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Living The Dream?! sustainable living & a Great British conversation just begging to be had.

19 Thursday Mar 2015

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Austin Powers, Banter, brands, Castles, Cats Cradle, China Dream, Climate Change, Constituencies of Action, Consumerism, Dreams, Emerged Economies, faith, great British conversation, Identity, John Stuart Mill, JUCCCE, Lighter Living, love, M&S, Pay Day Loans, Peggy Liu, Pork Scracthings, Prosecco, Reimagining Prosperity, Smarter Living, Stenna Stairlifts, sustainable living, Transforming Desire, UK Dream

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Funny how some phrases just fall in to your lap. Funny how some just stick. Living the Dream is just such a phrase – a gift horse that was staring me in the mouth.

In the space of two days I had the polarities of Great British aspiration and disappointment writ simple and large on my storytelling wall. Our Great British M&S-stylie Prosecco & Pistachio lifestyle and its poor PaydayLoan & Pork-scratching cousin came gift-wrapped in one exquisitely simple phrase.

In a West London brasserie bar sat a woman, fashionably turned out, the odd fancy shopping bag at her killer-heeled feet, a glass of bubbles in front of her, txting furiously on her i-phone 6. Her friend appeared suddenly, looking a little bedraggled, but on seeing her shiny friend she brightly chirped,’ living the dream babes…look at you…bubbles and everything…’

And within days of the upbeat version wafting in front of me, its poor cousin appeared in North London, just beyond N1. I see a bloke, obviously far from rolling in it: a bag of DIY stuff in one hand, one child in the buggy, the other mid tantrum, on the phone to his partner/girlfriend/wife/babymamma. She is patently giving him an earful. Cue a friend of his walking past on the other side of the street who shouts ‘ Oi Tommy..Living the Dream then mate!?’. The beer-battered sarcasm of this banter simply inspired a meek self-deprecating shrug in the bedraggled bloke on the mobile. True.

As a phrase Living the Dream does what every great tenet, mantra or philosophy of any authenticity and substance should do – it easily and effortlessly embraces every extremity, turbulence, nuance, depth and not so subtle shade of the thing it seeks to define or describe – in this case the quality of life the person is leading at that very moment the phrase is deployed.

It allows enormous complexity to sit just behind it, knowingly, without ever having to say it. The back-stories of these two people were plain to see without having to set them out.

This was the power of the phrase for me.

To be fair I had been searching for one to wrap up a very UK ‘dream of better’ for a while.

We had searched for a conversation starter around a more sustainable lifestyle – one that started in the real everyday world.

In 2013 we ran 4 pilot workshops in London for the UK Dream project to that end – to find a more populist, scalable conversation to inspire a more enduring model of prosperity: a thriving vibrant life open to all, underwritten with sustainable truths.

We needed a new narrative: a new lexicon of better for people to use in their everyday lives. The old narrative was simply not working. Sustainability people speaking to themselves: impenetrable, arcane, complex, off-putting.

For most people the end of the month comes before the end of the world. They are more concerned with making ends meet than with how they might meet their end in some post-apocalyptic climate-induced catastrophe. The old narratives, rooted as they are in the activist roots of environmentalism simply do not chime with your average Joe and Jane.

So we had a chasm to cross. We needed a simple and very UK-centric or British hook that allowed us to start with simple everyday human-sized truths – What keeps you up at night? What gets you out of bed in the morning? What does good look like from where you’re standing?

In a search for this new narrative, we had already applied the 7 stage Dream-In-A-Box methodology (well, three of them at least) to try and shape what better might look like and scaling the everyday conversation around it.

We got as diverse a group of individuals as possible into a room to play with, pull down, interrogate and explore the traits, dimensions, idioms and aspirations of a prosperous life underwritten by sustainable truths. And we did it by first banishing the language of the circular economy, up-cycling, collaborative consumption (a co-created art installation project by 17th Century British poets surely) stewardship, materiality, EP&L, Net Positive and every other phrase on the trending circuit.

