What was the latest climate catastrophe to hit the planet, or Brazil, or your own country, community, or neighborhood? By the time my words reach your eyes and ears, yet another extreme weather event may have struck us. And it’s not only the direct victims who are affected emotionally. So we find ourselves asking: Do we have time? Can we still dream?

It was feeling this pain that drove me to dream. This text found its way to life as I lay stirring, in that moment between sleep and consciousness. My first dream came in the form of music, and a few lines from singer-songwriter Paulinho Moska’s “O Último Dia“ (The last day) got stuck in my head: “My love, what would you do if you only had one day left? If the world were to end, tell me what would you do?”

What would we do, and what would we lose, if there were no tomorrow? Would we go on, stop…or embrace? Embrace the joys of instant gratification? Of hedonistic pleasure? Would we stop in fear, sadness, or resignation?

I focused on these lines that kept playing over and over in my head. If there is no tomorrow, can we do anything? Can we wish for things? Can we still dream?

The lyrics made me ask how it was that we have so quickly shrunk the time the world has left. I invite you to ponder these questions with me: What made us shift from denial, or from “climate change is a future problem,” to “it’s all over, done for, the end of the world”?

And that brings me to the second act of my awakening. The São Paulo sky was engulfed by smoke at the height of the wildfires, when I woke up with a thought in my head. I jotted the idea down in a book on my bedside table and went back to sleep. In the morning I read, “The subversive choice of dreaming.”

I had written this line on the last page of a book recently translated into Portuguese by Tiganá Santana, African Cosmology of the Bântu-Kôngo—Tying the Spiritual Knot: Principles of Life & Living, by Fu-Kiau, an eminent Congolese scholar of African philosophies. I didn’t know he talked about dreams in this book. In Bântu-Kôngo cosmologies, the word for “dream interpreter” can also mean “someone who goes deep into the heart.” This person interprets the community’s dreams and takes some of them to a community council as well. Fu-Kiau tells us our dreams contain warnings and messages; through them, the philosopher says, we learn about health, politics, people, the place where we live, and the present, past, and future. We need dreams to think about “the future of humanity and the world,” Fu-Kiau tells us.

I was introduced to this author’s writings by a dear friend, Veridiana Machado, who likewise introduced me to Tempo, or Time. In Candomblé Bântu, this Time is a nkisi, or divine being, “among the most beautiful gods,” as Caetano Veloso sings in “Oração ao Tempo” (Prayer to time).

I first encountered this nkisi Time in Salvador, Bahia, in 2012. It was August 10, his festival day, and I realized that when Time is sacred, we respect it, don’t rush it, and don’t trample it. Time doesn’t end, it spirals, according to Brazilian poet Leda Maria Martins. It is the beginning, middle, and beginning, as philosopher Antônio Bispo taught us. In his song “Tempo-Rei,” Gilberto Gil sings to the Time-King: “Look how murky the waters suddenly get […] Now everything might hang by a thread.” And it is to Time, “the rhythm of all drums,” that Gil appeals: “Transform our old ways of living.”

A few years ago, I invited my friend Veridiana to talk about Time, proposing she approach the topic from the perspective of Candomblé Bântu, while I would use the logical time of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. During our conversation, Veridiana said, “I think my ancestors resisted because they thought in terms of this Time, because they knew Time would end for them but they would continue within us.” We fight and resist when we know this.

Our time is made up of yesterdays, and futures necessarily depend on us. Chronological linearity makes us believe time is a line moving forward, as if we knew what had been and we had some control over what would come—a notion as arrogant as it is delusional. This is yet another ruse devised by Western subjectivity, flattening our experience of the world.

Right now, as we live through a critical time that demands immediate action and radical changes, I believe it is fundamental to think about Time. If we can open ourselves up to temporalities rooted in other cultures, it will help us reflect on this shrinkage of time we are suddenly experiencing.

Not a single scientist, environmentalist, or community representative has said, “It’s over, we can give up,” and so it is curious how we currently hear more talk about the “end of the world” than about Ailton Krenak’s ideas to postpone the world’s end. In a similar vein, world-renowned climate scientist Carlos Nobre recently said: “We have to feel encouraged; we can’t surrender the future of the planet, the future of our generations.” But newspaper headlines picked up just one sentence: “The disease of planet Earth is us, humanity.”

Highlighting these particular words isn’t fair to Carlos Nobre, who knows the problem isn’t humanity as a whole but our economic system and the process of colonization—a way of life that exploits and exterminates everything that differs from it, killing off the forest in myriad ways. Blaming humanity in general rather than holding to account the criminals—who need to be named—makes it impossible to punish them and invisibilizes the part of humanity that has resisted, sustaining worlds and building forests.

It is also important to say we cannot fall prey to blaming individuals. Our precarious notion of time is linked to colonialism’s dissemination of a narrow understanding of the world, of monocultures, which individualizes our bodies, attacks community-building, and generates ever more misery.

