Dreaming our Future
We are used to planning a lot: our vacations, our garden projects and our schedules. But planning out our whole lives? Isn't that a little bit much? Where is there room for spontaneity? But we don’t have to immediately set the rest of our lives in stone. There is a much more creative and playful way to think about the future: First we start with dreams...
We applied the concept of Dragon Dreaming to design our future. This project management method features a creative and open-minded concept phase supported by a positive attitude about the work to be done. There are four main project phases: dreaming, planning, doing, and celebration.
Since many of the methods used in Dragon Dreaming are tailored to larger groups with smaller projects, we have modified the methods to meet our needs. In order to make our big future plan at all tangible, we divided our lives into smaller areas that are all interconnected. And because planning needs fixed patterns, which can inhibit creativity, we decided to dream before planning. Because during a dream, there is no “that isn’t possible” that inhibits the imagination. Let’s start dreaming!
We applied the concept of Dragon Dreaming to design our future. This project management method features a creative and open-minded concept phase supported by a positive attitude about the work to be done. There are four main project phases: dreaming, planning, doing, and celebration.
Since many of the methods used in Dragon Dreaming are tailored to larger groups with smaller projects, we have modified the methods to meet our needs. In order to make our big future plan at all tangible, we divided our lives into smaller areas that are all interconnected. And because planning needs fixed patterns, which can inhibit creativity, we decided to dream before planning. Because during a dream, there is no “that isn’t possible” that inhibits the imagination. Let’s start dreaming!
Dreaming
The dreaming phase was the beginning of our design process. We dreamt about many possible futures and discovered a lot of hidden desires we didn’t even know we had. We had dreams about a homestead, living in community with friends and family, and in lots of different countries and regions that we like.
We started designing our future with creative dreaming in dream circles. We took turns leading a dream circle and telling the other about a dream. In our dreams, everything was possible, although we did avoid being too abstract or unrealistic. There was also no such thing as right or wrong and we tried to keep a positive attitude when listening to the other person's dreams. The dream circles began with a ritual lead by the person that introduced the dream. We started with a cleansing that consisted of singing, dancing, a short story, a massage, a sauna, etc. We set up a small altar and lit a candle to help create a concentrated and creative atmosphere. We recorded our dream circle, so that we could fully concentrate on listening and sharing. We closed the dream circle when both of us had shared all our thoughts. After ending the dream circle we reflected on the dream for about 15 minutes. This period of reflection ended up being one of the most productive aspects of our whole design process. |
Planning
We ended the dreaming phase after six dreams that included living in different countries and following different lifestyles. Obviously we cannot fulfill all of these dreams. We needed a method to narrow down our dreams to one common dream and a way to decide whether or not we truly liked it.
We asked ourselves: What needs to happen for this dream to come true? For each dream we wrote down what came to mind on sticky notes. Then we started clustering the ideas into overarching "themes" of our dreams. Some themes ended up being specific to a single dream. Other themes recurred in multiple dreams, and reflected important topicsin our lives. We called these common themes. For us, these include health and balance, family, homestead, community, finances, work, company, and connection to nature.
We asked ourselves: What needs to happen for this dream to come true? For each dream we wrote down what came to mind on sticky notes. Then we started clustering the ideas into overarching "themes" of our dreams. Some themes ended up being specific to a single dream. Other themes recurred in multiple dreams, and reflected important topicsin our lives. We called these common themes. For us, these include health and balance, family, homestead, community, finances, work, company, and connection to nature.
After we identified the common themes in our dreams, we expressed the connecting ideas as vision statements. The vision statements are a short phrase accompanied by a set of agreements. Our vision statements are ambitious views of the future - things that we look forward to and that motivate us in our daily lives. During the process, we narrowed down all the conflicting thoughts of multiple dreams into these statements-
Next we talked about the things that we actually want to achieve: our "long-term goals" and "short-term goals". We used our vision as the foundation and built our goals off of that. Whereas the vision is an idealized view of the future, a goal is something achievable, like a milestone. The goals are formulated using the SMART acronym: specific, measureable, achievable, realistic, and timely. The challenge is that there are many paths possible and we could come up with a large number of goals that we couldn't possiblly achieve all at the same time. So we collected ideas and narrowed down the number of goals to a set that is ambitious, sounds like fun to us and fits to our personal strengths. Our dreams and our vision guided us in this process. |
In Dragon Dreaming, a further step in the planning process is to break down the goals into "tasks", using a method called "Karrabirdt". We tried this method and it did not work out well for us. There are already so many aspects to planning one's life that breaking it down too much becomes confusing. We decided that breaking down our goals into tasks is a continous (as in life-long!) process that will be part of the Doing phase. For a smaller project, like building a house or learning to plan an instrument, a Karrabird might make more sense.
Doing
Unlike a typical dragon dreaming project, the doing phase for our life design doesn’t have a clear end point. Instead, the doing phase for us is the recurring process of planning out how our short and long-term goals fit into our lives in harmony with our vision statements. We decided that we would like to revisit our short-term goals four times a year. We chose to do this around the equinoxes and solstices as a way to keep ourselves accountable. Once a year (during the winter holidays) we will also review our long-term goals and our vision. This is actually a very important aspect of the project, because it helps us ensure we are still focusing on the things we really want to do with our lives. Of course, the biggest chunk of our design project is still to come: to actually do the things that we set goals for!
Celebrating
We ended up needing more than six months to complete the dreaming and planning parts of the design. We did not work on it constantly, but rather came back to it when we felt emotionally and mentally prepared. We needed to take so many breaks because the decisions we had to make and the discussions we had to have in the design process were intense. A way for us to gather strength in between this work was to celebrate. This took many forms, from nature walks, to dancing, to spending time with family and friends, to meditating.
Another way to keep us motivated was to introduce some beauty into the process. It was surprising how much more we enjoyed working on our project document once we changed to an appealing layout and put in pictures. In the dreaming phase, it was the ceremonial athmosphere with smells from candles or herbs, dimmed light, and a relaxed body and mind that made the process so much fun. Set the right mood, and your dream wont become a nightmare. ;)
It’s hard to plan out the future! However, this process has allowed us to recognize and honor all of our hopes for the future, as well as think realistically about which dreams we want to pursue and how we can go about realizing them on a practical level. Although the dreaming aspect of dragon dreaming was very helpful for our process, we had to alter the planning aspect so heavily to meet our needs that we couldn’t really call it dragon dreaming anymore. If we were to do this design again, we would research other planning methods that would better meet our needs and integrate them into our design process as well.
Another way to keep us motivated was to introduce some beauty into the process. It was surprising how much more we enjoyed working on our project document once we changed to an appealing layout and put in pictures. In the dreaming phase, it was the ceremonial athmosphere with smells from candles or herbs, dimmed light, and a relaxed body and mind that made the process so much fun. Set the right mood, and your dream wont become a nightmare. ;)
It’s hard to plan out the future! However, this process has allowed us to recognize and honor all of our hopes for the future, as well as think realistically about which dreams we want to pursue and how we can go about realizing them on a practical level. Although the dreaming aspect of dragon dreaming was very helpful for our process, we had to alter the planning aspect so heavily to meet our needs that we couldn’t really call it dragon dreaming anymore. If we were to do this design again, we would research other planning methods that would better meet our needs and integrate them into our design process as well.
Our design method is loosely based on Dragon Dreaming. You can download the free e-book here: https://dragondreaming.org/