The most interesting and charming conversations were sparked around the old arts of thrift – smart shrewd living skills. A form of street smarts for aspirational living. people who know know…

The idea of Lighter Living. Lightening the burden on oneself (bills, cost, beyond ones means) and on the world in which we endeavour to thrive offered an overarching narrative hook that felt aspirational; breezy; cool.

So UK Dream identified Smarter lighter living represented a good beginning – positive – something one feels before one thinks it.

But we still had the tricky D word. Left to its own devices, Dream is a very divisive word, regardless of how you underwrite it; especially in Britain. On the up side everyone likes a dreamy something – we are happy to have the dream job, the dream holiday. But these are specific uses of the word that define a clear and tangible set of benefits and experiences.

Use the D word on a more rarified cultural and nationalistic level and the long shadow of John Stuart Mill enters the room at the faintest whisper of the word.

Dreams. A tyranny of pasteurized living. The death of individuality. An opiate under whose suffocating crop invention withers and spirit is anaesthetised. Dreams: the heartland of the indolent and fearful. The sharp corners and friction of individuality are what keep us alive. Not buttered populist platitudes for us to get fat on.

For the UK audience, Dream just invites the cynic and the heckler to rip it up; test its edges, even when you try and put it in a box.

Hence my search for the phrase that delivered the idea of a dream of better as part of life in the here-and-now; as measured in clear and tangible terms – a phrase that could happily ladder up or down; for better or worse; good or bad; funny or sad.

Cue Living The Dream?!

As soon as we place the ‘Living the Dream?!’ question at the top of our conversational ladder everything shifts – and becomes more human.

It allows us to engage with really simple scenarios to begin with – what keeps you up at night? the ‘mares big and small of every day life – What gets you out of bed in the morning? the dreamy stuff that makes life worth living.

This simple two pillar approach can be used to inspire conversations around identity, fashion, lifestyle, living, food & drink, education, energy, finances, technology, travel & transport, leisure & entertainment, white goods, furniture – anything. Easy conversational doors into complex nuanced stories.

It also means that we can reframe conversations that interweave multiple dimensions (usually only looked at or explored as single threads) and explore them as we find them – as slightly more chaotic jumbled buckets of conversation.

For example:

Love & Shopping

The old intrinsic nature of love and how we demonstrated it – through nurture, provision, protection, empowerment, support and belonging – has been hijacked by brands trying to inveigle their way into a lead position on our purse. We are more likely to make an active demonstration of love through a commercial transaction than we are through a personal one. The extrinsic demonstrable nature of the neu-love we now practice is making us live beyond our means.

So we find ourselves living in a culture that celebrates Saturday shopping in Westfield as an act of bonding and love. Families share in the pursuit of living the dream; even if it just loading love on a credit card for later. Every demonstration of love seems to come with a bar code: DISCUSS.

Faith & Banter

Faith has become more than just the repose of religion – faith and leaps of it are required in every corner: humanists take the leap of faith in humanity and its ability to prevail. Philosophers cross the chasm of the ontological between universals and particulars. Artists relentlessly leap from humanities to science to metaphysics to the primal with an absolute faith in the eventual ascension of something sublime. Even in brittle science, in the absence of an M Theory waiting to be revealed, they undertake a leap of faith of their own every day between the two quantum truths without a bridge to join them.

But in the UK, if you get too serious, watch your language, lighten up and Get over yourself. This is the nation of ‘taking the piss’, heckling, ribbing and anarchic banter. How does something so serious play out in a culture where to be serious is to be dangerous. DISCUSS.

Castles & Cat’s Cradle

Every man is an island and every Englishman’s home is his castle. Well, ‘ish’. Given the level of Great British personal debt, mortgage rates, the ascendence of the pay day loans, just to keep the ‘castle’ from falling down, the old securities of a fixed and stable life are fast disappearing. And as the castle walls shrink or crumble, splendid isolation gives way to dynamic connection and collaboration. We are stitching ourselves back together again in myriad different ways, finding new ties that bind. If 2008 smashed the family china and pulled down the gazebo and the politicians are fracking society who’s got the UHU?

In the gaps and cracks they leave behind new opportunities and alliances form. Run down regions and communities are regenerated. people find new purpose. Can a new more enlighted aspiration for a more enduring life rise with the cultural phoenix? DISCUSS

Wellness in an highly emerged society.

