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Dream: 'The Crash of American Airlines'

Dream: 'The Crash of American Airlines'	350 Views
posted on Thursday, March 06, 2008

EDITOR'S COMMENT:

Many of you know that I am a big fan of dreams. I have been working with my own dreams, and the dreams of family and friends, for over three decades now. During this time, I have been constantly amazed at the depth, breadth, and healing power of dreams. Not, of course, that they are always easy to understand, but that in spite of this, they can be an enormous source of insight, healing, and, occasionally, precognitive protection for those who choose to befriend them.

Over the years, I've sent out many articles about dreams and dream work. One of the best overall summaries was a report on the book "Healing Dreams: Exploring the Dreams that Can Transform Your Life", by Marc Ian Barasch (see below for link). Among other things, this report included excerpts from Barasch's book that described how German journalist Charlotte Beradt catalogued the dream lives of three hundred of her fellow citizens during the rise of Nazism. According to Barasch, Beradt found that "while her informants felt constrained to go along with the devastating rending of the Weimar social fabric, their dreams were telling the dark parallel story".

Barasch goes on to wonder:

"Beradt's observations raise an intriguing question: Could countervailing forces arising from the psyche have mitigated fascism before it attained its final, distilled virulence? If pre-Nazi Germany had been honeycombed with grassroots dream groups -- if people had shared their nightmares, spoken them aloud -- would this have acted, in some small way, as an inoculation against totalitarianism, allowing people to draw courage from each others' inner visions?

"Or what if people had simply believed their own dreams? We often think of Nazi Germany as a cautionary tale of the unconscious run rampant, when the civilized ego-structure of a nation is overcome by its unleashed id, and the blind directives of Eros and Thanatos gather the collective force of an avalanche. But might it be more accurate to say its citizens had become deaf to their own unconscious, blind to their own nightmares and mute to the psyche's expression?"

Which brings me to the subject of this email: A long-time friend of mine, who also happens to be one the the best, most experienced dreamers I know, recently had a dream that he felt pertained to the dire condition of the American economy. Since my friend has asked to remain anonymous, I won't be identifying him by name. You'll have to take it from me that he, his dream, and his interpretation, deserve serious consideration.

Will the American economy collapse? If you've been reading the news reports I've been sending out, you know this is a distinct possibility.

But the state of the American economy is only one of a growing legion of potential disasters. Thus, a bigger question rushes to mind: "how can we effectively deal with disasters in general -- both real and imagined, personal and collective?"

I have two quick suggestions:

1. If you haven't done so already, I encourage you to read:

TWELVE "ANY TIME, ANY PLACE" SURVIVAL TIPS (v3.0)

2. A significant part of NHNE's work, from day one, has been to build a network of like-minded people that can "gracefully pass through whatever changes may come our way". That purpose remains intact and as long as we stick together, bringing our unique talents, perspectives, and real world resources to the community table, I have no doubt that we'll be able to weather whatever storms come our way. I want to encourage all of you, then, to add your voice to the choir: Have you had any dreams, visions, intuitions, or other inner experiences that you feel are relevant to this topic (or others like it)? If so, here's where you can add your comments to this important discussion:

Times Of Change & Transformation Forum

With Love & Best Wishes,
David Sunfellow

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THE CRASH OF AMERICAN AIRLINES
February 15, 2008

[My wife] and I and a few other friends are at an airport. A plane has apparently just crashed. It must have been either a smaller plane (like a commuter jet) or a larger plane with not too many casualties. But there are casualties because there are a lot of emergency personnel around taking care of the situation and taking care of those who have been injured or killed. We're standing back a ways because there's nothing we can do to help. It's being taken care of by the emergency personnel.

I'm looking out one of the big windows of the airport and happen to see a huge jumbo jetliner coming in for a landing. It says "American Airlines" in big letters on the side of the plane. It's coming down low and pretty far down the runway, as though it's going to overshoot the runway. It looks like it's going to crash. And it's a huge plane.

The pilots are trying to get it back up into the air so they can come around for another landing and maybe gauge the approach better. They're trying desperately to give it the gas, to give it a huge amount of jet fuel to get it airborne again. As it comes down it bumps once. Then the jet engines finally respond to the massive amount of fuel and the plane goes straight up in the air. It shoots up in the air like a rocket.

I'm watching with amazement as the massive jetliner goes vertical. Then suddenly it either runs out of gas or stalls, because it turns or flips over and comes directly down toward the ground, again like a rocket, but this time like a rocket coming down. And it's heading right for the airport.

I yell, "Run!" to everyone, and start running myself. Finally, at the last moment, I throw myself behind some kind of embankment. The plane crashes into the airport and explodes. It's clear that everyone on board has been killed and the airport has been destroyed. I don't know whether [my wife] or anyone else has survived. I'm horrified by the total destruction of the plane, the airport, and everyone I know who was there.

.............

Day Notes: Awakening from the intensity of the dream, I lie in bed, trying to feel my way into what it could be talking about. Quickly scanning my waking life, I'm unable to find anything close to that level of trauma. Instead, my first and almost immediate association is to a conversation we had over dinner the night before last about the current state of the U.S. economy. Congress had recently passed the "stimulus package" and commentators were talking about attempts to bring the economy in for "a soft landing" rather than have the stock market "crash" like it did it 1929.

During that conversation I picked up the current (February 2008) issue of Harper's Magazine and showed folks the cover story -- "The Next Bubble: Priming the markets for tomorrow's big crash." In the table of contents, the article is described as, "a thorough examination of our terrifying bubble-based economy."

