. . . driving through snow, as I had done for a total of 200 miles today, in a kind of lite trance as I had been from the monotony, something was happening around me that I hadn’t been paying direct attention to and as soon as I noticed it, I looked in front of me and there was a tornado wall, it was forming around me, and in front of me was the western wall of it and I saw (for just a second) a patch of clear brilliant blue sky (what is always right behind such a wall, almost unimaginably but it’s right there) and then it was closed over by that wall - I watched the wall go up and right and then it was too big to see the shape of as it went deosil and then behind me, and I was at the eye of that storm as at the edges it started to rip into the air all that it was touching. I closed my eyes in the dream and took my foot off the gas and felt myself come to a stop just as I also felt the car moving as maybe through the air but I didn’t look I just prayed, please please I want to be with my children please if I have to die send me directly to them and I started to list the people I love but knew there might not be time to make the list so I prayed myself into the list and myself/list written onto the wall of the storm directly with everything I could bring to the prayer against the wall of panic in my gut rising to meet the storm. I opened my eyes in the dream and I hadn’t moved - all around me cars and trees whatnot were every which way (though nobody seemed hurt, no injuries/wailing etc) in a perfect circle surprisingly small bc I could also see beyond that circle where the strip malls were untouched, as if the tornado at its eye had been almost exactly the size I could look at, say while driving . . . . Looking up at the sky to see if it was blue was the same thing as waking up, which I did with my heart pounding in my throat so hard that it was behind my face.
I don’t dream all that much. I mean, I remember the salamanders cz it’s not every day I have a dream. And never like that. Ummm (still shakey, holy fuck man), welp:
The individual and collective problems and dilemmas we face at the end of the 20th century are all, in a very real way, the consequence of incomplete (still evolving) conscious awareness. I am increasingly convinced that it is the huge disparity between our immensely sophisticated knowledge about how to manipulate the physical world, (skills which we inevitably try to use to satisfy the incoherent jumble of our less-than-conscious desires), in contrast with our almost total lack of reliable self-knowledge about the deeper structures of our interior lives, which is the main cause of the terrible situation(s) we find ourselves in at this perilous historical moment.
In the dream world, "wind & water" have been archetypal symbols of spirit ("which bloweth where it listeth") and emotion, (which "runs deep", even when it's still) for thousands (if not millions) of years. In the waking world, peoples from all over the planet share stories where the "voice of the God(s)" "speaks from out of the whirlwind". Non-technological peoples, (including the vast majority our own ancestors, back to the Old Stone Age an beyond), have viewed the "tornado" as "the finger of God", which points with precision and unparalleled power to the psycho-spiritual mysteries of guilt and hidden meaning. Like the imagined "Hand of God", the tornado demonstrates breath taking power, and leaves one life relatively untouched, while the life standing directly next to it is totally torn and shattered forever.
Each time we dream of "tornadoes", these ancient, collective layers of symbolic association reveal themselves anew. Each "dream tornado" is, at some level, a harbinger of change, in the psyche as well as the waking world. Although only the dreamer can say for sure what his or her dream images mean, dream "tornadoes" are compelling metaphors of the individual and collective social change that we "feel", (that we know in our secret heart of hearts), is necessary , and is coming. We intuit, as dreamers, that ultimately the "power of this impending storm" is not just a consequence of incomplete human consciousness and planning failure alone. The forces of change are also "forces of nature" - "divine forces", like nature herself. The dream "tornado", over and over again, turns out to be symbol of the dreamer's own personal relationship to the deepest unasked and unanswered psycho-spiritual questions is his/her life, and these issues always have transpersonal implications as well.
Of course, these inevitable, unconscious, archetypal associations echo back "out" of the dream world into our perception of the changes in the global weather patterns that are the other main inspiration for these dreams. No matter what we think and believe consciously, our nagging fear that these "earth changes" are a "punishment" is an inevitable reflection of our realization that we are misusing the divine gift of increasingly conscious self awareness. This "theological" belief creeps into the emotional tone and rhetoric of our debates over controlling ozone-depleting emissions, and the destruction of planetary bio-diversity in the service of short-term economic gain. We know, from the same deep, unconscious place that the dreams come from, that these global, political, economic, ecological issues are ultimately "spiritual" - that these issues both shape and reflect our deepest relationships with the most important meanings of our individual and collective lives, (a situation which our ancestors have always equated with our relationship to "God" and "the Divine"...)
