Infinite Possibilities of Social Dreaming

W. Gordon Lawrence, W. Gordon Lawrence

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429914904
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

Examining recalled dreams with many others in a Social Dreaming Matrix leads to the transformation of the thinking embedded in the dreams. There are infinite meanings to a dream by regarding the dream as an unconscious product of cultural knowledge, not as an expression of the psyche exclusively, opening new possibilities of thinking.

Chapter One
Infinite possibilities of Social Dreaming

W. Gordon Lawrence

Social Dreaming

Social Dreaming was discovered in the early 1980s at the Tavistock Institute in London. Its focus is on the dream and not the dreamer. It is done with a set of people who come together to share their dreams. This goes against the accepted belief, even dogma, that the study of dreaming can only be pursued in a one-to-one relationship, where one of the participants is a trained psychoanalyst.

Social Dreaming devised a method whereby dreaming could be pursued by a set of people working together. This collection of people was termed a Matrix. The Social Dreaming Matrix mirrors, while awake and conscious, the “matrix of the undifferentiated unconscious” (Ehrenzweig 1967) which operates during sleep. Since dreams arise from the unconscious, the hypothesis was that the configuration, or setting, to receive dreams had to render unconscious thinking salient. The idea of “group”, which was an obvious choice, was rejected. If “group” had been chosen, the conscious, inter-personal relationships of the dreamers would, inevitably, have become more important and interfered with the dreaming process. The idea was that dreams were to be the currency of the configuration, not the relationships, nor the feelings about the authority (transference) of the people dreaming. As it is, transference issues are to the dreams, not to any individual.

By focusing on the dream and not the dreamer, not only does the Matrix provide a safe mental space for the participants—who never have to defend their dreams or themselves—but it also approaches dreaming from a novel perspective. This perspective is from the thinking embedded and carried in the dream, which arises from the culture of the participants’ environment; all the systems within which the dreamer interacts and relates, such as a company organization or a community. The personality of the dreamer is not the concern of Social Dreaming. The dream becomes a shared object of the Matrix; once dreamt by an individual, it can be regarded and added to creatively by all the participants.

Social Dreaming makes possible the examination of the social unconscious, which comes into existence when three or more people relate through their individual unconscious. Through their unconsciousness they discover an added quality to their unconscious mind which would be beyond the capabilities of their individual unconscious. This is the social unconscious.

The Social Dreaming Matrix created a mental space at a conscious level which provided a container for the social unconscious to be addressed through dreaming and free association. The discovery of this new container for receiving and working with dreams resulted in a change in the contained. The form, contents and metaphors of dreaming changed. No longer was the dream dreamt for the benefit of one person and her task of discovering her innermost world, but was now for the many, for those in systems, organizations and institutions. The focus was not on the individual but on individuals in their culture. Social Dreaming freed the dream from being gagged and bound by the world of “I” and allowed it to speak of and address the social world of humanity.

By focusing on the thoughts and knowledge within the dream, a whole new view of dreaming is being developed. Through the use of free association a thought contained in a dream is expanded. Again, through amplification, the thoughts in the dream are related to the culture of the society; a thought may spark off a reference to a film, or any cultural artefact, that is part of the dreamers’ repertoire of what is consciously not known.

Through this thinking process, the thoughts contained in the dreams start to undergo a process of transformation. This capitalizes on the fact that the thinking processes which we use while awake are totally different from those used while sleeping. This is the difference between conscious and unconscious thinking.

While we are awake and conscious, we are dealing with perceptual input, mathematical symbols, signs, and words, which we relate logically. By contrast, while we are dreaming we think in imagery, which we relate by means of figurative language. In the in-between state, when we are in reverie and day-dreaming, we use fewer words and signs and are less logical but note the resonances of similarities and metaphor.

The sequencing of ideas while awake follows strict logical categories; while asleep and dreaming, these categories interrelate in ways that we could not imagine while awake. This is because the unconscious is non-logical and fuses everything and every experience into a one-ness.

While we are conscious, we are highly self-reflective, making use of the “I”, or the ego, to think through our experiences; but in dreaming we are not “egocentric” for the “I” is less important as we lose ourselves in the “thereness” of the dream.

Whereas conscious logic is concerned with discrimination and classification, because the mind is making propositions to itself about one thing and another and how they are related, the unconscious does not recognise such differences. This means that novel relationships can be discerned.

The boundaries around “knowledge system” are thick and well-defined while we are awake and conscious, but as we dream these boundaries are loosened; occasionally they become thin and disappear. Consequently, our thinking is within these structured subsystems while awake, but less within and more across subsystems of knowledge while asleep (Hartmann, 2000, p. 67).

