Hello dear dreamers of Earth,
The night before my dog Gaia passed away, just a few days before the winter solstice, she came to me in a dream. I cannot think of a greater gift than this. In the dream, Gaia showed me a map, pointing to a thick red line that separates the wild world from the domesticated one. It was a clear message that she was returning to the wild side of the map, after her fifteen year, profoundly loving visitation to our human world. I will spend the rest of my life hunting this line.
In the line Gaia showed me, I remembered that our dreams are doors to the wild cosmos within us, a bridge to our untamable psychic mythology. When we fall asleep, we cross that line out of familiar territory and gain access to the wild unknown. You see, like Gaia, who was an incredibly sweet dog as well as a wild soul who did whatever she pleased, dreams are guides to the places within us that refuse to be domesticated. Dreams themselves are wild creatures, feral, beyond our control, entirely free. They open the bars to the cage we have been taught to keep our instinct trapped inside. If you have been ignoring your own instincts for too long, be prepared for them to roar forth, often with claws and fangs, in your sleep.
Seeing that line between worlds reminded me how important it is for us to pay close attention to our night dreams. While humans try to keep things tidy, planned and under control, dreams remain unruly, seeping with nuance and paradox. In dreams we are all feral shapeshifters, wielding daggers of truth, embodying multitudes that link us to our magical lineages. Dreams tell the stories of a strangely familiar world where everything bleeds into the next thing, opening the floodgates to an existence that is wholly animate and sacred.
As part of my own dedication to loving the Earth, I have made a vow to listen to my dreams, and to take radical action based on what they say. As you might imagine, this has led to strange and often inconvenient happenings in my life. Not long ago, I had a dream that contained one very clear, highly mysterious image. I did exactly what the dream seemed to be telling me, which required a drastic life decision that felt like a huge loss, throwing me terrifyingly off-track both personally and professionally. It felt like jumping into a dark abyss. But still, I listened to the dream image, and I followed its instructions despite that the whole thing very well could have been utter nonsense.
if the path before you is clear,
you are probably on someone else’s.
(Joseph Campbell)
The thing is, I have fallen in love with nonsense, with the enigmas arising from Earth. I crave the thrilling freedom of changing my mind entirely. Of realizing I was wrong all along! More and more I find that listening to the apparently absurd seems to point me in the direction of magic. For those of us longing for a more poetic, earth-entwined life, to listen to our dreams is the very foundation for enacting our personal love story. Even a nightmare is woven from the tension between opposites, the very same force that all romance is kindled from.
Honestly, I believe the resurrection of our world depends on our willingness to engage with the wild and nonsensical images arising from our dreams. To pay attention to the realm on the other side of the line we have drawn. Humanity is in desperate need of more feral weirdness and freedom of heart, and the Earth tries, nightly, to give us what we’re missing. And what harm would it do, anyway, for us to all show a little more interest in the mysterious symbols and storylines living through us? Other than perhaps subverting the world as we know it…
west of the moon, east of the sun
We humans are mystical creatures to begin with, pulsing with dreams, creative inquiry, imagination and mythos. Dreams and myth are of the same language. As Joseph Campbell describes it, “the myth is the public domain, and the dream is the private myth.” Our night dreams are fragments of the world’s archetypal storylines, and to ignore them is to miss out on personalized clues for navigating our own magical life story.
But we do ignore our dreams, discounting them as random nonsense. As a species we are not the biggest fans of the metaphorical and the esoteric, preferring things to have a measurable value— a survival instinct gone a bit haywire, I think. Our black-and-white thinking eradicates our intuitive interconnectedness, and it is why humans are causing such great harm to our planet.
Because of our fixation on defining things, the world soul has to find subtle ways to bypass the human intellect in order to speak to us— these soul messages are delivered in the ancient languages of image and lore. They contain timeless truths, paradox, magic and doorways into our own wildly creative cosmic nature. Yes, these messages come through in our dreams, in myth, and in every fairytale and piece of folklore you’ve ever heard or read. The information that arrives through dreams and myth is not new or radical: they are wellsprings of ancient prophetic instruction, which P.L. Travers speaks of in her essay on myth, “The World of the Hero”:
And as to the meaning of myths, the more one studies them the more one sees that this heritage from archaic man— the rituals and concepts that guided his conscious life— miraculously survives and is ever-present in the subterranean layers of ourselves. It can be tapped as one taps the waters under the earth; it can be questioned as once our forefathers questioned the oracles, seeking an answer to what, in essence, is perhaps not so different from our own question.
We go to the myths not so much for what they mean as for our own meaning. Who am I? Why am I here? How can I live in accordance with reality?
Beneath the hardened exterior of our self-proclaimed identities and personas, there is a rich and fertile underworld jungle brewing inside us. This is the same realm that our dreams inhabit, like liquid moonlight living just beneath the lining of our our skin. It is in the body, a fluid and sensuous place, where we are attuned to our own love affair with the invisible moving web of life.
Within these soft depths is a universal longing for more aliveness, to know ourselves more intimately, to fall deliriously in love with the other species sharing our planet, to awaken to our fluency in Eros. We are made of such mystery, feeling, and wisdom that if we were able to catch even a glimpse of our own beauty, we would all fall instantaneously, wildly in love with who we really are.
if you want to change the world,
you have to change the metaphor.
(Joseph Campbell)