It’s a funny thing because we’re dreaming, in one way or another, maybe most of our lives. Really? Let’s look into this and see if we can also make good, conscious use of it.

During the night, we experience REM sleep during which the brain is detoxing and regenerating. The mind plays through some of the primarily jagged, emotionally charged experiences of the day and processing them. Some of it is the discharge of disturbances to homeostasis seeking resolution. Some of what happens is the mirroring of experiences through symbolic and archetypal language back to us for contemplation and consideration for our personal growth, development, and evolution. That’s dreaming during the night.

During the day, we dream as well, a lot! Perhaps most of each day, walking down the street, going to the market, or even in the middle of our work, we are ruminating, fantasizing, imagining, or “chatting” with ourselves throughout the day, distinct from being present with what’s right in front of our noses.

I have commented on this many times, including in my article on bicycling in NYC1, where people are “sleepwalking” or hypnotized by their cell phone or mind-chatter so they don’t see what’s right in front of them.

Why is this relevant? For lots of reasons! Could it be that we fantasize and dream because our lives are not infrequently less than we think it could be, and the life in our community and world is less than what we believe it should be, falling far below the vision we had of our future life when we were children, fantasizing and dreaming of what it would be like to be “a grown-up?”

Perhaps this is God’s way or Nature’s way of speaking with us, nudging us toward a greater life, a fulfillment of our higher potential.

Dream cultures

In ancient and indigenous cultures, dreaming was a vital part of living and guiding the community. One of many examples is the ancient Greeks2, who used a process called “incubation” to be in touch with their dreams as a means of self-understanding and even prophecy. A contemporary expression of this ancient technique is the creative use of the Floatation Tank, something I had in my healing center, The Center for Creative Well-Being, some years back in NYC.

Quantum physicist Fred Alan Wolf stated in his book The Dreaming Universe, that:

“Dreaming is not just a brain activity; it is a fundamental creative process of consciousness.”

Lucid dreaming merges worlds

Another really interesting aspect of the dream world is what has come to be identified as lucid dreaming. This is the process of experiencing the dream-as-reality that one is conscious while dreaming during sleep. Some people feel that because they are conscious, they can shape the dream and its outcomes. Indeed, that is has an outcome in material reality.

The border between these dimensions is intriguing to say the least.

Dreaming up a new world that works for all

Following through on the idea that in a dream state, we can be conscious and shape it and its outcomes, gives us some leverage in a world that feels so out of our control, where decisions about our lives are made too often by others, be that government authorities or even other people.

We are told that we cannot do what we’d like with our own bodies be it by society’s tacit mores or law. For instance, God forbid a woman would need an abortion for any number of reasons. In many states in the U.S. and many countries, she is prohibited by law from doing so. Even contraception is being challenged3 in some states.

We pay taxes, yet often have little say in how the funds are spent. Many wouldn’t want 60% of our taxed dollars to go to military purposes but rather to feed hungry children, build homes for the homeless and educate everyone, build local and national infrastructure, provide real healthcare, clean all bodies of water and contaminants in the air and soil.

But when was the last time we were asked how we want our hard-earned tax dollars to be spent?

When were we last asked whether we’d like to move to an energy system based on renewable sources instead of fossil fuels that destroy so much of our planet, our respiration, and our health?

When were we last asked about whether we insist upon building a culture of peace instead of having to be subject to the government’s persistently maintaining a state of perpetual war?

We know the answer: we’re never asked. The government doesn’t want to hear our views—they just want our votes to maintain their same status quo agenda.

Enter the dreamers

While it is vital to vote and to voice your views through writing letters, phone calls, marches, whatever suits you, there is another level of reality on which we can play, another realm to enter, and that’s the quantum realm, the energy field.

It is in this space of dreamy imagination, of image and word, that we can shape reality as we want to see it. We can dream a new world, a new planet, a new Earth, in which caring for people and planet precedes profit.

This is a space of creative consciousness, where we put our hearts and values “on the line”, to express our deepest desire for a better world, a world in which all beings are treated with dignity and respect.

How is reality shaped anyway, Alfie? Tell us what it’s all about!

I am suggesting that this is exactly how it’s shaped, through imagination, image, and word infused by emotions like passion and compassion.

Not only has this been known by wisdom traditions East and West for millennia, but neuroscience and the latter-day mystical tradition know this well too.

The work of Dr. Joe Dispenza4, Dr. Bruce Lipton, and discoveries in neuroscience and quantum physics have given scientific corroboration to these otherwise seemingly mystical ideas.

Imagine that if enough of us do this in alignment with our highest, humane spiritual virtues and values in a disciplined, coherent, focused fashion over time, we shift the energy and information in the quantum field, antecedent to what shows up in our material world.

If enough people are vibrating at the higher frequency of kindness, gratitude, compassion, respect for all life, and love and this gets focused into the artwork of imagery and language that represent those values, from the inside, the earthquake of this alchemical elixir, this transformation, begins and continues to take shape. If you can imagine, it becomes a subtle, all-encompassing, psycho-emotional, somato-spiritual earthquake, i.e., transformation!

My old teacher of T’ai-Chi, Bob Lumisch, in NYC’s Chinatown and East Village, used to say that all reality begins with an idea. The idea is nurtured and shaped into manifest, material form.

As a 21-year-old, when Bob first told me this, it was a new idea to me and exciting, as it gave us some hope and say in what shows up in our world. For the greatest effect, when it is done as a collective, as a community, the effect is exponentially amplified.

Dr. Larry Dossey’s work5 on prayer verified this effect in respect to healing people, even with cancer, even from a distance.

Through individual and collective prayer and work in the quantum field as above, we can remove the cancer of ignorance, selfishness, and greed in our society and replace these with the virtues and qualities that are just so much more fun and life-affirming.

So when I speak of “dreaming a new world” into existence, now you understand and even have the simple strategy to bring this to fruition.

Vision to fruition

Can you see a world in your mind and heart’s eye in which people play instead of fight, dance instead of struggle, serve each other as a matter of course, help each other and build an eco-friendly, regenerative, earth-honoring series of farms with food aplenty, clean water flowing and a marketplace full of the most beautiful and colorful, life-nourishing foods with world-music playing in the background, everyone housed, fed and educated with community flourishing?

Funny, it sounds a lot like the way the world was, and in many places is, when one steps out of “the advanced, developed countries” where money has become king instead of peace, respect and love, which is often where people with materially less tend to share what they have. I have experienced this directly in several parts of the world.

Isn’t that curious! Where life is lived in the simplest and humblest ways across this beautiful planet, the so-called “least developed” regions are where it is often also “most humane”. Just what is “more advanced?”

Dreaming is a way back to that very natural, human state of mind and heart. Perhaps wealth, kindness, and generosity can synergize and exist together.

With the world in such tumultuous flux, employing this strategy now would be greatly advised.

References

1 The tao of bicycling in New York City on Meer.
2 The Healing Power of Dream Incubation in Ancient Greece at Ancient Origins.
3 Is Birth Control Still Legal in the U.S.? at The New York Times.
4 Dr. Joe Dispenza, official website.
5 The Power of Premonitions by Larry Dossey on A Better World.