The unconscious is based on infinite sets which have no ending and no boundaries, but the conscious mind is structured with finite sets of the relationship between two things, or ideas, related to the person as thinker. These triads are the basis for our logical, rational thinking (Matte-Blanco, 1975).

Social Dreaming recognizes and works with these differences in thinking and pays attention to the unconscious, celebrating the matrix of the undifferentiated social unconscious because the Matrix is a source of human creativity and inventiveness. This spectrum of thinking is not to be seen in either or terms but in a both and sense for each is dependent on the other to sustain the holistic mind of humanity.

Dreaming and evolution

Dreaming has been part of our mental lives from the time that our forebears developed the pre-frontal areas of their brains and the visual areas of their cortex. Before that, in the early stages of evolution when our beginnings were as one-cell animals, millions of years ago, we engaged in a form of proto-dreaming as the cell interacted with its environment and began to rehearse and test how it would relate to its eco-niche. This took millions of years.

Dreaming has fascinated humans from the time they first learned to speak of this bizarre, strange, imaginary realm they entered while asleep. This imaginary realm was the basis for the creation of tools and artefacts that make up civilization as we know it. They came into being as humans experienced the social world they inhabited and used their imagination, fantasy and dreaming to create them. Humans created their culture as a product of the projections of their dream world onto the actual lived world they experienced. The possession of this imaginative realm gave humanity its genius.

Evolution and projection

Human beings’ cultural projections can be of two kinds; the benign and the destructive. There are all the cultural artefacts, like tools, buildings, literature, and all the arts that make for a constructive life. The less benign, more destructive, aspect of dreaming is that it can fuel the projections mankind makes on its surrounding world and affect political strategies for governing people. Hitler and all other dictators are a case in point. Imagination, fantasy and dreaming are intertwined mental processes, each sustained symbiotically by the other. Hitler was able to project his fantasy of a united Germany and Austria with disastrous results. Aided by propaganda and political circumstances in which Germany suffered punitive reparations, unemployment, and inflation, Hitler was able to persuade others to accept his grandiose fantasy of a Germany that would be strong and feared, lasting longer than any previous civilization. He persuaded the majority of the population that he was right in his thinking.

Any dissent of the minority was kept in check through a mixture of half-truths, deceit and dread of persecution. Those who disagreed were persecuted. Hitler projected his fantasy, which became more and more accepted as people took it into their inner, private world, by introjecting his public ideas. Hitler and his followers’ powers of persuasion were unique. The Third Reich became an in-grouping which relied on the creation of an out-grouping, defined by Hitler as enemies of the Reich: it included anybody foreign such as people of the conquered vassal states, Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, the handicapped, and non-believers of the accepted correctness of the Nazis. To be sure, his imagination and fantasy were flawed and distorted, but they had started from his dreaming mind, although no record of his dreams exists.

The situation was complex. Because of economic conditions in Germany which resulted in unemployment and inflation, Germans were driven psychically into social anxiety because they felt themselves victims of the occupying military forces imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. There was little hope in large sections of the population who felt persecuted by the prevailing social, economic and political conditions. Thus there arose a wish for a messiah who could explain why those conditions existed, to deliver them from their travails by offering certainty, security and a better future. Hitler’s ideas were presented in simplistic, easily understood terms.

His programme at first was only articulated by a small minority, while in the majority there was an unconscious brooding on his ideas in dream and fantasy. While not all would have thought of the draconian measures of Hitler, gradually many persuaded themselves they were acceptable. The majority of the population empathised with Hitler’s political fantasy because their unconscious wishes resonated with Hitler’s simplistic policy. A symbiotic relationship built up between Hitler, the “projector”, and the majority of the population, the “introjectees”. One could not exist without the other; otherwise the “projector” would have become an insane, shunned individual.

A unity of unconscious thinking from the imaginary realm swamped the minds of the majority of the population. There was little difference between the fantasy of Hitler and the fantasy of the German population. Today, as we watch documentary films of the times, we are amazed at the enthusiasm of the crowds for their Führer.

This example of the Third Reich and of mutual unconscious projection illustrates the uncomfortable, but incontrovertible, fact that we are inclined to forget that all cultures and civilizations are products of the human mind. As Frankl writes,

We tend to consider social behaviour to be conditioned by external circumstances and regard ourselves as victims of “objective reality”. But any study of man’s social reality, the external conditions as well as our responses to them, must acknowledge that it is humanity which creates its conditions and, what is more, does so largely unconsciously and then depends on the conditions it has created (Frankl, 1989, p. xvii).

The study of dreaming

The accepted explanation of dreaming for early humankind was that it came from the gods. It was a message from the transcendent, “other”, world. How else could the phenomenon be explained?

Freud, with his startling The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), overthrew such explanations with his pursuit of scientific rigour. The problem was that Freud was a product of his times. The science of his times was posited on cause-and-effect which was the organizing metaphor of mechanistic science. The world was seen as a gigantic machine of the stars and planets with the result that human kind’s behaviour was conceptualised on the same underlying principle.

