What is A Social Dreaming MATRIX?
Social Dreaming is a structured practice that allows individuals to share their nighttime dreams in a collective setting. While it shares an interest in the unconscious with psychoanalysis, the Social Dreaming Matrix is unique: it does not seek to interpret the individual dreamer. Instead, it focuses on the “social” life of the dream.
It’s primary purpose is to provide a forum for sharing dreams and observing the “new thinking” that emerges. These sessions reveal how dreams connect individuals to the social contexts we inhabit, moving beyond the personal to the communal.
The process is designed to move from raw imagination to collaborative reflection through two distinct phases:
Phase 1: The Dream Matrix
The first phase involves the spontaneous narration of nighttime dreams and free associations forming in the process. The identity and personal history of the dreamer is secondary to the dream itself. Dreams and associations flow into each other creating a “shared tapestry” co-emerging in this intersubjective space.
Phase 2: Dialogue and Reflection
After the dream matrix participants transition into an in-depth discussion. The aim is to identify patterns that surfaced in Phase 1. This stage focuses on:
- Developing tentative hypotheses.
- Linking dream imagery to waking life and social reality.
- Translating symbolic images into everyday thought.
In residential and online workshops, the matrix can be combined different forms of reflection and expression of the dreams, from drawing to music to corporal expression. Longer, multiple days events can be constituted in a longer chain of modules intertwined with other types of group work and sessions. It is also 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
A Social Dreaming Matrix can be held with about any number of people. It was created in a face-to-face scenario but it also works very well in an online environment, as it was proved during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The host (or hosts) are responsible for the framing and containment of the setting, as well as to guard the time boundaries of the event: They welcome participants like the owners of a beautiful house would 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. Participants are encouraged to omit personal information and details about the dreamer and by focusing on relating and listening to dreams as they emerge, refraining from personal judgements or interpretations.
SET AND SETTING
The seating arrangement has the finality of discouraging a hierarchical distinction between host and participants. It also assures that participants are not too close or intimate with each other making the sharing of dreams more comfortable.
In the traditional in a face-to-face settings this seating disposition is called “snowflake”. Chairs are grouped in clusters and participants seat back to back facing the different angles of the room. This configuration discourages eye contact between participants and creates a common blind space behind everybody’s back where the imaginary pattern is assembled.
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, participants constitute a voluntary and temporary gathering rather than a social group. In this framework group dynamics are not the focus of the work: 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, with the goal to make new thinking emerge.
THE ORIGIN OF THE METHOD
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.
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.
Ciao Fabio, ho visitato il tuo sito e ho scoperto cose di te che non sapevo e che fa si che io ti ammi ri sempre di più. Ti segnalo che nel testo c’è quella che a me sembra una svista. Tu scrivi:
Social dreaming is not therapy, and does have any relation with clinical settings.
Forse è un mio problema per la mia limitata conoscenza dell’inglese però mi sembra che tu debba scrivere:
Social dreaming is not therapy, and doesn’t have any relation with clinical settings.
Grazie Elio, il tuo appunto è corretto e vado a cambiare subito il testo. Grazie per l’attenta lettura!