At 1.30am this morning I was dreaming. I can’t remember the exact content of the dream, but I think it was a pleasant one. And yet something dark intruded on the dream. Something which introduced angst, discomfort, fear.
It happened again, and again, until I was rudely awoken. It was the sky gods, and boy were they angry.
It was fascinating – in my semi-sleep, semi-waking state, unbelievably loud thunderclaps were rolling across the sky above (and we have pretty thick walls/insulation and solid double-glazing), and I felt closer to an innate primal state. My conscious mind hadn’t kicked in and I could feel the raw hard-wired self-preservation instinct taking over. And it was afraid of this terrible noise, it wanted to get somewhere deeper and safer, it wanted to hold onto my partner and protect them.
As my conscious mind surfaced, the fear subsided, or perhaps converted into a state of awe. As the sonic wave from each thunderclap physically struck our apartment, I think awe is the most apt word – it is something that can contain not just wonder but also dread, bubbling under the surface. And it was a wholly physical assault, the rolling waves of sound caused by shockwaves in the air.
Ultimately that dread-awe gave way fully to wonder-awe, and I lay in the dark listening to the variations in the claps, peals, rolls, and rumbles of each progressive wave. And just as it would seem to be growing more distant, another nearby shock wave would strike, impossibly loud, instinctively reginting some of that dread-awe.
In that early semi-conscious state I could really sense how the instinctive self could give rise to the thought that a sky deity was enraged. I could empathise with our early ancestors, perhaps filled with the same dread-awe, huddling together for safety in the same way my instinct desired. And whilst we now have scientific explanations for the cause of these sounds, and that helps to ease our fears, it can’t bury completely our instinctive reaction.
I suspect that’s a good thing though. We may laugh now at the idea that our earlier selves attributed these sounds to a deity. But it’s incredible to see the huge array of thunder gods that existed in so many cultures around the world, and interestingly, in many cultures, the thunder deity was the supreme deity. So we can see that the raw power of a thunderstorm gave rise to a shared instinctive reaction amongst all humans. As a result, we can see it as something that reminds us of not only our shared bonds and origins, but also our common basic needs.
Beyond that, and bear with me here, the personification of this natural phenomenon may seem primitive to us now, but at the same time it speaks of a time when we were more attuned to how interconnected we are with our surrounding environment. European/Western ‘enlightened’ culture has worked very hard over the past hundreds of years to separate humanity and nature, and look where that has gotten us.
So perhaps we shouldn’t allow our conscious ‘enlightened’ mind to scoff quite so much at our instinctive reaction to this awesome (dread and wonder) phenomenon.
On a Variety of Topics 