My psychologist wife has taught me that to understand our past, we can read our journals. To understand our present, we need to look honestly and seriously in a mirror.  And, to understand our future, we need to examine our dreams.  Dream analysis has two parts.  One part focuses on our day time dreams which symbolize our hopes and aspirations and define where we want to go. For organization leaders this focus implies having a vision, mission, or purpose statement that sets a direction for where their organization is headed.  The other part of dream analysis examines the subconscious elements of our nighttime dreams.  These dreams often deal with the implicit challenges we face and give our mind a way to ponder what challenges we face and how we might deal with them through our dreams.  So by analyzing our nighttime dreams we can begin to accomplish our daytime visions.
 
The same logic may be applied to the HR profession.  We can look to our past in text books and articles; we can grasp our present by looking in the mirror of what we do; but we create our future by examining our dreams.  These dreams are rooted in the challenges of businesses today and how HR professionals should respond.  They also highlight the hopes and aspirations of HR professionals.  This essay begins with a brief overview of the context of business, suggests an over-arching vision for our future, reports 10 challenges that we must address and concludes with implications for both the structure of the HR organization and the personal requirements for HR professionals.