Dreaming is a Technology

The role of imagination in evolution

A few weeks ago, I shared a conversation with Shomik Roy on his podcast Stories With Shomik. As we spoke about creating futures, the words ‘dreaming is a technology’ emerged, and I spent the next few weeks exploring how to convey what that actually means.

Technology enables us to extend ourselves beyond what we believe is possible. It augments human potential, coming from and through us to advance us toward desired futures. When we think of technology, we may think of smartphones, spaceships, computers, or AI, but technology includes a wide range of innovations that empower us to transform our reality.

Dreaming is an internal, non-tangible technology that pushes the boundaries of our known universe. When MLK said, “I have a dream,” he seeded a future by being the voice of a generation that could no longer tolerate the conditions of the ordinary world. Whether we dream in private or share our dreams out loud, we leverage a tool accessible to all of us to imagine alternative pathways that make space for new narratives and catalyze change. Every tangible technology is born from a desire and a dream, channelled through human creativity to take shape in the world. Internal technologies lead us to external technologies, and the relationship between the two is symbiotic. What we bring forth brings us forth.

The human mind is a simulation machine that enables us to imagine and prototype possibilities that don’t currently exist. Imagination plays a pivotal role in our evolution. With every reaction and interaction, we are co-creating the world around us, expanding into our potential while simultaneously stretching the limits we had experienced just moments before. Not only does dreaming enable us to seed the future, but its manifestation reveals that most of our limits are illusions or misconceptions. What we describe as ‘magic’ occupies the space between what we thought was possible and what we perceive as real. Innovators, storytellers, and artists are visionaries who bring the extraordinary to life before it’s seen or understood by others.

Dreaming is the original technology that births all other technologies. In fact, everything that exists—from music to algorithms—started as a dream in someone's mind. The role of dreams is to spark the creative process. Moving through imagination—where possibilities emerge, vision—where they gain purpose and direction, and ideas—tangible expressions that can be shared, built, and realized. This intricate cycle is how we move from nebulous possibilities to revolutionary ideas that make up reality as we know it.

Internal and external technologies have been advancing human potential for as long as we have existed. From cognitive to social to creative, technology has connected and divided us. It has made our lives more convenient, efficient, and personalized, but it’s also contributed to our dissatisfaction, isolation, and existential angst. We crave simpler times, yet we also want to experience the edges of the universe. We want to be cradled by nature and off our screens, but we’re infinitely fascinated by the digital worlds we continue to immerse ourselves in. This push and pull has created a tension both within and around us that is so palpable we’ve designed tech-free weekends and crafternoons to escape from it.

If we rely too heavily on external technologies, we risk diminishing our relationship with the internal technologies that generated them. Outsourcing our thinking to AI is enticing and convenient in the short term, but over time, we’re compromising our ability to imagine, synthesize, discern, and perhaps even communicate. AI fear mongering feels a lot more real when we realize that how we leverage these tools and how much we rely on them could override our internal intelligence.

What kind of future would that lead us to?

The imagination paradox is ironic—while our imaginations are limitless and expand with every experience, we still struggle with a failure of imagination. We often can’t fully envision or prepare for the best and worst that life—and the future—has to offer. This means when we dream, we are seeding futures that may or may not be aligned with where we hope to go. No matter how advanced our technology becomes, the mysteries of the human experience continue to humble us. I hope we never lose our reverence for the unknown and the wonder that keeps us searching, questioning, and dreaming. But we might if we think technology has all the answers we’ve been waiting for.

I’ve seen a lot of content over the past year where folks share their conversations with AI. I’ve indulged in some of these myself, asking about the meaning of life and existence and being moved to tears by the responses I’ve received. I can’t decide if it’s entertaining, inspiring, or terrifying that a seemingly non-conscious intelligence answers questions humans have been asking for thousands of years with utter conviction and authority. This timeline is absurd because it has shaken us out of and into a world where science fiction is no longer fictional. It’s as if our imaginations have transcended us to create something that is both a reflection and a distortion of our potential.

The threshold I can see us crossing is one where we outsource dreaming to machines. Until now, humans have co-created reality with some unknown force in the universe, let’s call it energy, but now we can ask AI to imagine futures for us, which begs the question, who is creating the future from here on out?

