An unprecedented demand for dreaming (and other surprises)
When I first got the idea to start asking people about their dreams, I was up against a catch-22. Dreams reflect our most intimate desires and we generally tend to keep them to ourselves. There’s also a whole set of invisible norms that surround our dreams, keeping them relegated to the realm of the private and personal. I think this has the unfortunate effect of sequestering dreams to a perpetual state of unreality. This is a huge bummer. Maybe even a dream crisis. But even so, why would anyone want to share their dreams with a stranger? And why would anyone want to share their dreams publicly?
I shared these doubts with a friend and she humored me with a suggestion: Just make a sign that says, “talk to me about your dreams.” Surprisingly, this worked—and there have been many other delightful surprises along the way. I’m gathering my top three surprises so far.
There is an unprecedented demand for dreaming.
Quite simply, people want to dream. Everyone has a dream, and it seems like most of the people I’ve encountered have just been waiting for someone to finally ask. We need more spaces where we can dream.
Dreams are never far-fetched.
When people share their dreams, they don’t talk about winning outrageous sums of money in the lottery, time traveling, or inventing a radically different life for themselves out of thin air. People tend to dream within the contours of their current reality. Mostly, people dream about having or doing things that are incredibly straightforward, like going on vacation, having affordable housing, or finding a new job. Things taken for granted in previous generations are now the subject of dreams.
Dreaming is hard.
Dreaming isn’t always fun. Surfacing dreams can surface a lot of other stuff too. Like hopelessness (because dreams can seem very far away from current circumstances), shame (for not working on dreams or keeping them on pause), or uncertainty (because grind culture means that time to contemplate our dreams can be an elusive luxury for a lot of people). Grind culture is probably one of the biggest threats to dreaming. When people feel that most of their time is spent recovering from daily life, it’s easy to push dreams aside.
