To Sleep, Perchance To Dream

 

The legend goes that inventor James Watt, the Scottish engineer who fathered the Industrial Revolution, was having dream one night. In the dream, he was on top of a tall building, and the sky was raining molten lead. As he peered over the side of the building, he could see the drops of lead hitting a stream of water whereupon they would solidify. When Watt awoke, he realized that the same principle could be applied in a factory -- and thus he invented a process for producing lead shot.

The story may be apocryphal, but Dr. Dillard likes to tell it nevertheless, to demonstrate his view that dreams can be useful tools for businesspeople.

Dillard is a psychotherapist and -- dream analyst at the Association for Research and Enlightenment Clinic in Phoenix and he believes that dreams affect the way people handle problems during their waking hours. "The stress management process occurs in dreams," he says. "If you don't handle that stress well, it colors your waking life. It's a basic psychological law. "

This phenomenon, he argues, has important implications for people in business. "If a CEO is agonizing about, say, whether or not to issue new stock, he may become worried and frustrated. This affects his decision-making. But he can do lot of problem-solving while he is sleeping."

As an example, he cites the case of William Sechrist, a founder of Budget Rent-a-Car, who had been mulling over the question of incentive bonuses for employees. One night, he dreamed that he was putting quarter after quarter into a slot machine, with nothing to show for it. Then he inserted a gold coin -- and promptly hit the jackpot.

Upon awakening, Sechrist concluded hat the dream was telling him to provide big bonuses if he wanted to get results.

Of course all dreams nre not so easy to interpret, nor all problems so easy to solve. To facilitate the process, Dillard has developed a technique that he calls "dream sociometry," wherein a person analyzes a dream by -- in effect -- interviewing the dream characters.

"It's sort of like Gestalt role playing, he explains. By practicing dream sociometry, chief executive officers can learn how to sleep more creatively and handle stress more effectively, according to Dillard.

Dillard plans to teach CEOs to do just that at a series of "dream incubation" workshops beginning in November and plans to do further consulting in the future -- assuming, that is, he can find CEOs who sleep at all."