Who’s Dreaming Who?
The question made me jump when I saw it. We think a lot about dreams and plants, both, in our work, but mostly in separate contexts, each with their own separate shelf. Today we want to see if these two ideas can dance.
When one ingests a plant, it is easy to see how, at least biologically, plants can affect one’s dreams. It’s in your body so it contributes all of what you do which must include dreaming.
On the other end of the spectrum, psychoactive plants like psilocybin mushroom, peyote or ayahuasca most definitely affect our psyche, therefore our dreams.
But how does that in any way mean that the plants are dreaming?
If plants dream, what are they dreaming? Are they dreaming like we do, concerning their life in general, and most importantly for our discussion, are they dreaming us, like we also dream the other beings that surround us?
Creation, no matter how you look at it, underlies our question. If we understand it, rocks were here first, then the plants came, then the animals, then us. Now that’s way too simple to be scientifically accurate, but dirt and rocks did form into locations. Plants grew in those locations and grew into food for the animals and the eventual humans. Makes sense, right?
Well, that I know of, rocks, like plants, don’t have brains either, but where would we be without plants on our planet? Being that we ingest something from the plant world every single day, again, where would we be without plants?
Now since the rocks and the plants had to be here for the animals and humans to show up later, with brains, by the way, do plants or rocks need brains as we know them?
Do crystals need brains to power rockets and heal illness?
We human beings certainly need brains to operate. For the most part rocks and plants are doing OK without brains, it seems, except of course for the greedy destruction of Mother Earth for profit, by those with brains, no less.
In the article, Is Cannabis Divine? we visit the Garden of Eden and how, in its aftermath, the plants were the key to our survival on the hard Earth. Of course, that doesn’t only apply to cannabis. Survival, healing, vision and knowledge come from all the plants.
In the dreaming beliefs at this altar, we start with the idea that the Creator is dreaming us, so we, in turn, can dream our creations. We believe we are all little suns of our own mini universe, a universe we’re trying to grow from and within our Earth life.
We start our Earth dream in our human mother’s womb for approximately 260 days, and then when we come out, everybody else’s dreams start interacting with our dream. Then things, many times unfortunately, go haywire in life; our original dream is attacked, stretched, torn, dominated, seduced, and a whole list of manipulative actions that usually include us as victims and perpetrators both.
It may sound a little simplistic, describing life in the vocabulary of dreams, but when there is a need for healing, we assume something is wrong at the dream level. Our client’s dream of a good, harmonious life has been infected, we believe, by other dreams around them.
These are truths we find in ancient studies of dreaming, and what makes it pertinent now is that modern sleep and dream research is starting to prove some of those ancient beliefs. For instance, the idea that, at some level, we are always dreaming. Even in full waking mode, some part of our brain – the subconscious – is in dreamland preparing our next dream, basically 24-7.
This view of dreams in no way eliminates the need for medical attention, common sense, and care. On the contrary, the dream approach includes all of that, but that’s a talk for another time.
For now, our question – Do Plants Dream? – still stands.
Plants are part of all creation stories, in some ways they are part of every human story, a clear element in our creation and survival, for sure. In addition to their role in creation, plants live in our tradition and are a powerful element of Spirit.
“Creation, tradition and Spirit” sound kind of sacred, don’t they? I guess we can say divine, too. Are plants divine?
Dear Readers, if you hold plants in a way that approaches sacred, then maybe you’d be open to the idea that plants are dreaming us. And pushing on that a bit, perhaps plants, like us, have dreams of what they came to do on this Creation.
The plants known as Cannabis, along with its cousins, Marijuana and Hemp, show up on Mother Earth some 12,000 years ago. Findings dating back to that time show it in use around the globe. Those of you who have studied shamanism know how significant it is that the same skill is learned across the globe by people of all kinds with no communication. Maybe dreams come in there somewhere.
Cannabis spread all over the globe and into shamanic cultures of all kinds. It’s been medicine in too many ways to mention here, and for a whole lot longer than its been a criminalized crop. It has a specialized vocabulary in almost every language and culture, on the street and in the lab, with only a few misinformed law and order groups still locking people up. Now the plant speaks loudly to the world in two ways we understand, health and money. Maybe Cannabis was dreaming it all along.
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