about social dreaming matrix
The purpose of social dreaming matrix is to transform the thinking in the dreams offered to the matrix, by means of free association, and to become available to new thought
Participants gather in a broken spiral/snowflake configuration and offer their own dreams to the matrix. These dreams form a matrix by which the participants, individually and as a collective, may enter into the unconscious or infinite and work with raw thinking material that may not be otherwise available to them. Once placed in the matrix, dreams and free associations become part of a web of meaning, and cannot be traced back to whom offered them. Thus the matrix is an intimate but safe experience of creativity and meaning making, a kind of yoga for the artists inside everyone, and a means of discovering the unthought knowns of a particular situation.
What is Social Dreaming?
Social dreaming seeks to explore what the dream may be communicating about the social and political context of the dreamer. There is a sharing of dreams, and then meaning is expanded and developed through association, amplification, and systemic thinking in an attempt to give voice to the echoes of thought that exist in the space between individual minds and the shared environment. (1)
Working hypotheses:
Dreaming is one way of doing thinking.
A group of people gathered together for a purpose constitute a system, or mind, hivemind. We work in organization as social systems, representing the whole community including its past, present and potential.
There is a social purpose for dreams as well as a personal significance for the dreamer.
The social system can put dreams to work by offering the dreams to social dreaming matrix, using free association to make connections and find links between the dreams. The focus is on the dream and not the dreamer.
The matrix (from Latin for ‘uterus’) is a container from which something grows. It is also extremely receptive.
Why social dreaming?
Social dreaming is a way of cultivating an ecology of mind, and an awareness of this ecology.
Social dreaming is a means by which this social organism can be sensed. It is a means of collectively exercising the new organs of perception that Joseph Beuys believed was necessary to become beings capable of carrying evolution forward
Because we are working with the primal creative force within us, ie dream, we are simultaneously endowing that ecology of mind with a creative life, in a form of social sculpture:
A ‘supreme ethical rule [is] to elicit the best in oneself and others by drawing out the unique difference that constitutes each self… Characteristic of the ethical attitude is the painting, and constant retouching, of ideal portraits of our fellow humans and ourselves and acting toward them, and ourselves, in accordance with those portraits.’ (2)
Social Dreaming is democratic and safe, receptive and productive.
It allows for a multiverse of meanings. It is possible to produce truth, in multiple forms, without the need for a ‘master’. It is a choreography for participatory democracy that does not require consensus or agreement. A suspension of already available answers makes a space for new thinking possible.
The action of Social Dreaming is one of communal meaning making.
The artist, the poet must in some sense set the world free to have a new go at its business… If our given experience is a labyrinth, then its impassability is countered by the poet’s imagining some equivalent of the labyrinth and bringing himself and the reader through it. (3)
Social dreaming matrix can be understood to be a collectively imagined equivalent of the labyrinth of our experience or present situation, through which we bring ourselves to an ‘expanded common sense’.
further reading
the social dreaming phenomenon
dream intelligence
theatre of dreams
NOTES
(1) Helen Morgan, The Social Dreaming Matrix
(2) A Concept Map for Ethical Culture: Towards Philosophical Consensus – A statement of the National Leaders Council of the American Ethical Union
(3) Seamus Heaney, The Redress of Poetry