The Raw Food for Thought Series transcribes spontaneous confessions and bold conversations on how people relate to our changing world and contribute to creating it everyday. Words from anyone are in the raw, to open new lines of thinking and celebrate all that is.
I am lucky I wake up from nightmares every day.
Do you?
Those dreams feel so real that I have long wondered whether they are nightmares or travels through different bodies, times and spaces. Sometimes, I am running down narrow alley ways of an unknown slum in the Asian night. Breathless, I hold a stick to ward off the hungry stray dogs rampaging our landfill/open sewer while the thin crescent of the moon shines like an ironic smile above my head. Sometimes, I am at a lavish party, set in a modern architectural jewel of the West Coast. Rivers of strass, trays of crystal glasses, French perfumes and elongated white smiles are so saturated that I feel nauseous. Sometimes, I live alone in a minuscule apartment of a run down, soviet-like building. The winter sky is dark grey, my worn-out slippers have two holes over the big toes, and those old hands are cold and painful. And sometimes, we are at war.
There is also a world I keep returning to. I step into the dream and immediately know I am back. When this world opened up to me fifteen years ago, it was like no place I had ever seen. It felt like a very grim and damaged version of Earth. As I had just started working on climate change, I thought it could be our future. I remember the shock at the sight of familiar landscapes. All the sand had left beaches, which had turned into dark fields of razor-sharp rocks. In some places, the sea was further away, waves moving towards the shore in diagonal. Paris and New York had become heterogenous mixes of high-tech gated communities, violent ghettos, and more neutral places that were hardly urban. The countryside had gone communal, with unexpected settlements made of wooden-rock shacks on the bare beaches. But the saddest thing was the people: expressionless, distant, full of mistrust, and determined to take no risk. A single mother of that world plainly told me one day that she ‘could not afford’ love, for anything breaking within could send her whole world spiraling down.
I open my eyes in the morning with all the sensations from the night worlds still travelling my body. My breath can be hard to catch. The kids jump on the bed without realizing half of me is still stuck in a war zone. The horrors keep flashing before my eyes. But I can smile. I know the panic will pass eventually now that I am awake.
I know now that my voice creates the world I live in.
When I say “my voice”, it is not merely the stories I tell around. Actions speak much louder, maybe because they stem from the voice or the voices within – the silent dialogue I have with myself, which will transpire as emotions through the day. I sometimes feel that we are all floating in an ocean of emotions that each one of us exhales through our bodies. We navigate a collective vibe that we co-create, and that defines how the world around us feels at all times. And because our actions seem to flow from the same place as those emotions, I sometimes wonder if aggregating all our inner voices could determine what the future would look and feel like.
We are all powerful creators.
Every day, I can talk myself into staying in suffocating emotions, fuel helplessness whenever I have a chance, and act from fear so that my life and the nightmares become one. I did it for years while supporting development projects in India and working on climate change adaptation. I thought the nights enabled me to feel in my flesh what “vulnerable people” went through or were heading towards. I believed the nightmares would make me better at my job and as a human being. Or maybe, I just got addicted to the intensity of emotional pain overflowing my nervous system. During the day, when I was not toiling franticly to limit climate change impacts, dreaming up plans to engineer a global climate-resilient paradise, I would mind-travel back to places of misery and death. Both the media and official climate change reports were great support material. Fear felt like home, and I would always find men and women who also fell into that pain and grew the unconscious desire to experience more of it. We all need a home, and I can only look at the fear-home with tenderness.
Or, every day, I can wake up from the nightmare for real, by paying attention to the voice in my head. I am grateful that option appeared to me at some point. I ask myself: am I still one of the main protagonists in the story that my mind is telling? What am I or are we the victims of? What dream, vision or master plan is my mind producing in response so that we become heroes again? How excited am I to be part of this grand epic? Waking up means walking out of the nightmare without fleeing into a dream, whether those are night or day visions. Waking up means looking at nightmares, dreams, or visions for what they are: (wo)man-made stories – one-angle shots at a reality, taken at a certain time, under a certain light and with the device we have. A story is neither my life, nor the life of others, and never will be. Life is beyond words. However, our inner stories are quite telling of what each one of us is struggling with in this human body. In my case, the difficulty to accept what feels like unfair suffering, that we are born unequal, that we know nothing, and that we have both so little and so much control over our earthly experience.
Waking up to my inner voice was humbling as I started listening to all the illusions, beliefs and assumptions that made my world alternatively such a forlorn and such a grandiose place. I first craved a new narrative to stabilize me on the bright side, although I knew full well I would be anchoring myself in yet another story. I must have been afraid I would stop being if I put an end to all the judging and chatting going on inside my head. But silence brought life, energy and clarity. I have since tried to develop a more direct and intuitive relationship to the world, so as not to rely on one set of ideas and concepts that reduce, freeze and transfigure. It feels dense and thrilling at the same time, as it allows me to explore all bodies of knowledge and experience without the tacit boundaries imposed by the mind. It also empowers me to collaborate with others on the topic of climate change from a peaceful place, on which I will let my actions be my words.
Waking up from nightmares (or dreams) has largely become about cutting short the old drive to feel all suffering (or ecstasy), to judge, and to try and control what I cannot. The drive is still strong and recurring, so much so that keeping on waking up is a job in itself. I am not always successful. But the spontaneous joy when I am fully awake is worth all the efforts. And a funny thing happened recently. The last time I night-travelled to the dystopian future world, villagers had taken down all the high makeshift fences around the shacks of their hamlet and freed their farm animals to roam around. We felt happy for the very first time.
As many of us are thinking about the world we would like to live in after the pandemic, I hope this experience can inspire some reflections on our way forward. Maybe we could all be more open about the voices in our heads. Maybe as we realize how much our inner stories are limited interpretations of a reality, we will feel blissful and start questioning the writing of a new narrative to guide our actions. Maybe we will recognize that any dream vision founding a new narrative today also has a high nightmare potential for future generations — assuming our children still see the world in those binary terms.
Last, some questions remain: how can we address the paradox that telling stories seems to be the only approach to building a large-scale movement, while relying on stories could explain why we feel so detached from nature, from one another and from ourselves? Could we look into an alternative that acknowledges that the reality never was a nightmare to be turned into a dream, nor a dream to maintain at all costs? Could we expand personal efforts of grounding into a process of being, feeling, understanding and knowing to drive collective action? Could this intuitive approach help us bridge the divides that we thought existed, while freeing us from explaining all the past and projecting a common future? Could this approach give back their voices to the “voiceless” by experiencing that all of us always had a voice?
What do you feel?