Social Dreaming in the 21st Century

The World We Are Losing

John Clare, Ali Zarbafi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781855755543
• eBook ISBN: 9780429919329
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

We are running out of ideas in Western society. Faced with global warming, Third World devastation, nuclear proliferation and the threat posed by religious conflict, we need new ways of thinking. After the loss and carnage of the Twentieth Century there is prevailing mood of uncertainty and paranoia, yet at the same time a denial of tragedy, a salvation fantasy, an illusion that we will be saved. The decline in social solidarity, the fragmentation of communal values and a growing sense of 'I' as opposed to 'we', are all signs of an inversion of moral certitudes, a disconnection from reality. This book asks what methods do we have at our disposal to understand and reverse this breakdown of communication within and between communities.

CHAPTER ONE
Social dreaming and the self

John Clare

“Freud democratised genius by giving everyone a creative unconscious.”

—Philip Rieff, 1987

The shared experience of Social Dreaming is quite unlike most other ways of having a conversation. This chapter is an attempt to describe the phenomenology of the matrix in order to understand what happens to the self in Social Dreaming. First I want to look at the connection between self experience and free association and to ask what we mean when we talk about being real or ‘true to ourselves’. Then I will use the work of four psychoanalytical writers to elucidate the freedom and aliveness of mind, and its relation to the social, which is typical of the social dreaming matrix.

The night train

People often dream about trains and train journeys. Freud invited his patients, when they were embarking on psychoanalysis, to tell him whatever came into their heads, no matter how trivial or embarrassing. He suggested they imagined a train journey where they looked out of the window and reported to their analyst everything they saw as the world flew past, even the smallest things.

‘Act as though, for instance, you were a traveller sitting next to the window of a railway carriage and describing to someone inside the carriage the changing views which you see outside.’ (Freud, 1913, p. 135)

Here Freud was introducing them to the process of free association, the basic rule of analysis, that most subversive idea that they should just speak clearly everything that came into their minds. This is something ordinary which we all do internally every day, thinking to ourselves, one idea following another. Freud’s innovation was to suggest that in the analytic session these meandering thoughts were spoken out loud, so that even the most irrelevant ideas could be heard.

“It is uniformly found that precisely those ideas (the irrelevant) … are of particular value in discovering the forgotten material” (Bollas, 2002, pp. 7–8).*

Freud introduced a train journey to illustrate how free association creates a ‘train of thought’. Most of us probably have memories of being on a train. My own experience of a journey in France evokes the following vignette. Imagine you are on the night train from Paris to Geneva. As the train moves through the night, you walk slowly down the coach observing the sleeping passengers. Just as one thought leads to another, you pass from one coach to another and observe the next night-time interior. By the time you arrive in Geneva, you have reached the last coach and come to the end of the train. Similarly a train of thought starts in one place and leads from one thought to another, and then another, until it reaches its destination. Looking back, through all the connecting coaches, you can then see how you arrived at this latest thought. A dream is like the night train from Paris to Geneva. As you wake up you begin to recollect all the different, inter-connected night thoughts which have travelled through your mind but remain intact and undisturbed in the dream. In the social dreaming matrix, one dream leads to another. This dream sparks off a new train of thought, which further elicits someone else’s dream and then more thoughts and more dreams and so on. The following week another stream of ideas from our nocturnal travels is recounted and the journey continues. There is no destination: just the next dream.

