(Please note: Because of the prevalence of this phenomenon, I’ve changed my poll, please vote)
I’m hearing a common theme amongst a lot of people out there. Several friends and relatives have mentioned it and I myself have been suffering from it for several years now; end-of-world dreams.
It was during a recent comment posted by Courtney Mroch that had me realizing that it wasn’t just a phenomenon amongst those I know, but was far-reaching across the country, perhaps the world.
In my frequent end-of-the-world dream scenarios, I’m on the road with strangers. It’s a day-to-day survival theme. I get frustrated at some point and gather everyone together, pointing to strangers and saying “you get water,” “you find a cave,” “you pick berries…” I feel as though civilization has given up and lost their intelligence and I’m the only one who sees what needs to be done. That is perhaps just a reflection of how I see myself in real life when faced with the witless cell-phone attached zombies in cars on the roadways who seem to have forgotten how to use turn signals and merge. Running into folks who don’t seem to know how to say “thank you” or “excuse me” or calm their screaming kids down while in a store. It seems like daily I encounter a civilization that’s acting a bit like, well…the honeybees.
When I managed to get over how bleak and scary the dreams were, I moved into noting how I react to the end-of-world and it’s very practical and methodical and without emotion or fear or sadness. It just is what it is. I like to step away from the potential premonition connotations of the dreams and move on to seeing them as a state of how I feel in my world; as if everyone’s an a-hole and I’m the last one standing with commonsense.
Think about it, the past decade we’ve lived with things like red/orange/yellow warnings from the government, terrorist attacks, Anthrax, H1N1/bird flu, and financial collapse. Can you get a better theme to run through your dreams? It’s the background muzak of our daily lives.
Is this a sign that things are culminating in an end-of-times scenario? I seriously doubt we all got psychic together to predict such things. I know my mother and father (had me late in life) lived through the depression era and said that everyone had the same dreams that their crops had dried up and there was no food, that they went to find a job line and the door closed.
In bad times, dreams are amplifiers of every fear that daytime hours seep into our souls.
When I first had my son, for the first few years I kept having the same recurring nightmare; I’d be driving somewhere and realize I left him at home. My baby is at home alone, screaming, scared, lonely, hungry. All I can think of is the panic of getting to him as soon as possible before calamity befalls him. It was no prediction; it was an expression of my constant daily anxieties; can I be responsible for this little being who needs me for everything? What if I screw up? What if I forget something? What if I turn my head for one minute?
So, do our collective end-of-world dreams mean we’re facing end-of-times? Nope. These are nothing more than a individual reaction to a collective social dilemma. If these dreams bother you, take some time and consider how you react to them. How you react to the events in your dreams says how you feel about your coping skills in your daytime life. If you’re getting hysterical and hiding in your dreams, it’s a sign that you’re not acting on the events in your daytime life but reacting. If you take control in the dreams and find ways out of situations, you’re coping skills are up to snuff and these challenging dreams are doing nothing more than keeping your skills at the ready.
Hope this helps those suffering. I’d like to hear if any of you have been plagued by this phenomenon of late. Please feel free to comment.
(Oh, and I found a new blog that's lots of fun and magic and helps relieve the stress of the apocalypse, I've just started following it and enjoy it, thought I'd share hedgewitchhollow)