Sleep on it - solving business problems

Nation's Business, Dec, 1987 by Mark Nelson

Sleep On It

The CEO of a struggling company in San Jose, Calif., was never accused of being a head-in-the-clouds dreamer, but he recently discovered that his dreams hold answers to down-to-earth problems at work.

The executive, who experienced a high turnover on his board of directors, had a recurring dream: He drove a speeding car without brakes toward an anonymous group of pedestrians. At first, he didn't realize there might be a connection between the dream and what was happening in the boardroom.

After counseling with a dream therapist, though, the CEO realized the pedestrians in his dream represented the departing board members. He concluded that the brakeless car was a metaphor for his own out-of-control management style that was driving the board members away.

"Dreams are a natural problem-solving function of the mind," says Dr. Gayle Delaney, a psychologist, who, along with Dr. Loma Flowers, a psychiatrist, has begun a dream-consultation center in San Francisco.

"If you can learn the language of your dreams," Delaney says, "you'll find that they're not something that's terribly esoteric--they're a form of your own thinking. We're not talking about some psychic, superstitious or Freudian thing here. We're talking about practical, diagnostic approaches."

By interpreting his dream, the CEO knew immediately what he had to do: become less egomaniacal, tone down his management style and listen more to other opinions. After that, boardroom attrition became a thing of the past.

In addition to pinpointing problems, the dream therapists say you can "ask" your dreams to solve specific problems --a process the dream therapists call "incubation."

For instance, Robin Arnold, the owner of Arnold & Company Public Relations in San Francisco, says that she uses her dreams as an extra resource for solving work-related or even personal quandaries.

Recently, she needed an overnight marketing gimmick to persuade distributors to renew their contracts with one of her clients. That night, she says, she repeated the problem to herself before nodding off--essentially asking her dreaming mind to come up with a solution. By morning, her dream had done the work for her.

She dreamt about Las Vegas card dealers jockeying for position on a giant gold blimp shaped like the distinctively styled Cross brand pen. From this imaginative image, she says, she knew what to do before even stepping out of the shower that morning.

When Arnold got to her desk, she dashed off a note to the nearly 200 distributors, thanking them for their past loyalty. Included in each envelope was the new contract and a Cross pen to sign it with. The tactic worked.

"I think if anyone were to take the time, especially any business person, and experiment with this--whether it's to organize a speech, hire, fire, buy, sell, expand or whatever--they could get the same results I get," Arnold adds.

Although many business people view dream therapy with acute skepticism, it has become a growing field since Delaney wrote a book in 1981, entitled, Living Your Dreams. Published by Harper & Row, the book recently became required reading for a "Creativity in Business" course at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business.

"When people read about dreams, they often think there's some weird psychic or superstitious phenomenon at play," says Delaney. "But dreams, in effect, merely help us make the metaphoric bridge between life's experiences. . . . You just have to learn how to read them."

"Old school" psychoanalysts who follow Freudian principles are critical of the dream-counseling approach, which promises a quick understanding and untangling of everyday problems through dreams. This school believes that dreams, for the most part, reflect repressed sexual wishes rooted in childhood experience. They further contend that dreams can reveal parts of the past, but not the present or future.

However, Dr. Robert Van de Castle, director of clinical-psychology training at the University of Virginia Medical School, says that Freudian psychoanalysts are a diminishing breed whose ideas are considered pretty narrow. "Sure, sexual wishes are an important part of dreams, but we know now that dreams also tell us a lot of things about ourselves, such as anxieties, conflicts, guilt, apprehensions, creativity, power, competition."

Dreams are becoming a growing "natural resource" for people in the workplace to tap into, says de Castle. He adds that many therapists associated with company employee-assistance programs now help personnel interpret dreams as part of their counseling.

"Because it's free and so easy, people often don't believe it, but it's whole-heartedly true that you might find some helpful things about work in your dreams--choosing a job, whether to switch jobs, how to get along better with the boss, self-enlightenment and so on," says de Castle.

Some of the world's greatest ideas and inventions have come from dreams. For instance, Auguste Kekule wrote in 1870 that he visualized the structure of benzene in a dream, and Dmitri Mendeleyev, a Russian chemist, reported dreaming the order of the periodic table almost in its entirety. Robert Louis Stevenson said his dreams were the creative source for many of his novels, especially Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.