A few days ago we could read in The Guardian, that in these times of lockdown people dream more than usual. Or, as is always the case when dreaming is mentioned, remember more of their dreams. Or, as I always think in discussions about this, ‘a bit of both’.

Apparently a recurring theme many people have in their dreams at the moment are plagues of insects. This could of course have something to do with their biblical memories. We seem to live in a time of disasters, and who hasn’t heard of the plagues of Egypt.

On the other hand we see severe plagues of locusts scourging East Africa these months.

I am convinced there is a more direct link to what we are, even if only unconsciously, experiencing at the moment.

We, humans, have devastated the earth like plagues of locusts devastate the landscape they travel through….

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On small scale one can see that when we look at a busy beach after a summer’s day, a field after a pop festival, or even just a shopping area on a Saturday evening before the swift and silent cleaning up afterwards. We’re civilised, places must look never scourged after we’ve left!

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On a large scale we can see this everywhere : motorways, industrial agriculture, towns consisting of glass and concrete, ski slopes, ports, the recently fast growing business areas, airports that get vaster and vaster, gigantic mines now occurring in the remotest parts of our earth, and that’s not all.

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These are only part of the landscape where we behave like a plague, we do it wherever we go. Which is all over the planet by now. These places may look ordered and tidy and ‘good’ to us, but for the natural biodiversity of our planet they are lethal. Since unfortunately we are also dependant on a reasonably diverse planet, we seem to be committing suicide here as corona, but also earlier unprecedented fires and floods in all corners of earth, show.

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This unwittingly devastating locust like behaviour seems now to break out into our collective unconsciousness—– hence the dreams of plagues of insects.

These dreams are about us.

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