An Introduction to Social Dreaming
Workshop with Angela Eden
This is another workshop in the series of workshops on futures, narratives, foresight and design strategy that we are experiencing at the UK Portfolio of The National Lottery Community Fund. This workshop was one of the more experimental ones of our series so we all arrived with curiosity and an open mind! The workshop started and the only context we had been given was the following:
“Welcome to Social Dreaming. I am looking forward to being with you. There is no preparation needed for this introductory session. You might, if you want to, pay some attention to any dreams that come your way. We probably won’t share any, but it’s nice to know you are dreaming. If you have any questions before then, then please contact me. Best wishes til Monday.”
We shared thoughts and ideas about what we knew about social dreaming. People spoke about:
- The difference between dreaming about things while waking and the dreams we have while sleeping
- The interest in how dreams connect to things that actually happen in real life
History of social dreaming
People have been sharing their dreams since forever. Some communities would come together on waking up and talk about their dreams, and see what they could get from it. These dreams would help them decide what to do, in their day, their month, and life.
The Aboriginal Australian people use dream time to get in touch with their culture. Dreaming has happened forever. Some people dream more than others.
A woman in Germany in 1930 called [Hannah Baren] started collecting dreams because she heard her friends talking about dreams of fear, dreams of anxiety, dreams of death. She catalogued them all and wrote them all down, which she thought was to do with something called “
Fast forward in time to Gordon Lawrence, who read through the dreams Hannah Baren had written down. And in the 1980s he coined the idea of a “social dreaming matrix”. He asked:
If we share our dreams, can they tell us about the society we are in?
What is a matrix?
In a group we look at each other, we have relationships with each other, and we do ordinary things like saying hello and goodbye. He wanted it to be different — more abstract, more open, fewer 1:1 direct relationships — and so he called it a matrix. The word “matrix” comes from
How does it work?
- Each matrix has a “host” who invites people into the space.
- You bring people together.
- You set up the chairs in a ‘snowflake’ pattern (see image below).
- Everybody sits down.
- The host welcomes everybody, explains what the time is, what the task is, and says as openly as possible: what is the first dream?
- The task at hand is to invite dreams and associations — any free associations like films, memories, past dreams, cultural references
- Then somebody offers the first dream
What do we do with what we learn?
Angela’s response is:
“Who knows, and maybe nothing, and maybe something”
Examples of how other groups have used social dreaming
- At conferences where there is a social dreaming matrix every morning — and the contents of the dreams dictated the focus of discussions
- A group of therapists who met to have regular social dreaming sessions who dreamt of images of animals burning before the foot and mouth disease burning of animals
- Social dreaming being used for future company strategy planning
- A social dreaming group in London that meets on the first Friday of the month for 2 years
Next session
We will be trying out the social dreaming matrix with three opt-in sessions in the following weeks. Stay tuned to find out how they go!