Trains of thought can lead to thoughts of trains. At a matrix in the South of France, one dreamer noted that the subject of trains reminded him of a sign which stood by the roadside near many French railway crossings. It read, “Un train peut se cacher un autre” (one train may hide another) and this in turn suggested that an unknown thought may be hidden behind an object in one of the dreams. Similarly, one dream may hide another. This leads us to Christopher Bollas’s idea of the unthought known, (Bollas, 1987) a concept which is central to the social dreaming matrix—that we know things which we are unable to think, thoughts which remain unknown until we are able to dream them. Such ‘thoughts’ are easily discarded. Sadly, in a society where people demand the quick fix, the hard fact, the measurable result most people discard their dreams as surplus junk, even though they may then be haunted by them throughout the day. And yet a dream may hide a train of thought which could radically alter our lives, change the journey we take, bring us to a different destination. Social dreaming is about the social—what concerns us in the world and yet evades our waking mind—but it is also about the self. The self which is hidden behind another self, behind the constructed shape of our being which has developed over time with a logic and coherence which we are expected to live up to and yet which evades something real inside us; the thing that is missing which makes us what we are. Of course psychotherapy is also concerned with this hidden self but social dreaming entails its public discovery, its gradual flickering emergence into a train of thought, taken on by others and given back to the individual in the form of new ideas, other dreams, fresh metaphors.

The matrix is not a hermeneutic group of interpreters or organisational analysts; it is a body of dreamers on the night train to Geneva with their own nocturnal baggage, sleep thoughts, passing glimpses of towns and stations and their own dream-like destinations, hopes and desires. As dreamers, they are all on the same train and on their own different trains. None of them knows where s/he’ll arrive. The destination, if there is one, is to arrive at our subliminal, shared knowledge about the social world. At the same time it is a venue for the unknowable, inchoate but potential self. Through our dreams, as we encounter the vitality of objects, we explore the mystery of the world and our being in it. The train of thought—this free flowing caravanserai of associations which come in response to a dream— creates new thoughts. It extends who we are. Treating dreams as living objects of creativity, provides insight and this, in turn, invokes further dreams. Thus the world, and our self in it, becomes the dream work of our life. At night, while asleep, we allow ourselves to dissolve. We deconstruct who we are into strange and various identities. We dream ourselves into being. ‘We are a dream that dreams.’ (Unamuno, 1954, p. 39)

Within this apparently impossible aphorism lies a metaphorical truth: everything that exists does so because of our capacity to think—from the wilderness to the wheel, from French cuisine to jumbo jets. These things are only possible because of our capacity for thought: and our thinking originates in the dream. Dreams are our first access to thought in the hallucinatory state of infancy when we dream close to the mother’s body. Thus the dream always has a trace of the maternal. We conjure up a reality upon which we can then reflect, introducing the paternal symbolic order of thought. Hence Bollas’s term ‘Mother Dream, Father Thought’. (Bollas, 1987, p. 73) We dream ourselves into being, we are a dream that dreams.

New ways of seeing

Little has been written about the contingency of the dream and yet a chance encounter with an idea or an image in our own dream, or in the dreaming of another, may have a profound effect on our life. This change will not necessarily be conscious. We can be moved by fragments. Something glimpsed at the margins may have the most significance. We may think that reason rules our lives but we are not discrete, consistent, unified entities. The mind constantly contradicts itself. As Freud discovered, our lives are ruled by irrational forces. Conscious perception is only a fraction of what we know through our senses. Most of what we perceive is through subliminal perception and most of our mental life takes place unknown to us.

“Our lives are more like fragmentary dreams than the enactments of our conscious selves. We control very little of what we most care about; many of our most fateful decisions are made unbeknown to ourselves. Yet we insist that mankind can achieve what we cannot: conscious mastery of its existence.” (Gray, 2002, p. 38)

Unconscious and ‘other’ ways of seeing the world have largely been expunged by Western perception. We live in a world which in many ways devalue any form of expression outside the rational, positivist ideal of late capitalism. And yet we clearly need new ways of thinking and have to look to artists, musicians, poets and playwrights for alternatives to the cultural norm. All of these forms are closer to the dream; closer to the imaginative order of maternal reverie than to the paternal language of the social order which has faltered so drastically in recent history. Science, logic and measured control serve only to give us one truth, one version of the human condition, one way of treating one another. Like a dream, a work of art provides another version of reality. Van Gogh presents a universal image of suffering in his ‘Peasants Shoes’. The Expressionists painted intense emotional landscapes: Edvard Munch portrays the abject anxiety and sickness of modernity; the Fauves created their own emotional language of colour; the Surrealists took images directly from dreams; de Kooning’s primitive women emerge from abstract daubes which tell of some ineffable reality, some pre-verbal haunting, unavailable to ordinary consciousness. Picasso’s fragmented portraits break up the image, revealing something in its entirety and thus creating an object which can then be used by the viewer for self-realization. Something real is expressed which does not pertain to the given accepted world. Perhaps we could say, with Kafka, that art is the axe for the frozen sea within us. Early Paleolithic cave paintings described a vision without the hindsight of history and civilization, a view free of self-surveillance. Here is one representation of the sense-world we risk losing, with its lack of propriety, its subliminal sensitivity, its intuitive understanding of nature and its receptiveness to the dream.

