Personal and Collective Dreaming

In September 2022 I had the following dream, which I named: Bully Big Brother Takes His Sister’s Bed.

I see a large troupe of traveling performers, singers and dancers. They have just arrived at a large indoor stadium or arena, and they are going to camp out there for a while and do a few performances. Everyone is preparing their beds in a designated sleeping area, rolling out mats and sleeping bags underneath a large metal grandstand.

I start talking with a tall attractive young woman, I learn that she is one of the dancers in the troupe. Just then her big brother arrives. The brother is a very big man, about seven feet tall and powerfully built, and he is followed by his two henchmen, two very tough looking guys who are also big, although not as big as him. He announces to his sister that he will be taking her bed for himself tonight. She objects: “That’s not fair! You can’t just do that!” He replies calmly: “Too bad. I’m taking your bed. End of discussion.”

It is clear there is nothing she can do about it. Nobody in the troupe would be able to challenge him or stand up to him. She gives up protesting, she sits on the ground, demoralized and frustrated. There is a feeling that this has happened several times before, this is not the first time.

I am aware that I want to help her but there’s nothing I can do against the brother and his henchmen. I think: is there anything else I could do to help? So I offer her my bed. I am aware that I might have a bit of a hidden agenda– am I hoping that she will lie beside me for the night and we can share the bed? But either way, my offer is sincere, I want to do whatever I can to help her… I imagine lying beside her, and that might be comforting to her….I woke up….

Lying in bed I reviewed the dream in my mind– I knew this dream was important, but I had no sense of what it might refer to, it felt very new and unfamiliar somehow. Next, I did a re-entry; I spent more time in the dreamscape, looked around to see if there was any more information to be gleaned. I imagined a scenario in which I mustered up the courage to confront the big bully brother, I tried calling out for help to some of the other members of the troupe; maybe together we could stand up to the three aggressors. But this scenario had a forced and non-genuine quality, like waving a magic wand in denial of the truth. There was also an uncomfortable feeling that if we did stand up to the bullies, something much worse might happen.

The ‘magic wand’ insight gave me a sense that I might be dealing with a collective, rather than a personal dream. I have noticed over the years that when re-entering dreams which depict personal issues, imagining stronger and more pro-active outcomes typically works well–new vistas and possibilities open up and the overall feeling tone becomes more optimistic and exciting. Not so when re-entering dreams that depict collective (ie: political/social/environmental) issues. Here the imagined actions often have that ‘magic-wand’ quality, they feel forced, wishful thinking rather than genuine exploration of new possible outcomes.

This makes sense when we consider what we are up against. In a primarily personal dream what we are up against almost always has some component of perceived limitations and self-imposed stories and beliefs. These can change, if we only have the courage and flexibility to challenge them and try something new. But dreams which depict collective problems– which are typically massive and deeply entrenched, are of a different order. They do not change just because one dreamer is able to imagine something new. Thus the question ‘what is my dream asking me to do?’ usually makes sense on a personal level, but is harder to fathom on the collective level.

So what next? The dream remains mysterious. I decided to do something that I call a connection set-up. In this technique we extract the key elements, feelings, and the overall pattern of the dream, paraphrase them into one sentence, and then reflect– where does something like that exist, either in me or in my world?

Here is my extraction for the Bully Big Brother dream:

In this dream a big strong sibling arbitrarily and aggressively takes something  (not for the first time) that belongs to his smaller weaker sibling; this leaves her feeling demoralized and frustrated; me and other witnesses feel badly for her, we would like to help her, but we feel there is nothing we can do….

…where does something like that exist, either in me or in my world?

Aha! That’s what it is– Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine. The invasion was in its seventh month when I had this dream, and I, like many others, was feeling sickened by the ongoing injustice of it; the bully was getting away with his horrible bullying and there didn’t seem to be anything anybody could do about it. The overall pattern matched, the feelings matched, the key elements all matched. I felt certain the connection was true and resonant.

But now we come back to the question mentioned earlier– what was this dream asking me for? What could I do about the war in the Ukraine? Not much. Why would my dreaming brain send me such a disturbing story? I was already disturbed by the situation, what good would it be to feel more disturbed? Was it designed to break through my self-protective stance of trying to ignore relentless waves of bad news? Did it want me to open my heart again to the plight of the Ukrainians? Or…was there in fact a hint of a possible solution hidden somewhere within the dream?

I don’t have a ready answer here. I do know that people are having more and more dreams which seem to be rooted in collective rather than personal challenges, perhaps not surprising, given the magnitude and severity of the global problems we currently face. Also, it is possible that a dream can point toward both the personal and the collective? Yes, of course. But– if both perspectives are present, they need to be kept separate, otherwise things can quickly become muddled.

How can we keep them separate? Imagine that you are a painter or a photographer regarding the same subject from two different perspectives; that’s what I do. I do two different takes–let’s look at this through a personal lens…okay, now let’s look at it through a collective lens. When I do this, I find that in almost every case one of the perspectives is more alive than the other, it will be more charged with emotion and more lit up by spontaneous insight. This becomes your primary perspective, so you put more focus on it.

Next time you have a dream which puzzles you, be ready to change your lens and look at it in both ways. Try using the connection set-up technique if a resonant insight remains elusive. And when you do come across a collective element in your dream, I hope you will not abandon the question “what is this dream asking me for?” even if it keeps leading you back to: “There’s nothing I can do.” Keep holding the question even if no answer presents itself at first. Something may come in time.

-Christopher Sowton