Youthful optimism grows up

Back in 1973, at age 10, I invited a few of my grade school friends to join a group I created and called H.O.W. (Help Our World). Together, we sprawled out on the scratchy carpet of the basement floor, and Magic Markers in hand, we penned slogans on poster board that decried littering and admonished people to “Respect Mother Nature.”

That group lasted for just a few meetings, but I’ve never quite given up. I joined the “No Nukes” movement in high school and participated in Women’s Peace encampments in college. No matter how busy things have gotten as an adult with work, parenting and the ups and downs of life, I’ve managed to march, vote, recycle, reuse and eat what I call a “self-righteous diet” of mostly local, organic and vegetarian foods.

But like so many of my peers, as life got busier, my levels of activism declined in inverse relation to the escalating environmental crisis.

Then, in 2009 my friend Molly invited me to join her to hear Bill McKibben, environmental activist and founder of 350.org, speak at Mount Holyoke College. I argued that it would just be depressing to hear a talk about how bad things were. But my friend convinced me, and McKibben managed to re-inspire me. By the time he called members of the audience to take part in a worldwide a grassroots effort to draw attention to the desperate plight we faced if the carbon levels in the atmosphere kept rising, I was eager to take up his challenge to create an event that might draw wider attention to the cause.

Moving from dreams into action

Contemplating what to do, I decided to draw on my love of dreams (of both the aspirational and the sleeping variety) to guide my action. After all, I’d been remembering my dreams since I was a child, and had experienced their healing power on a personal level by using them to work through losses and difficult life transitions time and again.

Right around that time I’d even decided to transform my lifelong interest in dreams to a more public and professional pursuit. Putting it all together, I formed a group called 350 Dreamers, armed with the same outsized optimism of my 10-year-old self.

The goal was to gather 350 people to set their intention to dream for global healing in the face of climate change on the appointed night in October of that year. Facebook was still a new phenomenon, so the idea of finding 350 people in the next five months who’d agree to participate seemed pretty far-fetched. Plus, I wanted my group to have a global reach.

I reasoned that since dreams know no boundaries, and people of all cultures, ethnic, racial, social and economic groups dream, 350 Dreamers should be universal as well. My sister, who lives in Japan, agreed to join Molly and me in this endeavor, so I proudly announced that we had an international coalition.

Now I just needed 347 more people to join us!

Over the next five months, I managed to gather 350 participants. Ten years later, we now are a group of nearly 1,000 people representing countries including Panama, The Netherlands, Mexico, Canada, Germany, Israel, Ireland and many more. We gather online several times a year for a group dream in which we set an intention to dream for and about global healing. In the days that follow we meet on Facebook to share our experiences, comment on each other’s dreams and inspire one another to keep going.

Why dreams matter

As a professional dreamworker, I have studied the workings of the sleeping and dreaming brain, as well as the history, psychology, and theology of dreaming. I’ve worked with people in one-on-one sessions and dream groups and classes locally, nationally and worldwide. In the process, I have learned a great deal about how dreams can help us as individuals and how they can support us as a community. Here are some lessons I’ve learned that apply to the environmental crisis we’re now facing:

■According to dream experts, the characters in our dreams represent different parts of ourselves. Working with dreams we learn to mediate between these inner characters to harmonize their positions as we seek a harmonious and healing resolution.

Likewise, as the forests burn, and the sea levels rise, I make a conscious choice day by day to elevate my inner optimist and lovingly subdue the jaded skeptic that also lives within me.

■Like most people, I’ve experienced nightmares off and on throughout my life. From studying them I’ve learned that scary dreams can make us stronger, if we do the work it takes to understand where in our psyches they are coming from, and focus on how we can heal the issues behind them.

■We dreamers know that first and foremost, we don’t run away from the monsters in our scary dreams — we turn and face them instead. When we do this, the dream enemy loses its power and we gain strength. As we confront the global environmental nightmare now before us, we need to meet the challenges head-on and call on our human potential to understand, innovate and heal, personally and collectively.

■It’s well known that if we ignore a nightmare it will return even more forcefully until we learn the lesson it arose to teach us. Likewise, we must wake up to what is happening on our planet, and change our actions as individuals, communities, countries, and continents in response — or it will become increasingly more monstrous.

■As dreamers, we aim to stay awake and aware in our dreams (we call this lucid dreaming and most people can learn to do it). So too, we must stay present with what is happening to our environment, rather than numbing ourselves through the consumption of food, substances, and material comforts.

■Dreams have inspired invention and innovation throughout human history. Everything from the electric sewing machine that made the industrial revolution possible, to the periodic table, and the idea for Google came through dreams (as well as countless more contributions to the arts and sciences). Answers to our current crisis can come in a dream as well, so we would do well to cultivate and welcome our dreams’ wisdom and guidance.

■Real change comes from the inside out and our dreams are there to help us evolve and grow. Through the years I’ve been buoyed by members of 350 dreamers who’ve taken their dreams off the pillow: like the woman from Paris who decided to trade her car for a bicycle after one of our group dreams, and countless others who’ve said that just the act of setting an intention to dream with others on dream night gives them more hope and energy to take action and make a difference in whatever ways they can.

Staying open to our dreams and dreaming together makes us less likely to live in denial or to pretend our actions don’t matter. Through my work with 350 Dreamers, I stay true to the dreamy 10-year-old I once was, who gathered up her friends and colored markers and did what she could to make things better.

Tzivia Gover, is a certified dream therapist, director of the Institute for Dream Studies, and author of The Mindful Way to a Good Night’s Sleep and other books. She is the founder of 350 Dreamers, a worldwide network of individuals who dream together for global healing.

This article was published in The Daily Hampshire Gazette, 9/16/2019.

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350 Dreamers