A DREAM
A dream, 7 May 1996. In this dream I am in an urban war zone, it is Bosnia or someplace else in Eastern Europe where ethnic feuds among longtime neighbors have turned deadly and devastating. I am with some people who have some sort of shop in a narrow street. Like old European cities, narrow streets dense with history and culture. This shop stands front to front with a shop or stand belonging to the rival clan, only a few feet apart from each other. There has been all kinds of bad blood between these people. I am trying to convince them that they should compete economically rather than by killing each other. Specifically I suggest that they should sell books; apparently there are many old books around and why not sell them? More specifically, I suggest that they sell books in the opposing party’s language. Compete as rival booksellers in each other’s cultures. Apparently I convince them, because the dream ends with the sight of two rows of thick old yellowing books facing each other across the alleyway.
The critical element of the dream: each side is selling books in the other’s language. Like any smart business person they have to know what they’re selling. So they have to compete in empathy. They have to compete in knowing the Other.
This was about some transpersonal imperative that is very important, and has to do vitally with this webbed form of communication in which we are all engaged, whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not. What can we do about the dream? I don’t know, but perhaps we can find out together.
The setting of the dream is an old civilization that has been run down into barbarism. Many of us feel that America, Europe, the Middle East, many parts of the world are heading, bit by bit, downwards through the three poisons of greed, hatred, and delusion into a kind of Kali Yuga, a world-ending age of barbarism and ignorance. Many of us also feel that the counter-forces of life and love are most powerfully expressed in individual and collective creativity: art and power: art and social change: creativity and culture as healer of the big time ills of society and planet. The method of the dream is what Bateson called end-linkage, a reversal of some crucial variable, selling the Other’s culture – an element too of the Trickster.