What a remarkable assemblage of images, real knowledge of books, authors and titles, and blending of real-life information (my work in a library room at the Massachusetts Judicial System office in Boston) and newly created information. It was a long, elaborate dream that revealed something of the power inherent in the production of dreams – the moving of a peremptory stream of ideation through the brain, picking up real information, creating new images and assembling them into a story and a library filled with a vast and diverse array of books. As Jonathan Leonard (1998) noted in the title of his Harvard Magazine essay, we are unleashing the genies in our sleeping mind when we produce a dream!
Prophetic and Collective Dreams
There is one other type of dream and function to be considered. It takes us back to an ancient assumption that dreams come from the gods and offer us a prophetic vision of the future. Joseph’s dreams in the Old Testament stand out as a popular example of this perspective. This certainly is the most controversial of the functions I have identified. However, even if we don’t believe that dreams are venues for divine intervention and prophetic insights, there are many dreams that have been reported to me which offer powerful images of a potential (prophesized) future. This often would involve massive imagery (what I will shortly identify as the generative power of dreams).
These dreams can be quite positive and uplifting. We need only listen to the memorable speech of Martin Luther King when he spoke about having a dream about all people being treated equally and with kindness. There is also King Arthur’s dream of the round table. At the opposite end of the continuum there was Momma Rose’s dream (in the Broadway show “Gypsy”) of her oldest daughter (and later her younger daughter) being great showbusiness stars.
The Dream of Armageddon
Unfortunately, these prophetic images are often quite negative and alarming. We need only read the account of Armageddon in Revelations, which brings the Holy Bible to a crashing close. When portrayed in a dream, these accounts of a prophesied doomsday can easily fall into the dysfunctional category to which I am about to turn in this essay. Even if these dreams are not prophetic, they can yield real action in the dreamers awake world. One of my dreamers was handed a very alarming dream in which the entire world was in chaos. There were firestorms (perhaps created by nuclear explosions). A few people survived. They lived at the top of high-rise buildings. In this dream, trees were already re-growing around the burned out remains of the old trees. The grass and other vegetation were starting to bloom again. So, there was some hope in this dream—the high-rise survivors might be able to repopulate the world and the environment can be revised. However, the world must first be virtually destroyed.
In this dream, the people once again become hunter-gatherers. They forage for their food – and eat the remaining food to be found in the canned food that remains in the destroyed supermarkets. {This part of the dream seems to be borrowed from some movies and novels.] The survivors must rebuild society. Our dreamer reported that the dream ended with some hope that important lessons had been learned. Our dreamer noted that she rose in the morning with not only vivid recall of this entire dream, but also mixed feelings of fear and hope—and a vaguely sensed commitment to do something about the existential threat to humankind and the world.
