Atom Bomb Update and Thoughts on the Nature of Dreams and Nightmares

Today, I’ve been living and breathing beside atom bomb dreams. I’ve been researching, writing emails, and even one proposal in an effort to begin to lay the groundwork for a creative project that I mentioned in my last post. For those who haven’t read my earlier post, I’m currently working on a long investigative poem that’s based off of listening to and collecting people’s atom bomb dream experiences. This piece is actually beginning to collect some gravity. I just wrote a proposal to Peace Boat, a Japanese NGO asking for them to put me in contact with the Hibakusha, Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors. I’ve also started to look for publishers for this work. Normally, this wouldn’t be the first thing that I would attend to when engaging in a new writing project. However, the nature of collecting interviews changes my relationship to the work. This work is beginning to foster a deeper sense of agency and urgency in me. This project, these interviews feel like a message, a transmission that I'm responsible for carrying over to the world. I think this may be a way for me to engage with inner peace and outward action.

I’ve also been thinking about the naming of this project. I’ve been referring to it as Atom Bomb Dreams because isn't it redundant to say atom bomb nightmare? And, now, this has gotten me thinking about the difference between dreams and nightmares. There are all the obvious differences to speak of: the delight, mystery, or ambivalence of a dream versus the sheer terror of a nightmare. But then I ask myself, what is the nature of true terror? What is it that actually penetrates us, the dreamer with fear? I think terror and nightmares in their true form are the absolute walling in and limiting of possibilities of the mind in how it is able to find meaning in the world. A nightmare, on its most basic level, shuts down change unless, of course, the nightmare is transformed. Whereas dreams are the opposite, they are the ability to extend out in imaginative directions; they are infinite arisal and connection.

Nightmares and dreams can be thought of as neural circuit pathways in the brain. A nightmare is a dead end, suburban cul de sac, or insurmountable wall, and a dream is an open field or sky or an infinite network of alternate paths. What then of the manifestation of nightmares and dreams in the world? A true manifestation of a nightmare would be a young Palestinian child killed in an Israeli bombing. In this instance neither death nor life are given respect to their natural cycles, but rather life is physically cut-short, brutally, recklessly pillaged and pruned. The world is full of true nightmares. We hear them in the middle of night. They are the helicopters in Baltimore City circling overhead with a bullhorn, announcing their search for a missing 5-year-old child. The nightmares are on the news too; they are there and waiting every time I tune into Democracy Now or The Daily Show. The nightmares are nuclear Pakistan, threat of nuclear Taliban, and the "greening of the apocalypse" (http://www.thewitness.org/archive/april2001/williamsinterview.html) in the ever-imposing threats to our natural world. I think it’s important to acknowledge these nightmares by first bearing witness to them inside then outside ourselves. If we allow ourselves to see ugly truth, then we begin to have the power to transform it.

A manifestation of a dream is, on the other hand, as we so proudly know, taking the once remotest possibility of electing a black president and bringing this dream into reality. I often think about rhizomorphs, root structures with multiple branches. This is the structure that exists in our brain, in the networks of neurons that grow dense in our cerebral cortex. This is the internal and neural structure we develop inside ourselves when we educate and nurture our thoughts, in the process nurturing our hearts. This is the structure we protect and allow to flourish in the world when we protect our natural environment. This is the structure we create when we practice true democracy- a horizontal network with infinite avenues and possibilities for growth.

I believe that I’m working on a project about atom bomb dreams because I want to use this piece as a possible point of change, to feedback to the world a nightmare, turned dream of its own transformation.

I’ve never had an atom bomb dream, but I’m beginning to think about my own dreams in relation to my goals for this project. Where in my own dreams do I seek transformation?

I had a nightmare once of being trapped in a dark, cavernous house with a child in the dream who was my daughter. She was separated from me and I was frantically looking for her. I was terrified for her safety. I’m not a parent, but in this dream I was- and I knew the true fear of imminent danger threatening my child. I ran through the house desperately searching for her, inadvertently feeding into the fear that made one vulnerable to this house. I became one of the ghosts, dark, hungry, quivering, and empty, and I realized what was happening to me, that I was losing myself to the house. I forced myself back through the vortex-tunnel my soul was turning into as angry spirits began to assail me. I beckoned for a wand against a wall that I hadn’t brought with me but had always been mine, an amethyst crowning the tip. It flew into my hand, and I banished back the attacking spirits, driving them off with a wave of staff. My daughter in the dream was sitting at a table. She was this golden glowing child with long blonde hair, who was entirely unafraid, completely impervious to everything that had just transpired. I realized then that she was never in danger because she had no fear. I was the one that had always been in danger, like I needed to take the journey of almost losing myself to learn about the imminent dangers of giving in to fear. In the dream, I stood hesitant. I didn’t know whether I should leave my daughter or not because I perceived her as my ultimate attachment. I had at least begun to transform this nightmare, opening what was moving toward a single conclusion to a multiple one. It’s amazing to me, a bomb born in the splicing of an atom, billows destruction from the quantum to the physical level. It shuts down life on all levels. It shuts down the reason why we live: to transform. I mentioned Jane English in my previous post. I believe that I should share some of her thoughts on this. She does shed some light.

“We are in a situation where we will either experience large scale evolution to planetary, unitive awareness or not survive. Every scientist who has studied quantum physics has been given a koan, a seed that if allowed to sprout could result in great unfolding and growth in awareness. The concepts of modern quantum physics are particularly powerful for us because they touch us deep within our existing scientific belief system….

The nuclear crisis is both a problem and an opportunity. Just as in many mythologies the demons guard a treasure, there is within the nuclear problem a jewel, a seed of transformation. The kind of action on the nuclear crisis at this point [that] seems appropriate is work on transforming consciousness, coupled with continued technological, political, social, ecological, and educational work done by people who know and experience unitive consciousness.”

I can appreciate the idea of a demon guarding treasure, the atom bomb as a volatile gateway through which we may come out on the other end with an experience of unitive consciousness. It’s a journey that humanity together must passage through. The atom bomb is the ultimate manifestation of the destructive, non-unitive impulse that separates us from the world and from the ultimate nature of ourselves. It’s only in the expansion of consciousness that we may safe passage through.

I do love writing here on Evolver. It forces me to write through to another side of understanding. It’s participating in this community that helps me better understand my own value systems. The further I explore avenues of expansion in consciousness, the more I arrive at the question, the mission that’s most important to me: how do we transform suffering? This is the question I continue to sit with.