ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that attending to imaginings and dreams about the future can stimulate a development of consciousness that facilitates changes in social ontology and engenders sustained engagement with global warming. Drawing upon co-operative research with people involved in climate change issues, the author argues that conversations about individual and social futures can embrace greater complexity, flexibility and creativity when they incorporate unconscious imaginings, including those provided by dreams. Depth psychology, with its focus on creative and destructive unconscious processes and mythic understandings, is well equipped to analyse and work with the full gamut of possible imaginings to support the process of transforming emerging understandings about global warming into open and innovative perceptions and responses, and into new forms of being in the world. The contemporary emergence of worldviews which accept that there can be few certain narratives, solutions or outcomes in relation to global warming and its associated disruptions is vital to developing effective responses.