In exploring the Living The Dream conversation, we also realised that culturally, socially and systemically, the UK is so emerged it’s submerged. Simple and very meaningful topics so easily and directly dealt with in other cultures are in ours hidden inside a complex and codified landscape. Triggering conversations around these topics is a minefield: an assault course of social gaffes, trip wires, trap doors, raspberries and silences. So achieving just the right lightness of touch and integrity is critical.

The conversation around wellness and wellbeing is just such a conversation. It is not in the direct line of conversational fire. We speak indirectly of these things, usually as part of a different conversational thread. We are more likely to fall upon the topic of well-being through jokes about Stenna stairlifts, incontinence pants, supersize mother in laws, smoking in bed and Austin Power’s teeth than we are directly with a straight face.

Wellness is a supermarket trend supported by chemist brands – it is NOT a stitched in part of the great british psyche just yet. But we are getting there in our own sweet time.

This is very different to the China Dream where its emerging economy status means that health & well-being are absolutely central to the idea of what better looks like. A conversation that begins and ends with the need for something drastic to happen around air, water, food integrity and diet and their role in building a more resilient and dynamic society.

All in all, Living The Dream?! (for now at least) creates a simple conversational foundation for a bigger conversation around what good looks like and how we might get there individually, communally and collectively. Apply simple rules of smarter, lighter living at the heart of it and perhaps we might move the dial from over indexing on what keeps us up at night and start peaking again on what gets us out of bed in the morning!

All we need now is the right partners to scale the right conversation and start asking the right questions of the right people.

So any platform or brand looking for a purpose in the UK – looking for a conversation to fuel, inspire, support and celebrate – come on down. We have the beginnings of something good.

FOOTNOTES

LivingTheDream is planning to undertake 10 workshops across the UK in 2015 – simply to start asking the right questions of the right people; of what better might look like for them – in their language, in their words and from where they are standing. The curated outcomes will then be shared with the constituencies of action – local communities, councils, faith leaders, collectives, interested parties, brands, institutions and organisations – to adopt, reflect and act upon to start making better a reality.

Living The Dream & the art of smarter, lighter living is an organically developing theme rooted in the original Dream in A Box UK Dream project workshops and part of a wider DreamInABox initiative which includes the founding China Dream movement run in China through NGO JUCCCE and spearheaded by the inimitable Peggy Liu; inspiration and co-founder of all things DiaB.

The Luxury of Conscience & how the end of the month comes before the end of the world

16 Tuesday Dec 2014

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#squeegeemylife, Apprenticeships, Dream In A Box, everyday idioms and insights, Helter Skelter, John Stuart Mill, Kerring, LifestyleApp, Luxury of Conscience, M&S, Maslow, NGOs, Popper & Berlin, privilege, Re-imagining Prosperity, streetwise, UK Dream, Unilever

ivory_tower_defenders  There are two phrases that I use often:

The Luxury of Conscience.

The End of the Month comes before the End of the world.

They are my way of arriving at the same point: just from two wholly different ends of the social, strategic and storytelling spectrum.

The point I am usually making? That the narrative that will transform desire, reframe sustainability and re-imagine prosperity is potentially being shaped and moulded by the wrong people.

So what constitutes ‘wrong’ you might ask. And I would venture ‘those who might struggle to empathise with their audience – the 85%+ –  through a lack of real everyday insight and socio-cultural understanding into their lives, needs and desires: that of the ‘lived it been there’ kind.

The Luxury of Conscience is a phrase that I sometimes use when describing such a person – someone who has ability to sit back and engage in the bigger conversations around climate, environment and more sustainable lifestyles, their minds uncluttered by making ends meet, either spiritually or financially.

The ability to exercise and expend their energies and passions on designing a higher order human existence predicated on sustainability is indeed luxurious – proof that they exist in the upper tiers of Maslow’s Hierarchy.

They have the luxury of a ‘comfortable security’ – financial, educational, social and cultural – to see beyond the scrabble for immediate provision; for themselves and their families – of the tyranny of bills, eking out the money until the end of the month comes, trying to avoid the pay day loan light bulb in a head clouded by debt.

