Dream Sociometry

A Multi-Perspectival Path to the Transpersonal

Joseph Dillard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351137447
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This unique book is the first of two volumes that describe a new, transpersonal model for therapeutic work on dreams. Dream Sociometry, a form of Integral Deep Listening (IDL) life drama and dream character interviewing, contributes to the fields of application of the sociometric methods of J.L. Moreno and the use of sociometry in therapy, to support and direct personal development. The book describes an experiential, multi-perspectival integral life practice through accessing "emerging potentials, " or perspectives that integrate, transcend, and include one's current context and predicament.

Dream Sociometry provides a thoroughly phenomenological approach, suspending interpretation as well as assumptions about the reality and usefulness of synchronicities, mystical experiences, waking accidents, dreams, and nightmares, in favour of listening to dream characters and personifications of important life issues in a respectful and integral way. It thereby provides an important doorway to both causal and non-dual awareness by accessing perspectives that personify both, and will open doors for those interested not only in dream research, but in reducing anxiety disorders, such as phobias and post-traumatic stress disorders, and seeing through the often literal and concrete interpretations that we often give both physical and mental illness as well as mystical experiences.

Offering a fresh and unique approach to both dreamwork and self-development through sociometric methodologies, this book will be of interest to researchers in the fields of psychodrama, sociometry, group psychotherapy, transpersonal, experiential and action therapies, as well as postgraduate students studying psychology and sociology.

Chapter 1

What is Dream Sociometry?

A multi-perspectival path to the transpersonal

Dream Sociometry is an in-depth character and life issue interviewing protocol that is one aspect of Integral Deep Listening (IDL). IDL is itself a form of dream yoga, or a path to awakening from the dreamlike nature of reality, asleep or awake. IDL does not claim that life is a dream, only that it shares with dreaming the same common delusion that while asleep and dreaming one is awake. It also shares with dreaming the ability to wake up, or move into lucidity and out of the delusion, that occurs with lucid dreaming. Dream Sociometry is multi-perspectival because it asks you to take a variety of different world views or orientations that are invested in individual dreams and life dramas. It is transpersonal because it provides both temporary state and permanent stage access to holons that transcend, yet include, both rational/personal and belief/preference-based prepersonal levels of development.

The Dream Sociomatrix is a grid-based structure that is used to obtain interviewed character preferences, tabulate them, and provide numerical data which are tabulated and plotted on a Dream Sociogram. It is accompanied by elaborative remarks which make up the various Commentaries. The Dream Sociomatrix for the dream Ken Wilber Dies is an example of such a grid, recording the likes and dislikes of interviewed characters toward each listed element (interviewed character, action, or emotion) in the dream. The Dream Sociogram is a pictorial representation of the patterns of preferences among choosing characters and chosen characters, actions, and emotions. These components of Dream Sociometry provide many benefits, as we shall note below. Most fundamentally, the process is transpersonal, in that it is designed to cultivate both witnessing and witnessing of the witness, as well as multi-perspectivalism in service to the deconstruction of identification with any and all identities or definitions of self.

An integral life practice

Interviewing is one of five major components of IDL. The first three emphasize reducing the filters that keep you stuck in dreamlike delusion: recognizing and altering your life scripting, opting out of the Drama Triangle and recognizing and changing your emotional, logical and perceptual cognitive distortions. The remaining two are transpersonal: developing highly empathetic multi-perspectivalism with IDL interviewing, and meditation, including naming and pranayama. These five are together components of a sophisticated integral life practice that sets life priorities in consultation with your life compass. Your life compass is not to be confused with intuition, “soul,” conscience, divine will, a “still small voice,” dharma, karma, or predestination. It is represented in IDL by the consensual perspectives of characters and life issues, together referred to as “emerging potentials,” that you become and interview. IDL teaches you to deeply listen to the diamond wisdom of deathless emerging potentials that personify the priorities of life.

