The Ability to Imagine Peace |
Dreams offer new situations for us to imagine different outcomes.
The feelings we experience in new dream situations are real, expanding our waking understanding.
By imagining different outcomes, we can resolve conflicts.
The act of dreaming places us squarely in the realm of the unexpected. Falling asleep, we leave a familiar world of work and family to enter a landscape of the unknown. Not only are the settings of dreams unexpected, but in our dreams we often act in ways that come as a complete surprise upon waking. Asleep, we could be playing pickleball with our second-grade teacher, or hopping onstage to jam with a jazz band at a huge stadium.
In waking life, we may have famously frozen back in elementary school when our teacher asked us a question, and we may never have picked up an instrument to play in a band. The feelings in dreams of hitting the ball back this time, however, and the courage to be seen onstage and improvise with a group, are real (Kahn, 2013, Tuan, 2001). This embodied component to dreaming is one way that dreams help us to evolve, expanding our imagination for what is possible. As the “I” of the dream, we have a physical experience that grows our sense of self, enabling us to bring these new awarenesses into waking time (Kahn, 2013).
The expanded imagination that dreams offer extends beyond feelings to that of exploring different outcomes. Being able to respond instead of freezing creates a back-and-forth dialogue; spontaneously leaping onstage, instead of sitting on the sidelines, shows us we have a special sound to share with others.
In dreams we get to experience new ways of approaching current challenges without having to pay a real-life price. We “try out” different scenarios and “run the numbers” on........