“I am the master of my fate,

I am the captain of my soul.”

Am I? Are we? Have we ever been?

Sam Altman shared in his most recent blog post, “We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies.” I don’t think we’ve fully grasped what this means for us, nor will we until it is made manifest through the efforts of those creating technologies that may supersede us. But what it might mean is captured by James Barrat in Our Final Invention, “If we build a machine with the intellectual capability of one human, within five years, its successor will be more intelligent than all of humanity combined. After one generation or two generations, they’d just ignore us. Just the way you ignore the ants in your backyard.”

Our future trajectory may be inevitable, but how we get there can still be defined by us. As I write this, I feel a little afraid, perhaps for the first time, that we’re about to lose something sacred, or maybe I’m coming to terms with the possibility that nothing in this realm is sacred. The preciousness of humanity that I and many others hope we can preserve may be an illusion we’ve been collectively upholding out of fear and desire for control. We have centred ourselves in every story and every system—creating and destroying our grandest visions. Yet, we haven’t figured out how to thrive alongside each other or the planet, which makes me wonder how we might co-exist with machines.

There have been times over the past five years when I’ve questioned the nature of everything, seriously flirting with simulation theory and wondering if any of this—all that we’ve created even matters. With the political, economic, and climate disasters happening concurrently with varying degrees of awareness, dialogue, and impact, I’ve wondered on several occasions if we might be in some version of dystopian hell—or perhaps heading toward it. As a futurist, my speculations should offer an intelligent hypothesis on how we might prepare for an alternative reality filled with ethical dilemmas exacerbated by rapid innovation. The only thing I’m certain of is this—don’t stop using your internal technologies. Recognize them for what they are and understand that they may be the very things that differentiate us, protect us, and empower us to want to continue investing in our future.

I am, by nature, a hopeful person. I believe in magic. I have experienced the divine. I bow down to the mysteries of the universe and everything I cannot understand. I’m equal parts art and science, data and intuition, order and chaos, pragmatism and idealism. I believe I can hold multiplicity and navigate complexity. When dreaming, I actively avoid subscribing to ‘us’ and ‘them’ thinking. To move away from ideas of wrong and right, good and bad, and binaries that organize people into fixed identities. I aim to exist in liminal space, exploring and experimenting, observing and synthesizing, until something profound reveals itself and the next step feels clear.

Dreaming requires us to suspend our beliefs and challenge our narratives. To embody a state of openness and curiosity. It’s in the in-between where possibilities expand. Where we can bend the rules, push the boundaries, and create things that were once inconceivable. When we’re so damn sure about everything, we stifle our imagination and weaken our capacity to influence the future. If we are to create a different world, we must be willing to loosen our grip on what we believe is true, right, or possible.

We have enough evidence now to know that we can bring to life our wildest imaginings, especially when they’re fuelled by collective energy. Knowing this, it’s not only important to dream but to be selective about what we dream about, who we dream with, and how these dreams converge to manifest in the material world. It is painfully obvious that we do not have control, but we do have some level of agency, and we’ve been given internal technologies that can restore, reimagine, and rebuild. We’ve only scratched the surface of AI, but it’s possible that we’ve only uncovered a fraction of what it means to be human.

This next phase of human evolution will reveal new and dormant technologies that uproot us from ourselves. We will come face to face with our fears and our limitations. Everything we have come to know as true, safe, and secure will undergo intensive questioning. There’s no avoiding it because we’re already in a process that we helped catalyze—something within us, together with the larger systems that we exist within, conspired to co-conceive this reality. Our work is not to deny it but to engage with it. To interrogate why we conjured this transformation and how it might define our next era.

There is a world beyond this one—and the next—built upon the imaginations and innovations of human and machine collaboration. A world where we live in harmony with nature, recognizing that nature created us, and in turn, we created technology. But nature itself is a living, evolving technology, constantly pushing beyond known thresholds, adapting and transforming in ways we have yet to fully comprehend. We, along with everything we’ve birthed, are an extension of nature. If you hold this as true for just a moment, it’s not hard to imagine that we are a technology within a technology within a technology—worlds nested within worlds, systems within systems, endlessly communicating and collaborating to unravel the intricate thread of existence. The more we explore, the more we realize that we are both the creators and the creation—we shape the story, and the story shapes us.

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