Dear you, headphones on, press play and read on.
Hey!
I’ve been feeling a little doomy … Nothing like living in the UK whilst it’s in a state of decline and regression. amiright???? Especially cos us islanders love to complain. And fair enough really. We’ve got lots to digest and complain about!!!
BUT I really gotta say you guys… I don’t think doom alone take us anywhere we wanna go.
So, I’ve been thinking: what’s the counter-energy to doom?
and I reckon it’s dreaming.
The kind of dreaming that doesn’t bypass reality, or pretend things aren’t bleak. But instead sits WITH the bleak, holds the bleakness honestly and imagines a world in relation to it. Something beyond it. Something from it.
Adrienne Rich said:
“Nothing less than the most radical imagination will carry us beyond this place, beyond the mere struggle for survival, to that lucid recognition of our possibilities which will keep us impatient, and unresigned to mere survival.”And Robin D. G. Kelley reminds us:
“Without new visions, we don’t know what to build, only what to knock down.”
So how do we dream, in relation to the bleakest things?
A Story: A Doomy Time for me
In 2018, I experienced sexual violence. This isn’t an article about that.
But what feels relevant is the five and a half years that followed — being dragged through the criminal justice system, gaslit by police, kept in limbo, handed not-guilty verdicts.
That taught me something: sometimes things are just bleak.
No amount of hope, delusion, crying, or writing could make it less so. The harshest truth (to me) is that guilty or not guilty, sentenced or not — it didn’t change what happened, and getting guilty verdicts didn’t matter to me in the way stories told me it should. Because I came to see that prison isn’t justice or accountability. It’s just punishment.
And punishment doesn’t resolve harm, beacause punishment is harm. It doesn’t foster intimacy or transformation. The system unfortunately, often, prolongs trauma and you end up waiting for an answer that the state can’t really give.
Is this person guilty, or not guilty? Something that perhaps, in intimate violence, can only be known, really known, by those in the encounter. So it made the whole process, through one telling, kind of … utterly pointless.
That truth was (and is) crushing.
But what if the story of that system’s success can be rewritten? If punishment can be critically looked at as being the only assumed answer to violence… then what?
… my dream?
A society rooted not in punishment, but in accountability, intimacy, community, connection. Spaces where healing and transformation are possible.
That dream keeps me moving, has led me to campaigning in the house of lords, ministry of justice, it’s led to me writing a new rave opera (VIOLET) about this topic, and trying to continually live and foster hope in relation to this bleakness
My dream does not ignore the bleak. But instead allows the dream to be seeded, right from the the depth of doom.
So…
An Exercise: Dream Listening
Your bleakest thing might be different. So here’s a practice for seeding a dream from doom.
1. Move.
Put on music that makes you move. Three minutes. Shake off the doom.
2. Remember.
Notice your body. As Bessel van der Kolk says in The Body Keeps the Score:
“Trauma victims cannot recover until they become familiar with and befriend the sensations in their bodies.”
3. Dream Listening.
On paper, draw a circle.
Layer one: Write the doom you fear feels inevitable.
Layer two: Ask: What’s the dream that lives outside this doom, in resistance to it? Something that you WISH to happen in relation to it. even if it feels impossible. Write it. Sketch it. Name it.
Layer three: Draw a tiny you in the corner with a thought bubble. Inside, write the smallest imagination possible you could live into today. Call it: My Dream.
Then, if you can, carry that dream with you this week. Let it shift shape in your thoughts, conversations, actions.
For me, doom can be a weight that drags us under. But, paired with dreaming as it’s counter-current, that power can lift us up and keeps us travelling.
Here’s mine …