When such tornado dreams are remembered, it means that the dreamers are, in fact, equal to the psycho-spiritual tasks of increasing self-awareness and self-acceptance that the unknown frightening future demands, whether they feel or believe they are equal to these tasks, or not. ALL dreams come in the service of health & wholeness, and that means that NO dream, (even the dream of the 'terrifying tornado"), ever comes to say: "Nyeah, nyeah, nyeah - you have these problems and you can't do anything about them...!"
To have and remember such a dream is an invitation to the individual dreamer to search even more deeply within for the creative energies that are given shape in the "dream tornado" itself, for this image is, at another important level, a spontaneous symbolic meditation on the divine, as-yet unknown, unconscious creative energy that resides within each evolving human psyche.The dream tornado is an indication of the as-yet-unused-and only-intuited power of our own human ability to grow and change and evolve - the creative ability to change both ourselves and our planet in the process of our development. As long as such dreams continue to be remembered, there is every reason to believe that we can and will grow beyond even these "earth shaking" problems that our incomplete sorcerer's apprenticeship in consciousness itself have created. At this level, the "dream tornadoes" are a manifestation of that archetypal creative energy bubbling up in the collective psyche, asking for morally responsible creative expression in waking life.
In the dream world, "wind & water" have been archetypal symbols of spirit ("which bloweth where it listeth") and emotion, (which "runs deep", even when it's still) for thousands (if not millions) of years. In the waking world, peoples from all over the planet share stories where the "voice of the God(s)" "speaks from out of the whirlwind". Non-technological peoples, (including the vast majority our own ancestors, back to the Old Stone Age an beyond), have viewed the "tornado" as "the finger of God", which points with precision and unparalleled power to the psycho-spiritual mysteries of guilt and hidden meaning. Like the imagined "Hand of God", the tornado demonstrates breath taking power, and leaves one life relatively untouched, while the life standing directly next to it is totally torn and shattered forever.
Each time we dream of "tornadoes", these ancient, collective layers of symbolic association reveal themselves anew. Each "dream tornado" is, at some level, a harbinger of change, in the psyche as well as the waking world. Although only the dreamer can say for sure what his or her dream images mean, dream "tornadoes" are compelling metaphors of the individual and collective social change that we "feel", (that we know in our secret heart of hearts), is necessary , and is coming. We intuit, as dreamers, that ultimately the "power of this impending storm" is not just a consequence of incomplete human consciousness and planning failure alone. The forces of change are also "forces of nature" - "divine forces", like nature herself. The dream "tornado", over and over again, turns out to be symbol of the dreamer's own personal relationship to the deepest unasked and unanswered psycho-spiritual questions is his/her life, and these issues always have transpersonal implications as well.
Of course, these inevitable, unconscious, archetypal associations echo back "out" of the dream world into our perception of the changes in the global weather patterns that are the other main inspiration for these dreams. No matter what we think and believe consciously, our nagging fear that these "earth changes" are a "punishment" is an inevitable reflection of our realization that we are misusing the divine gift of increasingly conscious self awareness. This "theological" belief creeps into the emotional tone and rhetoric of our debates over controlling ozone-depleting emissions, and the destruction of planetary bio-diversity in the service of short-term economic gain. We know, from the same deep, unconscious place that the dreams come from, that these global, political, economic, ecological issues are ultimately "spiritual" - that these issues both shape and reflect our deepest relationships with the most important meanings of our individual and collective lives, (a situation which our ancestors have always equated with our relationship to "God" and "the Divine"...)
When such tornado dreams are remembered, it means that the dreamers are, in fact, equal to the psycho-spiritual tasks of increasing self-awareness and self-acceptance that the unknown frightening future demands, whether they feel or believe they are equal to these tasks, or not. ALL dreams come in the service of health & wholeness, and that means that NO dream, (even the dream of the 'terrifying tornado"), ever comes to say: "Nyeah, nyeah, nyeah - you have these problems and you can't do anything about them...!"
To have and remember such a dream is an invitation to the individual dreamer to search even more deeply within for the creative energies that are given shape in the "dream tornado" itself, for this image is, at another important level, a spontaneous symbolic meditation on the divine, as-yet unknown, unconscious creative energy that resides within each evolving human psyche.The dream tornado is an indication of the as-yet-unused-and only-intuited power of our own human ability to grow and change and evolve - the creative ability to change both ourselves and our planet in the process of our development. As long as such dreams continue to be remembered, there is every reason to believe that we can and will grow beyond even these "earth shaking" problems that our incomplete sorcerer's apprenticeship in consciousness itself have created. At this level, the "dream tornadoes" are a manifestation of that archetypal creative energy bubbling up in the collective psyche, asking for morally responsible creative expression in waking life.
