DREAMING PLANET
by
Paco Mitchell
CAN A PLANET DREAM?
We can answer this strange question with the help of modern cosmology plus a bit of imagination. Cosmology places us in the midst of an amazing celestial drama, a stunning display of pinwheel galaxies, exploding stars, light-years and planets. And whether one accentuates or dismisses the role of humans in the cosmic process, there is no denying that we are part of the whole story.
Consider this.
Several billion years ago, an immense cloud of primordial gas mingled with dust from exploding stars. The cloud condensed into a whirling mass, forming our sun and its planets, including the earth. As the earth cooled and solidified, an atmosphere formed, rain fell, oceans gathered and the land eroded.
The planet was probably not dreaming as yet.
Mud gathered in a chemical soup, shapeless but for the pockets and cracks into which it settled. Very slowly, however, the soup organized itself -- or was organized. It took shape over time and began to writhe. With more time it began to breathe, then to dance and sing and dream. At some late point during those uncounted aeons, long after the dancing, singing and dreaming had begun, we humans came onto the scene, like a flash of lightning.
Astronomers have determined that the iron that makes our blood red was compounded in the heart of an exploding star. If you and I breathe, sing and dream today, then, it is only because the elemental bodies of stars were sundered long ago in a cosmic sacrifice of heavenly proportions.
It would thus be no exaggeration to say that we humans are direct, living descendants of that ancient, ardent stellar process. We are, as it turns out, dreaming stardust, perhaps the planet’s first means of awareness of itself and its stellar past. But no matter how limited we might feel as humans, the fact is that our capacity for conscious reflection makes us carriers of a cosmic destiny.
Does this overestimate our importance? I think not. Conversely, does this reduce us to insignificance? Again, I think not.
It does, however, present us with a responsibility, a gift, and a burden.
(1) The responsibility is that of exercising the full consciousness of which each of us is potentially capable -- to carry the evolutionary thrust forward, as it were, within our limits. Several billion years were required for life on earth to reach this point. And here we stand. This is our chance. Shall we squander it?
(2) The gift is that such awareness permits us to witness knowingly the awesome beauty of the cosmic mystery, both in its grand and its intimate manifestations, as well as our participation in it.
(3) Any gift is also a burden, for it is usually with great difficulty that any portion of it can be brought to fruition, not to mention the ever-present possibility of failing the gift.
WHY DREAMS?
Dreaming is a psychic function we share with our animal brethren. It thus constitutes part of our evolutionary inheritance -- what nature has bequeathed to us. And though many of us don’t realize it, dreams will also form a portion of our own bequest to the future -- what we leave behind for the benefit of generations to come, along with books and ideas, bank accounts and pollution.
Dreaming, then, is part of our total organic make-up, so necessary for our well-being that without dreams we get sick. We can no more do without dreams than we can do without metabolizing food. We don’t have to think about our dreams, of course, for they do their work in the dark, while we sleep, just as our digestive system does its work without our conscious awareness, in the darkness of the bowels.
But with all that we share in common with the animals -- bless their hearts -- they seem untroubled by the questions that bedevil us humans: Who are we? What is our place in the scheme of things? Why are we here? Where are we going?
These questions have occupied countless minds for millennia, and the various answers have given rise to great philosophies, religions and art. Surprisingly, dreams likewise occupy themselves with these ageless concerns, among others. It seems that anything of importance to humans will find expression in dreams. And one of the most startling discoveries to one who explores dreams is that they not only carry us back into our past, but they also carry us into our future, heralding trends of development that have not yet reached consciousness.
Perhaps this is one way that dreams participate in and further the mysterious process of evolution. I even wonder whether we would have reached the evolutionary stage of homo sapiens at all, without the benefit of dreams.
This is, of course, a minority view.
DO YOU DREAM?
Many people say “I never dream” and leave it at that. Others go further and say “Dreams are garbage.” Precious few take the time and trouble to give serious consideration to their own dreams, or the dreams of others. The widespread prejudice against dreams suggests that most people experience dreams as an insult to their preferred conscious attitudes. After all, dreaming is a special function of the unconscious psyche, and is therefore largely beyond the reach of conscious intention and will -- always an affront to the ego.
Dreaming also shares with the unconscious the distinction of having existed prior to consciousness, which is a later evolutionary development. But we don’t like to be reminded of our watery, animal past, and of our gradual differentiation from our furred, fanged and flippered brethren. We like to think of ourselves as special, bursting onto the planetary scene as a result of divine fiat.
No, it is better to locate our specialness within the slow march of the ages, to accept our place in line. We still bear traces of that agonizingly patient process in the reptilian core of our brains, or the vestigial gill slits and tails in our embryos. And we recapitulate that same gentle gradient when we move out of infancy into childhood, toward adulthood.
Needless to say, dreams carry traces of our origins. When we go to sleep at night, we slide back down into that prior, more complete, less differentiated state, and recover the larger context to which we belong. The dream is not only the background to our consciousness, it is also the foundation of our psychic being. It is in the dream that we resume the long view, where the evolutionary drive pulls us out of ourselves, toward something new.
THE SNAKE IN YOUR DREAMS
Snakes remind us of our most primitive instincts. We shiver when we see one, the animal hair and skin on our bodies rises autonomously, as if in deep recognition of something alien yet familiar. When they crawl out of the darkness in our dreams, we could say that their tails point us back to our own primordial past. Simultaneously and paradoxically, though, their mesmerizing heads and hypnotic eyes may just be guiding us toward the future, and our most exalted spiritual aspirations.
As one of the oldest recorded symbols, the snake has received many different associations and projections over the millennia. But one of the most enduring associations, taught by ancient myths at least as far back as Gilgamesh, is that snakes symbolize transformative potentials in the future, since they carry the secret of renewal. By shedding their old skin, they manifest the new.
It should be no surprise, then, that Kundalini symbolism places the serpent in a central role, as the transformative energy that winds its way up through the chakras toward the crown of the head, the fontanelle, ancient portal to heaven. Or that in their manuscripts medieval alchemists saw fit to place a gold crown on a serpent’s head.
THE WISDOM IN DREAMS
I know from experience that there is profound wisdom in dreams. Sometimes it even seems as though the specific energy of evolution itself, symbolized at times by the snake, were the driving force behind all the kaleidoscopic images in dreams, combining and recombining endlessly, in a dark, universal urge toward the light.
It is as if the potential for advanced consciousness had been somehow latent in the drifting cosmic cloud, then again in the percolating amino acids and macromolecules of the primordial soup, and was somehow cherished and hoarded through all the accidents and transformations along the slow evolutionary ladder.
Would it be too much to say, then, that the very stars themselves, with eternal patience and all the time that ever was, were somehow longing to give birth to visions of the divine, in man and in the world?
It would be my hope that, if enough of us pool the wisdom we sometimes encounter in our dreams, a new jolt of that evolutionary energy may work its way into consciousness, in time to help humanity shed its skin and manifest whatever is trying to be born.
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