Here are several short passages from the story:

"A financial bubble is a market aberration manufactured by government, finance, and industry, a shared speculative hallucination and then a crash, followed by depression."

"Our economy is in serious trouble. Both the production-consumption sector and the FIRE [finance, insurance, real estate] sector know that a debt-deflation Armageddon is nigh, and both are praying for a timely miracle, a new bubble to keep the economy from slipping into a depression."

"Given the current state of our economy, the only thing worse than a new bubble would be its absence."

Dreams are elusive, kaleidoscopic creatures. In the days following "The Crash Of American Airlines" I have continued to mine the dream for rich (and more personal) associations. Yet I still find my initial, spontaneous associations to be deeply evocative.

------------

THE THIRD REICH OF DREAMS

Here is the complete excerpt mentioned above from "Healing Dreams" (Chapter 6, The Dream Society, Page 168, 169) concerning Charlotte Beradt's "The Third Reich of Dreams":

http://www.nhne.com/misc/healingdreams.html

"What if a dream is confined within the individual psyche, never to escape? In a book entitled 'The Third Reich of Dreams', the German journalist Charlotte Beradt catalogued the dream lives of three hundred of her fellow citizens during the rise of Nazism. She found that while her informants felt constrained to go along with the devastating rending of the Weimar social fabric, their dreams were telling the dark parallel story.

"Beradt heard the first dream that alarmed her in 1933, three days after Hitler seized power. Her acquaintance Herr S., an industrialist, dreamed that propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels visited his factory and had all workers line up in two rows facing each other. Herr S., who employed many Social Democrats who had opposed Hitler's rise, was forced to stand before them all and raise his arm in the Nazi salute. Goebbels watched him impassively as it 'took me half an hour to get my arm up, inch by inch.' Finally when he did manage, 'Goebbels said coldly 'I don't want your salute' and turned on his heel out the door. There I stood in my own factory arm raised, pilloried right in the midst of my own people. I was only able to keep from collapsing by staring at his clubfoot as he limped out. And so I stood until I woke up.'

"The dream, says Beradt, 'swept him off his self-made foundations, destroyed his sense of identity and left him disoriented.' It recurred again and again, each time with humiliating new details -- in one, Herr S. found himself struggling to lift his arm until his backbone literally broke. Such nightmares, she began to suspect, were becoming common, yet remained each dreamer's private hell. The atmosphere was becoming so poisoned, the ground so treacherous, that people were afraid to tell each other their dreams.

"Until she was compelled to leave the country in 1939, Beradt continued to compile her dream history. She quietly asked the people she normally came in contact with to tell her their dreams -- dressmakers, neighbors, an aunt, the mailman -- without revealing her purpose. She had to write her notes in code, camouflaging them as family anecdotes (Hitler, Goering, and Goebbels became "Unde Hans, Uncle Gusta, and Uncle Gerhard") and hiding them in the bindings of books scattered throughout her large private library.

"Beradt's work sheds light on the power of truth that Healing Dreams wield, and how, to society's tragic loss, that power can be reduced to a voice crying in the wilderness..."

"These dreams remarkably prefigured many of the horrors that were not yet manifest -- the subversion of medicine into torture and human experimentation; the elimination of the unfit and racially 'impure'; the contempt for civil procedure; the breakdown of individual psychological autonomy, allowing evil to run rampant. The uniqueness of these dreams, Beradt noted, is that they were not produced by conflicts in private life or personal psychological wounds but in response to a pubic realm of lies and imminent violence. Before the totalitarian ruthlessness of the Nazis was fully revealed -- when, as she wrote, 'the regime was still treading lightly' -- many already knew the facts in their dreams.

"It struck Beradt that the dreams tended to be unusually straightforward: 'These dreams adopt forms and guises which are no more complicated than the ones used in caricature or political satire, and the masks they assume are just as transparent as those worn at carnivals...'"

"She was amazed that even seemingly unexceptional people were envisioning the 'true apparitions of a new order.' 'On the basis of wide-spread experience,' Beradt concluded, 'one can safely assume that a great number of people were plagued by very similar dreams during the Third Reich.'

"Beradt's observations raise an intriguing question: Could countervailing forces arising from the psyche have mitigated fascism before it attained its final, distilled virulence? If pre-Nazi Germany had been honeycombed with grassroots dream groups -- if people had shared their nightmares, spoken them aloud -- would this have acted, in some small way, as an inoculation against totalitarianism, allowing people to draw courage from each others' inner visions?

"Or what if people had simply believed their own dreams? We often think of Nazi Germany as a cautionary tale of the unconscious run rampant, when the civilized ego-structure of a nation is overcome by its unleashed id, and the blind directives of Eros and Thanatos gather the collective force of an avalanche. But might it be more accurate to say its citizens had become deaf to their own unconscious, blind to their own nightmares and mute to the psyche's expression?

"There is one well-documented nightmare that helped a man dare to throw himself before the onrushing juggernaut. Franz Jaegerstetter was an Austrian who, before World War II broke out, publicly refused Nazi conscription, one of the only such cases for which we have a detailed dossier. During his trial, he testified that his actions were inspired by a powerful dream: 'I am in a valley, seeing a great train gathering speed as it comes down a mountain, watching in amazement as hundreds and then thousands and finally millions of people jump on. I am debating doing this myself when a booming voice proclaims, 'This train is going to Hell!' He knew come what may, he could never get aboard this terrible conveyance carrying such a great part of humanity into the abyss. In 1938, with all the barbarous pomp of Prussian militarism, Jaegerstetter was convicted of treason and publicly beheaded."

............

NHNE On Dreams & Inner Guidance