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Having dreams is important in life. Indeed, research from the University of Basel found that a sense of belief was often the most significant factor in whether a young person could achieve social mobility or not. The researchers found that having this belief became self-fulfilling in the form of the Pygmalion Effect.
A second study, from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, reinforces the importance of dreams and suggests that they can help us to build resilience at work. Whereas the Swiss research looked at real-world aspirations, however, the American research looked at the kind of dreams we have while sleeping.
While it may seem rather hard to believe, the researchers found that when our dreams are able to invoke in us a general sense of awe, our appraisal of that dream can flow into how we perceive things during our waking day.
“Say you have that dream experience in the morning. And then later in the afternoon, your supervisor tells you to conduct 10 more interviews than you were expecting to have to do this week,” the authors explain. “You might now think that in the grand scheme of things, it’s not that big a deal because you just had this awe-inspiring dream that’s putting everything in perspective. Feeling like there’s a bigger world out there, and you’re just part of it. Or feeling like you’re connected to everything.”
A sense of awe
Strange though it may sound, the researchers argue that the meaning we may attach to our dreams can easily bridge between our subconscious and conscious, thus affecting us when we’re awake in ways such as our resilience.
The key is to have awe-inspiring dreams, which the researchers argue help to color our interpretation of events long after the original sense of awe has gone away. For instance, such dreams can prompt us to view stresses at work as more manageable and less threatening than we might otherwise do.
They found that this phenomenon was most common among people with a generally curious disposition. They believe that curious people are often more welcoming to new experiences and having reality jolted, and indeed might actually revel in the kind of dreams that do this. For those with less curiosity, such dreams might be disconcerting, and so their impact is lessened.
Building resilience
The findings emerged after three studies were conducted involving hundreds of full-time employees, each of which was asked about their dreams. In total, the researchers captured over 1,500 dreams from the participants, with each volunteer required to also rate the extent to which they thought their dreams were either positive or negative. They were also required to answer three writing prompts that asked them to first describe their dream, then explain what it meant to them, and finally, what they thought the cause of their dream was. Last but not least, they responded to questions about whether their dreams evoked a sense of awe and then how their resilience and goal progression had changed during the following work day. The results reveal that feeling a sense of awe was hugely important.
“Awe is one of the fastest and most powerful methods of personal change and growth, [but] it remains a mystery as to how managers and employees can harness its benefits. Our research unravels this mystery by revealing how awe can be elicited at a time that has a critical impact on daily work outcomes,” the authors explain. “Dreams are a common, overlooked source of awe, and a single awe experience can bolster employee resilience and goal progress throughout the workday. Harnessing this power of awe may prove invaluable to organizations.”
Total recall
The study found that around 40% of participants were able to recall the dream they had the previous night, and while it might sound a bit hokey, the authors believe that sharing those dreams at work could actually be beneficial to employees and employers alike.
For instance, the researchers argue that when we think that our dreams are both positive and that they induce a sense of awe within us, we’re more likely to share those dreams with our colleagues. The skeptical among you may feel that this is as likely to be annoying as useful, but the researchers insist that doing so is likely to reduce feelings of personal concern and will facilitate resilience not only in the individual who had the dream but even in the listener. Indeed, they even believe that the act of sharing our dreams might help our relationships with colleagues.
They suggest that a good place to start is to keep a dream journal so that our dreams may “live on” and not fade from memory. Such an exercise also allows us to try and ascribe some kind of meaning to our dreams.
“For instance, an employee who recalls and records their dreams on a given morning, but does not find meaning in their dreams at that time, may later see a connection between those and other dreams, resulting in attributions of meaning and heightened levels of awe,” the researchers write. “Similarly, imagery rehearsal and dream mastery techniques … are simple practices employees can engage in to ‘steer’ their dream experiences. Thus, by keeping a dream journal—and, even more simply, envisioning the dream experiences one wishes to have before sleep—employees can increase their odds of having meaningful, awe-inspiring dreams.”
You have permission to view such things as a little bit hokey, but with resilience, a characteristic that is so widely sought after across the working world, it’s perhaps a low-cost way of trying to improve your resilience levels.