Nevertheless, Freud founded psychoanalysis and led the way in interpreting dreams. He regarded dreams as the expression of wish-fulfilment on the part of the patient. Freud and his followers focused on the individual and produced a great deal of important psychological data. But, in their pursuit of understanding the individual psyche, they tended to focus less on the social dimensions of dreaming. The cultural aspects of dreaming were disregarded, except by some psychoanalytically-orientated anthropologists such as Roheim (1934, 1982).

Jung, who broke from Freud, developed a far wider notion of psychology. He believed that order exists in the human psyche, but not always in a cause-and-effect relationship. Jung was fascinated by the new sciences which were emerging in the early twentieth century. He postulated that there could be “meaningful coincidence”, in time which originated in the psyche, independent of time and space. This notion of acausality explains chance, or randomness, which is the simultaneous relatedness between phenomena and events that are causally unconnected. Not every relationship between events, phenomena and experiences can be explained in cause-and-effect terms. In conjunction with Wolfgang Pauli, a natural scientist, Jung went on to identify the acausal “orderedness” of science. This particularly applies to dreaming.

Social Dreaming accepts synchronicity. In a Social Dreaming Matrix, where the dreams come from infinite sets of the unconscious, it is possible to work out connections and links between the dreams which are not apparently causally related. One hypothesis, for example, is that the very first dream of a Matrix is a fractal of all the dreams that are to follow. Free associations give this fractal more substance.

Dreaming as a tool of cultural enquiry

Social Dreaming engages the cultural aspects of dreaming. Human beings have the capacity to think what they like. There is no obvious limit on what can be thought, using fantasy and the imagination. The thoughts may not be remarkable; they may not be useful; but they are always novel. New experiences, new contexts, and new interactions create a continuous spectrum of different impressions and pictures of the world.

This, John Barrow believes, indicates that there are limitless possibilities for what we can think. Barrow calculates the

... number of neural configurations that the human brain can accommodate. He estimated that it can represent about 1070,000,000.000,000 possible “thoughts”—for comparison there are only about 1080 atoms in the entire visible universe. The brain is rather small, it contains only about 1027 atoms, but the feeling of limitless thinking that we possess derives not from this number alone but from the vastness of the numbers of possible connections that can exist between groups of atoms. This is what we mean by complexity, and it is the complexity of our minds that gives rise to the feeling that we are at the centre of unbounded immensities. We should not be surprised. Were our minds significantly simpler, then we would be too simple to know it (Barrow, 2005, p. 19).

Dreams are formed in the matrix of the unconscious as images, but in the act of recounting a dream in ordinary discourse each person has to translate the original images of the dream into words, or pictures and paintings, to render the raw images in communicable terms.

It can be argued that every recounted dream is an emerging truth because the veracity of the undifferentiated imagery of the dream eludes the speaker. How can the imagery be recaptured? In the process of free association, particularly with a large number of listeners to a particular dream in a Social Dreaming Matrix, one can attempt to reveal the “truth” of the dream. But it will always be an approximation of what the absolute truth might be, which is why working hypotheses are so critical in Social Dreaming. By the use of the working hypothesis we avoid hubris, the sense of omnipotence and omniscience of the classical interpretation, and we open up collective exploration in order to have a more scientific mode of addressing reality which, as human beings, we are always trying to understand, but know we are never able to capture.

The gap between the image and its description is a form of engagement, i.e. a creative act involving both feeling and thinking. This work of promoting understanding has shape and is continuous in the Matrix.

Social Dreaming is a humbling experience. But that challenge opens new possibilities. The challenge is that in attaining the limits of comprehension the human mind discovers the new thinking which is embedded in the unknown.

Social Dreaming deals with dreams, which are a product of the unconscious and the infinite, i.e. the unknown. Therefore it takes us out of the comfort zone of empirical, rational thinking and inducts us into the knowledge and understanding that can only be attained through experience, introducing us to acausal explanations and synchronicity.

Social Dreaming could not have been discovered without the ground swell of new scientific thinking that took place in the twentieth century. The rational purity of thought, enshrined as an ideal by the Enlightenment philosophers, was put into question by the discovery of the unconscious by Freud. This was made manifest by writers like Joyce and Burroughs. These writers saw that the ambition of linguistic purity was just an illusion. Burroughs famously cut up rational sentences and pasted them back together to make apparently irrational ones, giving new meanings to words in a new context.

Burroughs and Joyce were anticipating the communication revolution that has hit us since the PC and the Internet came into existence. Joyce wrote in Finnegans Wake that

... every person, place and thing in the chaosmos of Alle anyway connected with the go...