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.

All of us keep shining our unconscious awareness into our daytime spaces around us like bats beaming out ultrasound as they navigate their night time environment. And like bats interpreting the reflected echoes of their sonic searches, we are trying to interpret our reflected awareness to make sense of the world around us. But unlike bats, most of us are completely unaware of the meaningful echoes that are bouncing back to us.

The spaces around us are alive with our unconscious transmissions and responses; we tend to think of the spaces surrounding us as being empty and unimportant. We are taught that if it can’t be physically measured and recorded, then it simply doesn’t exist. However to our unconscious awareness, the space that surrounds us is alive with meaning and understanding. It only seems empty because we consciously filter out virtually all the information available to us.

Our symphonies of reflected awareness are routinely lost in cultural and social noise and the self censoring of our own selective vision in waking life. We selectively censor most of what comes back because it’s not rational. It’s not objective. It just doesn’t seem to make sense. In this noisy narrowness it can be difficult to make meaningful sense of what is really happening for us. It’s like trying to make sense of the world peering through a little letter box rather than opening the door and stepping outside.

This little letterboxed picture reflects a world where everything is black and white, right and wrong, good and bad. A world without ambiguity and paradox. So instead of reflecting our illuminations back into the immersive I-MAX of our own unconscious awareness in the form of vivid colour imagery and profoundly connected narrative, we find ourselves trying to objectively interpret a fuzzy little black and white picture swamped in static interference and blizzards of apparently random noise.

The bigger picture reflected from all our unconscious shining seems impossible to make sense of and understand. It can seem huge, overwhelming and unsettling. So we find ourselves ignoring its expansiveness and discarding its richness and just focusing on what we can tangibly measure. But every now and again we catch glimpses and fragments of the bigger picture, as if an untuned television had suddenly locked onto our favourite show.

There often seems to be something profoundly meaningful to us in these accidental glimpses and serendipitous fragments, so we desperately try to make sense of them. But instead of exploring them using our instinctive dream awareness, we usually try to rationalise them at a more analytical level.

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.

In the real world of quarterly reports and rain streaked corporate windows there seems to be no space or time for our dreams. Everything has to be defined and measured. We are instructed that if we can’t measure it then we can’t manage it. If it’s not colour coded in the plan or bar coded in the inventory, then it simply doesn’t exist. As we struggle to meet our budgets and targets we are constantly coerced and implored to be rational and analytical. To have all the answers and none of the questions. To make everything known and to know everything.

But as we try to stay in the domain of what we know, as we follow pre-planned procedures and company codes in an attempt to keep everything rational and real, we often become aware of something beyond the known. Something exciting. Something scary. Something full of potential. Something mysterious. An opportunity to step into the unknown to make a dream come true. And then we run away. And hide behind our walls of facts and figures.

The unknown can be scary for all of us and there are as many reasons for avoiding it as being seduced by it. The downsides and the upsides. The risks and rewards. The dangers and the delights. The paradoxes and the possibilities. But the main reason that so many of us find the unknown scary is that it offers us a choice. And when we have a choice we tend to stop asking ‘How?’ And begin to start asking ‘Why?’

We stop asking ‘How does this work?’ and begin asking ‘Why am I doing this? And that’s when our alarm bells start ringing. We begin to wake up to a space beyond plans and procedures and instead of obsessively searching for inconsistent data in a Six Sigma quality report, we begin to constantly search for meaning in everything we do. ‘Why?’ is one of the most powerful questions we can ever ask.

But when we start looking for meaning we soon begin to long for the cast iron certainties and concrete facts of the known. Searching for what really matters to us can be confusing, ambiguous and paradoxical. However, there is one absolutely guaranteed way to find out what holds most meaning for us, and that is to explore our dreams. What we dream about, both in our night time explorations and our waking life, is what holds most meaning for us. And as Friedrich Nietzsche said, ‘If you have a ‘Why’, you will always find a ‘How’. So how do our dreams help us answer ‘Why’?

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.

In our waking and working lives, we are encouraged to be rational and objective, to have all the facts and figures, and just to ignore our dreams and forget our dreaming. Our dreams seem to have no value. They are just dreams. You can’t write them down on a balance sheet, you can’t lock them in a safety deposit box, you can’t peg them to the dollar, you can’t fund a research programme with them. There seems to be no point in opening up those envelopes and seeing what dreams they might contain.

However, some people do pause on that threshold before they step into the outside world and read the messages from their unconscious. And not just people who are mysterious mystics and explorers of the esoteric, but people like Albert Einstein who used to dream about riding on a beam of light and used this inspiration to bring the Theory of Relativity into his own waking light.

Orville and Wilbur Wright used to dream about bicycles that could fly and realised their vision on the wind scoured sands of Kitty Hawk. Nobel Prize winning physicist Neils Bohr developed his model of the atom from a vivid dream in which he was sitting on the Sun and all the planets were whizzing around him on separate racetracks. The organic chemist Frederick Kekule discovered the benzene ring structure through dreaming, and after announcing his breakthrough he urged his fellow scientists to ‘Learn to dream, gentlemen, learn to dream’.

What Frederick recognised, and what we all unconsciously recognise is that we all automatically know how to dream. It’s one of our gifts of being a human, like knowing how to breathe, knowing how to smile, knowing how to cry. It is something that we do so naturally that we all tend to take the evolutionary gift of dreaming for granted. Try not to breathe today. And then try not to dream tonight.

But rather than learning to become more aware of the huge reservoir of awareness and understanding expressed in our dreams we have learned how to forget them. We trample on our own dreams as we rush from the inside to the outside and leave the fragments lying broken and discarded in shattered heaps. The splintered shards of our broken dreams bounce our light back at us from strange angles, distracting and perplexing us.

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.

And even more amazing than the epic unconscious dreamscapes that we create so easily is the fact that we all dream. Each one of us. Every night. It’s a natural process that requires no entrance fee, no monthly subscription, no expensive stimulants, no easy payment starter interest rates. All we need is a quiet space and the opportunity to close our eyes for a while.

But, many of us are utterly convinced that we don’t dream. People often proudly proclaim ‘I just don’t dream’. Or ‘I don’t have any time for dreams, I’m too busy’. Usually too busy chasing a dream in waking life that somehow is never fulfilled. However, we all dream. We have to. It is fundamental to our psychological health and physiological well being. When deprived of dream rich R.E.M. sleep we rapidly become confused and unable to cope with the simplest tasks in our waking reality.

When people say ‘I just don’t dream’, what they are really saying is that ‘I just don’t remember my dreams’. They just don’t remember the amazing experiences that they create for themselves every night. Although not remembering our sleeping dreams may seem to be of little or no consequence, the same thing often happens in waking life. We forget our dreams. We start off with great dreams of who we want to be, the wonderful people who will become our companions in this great adventure, the wealth that we will acquire and the stories that we will tell of who we became and the great deeds that we accomplished.

Then a few years later we are asking ourselves questions such as ‘Why am I doing this job?’ ‘Where is the meaning in what I do every day?’ ‘Why am I doing something that seems to have no real purpose?’ When that starts to happen, it is a sign that we are forgetting our dreams and as we do, we begin to become confused about our identity, our meaning and our purpose. Our dreams and our reality have diverged so much that there seems to be no way forward.

Pablo Picasso remarked that ‘All children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up’. In the same way, we are all born as dreamers. Our challenge is to keep dreaming as we grow and to bring our dreams to life in our waking realities. But because of the pressures and the routines of waking life, we routinely ignore the messages of our dreams and leave them unexplored and forgotten.