The way we see and understand reality has changed and with that something vital has disappeared. It is this intuitive, numinous way of seeing which can, in some ways, be revived in the social dreaming process. Our perception is largely culture-bound and our basic assumptions are repeatedly reflected in the world around us. We continually find out what we already know. In modern consumerist societies there is increasingly less agency of free thinking to act as a catalyst and challenge these implicit ideas and thus create a space for new ideas to be tested. Even art has become part and parcel of the market mentality with the post-modern irony of work produced as a critique of a capitalist world, which it simultaneously embraces with very high price tags.

Social dreaming is an antidote to this conformist world of ready-made ideas and taken for granted truth. It creates a space in which to think without having to fit in or conform. The matrix enables an unmediated form of perception with less need for self-scrutiny or justification. It can thus help to soften the internal saboteur of the psyche: to suspend the habitual dialogue of critical self-surveillance by letting us use our dreams to elaborate unconscious aspects of the world we know. As one social dreamer put it, “It gives us permission to be who we are.” The hypothesis here is that, in this way, it can even enable us to identify with the extremes suffered by distant oppressed people who we may never meet. I have illustrated this elsewhere with reference to dreams of the crisis in Third-World countries in the months before 9/11. (Clare, 2002, p. 57) These were dreams which delineated the experiences of people at the margins of human existence. This ‘identifying-with-others-through-dreams’ is comparable to the profound apperception engendered by contact with the art or music of people who sing or paint about loss and rejection, sadness and joy. Jazz musicians from Harlem, the gypsy groups of Romania, the Township musicians of South Africa, Aboriginal artists, Flamenco, American blues singers of the Deep South are examples of this ‘dreaming’ identification.

Dada and Expressionism: when Kurt Schwitters met George Grosz

‘Being a person’ is a continually moving, fluid experience. The self which acts and reacts to this perception is also not a fixed, absolute, finite entity. Paradoxically, this self can come into being only if we abandon the attempt to know it. It is only if we can stop being who we are, that we can ‘be’ ourselves. Only when we stop trying to compose ourselves, can we get a glimpse of who we might be behind our self-conscious attempt to be somebody we construct.

When we look in the mirror who is it we see? Although the conventional notion of reality tells us that we do have a self which is fixed and definable, an identity pinned to a name or category: although we can talk of a public and a private self as if it is self-evident who we are: although we may seem predictable, obvious, knowable— what do we actually mean when we talk about our self?

One day in pre-war Germany, the Dadaist painter Kurt Schwitters decided he wanted to meet George Grosz, the outspoken German Expressionist.

George Grosz was decidedly surly; the hatred in his pictures often overflowed into his private life. But Schwitters was not one to be put off. He wanted to meet Grosz so Mehring (a friend) took him up to Grosz’s flat. Schwitters rang the bell and Grosz opened the door.

“Good morning Herr Grosz my name is Schwitters,”

“I am not Grosz,” answered the other and slammed the door. There was nothing to be done.

