Business and Dreams

Although the world of business and the world of dreams are often considered to be incompatible, this is not so. Once one realises that dreams may be the ‘printout’ of the most shrewd and capable computer we have access to, we can see them as a source of useful information.

If you are in business, there is information in your memory, along with considered projects, questions about problem areas, which have never been, and perhaps cannot be put on a computer. Also, there is no computer program outside your own mind that can handle and manipulate all the variables, the integrating of different information sources – written words, feeling hunches, spoken information, personal observation and experience – and then sift through and explore different combinations, and reach into pure creativity by leaping into the new.

Dreams should not be seen as oracles, but if you take their information into account along with your other sources, you will find them a real addition to your business equipment. See: creativity and problem solving dreams.

As for why this is a practical possibility a little information may help to clarify.

Our brain is segmented into what has been defined as three levels. The base level we share in common with reptiles and this deals with our flight and fight, habitual behaviour and sexual impulse.

The level above that is called the mammalian brain, and its technical name is the Limbic System. This is wrapped around the reptilian brain, and is something we share with other mammals such as cats, dogs and horses. It developed about 60 million years ago and deals with your emotions, feelings responses to people and events, the subtler inner life you feel in love and sex, problem solving, and it provides a deep wisdom about social and individual relationships. Dreams often use mammals or apes to portray the influence in your life of this part of your unconscious drives and intuitions.

The action of this brain is largely unconscious, but it does express its enormous insight into people, their body language, social situations, as feelings, hunches and dreams.

So here is one of the aspects of our mental functioning that greatly enlarges our waking assessment of a person or a situation.

There is also a function I have named mega-awareness. It is a mental activity found more often in dreams than in waking. It is an ability the mind has to scan enormous amounts of information at the same moment. We are doing it all the time when we speak and listen to replies. In a flash we scan for possible meanings of the words and the context of them. It happens so fast we usually miss what is happening. But our mind can do that with the millions of bits of information we have gathered, even those bits seen or heard out of the ‘corner of our eye’ so to speak.

What megawareness does is to summarize what it scans, putting together unrelated bits of information in new and creative ways, and our dreams are a major way these insights are expressed. This function can be greatly enhanced by actually pursuing a question and watching for a ‘felt’ or dreamt response. But sometimes the process present things we haven’t asked for because they are relevant to the important situations we face.

See: Using Your Intuition; creativity and problem solving dreams.