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.

Recently a client who is an avid collector of stuffed animals shared a recurring dream that was unsettling him. In the dream, he was relaxing in his sumptuous home when a noticed that a prized stuffed otter seemed to be breathing. He tried to ignore it, but the more he ignored it, the more alive it seemed to become, until it was arching its back and stretching like a cat.

When we dream of animals we are reflecting on aspects of ourselves that are unconscious and instinctual, and that we perhaps try to keep hidden as we feel that they may be difficult to control. When we dream of a stuffed animal we are considering a part of our unconscious self that we think we have controlled and neutralised so that it no longer poses a threat to us.

However, when we dream of a stuffed animal coming to life, we feel that some instinctive behaviour that we thought we had under control is beginning to take on a life of its own again. In this case of an otter in a case, it suggests a need to be more playful and altruistic when exploring the flowing waters of feelings and emotions.

This dream of taxidermic trauma is similar to the dreams about bombs, where potential energy is available for the dreamer to positively change some aspect of their life that they are repressing, or have been forced to repress. By welcoming this instinctual energy and using it to go with the flow, my client brought a valuable aspect of himself back to life.

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.

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.

Episode 6 of the fabulous Bellamy’s People has a brilliant spoof of a dream interpreter, played by the wonderful Lucy Montgomery. You can catch the show on the BBC iPlayer and the dream interpretation starts at about 3 minutes and 20 seconds. It made me weep with laughter because it is such an accurate potrayal of how most self acclaimed dream analysts/doctors/experts work.

However, the dream that Gary shared sounds exactly like the sort of dream that Paul Whitehouse might have. According to Johnny Depp, Paul is the best character actor in the world and I imagine that the boundaries can become very blurred between his real self and the characters that he so skilfully plays. Here is the dream…

‘I was in my bed and the wardrobe fell on me and completely covered me with all its contents.’

…and that suggests that the dreamer habitually hides his true self behind an array of assumed identities. The dreamer does this to please others and be accepted socially but he can find it quite overwhelming. Sometimes it can be a great release to shrug off old habits and just be his real self.

This week I have been working with Big Brother and  analysing the dream diaries of the BB9 Housemates. Exploring the housemate’s dreams has been absolutely fascinating and has illuminated a lot about their unconscious behaviour.

The Housemates kept dream diaries for a couple of weeks before entering the house and many of the events that have taken place during BB9 were anticipated by their dreams.

You can read some of the Dream Diary analysis at Dream On 1 and Dream On 2.