The Business Of Dreaming | Ian McLaren Wallace

The experience of dreaming during sleep is simultaneously bizarrely unusual and completely natural. We effortlessly generate entire worlds where the unbelievable happens in the everyday, where the amazing is a routine event, where the sacred meets the profane. Even when you seem to be looking at yourself from a distance, you are creating the entire dream. Every unique part of it, from the fading indigo storm clouds on the horizon to the tiny dust motes glittering in the slanting sunlight.

As we chase our dreams from the dismal cubicles of industrial greyland to the sumptuous spas of leader’s retreats, most of us ignore our real dreams, the ones that are driving the material dreams that just always seem out of reach. Unexplored dreams are like unopened letters, piling up on the doormat behind our front door. Most of us just trample on them and kick them aside as we make our way to the shop floor, the airport, the intranet, the corner office.

So how do our wonderful, valuable dreams end up as broken, discarded fragments? It often seems inevitable that the hard unyielding world of working for a living will shatter our fragile dreams into the half remembered reflections of who we might have been. We are told to ‘Get real’, ‘Quit dreaming’, ‘Wake up and smell the roses’. Or the coffee. Or the fear.

We usually think of dreaming as a phenomenon that only occurs unconsciously during sleep. Weird scenes inside the goldmine and then the alarm clock rings and we blearily open our eyes. End of. But our dreaming doesn’t end there. Even after we are awake, we continue to project our unconscious awareness into our surroundings. We usually aren’t even aware that we're doing this, because…well because we're doing it unconsciously.

For thousands of years we have been trying to make sense of what is unconsciously reflected back to us in our dreams and our waking lives. But as we attempt to rationalise our unconscious reflections we lose much of the meaning that we instinctively sense. It is difficult to describe the seemingly irrational using only rational language, and so in all our cultures and all our creeds we have evolved symbols as a way to try and objectively define the indefinable.

As your unconscious sweeps your beams of awareness into the rich unspoken spaces all around you, you are just not shining randomly. You are looking for something unique that is of great significance and uniquely meaningful to you. In all that apparent mystery and confusion you are looking to find your own self. To make sense of who you really are. To truly identify yourself.

As we become more aware of our actions and the purpose that emerges from them, we begin to realise that we find some intentions and identities more meaningful than others. The more meaningful something is to us, the more we need it. And the more we need something, the more we value it. In the same way that our identities reflect our intentions, what we value reflects our needs.

As we unconsciously search for our identities and gravitate towards what we value, we find ourselves on a journey that transports us through a variety of different viewpoints and perspectives. By shining our awareness out from these vantage points we begin to form beliefs about what we see being reflected back to us. So much of what we see can be confusing and conflicting so rather than trusting our own judgement we become filled with self doubt and uncertainty.

The bigger picture continuously created by our unconscious awareness is not a huge masterpiece set in a gilt frame hanging flatly on a wall to be contemplated from a distance. Instead, we naturally construct an immersive and dynamic world from the countless tiny pictures that we unconsciously notice and absorb in waking and dreaming. These tiny pictures are not discrete and isolated data points but deeply connected fragments that we hold as meaningful patterns in our memories, stories and rhythms.

As we establish our library of familiar patterns they evolve into potential stories where we have a certain expectation of the outcome. But sometimes, instead of being able to deal with something new based on the experience of accumulated patterns, we find ourselves experiencing a sudden and unfamiliar change. This change often manifests itself in the form of an unexpected and apparently unpredictable crisis.

As we embrace the stories that help us grow and break free from the patterns that limit us, our dreaming awareness keeps expanding outwards towards the edge of what we know. Even though we may feel that we have settled into a comfortable groove and no longer seek adventure, our dreams continue to search at the edges of what we know. Beyond the everyday and the routine, our dreams are exploring the edges of the known and unknown, the familiar and the unfamiliar.

Although our dreams seem to promise powerful awareness and profound insight into our circumstances, can we really use that unconscious awareness in the day-to-day, nitty gritty, bump and grind of our working lives? It may seem like no amount of insight and awareness can resurrect our rusting aspirations and coax them back into shiny new life.