It is for this reason that those with the Luxury Of Conscience should never be the people who shape the final vernaculars and narrative for a populist movement towards a more sustainable life.

It is indeed a luxury to live in what seems (to the average bank worker or electrician at least) a rather pompous dislocated 6th Form debating society world, extrapolating concepts and frameworks of improved human existence more akin in discourse to the letters of Hitchens’ and the treatise of Popper and Stuart Mill than the average pub banter.

There needs to be a real understanding in there somewhere of the everyday insights, idioms, influences and irrationalities that really connect with everyday people. It is exactly these subtleties that might tip the balance on whether that new narrative flies or fails. And they seem to be desperately lacking here.

Much as the Old Etonian politician who kisses the cheek of the docker’s baby has absolutely no idea what living their life entails (and should therefore be barred from influencing or creating policy that affects their lives in any substantive way), so it goes for the CEOs, the NGOs and the Activist Academics who populate the world of Sustainability. They are amazing. But they are dislocated from the truths of people’s everyday lives to such extremity, that they should be dissuaded from taking to the soap-box or typing the manifesto on behalf of those people they have such little real understanding of.

The people living in the mode of making ends meet are those most likely to be buying products and maintaining lifestyles that offend every statute in the sustainability rule-book – and doing it at scale.

They rarely do this maliciously. The concept and detailed understanding of whether a 3-blade razor or food product threatens the ecosystem of the planet, a precious resource or a community is the furthest thing from their mind – and therefore not something they are wilfully disregarding.

Saying that, equally, they do react badly when someone steps up into their eye-line with a message that seems to expect everything of them with little immediate benefit.

Breaking the line of sight between them and the end of the month with a fairly long-termist do-less/reduce/recycle/reuse message does not go down well.

Many people – the majority bloc of the 85%+ who are currently disengaged in this conversation – are living in a bi-polar world: a world whose greater potential for immediate gratification is bluntly counterpointed by an equally great potential for immediate disappointment or failure.

And we have to respect this – and shape and present narratives and solutions that are meaningful and positive in light of the world they live in: that enlighten them and enable them to make a considered and fully informed decision for themselves and the lifestyle they the choose to adopt.

We must also remember that the idea of a diminished or diminishing lifestyle fundamentally goes against the evolutionary gene pool imperative of acquire, appropriate and accrue that most of us are compelled by. It is hard to dismiss and de-list that which you have yet to have the pleasure and experience of.

It is far less onerous task to flick off or set aside the tyranny of the gene pool imperative when you come from the elite tier – as someone that already enjoys the benefits of being at the top of the socio-cultural ladder of humanity.

Having been liberated from the striving and surviving mode, you are free to discard that which others are still struggling to acquire.

You are free to discard the clutter of beliefs, attitudes, behaviours and material things that you or those generations before you have spent so much time collecting and curating.

The populist agenda and narrative can never solely mapped by people in rare places and cocooned in a bubble of otherness, set apart from the everyday lives of everyday people. They might try and inspire it, prod it, provoke it or record it: most certainly provide the substantial sustainability truths that underwrite it – but the Great British Story Book of Enduring Human Prosperity is being written in the pub, not the library.

Laws of similarity are what work in our highly tribal stratified social world.

There are many anecdotal instances where people from marginalised and degraded tribes, cultures and communities rued and resented the day that (predominantly) white middle class liberals started having anything to do with any form of their social development or increasing well being – devoid as they are of any of the cultural background or deeper understandings of what makes these people who they are.

So one might ask the question: what in any god’s name are we thinking when we task a bunch of PHD+ super rational and highly intellectual predominantly upper middle class people to construct an emotional and compelling argument or story to inspire and convince the 85% + people out there from a C2DE background of anything: the Laws of Dissimilarity seem heavily at work here.

It is no surprise that the majority of NGO activists are seen by the average working class kid as a bunch of bleeding heart liberals without the faintest idea of what living and surviving in the real world actually might entail. Unfair? Possibly. But in the real material terms of security, environment and financial status; quite correct.

So I think we need to do a little bit of filing, framing and a whole lot of question asking – and they need to be the right questions of the right people.

