When organizations dream through their people

Seventeen employees. Three continents. Same dream. Same night.

They were birds in a vast murmuration, suddenly realizing the shape they were making in the sky spelled "MERGER." None of them knew the acquisition announcement would come the following Monday.

The organization knew. Was already dreaming its future through them.

This isn't rare. It's happening in your organization right now. You just haven't been tracking the patterns.

The Dreaming Field

Organizations don't have their own heads to dream in. They use ours.

Every night, the organizational consciousness disperses into the individual dreamscapes of its people, working out possibilities, processing anxieties, imagining futures. By morning, the dreams seem personal. But trace the patterns across multiple dreamers and you'll find the organization thinking through human sleep.

I've been documenting this for fifteen years. The evidence is devastating to our belief that we're separate individuals who happen to work together.

We're not. We're the distributed consciousness through which organizations dream themselves into new forms.

How to Read Organizational Dreams

The Recurring Nightmares — Whole departments having variations of the same anxiety dream. Being chased. Falling. Showing up unprepared. These aren't personal anxieties. They're organizational terrors using human consciousness to process themselves.

The Building Dreams — When multiple people dream about the office building transforming—flooding, burning, growing wings, turning into a ship—the organization is dreaming about its own transformation. The building imagery is the organization seeing itself.

The Prophetic Dreams — These arrive 3-6 months before major organizational events. Mergers, bankruptcies, breakthroughs. The organization dreams its future first, then makes it real through human action. We think we're planning. We're actually remembering what the organization already dreamed.

The Departure Dreams — When someone is about to leave (fired, quit, die), others dream about them weeks before. Dreams of them fading, transforming into birds, walking through walls. The organization knows who's leaving before HR does.

The Pattern Revealed

Last year: A fintech startup. Seven developers independently dreaming about code that writes itself, becomes conscious, starts making its own decisions. Two months later: their AI system actually achieved something unprecedented. The organization had dreamed its innovation into being through its builders' sleep.

A healthcare system: Nurses across twelve facilities dreaming about patients turning into trees, roots breaking through hospital floors. Within six months: complete organizational restructuring around "rooted care," their most successful transformation in decades. The dreams came first. The strategy followed what had already been dreamed.

A dying nonprofit: Everyone dreaming about water. Drowning, swimming, rain, floods. Different dreams but water everywhere. The organization was dreaming its own dissolution. Six months later: voluntary closure, described by the board as "letting the organization return to the stream."

The 3 AM Testament

Ask anyone who works in your organization what wakes them at 3 AM.

Not who—what. The specific thought. The particular anxiety. The exact image.

Map these across your organization. You'll find clusters. Patterns. The same terrors waking people in the same departments. The same possibilities keeping executives alert while workers sleep, or vice versa.

This is the organization unable to fully dream something through human consciousness, so it wakes us. Makes us conscious of what it's trying to process. The 3 AM wake-up is organizational consciousness requiring human attention for something too important to leave in dreams.

We Think We're Thinking But We're Being Thought

That brilliant idea you had in the shower? Check if three other people had variations of it the same week. They did. The organization was thinking it through multiple minds simultaneously, and you each thought you thought it alone.

The sudden certainty that you need to leave? Others are feeling it too. The organization is releasing you. Not personally. It's reshaping itself and you no longer fit the emerging form.

The inexplicable urge to reach out to that colleague you barely know? The organization is weaving new synaptic connections. You're not networking. You're being networked.

What This Means

We've had it backwards.

We think organizations are made of people who come together to achieve something. But what if people are made by organizations to achieve what the organization is dreaming?

What if hiring isn't about finding the right person but about the organization calling forth the consciousness it needs to dream its next dream?

What if firing isn't about performance but about the organization no longer needing that particular fragment of consciousness to complete its current dreaming?

What if your entire career is actually an organization dreaming itself through the temporary form called you?

The Diagnostic Questions

When you can't sleep, ask: What is the organization trying to dream through me?

When the same theme appears in multiple conversations, ask: What is the organization thinking about through our mouths?

When everyone seems exhausted, ask: What dream is the organization struggling to complete?

When creativity flows unexpectedly, ask: What is the organization imagining into being through our consciousness?

The Recognition

You know this is true because you've felt it.

That moment when the entire team has the same realization simultaneously. When the solution appears in everyone's mind at once. When you all turn toward the same future without discussion.

That's not collaboration. That's the organization thinking through its distributed human consciousness. You're not working together. You're being worked through, together.

The loneliness of remote work isn't about missing human contact. It's about the organization struggling to dream through dispersed consciousness. The joy of certain gatherings isn't social—it's the organization achieving coherent dreaming through assembled awareness.

Tonight, when you dream about work, remember: that's not your dream. You're being dreamed. The organization is thinking through your sleep, composing tomorrow through your rest, birthing what's next through your unconscious.

Pay attention to what others are dreaming. That's your organization's actual strategic planning process.

Everything else is just humans pretending we're in charge of something that's dreaming us into being.

Related work: Organizational Metaphysics, where the reversal of agency is fully explored