Talking About Dreams

It’s summer 2020, Pia and I are meeting for the second time. We’re sitting on a wall in the park.

She tells me that a lot is going on for her, that she feels overwhelmed but at the same time deeply inspired. That for the first time it feels like she has a real vision of the future: living together with her closest people in one house and sharing life as a community. This vision partly came from watching a series called Tales of the City, which shows queer people of different ages living together as a community on a larger property.

And something clicked inside me.

After burnout and the end of a long relationship in 2019, I was floating a bit. I felt like I had fallen behind on the traditional path of life, that I had to start again from scratch and walk the classic nuclear-family road: relationship–moving in together–children–house. Even though I had often felt lonely in my “previous life,” it still seemed like the only imaginable way forward.

Pia’s ideas about the future inspired me and continue to shape my everyday life and philosophy to this day. That’s how powerful inspiration can be.

Imagination

I’m fascinated by human consciousness, by our imagination. We can travel to the past and to the future, create new worlds and step into the worlds created by others. In fractions of a second we can envision different scenarios and emotions.

So much has already been created through imagination, communication, and collaboration. Many things that people dreamed of decades ago are now a reality.

But when we think of the future today, it is often accompanied by fear. Understandable, with crises like climate change, fascism, wars… The focus is mostly on preventing something terrible.

Have we stopped dreaming?

Uncertainty and the Status Quo

Another shock: a study showed that young people in Germany would be most likely to vote for the far-right AfD. That they are pessimistic about the future and think this party has the best answers to their fears.

In her book Everyday Utopia, Kristen Ghodsee writes about status quo bias. Our brains prefer what we already know, because change often feels uncertain and carries the risk of things getting worse. So the first instinct toward change is often: everything should stay the way I know it.

In times of rapid change and crisis, it makes sense that we cling to the familiar, that we want peace, that we simply want to live the way we’re used to. Especially when change is always portrayed as something negative, and there are no positive visions for the future.

I don’t believe that young people want to vote for the AfD because of its good ideas. They want to vote for it because the AfD promises security. Only a false security, but that doesn’t matter.

That’s why it’s our collective responsibility to dream up a future that promises more than the status quo. It’s about time.

Utopias

I once read that imagination can be trained like a muscle.

The more we engage with different ways of living, the more possibilities we have to imagine our own future in different scenarios.

By allowing ourselves to dream again—individually and collectively—and by sharing these dreams with each other, we can inspire one another and co-create a more beautiful, more just world.

A good exercise for this is exploring utopias. They challenge us to rethink life and expand our imagination through inspiration.

Tales of the City is one such example, which has already had a huge impact on my life. Also “Humankind” by Rutger Bregman and “Everyday Utopia” by Kristen Ghodsee.

In times of collective fear about the future, utopias are more important than ever.

Here’s to more utopias.