The work of environmental/climate humanists is premised on the assumption that the way we make sense of the world matters. This means that the dreams we have — Covid pandemic dreams, climate change dreams — also matter. The best artists, in turn, help shape our collective dreaming. The environmental arts and humanities aim to help dream a new world into existence.
Brooke Jarvis’s “The Global Dream Lab” (“Did the Pandemic Change How We Dream?“), which appeared in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine, captures a bit of the reason why I do what I do, and why I often find the wilder, more speculative variations of ecocinema (like the films I focus on in Ecologies of the Moving Image) more promising than empirical, fact-based eco-documentaries.
Jarvis’s key interlocutor, psychologist and dream researcher Dierdre Barrett, is cited as describing dreams as “another way of thinking,” when “the unheard parts of ourselves are allowed to speak.” The dreaming brain, Jarvis writes, is “tuned differently” than the waking brain; its “most bizarre and nonsensical elements” keep dreams from being “‘overfitted,’ or unable to make sense of new information.” Dreamlife, in this sense, represents the opening up our creative capacities for integrating the challenges of an unmoored world. (That in turn connects with my interest in A. N. Whitehead, the metaphysician of creativity.)
For making sense of the new world represented by Anthropocenic climate change, we may need to “seed” our dreams with new imaginative possibilities, like the ones I refer to in my recent talk on navigating climate trauma.
Read Jarvis’s article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/03/magazine/pandemic-dreams.html.
Hi, Adrian. Thanks for the post.
I’m almost finished a book “The fear free mind” which is a (proven) psychodynamic technique to permanently remove fear from people. It contains (amongst other things) a complete description of (in your words) “the way we make sense of the world”, some of which is at the start.
I realise you are probably extremely busy, but I would love to get some feedback from you if you are feeling charitable (or curious: I’m told it’s reasonably entertaining and informative).
I have put the opening section here: https://deafInOneEye.com/
Please pop over and take a look if you have the time and the inclination.
Just to be clear: I am not asking you for an endorsement or whatever: just some feedback :-).
Thanks in advance.
Cheers,
e.
Thanks, Eoin, for linking to your piece. I read it and enjoyed the ramble… It’s very reader-friendly. Will there be more?
There were questions that came up for me as I read, some very minor (e.g., By “astrological”, do you mean “astronomical”?), others semantic or conceptual (Why “literally infinitely complex”?). I wasn’t sure that it followed that “everything you perceive is a concept that only exists inside your mind.” That would taking defining “mind,” “you,” “inside,” et al.
But I saw the exercise as one that guides readers through a certain territory – the territory of reflecting on the nature of experience (not necessarily the nature of concepts, though they are part of experience). They set off resonances with other writings and philosophical concepts (e.g., Buddhist mind-only metaphysics, Bergson, ontologically oriented anthropology, et al).
I hope you do keep writing it and get it published.
All the best,
Adrian
Hi Adrian,
I stumbled upon this wonderful post as i was doing a Google search using ‘dream’ and ‘anthropocene’ as key terms in prep for a grant proposal here in Norway. I was really struck by the idea that “The environmental arts and humanities aim to help dream a new world into existence”. It seems to me that this is such an important idea, and whereas many – especially many indigenous communities – continue to cultivate dream consultation, and have nurtured a kind of ‘social life’ of dreaming, where dream knowledge about the world is allowed to unfold into the waking present (a kind of reverse phenomenology because the subject is rarely the driver of the dream narrative, and often sits in the back seat), it seems to me that (and to extend the metaphor) much thinking in the environmental humanities is akin to a student driver, overcompensating for the inherent anthropomorphism of ‘thinking outside of the subject’, and jumping to post-humanism, abandoning the human subject, and thus kicking away any notion or semblace of ‘being’ upon which we might then think (or dream) a new world (or worlds) into existence.
I don’t know, a bit of a ramble there I think. Anyway, as an anthropologist of dreams myself, I am keen to explore some of these ideas, and I appreciate your thoughts, and the wonderful links, especially to Jarvis’s works.
Hi again, Adrian.
Would you believe this is the first time I saw your response – two years and two months later :-)?
It has been an insane couple of years – at the risk of TMI: I split up with my girlfriend (of 30 years) and moved from Amsterdam back to San Diego. If I continued you’d see it’s actually a reasonable excuse :-).
FIrstly: thank you for your feedback.
“(e.g., By “astrological”, do you mean “astronomical”?)”
This was originally a typo – I meant astronomical, but on rereading I liked the way it both suggested disparity and gave the head a little jog switching from the physical to the conceptual.
“(Why “literally infinitely complex”?). I wasn’t sure that it followed that “everything you perceive is a concept that only exists inside your mind.” That would taking defining “mind,” “you,” “inside,” et al.”
Without being condescending, this is your knowledge trap balking :-), please read it once more, slowly.
There’s no need to define “you”, “mind”, etc. because you already have concepts for those things, just like everyone else – which one is writer or ronger than another is a matter of conditioning, nothing more :-).
The book is not about definitions, it is about direct experience and it really does remove fear from the human mind if you let it – as crazy as that sounds. And I have taken great pains to avoid preaching – I hope it worked :-).
Please do give it a second read (it is very dense writing) and if you like, you can grab the ebook for 99c – Amazon won’t let me offer it for free :-(. You should revisit the site anyway: I rebuilt it recently, so it’s more attractive and has more things on it.