A wee video loop made for the University of Saskatchewan Leadership Conference in May.

1. Your dreams will find your dreams.
2. You create the dream that dreams you.
3. What happens inside, happens outside.
4. If you have a why, you will always find a how.
5. You are dreaming right now.
6. A symbol without a space is like a bull without a china shop.
7. If you want to know who you are, look at what you are doing.
8. All need is unrequited love for the self.
9. If we never listen to the truths of others, we will never hear our own truths.
10. Meaning is what really matters.
11. Our dreams and stories don’t always give us the endings we expect, but they always give us the endings that we need.
12. The closer you get to the edge, the more you realise that there is no edge.
13. The best story always wins.
14. Own your own dreams.
15. Change your myth. Change your reality.
16. If you want to know about dreaming, ask your dream. In a dream.
17. Creativity and play are serious survival strategies.
18. Our shared spaces connect our private myths and our public dreams.
19. Other people are the best mirrors we have.
20. Show others how to dream their own dream, rather than forcing them to be in your dreams.
21. Your dreams need space. Walk in a wild place and listen to your heart sing.
22. The most successful organisations are the ones that dream.
23. Your future arrives one dream at a time.
24. Your dreams are in the spaces all around you.

Only our unconscious really knows what our conscious strives to know. Our dreams are answering questions that we don’t even know that we are asking, and remembering all that we have consciously filtered and forgotten. This is what Sufi mystics termed anamnesis, the end of forgetting who we really are. When we dream, our fragmented identities connect to a more fundamental awareness and we begin to truly understand the mystery that we are trying to unravel.

Solving the mystery of who you are, who you have been and who you will be cannot be accomplished as a detached observer, evaluating your situation from a distance. Stepping fully into your dreams is the only real way to meet the person who you dream of being and to truly live your dreams you really have to be in them. Your dreams are not some vague things that may or may never happen. They are happening right now as you read these words and you can choose to immerse yourself in them or try to keep hiding from them.

And if you try to hide from your dreams, they will keep searching for you until you truly find your own self and can at last speak your own clear truths. As your dreams discover you, you begin to realise that you are not just living ‘the’ dream, whatever that might currently be. You are living and breathing your dream, the one unique, big dream that only you can dream. This dream is not just something that is happening to you, you are happening to the dream.

Remembering how to dream is as simple as becoming aware of the space and time that we unconsciously create. Our dreams take us to the edge of the known and unknown and illuminate all our realisable possibilities and potentials. They eloquently celebrate our individual uniqueness in a wider celebration of our universal awareness. Dreams invite us to step into our true power which can be scary. And magnificent. They honestly show us our beauty, our love and our truth. Your dreams are in the spaces all around you, waiting to be dreamed. Be your dreams now.

Most business analysts attempt to predict the future by analysing past patterns and extrapolating them in to a state of favourable future conditions. However, past experience shows us that this approach doesn’t always work. Although historic patterns do tend to repeat, our constant search for newness often invites the unpredicted into our lives. Rather than arriving in a long awaited and neatly packaged parcel, the future usually arrives in our current reality in the form of sudden flashes of insight and unexpected fragments of opportunity.

In planning for the future, the unexpected is usually associated with unpleasant surprises. When the unforeseen inevitably occurs, we repeatedly try to ignore it. If it’s not in the plan, it can’t exist. Rather than exploring these unanticipated opportunities, we retreat back into the comfortable past, waiting for the future to arrive and set us free. But the more we try to hold on to the old, the more that fragments of the future begin to appear unexpectedly in our lives.

We first become aware of the future in our dreams. Our unconscious awareness beams out from us in time as well as space and usually begins to sense the future before we become consciously aware of it. Like our dreams, the future arrives in seemingly disconnected fragments that we usually filter out because they seem to make little sense to us. We hear these fragments all around us in snatches of conversation, and see them in signs that we are not allowing ourselves to notice yet. As Henry David Thoreau observed, ‘Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven’.

These flashes often illuminate surprising insights and all of a sudden we see what is new. Our insight may appear to be a stroke of absolute genius, but usually all we have done is to notice something that we have been unconsciously aware of for sometime. It may seem to have happened suddenly, but like most overnight sensations, it has probably been knocking on the door of our conscious awareness for years. Although our inventive genius may seem like a solitary pursuit, its success usually depends on how many conversations we are engaged in and truly listening to what we are saying and hearing.

The more conversations we are in, then the more connected we will be. And the more connected we are with ourselves and others, the more easily we will be able to connect all the fragments of the future that are continually arriving in our lives. All these fragments are fundamentally connected, and they all reflect what our future looks like. By connecting the fragments that have most meaning for us, it can be surprisingly easy to release ourselves and create the future that we want to be in.

