Martha Crawford started having climate change dreams about 11 or 12 years ago. Unlike many of her previously remembered dreams, these were not fragmented or nonsensical—they were “very explicit,” she recalls. “They didn’t require a lot of interpretation.” In one, she’s reading a textbook about climate change and then throws it behind the back of her couch, pretending it doesn’t exist. In another, she’s sitting in a lecture given by a climate scientist. But the professor starts yelling at her for not paying attention, and she fails the course. The meaning was pretty clear, says Crawford, a licensed clinical social worker: “You’re not paying attention, and you need to pay attention.”
The dreams eventually inspired her to start the Climate Dreams Project in 2019, and since, she’s been facilitating a space where people can share climate dream anecdotes, mostly anonymously.
One dream submitted to the collection was of people digging holes in the desert so that the rising seas would have somewhere to go. In another contribution, a Flood Football game was underway, and in the second half, players were floating on inner-tubes. Another person, who shared four climate dreams, recounted one in which billions of people were funneling into a giant room that looked like a video-game sports arena, but large enough to hold the world’s population. “At the end of the dream, the entire face of the earth was different,” they wrote. “It was completely icy and the only habitable part was a giant plateau with a city on it.”
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How To Interpret Your Climate Dreams
Studying dreams helps people better understand how the world affects them emotionally. This is particularly true for things outside of an individual’s control, like the impacts of climate change. Part of navigating the climate crisis through dreams, says Crawford, is being “able to come to terms with the aspects of living, the world, and our habitable environment that we do not have control over.”
There are a few questions Weston says she’d ask to help someone interpret their climate dreams: What is your relationship to the land, and the p
lace that’s being affected in the dream? What feelings of home does it stir up? Or what about feelings of loss or connection? Who else is in the dream, and what is your relationship to them? What type of relationship is it, one of power, stability, or perhaps insecurity? “I would ask about those things and then talk to them about how that manifests in their world, in their lives,” she explains. Maybe it’s part of your subconscious self “saying this is what we need to develop in your waking life, more connection, more access to nature … connection to other people who are engaging in these issues.”
There could be lessons beyond the individual too. Maybe dreams can teach us something about how to deal with climate change, says Tore Nielsen, director of the Dreams and Nightmares Laboratory and psychiatry professor at the University of Montreal.
Source et article complet Climate Change Is Changing How We Dream (yahoo.com)