Social Dreaming
DREAM MATRIX and STUDY GROUP
Social dreaming is a method of non-interpretative listening to dreams within a group of participants whose social context constitutes the “matrix.” It is an experience-based practice that, in contrast to dream-interpretation that traditionally focuses on meaning making of the individual dreamer’s dreams, shifts the focus to representations of collective, communal, historic, and spiritual domains of meaning and concern. This method of dream-work is not reliant upon a symbol system for interpretation. As each participant’s dreams are recalled and shared, images are further amplified through associations, memories, and resonance within the matrix. Patterns emerge that evidence and exalt our social connection. We become attuned to the complexity and unthought-of facets of life as expressed and presented to us through our dreams. Listening to one another’s dreams in this way has many implications for artists and writers and those who want to enrich their lives through an exploration of unfathomable depths. The well of our deepest aliveness and creativity is there to be discovered.
The form of Social Dreaming being presented in this group is an outgrowth of The British Object Relations School of Psychoanalysis, developed by the social scientist Dr. W. Gordon Lawrence (1934-2013). But dream-work has been practiced in many forms throughout history. As we live we construct the world, en masse, through our projections of thought processes, impulses, and evacuation of emotions. While we sleep, our dreaming mind continues to work on problems, and the world continues streaming. Our dream images are emotion-laden, highly condensed into pictographs. A dream-matrix may be imagined as “The Jewel Net of Indra,” a fundamental image from early Indian Buddhism that is a model for the teaching of inter-dependent co-arising, in which we see everything in the world reflected in everything else. Because of this, that arises… on and on. Nothing is left out. Participation in the social dreaming matrix is one way to discover the treasures that lay waiting to be discovered in the jewel net of our dreams that is our emotional, relational, political, spiritual, and historic life.
ORIENTATION begins with a history and description of social dreaming and the concept of the dream matrix. We will learn some of the basic terms, concepts, and language used in classical Freudian and Jungian dream-work, along with contemporary psychoanalysis, as skillful means to support insight and meaning-making from condensed dream-images and dream-logic.
The MATRIX itself is our way of arranging chairs in an organic form that supports non-interactive, inward focusing of our attention. In this way, we better attend to the feeling-tone of dream images as they spontaneously emerge. As dreams are recalled, associations spark the recall of other, earlier dreams. We do not respond or interpret one another’s dreams, merely allow for our own associations and memories to arise. Participants may choose to share a dream or not.
PART II of The MATRIX is a period of amplification, discovery/exploration of patterns and themes, in which further dream-images, dreams, memories, and associations beget new knowledge. As the individual dreamer’s experience of ‘self’ shifts within the dynamic of inter-connective, social awareness, life long internal models of an isolated, individual psyche give way to new experience such as, the fluidity of identity and inter-connectedness of all time and being.