What could Dreams, Collective Imagination, and Tech enable in the future?

I had this vivid dream sometime last year during a period I was participating in a Collective Imagination Huddle organised by Collective Imagination Practice Community. This is the first dream am writing down because it’s not often that get a dream so alive. Am curious how you would interpret it.

Start dream.

An ancient community is trying to understand their purpose and the dance between inner and outer work. They are disarrayed in this longing for meaning and purpose. Soon, an old woman comes across an object that responds to not touch, but to intentions and decisions. She brings it home and community members have no idea what it is let alone its purpose. Amazed by its beauty, everyone wants to hold and feel it.

Time flies in dreams. It goes by and the only thing they know about this thing is holding and feeling, and mesmerising at its beauty. Bit by bit knowledge about this unknown beauty grows, and finally, they gather people and sages from all communities to really understand it. The ‘object’ begins to glow in a kind of living way — more like fireflies, as if to nod to the intention of this collective effort. As they go deeper into unveiling the mystery of this being through shared reflection, more layers start to emit light. The most peaceful light is emitted when they reconcile all explanations into one beautiful idea.

This being is inside each of us. When more of us understand our inner selves and align our intentions, we create an energy field strong enough to emit that peaceful light.

End Dream.

Whether you’re a designer, policy expert, entrepreneur, artist, engineer, or anything else, our fragmented selves are called upon to see the whole in the self, care about the whole, and align daily intentions toward the health of the whole. Colonialists set the tone of fragmenting ‘communities flowing with nature’ into ‘individual selves extracting nature’ for limitless material satiety. Capitalism accelerated this extraction and fragmentation. Regeneration comes through aligning our spiritual being, intentions, decisions, and actions, with the whole.

What would be the role of technology in a spiritual civilisation? What if technology enabled us to tap the potential of our inner selves, rather than focusing on polluting our minds with external consumerist content, which feeds narrow interests of extraction and accumulation? Can a dream be recorded by AR, or interpreted by AI? What are the implications of collective dreaming and everyday decisions? My inner/outer journey says a lot about systems evolution. The deeper I go inside, the stronger the pull toward outside work, and the deeper I go outside, the weaker the pull to work on both inner and outer worlds — i.e. maintain the status quo.

Instead of thinking about what we could become, instead of developing our capability to make a difference, we default to managing problems while creating more problems. Instead of driving technology, technology is driving us.

And we see this trend dominate the web3 space — centering the tech. This was a web3 huddle but through collective imagination, we centered what the world could become and then how web3 could play a role in that.

The pattern of colonialism’s legacy is one of erasing community from our culture — leading to the polycrisis we face today.

Teku an Indigenous leader said, “We don’t plan. We come together and we dream. We activate the dream. We integrate what we did. We dream again…” Collective imagination is collective dreaming, it’s collective growth, it’s collective joy.

We started organising neighbourhood kinship dialogues in the community I live in to understand what they value and care about, their challenges, and the life they dream of in this place, with the aim our reconciling these human dreams with what the land/place wants.

We’re learning that 1) there is a deep hunger for collective dreaming toward an alternative system, 2) the only reason the status quo persists is the absence of spaces (or coordination) toward collective dreaming, so individual dreaming takes the day, in the end, we work below our individual and collective potential. As Nora Bateson says, “There will not be community without communing.”

Perhaps the brilliance of the system is in disincentivizing collective dreaming time and spaces, motivating and busying us with lower-order purposes instead of higher-order purposes where we might contribute to the health of the whole.

Collective imagination is collective dreaming, it’s collective growth, it’s collective joy.

How do we create more spaces for collective imaginations, and what is the role of money and tech in this? What future could these enable?