Reflections on Violence:
Dreaming Into the Collective

Karen Jaenke

In a phenomenon identified by C.G. Jung as collective dreams, individuals dream about culturally-shared realities. “A dream with collective meaning is valid in the first place for the dreamer, but it expresses at the same time the fact that this momentary problem is also a problem of other people…. Every individual problem is also the problem of the age….” (Jung, Collected Works 10, par. 323). Such dreams have a collective meaning and people instinctively want to share them.

This column, Dreaming Into the Collective, foregrounds the special wisdom of dreams in illuminating our common cultural concerns. The column aims to tap into the wisdom of dreaming in addressing today’s unprecedented societal and global issues. The shift in the Western orientation so urgently needed in our times, called the Great Turning by Joanna Macy and David Korten, refers to an epic shift from a 5000-year era of empires and earth domination to a new era of earth community; it can be fostered by attending to the undervalued perspectives of nighttime dream knowledge.

When war suddenly broke out in Ukraine  in February 2022, and again in Gaza in October 2023, many of us were shocked and rocked to the core. After over a half century of relative peace in Europe, it was disturbing to witness unprovoked violence inflicted upon the innocent people of Ukraine, who happen to inhabit a territory falling under the conquest designs of a power-crazed dictator next door. The fragile relations between Israel and Gaza harbors deep unresolved, centuries-old regional, cultural, religious and political conflicts. And now the United States has entered the fray of international conflict, exercising its own muscle of aggression by inflicting war on Iran, further destabilizing the region and the entire global economy. With no global agreement, international law, or structure in place to prevent egregious aggression by those willing to unleash it, we sit at our screens watching the daily violence of a society being bombed and torn to shreds. Tragically, to date, there is no collective muscle stronger than the will of a single despot or band of thugs.

Remembering the deeper historical context, these regions are soaked in human blood spilled in wars fought over religious, territorial, political and ideological battles. In European history, periods of peace regularly alternated with war. Violence intrudes all around: In 2023, mass shootings now occur on average two times per week in the gun-crazed US, police violence against people of color is a regular occurrence—the visible tip of the proverbial iceberg of a much longer history of violence against non-Western & Indigenous peoples all over the world. An epidemic of violence is emerging; most of the mainstream nightly news stories involve reports of violence.

My nervous system is particularly sensitive to violence, as I came into the world through the aperture of violence. The doctor who delivered me administered a heavy dose of Pitocin to my mother in order to forcibly induce my birth, albeit for no medical reason. I was violently expunged from the womb. Violence entered my cellular memory, sitting there uneasily.

While struggling to metabolize the steady stream of media images of violence, I searched for thought leaders who might place these latest unthinkable conflicts in some larger perspective, perhaps an evolutionary framework, conferring some further meaning enabling me to metabolize my abhorrence of human brutality. Then a dream appeared, offering a depth perspective on violence in our species and world.

I am co-teaching a class with a close colleague about our relationship with the land. One of the course exercises asks students to take two parallel walks mindfully through the woods, sensing with their bodies the difference between the two places. The first path has incurred heavy human foot traffic as well as human intrusion to the natural environment, the cutting and removing of trees for commercial purposes.

The second walk meanders through undisturbed woods, unaltered by human presence; it exists in its original, natural state without any signs of human interference whatsoever. The class exercise intends for students to sense qualitatively, in their bodies, the difference between these two places. And now I too am sensing the difference, as the second place pulls me from ordinary awareness, dropping me into a deep embodied interiority, silence and stillness. I feel the intricacy of the subtle energies of the forest, pulsing, communicating, breathing. And this vibrating aliveness, pure original presence, also pulses with vulnerability, the vulnerability of potential violation.

The dream awakens a sense of sacred depth, repositioning my awareness within my belly center, while providing a portal into unsullied nature, a place of pure creative presence, free of any intruding disturbances. The original flow of life energy is seamless, sparkling with vitality. The dream place calls to mind a walk taken two decades earlier in a remote rainforest in New Zealand. That virgin forest, barely grazed by Maori and other human footprints, emits a symphony of waterdrops, played on the strings of gravity, a dripping surround-sound, within the sheltering tangle of fecund plant life. Nearby shimmering streams provide background humming, everything wet, entangled, undisturbed, intact, pulsing with life force.

Yet the dream conveys a stark truth—to be alive, to partake of living embodiment in any form, brings a vulnerability to violence. The possibility of being violated is inherent within the vibrant, pulsating gift of life. The pristine, unviolated place contrasts starkly with all places altered by human activity. The light footfalls of those who may have passed through before are qualitatively faint in comparison with the heavy-handed intrusions of resource extraction found elsewhere.

In those now-rare places untainted by human intrusion or disturbance, something qualitatively distinct appears. Such places radiate a sparkling aliveness and tender vibrancy, a vital potency sufficient to quiet and still the restless human ego. They douse the human psyche in a faintly-remembered atmosphere of non-violence, eliciting silent awe. The shimmering vitality of these rare, uncorrupted places is akin to entering the first day of creation, partaking of the presence of pure creation, shimmering with the original intent of the creator.

