The weather, as writers on climate change from Amitav Ghosh to Jenny Offill (and many others) have been noting, hardly ever figures at the centre of the plot. Even stories that have a large climactic disaster determining the world they build (The Road, or Margaret Atwood’s Maddadam series, or Octavia Butler’s Parables), the event is usually, in a somewhat punny phrase, precipitating; it happens before, or because, it does not change, it does not change with us, and it cannot be changed.
It is weird to think that a concept so clearly defined by the tendency to change – namely, climate change – is at the same time an acknowledgment of the absolutely planetary scope of human agency (after all, it is human-induced climate change that should most concern us) and of its limits (after all, it is clear that we are locked into at least 1.5C degree warming now, with all the unpredictability that brings). To think about the weather, then, is to dwell on – and at – the very boundary of the human condition: both what we can achieve – destroy, mostly – and what we cannot (repair, mostly). It is also, as Brian Wynne brilliantly analyzed, to revisit the boundaries between observation (or phenomenology), measurement (or attempt at quantification/standardization), and indeterminacy, and thus pose the question that forms the crux of one of the strands of my work: what is the relationship between knowing about and doing something about the future? Or, to put it slightly differently, is the future something we know about or something we do?
To dream of the weather, then, adds another degree of radical indeterminacy: to the extent to which dreams are not volitional (and even for fans of lucid dreaming, that is still a large extent), the incursion of weather into dreams further refracts the horizon of agency. While in dreams we think we can choose what we do (or don’t do), but we are both in charge and not in charge; we are (again, with exceptions) not aware of the dream as we are producing it, but we are producing it; there is no-one else there, right?
It struck me some time ago that, to the best of my knowledge, not many people dream about the weather. Or, in the vein of the backdrop that Ghosh writes about, even if they do, they dream of the weather as something that just happens. True to form, I had a dream that featured a blizzard that very night; but it also featured a snow plough, or road sweeper/gritter, I am not sure which.
Last night, however, I had a dream of a storm cloud passing all over North America, and then getting to the UK. In my dream, the southwest tip of the UK – Cornwall, a bit of Dorset, Somerset – was the only part that was spared. This was strange, as I was sure that what precipitated the dream was reading the forecast about storm Nelson, which predicted high impact in the southwest, but almost none in the northeast, where I live. Yet, when I woke up, rain was lashing against my windows; a thick, low cloud hung over most of the coast.
Strange weather?
Jana Bacevic 