Social Dreaming
Social Dreaming is a practice of sharing dreams within a social space, to explore what they might reveal collectively
Social dreaming is a practice in which a group of people come together to share their dreams within a group setting. The idea is that dreams are not only personal. They also carry traces of the social world we live in: our anxieties, our cultural preoccupations, the things that go unspoken in organisational and public life.
A social dreaming session is called a “matrix” rather than a group. Participants share dreams and make free associations, noticing patterns and connections across the material. The matrix is designed to avoid the dynamics familiar in therapy or group relations work, and instead to create a container in which dreams can speak to dreams.
The focus is the dream, not the dreamer, and on what emerges when dreams are placed alongside one another.
The practice was developed by Gordon Lawrence and his colleagues at the Tavistock Institute and partner organisations in the 1980s. What draws people to it is the way it gives access to a different kind of knowledge: the things we sense but cannot yet articulate, the undercurrents that shape how we think, feel and act together.
“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Gordon Lawrence, 2011, op cit, unpublished
Application
Social dreaming can be used in all sorts of settings: organisational development, group relations, education, action research and social enquiry, wherever there is value in surfacing what is usually unattended, and in making the unconscious dimensions of collective life available for reflection and new thinking.