To look at what the right kind of questions might mean we should perhaps look at the context and culture of the different tribes involved in this dash for the answer.

We already know that some 7-15% of people (depending on which and whose sliding scale of insight data we use) have adopted and embraced to a greater degree the idea of changing their lifestyle to some substantial degree to do their part for a more harmonious positive human existence. So focusing a new narrative on them would, to be fair, be a waste of our energy.

Them aside, the top percentiles fall in to 3 categories – there are the corporates and high net worth individuals and of course Brands

Corporates – we have all seen them; the enlightened ones – setting some form of agenda – especially those delivering the props of prosperity up into the god light of the all seeing consumer eye – the multinational FMCG, retail, Food & Beverage, tech and fashion brands. They are hamstrung to some degree by their investor relations but as Unilever has already proven, these relationship can be tested and reshaped – and their consumer perceptions changed – but they need the right narrative.

High net worth individuals – this group are either shaping mass consumption trends through shaping their own business (Kerring leaps to mind) or they are in a position to trade massive blocks of shares in such a way as to heavily influence the people running the companies on which their gaze might fall. They have a filter for seeking exceptional financial performance screwed into their psyche – but they can be the most vocal on the positive impact on Long term profitability and growth from more sustainable and inspired operations.

And we are clear about how the brands that stitch themselves into the fabric of people’s everyday lives can start to shade and shape what they do to deliver a more enduring aspiration without passing on the cost. M&S is exceptional in its ability to respect its place in the fabric of the great British way of life by repaying the society in which it thrives with a smarter lighter and kinder business offering stand out solutions without making the customer foot the bill for Plan A sensibilities in product premiums.

If we look at these super players in the luxury of conscience stratosphere – we can separate them out as demanding a particular shade of micro or ‘shadow’ narrative – linked to the whole yet very particularly tuned to the closed room conversations that fuel their world. The narrative and the ask for the top end is very specific.

If we separate them out (along with the 7-15% who are already playing nice) it enables us to get a clearer view of what I like to call the ‘End Of The Monthers’ – those whom engage their conscience on a strictly Planet Me basis – my family my tribe my community my world.

How do we bring ‘End of The Monthers’ onside?  They do not have the luxury of just turning everything in their life on its head. So how do we facilitate and enable them

Partially that should come in the form of some simple playful tools that help them  and partially in a mode of educating them in such a way as to add value to their lives.

The inspiration for one tool idea came from a UK Dream Workshop. It was a piece of language that came out of one of the workshops around the lighter brighter approach to cleaning up ones slightly dustier lifestyle and consumption habits.

Someone told the story of a Window Cleaner who explained that he had to give something away to get it all back – and to convert a street, he used to do one person’s windows randomly for free. The reason: because until you’ve had your eye’s opened to the before and after you can easily just not bother. So one bit of tasty squeegee work And they became his Word of Mouth campaign.

So we thought that perhaps to inspire a smarter lighter brighter life in a way that was helpful and easy, we could create an app or site experience where people could populate the info on things in their life – finance/insurance – food shopping – car purchase – travel etc, and then ask the site to ‘squeegee that’ – at which point the site would use an aggregated information programme to review the information put in and see whether by post code region profile etc the costs of their lifestyle could be reduced – and their consumption ‘cleaned up’. We could call it, prosaically, #Squeegeemylife.

And perhaps the next wave of apprenticeships that we develop in the UK should include internships at major brands and businesses for young people from underprivileged backgrounds – those without the Luxury of Conscience – expressly to allow them the luxury of learning the benefits of shaping and securing a lighter life: individually, communally, regionally and eventually nationally. And in such a way as to ensure that when they take their ‘stories’ back into the pub, they resonate and have meaning and integrity.

If we don’t engage the man and woman in the pub meaningfully and authentically we are wilfully passing over the clay for the new model of our more resilient and enduring prosperity to the likes of Mr Farage.

Blimey.

