Environment Dream
Maurice was a man in midlife, living in the countryside, with a love of nature and a detestation of the encroachment of city roads and wealthy housing into the natural environment. He presented this dream at a workshop.
Dream report: Roadworks Blow-up
I am going down a steep hill in some vehicle in which there appears to be little between me and the gravelly road ahead – a bit like being in one of those carts kids make. Not a great deal of control either. There are a number of earth-moving machines working to my left and below me, and some quite large over-ostentatious houses on my right.
Suddenly there is an explosion at the bottom of the hill, a large puff of smoke. I try to turn, and have to enter one of the driveways to the houses in order to do this. I sense a reticence about entering this driveway – like they are rich people and not very nice – and then I am racing up the hill to escape. The machines have also fled and begin to race up the side of the road, some exploding as if hit by a weapon of some kind. They really are fleeing. They have become animated caricatures of earth movers, leaping and ducking all over the place, racing here and there in a demented cartoon fashion.
Then I am in a graveyard of old earthmoving and industrial machinery. I am sitting on a seat-type thing, like an interactive museum, and a young man comes along. He plays with some levers and my chair begins to rise. I feel vulnerable. The machine topples, and I think how silly he is to play with such dangerous things, and how I could quite easily be injured.
I am not injured at all, and just tell the young man to be careful. I am thinking that I don’t want him to feel bad about what has just happened.
Maurice gave his first interpretation of the dream as possibly a warning to him that there might be trouble ahead on his road of life. But as he began to express his associations with the elements of the dream it became clear that he held strong feelings about the loss of natural environments to wealthy suburbs and resorts, with roads being widened to take ever more city traffic to remote settlements. The big machines are thus symbols of the “fat cat” invaders and destroyers. When the explosion occurs, he is delighted to see them fleeing in fear, so disorganized that they are laughable.
Scene 2 seems to take a jump into the future, when the machines have “died,” and become museum pieces, where young people come to look at the past, even trying to play with them, not realizing how dangerous these things were.
Maurice’s dream seems to give a prophetic warning about the current heedless destruction of our environment, along with a hope that the human race will outgrow such destructive attitudes – but we could still be vulnerable to losing our balance.