Although we are unconsciously aware of the significance of our dreams, many of us find it a challenge to bring their value out into waking reality. We continually generate the most fantastic connections and insights in our unconscious but instead of trying to realise their worth, we usually just let them slip away. Because they seem intangible, we can find it difficult to really own our own dreams, so we tend to externalise them in possessions and other people.

Our unconscious awareness illuminates the spaces that surround us and we create meaningful patterns in what we see reflected back. When we share the patterns of meaning that we see, we find ourselves telling our stories. The comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell observed ‘A dream is a private myth; a myth is a public dream’. The stories that we tell give authentic voice to our dreams and in the social spaces we create, we share our personal myths in the stories that we tell each other.

Our personal myths shine with meaning. They collect and connect all the remembered fragments of what we have experienced and what we hope to experience, and weave all our memories and hopes into a single shining story. But our memories are not static isolated objects filed away neatly in our brain. Instead, when we remember, we reconstruct fragments of past experience into a pattern that has meaning for us now. We don’t remember data points; we rebuild them by remembering the stories around them.

As well as meaningfully connecting the fragments of our own experiences, our dreaming brains connect us back to more ancient experiences of ourselves. Our unconscious awareness invites us back into a mythic realm, a primordial landscape inhabited by the ghosts and gods of our ancestors. These dreams directly connect our own waking reality to dreams of an older and greater reality that has also produced all our art, mythology, religion and psychology.

As our beliefs evolve beyond the dogma of religion and the rituals of magic, and psychology becomes more and more focused on lab rats and nuclear magnetic resonance, our dreams and our creativity continue to provide the most profound insights into our lives. But the great art and great dreams that illuminate our mythic realms are often ignored as we scurry from one transitory stimulus to another, like frantic rodents in a laboratory maze.

As we shine our awareness out into the spaces around us, we are constantly evaluating what we see reflected back. We are unconsciously connecting with other people and exploring the possibilities for self awareness that they offer. It may sometimes seem that we are passive observers but we constantly transmit our intentions, needs and perspectives into the space and time we create. In the same way that we create epic dreamscapes, we are constantly creating space and time in our waking lives.

As you create offers and make space, you become more and more of an attractor and the space that you create becomes more and more powerful and attracts more and more people into it. You know you have made a successful space when everyone wants to be in it. Suddenly it seems like everyone wants to be your friend and wants to be in your dreaming space. From your perspective, you think they are being drawn to the unique attraction that you have created and that’s what has drawn them into this space.

The opportunity spaces that we can create are only limited by our boundless imagination. In our dreams we create wild, mysterious landscapes full of wonder and mystery, a last great wilderness in the ever encroaching urban sprawl of our working realities. Our dreams are our wildlands, where we can escape from our aspirational pressures and lose ourselves in a much wider awareness. All human cultures dream of rain forests, high mountains, shimmering lagoons, endless savannah stretching into an unknowable distance.

But how can we honour our mysteries and still build our organisations? We often think of our businesses as existing entirely in the conscious domain with no room for the apparent vagueness of dreaming. Everything in a business should be rationalised, measured, monitored and managed. The more everything runs like clockwork, the better. Although this may be useful for some industrial processes, it is often of little use in working with human nature.

For many of us, the future seems a far away place that will somehow arrive someday. We often equate the future with individual and collective freedom, saying things to ourselves such as ‘Only five more years until retirement and then I’ll be free’, ‘When this technology is invented, then I’ll be free’, ‘When we own those resources then we’ll be free’, ‘When we are in power then we’ll be free’ . Most organisations are far more focused on the freedoms of their future share price rather than the reality of the shared value that they can create in the present.

We all dream. Every single one of us. Everyone dreams but our modern world often distracts us from the beauty of our dreams and drowns out their powerful songs. Dreaming may have evolved as a way for complex neural networks to process information and pattern match more effectively. It may have developed as a way of synthesising new stimuli with past experience. It may be how a curious and opportunistic universe becomes self aware in all its glory.