A better world.
Two weeks ago, I was sitting here at my desk writing when I noticed billowing smoke outside my window. Seconds later, flames burst from the abandoned house two doors down. A neighbour was already outside, calling emergency services, and within minutes three fire engines had arrived. No-one was hurt, but the already dilapidated house was a goner.
The view from my window had changed in a single afternoon. Although the house had been left to ruin, the old corrugated, somewhat rusted roof and brick chimney rising above my immediate neighbour’s home had formed an attractive eyeline. After the fire, the chimney remained but the roof was black, ripped, and curling.
Yesterday, as I was sitting here at my desk preparing to do a phone dream therapy session with a client, a bright yellow dinosaur hovered into view, grunting and grating as it gyrated its massive steel jaw from side to side.
The giant bulldozer had arrived to demolish the remains of the house. Bite by huge bite it chomped through the fragile remains of the roof. Nudge by nudge it toppled the brick chimney.
So today, as I sit here to write this blog, my view has changed yet again. I can hear the mechanical rumblings and grumblings of the fallen debris being cleared from the site, but my eyeline now extends to a more distant horizon, and I wonder how the view will change again in coming weeks and months. Will the land remain vacant or will a new structure rise in place of the old and dilapidated?
How suddenly things can change: old, tenacious structures toppled, space for new possibilities opened up.
And how swiftly our views can change too.
As I sit here at my desk, in late June 2020, we are still in the midst of a global pandemic. Here in Tasmania, we are currently fortunate to have had no new Covid-19 cases for 40 days, though we are still officially in a state of emergency and with our borders closed to other Australian states as well as internationally. Elsewhere in the world, and possibly where you live, the picture is far more dire.
“Take a long look at the yachts sailing in,” I had said to my young grandchildren on New Year’s Eve, as we watched the last of the boats in the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race edge into safe harbour. “Remember this moment, the last day of 2019. Tomorrow is not only a new year, but a whole new decade. I wonder what amazing changes the 2020s will bring.”
Little did we know!
After the pandemic, what changes will the 2020s decade bring? We are already witnessing social, economic, political, and environmental change, and as dilapidated structures topple, how can we tap into our dreams to help build a better world?
One function of dreaming is creative problem-solving.
When you take a problem to bed and ‘sleep on it’, morning light can sometimes deliver surprising results, whether or not you remember your dreams.
Your dreams are unlikely to offer ideas in a straightforward, literal fashion, but if you read between the lines you may be inspired to take action in the world. Ideas may include new ways of connecting with and supporting community, projects to help shift global vision, practical steps around promoting new paradigms, and Eureka moments in science and innovation.
Far more urgently, dreams help us to know ourselves more deeply, to identify our unconscious (and sometimes darker) views about the world and our place in it.
It’s our unconscious views and mindset that can drive the way we live and take action in the world. If you want to see a better world arise, explore the dreams you are gifted each morning to discover what needs to change within you to support the kind of positive change you would like to see in the world. Discover your limited thinking, your blind spots, your deeply rooted prejudices, as well as your deeply buried talents and magnificent potential.
When you rebuild from the inside, everything changes.
A few days before writing this blog, I dreamed that two tortoises had lived in a small box ever since the day they were born. The box was their whole world. They knew no other life. They were happy yet knew that they were about to die. But I, standing outside their box, knew that they were about to pass from the tiny box world into the vastly bigger and better world where I stood. “Not a death, but a birth,” I told the person standing next to me. Although the dream is about me and my inner world, it also offers a universal promise of a better world and inspired my choice of the mythological World Turtle or World Tortoise for this blog’s header image. Ah, the many layered gifts of dreaming!
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