The Climate Crisis is Changing How we Dream
Hello there :)
Welcome to issue sixty nine of Manufacturing Serendipity, a loosely connected, somewhat rambling collection of the unexpected things I’ve recently encountered.
This newsletter is free to receive, but expensive to make :)
If you’d like to support me, and can afford to do so, please consider buying me a coffee. Your support means the world to me, and keeps this newsletter free for everyone.
Speaking of coffee, grab yourself a suitable beverage my loves, let’s do this thing...
Part I: Things I’ve Discovered Online
Climate Change Is Changing How We Dream
Journalist, Kyla Mandel notes:
“Every now and then, society collectively experiences the same moment to such an acute degree that it changes our dreams. The pandemic certainly did this, as have world wars and 9/11. The question is whether enough people are feeling climate change acutely enough that it is systemically infiltrating our dreams at a population-level.”
Friends, it seems that the climate crisis is indeed changing our dreams. Mandel kicks things off by referencing the Martha Crawford’s Climate Dreams Project — an online space where people can share climate dream anecdotes:
“One dream submitted to the collection was of people digging holes in the desert so that the rising seas would have somewhere to go. In another contribution, a Flood Football game was underway, and in the second half, players were floating on inner-tubes. Another person, who shared four climate dreams, recounted one in which billions of people were funneling into a giant room that looked like a video-game sports arena, but large enough to hold the world’s population. “At the end of the dream, the entire face of the earth was different,” they wrote. “It was completely icy and the only habitable part was a giant plateau with a city on it.”
Mandel then goes on to talk about a survey commissioned by Time on this topic:
“… According to a survey of 1,009 people conducted by The Harris Poll in June on behalf of TIME, over a third of people in the U.S. have dreamed about climate change at least once in their lives.
The imagery and sensations evoked by these dreams vary widely, according to the survey. Most people’s climate dreams involve extreme weather or natural disasters; fewer are about mosquitoes and locusts or political leaders and laws. The most common emotions reported are fear and stress, except among Millennials who seem to have more hopeful dreams.
The prevalence of climate dreams decreases with age: 56% of people between 18 and 34 years old said they had at least one climate dream in their life compared to 14% of people over the age of 55. Men appear to be dreaming more about climate change than women. And people of color are dreaming about it far more than white people. Together, the data gives us a new perspective on how the country may be feeling about climate change.”
“The majority (57%) of Gen Z and Millennials have dreamed about climate change, according to the survey. That’s compared to 35% of Gen Xers and just 14% of Boomers. One way this split can be interpreted is that, from school lessons to real world events, climate change has been pervasive throughout younger people’s lives in a way it hasn’t been for older generations—and it will continue to define their future.”
“For many people, particularly Gen Zers and Boomers, climate change makes for bad dreams: 44% of Gen Z respondents said their dreams evoked negative emotions (rather than positive or neutral); 41% of Boomers said the same. That’s compared to 24% of Millennials, and 34% of Gen Xers. For both of those generations, positive emotions were far more common; 41% of Gen X respondents, for example, had good climate dreams compared to 35% of Gen Zers and 20% of Boomers.
But no one is having more positive climate dreams than Millennials. In this group, 54% of respondents indicated their dreams had positive emotions. Intriguingly, over a third of Millennials said their dreams involved science—at a rate at least 10 percentage points higher than other generations.
Climate dreams may actually help people feel motivated to protect the world around them, adds Crawford. “Our dreams often show us that we're embedded in an ongoing relationship with our habitat. Now, many of these dreams can strengthen people and help them find hope.”
In one dream submitted to Crawford’s collection, for example, the entrant recounts being asked to give a speech on behalf of a climate scientist: “The auditorium is filled with pictures of different mushrooms and these are important to the scientist’s work. I am asking the audience to reflect on their sense of belonging in the natural world, and their level of grief. There is a theory underlying the lecture about how these two experiences entwine, but it is overall very positive—there is a sense of active hope pulsing through the words and the crowd.”
Mandel also explores how various demographics dream:
“Be it drought or heat waves, hurricanes or flooding, people of color are among the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. And that awareness seems to be reflected in the survey results. Half of all people of color who were surveyed said they had dreamed about climate change at least once in their lives, compared to just 28% of white people.”
“People who self-identified as Conservatives dreamed far less (24%) than those who said they were Liberal (48%). And of those who did have climate dreams, positive dreams were far more likely among Conservatives (60%) than Liberals (45%). This seems to reflect the current national divide when it comes to views on how urgent of a threat climate change is. According to an April survey by Pew, significantly more Democrats, or Democrat-leaning, individuals (78%) view climate change as a major threat to the country’s well-being compared to just a quarter of Republicans.”
“43% of men had dreamed about climate change while just 29% of women had. More men (50%) had positive dreams compared to women (34%). And regardless of whether the dreams were positive or negative, more women (39%) reported dreams about family than men (29%).”
