Wednesday Thought for the Day 

June 18, 2025 

Humanity is failing in many ways, not the least of which is the failure to be an effective steward of resources, whether those resources are economic, social, cultural, scientific, artistic, or anything else. At bottom, this is nothing less than suicidal. For the first time, Homo sapiens are facing extinction, and much of the impetus for this ineluctable reality is the result of our own unbounded hubris.

One resource so far exempt from this ubiquitous mayhem is what happens when our ego consciousness and our body become paralyzed. I am referring to dreams. The likely reason for this exemption is that for the vast majority of individuals, collectives, and organizations, this resource is ignored.

Dreams are a resource other than conscious intentions, and for this reason are likely to be the source of “outside the box” ways of being, doing, and functioning. Where dreams are an object of attention, most of this attention is interpreting, explaining, or trying to understand dreams only in relation to consciousness. This is not the most fruitful way of working with dreams. The “otherness” of dreams requires recapturing the early sense of dreams as “alien.” So, to relate to dreams would be relating to an other. In this mutuality, this eros potentiality, the ego may find ways of “serving” the hints and possibilities presented by the other.

Recall the scene in The Day When the Earth Stood Still. Klatu, the alien, holds up a device, but the military decides it’s a weapon, destroys it, and injures Klatu. It was a gift from the alien for the president to be able to understand life in the universe. This scene provides a riveting example of wrongheadedness in the face of the other. It also mirrors how most humans treat the gift of dreams.