“Emerging potentials” refers to interviewed perspectives with which you identify, whether during an interview or sometime thereafter: for instance, when you are meditating, at work, or arguing with your partner. These perspectives may be derived from elements with which you identify or the personifications of life issues that are important to you. They may also be mythological, literary, historical, or religious in origin. They are neither self-aspects nor external realities, but rather contain important, irreducible aspects of both, in that they are undoubtedly both self-creations and autonomous, capable of expressing great independence from your assumptions, preferences and world view. Emerging potentials cannot be categorized as unconscious, subconscious or superconscious, spiritual or mundane, prepersonal, personal or transpersonal, irrational, rational, or arational or trans-rational. They are not symbols, nor are they archetypes.

Rather than finding your growth chronically held hostage by your daily dramas, scripting, addictions, and fixations, IDL progressively expands your ability to witness the endless parade of hopes, thoughts, feelings, and relationships that fill your life. This is a concrete type of witnessing, in that it produces practical and personalized recommendations for getting unstuck and moving your reality into deeper alignment with the priorities of life.

The art of deeply listening to the priorities of your life compass is intrinsically healing, providing the integration and balancing of your various life roles. As you experience the harmony, wisdom, and acceptance of life as it uniquely expresses itself through you, you can then move forward in inner consensus rather than as a dictatorial ego attempting to force compliance from repressed, ignored, and discounted feelings, preferences, and desires. This allows you to progress on your life’s journey as a whole rather than as a fragmented being. Instead of leaving important parts of yourself behind as dead weight, slowing or stopping your development, you welcome them into an expanded definition of who you are. Instead of living within your self definitions, you open yourself to broader framings represented by interviewed emerging potentials. As your identity expands, a partnership is forged between you and your intrasocial community, leading you to first become one with your life compass, then with life itself, as you move your life experience into transpersonal perspectives.

Your “intrasocial community” is comprised of 1) self-aspects, such as your preferences and addictions, 2) others, including your exterior or disowned reality, to the extent that what you know of other people, places, or objects is a projection of your own experience, values, and meanings, and 3) interviewed emerging potentials, which combine elements of both self and other but which cannot be reduced to either. Together, these serve as wake-up calls that, when deeply listened to, both expand and thin your sense of self.

Dream Sociometry is the foundational methodology that IDL uses to accomplish waking up, clarity, lucidity, and progressive enlightenment. However, in practice, IDL usually relies on interviews of individual elements, due to its relative simplicity. Dream Sociometry is used as both a research tool and as a way for students to become thoroughly grounded in the principles that underlie the various individual element interviewing protocols.¹ Its object is to provide a structure by which your life compass can alchemically transform the secular and mundane clay of your life into the precious gold of the sacred. It does so through two processes: unearthing and resolving all sorts of conflicts that block your further development and shifting your identity from yourself to identification with life’s perspectives and agendas, and by creating space in which expanded, more inclusive awareness can be born.² Dream Sociometry is a tool that allows you to not only step back and watch yourself go by, but to deeply listen to and learn from emerging potentials that not only support your development but that also oppose you and thereby slow your development. You will also find yourself amazed by the perspectives on your life provided by interviewed emerging potentials, whether angelic messengers or toilet brushes, that are not stuck in the same ruts that currently bog down your progress. As you merge with perspectives that include, yet transcend, your own, you assimilate their fearlessness and objectivity, thereby diffusing and broadening your identity.

While Dream Sociometry can be used effectively for such secular purposes as finding a job, a mate, or creative problem solving in groups or industry, when it is used to become one with life itself, it becomes a form of yoga. It also serves as a yoga when secular goals, such as career and relationship success, are approached from the context of transpersonal purposes, such as living one’s life more in harmony with the priorities of one’s life compass.³

Dream Sociometry involves the eliciting of the preferences of interviewed dream characters or personifications of life issues important to you along with the collection of explanations of their preferences, called elaborations. Other approaches to interviewing taught by IDL include the dream and life issue protocols used for interviewing individual perspectives and DreamQuest!, a character interviewing game. Dream Sociometry is most often approached as a self-directed approach, although it can be used with others: for example, when a couple or work group creates sociomatrices on the same, commonly shared issue, controversy, conflict, or work problem. By applying Dream Sociometry to a series of your own dreams waking life “dreams” and nightmares, you can familiarize yourself with the underlying principles of IDL interviewing.

