About

Dragon Dreaming is a playful, inspiring, encouraging and meaningful method for assisting individuals and groups who seek to make their dreams come true.

Could that be you? So Dragon Dreaming can help:

– People working with project management find inspiration and innovation for companies, organisations and business enterprises of all kinds

– Politicians and Professionals working with urban, rural or regional development find new ideas for fostering community ownership and civic participation

– Grassroots movements find support with proven methods for the implementation of their ideas for bringing about change in the communities to which they belong

– Creative people and artists find methods which accommodate their own way of working that honours their talents and abilities

– Psychologists and Coaches find playful methods for building visions, planning, implementing and celebrating new projects

– Everyday individuals who may not ever have tried to do something outstanding before but who seek a pathway of making a difference in their own lives and the lives of others

Dragon Dreaming was first developed by John Croft and his late wife Vivienne Elanta while they were both working for the Western Australian Gaia Foundation that they co-founded.

All his professional life John has worked in the field of community development, community education and project development all around the world; in Africa, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Australia and New Zealand and since 2006 in the US and Canada, in Europe and Latin America.

As a community activist and deep ecologist, who has worked with indigenous people on four continents, he wondered how people in developed “Northern” industrialized societies could reverse the damage they were doing by their narrow consumerist lifestyles and instead build creative ways of regenerating our environments and fostering strong supportive communities needed for our future.

From 1974 through tertiary post-graduate research at the University of Western Australia, at London University, UNESCO in Paris and the ILO/UNRISD in Geneva, and working in a number of third world and developed nations, he explored the question of why do some projects work so successfully, while others fail so dismally, producing worse outcomes than if they had never been done at all. 

From 1978, in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and in Australia, he has worked in community, urban, regional and rural development assisting individuals and groups who have sought to improve their lives in various ways, using techniques drawn from “Community Building”, “Empowerment Education”, organisation development and “Experiential Deep Ecology”.

Dragon Dreaming is inspired by social and environmental activism, the new physics, Gaia and Earth sciences, living systems and chaos and complexity theory, and the ancient sustainable wisdom of indigenous cultures and Australian Aborigines.

The method integrates holistic aspects which have long been ignored, separated or divided in our cultures: our right and left brain hemispheres, logic and intuition, individual and environment, theory and practice, thought and action, work and play, success and failure.

Dragon Dreaming is based on liberating collective intelligence, creativity, cooperation and the sleeping power within ourselves and inherent in our communities.

After the death of his wife, in 2006 John travelled to Germany, and lived until September 2012, near the Lake of Constance, the center of central Europe. Since then he has been traveling, sharing his knowledge, holding workshops and presentations all over the world.

In 2012 he moved back to Australia where he is currently working on his book “Dragon Dreaming – opening the global heart”.  He still spends 6-7 months outside Australia in spreading the methods of Dragon Dreaming in new contexts.

Over the last 10 years there is now a growing worldwide community of Dragon Dreaming enthusiasts and trainers.

Some 5,500 people have been trained in the techniques, from Moscow, and Ankara to Ireland, Madrid and Lisbon in Europe, and from Canada and Brazil to Sri Lanka, Ghana and the Congo elsewhere.  There may be as many as 4,200 projects that have made use of some or all of the tools. 

These people are exploring the process of forming new Empty Centered Organisations around the world in order to pass on the knowledge and wisdom of Dragon Dreaming.

Come and join this growing community.

Dragon Dreaming is like an open-source tool-box: Many well-known and established methods have gone into the process of creating it – and anyone can develop it further. If you do, we would love to hear your experiences and your feedback.

It is highly recommended that until one has more than 10,000 hours of offering trainings (i.e. more than 5 years experience) that trainers, wherever possibly co-facilitate, with both a male and female presenter. 

Unless otherwise specified, it is recommended that the minimum number in a course be ten participants. 

A Dream Team of not less than 4 people is highly recommended in organizing any of these courses, and if possible fees are otherwise covered, these people can attend at no financial cost, as their work has paid for their attendance. 

Anyone can use Dragon Dreaming. It is, however, not only made up of theory, but rather consists of the actual practical experience.

“You can’t walk that path alone, but only you can do the walking”, from a song of the Zapatista of Mexico.

As we enter the first years of the third millennium, it is clear that the world as a whole is facing a challenge of a type never before seen.  Within the 20th century, human populations increased from one and a half billion, in 1900 to over 7 billion by century’s end. 