 

 

Sustainable Human Existence, The D Word & Treading carefully

02 Saturday Aug 2014

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Brian Cox, cary Grant, China Dream, D Ream, Dream catchers, Dream In A Box, Freud, gramsci, Identity, John Stuart Mill, Loveboat, Mad magazine, Martin Luther King Jnr, Morpheus, Peggy Liu, Philosophy, Science, Sustainability, The Ancients, The Civil Rights Movement, Transforming Desire, Walt Disney, Yeats

Screen Shot 2014-08-03 at 00.05.59

Funny things dreams. Profound to some – sophistry to others.
So please mind your language!

I used the word Dream in a presentation once in the UK. Won’t be doing that again in a hurry any time soon: certainly not without a lot of qualification.
Let’s just say I had not realised how ‘spooked’ grown ups can get by a word.

Equally, it served to remind me that my own slap dash use of language and bumbling naivety could do with some heavy spanner work and a healthy dose of tuning fork.

To be fair the D word popped up in very particular circumstance – a discussion about a methodology called Dream In A Box.

The methodology endeavours to reuse and recycle old wisdoms, contemporary cultural signposting, local idioms and vernaculars to write a new narrative – to re-imagine prosperity, reframe sustainability and transform desire – the consuming kind particularly – to a more enduring and sustainable model; all this in pursuit of a more sustainable human existence.

The D word was chosen for its particular resonance with and reference to ‘the American Dream’ and the staining nature of its most recent variant on our beleaguered planet. Not that it was always thus.

The American Dream was one under which all men (and, sure, yup, women, and ok, eventually, if you’re going to push it, with a civil rights movement for example, Afro-Americans) were equal.

In the heady industry-rebuilding, economy-expanding (where waists would surely follow) post-war rush to create the perfect American thriving, surviving white-picket society, that dream took a few toxic turns, until finally, it eventually settled on the perfectly trimmed lawn of the idyllic all-consuming sub Urban lifestyle that we know and love.

Cue Cary Grant movies. Loveboat. Doris Day. And the chirpy satire of Mad Magazine.

It was a dream promising the consumer citizen infinite growth, financially, spiritually, socially and collectively; all merrily based upon an apparently infinite, fecund and plentiful pool of glorious ‘Godly’ resources; material human and physical.

The patently obvious and accelerating realisation of how wrong that immaculate assumption actually was aside, the feeling in the Dream In A Box camp was that the Dream bit of the phrase was reasonably off set by the In A Box bit.

The In A Box part of it made the following particular point: unless you can find a way of containing the otherwise intangible, lofty, unreachable and mildly frustrating dimensions of a Dream and make them real in ways that are meaningful and valuable to everyday people in the everyday thread of life, you are merely peddling opiates.

Even so, for some it smacked of an over simplified homogenous hideous social chimera. A one size fits all piece of social bullying or bluff that was fundamentally anti–social in its anti-individualist bent.

But this vehemence is not a feeling reserved exclusively for the more square cornered sustainable analysts, scientists, engineers underwriting the operational truths of supply and value chains everywhere.

Dreams generally enjoy a dynamic polarity in many people’s minds.

Dreams seem to inhabit a similar place to things like religious fervor, faith and Walt Disney for many of the reason and rationality junkies out there.
To the nay-sayers and doubters, the idea of having a dream (a phrase preferably spat out or sneered through) verges on criminal self delusion and puffery.

The intangible what if nature of them seems to fill them with some form of existential dread.

There is no place for dreams in a reasonable world, especially a scientific one and certainly no place for reason in dreams  – so what if Brian ‘Mine’s Hadron Collider’ Cox’s band was called D.Ream. Doesn’t mean he ascribes to them.

The reoccurring theme seems to be that Dreams, like faith, are dangerous things – dark instruments. Dreams obfuscate the real raw nature of our human existence and all of its incumbent challenges, puzzles and conundrums.

The realm of Morpheus is a confection that far from enlightening us is seen as one that diminishes us.

Its almost as if Dreams are flawed in some evolutionary way: rendering us incapable of basic human survival; stupefied by our hazy, twinkle-filled and fantastical view of the world.
A small rummage around the point counter point arguments of, on the one hand, the evolutionary benefits set out in Anttii Revonsuo’s Threat Simulation theory, and Flannagan’s concept of Evolutionary epiphenomena (dreams as a state that lacks any form of adaptive function) on the other clearly inform us that the evolutionary jury’s out on this one.

