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bjr2022's review
5.0
By some kind of divine guidance or synchronicity, I read Dreaming with Polar Bears immediately after finishing Sophie’s World, a novel about the history of philosophy by Jostein Gaarder. If you are a philosophy lover who can accept Kant’s statement that “time and space are first and foremost modes of perception and not attributes of the physical world,” or if you are excited by (and aware of) string theory’s descriptions of levels of existence that can make your head swim, or if you have an education in indigenous wisdom, shamanism, dream “medicine,” and ways of communication that have been around since the beginning of man (but are denied by modern Western European culture or referred to as “supernatural”), you may love Dreaming with Polar Bears.
Dawn Baumann Brunke is a brave writer. And an even braver dreamer. In Dreaming with Polar Bears she “comes out” as a person who has experienced shared dreams with real living polar bears and meetings with Spirit bears and a Polar Bear Council that is hoping to awaken our human species. Brunke is not a New Age crank. She is a journalist. She is deeply educated in the ways of animals. And she is a skeptical and articulate explorer of her own experiences.
Inherent in the act of translating into language something as experiential as a dream—even a lucid one—is using the language of the translator. Hence, a lot of the bear talk sounds like an articulate explorer. But there is more. In my favorite section, that intellectual language gives way to something visceral and exhilarating: the feeling of transforming into and being a polar bear. (I won’t spoil it for you, but it comes on page 113.) And this and all the other passages that allow you to feel as though you are walking in the Arctic as a bear, hearing sounds and smelling smells you’ve never sensed before, tasting air, feeling seal breath—this is what is transformative about this book. Yes, there is analysis and a clearly stated mission, but it’s when we get to feel what Brunke feels being a bear that we also feel a new connection to and reverence for Earth.
Brunke wrote this book to serve the polar bears’ cause: to wake us humans up and help us reconnect to Earth and who we are. “. . . I sometimes felt a weighty responsibility,” she writes. “How to open to a dialogue between humans and polar bears? How to share a story about polar bears that is so far removed from the general experience of most humans? How to convey their bridge of dreams, their deeper sense of connection between all beings that spurs us to evolve and expand our awareness?”
This is not a book for everyone. New Agers who don’t want to work to analyze their dreams, or people who scoff at any notion of intelligence in other species or real experience that does not happen in our everyday conscious state will not be fans. But there are others who will read, digest, and maybe be changed a little.
Dawn Baumann Brunke is a brave writer. And an even braver dreamer. In Dreaming with Polar Bears she “comes out” as a person who has experienced shared dreams with real living polar bears and meetings with Spirit bears and a Polar Bear Council that is hoping to awaken our human species. Brunke is not a New Age crank. She is a journalist. She is deeply educated in the ways of animals. And she is a skeptical and articulate explorer of her own experiences.
Inherent in the act of translating into language something as experiential as a dream—even a lucid one—is using the language of the translator. Hence, a lot of the bear talk sounds like an articulate explorer. But there is more. In my favorite section, that intellectual language gives way to something visceral and exhilarating: the feeling of transforming into and being a polar bear. (I won’t spoil it for you, but it comes on page 113.) And this and all the other passages that allow you to feel as though you are walking in the Arctic as a bear, hearing sounds and smelling smells you’ve never sensed before, tasting air, feeling seal breath—this is what is transformative about this book. Yes, there is analysis and a clearly stated mission, but it’s when we get to feel what Brunke feels being a bear that we also feel a new connection to and reverence for Earth.
Brunke wrote this book to serve the polar bears’ cause: to wake us humans up and help us reconnect to Earth and who we are. “. . . I sometimes felt a weighty responsibility,” she writes. “How to open to a dialogue between humans and polar bears? How to share a story about polar bears that is so far removed from the general experience of most humans? How to convey their bridge of dreams, their deeper sense of connection between all beings that spurs us to evolve and expand our awareness?”
This is not a book for everyone. New Agers who don’t want to work to analyze their dreams, or people who scoff at any notion of intelligence in other species or real experience that does not happen in our everyday conscious state will not be fans. But there are others who will read, digest, and maybe be changed a little.
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