When we lose our sense of community, it is much easier for us to succumb to the feeling of resignation that has gripped so many today. Indeed, if we try to take on a planetary-scale problem alone, nothing is possible. This is why it may be vital for us to listen to the forest, which knows what differences can produce.

Gabriela Alves is a partner in the Dream Workshops we hold for socio-environmental activists and a co-founder of Perifa Sustentável, or Sustainable Periphery, an institute that mobilizes young people from Brazil’s poor urban areas to fight for racial and environmental justice. One day when we were talking about dreams and resistance, Gabriela told me, “Mari, we need to look at Terra Preta de Índio [Amazonian black earth].” Over thousands of years, this highly fertile soil was produced by Amerindian peoples in the Amazon region through multispecies collaboration with both living and nonliving beings. That’s right, a soil formed from remains, ashes, scraps of food, dead animals, dry leaves, and ceramic shards, all of which ultimately resulted in an even more fertile compost thousands of years later. What was this humanity’s experience of time, this past humanity whose work lingers today, still looking after a humanity who came along much later?

Many recent studies have shown that part of the Amazon Forest is a product of human action, and its biodiversity is intimately tied to the diversity of the peoples who lived on and managed this land—as they still do. It was this humanity, comprising various peoples, who built this place that is now essential to our staying alive. This humanity knows how to compose worlds. So when Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, representative of the rainforest, says we have to dream to hold up the sky, what might happen if we took his summons seriously?

My research on how the climate emergency has affected people’s subjectivity began in 2019, the first year of Brazil’s most recent far-right government. By 2022, we were already suffering many visible effects of global heating, but it wasn’t talked about as widely as today. I wondered why not. Why so much silence? Do you suppose people are dreaming what they aren’t ready to see?

What’s more, considering the anticipatory power of dreams, could they help us experience what is yet to come?

Since dreams defy borders and subvert categories, allowing me to be a tree or fly like an Eagle; since they have no beginning, middle, or end and let me feel feelings that aren’t mine, could they open us up to valuable ways of facing this moment and engaging in a cause that can only be collective? Could dreams help us forge bonds, rebuild communities, and heal the Nature-Culture rift and so many other binary perspectives that have frayed our subjectivity?

During the pandemic or even before, in times of war, many groups recognized the social dimension of our dreams and heard them as unconscious witnesses to a time. Then it occurred to me: if people are dreaming about what we are now living through on the planet, it might be worthwhile to create a network to share this content. People are already experiencing the threats of global heating but from a position of powerlessness, and we need to know we are not suffering or dreaming alone.

This is how the Jacarandá Dream Sharing Network came about, a project dedicated to listening to “world dreams” by giving people a space where they could tell others their dreams and also contribute to a shared compilation of these collective visions.

Because we wanted to reach an audience beyond the walls of academe, I had trouble finding a name for the project. After thinking about it a while, I realized I had to dream the name.

Very generously, a dream visited me that same night.

I was at home with family members and strangers, all standing around and talking, glasses in hand, like we were at a cocktail party. Suddenly a huge shimmering Snake appeared in the room, its skin a geometrical pattern of purples and pinks. I was puzzled because I knew it was a spirit being, but I was also terrified. I kept looking at the closed window, the closed door, and wondering how it had snuck in.

As the Snake was walking around the room, I shouted, “It’s a Jacarandá [Brazilian rosewood tree]! A Jacarandá!” But nobody heard me. Then the Snake slowly devoured a piece of the house and left. I tried to get people to notice what had just happened, but everyone kept on talking, standing there distracted, cocktails in hand. The Snake came back, and I yelled, “Can’t you see it? It’s a Jacarandá!”

The Snake ate another chunk of the house and left again. When I opened my mouth to warn that the Snake would return and devour us once there was nothing else left to swallow, I woke up.

In this dream, I saw a Snake but named a tree. I tried to get people’s attention, yelling that our house was being devoured—and nobody listened to me. Everyone went on enjoying the party, while I was all alone in my despair.

Sometimes we want to forget nightmares, but both psychoanalysis and Indigenous communities agree it’s better not to keep bad dreams to yourself. Many of the dreams received through our Jacarandá project reach a level of terror that wakes the dreamer.

Our dreams often make us see before we understand, putting images to the horror, the trauma, before we’re able to talk about it. And these images frame the unthinkable we have been living through.

Record temperatures, the Amazon on fire—I repeat, the Amazon on fire—and its rivers drying up. Flames reaching our windows. Cities flooded like never before—I repeat, like never before. The surreal and science fiction have penetrated real, everyday life, and we can’t normalize it. We must think about how to face it without getting sick or wanting to escape.

In addition to letting us glimpse things even before we live through them, having someone with whom to share our dreams can play a fundamental role in working through trauma: the role of bearing witness. I listen to the horror you are experiencing and acknowledge it. Trauma’s power stems not only from the tragedy itself but from the fact one lives it alone, in emotional and representational helplessness.

