Spicy Nina: Conversations at the Homestead

Before the Deluge

Before the Deluge

“Some of them were dreamers

And some of them were fools

Who were making plans and thinking of the future

With the energy of the innocent

They were gathering the tools

They would need to make their journey back to nature

While the sand slipped through the opening

And their hands reached for the golden ring

With their hearts they turned to each other’s hearts for refuge

In the troubled years that came before the deluge…”

I was walking my dog Casey when she was still alive back in the fall of 2016, when Jackson Browne’s song Before the Deluge opened in my playlist and the verse above began to work its way into my thoughts. Suddenly, I was struck by the realization that the lyrics were connected to a dream a woman—I call her Susan here, not her real name—had recently shared with me. I was the central figure in the dream, but Susan hadn’t realized that until the moment she saw me sitting across from her in a circle where we had gathered for a workshop at The Dream Institute of Northern California, Berkeley. She was a person I barely knew, not even by name, until she shared the dream with me. Later, we became good friends until she died a few years later. I now believe this dream, which came to her one month before the 2016 election, is a symbolic vision of a collective future. I also believe Susan (on a soul level, not consciously) trusted I would share it with others when the time was right. But I get ahead of myself.

The dream as Susan told it to me in the first person:

Finding Safety from the Flood

There is a woman living on a houseboat on what appears to be a delta region where the waters are blue-green and calm. There are several tributaries flowing in different directions, all leading to the Amazon River. Further down, the river gets going quite fast, white water fast, but here in the delta it is calm and serene. The green grasses along the shore are waving in the light breeze. The houseboat is not fancy. It is sturdy—reminds me of houseboats I’ve seen in the Midwest. It has a wide deck and is painted light blue. The woman is gathering people to come live on her boat, because the annual monsoons and floods are going to begin. This is not some isolated cataclysmic event, but rather a sharp rising of the waters that happens on a cyclical basis. That makes it different from the Ark, apocalyptic story, but reminds me of it in the way that people begin filing onto to the boat; more people than will fit it seems. However, they all make it in nicely. Finally, the woman is content that all are safe. I see her looking peacefully out of one of the windows on the boat before the heavy rains begin.” (End of Dream)

When I was first introduced to the dream, I had no idea what it’s meaning was to my life, so I chose to let it reveal more of its meaning over time. What I found immediately interesting, bordering on telepathic—aside from the fact that Susan dreamed about me, a stranger—was how the dream picked up on some circumstances of my life that were pertinent to the dream symbology. To begin, I lived many years of my adult life in the Midwest, in Fremont, Michigan. Before moving to Michigan, my late husband Gene, our young daughter Jessica and I lived in Englewood, Florida in the early 1970s on a homemade, “no frills” catamaran while Gene worked as a laborer with the engineer who was building the Englewood Marina in the 1970’s. Gene and his father had built our boat themselves, making the deck wider than normal to accommodate lobster trapping (something we never actually got around to doing). Also relevant to the dream, was time I’d spent on the Napo River delta during a visit to Ecuador in 2011. The Napo is a mild tributary to the Amazon River, flowing along the banks of Misahaulli, Ecuador. I loved my few days on the lazy waters of the Napo and had fallen in love with the people and the natural beauty of the land along its shores. These were facts about my life of which the dreamer had no conscious knowledge.

I had the dream on the back burner of my thoughts when I heard the song lyrics I’ve shared above. Right away it became clear to me that many, myself included, were seeking refuge from the rising waters of the collective unconscious, specifically the specter of civil unrest that had grown around America’s polarized election process at that time in 2016. Interestingly, a similar phenomenon was occurring in 1974 when Before the Deluge was released. Richard Nixon was president, the Vietnam War was raging, and the country was polarized either for the war or against it, as the massive demonstrations testified.

I did more research about the song to understand the dream better and found that the title of Before the Deluge is based on a 1954 French film of the same name in which several desperate teens are planning to buy a boat and sail to a remote island to escape what they consider to be inevitable atomic warfare. Although things go sadly awry with the teens’ plans in the film, their hearts are innocent, albeit despairing of a generation of adults who are giving away their freedoms in the rush for nuclear arms to protect their own culture’s greed and acquisitiveness.

It was also in 1954 that Senator Joseph McCarthy began aiming his vitriol at the United States Army with his claim that the Army was soft on communism, and where he finally met his Waterloo in the form of a brilliant and soft-spoken lawyer by the name of Joseph N. Welch. During the now famous Army vs McCarthy hearings, Welch shot down all McCarthy’s arguments and openly declared McCarthy’s evil and vindictive nature, bravely exposing him as the reckless bully he was. Thus, Welch’s impassioned words engaged a fed-up populace’s support and catapulted McCarthy at long last into public disgrace. Does the reckless bully scenario sound familiar with what was happening in 2016 and a second time around now in 2025? As Gene would say if he were alive today: DDSOS (different day, same old shit).

Back to the dream…

If we pay attention to the dream as a teaching story, it is revealing that community is important during times of upheaval. That we need to gather together for safety and camaraderie, otherwise the waters of chaotic events that rise up will draw us into the torrent where we would find we could not avoid being pulled under without some vessel to keep us afloat. We are each required to play our individual part, to be sure. But losing oneself in the drama without support or a coherent plan is a detriment to the individual as well as the collective.

We can choose to survive this particular storm of extreme polarization that our political ideologies have engendered in us by turning our attention back to our true nature as communal beings and focusing on what brings us together instead of what divides us. We can make choices, based on knowledge about what supports the greater good and keeps us afloat; choose a timely strategy, as did Joseph N. Welch; pay attention to the changing mood of the times and tell the truth. As in the dream, I believe the troubled waters will again recede and we will be free to choose any one of the many tributaries that leads us to that larger place where diversity in its many forms survives and even thrives.

I believe Susan had this dream and shared it with me before she died because I am a storyteller and am using it now to show how dreams can have collective relevance over long periods of time.

I also believe this important dream was given to me to remind me to gather with others for solace and to brainstorm ways to keep our communities safe during the unprecedented changes taking place in our country at this time. I give it to you for the same reason.

Ciao,

Jenna