Most students of IDL will already be familiar with the single-character interviewing protocol, which questions individual elements and other emerging potentials, such as emotions or characters taken from actual waking life events. Dream Sociometry is the foundation for the single-character interviewing protocol. I only reluctantly developed that methodology after years of largely unsuccessful efforts to make Dream Sociometry more accessible to a broader number of people. Dream Sociometry takes longer and provides much more information than most people want or can use. Therefore, for years, I regarded it primarily as a research tool. It was only after a number of years of including Dream Sociometry in the IDL Practitioner training program and listening to the positive feedback of students who already had a strong foundation in the single character interviewing protocols that I returned to my original belief, that Dream Sociometry had important practical and not just research-based applications.

The dream and life issue interviewing protocols contain many of the core principles of Dream Sociometry in various forms, but without the depth that comes from interviewing multiple perspectives and without the advantage of the visual representation of intrasocial dynamics provided by the Dream Sociogram. In addition to being foundational, Dream Sociometry is extremely versatile, providing a very extensive and thorough approach to transpersonal development that can be pursued in isolation by monks, prisoners, introverts, or the highly analytical, or in couples and groups for relationship, family, work, and socio-cultural applications. Dream Sociometry can be an important component of a transpersonal discipline, which is what a yoga is meant to be. The two-plus hours that are spent on a dream with Dream Sociometry provide a treasure trove of assistance in growth, healing, and life balancing.

A third reason to become familiar with Dream Sociometry is to give depth to your interviewing of emerging potentials and therefore speed your development. Understanding Dream Sociometry explains the genesis for many of the questions used in the IDL dream and life issue protocols, examples of which you will find in the appendices. The questions they contain are largely drawn from those in the various Dream Sociometric elaborations discussed below. Creating Dream Sociometrices deepens both confidence and understanding of why each particular question is asked. Dream Sociometry also generates opportunities to cultivate your experience of the pure witness and subject permanence through identification with that consciousness which creates dreams and, by analogy, creates all form.⁴ This experience is of immense importance for those desiring either to find or integrate non-dual awareness into their meditative or daily life. Finally, for those of you who wish to become teachers of IDL, or life coaches, personal familiarity with Dream Sociometry is a requirement, since you must understand it in order to be able to teach it to others. Learning Dream Sociometry will add great depth of understanding and application to your work with the single-character interviewing protocols.

In the Dream Sociometric method, as in the single-character interviewing protocol process, you first identify three life issues that are of current concern to you. You then imagine that you are various interviewed characters in your recalled dream or waking life experience and write down how you feel about yourself, the dreamer, and what is going on in your dream.⁵ The preferences of interviewed elements are given numerical values. These are: love = +3; like a lot = +2; like = +1; don’t care = 0; dislike = −1; dislike a lot = −2; hate = −3; and transcending all preferences = *.⁶ These numerical values are noted in a grid-like data collection form called a Dream Sociomatrix. It provides a way to step back and look objectively at what aspects of your larger identity have to say to you about why you have the issues you are dealing with now in your life and what you need to do about them, from their perspective.

The Dream Sociomatrix provides for the orderly tabulation and evaluation of the preferences expressed by different interviewed characters. The expression of these preferences usually elicits thoughts and feelings. These are written as elaborations in a section following the Dream Sociomatrix, called the Sociomatrix Commentary. Information from all these processes does much more than provide insight into the dream or waking life issue; it is used to integrate your waking and dream lives, which is a powerful support for both waking up and the development of clear consciousness. To this end, there follows a special set of directions for using character recommendations to resolve waking life issues you have identitied. These elaborations include a Dream Commentary, in which emerging potentials generate an integrative revision of the dream, called a dreamage. It also includes a Waking Commentary, in which characters recommend changes in your waking life. An Action Plan is created that specifies situations in which it will be beneficial for you to imagine you are this or that character in your waking life. Information from this process can also be used to create and understand the Dream Sociogram, which depicts patterns of intrasocial interaction.

