If this were your dream, would you buy it?

The first thing that really struck me entering Second Life way back was the feeling of dreaming. It felt like lucid dreaming. I could fly and create, unlike in most nightly dreams.

Now many years after people are still trying to grasp what it is that makes Second Life great. Second Life might be a dream factory. As in dreaming there are nightmares, erotic dreams, and just amazing mirages.

The unique thing about the dream making in Second Life is that we share the dreams. Building dreams on your own has a limited fun period. However, when you share and collaborate in creating, the fun (and/or the drama) goes on. In Second Life, you create and share your own soap, and like in any soap, there is no ending, no final point to be made.

Second Life is a place where we create dreams together. But more than that; Those dreams spread into RL too. People change because of Second Life. People from all over the world meet each other and meet up in real life too. Projects spreads from Second Life to real life, and Second Life is changing the world, just maybe in a lesser scale than Philip & Co. had first  imagined.

Dreaming creates value. Some people are trying to make some money out of selling dreams to other dreamers. And some people try to make a living out of selling other people’s dreams to dreamers. This is nothing new. But when the value of dreams is only considered to be an economical one, you can easily lose sight of, and maybe even kill, the subtle values that are created. The stuff that cannot be bought and sold, but only shared.

Luckily the digital goods, the shared dreams, isn’t easily controlled. It is impossible to lock the digital dreams up in some warehouse, and be the sole distributor. As long as people have time, I guess we will keep on creating dreams to share, even if the value created will not be generated in cash.