DRENCHED IN OIL: Dreams Reveal Truth of US Foreign Policy
Two horizontal screens.
On the top screen, a plane is flying into a building like the World Trade Center. It’s a rerun of the 9/11 attacks. On the bottom half of the screen, a sculpture emerges from the waters of Richardson Bay, where a bronze sea lion graces views from the Sausalito boardwalk. It is a mermaid. The mermaid is drenched in oil. Hand raised, she looks like the freedom statue.—JL, Marin County, California, January 18, 2002
The night before the “Drenched in Oil” dream, I watched a PBS Frontline report on Saudi Arabia and the United States, exposing the decades-long wars for oil at the heart of US foreign policy.
“Others (Saudis) buy our technology and military equipment because it’s the best. We are their security. Because we have self-interest, these energy reserves do not fall under adversary regimes,” James Baker told host Lowell Bergman. Baker, who served under four administrations, said the US goes to war to protect the oil reserves.
Oil and gas reserves and pipelines in the Middle East, circa 2009
Energy Information Agency, via Wikimedia Commons
Secretary of State in the George H. W. Bush administration during the Persian Gulf War, Baker acknowledged what US presidents and policy makers usually cloak in decorous terms of democracy and freedom. The United States, at war for 231 of its 249 years, employs chaos, violence, and death to exploit other countries, usually non-white, poor countries, to benefit global corporations rather than the people of the globe. It is estimated more than 8 million people worldwide have died in US wars since the Second World War.
Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran in the Middle East have the largest oil reserves in the world. Like the politics of the Caspian Basin, who will mine the oil, who will control the pipelines transporting the “black gold” from source to market, and who will reap the profits shape allegiances and alliances.
Strengthening Global Alliances, the 2001 report of the Bush administration energy task force headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, urged different “foreign suitors”–Western oil companies like ExxonMobil, Chevron, Enron, ConocoPhillips, and British Petroleum–for Iraqi oilfield contracts rather than the agreements Iraq, which nationalized its oil industry in 1972, potentially had with the energy companies of Russia, China, and other Eastern countries.
Manufacturing Consent
How do US presidents explain our blood-soaked foreign policy, and how do our nighttime dreams answer the same question?
George W. Bush wanted the world to believe the US carpet bombing of Afghanistan in the aftermath of 9/11 was to stop Islamic terrorists, but my Omen dream, published in a longer form in the aftermath of 9/11, tells us the two-decades-long conflagration was about oil:
AN OMEN: The 9/11 True Story
A tumbler filled with sludge.
This disturbing dream image woke me with a jolt the morning of September 17 (2001), Rosh Hashanah, the dawn of the Jewish New Year. The bleakness this image prophesied for the coming year haunted me for days. I had an ominous sense of what awaited the world in the aftermath of the horrendous attack on the United States a week before.
The meaning of the glass tumbler dream for me as a journalist took shape several days later at a Media Alliance event in San Francisco. Farhad Azad, publisher of Afghanmagazine.com, spoke about the struggles for his native land from power-hungry czars to the war on terrorism. When he finished, the observer standing next to me whispered, “What about the pipeline?”
“What about what pipeline?” I asked.
“The one going through Afghanistan to the Caspian because going through Iran or Russia is out of the picture,” he explained.
As he spoke, I wrote in my notebook, “It’s about oil.” I drew a picture of the tumbler from my dream and put a box around the word “oil.” At that moment, I knew the Bush Administration’s so-called war on terrorism was about oil. The dream told the true story behind the rush to the massive U.S. military response to the September 11 terrorist attacks.
The costs of the US war in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021: $2,26 trillion; deaths: 6,442 US military and contractors, 71,000 Afghan civilians.*
Manufacturing Consent for War in the Middle East
Bush and Cheney wanted the world to believe the “shock and awe” bombing of Iraq was to stop its leader, Saddam Hussein, from securing weapons of mass destruction, but my “Drenched in Oil” dream above exposes the 10-year-long war, originally called Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL), was about oil.
The costs of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq from 2003 to 2013: $2.7 trillion; deaths: 7,888 US soldiers and contractors; 49,000 Iraqi military and police; 134,000 Iraqi civilians.* Other sources estimate: 600,000 to more than a million Iraqi civilian deaths.
