As we have arrived in the year 2025, what is your dream?
Dreaming is a fundamental human experience that transcends culture, time, and individual circumstance. Dreams represent the fluidity of thought and possibility. They allow for the exploration of worlds and selves that do not adhere to the constraints of logic or physical laws. Dreaming matters because it is through these journeys that we engage with the deepest layers of the mind. In dream arenas, I would emphasize process, not answer. I would speak about the promise of going blank. I would discuss the tainted and strange and colliding where familiar and unfamiliar elements—that don’t belong together, coexist together in a way that feels both surreal and inevitable. This chaotic merging reflects a deeper psychological struggle: parts of the self in conflict, fragmented thoughts and feelings crashing together in an attempt to make sense of contradictions, fears, or desires.
Dreams scenario’s are often not only incoherent; they reveal themselves as symbolic battlegrounds where my unconscious mind seems to work through internal tensions that challenges my conventional understanding. The invitation is to explore the dissonance between the conscious and unconscious realms, urging us to confront the relationships that have been neglected, repressed, or misunderstood. Dreams raise questions about the nature of reality and perception. What is "real" when the mind can create such vivid, complex experiences that feel indistinguishable from waking life?
Carl Jung, renowned for transcribing his dreams, documented this process in The Red Book. In the early 1910s, following a psychological crisis, he turned inward to confront the unconscious mind more directly. He began recording his dreams, fantasies, and visions as a means of dialogue with his deeper psyche. This marked the beginning of his intense practice of "active imagination," where he consciously engaged with the images and symbols that emerged, allowing them to unfold without interference, thus creating a path of profound self-exploration.
In The Red Book (also known as Liber Novus), Jung transcribed and illustrated his visions and dreams, merging psychology, mythology, and art. He viewed these visions as a descent into the unconscious, likening it to a journey into the "underworld"—a metaphor for the hidden depths of the psyche, where repressed material and archetypal symbols reside. Jung believed that by engaging with this underworld, one could integrate the unconscious into consciousness. He saw dreams as bridges between both realms that were vital to integrating the fragmented parts of the psyche, offering both personal insight and universal archetypes. He believed that every person partakes of a universal or collective unconscious that persists through generations.
I want to encourage active skepticism as well, which means that you’re on the side of curiously questioning rather than accepting. Dream skepticism has traditionally been the most famous and widely discussed philosophical problem raised by dreaming (Williams 1978; Stroud 1984) - from the study Dreams and Dreaming. Dreams suggest deception. Even the most realistic experience can occur in a dream, and vice versa, considering the state of the planet and the world we live in. This raises doubts about the reliability of perception itself, blurring the line between what is real and what is illusion. If our waking life can be as questionable as a dream, how can we trust our sensory experience at all? The very nature of dreaming challenges the boundaries of knowledge and reality.
The most important rival to the hallucination and deception view is that dreams are imaginative experiences (Liao & Gendler 2019; Thomas 2014). Imagination can be characterized as active and under our control, involving “a special effort of the mind," whereas perception and dreaming are passive. Because dreams seem to just happen to us, they present an important challenge for the imagination view. For instance, what wants to come into consciousness through what is salient, and what is real?
My work through my organization Open Up is a passionate attempt to make the unconscious conscious, to make sense of our disconnection in a world where something more than reality retrieval is at work. Through practices such as breathwork, people can access dream-like states where ordinary waking consciousness diminishes, and a deeper, more expansive reality opens up. In this liminal space, a reality can emerge that feels so real to some people that it becomes a motivator for change in real life. The ideas and insights that arise in these states can shift our perception and relation to the outside world, where imagination can be practiced to bring these ideas into action. At the same time it’s a research inquiry into what choices and actions are composed of? Therefore I would like to speak of 'action' as an “act of journey”.
2025 may be the year of the unimaginable and bizarre, as if we are dreaming. In scientific dream research, the vagueness of a dream is regarded as a type of bizarreness (Hobson 1988; Revonsuo & Salmivalli 1995). What if we observed this bizarreness in our practice of imagination and action—not as something to reject, but to open with and journey with.
Hatsuyume symbolizes perhaps a vision of hope or insight, and encourages a deeper engagement with the spontaneous and sometimes illogical qualities of reality.
May your dreams offer fresh perspectives on the challenges we face in the world today, allowing us to reshape our interactions with others and the planet in meaningful ways.
“What if I slept a little more and forgot about all this nonsense.” — Franz Kafka
Together in electric dreams,
Katrien
About Hatsuyume:
There are various theories regarding the origins as to why this particular combination of Mount Fuji, a hawk and an eggplant was considered to be auspicious. One theory suggests that this combination is lucky because Mount Fuji is Japan's highest mountain, the hawk is a clever and strong bird, and the word for eggplant (茄子, nasu or nasubi) suggests achieving something great (成す nasu). Another theory suggests that this combination arose because Mount Fuji, falconry, and early eggplants were favorites of the shōgun Tokugawa Ieyasu, who became the new Shōgun in 1603, and whose family ruled in relative peace and prosperity for more than 250 years stayed. Another explanation is that they are puns: 富士 Fuji sounds like 無事 “buji” (unharmed), 鷹 taka (falcon) like 高い “takai” (high), and 茄子 nasu (eggplant) like 成す “nasu” (become).