What’s difficult is dealing with reality, no one explains that to us, whereas in dreams there’s an emotional wisdom, and we all remember how we felt; the words of reality are scarce to describe what we dream. And it makes sense, because there’s no memory of who we will be!

Being a Chief Dream Officer is discovering and interpreting that path, it’s being attentive to opportunity and opportunism. It’s permanently letting go of will, and following what is suggested. It’s using intuition to find a loose piece of dream in chance, which can serve us to transform reality.

I had many dreams, all bigger than those I dreamed awake. I wanted to be a film director, but I ended up discovering my vocation. This epiphany was offered to me, by already being mine, by a sage. It was he who made me realize that being a People Director is more interesting than being a Filmmaker.

In the end, people are real, and it’s harder, it’s more complex to make them trust their light than to encourage them to fall asleep in the waking world.

Reality is a rehearsed monologue, where people say the same things. I see the Real as the Path and the Dream as the Destination. I don’t remember the dreams I realized, but I always have near me what I want to interpret.

I want to discover myself, I want my curiosity, to connect with others and synchronize dreams. In French, the word “rêve” comes from “rever”, implying trying again. In Castilian, the word “vive” is close to the concept of idleness. Today I know that we only understand business when we understand leisure. Dreams are made of loose ideas that we need to mend, while reality is made of clues for us to fit them together.

I don’t know if our mission is to realize dreams because there’s nothing more real than the dream. Perhaps our mission is to discern from this reality the pieces we want to interpret who we are.

I don’t know how dreams come true; I prefer to transform reality into a dream.

Dreams always happened to me when I freed myself from my desires, when I focused on believing. Perhaps that’s why the dream is so linked to the concept of faith and spirituality.

Only at night do we synchronize in silence.

It’s in our silence, it’s in our inaction that everything happens, that’s where it all begins.

About the Dream, Fernando Pessoa said:

“No one gets tired of dreaming because dreaming is forgetting, and forgetting doesn’t weigh, it’s a dreamless sleep in which we are awake.”

“To realize a dream, it’s necessary to forget it, distract attention from it. Therefore, to realize is not to realize.”

“To kill the dream is to kill ourselves. It’s mutilating our soul. The dream is what we truly have, impregnably and inexorably ours.”

So, for me, dreaming is discovering who we are.

And I… want to make of myself.

Speech to Present at the Alpha Forum of IADE on December 12, 2015

(I thank the European University for the luck of the invitation and appreciate the opportunity to have made this reflection)

Find out more about Tiago Forjaz here.