And the case for Dreams as a scientifically proven improver of our human condition is never helped in the eyes of the scientist by the presence of Dream Catchers and other juvenile voodoo bric a brac in the windows’ of student houses and hippy retreats.

Perhaps the most virulent critics spent one long night too many at college or university pretending to give a crap as the fragile teen sitting opposite them bleated their dream stories in some desperate effort to seem windswept, deep and interesting.

Equally the phrase ‘to follow one’s dreams’ doesn’t help, in that it implies a sheep-like loyalty: a subservience in service of something intangible beyond your control. And we know how rationalists like a smidgen of control. 

Whatever it is that causes the anger and disdain; it is a powerful and quite corrosive emotion.

But, for the Dream believers, Dreams are a way of allowing people to transcend the bleak sharp cornered truths of what is and embrace the brighter potential of what could be. Dreams allow us to rise above the deterministic absolutes of any given situation and envision something better.

Martin Luther King had a dream that succeeded in helping to shift millions of black Americans from a position of sub human species needing to know its place to a powerful ethnic constituency in search of a spiritual homeland and tangible human rights and respect.
I doubt even the fiercest doubters could ridicule or set aside the power of that dream to change lives and human existence for the better in some shape or form.
There is a sense that, in the USA of the 1960s, the political power elites, intellectual tribes, state collectives, regional advocates and community activists all jostling for position on either side of the colour divide would never have convened their mighty voices into that one immutable, immoveable and deafening roar without the focus of that Dream, voiced so eloquently and publicly.

But equally, John Stuart Mill found the idea of galvanising and socialising a nation through a singular collective idyll – an idea or dream of better – was at best childish and naïve and at worst an aggressive act of hubris and societal hegemony – a social tyranny.
He believed in the axiom that ‘man should judge everything in life based upon its ability to promote the greatest individual happiness’.
“the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling is more formidable than many kinds of political oppression …leav[ing] fewer means of escape … and penetrat[ing] more deeply into the details of life. ”The “tendency of society to impose … its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and if possible, prevent the formation of individuality, not in harmony with its ways”

There is a sense in this view that an individual Dream is fine while it is held safe and unsullied in the heart and the mind of an individual. It is a beautiful and highly personal wonder, broadly uncorrupted though perhaps a little influenced by the dreams of others.

(It is worth reminding ourselves that Martin Luther King Jnr. said ‘I have a dream…’; not ‘We have a Dream’. It was his; it just had the potential to move many others within it.)

It seems that while in its unadulterated individual state, that which is most emotionally proximal to its originator, a dream is widely lauded as the profound generator of poetry, music, art and literature.

Yeat’s Cloths of Gold directs the listener to ‘tread gently for you tread on my dreams’. They are presented as the purest, most precious things he has to offer the world.
Mamma Cass’s ‘California Dreaming’ protested a desire for a sunnier brighter life far removed from the cold emotionally bleak east of Fall and Atlantic swells. It is her dream and hers alone: just one that happened to be shared by a generation.

The problem it seems is that when mobilised, industrialised and socialised at scale, a dream becomes The Dream – the Mother of Suppression of the Individual in hot pursuit of the collective good. The Dream quickly becomes the destroyer of intelligent dissent and the brutal editor of different orthodoxies and philosophies that did not quite ‘fit’ ‘The Dream’. It becomes all that John Stuart Mill berated and warned of in his view of one dimensional models of collective happiness as some conjuring trick played on the masses.

Dreams also have an ill-judged and reoccurring tendency of turning up at the very heart of large orgiastic excursions into nationalistic and hubristic megalomania.
Dreams of Empire whether by Georgian and Victorian Britain, Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy or the German Third Reich always seem to bear out the truth of Mr Mill’s perception.

To use a singular Dream in this way is to squash the very diversity and healthy human tension the enables us to evolve as a species. Dreams are a recidivist and controlling mechanism that are worthy of deep suspicion.

The pollutant seems (as so often is the case) to be somewhat rooted in what man has done in the name of dreams; not in the condition of dreaming which in itself is a pretty confounding experience. They are after all an axial mechanism of our deepest mind.