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.

Our expansive dream landscapes reflect our yearning for extensive wilderness places where we can travel under our own power into the unknown and unseen. We need new places to discover. Not so we can conquer territory and own the land, but because exploring a new place helps us to discover new things about our own inner landscapes. Spacious wildernesses reflect our own mysteries, giving us space to dream and new opportunities to explore.

In many corporate environments, the unknown self is a stagnant marsh to be drained, rather than an ever flowing river that irrigates and sustains the psychic landscape. The unknown can seem scary and unfamiliar territory, full of lurking threats and unpredictable behaviours. We are warned ‘It’s a jungle out there’ and so instead of exploring, observing and discovering, we attempt to eliminate all mystery. Logging our behaviour in surveillance databases has the same outcome as logging in the Amazon basin. Something beautiful and valuable is destroyed and the unseen and unknown simply moves elsewhere.

Rather than true wilderness that makes our wild hearts rise, we end up with sanitised nature reserves and plastic theme parks that try to recreate that mysterious experience. Albert Einstein observed that ‘The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed’.

With out the presence of mystery, we would feel no need to search. A recurring theme in many of our dreams is the search. We make these dream journeys not to reach a final and predetermined destination, but to create a heroic space where we can continue to discover ourselves.  For an inquisitive, pattern forming, opportunistic organism such as a human being, what makes search engines such as Google so attractive is not that they organise all the world’s information, but that they help power our own journeys of self discovery.

We often attribute our lack of freedom and choice to external influences such as lack of money or opportunity, not realising that the necessary resources are usually readily available within ourselves, in our own inner dreamscapes. Once we begin exploring ourselves, adventures, discoveries and surprises soon follow. And the most surprising discovery is usually finding our true self. To quote T.S. Eliot ‘We shall not cease from exploration, And the end of all our exploring, Will be to arrive where we started, And know the place for the first time’.

Although this may seem rewarding and flattering to you, the real truth is that it is usually the space that you have created that people are attracted to rather than just you. This might be your own attractive qualities or something attractive you are creating the space with. However, what they really want are your possibilities, your potential for themselves and they invade your space because they want the space where their own magic can happen.

Space invaders often couldn’t care less about you and your attractor; usually that is the first thing that they want to get rid off when they enter your space. This happens time and time again when organisations merge and acquire each other. A group of people has created an attractive thing and another company acquires that group so they can own the space. Usually they end up with all the tangible assets, all the processes and procedures and the fragments of meaning, but somewhere along the line they just lose the space that attracted them in the first place. This is where mergers and acquisitions nearly always go wrong.

An obvious answer is to encourage potential space invaders to create their own spaces, rather than trying to take control of your unique spaces. However, the one thing that everyone is inexorably drawn towards and then almost invariably runs away from is an authentic glimpse into themselves and where they find meaning. Anything so they don’t have to confront their own fears, brilliance, magnificence, and power. Rather than sharing our myths, beating our drums, and painting our hunts, it can be easier to hide behind PowerPoint platitudes and defensively conceal our real selves.

But one of the great things about dreaming space is that it is elastic space. Our dreams are boundless and only limited by the Hubble constant of our ever expanding awareness. Our imaginations are abundant but we often try to police them and control them by inappropriate intellectual property initiatives. Much more effort is put into locking down our DRMs than opening up our dreams.

There is always space to create new dreaming space, but it takes courage to stop desiring the special spaces that others create and to step into the unknown and uncertainty of creating your own dreams. And as others are attracted into your spaces, the most valuable thing you can do is to show them how to create their own magic, rather than trying to lock them into yours. And remember, it’s always about the space that you or your object creates, and never really about you or your object.

However, as we do this our unconscious awareness has no rigid scripts; it is very improvisational in nature. As we blend our current experience with more ancient wisdoms we make it up as we go along, playing out our family of contextual identities into our surroundings. What seem like trivial social interactions are deeper projections and reflections of who we are and who we could be. We fill the spaces around us with unconscious cues and clues as we try to connect with each other, and so establish contact with our deeper selves.

Our dreaming awareness knows that the best way to for us to connect is to continually create space and possibilities for each other. This is what we all do, every night in our dreams as we act out different characters and meet all sorts of people who seem to hold some sort of unspoken meaning for us. We project our identities into the spaces we create and this unconscious dialogue enables us to converse with undiscovered parts of the self.