A phenomenalistic approach to dream interpretation

While the reader will discover many similarities to other approaches to dreamwork, most of those similarities are superficial. Dream Sociometry differs in significant ways from the Gestalt role-play of Fritz Perls, the emphasis on symbolic interpretation of Freud, Jung, and Cayce the projective group processes of Montague Ullman or the Voice Dialogue methodologies of the Stones. Dream Sociometry shares with Perl’s Gestalt common phenomenalistic roots in Jacob Moreno‘s sociometric and psychodramatic theories and methods. It may also remind students of comparative dreamwork methods of the phenomenological approach taken by Walter Bonime, but I have no background and scant familiarity with his work, which I nevertheless respect for its emphasis on the laying aside of reality claims.

Dream Sociometry draws upon early subjective methods in psychology that place emphasis on self-direction through the development of those introspective skills that provide a measure of objectivity toward oneself. It strives to be integrative, meaning that it respects and attempts to take into account many of the important distinctions set forth in the integral psychology of Ken Wilber, in that it is mindful of the level and line of interviewed perspectives, all four holon quadrants, the stage of development of the self and the implications of findings for waking, dreaming, deep sleep, and meditative experience.⁷

“Phenomenalistic” approaches to life suspend reality claims. In IDL, interviewed perspectives are not approached initially as subjective, self-created symbols or self-aspects or as real beings from some other dimension, but as beings possessing the same degree of reality that you do. If you are real, they are real as well, because they are both projections and reflections of your consciousness. If you are a figment of your own imagination, they are figments as well. While their ontology is indeterminate, their axiology or value is presumed to be due respect until proven otherwise, just as yours is. This is because you and all beings are interdependently co-created and mirror or reflect one another. Therefore, all are due respect until proven otherwise. While this is not a phenomenalistically neutral position, respect is a necessary precondition, because to discount the value of any perspective is to discount the value of those identities that they personify or represent, including yourself, which builds a negative bias into your observations, identifications and questioning. Interviewed perspectives are therefore due the same respect you expect to receive from others.

Additionally, if I assume you are a symbol, as I may if you appear in one of my dreams, I am focusing on your meaning for me and on your instrumental value in my life. Your being is derived from and dependent upon the meanings that I project upon it. This constitutes a subtle discount ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 What is Dream Sociometry?
• 2 Benefits of Dream Sociometry
• 3 The origins of Dream Sociometry
• 4 Interviewed dream characters and your waking roles
• 5 Enhancing dream recall
• 6 Recording your dreams
• 7 Purpose of the Dream Sociomatrix
• 8 The dream elements
• 9 Element categorization
• 10 Making predictions
• 11 Structure of the Dream Sociomatrix
• 12 Obtaining interviewed dream character preferences
• 13 Agreement in the Dream Sociomatrix
• 14 Ambivalence in the Dream Sociomatrix
• 15 Interviewed character categories and attributes
• 16 Structure of the Dream Sociomatrix Commentary
• 17 Functions of the Dream Sociomatrix Commentary
• 18 Overview of commentary construction and creation of the Action Plan
• 19 The Dream Summary Commentary
• 20 Constructing the Dreamage
• 21 Creating the Waking Commentary
• 22 The Identification Commentary
• 23 Designing your Action Plan
• 24 The Dream Sociogram Commentary
• 25 The Dream Group Dynamics Commentary
• 26 What I am saying to myself is …
• 27 The Dream Group Feedback Commentary
• 28 Evaluating your predictions
• 29 Using Dream Sociometry with waking events
• Appendix I: Ken Wilber dies commentaries
• Appendix II: IDL dream interviewing protocol
• Appendix III: IDL life issue interviewing protocol
• Index