President Joe Biden and Vice President turned 2024 presidential candidate Kamala Harris and current President Donald Trump want the world to believe the US-Israel slaughter of half a million Palestinian men, women, and children is about stopping “Hamas terrorists,” but the dream of a friend exposes the decades-long US-backed-Israel ethnic cleansing-genocide of the Palestinians is about oil:
Oil in Gaza Dream
I am above the Middle East, looking down. From this perch, I see the sea glistening with oil.
“On Friday night, I had dinner with a Mongolian shaman, who was visiting Marin. I was assigned dessert for the potluck. I finally decided on apple cake. The next morning (April 12, 2002), I dreamt about {the oil-drenched ocean},” explained DS, who, like me, lived in Marin County, just north of the Golden Bridge.
She said dinner with the shaman prompted the dream because “There is oil under Gaza, just like there is oil in Mongolia, which was pristine before drilling happened there.”
Since the discovery of oil in Gaza in 1998, “Geologists and natural resources economists have confirmed the Occupied Palestinian territory lies above large reservoirs of oil and natural gas, in Area C of the West Bank, and along the Mediterranean coast off the Gaza Strip,” according to The Economic Cost of Occupation for the Palestinian People: The Unrealized Oil and Natural Gas Potential.
Israel has occupied and controlled the Gaza Strip, West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Golan Heights since the 1967 Six-Day War.
Costs of the US-Israel genocide of Palestinians from October 7, 2023, to October 7, 2025: $21.7 billion; deaths: on 10/7: 1,139 Israelis: 695 civilians, 373 security forces, and 71 foreign nationals.* (Other sources note the number of those Israeli deaths caused by Israel issuing the Hannibal Directive is uncertain.)
Since 10/7: 67,075 Palestinian civilian deaths in Gaza; 1,048 Palestinian deaths in the West Bank; 1,200-1,500, Israeli military deaths.* (Other sources estimate more likely 200,000-500,000 Palestinian civilian deaths.)
Other sources put US aid (mostly military) to Israel at $300 billion from 1946 to 2024.rom 2008 to 10/6, Israeli actions killed 16,346 Palestinians; Palestinian actions caused 308 Israeli deaths. F
War or Peace?
The creation of the state of Israel has been about oil since at least November 2, 1917, when a letter from the aristocratic former British prime minister, then foreign secretary, Arthur James Balfour to Lionel Walter Rothschild of the powerful European banking family and British liaison to the Zionist movement. The letter declared British support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”
The Balfour Declaration ensured British control of the Suez Canal, the gateway to the Middle East, Central Asia, and India, and made the Mediterranean coast of the Mandatory Palestine ideal for oil and trade ports. The letter paved the way for the creation of the Jewish ethno-state of Israel in 1948 and the perpetual colonization of Palestine and subjugation of the Palestinian people.
In 2007, Israel imposed a land, sea, and air blockade on the 2.3 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip. Over time, the Israelis restricted all aspects of life–from caloric intake to income to travel. The blockade prevented the Palestinians from using the energy and generating income from the oil and gas reserves in the land and water. A 2023 United Nations report estimates Palestinians have lost billions of dollars in energy revenue because of the economic suppression of the occupation.
Disastrously, for decades, the United States—economically, politically, militarily, diplomatically—has conspired with Israel, choosing the path of violence and war, instead of the pursuit of peace.
Point of View
The “Oil under Gaza” dream imparted a startling insight: the multi-generational, decades-long battles seemingly over ancient land, biblically allotted, are about who will control and reap the profits from the oil reserves in the Middle East.
The omnipresent view in the dream reveals the people of Palestine and Israel, of Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Iran, the people of the Middle East, are pawns in a game in which multinational oil corporations, colluding with nation-states, are the puppet masters. From the omnipresent point of view in her dream, above the deals for land, the deals for oil, and the deals for war, above the mayhem, DS saw the truth.
* Note: The costs of war numbers are compiled by the Costs of War Project at Brown University, costsofwar.watson.brown.edu. The death statistics cited for the nations/entities the US has attacked are likely a vast undercount because of verification and other issues. Check the Project for other costs, such as injuries and displacement.
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Journalist Joyce Lynn writes about the power of dreams for personal and planetary well-being. She is the author of two books on dreams: Plum Dreams Diary: On Mothers, Men, Modern Medicine, and the Divine and also Dreams and the Wisdom Within, available at Amazon.com. Joyce’s forthcoming book, TRUTH: Dreams Reveal Rising Tide of Fascism Engulfing America, will be published in 2026. Sign up to receive Dream On! Journal on the guiding, healing, and transformative power of dreams. Let’s dream for personal and planetary well-being and peace.