Let’s Dream Together: 3rd Matrix 23rd August 2026
Social Dreaming Matrix: Hall of Mirrors & Collective Grief
The third gathering of this monthly Social Dreaming Matrix kicked off online on August 23, with 9 participants.
The matrix opens with a dream about a quiet, unhurried search for small hand mirrors—palm-sized and round, much like a mother’s old makeup compact. The mirrors are lifted not to look at the face, but placed upon the cheek and forehead, turned inward to discover and see inside the self. From this intimate image of self-examination, we travel to a group convention in Mexico City, where the dreamer, a Fulbright scholar, feels conflicted over whether to stay or return to the United States. A beach resort appears, hosting a social dreaming matrix retreat beside a pool; nearby, a soccer field hosts amateurs of mixed nationalities. An Italian tour guide named Marco, riding a motorcycle, insists life in Cuba is good despite the news, even as the conversation abruptly ends on a toilet with no flushing water. This invokes a waking association to Martha’s Vineyard, where a resort house utilizes a waterless composting toilet.
We then move to a half-underground brick building with three rooms, completely full of sheep. Oil is poured over them, mixing the anointed and the un-anointed in a mass where the prevailing sensation is simply that of being among creatures. This image of the flock resonates with an association to a former sheep farm overgrown with brush, where ancestors built a summer house. It also summons the valleys of Wales, where sheep farming is big business and where the slur “sheep shaggers” is used by opposing British football teams to dehumanize Welsh men, linking football chants to the broader pattern of calling people animals as a prelude to oppression. This cascades into a memory of an animal market in Northwestern China, where livestock is traded next to skinned and butchered carcasses, and a child weeps at witnessing the passage from animal to meat.
The matrix then brings forth a brown horse standing motionless in a courtyard, overwhelmed with grief. It belongs to a noble indigenous tribe now destroyed, the mother and baby killed, the father and horse taken captive, and it weeps as it is held, promised a return to the open wilderness despite the impossibility. Behind a chain-link fence, riderless horses with racing saddles run freely in pouring rain. These horses carry the matrix toward global grief. Wild horses rounded up for slaughter by government land management are linked to the historical slaughter of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, extending that logic of disposability to contemporary white supremacist rhetoric that treats non-white civilizations as acceptable losses.
Outside a school in Milan, a tall girl with long brown hair transforms into an eagle, flies two blocks to her car without caring who sees, phones her teacher to report what she has done, and turns back into a girl. The teacher-bird who does not care about being seen suggests a freedom from shame, a refusal of the inferiority usually imposed on moving between human and animal. This joins a chorus of height: an English pub where a very tall landlord carries a child whose head strikes the doorframe, eventually lying the full length of the bar to demonstrate his stature; and mountains where time is imagined to move more slowly. Against these heights stand the valleys, accumulating references to songs like “The Folks Who Live on the Hill” and the Beatles’ “The Fool on the Hill”, as well as MLK’s mountaintop speech. The mountaintop becomes a geography of privilege and vision, while the valley is framed as a place of poverty and disposable identity.
A sudden panic at a Milanese university over a history exam dissolves when the realization arrives that graduation has already happened, turning the search toward a plot of land to lease and the gifting of a bag of organic rice. Finally, a calculation of time takes hold—measuring the 525,600 minutes in a year through the lens of love and attention—yet it collides with the crushing weight of the forty trillion dollar U.S. national debt, as if each cherished minute carries a literal cost.
Reflective Dialogue
The participants recognized that the matrix had traveled from the intimate inward mirror to a global mirror reflecting human inhumanity. The volume of dreams and associations was unusually high, creating a hall of mirrors effect where disorientation reigned. Yet, despite the modest headcount, the gathering demonstrated that there is no such thing as a “small” matrix; the psychological weight and collective capacity held by a few participants can equal or exceed that of a vast assembly.
The recurring motifs of heights and valleys revealed a traveling class discovering its own privilege. The sudden realization of mobility inequality during the COVID pandemic, and the irony of being “on the hill” digitally via Zoom, highlighted the spatial and social divides present even within virtual containers.
The density of the material pushed the participants toward a saturation point where silence became the only possible response. The purpose of the work was framed as restoring a lost capacity to process collective tragedy, facing the twentieth century’s industrial atrocities and their continuing echo, calling to mind Gordon Lawrence’s Tongued with Fire.
The session closed with a held silence—a tribute to the past, present, and future slaughter of whoever is not welcome or not in power. This closing silence carried the remarkable sensation of being entirely “out of dreams,” as though the matrix had drawn out every image to create a generative vacuum. Yet within that vacuum, participants felt a profound human warmth, solidarity, and interconnectedness across geographical distances. It was observed that not every matrix needs a happy ending; by fully inhabiting thick grief together, the matrix offered a collective depth far greater than any individual could achieve alone.
Post Matrix comments reiterated the sense of grief and fear: a central illumination emerged around the root connection between the words animal and soul (from the Latin anima). The wild animal is trapped inside and the work of the mirrors is to reflect a way for it to emerge in a safe and non violent way.
Read the synopsis of Matrix #1
Read the synopsis of Matrix #2
Learn more About this Social Dreaming Series
