Jensen - Dreams

Praise for Derrick Jensen

Given the significance of its subject matter and the urgency of Jensens message, Endgame is the most important book of the decade and could stand as the must-read book of our lifetimes.

Press Action, upon awarding Derrick Jensen with the 2006 Press Action Person of the Year

Derrick Jensen is a rare and original voice of sanity in a chaotic world. He has wisdom and wit, grace and style, and is a wonderful guide to a good life beautifully lived.

Howard Zinn

Derrick Jensen is a force for the common good. His books are mandatory reading in the study of culture and social change. Derrick Jensen is a contemporary philosopher with his feet firmly on the ground.

Terry Tempest Williams

Derrick Jensen is a gifted and lyrical writer on a wide range of critical issues. He is unrelenting in his commitment to the environment and justice.

Winona LaDuke

Jensen has proven himself a formidable thinker unafraid of showing us, with unsettling precision, the countless ways we are allowing ourselves and our planet to be killed.

The San Francisco Chronicle

Militant and provocative [Jensens] assertive, aphoristic style demands reader response.

Utne

Praise for Derrick Jensens Previous Books

Singular, compelling and courageously honest [The Culture of Make Believe] relates the extraordinary journey of one man striving to save his own spirit and our planets Jensens book accomplished the rare feat of both breaking and mending the readers heart.

Publishers Weekly

Jensen paints on a huge canvas an emotionally compelling and devastating critique of the intellectual, psychological, emotional and social structure of Western culture that demands attention.

Publishers Weekly

Suitably epic, embracing everything from lynchings to television, rape to corporate crimes against humanity and the planet, on to genocide, American prisons, pollution, hunger, child prostitution, international trade, and deforestation.

Booklist (starred)

Activist Jensens absorbing and insightful writings and speeches have placed him in the vanguard of the environmental movement Written with passion, anger, frustration, hope, and even humor, this massive work is highly recommended.

Library Journal

This compelling book has a refreshing style, at once very personal and very passionate.

Library Journal

Jensen and McBay conduct an in-depth analysis of waste and wastefulness their demand for the end of wishful thinking and beginning of environmental transformation is rooted in meticulously constructed arguments, striking psychological insights, and profound love of life.

Booklist

[Endgame is] remarkable in its consideration of the present system of exploitation, destruction of the natural world, and indeed, self-destruction Jensen raises vital questions that must be asked, and moreover, that must be answered. In this mad venture, we are all complicit, if only in our silence. Jensen shatters this silence.

Mumia Abu-Jamal

[What We Leave Behind] is a fierce book Its basic premisethat were in worse trouble than we understand, and that a little change around the edges wont helpis precisely the message that needs to get out.

Bill McKibben

Armed with a heart-stopping language older than words, Jensen is a mathematician, a comedian, a fierce critic of decent white male human history Read this book. Get it for everyone you care about.

Inga Muscio

a map to personal healing through the larger historical, economical, cosmologicaland most mysteriousprocesses that are source and balm for our traumas this book shows that when we are fully engaged with the world around us, the universe if our greatest ally.

Luis Rodriguez

Derrick Jensen masterfully weaves together ancient wisdom, curiosity, the innocence and courage of a child to profoundly answer the most pressing questions about domestic abuse and our larger sense of community. If youre not moved to tears and action, wake up and read it again.

Charlotte A. Watson, executive director of My Sisters Place, New York

The primordial language of the universe is the language expressed in the night sky, in the dawn and sunset, in the flight of the eagle; it resonates in the song of the meadowlark, in the fragile bloom of the orchid the mountains, the valleys and the rivers and this book.

Father Thomas Berry

ALSO BY DERRICK JENSEN

Railroads and Clearcuts: Legacy of Congresss 1864
Northern Pacific Land Grant

Listening to the Land: Conversations About Nature,
Culture, and Eros

A Language Older Than Words

Standup Tragedy (live CD)

The Culture of Make Believe

The Other Side of Darkness (live CD)

Strangely Like War: The Global Assault on Forests

Walking on Water: Reading, Writing, and Revolution

Welcome to the Machine: Science, Surveillance, and the Culture of Control

Endgame, Volume 1: The Problem of Civilization

Endgame, Volume 2: Resistance

Thought to Exist in the Wild: Awakening From the Nightmare of Zoos

As the World Burns: 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Stay in Denial

How Shall I Live My Life: On Liberating the Earth From Civilization

Now This War Has Two Sides (live CD)

Songs of the Dead

What We Leave Behind with Aric McBay

Deep Green Resistance with Lierre Keith and Aric McBay

Copyright 2011 by Derrick Jensen

A Seven Stories Press First Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electric, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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New York, NY 10013
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jensen, Derrick, 1960
Dreams / Derrick Jensen.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-60980-128-1
1. Dreams. I. Title.
BF1078.J36 2011
154.63dc22

2011007282

v3.1

Those who have compared our life to a dream were right. We sleeping
wake, and waking sleep.

MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

For many years Ive wanted to write a book about the mutually beneficial and extremely complex relationships between dreaming and waking realities. But each time Id finish a book and begin preparing for this one, some other book would suddenly demand my attention, and this one would get pushed aside. Then this year this book made clear, in ways well explore in the book itself, that it was to be next. There was to be no more delay.

As so often happens with messages from the places where writing comes from, or where dreams come from, I chose to ignore it. I thought my reason for ignoring this message was, as we always seem to think our reasons for ignoring these messages are, inescapable. In this case my reason was that the real, physical world is being murdered, and I didnt want to waste my time writing about dreams. With all the world at stake, any bookany action, any thought, any day, any lifetimethat doesnt help us