Dreams at their most basic level are the powerhouse of our emotional computing.
They are the synaptic equivalent of taking the big data from every facet and corner of our existence and atomically mixing it up with the narrative skills of Lewis Carroll, Dickens, Spielberg and Plato.

Dreams are the super processor of individual human potential.

They are the transcendence mechanism in us – they are the ‘reach’ mechanism that compels us to perhaps stretch beyond what seems immediately possible or probable to test the edges of what could or might be.

Science clearly sets out the power of our sleeping computations in regards to cognitive ability and capacity.

But given their sleep hosted ‘madness’, flaky associations, the abstracted corollaries that exist within them and Freud’s rather particular take on them, it is easy to set Dreams aside as garish hyperemotional gibberish – or reinvent them as some twist of needy or proving self-identification and elevation.

Most people find the sharing of what one dreams an immature act of identity assertion; usually by those who feel there is little social or intellectual mystery or magic about them. Given that it is a habit that one usually hopes dies out with the arrival of slightly greater intellectual and spiritual surety, perhaps the mere sight of the word makes them run for the hills screaming.

There is a theory that dreams exist in the sleep-scapes of REM Rapid Eye Movement and NREM Non Rapid Eye Movement and do so with a very clear function.

It is believed that the process of sleep to encode and transfer data from the temporary memory store in the conscious mind accesses and activated in NREM sleep to the long term memory store in the subconscious mind accessed and activated in REM sleep – and the continual activation of this flow is what stimulates dreams. So in that way they are a robust and meaningful process of our body science and an enricher of our more adaptive cognition.

It is not just the science of the brain that frames the arguments and beliefs around dreams and their role.

Human history and the texts of the ancients are riddled with expansive philosophical treatise and frameworks. From the ancient Mesopotamians, Chinese, Upanishads, and Babylonians, to the Egyptians Greeks and Romans, the powerful nature of dreams have always held a deep and profound place in our collective social memory.

In some ways perhaps the truth of Dreams lies as with many things somewhere between the two; at the point at which these two distinct perspectives overlap and stitch together; neither being the predominant force but both represented as balanced and weighted in a perfect symmetry with each other. This duality might offer us a more productive way forwards.

Gramsci invites us to apply Pessimism of the Intellect and Optimism of the Will in all things. Perhaps this is the filter through which we should view Dreams and everything to do with them in regards to the ambition of transforming the more toxic desires of the average consumer.

Certainly in regards to the Dream word being used as a way to frame the spiritual social and material vision of a more sustainable form of consumption, Gramsci’s invitation would help balance the two dimensions.
The pessimistic Intellect – the science – interrogating the truths of how we engineer and support these more sustainable lifestyles while the optimistic Spirit – the philosophical – compels a more transcendent human nature be applied at every opportunity – a higher human purpose that might take everyday humanity beyond the impenetrable science and just doing enough to scrape through.
This would liberate the word and the language around it to be both rooted in the deep science that will be required to reinvent our standard forms of consumption and yet elevated by the optimism of a collective human endeavour lived in real time in the real world.

And perhaps if we liberated the word – set it free from the shackles of an Either/Or model of determinative application we might find something richer and more human again in Dreams.

If perhaps we also recognised that in regards to visionary models of human consumption, Dreams can be nuanced, shaded and culturally meaningful even at a meta level.

In the Dream In A Box initiatives undertaken so far we already have 5 Shades of Dream – Emerging; Latent; Resurgent; Extant; Evolving – starting to reveal themselves in regards to formulating desirable and enduring lifestyles of consumption.

I am certain that more will present themselves before we are finished.

So here’s to those turbulent, intangible, flaky, studenty, inspirational, nation-shaping, scientist irritating things called Dreams.

If for nothing else they should be considered eminently remarkable purely on the basis that they can elicit so much passionate debate and discourse purely by their mention.

As long as each Dream is considered on its merit – not on some preconceived concept of what it does not fulfil, or on some etymological witch hunt dressed up as rigour and realism we’ll perhaps be fine. Until then…

As Stephen Tyler sang: ‘Dream On’

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