelming - dreams I have had of climate breakdown, during the last decade.
I’ve just written a piece for Psyche on a recent dream I had that forced me to question the issue of sovereignty and ‘sovereigntism’. This dream opened my eyes to accept that which I now believe to be true; we have no chance of transforming our civilisation into one that could last unless we replace the sovereignty model with a new way of thinking/feeling/acting that’s genuinely relational. Indeed, I have explored this issue further on my Medium and in my last Substack post, but it was a dream that brought this underexplored issue to the forefront for me.
I do believe that dreams can sometimes bring out a wisdom that I often struggle for in daily life.
I am convinced that our civilisation would fail less, if we sometimes listened to our dreams.
For more on the dream that helped me view the politics of sovereignty in a new light, read my Psyche piece here.
Dreams are common to the animal kingdom revealing that animal sentience and the animal spirit stem from a time of common ancestry.
We walked Earth as dinosaurs for 175 million years before humans existed. no-one is a prophet but perhaps we reincarnate anyway. Vegan to break the cage beyond the grave
Cosmic Affairs. 💚 🖤
Dear Mr Read, I very much appreciated your piece on sovereignty in Psyche. In regard to this sentence: “There need be nothing wrong with sovereignty; what goes wrong is over-attachment to it.”, you may, possibly, be interested in this quote: “The error of misplaced absoluteness, the seizing of the determinate as itself ultimate is the root-error, the root form of all errors. It is rooted in the false sense of self, the imagination of unconditionedness in regard to a specific embodiment, the ego, the body-mind complex as itself ultimate.” Nagarjuna’s Philosophy, K. Venkata Ramanan, Motilal Banarsidass: Delhi, 1987, p. 247. GR