The Better Future Narratives project hopes to birth stories of hope, reciprocity, abundance, and awe in the every day to heal modern day ailments of eco-anxiety, depression, climate fatigue, apathy, and bed-rotting.

Dreams of Unwritten Futures was written by Felipe Soraires, Juana Riepenhausen, Marla Lise, Nick Lane, Viroshan Naicker and illustrated by Pete Jeffs - an international group of writers, dreamers, and better future advocates.

This book is the first in what we hope will be a series — each one an invitation to see the awe stitched into the fabric of everyday life.

These words remind us that success is not measured by what we accumulate, but by how deeply we are connected: to one another, to community, to Mother Earth herself.

To help these words reach as many hearts as it can, we have opened a circle of reciprocity.

If you are able, we invite you to place a copy into the hands of someone who might not otherwise have one, and to help us carry the seeds of a second book into being.

Your gift is more than support; it is a gesture of kinship, a way of weaving a future rooted in connection, community, and conscious living.

(these beautiful images are from our book, please do not use them without permission.)

One of the skills we most need to cultivate in these days where the future is being cancelled and colonised by dark forces is 'temporal fluidity', the ability to escape the confines of the present and to step into the past and into the future, to move between worlds.

This beautiful book is a step into the future, into the past, into a world where the imagination is our most powerful tool.

Step in, and let it take you to many wonderful places.

You'll be glad you did.

Rob Hopkins 

Co-founder Transition Network, author, public speaker, podcaster, artist, father, 'Field Recordings from the Future', Imagination Catalyst and Time Traveller

The original meaning of 'dream' is said to be ‘music’ and ‘joy’. This book is music to the ears and joy to the mind.

Dreamers, slow down and feel both of them. Imagination awakens when the sound of music follows the narrative of joy. 

Jesus Martin Gonzalez 

Anthropologist of an ecosocial transition

A breathtakingly beautiful ode to hope, possibility, imagination and above all life. A better future is possible, and this collection of essays and poems shows us what that future could look like and how we can bring it into being, all while making you smile with joy and draw breath in delight.

Erin Remblance

Researcher, Writer & Educator

Imagine a future. It´s an invitation, a provocation, a plea. 

This beautiful book gives us not just better future narratives, but lucid visions of what we might create together. 

At this time of deep uncertainty and creeping hopelessness, 

Dreams of Unwritten Futures offers an antidote that inspires us. 

Maya Frost

Creative adaption strategist, Collapse Forward

with love, us

Culture shapes values, and these in turn create the history of our civilization. The stories we tell ourselves -individually and collectively as societies, act as a kind of lens or filter on how we perceive the world, and therefore on our daily actions. In the current context, marked by multiple complex crises, it seems more important than ever to understand this, so that together we can dream (and build!) new and better worlds. This collaborative writing project with different activists and dreamers from around the world seeks to empower people to find hope in these uncertain times, to imagine better futures where we thrive as we never dared before, to find inspiration to act, because the time has arrived, and we are the generation that flipped the script.

Felipe Soraires

The invitation to participate in this project arrived at the perfect time for me. After years of living in a crowded yet lonely city, I had become fascinated with returning to a kinder way of life, but I knew simply relocating wouldn’t be enough. The systems that informed our choices for decades live inside of us, inviting us to choose hostility over community, self-improvement over collective action. We can move to the middle of nowhere, and selfishness will still find its way to us. 

The piece that inspired this book sparked something in me, and I started asking the right questions: What are we not seeing? How do we nurture tangible hope? What does a better future actually look like?

We hope this book is an invitation to turn anxiety into imagination, grief into action and a despairing present into the seed needed to grow a better future narrative.

Juana Riepenhausen

It started with a thought. Then a sleepless night drowning in a deluge of thoughts. The tempest subsided and the word droplets made their way slowly out of my head, down my neck and arm, into my fingers and keyboard. The article “imagine” allowed the words to slowly pool into meaning.

That article was sent to 5 people around the planet with a simple message, let’s create a better future narrative.

And today I present our gift; Dreams of Unwritten Futures - born from the thoughts of others like me who believe “a better world is not only possible, she’s on her way”.

Marla Lise

What is the appropriate response to Ecological Collapse? Grief? Anxiety? Rage?

Ancient teachings have long spoken about the impermanence of all things. Through Nature's paradigm we might sense these same lessons. Whilst this might not comfort many, the same teaching may also guide us towards focusing on what we love about the living world. What we love about this beautiful planet we call home. What we love about this chance to be alive and breathing.

This book aims to open the  heart and share a common love for life while imagining the  regenerative futures we know are possible.

Nick Lane

I want whales, wild things and places, sacred holiness and fearless boldness: If we don’t find those places within ourselves, then who will? If we don’t imagine things differently, then what? It’s always been up to us to see a different future, and then change the trajectory to get there. It’s not that we’re struggling for resources, it’s the lack of imagination. That’s why, this book.

Viroshan Naicker

The original pencil illustrations were hand-drawn over a period of three months, as I absorbed the texts. The book evolved, organically, with the images coming to me, as in a "dream of an unwritten future".

Allowing a period of months for the unfolding, the images appeared almost of their own volition, surging from the collective memory of times to come. It has been a lovely process of co-creation. I am grateful to have been chosen as their illustrator and artist for this project.

Pete Jeffs