Welcome

An archive of collected dreams about shared realities

and about dreaming as a community process

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We spend nearly half of our lives listening to the stories our sleeping brains tell us, stories that the unconscious brain writes autonomously. 

Many wake up and deny that their dreams are meaningful.

But dreams go right on insisting that they have meaning whether we can discern their meaning or not,

whether we “believe” in dreams or not.

And the vast majority of people I have encountered, including myself, have had dreams that have changed our lives, shaped our fears and phobias, told us truths we did not want to face in the daylight, warned us of threats we had minimized, or showed us a pathway toward hope.

We also dream about the world we live in and the collective challenges and crises we face together.

We dream about our collective circumstances, our shared social and natural environment.

Is that surprising?

Sometimes our dreams are about the land we sleep on and the health of the planet. Sometimes they are about our leaders, and our relationship to world changing events.  

Dreams provide us with sensory information about how we are negotiating the moment upon us:

Changes in culture and conceptions of civilization can be compared with a gradual change in the pieces of a mosaic. At a certain point in the process of replacing one piece with another we no longer have a clear picture of the pattern we are creating…

We must leave behind the individual pieces of the mosaic and concentrate on the meaning to be found in the emerging picture.

We must perceive situations in a total experience in order to make sense of our lives.

 ~ Vine Deloria Jr., The Metaphysics of Modern Existence

Perhaps each dream is just one small piece, and the assembled dreams of a culture or a nation, merely a larger one, of a fragmented collective whole.  

So, here we share thousands of collected pieces in case anyone wants to hold them up alongside their own, so that we might actually look for a moment and try to glimpse a larger pattern.

This space is a collection, an archive, a gathering of shared dreams about the collective challenges and crises we are facing.

Here you can peruse collected dreams about Trumpism, about climate change and about artificial intelligence, and perhaps more to come. Readings and resources that helped to shape and understand the collection are available. You are invited to share your dreams anonymously or with attribution, and you are also invited to submit your pertinent art, poems, and creative projects that are a response to, and an extension of our collective dreaming. 

Welcome to Collective Dreaming, a expanding community dream-mosaic, where we might find our way dreaming together through a time of extreme challenge toward a new world. 

To learn more about the history of this project

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