Bear-Earth Dreaming

Nature Notes - December 2023

Communing with nature – experiencing it with your imagination – is a centering endeavor. With communion, the spiritual isn’t brought down as much as the terrestrial is brought up.
 
​- by James Inabinet

“Imagination is reality [Robert Avens].”
 
Imagine a bear, snug in his den, a dark hole scratched into Earth where there’s nothing for eyes to see, no one to confront. As fierce, aggressive creatures, bear nature is to confront: “to stand or meet facing.” Who is there for our sleeping bear to meet facing? Legend has it that this bear must confront himself. In his cave, he goes within and begins dreaming bear dreams. What is a bear dream? What is a dream at all ...
 

 
Dreams are spontaneous imagining, the source of imagination, the primal source of knowing. It is through imagination that we see or know anything. The philosopher Thomas Berry wrote: “In the beginning was the dream. Through the dream all things were made.” When gazing at a tree, we imagine its shape. Then and only then does a tree spring into being. Imagination is reality. This is the spiritual underpinnings of seeing and knowing. We are always in two realms at once, the terrestrial and spiritual. Out of these two, reality is woven.
 

 In the cave, bears dream about the doings of bears. His dreams are not about just anywhere; they’re about the home place: in the berry patch gathering berries, at the river scooping fish, in the “secluded spot” scratching out a den. In his home place he confronts, growling fiercely. Using his dreaming imagination, he finds many things in his bear soul that he finds outside in his world. In this way our bear goes inside in order to go outside. His bear soul somnambulates over familiar landscapes where bear-ness meets the way of the world, not just any world, his world.
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This “bear-dreaming-way” holds clues to how we might dream an earth dream and interact spiritually with our world. This is dreaming while awake, best initiated in nature. Normal meditation techniques like following the breath are useful for becoming centered and leaving the day-to-day behind, but for this kind of dreaming we must not retreat from the world but stay with it. So centered, and with eyes wide open, we dazedly wander with our eyes. As we do, we often initiate a communion experience where spiritual and terrestrial converge. Boundaries between self and place blur. With communion, the spiritual isn’t brought down as much as the terrestrial is brought up and “gilded.” Our attention is rapt.
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In a kind of stationary walk-about, we may wander familiar landscapes, dreaming like a bear: bear-earth-dreaming, going inside in order to go to outside–to the inside of the outside, the soul of the place. When the world becomes so animated, a light shines from within and we can feel it’s depth. In this way, we dream ourselves into the inside of nature. In earth dreaming we are in dialogue with nature. Our psyche imaginatively roams about, finding new meanings.
 

 
In a dream we meet the place as it is. Then expand it into more than it is! This isn’t making stuff up as much as not judging what we see. We allow things be what they are, or maybe what they’re not quite, or maybe even what they’re on the way to being: a squirrel can become a dog, a dog can morph into a frog. Everything is more open to interpretation. This requires fluidity, a metaphoric attitude that expands meaning. It’s genius, “the capacity to treat objects of the imagination as real [Novalis].” In the dream, we let things be what they can be, until we wake up! As we snap out of our revery, the world begins to congeal, fuzzy edges solidify. Our squirrel-dog is now either a squirrel or a dog, but maybe not as wholeheartedly as before. Now we know there’s more going on out there than meets the eye.
 

 
By having our imaginations evoked in nature, we lay bare the moods and vicissitudes of the place, its deeds and sufferings. We begin to seriously consider what it’s like to “be human” in this place, human in the face of the character of cluster of trees, the emotions of flowers visited by bees, the mood of a morning fog lifting. We consider the place in mythic terms too, like Orpheus in the sheer depth of a spreading live oak, Mars in the violence of a storm or a barred owl’s aggression, or Venus in the bursting forth of greening life after a forest fire, or, finally, Dionysus the trickster who has lured us to pick a showy flower only to be pricked by a thorn.
 
If we’ve succeeded in this dreaming, we wonder what’s always hidden from view. We now know that we are not separate from the place, that it mirrors itself in me even as I dream myself into it. Seamlessly connected, we now swim in the same psychic current as my watery soul shapeshifts, flows around, and takes the shape of the place–a sharing of energetic aspects. By sharing a bear-earth-dream, we find that we are not so disconnected and different than our home place after all.
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