Social dreaming

What is social dreaming?: A practice in which a group shares dreams within a social space to explore what they reveal collectively. Dreams are treated as carrying traces of the social world, not just the personal one.
What is a social dreaming matrix?: The term for a social dreaming session. Participants share dreams and make free associations across the material, in a format designed to avoid the dynamics familiar in therapy or group relations work. The focus is the dream, not the dreamer.
Who developed social dreaming?: Gordon Lawrence and his colleagues at the Tavistock Institute and partner organisations developed it in the 1980s.
Where can social dreaming be applied?: In organisational development, group relations, education, action research and social enquiry, wherever there is value in surfacing what usually goes unattended.

The focus is the dream, not the dreamer

'Dreams shared are seen as objects existing in their own right (rather than as disguised messages from a private, psychic world).

The participants are invited to look at a dream as if it had never existed before, seeing its uniqueness and rarity. It is comparable to picking up a pebble on a beach as a child. You look at it in minute detail, as the poet Rilke put it, something that “finds itself in the centre of your universe'.

Gordon Lawrence, 2011, op cit, unpublished