Nature is the always container for human existence. Yet the dream distinguishes between two types of places on earth, those essentially unaltered by human presence, and those intruded upon and violated by the colonial and “civilizing” move, with heavy violence towards original inhabitants and extraction of natural resources. Today, the former are few and far between; in particular, Western culture’s overreaching and overrunning the land has all but extinguished these untouched topographies that once pulsed with rich, entangled biodiversity. For most of us, to enter a virgin forest unaltered by human trammeling presents a rare and exceptional experience. Instead, we’ve grown accustomed to places where human alteration and violation reigns supreme. Today we mainly exist within the unquestioned, unremarkable norm of physical environments that are either stamped with human imprint, or entirely remade, man-made, paved over with concrete platforms and dense superstructures that tower over the once bare land, filled with bustling human activity, entirely severed from the natural world. Even our memory of untarnished spaces is faint and distant.

Yet the dreaming remembers, calling up a verdant place never disrespected or violated by homo sapiens, thereby casting a laser beam across our routinely standardized, normative experience of an altered, violated, banal world. Our human tendency to intrude, alter and violate living nature and living beings in all forms is everywhere to be found—simply normal, and mostly unremarkable.

In an incisive analysis, Jürgen Kremer (2023) sees one of the origin points of violence in Western culture as a violence inflicted “against the self (aka self-colonization, i.e., the left brain seizes colonial power over the rich spectrum of knowing processes that were cherished when the right brain was the master” and dreams were integral to the sense of self. This internal violence “subsequently gets externalized, most recently in the history of colonialism in its various incarnations,” with routine violence against native peoples.

The path taken by the West rejects a fundamental entangled intimacy with the world, refuses human embeddedness in the web of life, thus making a cut in the natural intra-action of mind and matter (Kremer, 2023). This dissociative move, or cut, separates the normative Western self from awareness and perception of the mind-matter interchange; at bottom, there is a violence against our human embodiment in the web of life, that begins internally in a severing within the self, a splitting between the linear logic of left brain processes and right brain visionary, imagistic knowing, and meaning making. In this progressive and cumulative psycho-historical process, “each rejection of entanglement, each small act of violence [against holistic knowing processes] constitutes a loss, a continuously self-inflicted wound leading over time to the strongly boundaried and masterful self idealized in the contemporary West” (Kremer, 2023).Thus, “a largely unconscious trauma… structures the attentional processes of the (post)modern self”, with the ultimate result of our species destroying life on the planet, while internally suffering a stasis in self process, a reification (Kremer, 2023).

Probing for the origins of the deep-seated violence within the Western world leads to the internal dynamics of violence and the dissociative effects of trauma in the psyche. The healing of violence in our collective life, then requires attending to the underlying unconscious trauma, along with the dissociative cuts that sever awareness and attention from deep body knowing and entangled intimacy with the web of life. The dynamics of violence is a dialectic between intra-psychic and collective dimensions.

It is helpful to remember that in contrast to the normative violence enshrined in the West, some native cultures were and are actually oriented and organized around peace as a central guiding value. According to Apela (Pamela) Colorado of the Iroquois nation, “The end point of an indigenous scientific process is a known and recognized place. This point of balance, referred to by my own tribe as the Great Peace, is both peaceful and electrifyingly alive. In the joy of exact balance, creativity occurs, which is why we can think of our way of knowing as a life science” (Colorado, 1994).

Similarly for the Navajo, life is oriented towards hózhó, which translates as beauty, harmony and balance. According to Benally (1987, p. 139), “The ultimate goals of Navajo life are: First, to seek and establish the state of hózhó; and secondly, to learn behavior appropriate to that state of hózhó. Hózhó appears to be a life where peaceful words (hózhóóji saad) are spoken, peaceful thought (hózhóogo ntsáhákees) exists and tranquil society (hózhóogo da’iiná) exists.”

While acknowledging that all humans are capable of violence, my dream points to two different pathways, two distinct possibilities, that humans can take. One makes violence part of normativity, the other envisions peace and strives for balance. The forest unsullied by humans is a forest that is pristine because humans honor all ways of knowing, including dreams, and their entanglements with nature.

References

Colorado, Pamela. (1994). Indigenous science and western science: a healing convergence. Presentation at the World Sciences Dialog I, New York City, April 25-27, 1994.

Benally, H. J. (1987). Diné bo’óhoo’aah bhindii’a’. Diné Be’iina’—A Journal of Navajo Life, 1(1), 133-148.

Jung, C. G.(1982).Civilization in Transition, Vol. 10, Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press.

Kremer, J. W. (2026). Dreaming—Out on the shimmering edges of self.  ReVision, 35(2), 40-58.