Change the world one dream at a time

What if our night-time dreams offered the potential to create real, positive change in the world?

Well, they do.

Imagine that! Asleep, in bed, being gifted everything you need to make a difference in the world, dream by dream, night by night!

I could argue that simply having a good eight-hour sleep each night, along with all the physiological, mental, and emotional benefits that dreaming brings (whether you remember those dreams or not) is a good starting point. Rather than facing a new day short on sleep, your mind clogged and fogged by inadequate processing of your daily experiences due to skimping on healing dreaming time, a full sleep enables you to bring a refreshed self to the day ahead.

But that is only a beginning.

Occasional dreams can offer creative solutions to problems, as well as sparkling new ideas and inventions that can be put into action. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, Niels Bohr’s realisation of the structure of the atom, and Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table of the elements, are amongst the more famous examples of world-changing scientific ideas perceived in dreams. The rapid transformation of the textile and clothing industries from handmade to machine manufactured products was a direct result of Elias Howe’s problem-solving dream, in 1846. Howe had been searching for a way to design an efficient sewing machine suitable for mass manufacture. He dreamed he was about to be killed for failing to come up with the solution when he suddenly noticed that the warriors surrounding him all had spears with a hole near the tip. That was what was needed: a hole at the eye of the sewing machine needle, not at the blunt end as was the case with a handheld sewing needle.

Closer to our times, Larry Page had a world-changing dream that seeded the idea of a search engine, resulting in the birth of Google some two years post-dream development.

But what about our more usual dreams, yours and mine?

How can we change the world, one dream at a time?

We too may occasionally dream of practical, potentially world-changing ideas, or our dreams may inspire us to take creative action to contribute to a better world, but we can do even more through every single dream, if we take the time to understand them.

The dreams we have every night invite us to understand ourselves more deeply, to integrate our conscious and unconscious life experiences in healing ways, to transform our inner worlds where they need positive transformation, and to nurture our deepest gifts and bring them into the light of day. Our dreams help us to accept our deepest shadows and to accept and empathise with people who we might have tarred with that same shadow brush. Our dreams help us to walk in another’s shoes, to understand and empathise with other people, other cultures, and other perspectives, through understanding our personal unconscious perspectives and drives.

Our dreams help us to grow in ways that benefit our everyday interactions with other people and the world around us, and that’s a very good place to start.

 

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