Using Dreams To Find a More Soulful Career
Author: Rizwan Virk

“I want to know for what a man is preparing himself. That is what I read out of his dreams.”
-Carl Jung


Today, after the great boom and bust of the last few years, many of us are looking for looking for a more soul-ful job, career, or business – one that is aligned with, and in fact, helps to fuel, our own spiritual growth.

One important tool in this search that is often overlooked is the power of our dreams to help guide us in our search for more fulfilling work. Many Native American societies, such as the Iroquois, believed that dreams reveal “the wishes of the soul”. A “big dream” was one that often revealed the life and career path that a dreamer’s soul was calling out for. By following your dreams, you could not only lead a more spiritual life, you could fulfill your particular destiny.

As a powerful example, Deganawidah, an Iroquois, had a vivid dream about a “Tree of Peace” that tied together different tribes that were constantly battling each other into a coherent “League”. So powerful was his dream that he spent the rest of his life assembling the sparring tribes around his into the “League of the Iroquois”, which provided for a “powerful” federal structure that contained each of the Five Nations. This structure proved so valuable that when the Founding Fathers of the United States, men like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, were looking for a model for the newly formed nation, they explicitly based the federal and state governmental structure of the new Constitution on the structure that was built by Deganawidah from his dream.


What about the modern world?

You might think, “Well that’s great - but Native societies are very different from our own. What does that mean for me today? Can my dreams have an impact on my career today?”

You might be surprised to learn that throughout modern history, and continuing to the present time, artists, politicians, and scientists have used their dreams to help them with their careers:

Arts:
• James Cameron, who was working on B movies at the time, had a particularly troubling dream vision of robots emerging from the flames. He drew a picture of his dream vision and told all of his friends about it. It eventually became the basis for his first big film, The Terminator.

• Salvador Dali used imagery from his dreams extensively in his paintings, including his famous image of clocks drooping in The Persistence of Memory, after having read The Interpretation of Dreams by Freud.

Politics:

• Gandhi, during the 1940’s was frustrated when violent protests broke out all across India and no one was listening to his message of peaceful protest. One morning he awoke from what he calls “a compelling dream” and immediately called Nehru and others to start implementing his “dream vision”. This was the inspiration for the peaceful civil disobedience that contributed greatly to the Independence of India and Pakistan from the British.


Science and Technology

• Neils Bohr, struggled with figuring out the basic principles of the physical world. One day, Bohr had a dream that he was visiting a race course, and all of the horses had to stay within their thickly chalked lines, unless they had a special pass. From this dream, he formed his formed his Nobel Prize winning theories about “electrons” going around the nucleus in “pre-defined” orbits, which could only switch orbits if they had enough “energy”.

These are but a few of the many, many stories from the twentieth century of how dreams have had an impact on modern society. My question for you is that if scientists, artists, and politicians throughout history have used dreams to inspire them, why not you and I? Why not businessmen and women? Tom Brown writes, “The dreams and visions that were available to medicine men and women long ago are still available to us today.”

My own experiences

My own experiences as a high tech entrepreneur have led me to believe that dreams can have a significant impact on our career paths. In what might seem like a very un-spiritual profession, computer software, I have used my dreams to help solve work-related problems, to help find my career path and work path, and have even started entire businesses based upon intuitions that have come from the dream world.

As an example, I had a dream recently that served as inspiration for a company that I started, CambridgeDocs. This occurred after the high tech bust of 2000/2001, and very few areas of computer software were still viable for new start-ups. In the dream, I was visiting a “conference” which consisted of a group of businessmen, one of whom used to be a mentor of mine, and I asked them what kinds of businesses they were starting. They told me that I should look at “XML” as an important new technology, and one of them showed me a brochure that had a diagram that looked like a spider. In the middle of this diagram was this new technology.

I awoke from the dream with a peculiar feeling that this dream was important, and so wrote it down. Within a few months, I co-founded a new business, which made a product that was very similar to the product in the brochure that was shown to me in that dream.

This is only one example of many when a dream came at the right time and helped point out a particular direction that I might want to follow in waking life. I give many others in my book, Zen Entrepreneurship,

Some Keys to Using Your Dreams For Your Career

By learning to pay attention to your dreams, you too can help solve problems and become clear on the “wishes of your soul”. Here are some simple steps you can follow to accomplish this:

• Write Down Your Dreams. According to scientists, we all dream every night, but many of us don’t remember much about our dreams. If you make an effort upon waking to remember what you were dreaming and write it down, you’ll start to flex your “dream recall muscles”.

• Identify settings and people that relate to your career. This could be a co-worker who appears in your dreams, or a mentor from long ago. The setting could be a “generic” setting – like a business conference, or an office building. These are all clues that this dream is revealing something to you about your work and perhaps even your life path.

• Look for Elements of your Dreams in Waking Life. Carl Jung defined a synchronicity as the meeting of an inner event with an outer event. I have often had dreams, for example, when someone appears that I haven’t heard from in a long time, and then the next day or next few days, they contact me. Or I am dreaming about the solution to a particular technical problem, and wake up with the vague sense that it involves looking into technology ‘X”. A few days later, “X” appears in an email or I notice a book about “X”. Synchronicities can be clues that reveal underlying patterns that are emerging in our lives.

• Bring elements of your Dreams into Waking Life. Even more consciously, you can start to bring the energy of your dreams into your Waking Life. This is referred to as “honoring your dream”.

This means to do something physical as a result of your dreams; this could involve drawing a picture of something you’ve seen in a dream, or contacting someone who you saw in your dreams. The more that you are able to bring your dream and waking consciousness together - the more likely you will be to have and remember dreams that contain practical information to help you in your life path.


Conclusion

Throughout history, and not just in ancient times, artists, poets, and even scientists and politicians have used their dreams as a way to unlock their creativity and to guide them in their lives. If it was good enough for them, why not for us today?

The Buddha said that “your task in life is to find your work and to give your heart to it.” Dreams are a powerful but often overlooked tool to accomplish this. By following a few simple techniques to help you pay attention to your dreams and to bring the dream world closer to the waking world, you can find the “wishes of your soul” and “give your heart” to them.








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Rizwan Virk is a writer and entrepreneur who has started, grown, and sold, several high technology companies. His businesses have been featured in publications ranging from the Boston Globe, to Information Week and Inc. magazine. Mr. Virk is the author of Zen Entrepreneurship, a book about spirituality and business. It is available at www.zenentrepreneur.com.

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