I Had Two Dreams

My subconscious recently treated me to two hopeful signs.

I don’t usually publish my dreams — though I am an active, vivid and lucid dreamer and often remember multiple subplots each morning. I figure there’s no sense in clogging the airwaves with my mental memes, from running races where I can’t find the route, to mind-bending epics where people from my life criss-cross geographies, time and context. Even though those dreams feel strikingly similar to my real life, there is plenty else to discuss.

But every now and then, a dream wafts up that offers me a message of hope. It’s in that spirit that I share these two.

In the first dream, I was walking down the street in Toronto, the city where I was born, when I heard birds — lots of them — making my favorite sound: birdruckus. I turned towards the noise and saw a leafy wall of tall, wide trees hemming the sidewalk in a way that nearly took over the path though it was still easy to walk along.

Peering into this huge mass of green at eye level was like popping my head into another world. What I saw made me smile: the greenery was a-buzz with not just birds but all sorts of bugs too — flying, crawling, shimmering and speckled. It was full of commotion in there!

In my dream state I thought to myself: It’s happened. We let them come back. We were on the brink of wiping out more insects than we could count in 2019, but all the work to restore ecosystems, to recognize and enable the value of insects, came to fruition and now here we are in this incredibly rich, biodiverse world.

In my bones I knew that even major cities had reoriented to become a haven for bugs (and so too, for birds and trees) and therefore (lucky us) for humans too!

I woke up with an elated feeling, like I’d just tunneled into and back out of the future, returning with a reinforced belief that what we have set out to do is absolutely possible.

And then a couple nights later, with my mental slurry stirred up by a deep dive into conversations about living soils with Regeneration Canada, I dreamt that we collectively moved the economy towards valuing real value, which has nothing to do with money.

We were in a huge crowd — like a protest march, except everyone was flooded with joy — and people had their arms up in the air. And then, invisible to our eyes but we could feel it in our fingertips, we began shifting the weight that we were all holding above our heads. It was as if there were a giant layer of understanding above us which we could shift along in whatever way felt right, in tandem. And we all knew which way that was.

In this dream I felt an overwhelming sense that each and every finger, hand, arm, person in the crowd was connected. No one talked about what we were doing, we just kept going, knowing it was what needed to be done and feeling it on a visceral level as if we were experiencing a virtuoso musical performance. We all felt the same energy moving through us. And we knew that we created the energy by believing in it while using our little fingertips to shift this great big shared understanding towards a beautiful place.

Again I awoke with a sense of elation, as if all along I’d been trying to describe something that doesn’t need words, it simply needs action coupled with belief. It felt so simple.

I can still feel both of those dreams on my soul even though a few more nights have passed. To paraphrase John Lennon, you may say I’m a dreamer. But I have a deep-seated feeling I’m not the only one.