Dreams & Obstacles in Brooklyn: An Evening of Collective Intelligence

Dreams & Obstacles is a collective problem-solving practice.

Dreamers say a dream out loud, and name what stands in its way. Then the whole room takes the obstacles apart: introductions, practical solutions, and breakthrough ideas.

I have been running Dreams & Obstacles rooms for many years. Then a carousel of five images changed the scale of the conversation around them.

The post announcing the Farm.One room reached more than 200,000 people. More than 1,000 responded with dreams of their own, asking to be there. The room could hold about 70.

On August 10, we carried that impossible arithmetic into Farm.One in Brooklyn for a room created in partnership with Humanarium.

Dig Ferreira drew the dreamers and their dreams with a sumi brush held in his mouth. Carlos David photographed people holding their dreams, handwritten on big sheets of paper. Maricruz brought people into conversation with one another.

Everyone wore a sticky badge.

The line where a name and a company usually go carried a dream.

Before we even started, people leaned toward one another and asked about the dreams on their chests. Ideas started moving around the room.

Somewhere along the way, I found my favorite way to measure these rooms: by how many times we get goosebumps. I invite people to say “goosebumps” out loud whenever they feel them, so the whole room can notice the moment together. At Farm.One, we lost count.

One woman shared her dream of making candles as art. She had no experience promoting them and felt caught between making the work and finding the people who might love it.

The room filled her hands with ideas.

Later that evening, another dreamer said she needed a gallery. The candle-maker offered to introduce her to a friend with a gallery in Williamsburg.

She had entered the room carrying an obstacle. Before the night was over, she had become a guide for somebody else.

After spending the night drawing other people’s dreams, Dig hesitated when it was time to say his own. Then he took the microphone.

“My idea was Oprah,” he said.

He wanted to work with her on her show, documenting it through his art, and turn the work into giant canvases for an exhibition across America. But he had no idea where to begin. Four hands went up immediately. “A friend of mine was just on Oprah a few months ago,” one person said. Another began laying out a route to Oprah’s team through a vendor proposal and submissions. In less than a minute, the distance between Dig and Oprah felt much smaller. It was one of the many moments that night when people around the room said it again: “Goosebumps.”

After everyone went home, Maddie wrote on the event page that she is a playwright and director dreaming of opening a documentary theatre company. Marcus replied that he had spent the last decade building sets for theatre and private events, and that he would reach out to her.

The room had already closed. It kept working anyway.

Around those exchanges, people began offering spaces and asking how they could bring Dreams & Obstacles to where they live.

The format has now been invited to 30 cities around the world.

The post created the wave. But a social media feed could not hold what people were bringing to it. Posts disappear. Even the people who care most can lose one another inside the feed.

So I built the Dreams & Obstacles portal.

Inside, you can write down your dream and what stands in its way. Your profile stays private until you decide otherwise.

You can also tell us how you would like to participate, whether you want to enter a room, help another dreamer, or explore hosting one.

For this first priority window, registering is also how we know to contact you before the next rooms are announced publicly.

If you have already registered, you are on the list.

If you have not, this is your invitation.

We want our people in these rooms. We would love the next chapter to begin with you.

Enter Dreams & Obstacles→

May all be juicy. 🍊 — Fedor Sokolov, Founder & Editor-in-Juice

Photographs by Carlos David