September 25: World Dream Day

Celebrated worldwide each September 25 since 2012, World Dream Day is far from mere rhetoric. It embodies a vital vision: cultivating confidence in human potential and the power of dreams to transform our lives. Created by Ozioma Egwuonwu, an American educator and motivational speaker, World Dream Day reminds people of the importance of cultivating and achieving their desires. The underlying idea, which characterizes much of North American philosophy, is that happiness is a force capable of changing the world for the better. World Happiness Day promotes reasoned and pragmatic optimism, which is difficult to maintain during years marked by conflict, war, and pandemics. This optimism extends to individuals, relationships, and society as a whole. Egwuonwu has worked for major corporations, including Procter & Gamble, General Mills, Verizon, Ford Motor Company, Walmart, Sam's Club, Target, and Nestlé. As a consultant and speaker, she has addressed key assemblies at the United Nations, TEDx events, and prestigious universities such as Oxford and Columbia. She is also a commentator for media networks such as NBC, CBS, ABC, FOX, MSNBC, The Huffington Post, Thrive Global, and UN Magazine.

World Dream Day is a global celebration that invites individuals, families, schools, businesses, and communities to dream boldly and bring those dreams to life. It is a time for reflection that inspires hope and motivates citizens to take action and get involved. Through genuine engagement, a cross-cultural call to action has fostered an active community, structured programs, and shared events. However, the echoes of dreams are more extensive and complex in terms of resonance, imagery, studies, knowledge, and the interrelationships between the psychic, cognitive, and existential dimensions of life. This intricate weaving reveals the dream world as a realm of layered truths, apparitions, and revelations.

It provides access to a mysterious and indecipherable landscape of perceptual layers that unfold energies in sequence and progression, like neural networks.

The Art of Dreaming: A mysterious network of symbols, narratives, and interconnected stories.

Dreams and art share an ancient and profound connection, still largely mysterious. The unconscious mind houses vivid images, symbols, and atmospheres that pose cryptic questions. Throughout history, these visions have inspired artists to move beyond conventional rationality seeking higher, invisible forms of knowledge. Movements like 19th-century Symbolism and Surrealism were pioneers in translating inner visions and the soul’s anxieties into visual form, opening the way to a sensibility guided by the unconscious. These visions also influenced design, making it more organic. Furniture, objects, and spaces became blurred and fluid with respect to the boundaries between reality, functionality, and imagination. Thus, dreams incorporated an emotional, gestural, and spiritual dimension into thought, research, and the arts. These fields became a realm of inner exploration, of sensitive listening to vibrations, and of fluid, experimental, and informal design. The visionary, intangible, and hybrid territories of fashion, architecture, and design reveal themselves when they intersect with psychedelia, meditation, and out-of-body experiences. Increasingly sophisticated technology accompanies us into immersive worlds, parametric realities, and interactive installations of synthetic and digital environments that push the limits of what is possible.

The scientific truth of dreams

Dreams allow the mind to process experiences, emotions, and repressed thoughts from wakefulness. They update cognitive processes and integrate the unconscious. Indeed, dreams remain one of the most fascinating and enigmatic aspects of sleep. Despite numerous studies, this mental, sensory, emotional, and cognitive experience remains an unexplored world. However, scientists agree that dreams and real life are closely interconnected and influenced by learned behaviors, environmental factors, the individual and collective unconscious, and archetypes, as well as events.

The Irregular Time of Dreams

The time of dreams is circular, infinite, and timeless. It is beyond chronology and far removed from any predictable, linear progression. Events belong to all times—past, present, and future—which are codes, metaphors, and terrains of symbolic elaboration. Plots are made up of environments with slight separations, full and empty spaces, light and shadow—chiaroscuro. These are places and narratives where every plot twist is a connection, every place a changing space of the imagination, and every thought a landing place and a drift.