To become effective social change agents we may need to be ‘magical realists’; we need to pay attention to both the world of everyday reality and to the dreamtime. We may need to keep one eye open to the dream world and one eye open to the world of everyday reality.

If we disregard the viewpoints of people in consensus reality, if we ignore the sorrows of the world and if we ignore social reality we will end up living in a meaningless, flat fantasy world. We need to process our own pain and trauma, be aware of the social oppression and power inequalities that exist in our culture, support people in our local community and we may need to engage in the consensus reality worlds of grassroots politics, science or business.

But at the same time, if we ignore the dreamtime, we will never escape from the suffocating and oppressive nature of the modern human world. Only by being willing to travel into the depths of our collective imagination and the depths of the earth’s dreaming will we will be delivered from our culture of alienation and disconnection.

In order to bring a new world into being we need to dream unlimited dreams and risk doing things which may seem crazy or socially unacceptable. We may need to invite spirits and the dead to business meetings, consult with mountains about how best to engage with social issues and ride on photons like ladders up to the stars. We may need to think thoughts and feel feelings which no-one has thought or felt for thousands of years and we may need to do impossible things