The Hindu Business Line : Dream on ... for success

Whoever heard of dreams being instrumental in a company's successes? Well, Dr Anjali Hazarika tells you that dreams can replace cold logic as an effective administrative tool. So, dream on!

Attention corporate world, it's time for you to sleep... perchance to dream. It is these dreams that will be your wake-up call, your hazard alarm and your eventual pathway to triumph. Sleep and you will succeed.

Surprised? Does this go against every piece of advice and all the admonitions of your parents/teachers/bosses? If yes, then you haven't met Dr Anjali Hazarika who has the power to turn your bed into an office and the dreams you dream will be the solutions to all your corporate worries.

Dr Anjali, Director of India's National Petroleum Management Programme, has done her doctorate in a rather unusual subject — Creativity, Dreamwork and Exploratory Study of Training Methodology. She describes herself as a dream interpreter, a behavioural scientist and a management trainer and specialises in the analysis of dreams for superior business administration.

She says that though firms have always emphasised on logic for better organisation, "this doesn't always lead to the required conclusions. Companies need to learn to harness a manager's latent talent through his or her dreams. In this day and age, it's important that businesses rely on intuition as well as reason."

She justifies this train of thought by quoting the examples of famous scientists who have attested that intuition helped them solve some of the most obstinate of problems. Madam Curie was one who relied on instinct and Albert Einstein kept a notepad at his bedside to jot down suggestions that were thrown up in his sleep.

Dr Anjali works with high-powered corporations and brings together two extremely unlikely bed partners — dreams and corporate success.

The use of dreams in forwarding management practices is a new technique. Serious work in this field began only in 1985. A pioneer in dream interpretation in India, she has held many workshops related to the theme.

She does not take more than 20 participants at a time for her four-day workshops where she explains the importance of dreams in the context of managerial development. Participants range from top CEOs to entry-level management trainees. In fact, her workshops have been such a runaway success that many leading corporate honchos can be found attending them.

New discipline

However, she admits that the science is not without its drawbacks. "Being a new discipline, there isn't a huge database to go by. Experiential studies are based on data provided by managers themselves," she says, adding that an accurate perception of dreams is a technique to tap one's own creativity.

She cites the example of the President of an air-conditioning company who was preparing to launch a joint venture. The deal looked great on paper — all the figures made sense — but the executive had misgivings for which he could not find a reason. Before the deal was finalised he took part in a dream workshop, where he dreamt of travelling on a bumpy road that led to a rickety bridge and finally a dead end. At this dead end he met his prospective business partner. The dream helped sharpen the awareness that the key problem was not financial but rather, the likelihood of a stormy relationship between the to-be partners. He decided not to proceed.

But Dr Anjali is quick to acknowledge that for a layman a problem is usually the correct re-construction of dreams and then using them as a management tool. "This is where I come in and help unravel the mystery and show the manager the proper path on which to proceed," she says.

Practice makes perfect

To rightly understand dreams and then implement them requires both motivation and practice — there has to be motivation to recall dreams, understand their implications and, most importantly, to apply them in daily life. Recalling and comprehension are crucial to this discipline and this can only come with practice.

A dream is but the subconscious of a person reflecting concerns and problems that the conscious mind may be overlooking. They are made up of everyday experiences and emotions which people find difficult and sometimes embarrassing to address in real life. It is these repressed feelings that surface when a person is asleep.

"Unfinished projects, a work-related problem, worries over upcoming ventures, mergers or new launches, all come to the fore in the dead of the night. The setting of the dream may not be the office or home but may be in the form of certain symbols and metaphors with a few essential factors that relate it to the particular problem," says Dr Anjali.

She gives the example of aDelhi-based businessman who finally walked out of a partnership following a dream. He dreamt of an argument with his business partner over differences in business principles. The dream then changed and suddenly he saw a wall. As he leaned towards it, the wall started developing cracks. Once the meaning had been made evident to him, the businessman terminated his partnership.

However, all dreams do not come in the form of symbols. Sometimes the potency and the message of a dream are so clear and powerful that the point just cannot be ignored especially if the dream recurs.

Dr Anjali says that dreams not only make managers aware of gaps, omissions and other flaws in the problem at hand, they also make them more receptive to new ideas and help them see things in unusual ways. "Dreams make meaningful connections between past experiences and present associations by bringing them into a common pool," she says.

She cites another example of a woman to prove this. The woman had been a manager in a public sector organisation, a post she handled competently. But she always felt her metier was politics. But she belonged to an orthodox family that was against her joining politics. It was during this tumultuous period in her life that she had a dream of a lush green tree, which had grown through and emerged from the top of a high-rise building. But there were no cracks in the building, just a neat hole.

This dream had a powerful impact on the woman and she contacted Dr Anjali who interpreted it to mean that she could "grow" to her full potential without upsetting her family. Recently, the woman joined a political party, but instead of taking up an active role she is now managing a new wing that sets up self-help projects for under-privileged women.

In this case, the dream helped her take a bold decision as a result of which she not only joined a political party but also started helping deprived women. Her family members approved of what she was doing though they have yet to approve of her joining politics. However, her family has ceased to be an obstacle between her and her political career.

Dr Anjali, who has formed the Forum for Women in Public Sector, has now also started conducting workshops specifically for female executives, focusing on dreams as a way of promoting independent decision-making and increasing feelings of empowerment.

Dream On!

So upbeat is she about this science that she says it would be a good idea to include this in the curriculum for undergraduate courses. She feels that cultural factors may make Indian managers more open to exploring dreams than those in Western societies. Children in India, she notes, grow up with an oral tradition involving dream-related stories that forge a positive link between dreams and reality.

However, her optimism is lined with caution that all problems cannot necessarily be solved through dreams. Dreams are just an alternative. On a more positive note, she adds, "The Upanishads recognise dreaming as among the four states of consciousness and that accounts for a lot."

For her the turning point in management training will occur when dreams replace cold logic as a tool of administration. In this age of rationality a database consisting of conclusions drawn from people's dreams may seem foolhardy. But in the near future it could be the basis for a new "holistic and impartial" approach to management.

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