It's not every day the Dalai Lama comes to you in a dream and sets you off on a life-altering journey.

But for Victor Spence, he will never forget the surreal moment that changed the course of his life and led to the creation of a new tartan aimed at spreading peace around the world.

"I was in a room and there was this very powerful light coming through a big window," Victor explains.

"This figure came through the light and I recognised it as the Dalai Lama. He came right up to me, took his glasses off, looked me straight in the eyes, smiled and started laughing.

"He put his glasses back on, put his hands together and walked back out through the light again. And then I woke up."

Confused by its meaning, the dream lingered in Victor's thoughts for several months until he felt drawn to the idea of organising a visit to bring the venerated Buddhist leader to Scotland for the first time in over a decade.

He began sending letters to senior figures in Scotland asking for their support and after months of work a reply came from the Dalai Lama accepting the invitation.

Victor then flew to Cape Town to join thousands of religious leaders and delegates at a conference in the hopes of handing over the invitation personally.

"It was a real moment," he says reflecting back to that first meeting.

"I was waiting on a lobby landing of the hotel and his private secretary went to His Holiness' room to greet him.

"They were going somewhere but I was being squeezed in for a few minutes on their way.

"He came up to me and was very kind to me and I handed over the letters to him.

"The Tibetan tradition is that they give white silk scarves. I received a khata from His Holiness.

"While I was standing speaking to him, the thought arrived in my head that the next time I saw him, I would give him a tartan scarf."

True to his word, on his next meeting with the Dalai Lama in Paris, Victor handed him a folded tartan scarf. His response this time sparked another idea.

"He opened it up and looked at me and put it on," he says.

"I had another thought to myself, 'next time I see you, I am going to give you a tartan scarf but this time I am going to put it on you like the Tibetans do'."

His moment came in 2004 when the Dalai Lama arrived in Scotland. But rather than feel content with his completed mission, Victor decided to ask the Dalai Lama if he would publicly support the Make Poverty History campaign in 2005 ahead of the G8 summit at Gleneagles.

The Dalai Lama agreed and to Victor's surprise he was asked to help draft the Dalai Lama's comment.

Within a matter of weeks, these words were read aloud at a press conference by Annie Lennox, with Victor then delivering the letter to Bob Geldof minutes before he set off on a bus to the G8 summit.

It was no surprise then when he was approached to organise another Dalai Lama visit to Scotland later that year.

Since that first meeting in 1998, Victor has been slowly stitching together the story of the World Peace Tartan.

It may only have been on the shelves for the last four years, a minor feat when compared to the legacies of Scotland's historic clan tartans, but it has taken Victor on a fascinating voyage meeting everyone from archbishops and Nobel Peace Prize winners to rock stars and astronauts.

Having studied world religions in Edinburgh and describing his own faith as "not nameable" but very deep, Victor also became involved in the Edinburgh Interfaith Association and built up a network of contacts over a number of years.

Following this, he spent the next few years co-directing the Festival of Spirituality and Peace in Edinburgh.

Here, he carried on his new tradition of gifting people tartan scarves.

In 2008, he invited Arun Gandhi, the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, to the festival. As he offered him a scarf, he silently made the decision to make a dedicated tartan, and the name World Peace Tartan was born.

"I would say to them as I put it on, 'I am giving you this as a gesture of peace and friendship from my heart to yours from the heart of Scotland' and people really responded to it."

Never one to let a challenge stand in his way, Victor tasked himself with learning about tartan design and production from scratch.

"The first colour that came to mind was UN blue," he says. "I thought that would be a strong colour.

"Then I thought, 'how will I put Scotland at heart of this enterprise?' and the colour of thistles arrived in my head - purple and green - and then I thought I had to to have white for peace and light.

"Something in me said there was something missing," he adds.

"I like to deal with the realities of this field of work. I wanted to deal with the realities of violence and I thought 'red and black'."

After registering the tartan in 2011 and completing the first batch of production in 2012, Victor decided it was only fitting the Dalai Lama be the first person to be presented with the tartan, a moment he seized when he visited Scotland again that same year.

Since that first scarf was gifted, the tartan has graced catwalks, been showcased during the New York Tartan Week parade, been worn by celebrities such as Outlander's Graham McTavish and astronaut Chris Hadfield and used by fashion designers such as Judy R Clark.

Around 6000 items have been sold from Scotland to North America, with a percentage of the sale being banked towards grass roots projects.

There are also plans in the pipeline to introduce a peace medal programme and to work with more fashion designers.

Victor says: "There's a Muslim lady in Nigeria who I have been following - a very inspiring woman - who is working on her own doing very important interfaith work in Nigeria. But she is a tiny organisation with very little resources.

"A model of supporting a grass roots situation is that the person needs support, every penny counts."

He adds: "It is not just about tartan scarves. The product is a vehicle to carry a message, to build revenues and build funds for charitable purposes."

Victor's plans do not stop there, though. Like his entire approach to date, he says he plans to seize whatever opportunities arise and hopes the legacy of the tartan far outlives his lifetime with more ambassadors coming on board to support it.

He has even began putting pen to paper and documenting the story so far in the hope of publishing a book.

"The giving of the scarves, it is not about me and I don't want it to be about me," Victor says.

"The key thing to this when it comes to violence and trying to build a culture of peace is that this is done through non-violent means.

"You can't address violence with violence, an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, as Gandhi said.

"Tartan itself is an amazing platform for narratives of meaning. You can tell any story through a tartan design.

"I see it on the edge of a wave of new development on the use of tartan and tartan's future," Victor adds.

"I am controversially suggesting that World Peace Tartan is the clan of all clans.

"It has equality and diversity built into its narrative."