Dreaming in a time of nightmares
On dreamwork as an embodied, relational, creative response to the times
“What we cannot imagine cannot come into being.”
-bell hooks
What does it mean to practice dreamwork in a time of nightmares? This is the question I am sitting with today.
My dreams last night were normal - teaching anxiety dreams, imaginary classroom problems playing out. Then I woke up to the news of more war, like you probably did. To the nightmare of that reality.
A living nightmare, especially for those being bombed or whose families are in danger. But a certain kind of nightmare, too, for those of us in whose names those bombs are being dropped, under the false rhetoric of “safety” and “peace.” For those of us who dream of a true peace.
What can our dreams teach us in this time of nightmares? How might they guide us? What wisdom can they offer?
The nightmare we are living in can be called modernity, late-stage capitalism, the metacrisis, and we have to wake up from this nightmare. The nightmare of modernity is a spiritual, material, and relational crisis. It is a crisis of valuing life over destruction, life over profits, the lives of billions and the planet over a few destructive old rich men. It is a crisis of where we invest our time, energy, resources. It is a crisis of systems rooted in separation and domination in a beyond-interconnected world.
I was thinking this morning about those men, those few, delusional, harmful men who are ruining the planet for everyone. How they could have gone and rested, which should be the gift of old age, but instead are using the last years of their life force energy to destroy things that will need repairing for generations to come.
We need to collectively wake up to the fact that bombs can never bring peace. To the fact that there is money for everyone to have what they need for not just surviving, but thriving - if we just choose to allocate resources differently. Towards life, and away from destruction. Toward care, away from malice. Toward love, away from hatred.
We need to employ every tool we have that helps us serve life, protect life, reconnect with our own aliveness so that we remember we are a part of this planet and a part of each other and that we need to protect and care, not destroy. We need, in the words of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective, “embodied, relational, creative responses.”
Dreamwork is one such practice, one such response. No, I am not suggesting we (only) dream our way out of war. Nor am I suggesting that dreamwork is the antidote to all of this (there is no singular antidote - we need many. Another beautiful line from a GTDF poem: “remember that our medicines are both indispensible and insufficient”).
Dreamwork is a practice of connecting the seen and unseen realms. Dreams often tell us things from the depths, sometimes things we don’t necessarily want to hear. Dreamwork is a practice of healing and reconnecting - healing ourselves, our relationships, connecting us with the land, our ancestors. Dreamwork, when practiced with others, is a powerful community weaver, and is a container for building relationships based in trust, care, and vulnerability - the kind of relationships we need for another world to be possible. Dreamwork, as Minna and I have written elsewhere, is a practice of intercultural peacelearning, and dare I say, a practice of peacebuilding and peaceweaving.
Other worlds are possible.
Among the things that connect us as humans, dreaming is one of them. One of the threads running through our common humanity is the thread of dreams (and this also reaches beyond humanity, connecting us with the more-than-human world, too).
We need every practice we can to stay rooted, grounded, connected - to heal. We need our dreams - waking and sleeping ones - to tether ourselves to amidst the swaying of this madness and destruction. We do need to dream our way towards other worlds.
Can we dream our way out of this nightmare?
Can we dream our way beyond war, destruction, genocide, and ecological destruction?
Dreaming alone will not be the answer. But we need our dreams. We need to dream our way through and beyond, and act from those dreams for better worlds.
With love, care, and deep wishes for peace and safety for all,
Stephanie
Stephanie Knox Steiner, PhD is an enchantress, mother-scholar, dreamworker, community weaver, professor, and peace educator who currently lives and teaches at the University for Peace in Costa Rica. She has been writing down her dreams since she was a teenager, and studied community dreamwork as part of her doctoral studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute. She writes prolifically about peace, enchantment, interbeing, and re-imagining education at her other Substack, Enchantable.