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 we 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.

Rather than seeing ourselves as the source of the dreams that we create, we constantly look outside to others to fulfil our dreams. Our dreams end up in the ownership of groups who have little or no interest in our individual dreams and as we defer our futures to them, we begin to lose interest in our own dreams. The market to fulfil our dreams is huge and by dictating the type of dreams we should have, corporations can accumulate a great deal of income from us.

Although our sleeping dreams often focus on getting rid of baggage and freeing ourselves from encumbrances, many of our waking dreams are centred on material wealth. We often measure our success by the apparent value of the objects that we accumulate, as valuable objects are often seen as a tangible reflection of our own value. And the objects that we desire most are the ones that apparently have most meaning for us and our culture, the totems that make us feel most valued and most needed.

We focus on these objects of desire and imbue them with an almost magical presence and properties. Often it seems as if these magical objects have taken on a life of their own and become possessed by an exquisite animism. However, the object itself is not magic. It is only reflecting our own innate magic as we shine our dreams on to it. The object does not actually contain anything meaningful or magical; it reflects it. It is the magic that it inspires in us that makes it so apparently valuable.

Because of what it reflects, the object itself can seem to be an attractor. But what makes it so attractive are the meaningful spaces being created around it. The most attractive and desirable objects are those that create a social space around that increase the potential for connection and opportunity. These are what anthropologists call Social Objects; objects that help create spaces where we can tell our stories and become more aware of our dreams.

A string of shark’s teeth. A bottle of wine. An iPhone. These are all objects that create spaces by reflecting our dreaming awareness, and although we imbue them with great value, even the most wonderful social objects are inanimate. What brings them into life are our dreams and our ability to see reflected meaning that allows us to truly own and celebrate our own dreams. Owning the dream means that we embody them ourselves rather than transferring them into the control of others. And there is nothing quite as valuable as a dream that we truly own ourselves.

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.

And if our dreams are so important, why do we forget them so easily? Surely the deep insight and wide awareness that we experience in our dreams should be far more persistent if they are of any real value to us? If our unconscious illuminations and reflections are so powerful, why do we let them slip away so easily? The answer is that we naturally seem to forget our dreams because of a simple function of how the dreaming process has evolved biologically.

The evolutionary reason that we forget our dreams is so that we can quickly distinguish between our dreams and waking reality when we wake up. Otherwise we might behave like startled dogs woken from dreams of rabbit pursuit, bewildered and slightly psychotic. In our past, we needed to quickly step from the caves of our dreams into a conscious reality so we could fend off sabre toothed tigers and pursue herds of passing Megaloceros.

But then our ancestors began painting their hunting dreams on their cave walls and subsequently much of our existence has become based on our shared symbols. Forgetting our dreams was an evolutionary adaptation when we were animals. Now that we live in a largely symbolic world, remembering our dreams and the symbols they speak in is evolutionarily selective. The ability to recall our dreams and be unconsciously aware of them has become a competitive advantage.

However in a corporate context, being aware of our unconscious may seem completely unnecessary. It might be more commercially advantageous if we were just computer controlled meatbots like the cognitive scientists seem to think we are. Or sophisticated automatons programmed to operate and fulfil functions without knowing why, only how. Our dreams and our creativity would no longer inspire us to look beyond our designated functions and productivity targets.

Our dreams can disappear very quickly when confronted by the more primitive aspects of commercial reality. Brief flashes and glimpses of real opportunity fade away into the grey corporate mists of what might have been. But an organisation that is unconsciously aware and can remember its dreams possesses a distinct competitive advantage. The collective dreams of an organisation hold its future and the ability to adapt and evolve to truly realise opportunity.

Carl Jung said that <em>‘The more we attend to our dreams, the more aware that we become’.</em> In our workplaces, the more that we attend to the collective imagery and shared myths of our unconscious awareness, the more meaning the workplace will have. And the more meaning the workplace has, the better the stories are that are told in it and told about it. And in any business sector, the best story always wins.

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.

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.

It may seem as if the crisis has suddenly arrived out of nowhere, but our dreaming awareness has usually registered an impending crisis before it registers in our conscious mind. We notice seemingly trivial clues that don’t fit into our existing patterns. A large buff coloured envelope. A frowning forehead. A strange ticking becoming louder and louder. A partner’s eyes looking suddenly away. Our dreaming awareness often gives us this distant early warning of the storm on our horizon but we usually just ignore it because it does not fit a familiar pattern.

When we become immersed in a crisis, our reaction is often to try and change our environment and the behaviour of those around us in an attempt to restore previous patterns and old familiar stories. The more we do this, the worse our crisis usually becomes. Instead, if we allow ourselves to change and embrace our new selves, we discover a whole new freedom. When someone says ‘I want to change the world’, what they are really saying is ‘I want to change myself’. As Gandhi said ‘Be the change you want to see in the world’.

As we embrace the freedoms of change that have been liberated by our crisis, something truly unexpected happens. Our dreaming awareness begins to connect the disparate patterns of the familiar and unfamiliar, improvising old themes into new motifs and variations. We take our old stories and new insights and start jamming on them, remixing them, mashing them up, creating new patterns. Sometimes the new pattern emerges as a minor innovation. Sometimes it seems to be a work of genius.

What seems to be genius is actually the ability to step out of old patterns and into new stories of the future. As William Gibson remarked ‘The future is here already; it is just unevenly distributed’. But to reach into our new futures we have to let our broken stories go and release ourselves from long held maladaptive myths. Our new stories may not give us the outcome we expected but they will always give us the ending we truly need.

By stepping out of our old stories we also step outside our own selves and receive the powerful gift that it gives us, which as Robert Burns observed, is to ‘See ourselves as others see us’. We become an audience for our stories as well as the principal actors in them and that intimate distance often provides a sudden self awareness that lets us know when we are really free.