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.

Organisations often seek to control human behaviour by imposing some form of culture. This imposed culture is declared on mouse mats, screensavers, exhibition banners and employee contracts. The organisational culture is declared as a series of values and visions and a mission statement, usually involving extensive use of the words ‘passion’ or ‘passionate’. Values and visions are often elicited by a facilitator during a dreary offsite at an airport hotel somewhere, and the mission statement may have been authored by some wacky poet-in-residence or thought up by the CEO’s wife.

Although missions, visions and values are generally ignored by employees, it is because they are largely irrelevant, rather than dereliction of duty. The only time they really care about values is at appraisal time, when part of their compensation depends on how well they ‘have lived the values’. Beyond the synthetic boundaries of the imposed culture is the real culture in the collective memory that lives outside the corporate brain in the collective identities, values and beliefs reflected from the individual intentions, needs and views.

Culture is the group memory that enables individuals to integrate with the collective, the future to connect to the past, the incorporation of new knowledge with old wisdom, and the unknown to speak to the known. This memory is not manufactured but emerges, like a dream, from a vast numbers of interconnected neuronal complexes playing in concert. Like our dreams, our real organisational cultures are dynamic stories of self 0rganising connections between our individual identities, values and beliefs.

Rather than being just some asset sheets and incorporation certificates, our organisations are dynamic patterns of autopoetic connections between the participants. For all its material wealth, an organisation is a human achievement; it is the expression of individual aspiration working together to discover a bigger dream. As that bigger dream is explored, structures begin to form, not from annual reports and HR manuals, but from the reflection of collective meaning, purpose and awareness.

The structures that begin to emerge are not bounded by more limitations and regulations. Instead we see communities coalescing around their collective dreaming, and gathering the unstoppable momentum of dreams whose time has come. From start ups in garages in Silicon Valley to boffins in sheds in the Cotswolds, collective dreaming brings us a mythic consciousness that goes beyond the higher consciousness of reason and factual knowledge. It is not usually a single technology or one brilliant individual that makes the difference; the most successful organisations are the ones that dream.

Dreams. We all have them. Every single one of us. And every week hundreds of dreamers contact me, keen to find out what their dreams really mean. I really do appreciate this level of interest and trust in my expertise but as a busy working psychologist, there are only so many individual dreams I can analyse and reply to.

I always try to respond to dreamers who appear to be in genuine need or some sort of crisis and also to dreams that I personally find interesting and intriguing. And to be perfectly honest, the more charming the email from the dreamer, the more likely I am to reply to it!

If I don’t manage to reply to your dream question, please use the search box on the site to find a dream similar to your one. You will more than likely find some meaningful information there, either in the Dream Diary or the Nodcasts. For dreamers in Scotland, you can also email your dreams to my weekly column in the Sunday Mail at dreams@sundaymail.co.uk.

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.

But rather than adventuring out into the unknown and unfamiliar, our conscious selves usually choose to stay well inside the boundaries of what we know. Instead of allowing ourselves to shine with the bright illumination of our self awareness, we peer into the darkness with the flickering Zippo lighter of self consciousness. We cloak our own luminosity and let our dreams fade back into our unconsciousness, so scared of losing what we have that we end up never finding out who we can be.

Even though we might try to consciously try to ignore our dreams, they keep calling us out to the edges of what we know. Because our dreaming awareness knows that the closer we get to the edge, the more we realise that there is no edge. As we step beyond the edge we step outside ourselves, beyond self consciousness into a true self awareness. This is what the Greeks termed Ecstasy, literally meaning to stand outside ourselves, to ecstatically experience the self beyond the self.

This awareness is universally experienced across all human cultures. It can be called Enlightenment. Oneness. Satori. Flow. In this awareness there are no boundaries between who we are and what we do, between what we value and what we need, and between what we believe and what we see. Our experience of beauty, love and truth becomes real and meaningful. It is not a state that we consciously create. We arrive there by removing the criticality and judgment of our habitual filters and conscious obstacles.

As we let go, we notice more. As our dreams change from more distant aspirations to something we are experiencing right now, something really interesting happens. We begin to truly illuminate the spaces around us and as we do we begin to attract what we dream about into our lives. Our dreams start to come true. All the things that we have dreamt about coming true and the person that we have dreamt about being begin to manifest in our daily realities.

As we become our own guiding light and we illuminate our own spaces, we attract others like a beacon to our dreams because they can see their dreams being reflected by us. We become an attractor who creates meaningful space and time for them as well as ourselves.  And as we travel along that curving shore between unconscious awareness and conscious reality, our understanding continues to emerge and our dreams continue to manifest.