Tag Archives: dreams

Climate Dreams September 2024

Please feel free to share any dreams you have had about our destabilizing climate in the comments section – those submitted to this site directly will be anonymized before they are posted.

April 13, ’24. I dreamt about tornadoes, not for the first time recently. I was in a school building in an anonymous city. I don’t know if I was a student or a teacher. (I did work IRL as a high school teacher for several years.) After visiting with the principal, I was in a classroom. The PA announced danger of a tornado so I walked with all the young adults of the school to the stairs. Half went upstairs and I was with the half who went down. I asked why the others were going up, wasn’t down safer in a tornado? The people around me told me there wasn’t enough room this way for everyone and it was better to split up. We got on a bus and drove away. I had a camera in my hand and photographed the massive black cyclone, which I could see from the bus. I twisted around to get the pictures as we and it both traveled. It was enormous. Someone may have held my camera for me for a bit, or else I lost and refound it.

In a dream 11 days previous, I was also in a city, sitting at long tables outside a tall building having lunch with coworkers of some kind, when a storm kicked up and caused tornadoes and waterspouts which I photographed with a dSLR. Someone insisted we all go inside the building, a science center. I grab some friends’ valuables as we go, wallets and phones, so they wouldn’t lose them, and made my way inside with everyone.

I had a dream last night that took place in some sort of abandoned warehouse. On the ground I saw a dead bee – a big fuzzy orange and black one. I knelt down and touched her, told her she did a good job and to go in peace. When I stood back up, I realized there were other dead bees, hundreds of them, strewn around the floor of the warehouse. I started to sob.

Jan 1, ’24. Flood. I dreamt of floods. For hours. Perhaps first at the rural road where I grew up (which flooded often IRL and floods much more frequently and severely now). A stranger showed me the massive extent of flooding there, pressing upon me how I didn’t understand how bad it was, and indeed I barely recognized the landscape, it was some unfamiliar canyon with a wild river through it. Then I was in a city. It was flooding. Neighborhoods were under water, people were fleeing for higher ground. I was in so many places with so many people. People offering refuge until they no longer had it to offer. Briefly I was somewhere with my husband that was safe until it wasn’t. Our possessions were lost to rising water. “Hundred foot waves” chased people from building to building. At one point I was offering my help putting up a tent for someone’s massive party, but there were people everywhere, I found it hard to find a location for the tent. The water never stopped coming. It wasn’t even raining.

On Sunday March 31, I dreamt of climate change. I was studying in my school classroom when suddenly the ground started shaking. Yup it was an earthquake. Everyone immediately huddled in a corner for some reason. And during this, someone who was using their phone yelled out it was going to be 40 something degrees next week and implying it was never going to go down.

Climate Dreams March 24, 2024

Please feel free to share any dreams you have had about our destabilizing climate in the comments section – they will be anonymized before they are posted.

One night in December 2021, I had a series of disturbing dreams in which the world as we know it came to end. In the course of a single day, everything broke down — the climate, the industrial order, the rules of civil society — and the results were not pleasant at all. It won’t happen quite so dramatically in real life, of course, but the message of these dreams for me was that the end of modern civilization is coming, and it will come much sooner than most people expect or will be prepared for. – Anonymous

I’ve had at least three climate dreams recently: (I keep a journal, which is why I know the dates)

July 7, 2023 Cycling down a long, steep, straight road, with views of piedmont and flatlands spreading away to the left. Flying! Like a kid. On my right, a wall of oak trees, all uniformly red, an incredible color—like coals that have the faintest sheen of ash over them. What kind of trees are those? Someone asks and I say Oak, but then, looking closer, every kind of tree in the forest is this same gorgeous, unearthly color. Then, scene change, and I am losing my friend M in a train station where the signs (bafflingly) refer to both London and Ohio. Scanning the crowds for her shining cap of red hair. But everyone in the platform has red hair: a seething mass of shades of red. I wake up and think of this quote from Tolkien: It’s a red day–ride, ride to ruin and the world’s ending. (and the temperature outside is apocalyptic for here: 90 degrees)

Sept. 3, 2023 On a sailboat in Caribbean-blue waters, but there are big chunks of ice floating everywhere. Someone says, Oh, that’s the Antarctic ice shelf. And a feeling of deep sadness. (This was the day Jimmy Buffet died, which I think has something to do with the dream)

Sept. 20 I’m floating down a canal, or a flooded street, in a giant inner tube, among others doing the same. Bumping into various people, one of whom is a plump, sweet-faced girl who I realize is my grand-niece. I say, what do you think now? And she looks puzzled. There’s no way to stop though so I just float on away from her. The water is murky. I am concerned because she is standing waist-deep in it. (Her politics have veered to the right in recent years. We used to be very close) – Anonymous

I dreamed that climate change was deliberately caused by billionaires who needed better conditions to grow their brain-enhancing meteor spores.

Climate Dreams March 2024

Please feel free to share any dreams you have had about our destabilizing climate in the comments section – they will be anonymized before they are posted.

In the dream, I am suddenly aware of a very loud sound, like an alarm, coming from invisible loudspeakers in the sky. No one else around me seems to notice. I look up into the sky and see a vivid scene playing out. I figure out quickly that the scene is meant to show people what is happening at an unseen level, in this case, what is happening in the ocean. With the sky as a kind of movie screen, whales are shown thrashing around, contorting as if they are in great pain. Some are dying. It’s not just a film, it’s real, it’s a reflection of what is happening in the oceans. I point to the sky to try to get people around me to notice, but they don’t seem to care. Some of the people are my friends. I don’t understand why they aren’t upset. In the next moment a large group of birds appear and they are wheeling wildly in the sky. In seconds they all slam into the ground. I’m horrified because I can hear the impact of their bodies on the concrete, and can see their bodies on the ground. I know this has something to do with the hundreds of millions of birds who die every year in the US when they hit buildings and windows. This dream was more of a nightmare for me, and I feel like I am supposed to do something to stop the suffering and death of animals, I just don’t know what to do anymore.

~ Anonymous

R.W.W. Greene (He/him) @rwwgreene.bsky.social

Had a dream last night that I — and either @glenngiven.bsky.social or @danielbrian.bsky.social — were defending a ferryboat full of climate refugees by using Harry Potter spells. Apparently, I was saying them in my sleep.

Emily Stepp @emilyart.bsky.social

I had a dream the other night that alligators’ native range expanded into the midwest region because of climate change. Probably not that unrealistic.

remotecore @remotecore.bsky.social

Had a weird dream. Was at a meeting with world leaders. And I insisted they showed a particularly powerful episode of The Simpsons, that dealt with climate change. People were in tears by the end of the screening and the whole tone of the meeting after was transformational.

Matthew R Francis @bowlerhatscience.org

I have that kind of dream often (I’m usually late by like six hours or two days or something ridiculous like that). Last night’s was … I had inherited the family farmhouse, but there was a league of supervillains working on “solving” climate change by making other things worse, etc.

@amcglashen.bsky.social

Climate change is bad but last night I had a dream that a colony of Wood Storks was nesting near me here in Michigan, and it was awesome.