What if rivers have always been speaking—and we have simply forgotten how to listen? Reflecting on Rivers of Tomorrow: A Dreams and Disruptions Game, this provocation explores rivers as partners, teachers, elders, and living participants in the future. Perhaps foresight is not only about seeing further ahead, but learning to listen differently—to communities, landscapes, future generations, and the more-than-human world.

At the Flourishing Futures Lab, playful imagination became a way of seeing power more clearly. Through the Dreams and Disruptions game, PhD candidates and HDR students explored preposterous futures—from food nanobots and digital twins to water feudalism, creative economies, public health systems, and alien contact. What began as absurdity quickly became serious inquiry. Using Sarkar’s Law of Social Cycle, the scenarios shifted from asking “What might happen?” to “Who gets to shape what happens?

Earlier this year, I facilitated a session with a group of fire protection practitioners using the Dreams and Disruptions Game, a participatory futures method developed by the Center for Engaged Foresight. As an Adjunct Faculty member of the Philippine Public Safety Academy, I have been bringing foresight games into professional development and learning spaces where it is rarely used — and fire protection, it turns out, is one of the most fertile grounds for this kind of work.