Dream Work for Social Change?

Has anyone else ever thought about the potential for working for social change in the dream world? If we can access deeper, shared levels of mind in our dreams, it seems to me there’s some real potential for seeding change there… (There might be issues of consent and I would imagine it would be necessary for the social change to be consistent with the continued existence and thriving of life, but just putting it out there to see if anyone has thought about this.) Thanks! :slight_smile:

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What changes would you suggest?

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Well two ideas I’ve had, but haven’t yet tested:

  1. getting lucid and yelling into the dream world about climate change and ecological overshoot to help people wake up to it (or holding a dreamworld symposium about it or something…yelling probably wouldn’t be the most effective, lol) and
  2. getting lucid and attempting to experience the burden of other beings (for instance, as a white person, I wonder if it’d be possible to ask the dreammaker to show me how it feels to be a Black person in the US; or I wonder if I could ask the dreammaker to remove/resolve any unconscious bias in my own psyche)
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I also wonder, since healing the physical body is possible through lucid dreaming, could it be possible to heal the larger body of the Earth?

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What are you doing during “awake time” to achieve those goals?

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This sounds intriguing!

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What issues around consent do you see with this?

I second @_Barry’s question, what are you doing in the waking world to address these issues? Per dream yoga dogma, the physical world is also dreamlike, therefore improving the collective dream can be done here as well, perhaps more effectively. (Driving an electic car or taking public transit in the physical world, for example, may be more effective ways of addressing climate change than driving an electric car in a dream and then driving a gas-powered car after you wake up.)

It’s an interesting idea to work on social change in the dreamworld as well as taking action in the physical world as well. But if one is only working on such issues in nocturnal dreams, it could be a form of avoiding what needs to be done in the physical world.

It seems to me that working on yourself in relation to these issues is the most direct way to approach it. You suggest:

This sounds like a good approach to me. I think it would be most effective if you spent a lot of time incubating such a dream by absorbing perspectives of black people living in the US while awake, so that your dreaming mind has more to work with – there are lots of books and films on the subject (as well as some material in VR if you have access to virtual reality, e.g. Travelling While Black).

~ArthurG

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My whole life is centered around achieving these goals – this kind of stuff is practically all I think about. I’m a social justice lawyer, spiritual teacher and coach for changemakers, and former climate nonprofit director. As I see it, our world is in need of healing at three levels: individually, interpersonally, and globally (as a species and with the entire Earth). I resonate with the term bodhisattva, and see the liberation of all beings as my mission. I’m a longtime vegan, don’t drive or fly, aim to be as zero waste as possible, been committed to racial justice my whole life, etc. So it’s definitely a both/and kind of proposition! :slight_smile:

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Electric car? Do you know about Ashoka Changemaker Schools?

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Cool! I hadn’t heard of Ashoka Changemaker Schools! The link looks awesome. Thank you!
(And re electric car, no – just no car at all! :slight_smile: )

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I used to work at a school in San Antonio, Texas that was given a prestigious Peace Laureate award for 2021. They are an Ashoka School.

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Excellent! I’m delighted to hear that you are doing so much. :smiley:

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