Universal Sadness in Dreams

“Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.”

~Virginia Woolf

Lately my dreams have involved crumbling cliffs and wild waters. Last night I dreamt that I was walking along a beach bluff, and the cliff I was standing on fell into the sea while my dogs were swept away. The night before, I was strolling down a river bed, when suddenly I was wading into water, and before I knew it was completely submerged.

Naturally, when I woke up, my first assumption was that my emotions were consuming me. Water is associated with emotions in the psyche realms, and both dreams were a combination of a completely normal daily activity that resulted in being submerged in water.

My emotions in my waking life have been carrying just over their fair share of sway. Normally, my emotions are checked by coexisting with a couple billion other people on the planet. However, there are times. Seasons, per say. Where they completely engulf every aspect of my life.

I adore my emotions for their pizzazz and courage when looking forward into the big empty abyss of life. Sometimes though, I struggle to grapple with their scope and depth in the face of adversity. Waves and waves and waves of emotions have carried me into the exact place where I stand, and those same waves are what leave me gasping for air.

The last few nights of dreams have been the drowning.

The reasons why, weren’t what I initially thought.

I thought that my emotions had to do with distance. With a far away lover, and my inability to be in that space. With the moon, and Friday the 13th, and not having a home, and general dissatisfaction in life. A lot of these are emotionally stressful, and yet, all of these are intertwined into a bigger picture that has been leaving me and many others with a sense of hopelessness.

It isn’t merely coincidence that half of the menstruating women on earth fall around the new moon, while the other half on the full. There is a pull, a pattern, a reason much bigger than the scope of our human comprehension for why we are alive as we are. We are all operating in the same system with everything else in existence.

Whether we choose to admit or defy this is up to our own free will, but the laws of physics and nature grants us space to reflect on how our piece plays into the whole. Our piece as humanity has created a hole much vaster than our simple human emotions can grasp.

What I am trying to say, is that I have been drowning in my dreams collectively with the ways that humanity is drowning itself. The ways in which we have crafted our daily lives; cars, single use, speed, working around a clock, meat consumption, etc… have caused the spatial gap we feel between ourselves and our purpose. We do not see the intention that goes into growing food, or crafting clothes, or making candles, or making a home. We expect products, without practice. We do not give credit to the life that people live for their arts.

And that is why I’ve been drowning. I can’t keep up with the speed of this life. Capitalism is hurtling us from one commodity to the next, from one space to the next, from one person to the next, without giving us the time to breathe and be with any part of it.

Until we can slow down, we will continue to gasp for air. There is a world that moves much slower than we do now. And there is happiness there. In the ability to sit, and be, with the people and place in front of us. There we will see how it is all connected. That we are too.

I am, you.