Big Dreams Part III: The Apocalypse

“The book of Revelations is the strangest book in the Bible, and the most controversial. Instead of stories and moral teachings, it offers only visions – dreams and nightmares, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, earthquakes, plagues, and war. “

— Elaine Pagels

In 2015, I sat straight up in bed out of a deep sleep. There were no images of the “dream,” only this phrase in its entirety:

“When you see the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse coming,

turn your eyes inward and start a new civilization in your belly.”

I was raised as a secular Jewish kid without any religious education. The “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” is not my language. In Christian mythology, this is the symbolic language of “end times” in the book of Revelations, a 2000-year-old myth that says there will be an apocalypse when the original boundaries of Israel are restored; only then would Christ return.

The first White Horseman brings pestilence: at the beginning of the pandemic, in March 2020, I woke in the middle of the night, anxious for our son and for the people in New York, which was ground zero of the first wave of COVID-19 in the United States. I went onto a tarot site and electronically pulled cards from the Shaman Tarot, a deck not familiar to me. The images showed the city of New York, a nightmarish vision of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse over a sick bed, and another horrifying image of people falling off of collapsing structures. However, what struck me is that each nightmarish image was accompanied by a form of medicine: banging the medicine drum, praying to the great medicine shield in the sky, and a boat sailing over the city which illustrates transcending the horrors. Tarotpy is a shamanic practice; like the image of a snake encircling the world, it is a way of holding prayer for the world.

The Red Horseman brings chaos and strife. In witnessing the tragic events unfolding in Israel and Gaza, I see the myth of “the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” playing out in the exact location where the biblical prophecy is supposed to take place.

There is a great problem inherent in following a 2000-year-old prophecy or myth: the archetypal power of mythology shapes our destiny. Richard Clarke, the American National Security Chief, said that 9/11 was “a failure of imagination.” We could say the same about all the issues that we face in current times. From a dualistic and limited perspective, we cannot solve the problems of limited resources, wars, famine, climate change, the rise of demagogues, etc. But one can change the operating myth in a culture.

From the dream’s intelligence, there is a call to go inward and birth a new myth to live by, one that is birthed out of the Divine Feminine. 

The weekend before the 2016 elections, another big and disturbing “whale” dream came:

I am in a basement and hear a high-pitched scream. I discover an aquarium with two-foot-thick glass. A huge father whale is dead at the bottom of the aquarium, his skin having turned powdery white. A baby girl whale is shrieking and pounding up against him over and over trying to awaken him. It’s a heart-wrenching scene.

I woke from the dream knowing that something had gone terribly wrong. I didn’t exactly know what, but I said aloud, “This is the death of the great father.” Two days later, Donald Trump won the presidency, to the shock of many who had been assured that Hillary Clinton would win.  

I threw the Toltec I Ching following the election. The reading said: “There is nobility in a failed leadership. He was only there to accelerate the transition from the old to the new.” It added, “But the damage that will be done to institutions will take decades to undo.”

If the American Empire is meant to fall (as all empires eventually do, because the universe requires balance), then who better than Donald Trump, the human wrecking ball, to do the job?

It is important to state that empire collapse is not the end of the world, nor the end of a nation. There are many examples of empires that have collapsed yet continue to exist as nations and countries. We might transition more kindly and gently if we surrender our “exceptionalism” to a greater worldview.

We are reaching an endpoint that requires us to recognize the power of imagination to shape the material world. Perhaps we can all call upon our dreams for a new vision for civilization, one that balances the Divine Masculine and Feminine energies.