What is A Social Dreaming MATRIX?

The social dreaming matrix is a structured opportunity to share dreams with others. It shares the interest about dreams with psychoanalysis but it differs because it does not attempt any interpretation and it has no therapeutic finality.

The main purpose of Social Dreaming is to provide a forum for the sharing of night dreams and the observation of emerging new thinking. New thinking concerns the social context we live in and the awareness that dreams connect individuals in a more profound way than what is usually experienced in day-to-day interactions.

We are all dreamers and we share this capacity to create from raw imagination.

The process of the Social Dreaming Matrix is subdivided in two main phases.

• Phase 1, The Dream Matrix, is a spontaneous narration of night time dreams and free associations that accumulate during the course of the session. Details that identify the individual dreamers are not important. The dreams and associated images are the main blocks of the process.
• Phase 2, can happen in form of Dialogue or Reflection, a moment where participants have a more in-depth discussion of the pattern that surfaces during phase 1. Tentative hypothesis and links between dreams and waking life are explored in this part, in an attempt to translate dream images back into our everyday way of thinking.

The Social Dreaming Matrix session can be assembled in a longer chain of modules intertwined with other types of group work and sessions of mindful meditation and Yoga Nidra. In case of longer/residential interventions it is possible to have sessions before and after a night of sleep incorporating the dreams that emerge in a recursive pattern: dreaming the dreams we dream.

THE HOSTS

The host (or hosts) of a social dreaming matrix are responsible for the framing and containment of the setting, as well as to guard the time boundaries of the event. The host will welcome participants like the owners of a beautiful house welcome their guests, offering an environment where dream sharing and associations are encouraged and nourished.

In social dreaming nobody is an expert, and the participation is voluntary and democratic. In a way all the participants share the responsibility to create a space where dreams can arise and intertwine one another through the connective work of associations. This responsibility is by leaving out personal information and details about the dreamer and by concentrating on relating and listening to the dream as it is, without offering judgements or interpretations.

WHAT IS NOT SOCIAL DREAMING

Social dreaming is not therapy, and doesn’t have any relationship with clinical settings. Even though there is no therapeutic finality, the process is able to provide wellbeing to participants.

The host discourage any attempt of interpretation of the dream in terms of the individual. In this context dreams tell nothing about the dreamer, they become instead a common story that circulates in the newly formed group. Once a dream is shared any connection to the individual who brought the dream ceases and the dream becomes a shared image available to contamination and re-telling.

Social dreaming is not a dream group, participant of a dream matrix constitute a voluntary gathering rather than a social group. Group dynamics are not the object of a social dreaming matrix: this does not mean they are absent, simply they are not the object of the meeting and the attention is constantly brought back to the dreams and the associations offered.

THE ORIGIN OF SOCIAL DREAMING

Gordon Lawrence has worked with SD since 1982. His discovery was rather fortuitous, emerging from a series of experience working with groups at the Tavistock Institute in London, and later outside of the institution in settings that provided him with more freedom of action.

Lawrence had noted how dreams would be present while working with groups but were hardly expressed and considered in the group work. The prejudice that the dream was the domain of the personal and individual, the classical “analyst-analysand situation”, would block the circulation of dreams and its associated images

As he demonstrated after many successful experiences all over the world, dreams have an important place in groups setting and in society for their ability to “make the implicit explicit” and as a tool for the birth of new thoughts and ideas.

THE STRUCTURE OF THE WORKSHOP

A Social Dreaming Matrix can be held with about any number of people. It can happen in face-to-face scenario but it also works very well in an online environment.

Traditionally in a face-to-face Social Dreaming matrix the preferred seating disposition is called “snowflake”. Chairs are grouped in clusters and participants seat back to back facing the different angles of the room. This seating discourages eye contact between participants and creates a common blind space behind everybody’s back where the imaginary pattern is assembled.

The seating arrangement has the finality of discouraging a hierarchical distinction between host and participants (in Social Dreaming there are no experts. It also assures that participants are not too close or intimate with each other making the sharing of dreams more comfortable.

USEFUL LINKS:

LET’s DREAM TOGETHER – A Social Dreaming Community: https://www.psychologyofsailing.com/social-dreaming-community/

SOCIAL DREAMING TALKS – livestream interviews with Social Dreaming hosts: https://www.psychologyofsailing.com/social-dreaming-talks/

CENTRE FOR SOCIAL DREAMING: https://www.socialdreaming.com/

TAVISTOCK INSTITUTE: https://www.tavinstitute.org/

SOCIAL DREAMING INTERNATIONAL NETWORK: http://www.socialdreaminginternational.net/

BIBLIOGRAPHY

– Beradt. C. (1968). The Third Reich of Dreams, Chicago, Quadrangle Books

– Bion, W. (1961). Experiences in Groups, London, Tavistock Publications

– Matte-Blanco, Ignacio. (1975). The unconscious as infinite sets: An essay in bi-logic. London: Duckworth.

– Bollas, C. (1987). The Shadow of the Object. London: Free Association.

– Baglioni, L and Fubini, F. (2013). Social dreaming. In: S. Long (Ed.), Socioanalytic Methods: Discovering the Hidden in Organisations and Social Systems London: Karnac.

– Bohm, D. (1980). Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London: Routledge,2002.

– Lawrence, W.G. (1998). Social Dreaming @ Work. London: Karnac Books.

– Lawrence, W.G. (2001). Social Dreaming: lafunzione sociale del sogno. Rome: Edizione Borla.

– Lawrence, W.G. (2003). Experiences in Social Dreaming. London: Karnac Books.

– Lawrence, W.G. (2004). Esperienze nel Social Dreaming. Rome; Edizione Borla.

– Lawrence, W.G. (2005). Introduction to Social Dreaming. London: Karnac Books.

– Lawrence, W.G. (2007). Infinite Possibilities of Social Dreaming. London: Karnac Books.

– Lawrence, W.G. (2007). Social Dreaming. Budapest: Lelekben Otthon Kiabo.

– Lawrence, W.G. (1991) Won from the Void and Formless Infinite: Experiences of Social Dreaming. Free Associations. Vol.2, Part 2 (No. 22).

– Lawrence, W.G. (1999) The Contribution of Social Dreaming to Socio-Analysis. Socio-Analysis. Vol.1, No. 1

– Lawrence, W.G. (2001). Social Dreaming Illuminating Social Change. Organisational and Social Dynamics. Vol. 6, No. 1.

– Lawrence, W.G. and Biran, H. (2002). The Complementarity of Social Dreaming and Therapeutic Dreaming. In Neri. C., M. Pines, and R. Friedman, eds., Dreams in Group Psychotherapy. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers Ltd.

– Lawrence, W.G. (2003). Social Dreaming as Sustained Thinking. Human Relations, Vol.56, No. 5.

– Lawrence, W.G. (2005). The Language of Social Dreaming and Childhood. In Szekacs, J. and I. Ward, eds. Lost Childhood and the Language of Exile. London: IMAGO East West, The Freud Museum.

– Lawrence, W.G. (2005) The Infinite Possibilities of Transforming Thinking Through Dreaming. Dreamtime, Vol.22 No 2.

– Lawrence, W.G. (2006). The Social Dreaming Matrix for the Transformation of Thinking, FOR, No. 67, Aprile-Giugno.