Halfway down the stairs Schwitters stopped and said “Just a moment”. Up the stairs he went and once more rang Grosz’s bell. Grosz, enraged by the continual jangling, opened the door, but before he could say a word, Schwitters said, “I am not Schwitters, either”. And went down stairs again. Finis. They never met again. (Richter, 1965, p. 145)

In addition to Schwitters’ spontaneity and wit, there is a serious idea here. In a sense, perhaps both men were right. Grosz was not Grosz and Schwitters was not Schwitters. We are never who we seem to be. The name of a man suggests a unified entity, a coherent discrete personality with a fixed set of traits, temperament, attributes and appearance. But does a self experience itself in this consistent and logical way? If someone mentions Margaret Thatcher, or the name of your best friend, you probably know exactly who they are talking about. A character springs to life and you see someone in your mind’s eye, you have an emotional sense of who they are, a coherent solid image of a person, an internal memory of their being. Emotion returns before memory. You remember how you feel about that person. But if you suddenly hear your own name spoken you may have no idea who that person is. We do not experience our own self as a coherent character. We are not logical or consistent, we change from moment to moment, we are endlessly contradictory and who we are could not possibly be summed up in a name. We do not add up. We are many different things. We are a dream that dreams.

The self as invention

Our existence as a person is an invention. We are not an observable concrete fact but a complex set of ideas. Of course we have a body which we can see in the mirror but that is not who we are. We are not born with a fully-formed, character or personality, rather this is made and negotiated gradually over time in relation to our environment as we discover and elaborate experience. The formatives stage of development in infancy, childhood and adolescence is crucial but who we are is continually developing and changing throughout the rest of life.

In the given context of a family, society and culture (over which we have little choice), we then ‘make’ ourselves with our thoughts and feelings, expressed in words and music, work and play, tragedy and comedy, fears and desires. Dreaming is part of this process of becoming. Dreams and day-dreams in infancy are our first forms of thinking. We dream about being and becoming, about ‘me’ and ‘not me’, and this creates a sense of an inside, an interior world in which to think and feel. This in turn extends and changes what we find. In a sense our dreams create who we are. This is what Shakespeare poignantly alludes to when he says,

We are such stuff as dreams are made on
And our little life is rounded with a sleep

(Shakespeare, The Tempest)

As Gordon Lawrence has shown, this poetic truth highlights the first forms of thinking which we experience (Lawrence, 2000, p. 218–9). We dream ourselves into being when we remember and reflect on our dreams. We do not exist as an entirely knowable, unified self, a logical person with a fixed conceptual existence. But as we dream and imagine ourselves into being, most of what we know is unconscious. Anton Ehrenzweig, with his theory of ‘unconscious scanning’, has laid bare the vast daily round of unconscious observation, the scrutinising and selecting of objects which we all do:

‘Unconscious vision … [has] proved to be capable … of gathering more information than a conscious scrutiny lasting a hundred times longer … the undifferentiated structure of unconscious vision … displays scanning powers that is superior to conscious vision.’ (Ehrenzweig, 2000, p. 14)

The process of dreaming and thinking leads us into awareness. As we experience the effect of our actions we gradually discover that other people have thoughts and feelings independent of our own, separate and exterior to us. Other people, we come to know, also have an inner world. They too dream and have an unconscious being which shows itself fleetingly and unexpectedly, making us laugh, frightened, aroused, curious—surprising us with a glimpse of the other which we may recognize as just like us or as totally alien. We find out about ourselves in similar ways especially when we dream. We are surprised to discover that we are not always who we thought we were. But if a large part of us is hidden and unknown, what sense can we make of our lives? As John Gray has said, we think we are different from other animals. We are conscious and believe we have choices and that consciousness raises us above all other creatures. We like to think that reason guides our lives but this is not the case. We are not unified beings.

Conscious perception is only a tiny part of what we know through our senses. By far the greater part we receive through subliminal perception. What surfaces in consciousness are fading shadow...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE Social dreaming and the self
• CHAPTER TWO The night train of social dreams
• CHAPTER THREE Dreaming after 9/11
• CHAPTER FOUR Sweet honey in the rock
• CHAPTER FIVE The end of the dance: Dreams at a literary festival
• CHAPTER SIX We are all slaves to babble-land: A mass dreaming experiment
• CHAPTER SEVEN Dreaming in the inner city
• CHAPTER EIGHT Too late! Social dreaming in the Haute Languedoc
• CHAPTER NINE Conclusion
• GLOSSARY
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX