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# 2025-11-29 - Dreams And Mycelium by Sharon Sliwinski
How fungus and Freud converge to illuminate a deep ecology of mind,
nature, and human ancestry.
IMG "Intergenerational" by Melinda Josie
This article is excerpted from Sharon Sliwinski's book
"An Alphabet for Dreamers: How to See the World With Eyes Closed."
* * *
The next time you find yourself on a wooded trail, look for an old
log that has been on the ground for a while. The more rot, the
better. Underneath, you will likely find fuzzy, white, cobweb-like
threads that are called hyphae. They are the tip of a vast fungal
network called mycelium that stretches much farther than you can see,
binding the soil beneath your feet, weaving into tree roots at a
cellular level, channeling nutrients, and redistributing resources
throughout the entire ecosystem.
In recent decades, there has been an explosion of interest in these
proliferating fungal networks, including mushrooms, which are the
"fruit" of these organisms. Mycelia have been described as "the grand
recyclers of our planet" because they disassemble larger molecules
into simpler forms, creating ever-thickening layers of soil,
unlocking nutrients, and sharing them in ways that can regenerate
depleted environments. Some researchers believe that mycelium is a
key to our evolutionary survival.
These densely interconnected networks have also evoked comparisons to
the internet and have been nicknamed the "wood wide web." In this
analogy, mycelium functions akin to fiber optic cables by providing
the infrastructure for a vast subterranean communication system.
Apart from allowing plants and trees to share resources--sugar,
nitrogen, and phosphorus--this network also allows them to
communicate in the manner of a social network. While we have known
for some time that trees "talk" to each other across significant
distances using airborne hormones, we are just beginning to
understand what occurs beneath our feet.
I prefer Suzanne Simard's description of this network. Bypassing the
technological metaphors, the forest scientist has shown how these
fungal networks are patterned in ways that resemble the human brain
(or perhaps more accurately, the human brain resembles these much
more ancient networks). In the forest, trees actively perceive,
communicate, and respond to one another by emitting chemical signals:
"Chemicals identical to our own neurotransmitters. Signals created by
ions cascading across fungal networks."
Simard has shown that there is a generational structure to this
underground network. Her research shows that older trees can discern
which seedlings are their own kin, and they actively nurture them
using the fungal network, sending food, water, and information as
needed. When these "mother trees" die, they pass on their wisdom to
their kin, sharing a lifetime of acquired knowledge about how to
survive in an ever-changing environment.
This relatively new body of research on mycelium--a mass noun that
puts pressure on the very idea of individuality--raises questions
about where species begin and end, how all living things are
radically interconnected, what counts as knowledge and communication,
and how information is gathered, stored, and shared.
Long before this recent scientific furor, Sigmund Freud also turned
to mycelium to describe dream life. In one of the most famous
passages in "The Interpretation of Dreams," Freud compares mycelium
to the tangled mass of unconscious thoughts out of which a dream
emerges (Freud regularly took his family to the mountains outside
Vienna for holidays, where they hiked, picnicked, and hunted for
mushrooms):
> The dream-thoughts to which we are led by interpretation, cannot,
> from the nature of things, have any definite endings; they are
> bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network
> of our world of thought. It is at some point where this meshwork is
> particularly close that the dream-wish grows up, like a mushroom
> out of its mycelium.
This passage is usually understood to refer to the limitations of
dream interpretation. The latent content of any given dream--what
Freud calls the "dream-thoughts"--is so infinitely complex and leads
in so many directions that aspects inevitably elude us. Freud calls
this the "navel" of the dream. Even in the most obvious of dreams, he
admits, contrary to his central thesis, there is a place that remains
shrouded, a "spot where it reaches down into the unknown."
The mycelium/mushroom model works effectively as a way to convey the
relationship between the singularity of a dream and the vast network
of ideas from which it grows--a network that has no definite endings
and that reaches down into the unknown. The metaphor also works to
highlight the generational quality of the intricate "world of
thought" that dream life connects us to. The navel is, of course, a
trace of a physical connection to our mothers through the umbilical
cord.
When Freud's model of dream life is brought together with
contemporary descriptions of mycelium, we see something that begins
to resemble the idea of a collective unconscious, a vast web of
communication that does not just connect individual human beings to
each other (as Carl Jung imagined) but is something akin to the way
Indigenous peoples describe our radical connectedness to the greater
world, an understanding that "the life of one is dependent on the
life of all."
When my friend and colleague Lewis Williams formally introduces
herself, she usually says, first in the Māori language and then in
English: "My ancestors are of the people of Ngāi Te Rangi, Scotland,
Wales and Germany. Ngāi Tūkairangi (Tauranga Moana) and Nan
Ageantaich (Isle of Arran) are my clans. I grew up in Auckland and
eventually returned to the Tauranga Moana, the homelands of my Ngāi
Te Rangi ancestors. I am of that land. That is the land I was birthed
to."
Williams's area of research is human ecology--the study and practice
of relationships between the natural and social environment. What she
calls "radical human ecology" infuses Western definitions of the
discipline with Indigenous methods that regard humanity as "an
implicit part of biodiversity, embedded in a vast web of mutual and
symbiotic interrelationships." What drives her work is an effort to
deepen our collective sense of relationality. Rather than focusing on
whether the environment can absorb and adapt to human activity,
Williams asks how we might deepen our understanding of humanity's
relationship with the living world.
This is why, in part, Williams introduces herself by describing her
ancestors and the land from which she comes. Her sense of place in
the world is derived from her connection to these
ancestors--including Mauao, the sacred mountain of the Tauranga Moana
tribe. In her case, this sense of connection was hard won. Growing up
in Auckland, New Zealand, in the 1970s, she did not understand
herself to be Indigenous. In fact, she once resigned from a job with
the Department of Social Welfare so a Māori applicant could fill the
role. At the time, Lewis was alienated from the Māori part of
herself. As she put it, "I was long forgotten to my people, but worst
of all, I was long forgotten to myself--to that part of myself."
Lewis's ancestral inheritance came to her in fragments, in vague
feelings, in snatches of conversation--and in dreams. In January
2000, while she was working on her PhD dissertation, she had a
significant dream that she has named "Looking Back." It featured Jane
Faulkner, one of her Māori ancestors whom she had just learned about:
> I am walking onto the Marae [a sacred community space] in search of
> the casket of Jane Faulkner, daughter of Ruawāhine Puhi, high class
> woman of the Ngāi Te Rangi tribe, and Johnlees Faulkner, Pākehā
> [European] trader. I expect to see a Māori--looking woman in Pākehā
> clothing, because to me that's who Jane was--bilingual, schooled in
> both Māori and European ways. For me, though, her heart was Māori.
>
> I enter from the back. There is a group of rangatahi (youth) is
> standing around. I walk by and look to them expectantly; they do
> not see me. I can see no coffin. I walk into the wharekai (dining
> house) where there are some wāhine (women). Again they do not see
> me, do not greet me. I am invisible. I wander outside, feeling
> bleak. I look about. I had expected to see Jane lain out in her
> coffin in all her finery. I see no one, I see nothing... I am
> nothing.
>
> I'm now on the wildest part of the Marae, the grass all long and
> overgrown. And then I see it. A coffin, lying in the long grass, in
> a state of disrepair, completely closed, one lid folded over the
> other, dusty, cobwebbed--long forgotten. I am long forgotten... to
> my iwi [people] and myself. I wake. I feel a deep despair.
Williams awoke from this dream deeply disturbed. But as much as it
left her with a sense of despair, it also compelled her to begin
descending, climbing down what she calls an "inner thread, the thread
of my Ngāi Te Rangi tanga." The dream functioned akin to the
mycelium's hyphae--a thread that led her to a larger, intricately
interconnected network of kin.
For many Indigenous knowledge keepers, dreams have long been
understood to be portals for accessing the metaphysical dimension and
a vital means for communicating with both the natural and spiritual
worlds. Williams's dream of Jane Faulkner led her to begin
reconstituting and deepening her sense of relationality through
ancestral research, speaking with Ngāi Te Rangi elders, and
eventually returning to Mauao, the esteemed mountain that stands
guard at the entrance of Tauranga harbor.
Through this work, Lewis discovered that in 1864, during Jane
Faulkner's lifetime, her tribe's ancestral lands--including the
sacred mountain--were confiscated by the colonial government of New
Zealand. In the wake of this spatial and spiritual exile, Williams's
great-grandfather moved to Auckland, and not until 2003 did Lewis and
her mother reconnect with their ancestral lands and Ngai Te Rangi
relatives.
It was a dream that called Lewis back, leading her to restore her
connection with the land and her people--a return to the soil from
which she came. Dreams, like mycelium, have the power to regenerate
lifeworlds and even heal the wounds of history.
* * *
Sharon Sliwinski is Professor of Information and Media Studies at
Western University in Canada. She has written four books, including
"An Alphabet for Dreamers: How to See the World with Eyes Closed."
HTML From: https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/dreams-and-mycelium-mapping-the-endless-network-of-existence/
tags: biophilia,outdoor,science
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