We will need spaces where we can talk about this. Trauma will occur more often and become increasingly collective. It will be crucial to listen to the pain of those who have lived through or suffered the threat of a climate catastrophe. But we need to go further. Recognition isn’t just a matter of finding an ear. It is imperative we take into account that witnessing becomes effective when there is accountability.

There’s a dangerous risk in calling this era the Anthropocene, in saying humanity has done this to the planet. If humanity is to blame, we all deserve to be punished. But no, the highest rates of greenhouse gas emissions, which cause global heating, stem from the production and use of fossil fuels. Petroleum, oil, and natural gas corporations; soy, beef, and palm oil companies; and mining, pesticides, and ultra-processed foods are destroying the planet. Their main shareholders are billionaires and super-millionaires, people with first and last names, who concentrate ever more global wealth with each year of collapse. In Brazil, the biggest contributor to emissions is land (ab)use, deforestation. In addition to corporations, most of which fly the flags of countries in the Global North, there are big ranchers, land grabbers, and large landowners who burn the forest to make pasture and produce soy and palm oil or simply to speculate on the land.

What we are living through constitutes a case of unrecognized abuse. Negligent, slow-moving public policies and indifference to warnings from scientists and forest-peoples aggravate the traumatic potential of what we are experiencing now and will in the future. But, as I said, arguing that humanity is to blame is yet another form of abuse, because most of humanity is now suffering the consequences of what only a fraction of humanity has done.

It’s not humanity as a whole driving us to extinction. There are many people who resist through their ways of life and many people who are seeking alternative ways of living, wanting to form bonds and communities.

And this is where dreams emerge once again, offering themselves as a subversive choice. A concern with caring for others also appears in the dreams we have received in our Jacarandá network. “I had to warn people” is accompanied by a feeling of impotence: “I tried but they wouldn’t listen.”

I also remember a dream I heard from a psychoanalytic client of mine who is an Indigenous leader of the Wapichana people. In her dream, she had heard noises that sent shivers down her spine. I asked her what kind of noise, and she told me it had sounded like trumpets announcing the apocalypse. She had felt very scared but then had noticed there was a newborn baby in her arms, and she needed to take care of it. Somehow, she would have to focus on taking care of the baby and not let the noise distract her.

I thought back to my dream where the sky was filled with smoke. When I told colleagues of mine about it, some of them said, “Yeah, it’s the end of the world.” And a friend commented, “If I had children, it would be much worse.”

The night before, I must confess, I had cried while watching my sleeping son. Many people are now saying they don’t want to have children for fear of the future. And I ask myself: How can we create a world in which our children are not just our children? How can love and responsibility expand parenthood?

Sandra Benites, a Guarani mother, researcher, and activist, said in an interview: “As long as women dream of their children, of living beings yet to come, we will resist.” The knowledge and wisdom shared by Sandra Benites and her kin teach us that when we say “it takes a village to raise a child,” it isn’t just a group of people that is needed but cosmologies where parenting enfolds many other children—and not only them but trees, animals, fruit, water, air, land. When I learned that rafts of sunflowers had been sent to Chernobyl so radioactive water from the nuclear power plant could be filtered, I realized the powerful ways parenting and kinship might enable us to regenerate the world we live in.

In one of my first meetings in 2022 with the young Wapichana woman I mentioned earlier, she told me she had spent the night on fire, burning: “Mariana, I was crying like a jaguar; I was screaming [in my dream].” When she woke up, she learned the forest was ablaze kilometers away and told me, “When the forest is on fire, my body burns.”

The pain of the forest is hers as well, and she teaches me this pain is also ours. We must urgently expand our understanding of what it means to be human and what we can achieve together.

A forest is friction and interaction. Our body is not one. Our body is permeated not only by a language system but by many living beings, and we only survive because this infinity of other beings exists inside us. Entire communities sustain our bodies, and everything we are is a metamorphosis of what we once were. We are the result of multiple beings and times, and to truly grasp this, we may need the help of our dreams.

All I’ve said has been woven through by the words and writings of many people, because to confront this time, we really need the company of many types of knowledge. And so I am sustained by a forest of references that includes Davi Kopenawa, Antônio Bispo, Ailton Krenak, Kaká Werá, Txai Suruí, Eliane Brum, Sandra Benites, Hanna Limulja, Ilana Katz, Sidarta Ribeiro, Donna Haraway, Lucila de Jesus, Gabi Alves, Miguel Bairrão—and also Édouard Glissant, a poet and writer born in Martinique who defended a poetics of diversity with a twist: while he fought for the end of oppressive colonialism and for the recognition of the pain it has brought, he also called for an affirmation of creation, pleasure, and joy as vital forces.

This isn’t the end, but we are living in a critical time that depends a lot on our active presence in how the metamorphosis of this planet plays out. Not a crisis in the sense of a passing predicament but of a complex crossroads where our actions must be swift while also entailing structural changes. This is not a simple task. But our dreams might just help us dream the forest and open up to other Times.