Warning, this dream is not for the faint-hearted. Don’t read this if gory images upset you. It offers insight, I believe, into the paralyzing sadness I have been experiencing the last couple of days and wrote about last night, and seems to suggest it is part of a collective as well as personal event. I had the dream this morning.

I mentioned on Friday night that I had watched the movie Food, Inc. In it they showed very disturbing footage of hundreds of cattle dumped from stalls onto a stainless steel moving surface that took them to a point of slaughter, their corpses coming out the other side. There was zero dignity for the animal as a living being; only cold, heartless, machine driven horror in life and death for them. This mindset is what we take into our bodies when we eat them, and what we collude with when we buy the meat.

In my dream I saw the same image but with humans being poured into the steel moving tray, helplessly riding on it until a guillotine at the top beheads them, and then as their bodies move through, it also chops off the feet. I had driven my car into the maze where this enormous event is going on continuously and am in the dream the only human soul not in the steel tray there to witness what is happening. I was sitting beside the big machines right next to where the beheading was happening. I noticed that the blood and slime that flew from the machines was covering me and dripping from my hair into my mouth. At some point an old friend of mine drove up in a fancy car, pretty clothes, all dressed for being going out socially. She handed me a cup of cold water from a fountain in her car that dispensed both hot and cold water. Her car was all tricked out in such ways. She was offering to give me a ride out of there. I accepted but with emotional reluctance saying, “But somebody has to grieve all of this!”

My thoughts on this dream so far are that the movie on Friday night triggered two days of an emotional drop to rock bottom for me, and I do mean rock bottom, for a variety of reasons both personal and collective. On the collective level, easier to talk about first, I see the dream as a depiction of a deeper reality that the movie is revealing. If the assumption that quantum physics is beginning to prove, which mystics have long intuited, that reality is all one fabric, that every seemingly separated thing is really part of one whole, might be accepted as true, then it is 100% delusional to think that we can treat any aspect of nature so inhumanely without thinking that we are doing the exact same thing to ourselves. My dream might as well be the picture that such a movie presents, because it is the truth of the situation. To imagine ourselves as not affected by what we do to the rest of the life that we are an intricate part of is mental illness. We are involved in a collective psychopathology. Its effects are far-reaching and very disturbing. Denial is sometimes the only antidote, and it is breaking down.

Indigenous people say that the true thinking apparatus is in the heart. The thinking of the head has always been intended to be servant to the heart, rather than master. I have read some of the fascinating research of Childre and Martin in The Heartmath Solution, and the work of the Institute of HeartMath, which describes the work of scientists who have discovered the brain in the heart, neurons in the heart that are the same as those in the various subcortical areas of the brain. When Western thought began to marginalize the thought of the heart and allowed the head to become the dominant thinking apparatus, we lost our way, our balance and our real intelligence. Indigenous people know this and look at us like destructive, drug-fueled, crazy children, which we are.

The thought of the heart must be rediscovered, revived and given back its authority. Thinking with the heart would never allow us to do what we now do to animals, to rivers, to the air, or the ocean, or the topsoil, because the thinking of the heart would not perceive any of it as separate from our very own self. It’s not just a cozy myth that the animals and air and wind and waters are our brothers and sisters. It is real.

I usually avoid anything that might come off as didactic in my blog writing, and intend to keep that preference. But this dream shook me up. This sadness has shaken me up. So I am saying what my heart is telling me right now.