I was half asleep when I first heard news of the Asian earthquake, and didn't think much about it. It might have been a dream. Later I was moved by the images of desolation and suffering, but was first transfixed by the figures. I tried to picture waves travelling at 500 miles an hour; 5,000 dead, 10,000 and rising. What does it mean for the earth to wobble on its axis (by an inch)? I watched with autistic fascination as the stats and graphics rolled out, but in time grew weary with the numbers. Rising death tolls, I suspect, give a perverse, unacknowledged satisfaction to some observers and I began to question my own fixation with the figures. Some things we reveal to ourselves only "under a pledge of secrecy" said Dostoevsky; other things not at all. I caught myself hopping casually between news and sports channels. Their common obsession with statistics was troubling. On either side of the reality divide, well-groomed presenters were giving the latest score and I was blithely collating the data. It took a single image to jolt me from my sterile fascination. A man, waist-deep in water, faced the camera. He bore an infant corpse as if it were an offering. It was not the grief-contorted face of the father that got to me so much as the oblivious beauty of the son.
The tsunami stirred something else lying dormant in the shadowlands of my psyche. I often dream of the ocean. Indeed, the night before this great catastrophe I found myself in a turbulent sea being tossed through the spray by waves as steep and grey as church roofs. For years I had the archetypal tsunami nightmare. I'd be standing on the beach and a rolling swell would surge from the horizon, rising up to a sheer wall of water. I'd run frantically as the shadow of the wave overtook me. I never survived. Giant waves are a universal dream theme, like flying or falling or finding oneself naked in a public place. These dreams resonate with primordial emotion—joy, fear, shame. You can, if you choose, delve into the particulars of symbolic content, but I'd rather not. It too often leads to penile flames and vaginal fireplaces. But the force of archetypal dreams is compelling. People down the ages and across the globe have flown, fallen and fled through the same dreamscapes. The residue of such dreams can colour waking consciousness for days to follow. Why nakedness? Why ocean waves? There are a hundred other ways of representing impotence or loss, all more consistent with the experience of modern living. Nothing in my personal history predisposes me to dream of tsunamis. I was raised in a midlands town about as far from the coast as it is possible to be on this island, and my earliest experience of the sea was Blackpool beach, which is not known for its rip-curling surf. Since they are built mostly from the materials of experience, there are many kinds of dream and there is great cultural variation in dream content. But archetypal dreams seem to stem from ancient phyletic programmes, from layers of the mind laid down at the dawn of human consciousness before the partition of nature and culture. They are as fundamental as the expression of emotion.
The tsunami tragedy has inspired unprecedented global compassion. There are different ways to account for this. The scale of the disaster is itself extreme in terms of lives lost and the geographical span of destruction. The latter gives it a global aspect. It is our shared home that wobbles. Saturation news coverage has ensured that most sentient heads on the planet are filled with the images and stories of personal despair and, yes, the tiresome, perturbing numbers to multiply them by. This was also a natural disaster of an unusual, startling kind. Novelty, for want of a better term, draws attention (one could imagine an asteroid impact having comparable effects for the same reasons). But, beyond this, perhaps the tsunami, an awesome physical manifestation of an archetypal dream, has also flooded the deepest vaults of the collective unconscious, stirring ancient relics of our common humanity. The things that move us are not always explicit.
Most dreams are shaped by recent personal experience rather than shared evolutionary history. They deal in everyday hopes and fears. But mundane content sometimes masks surprising subtlety. When it is not painting archetypal landscapes, the unconscious mind is busy sketching cartoons. It has wit and irony in its repertoire and can be gently mocking. I was discussing the tsunami with one of my colleagues, a Christian. I told her that my reaction to the clerics and theologians parading before us to defend their God had surprised me. I was amused. Their surreal logic was, in the circumstances, beyond indignation. It turned comic against the backdrop of epic tragedy. "You see this as an act of God, don't you?" said a radio interviewer to one distinguished theologian. "Certainly," he said. "God tests us." I really did smile at the time, but now I was becoming prickly with my colleague for defending the theologian's position. That's frankly loony, I told her. She said I was intolerant. I just had no patience when it came to religion. That night I dreamed I was working at the hospital. There were doctors, nurses and receptionists, but the wards and waiting rooms were empty. True, I had no patients. It's time for us to test God.
