Dreaming of disasters
Issue 150 - 9 Aug 2023 (7-min read)
There is a road in Tahiti that goes down a hill towards the shore and, at one of the turns when you look at the vast Pacific Ocean, you cannot tell where the water meets the sky. The perspective is spectacular and overwhelming and, each time I witnessed it, it left me in awe.
I usually don’t remember my dreams when I wake up in the morning but this one has occurred multiple times so it sticks. It happens on this exact road in Tahiti, where I am watching the vast ocean ahead of me and it goes from stillness to chaos. Giant waves rising and gobbling down chunks of the shoreline. Even 400 metres above sea level, I feel the urge to run towards higher ground.
Dream interpreters may dissect it in many ways but I’ve recently learned about the idea of climate dreams and it seems there are many others like me who are dreaming of disasters.
Join us this week in The Global Tiller as we look into climate dreams — what they are and who’s having them? What kinds of emotions does climate change evoke in our societies and how will extreme weathers impact our collective intelligence?
The thing with climate dreams is that they are often quite explicit — you won’t have any doubts that the main protagonist of your dream is climate itself. Martha Crawford, a licensed clinical social worker who started compiling climate dreams on her blog, shares some of hers: a climate change book she is reading that she throws behind the couch, a climate scientist berating her for not paying attention during her talk. Her blog received a dream entry of people digging holes in the desert so rising seas would have somewhere to go. You don’t need an interpreter to get the message — it’s very on the nose.
In a survey of 1,009 people conducted by Time magazine in June, over a third of people in the US have dreamed about climate change at least once in their lives. Most of their dreams are about natural disasters or extreme weather events but a few dreamt of mosquitoes and political leaders and laws.
One interesting finding from the survey is how these dreams differed between different generations. It showed that the prevalence of climate dreams decreases with age: 56% of people between 18 and 34 years old said they had at least one climate dream in their life compared to 14% of people over the age of 55. Most age groups had nightmares or some kind of negative climate dream, but the millennials stood out. In this group, 54% of respondents indicated their dreams had positive emotions, with one-third of them saying their dreams involved science.
Other demographic factors also influence how our subconscious is dealing with climate anxiety. Men appear to be dreaming more about climate change than women — 43% compared to just 29% of women. And people of colour are dreaming about it far more than white people — half of all people of colour who were surveyed said they had dreamed about climate change at least once in their lives, compared to just 28% of those who identified as white.
Despite the insights in the survey, it is important to note that it only covers people living in the US whose experience of climate change may not be shared with people in other parts of the world. I’m sure the dreams of those living in the Pacific Island nations, who are literally sinking amid rising sea levels, and those in countries in the Global South facing extreme weather events on top of existing poverty, would reflect different realities.
Nevertheless, the anxiety around climate change and the range of emotions it evokes, regardless of where on the victimhood spectrum we lie, reveals the magnanimity of the crisis. What sends a lot of people into a spiral of panic and despondency is the scale of climate change that makes us feel powerless and hypocritical at the same time as we continue to consume things we know are damaging the planet.
Unfortunately, we also cannot rely on common ways to handle standard anxiety, like 'keep calm and carry on’. According to 'Emotional Resiliency in the Era of Climate Change’ writer Leslie Davenport, when it comes to climate change, the brain’s desire to resolve anxiety and distress often leads either to denial or fatalism: some people convince themselves that climate change is not a big deal, or that someone else will take care of it; others conclude that all is lost and there’s nothing to be done. Davenport pushes her clients to aim for a middle ground of sustainable distress. She suggests becoming comfortable with uncertainty, and remaining present and active in the midst of fear and grief.
However, these solutions offer help primarily to those environmentally conscious people who grew up in the first world, driven by guilt from lifestyles designed to consume endlessly. For those who grew up in poorer countries, they have the additional stress of knowing that annual COPs consider their countries expendable and their suffering inevitable. These people do not even have the luxury to feel anxious, they are in survival mode all the time.
But let’s not end on this note of despondency, as climate psychology experts recommend, strategies that arouse regret, guilt, or fear are the least likely to inspire change. It is strategies that inspire hope and action, like passing a clean air bill, which are the most effective.
So even if you may disagree with them on everything else, let’s learn this one thing from the millennials: hope.
Until next time, take care and stay safe!
Hira - Editor - The Global Tiller
Dig Deeper
Long-term exposure to heat can have an impact on your cognitive abilities. As global warming occurs, what does it mean for our collective intelligence?
…and now what?
I’m definitely not into dream interpretation. Too Freudian for me. Plus, I usually don’t remember my dreams anyway. So I can’t tell you if I have had climate dreams or not. But I do know that the dreams I usually remember are definitely related to issues happening in real life.
And that’s probably what dreams are for: a way for our brain to process our anxieties, fears but also hopes and plans. So I’m not surprised that climate change has become a “dream topic”.
The first thought that may come to mind hearing about this (probably for the first time like me) may be one of despair: the situation is getting so bad that it’s taking up our nerves to a point that it starts haunting our nights.
But it may actually be a good sign. For so long, climate change has be more of a conceptual topic than anything: temperature “will” rise, islands “will” drown… It was something about the future and the future is something we struggle to empathise with. But as climate change is becoming more of a concrete reality, emotions are getting involved: we feel that climate is changing because we see those catastrophes on TV, we hear about friends or relatives being in heat waves or other crazy climate situations. It hits us more strongly now. And once our emotions are involved that’s when we are ready to change, because we know why we change: to get away from fear, pain and anxiety.
I recently learned that you can feel nostalgia for the future. It seems that today we can feel more than that about a future that is more and more present in our life. So maybe that’s finally what we were all waiting for: the spark, the kick in the bu…cket that will drive our policymakers, our entrepreneurs, our citizens to take up on the challenge.
And when humans take up on a challenge from a gut feeling more than a reasonable argument, we are almost unstoppable.
So don’t despair from the dreams that may already or will soon haunt you about the climate tragedy. There may lie the key to our solace.
As A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, the former Indian president said: “You have to dream before your dreams can come true.” So let’s dream about climate change, but let’s also dream about a future of thriving humanity despite or because of it. And as we’ll dream about climate change, we’ll make our dreams of a positive and possible future come true.
Philippe - Founder & CEO - Pacific Ventury
Wow that's really interesting about the prevalence of "climate dreams" in that it's definitely something that some people are thinking about at a subconscious level at least.