Friends, I have just one criticism of the article — the usage of the term “climate change” as opposed to “climate crisis”. Nevertheless I found it fascinating and would strongly encourage you to check it out.
Moar serendipitous finds:
On Pandering by Claire Vaye Watkins
“I have been reenacting in my artmaking the undying pastime of my girlhood: watching boys, emulating them, trying to catch the attention of the ones who have no idea I exist.
[…]
I wrote Battleborn for white men, toward them. If you hold the book to a certain light, you’ll see it as an exercise in self-hazing, a product of working-class madness, the female strain. So, natural then that Battleborn was well-received by the white male lit establishment: it was written for them. The whole book’s a pander. Look, I said with my stories: I can write old men, I can write sex, I can write abortion. I can write hard, unflinching, unsentimental. I can write an old man getting a boner!”
The Most Iconic Hip-Hop Sample of Every Year (1973-2023)
This is a thirty minute video, but it’s definitely worth your time. The visualisations allow you to see how the various samples were modified, repeated, and layered to create each track. (Warning: NSFW lyrics).
Scientists Should Stop Naming Species after Awful People
And they ought to consider revoking names that never should have been honored in the first place.
Is Britain really as poor as Mississippi?
“It will surprise nobody that London accounts for an outsized share of Britain’s output, but the magnitude of the UK’s economic monopolarity is remarkable.
Removing London’s output and headcount would shave 14 per cent off British living standards, precisely enough to slip behind the last of the US states. Britain in the aggregate may not be as poor as Mississippi, but absent its outlier capital it would be.
By comparison, amputating Amsterdam from the Netherlands would shave off 5 per cent, and removing Germany’s most productive city (Munich) would only shave off 1 per cent. Most strikingly, for all of San Francisco’s opulent output, if the whole of the bay area from the Golden Gate to Cupertino seceded tomorrow, US GDP per capita would only dip by 4 per cent.”
The Least-Streamed Songs by the World’s Most-Streamed Artists
“Back in the dark ages, when you actually had to trudge out to a mall and slap down $20 to buy a CD, it was next to impossible to know which tracks people enjoyed the most on a given album, and which ones they quietly kinda hated. But now that we live in a crazy future where the world’s biggest record store lives in our phone and costs just $9.99 a month to access in full, we know precisely what people are playing and what they’re skipping past…”
Amy Sherald On Bearing Witness, Social Anxiety, and Finding Respite in Her Work
“I remember being frustrated when I was like five, six years old, wanting to make a masterpiece, but I didn’t have the skills. My crayons weren’t giving me Leonardo da Vinci.”
“Portraiture, for me, is having the opportunity to tell a story, to tell my story, to tell our story [as Black people], to have the portrait work in ways that are creating a counter-narrative, a corrective narrative, but then also a narrative that can carry us into our future selves. They have the capacity to be mirrors for today and also vessels to look through to see into the future.”
Part II: Books I’m Reading Right Now
I read a bunch of wonderful books whilst I was away on holiday — here are a few of my favourites:
Things We Say in the Dark, Kirsty Logan - This collection of chilling fairy tale-like short stories shift from the uncanny to the terrifying (and definitely won’t be for everyone) but I loved it.
Our Missing Hearts, Celeste Ng - I devoured this dystopian parable about America’s history of child removal.
Penance, Eliza Clark - With her fictional tale of an horrific murder in a small town in the North of England, Clark takes aim at our obsession with true crime. I’m not convinced she quite succeeds, but it’s a hell of a ride.
Chain Gang All-Stars, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah - Prison inmates fight to the death in order to win their freedom on reality TV (again, this one won’t be for everyone) in this compelling dystopian tale.
Trust, Hernan Diaz - Comprised of four different manuscripts which tell different versions of the life of a Wall Street businessman and his wife, this is a slow-burner about the ways in which we deceive ourselves and each other.
Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi - A young woman attempts to come to terms with her brother’s death in this beautiful meditation on science, faith, and grief.
Pearl, Sian Hughes - Inspired by the medieval poem of the same name, this novel explores, love, loss, and healing, as a young woman attempts to come to terms with her Mother’s disappearance.
Part III: Things I’ve Been Watching
The Bear - Season 2, DisneyPlus. Season 1 of this tightly-written drama was one of the best things I watched last year, and I’m happy to report the second season is quite possibly even better than the first. Drop whatever you’re doing and watch this immediately.
Part IV: What I’ve been up to…
I had a wonderful time on my hols! :)
What’s next?
Inbox wrangling, slide decks for conferences and training courses, plus I’m taking my Mum out for a fancy dinner to celebrate her birthday.
That’s all from me for now :)
If you enjoyed this newsletter, please consider sharing it, and if you would like to support me you can buy me a coffee.
Big love,
Hannah x
PS Wanna find out more about me and my work? Head over to Worderist.com