At the same time the average human lifespan in the 100 years went from an average of just 28 years, in 1900 to over 67 years by 2000.  This was achieved through an enormous increase in agricultural and industrial production, achieved through an expansion in the exploitation of fossil fuel energies. 

This was a fantastic achievement.  The economic system that presided over this growth was based upon the creation of financial debt in the issuance of money, and of continuous economic growth to pay for that debt. 

Finally the environmental impact of those changes means that the current rate of planetary extinction has been growing accurately estimated from one species per year in 1900 to over 100 species a day today, most of which are soil bacteria whose effects on keeping the planet habitable we have no idea. 

We have increased the amount of CO2, the greenhouse warming gas from 280 parts per million to over 400 ppm today, producing climatic disruptions of a kind not seen since the end of the last ice age. 

Any culture that destroys its life support system in the name of progress, is insane, and is practicing a form of ecological suicide.  This is a triple “E crisis”, one of “Energy Depletion”, “Economic Crisis” in world finances, and “Environmental Collapse”, climate change and biodiversity loss. 

It is the energy going into our system, the economy that runs our system and the environmental impacts coming out of our system, that all need to be changed.  People everywhere recognise that we need to change.  You do I am sure.  But our everyday lives are built upon and support the coming triple E crisis and our future ecological suicide.   But how can we do it?  How can we change?

There is an African proverb: “if you want to go fast you go alone.  If you want to go far you go together”. 

But given the interlocking problem described above, we need to go fast and we need to go far.  How do we go alone and together at the same time.  Dragon Dreaming shows us how.

We humans collectively create our reality, both by our actions and our inaction. That is the reason why we can only find the way out of our environmental, economical and identity crises toward a better world if we go together.

The current crises will inevitably be a learning process for humanity, and we have a choice. We can wait until these interlocking problems get worse, hoping that we can make proper changes in the crisis. 

Or we can act now, in this window of opportunity, to deepen our empathy and to better cooperate with each other and with life itself.  In crisis, we tend to respond with fear, which reduces creativity and produces both a lack of trust and win-lose games that in the crisis usually produce violent lose-lose outcomes for all involved – humans and the other species with which we share our world. 

Creativity needs the marriage of time and need, and we need to stimulate planetary creativity on a scale never before attempted, to find a way out of the “triple E crisis”.  How do we do that?

Dragon Dreaming describes and guides us toward a huge liberation of collective intelligence.

But how can we develop joint and individual successful projects out of all these different, individual ideas? How can we come from the inspiration to the creative action?

And how can we ensure feedback which is as rapid and efficient as possible so that we may use it to improve our projects?  In this way we need to cultivate the skills of participating together and observing individually at the same time. 

The new physics teaches us that the old idea of Newtonian science, of the outside observer having no effect upon what he or she observes is a myth. 

We are all participant/observers, and as we get into action so we can recognise ourselves as “temporary nodes in a process of flow”.  We realise that if we are not part of the solution we are part of the problem.

So, come, join us in building a win-win-win world for everybody.  We seek a world that celebrates and benefits from the human presence, instead of as it does at the moment, that suffers from our choices. 

Come and have fun in Dragon Dreaming and join the party!!

Every project starts as the Dream of a single individual, but daily experience teaches 90% of our dreams get blocked in the dreaming stage, and this usually happens because we do not share our dreams. 

How then do we make our dreams come true? 

The first step is to share your dream and build a team around your dream that assists in making the dream come true.

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The second stage is to build a plan: people do not plan to fail, they only fail to plan.  Again experience teaches us that 90% of projects do not work according to plan. 

This is because the “planners” are seen as the “head” of the organisation, and they blame the “body” of the organisation for not following the plan, whilst the “body” blames the “head” for being out of touch with reality.

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The third stage is where much of the work occurs.  This is the doing stage of the project, and international figures show that some 90% of business ideas, start-ups or non government community initiatives fail to last longer than 3 years. 

This often happens through “burnout” on the part of the initiators, and the lack of effective succession planning. People feel tired and exhausted, because they have not refueled themselves with the fourth step.

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The fourth stage of a successful project is celebration.  This is built upon gratitude and thankfulness, acknowledgement and recognition. 

It is celebration that connects the doing of a project back to the original dreaming.  We say 25% of any project needs to be celebration.  And it needs to be fully integrated throughout the process.

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