In our waking realities, we often do the opposite. Instead of creating space and possibilities for each other, we tend to close each other down. By blocking offers from others, we end up blocking valuable offers from our own selves. The more space that we create for others, the more of ourselves we can see. Rather than blocking someone else, no matter how antagonistic they might seem, it makes much more sense to open up to them and see what they have to offer us.

Opening up to others and hearing what they have to offer us often means letting go of our preconceptions. The more we let go of who we think they are, the more we notice about who they really are. And the more we notice about them, the more we become aware of ourselves. This often gives voice to our unconscious awareness and opens us up to talents and understandings we didn’t even know we had. In our dreams, we let go, notice more and use everything we encounter, and the more we do this in our waking lives, the more connected we become.

Without connection, there is no reflection, and other people are the best mirrors we have. And if we want to influence someone, the best way to persuade them is to reflect their dreams. By creating space for them to dream and to connect with those dreams, we make them a dream offer that is almost impossible to refuse.

Rather than using our dreams to experience symbolic space and create meaning, we conceptualise, analyse and reduce our worlds until we are only left with meaningless results. The meaningful spaces created by our dreaming awareness cannot be directly understood by rational and reductionist analysis. Our unconscious awareness can often seem to be like the Big Bang white noise of an unattended TV, continually revealing a great mystery if we only knew what the question was.

Using an NMR brain scanner to try and find out what is really happening in our heads is like a television engineer try to make sense of the stories being played out on screen by measuring voltages inside the television set. The engineer will be able to detect that the TV is on and perhaps even which channel is being received. But they will never see the bigger picture because reducing a human epic to a series of voltages will never tell the real story. The voltages may be measurable signs but they are not contextual symbols.  The engineers can perhaps define the signs but have no idea about the story space that the symbols create.

Our symbols help us to create a meaningful space where meaning can be expressed and encountered. A symbol resonates in meaningful space, helping our inner awareness to resonate with what we experience outside. It links the known and the unknown, the familiar and the unfamiliar. A symbol without meaningful space is merely a token sign, and trying to break a symbol down to dissect it merely destroys it. We experience symbols in their contextual spaces as energised images that reflect the stories all around us.  Our shared symbols become an iconography that creates the spaces for our private dreams to connect with the public myth.

The gift of a symbol is the meaningful space it helps to create. All over the world, we all dream the same themes and produce common symbols from mandalas to Mac desktops. Our dreams are fantastic creators of resonant imagery and the art of interpreting our own waking dreams is to find the meaningful spaces, not just analysing the symbols by saying ‘this means that’. Words can only hint at this meaningful space and never fully explain it.

Aristotle observed that ‘The most skilful interpreter of dreams is he who has the facility for observing resemblances’. The symbols and spaces that we resonate with are those that most resemble our own individual myths and stories. Where our words explain, resonant symbols arouse intimations, possibilities and emotions beyond verbal expression.

These are all cultural routes that we use to reflect our selves as we try to find our individual paths to a wider awareness. Our unconscious expresses itself most eloquently in our dreams and myths and in our art and play; our dreams are the great art that we all spontaneously create. We don’t dream to be like each other; we dream to search for our self and know who we are amongst everyone else. We search by creating and we begin our search by copying others as we search for our own dreams.

Our first attempts to copy others often sound like bad poetry, spoken loudly. This is not herd behaviour; we are trying to find our own unspoken dream. First we mimic others and then as we start to hear our own voice emerging, we begin to drift away from others into our own unique poetry. Our poems and dreams both use ambiguity to create webs of associative meaning in the evocation of feeling and atmosphere. And our unconscious works like a poem with its ability to compress and expand memory and meaning, speaking its imagery and feeling its rhythms.

A poem doesn’t describe a space, it creates a space. This is also how play works, creating a space for potential and trying out new strategies and patterns. The ludic state is a serious business in all mammals as we simulate our waking reality and test out our strategies for the future. We play by adopting other identities and needs, beliefs and stories. When we play, we return to a dreaming state where we can develop our fundamental human awareness by stories, songs, chants and poetry. The individuals we value most highly are the performers who play for us and reflect our own deeper truths.

The arts that we profoundly play in and the dreams we autopoetically create are both emotionally loaded forms of communication. Like our collective myths, our works of art are public dreams. And like great art, dreams are not about what they are about; they are about creating our own individuality by stepping into the playground of the unknown and the unfamiliar. In dreams we are all artists, musicians, playwrights and actors.

And the more we play, and the more we create, the more the mundane patterns of everyday life become transfused with the radiant intensity of the incredible. The profound mysteries and secret resources of our ancient selves spring to life in the most unlikely places, a manifestation of our own uniqueness.