A strange dream

Last night, I had a very strange dream. It was the closest to a nightmare I've had in a long time. I'm certainly glad I woke up before it got any worse...

As with most dreams, my recollection is a mixture of images and feelings without images. I remember a man in a hall talking to a large audience - perhaps worldwide - from a podium. He talks about how we had the chance to do something about the situation humankind finds itself in, with the speed at which we are poisoning the natural systems upon which our survival depends. There is no accompanying image, but it seems like I'm one of the audience members. Along with everyone else, I feel a crushing sense of sadness. We have failed to address our problems and the end (whatever that means) is coming. Humans are a failed species.

Then (and perhaps this is the more traditional part of the dream), I am hiding with others in a dark house. Destructive humanoid machines, reminiscent of The Terminator, are descending upon us to destroy us. The last thing I see before awakening is the machine standing at the door, it's red eyes piercing the darkness.

I awoke, full of fear. It was perhaps 4am and still pitch dark. The dream was an extrapolation of a growing fear within me that as a species, we just don't care about the destruction we are bringing down on the planet. Almost nobody is doing anything. Most people I know barely care at all.

That's not a criticism of them, just a realization that it is very hard for people to wrap their brains around the enormity of the challenges we face and the scale of what we must accomplish to even be remotely prepared. And we are too busy just getting by. I wonder if the best we will actually end up achieving is that a few people will make big strides but the vast majority of people will only wait and react when the worst hits. As a species, we will not change the systems at the root of the problem - we will wait for the systems to fall and drag us down with them. How bad it gets will depend on who you are and where you live.

This returns me to the critical element of consciousness-raising. Preparing for the future will involve a combination of cleaning our ways and re-learning skills and habits for a scaled-down future made by hand. The only way to get moving is to jolt ourselves from our old patterns, shake up our brains, and act.

For me, going car-free for a year was a great consciousness-raising tool but I must continue. I've considered a range of brain-jolting ideas but as of yet haven't settled on any one idea. I'm sure that whatever I decided, a lot of people would try to persuade me not to go through with it! But my aim is not to attract support, but to do something of value to my own and others' consciousnesses. Let's see what happens...