Introduction to Social Dreaming

Transforming Thinking

W. Gordon Lawrence

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367325176
• eBook ISBN: 9780429915178
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría en psicología

This book explains social dreaming by situating it in the context of thinking, culture, and knowledge and distinguishes how it differs from conventional, therapeutic dreaming, making the case for how it can be used in systems, like business organizations, educational institutions, and hospitals.

Chapter One

Social dreaming in a company

Early on it was thought that social dreaming could have applications for business people. An opportunity came with a French group of companies. Each year for five years the president of the group convened a seminar for his senior managers. The writer had been an organizational consultant working with the president for about eight years. The purpose of the seminar was to reflect on the state of the company by identifying the pressing problems and issues the group was facing in a changing commercial environment. From this analysis the seminar considered what the group could become to realize its goals. Each seminar lasted for four days, and they were convened in various countries, such as Spain, France, and Bulgaria. At the fifth seminar it was decided to hold a social dreaming matrix (SDM) each morning for an hour, as the first event of the day. The language was French, with occasional forays into English.

The hypothesis that managers with pressing business problems could benefit from the experience of social dreaming as part of the seminar was offered. Consequently, it was tried with the senior managers of the group (Lawrence, 1998b). The following very truncated summary, which has been disguised to preserve confidentiality, may serve to introduce some aspects of a social dreaming matrix and give examples of the quality of thinking it engenders. The purpose of the matrix was to share dreams and to associate to them as freely as possible.

The first matrix opened with some observations on the nature of dreaming, and some participants wondered whether they actually dream at all. They concluded that they dreamed more when they were on holiday than when they were at work.

One manager, who had a dream of being on an escalator, expressed doubts about the value and possible risks of dreaming. He had a feeling of being off-balance. The escalator symbolized links between waking and dreaming. At the same time, it highlighted the levels of consciousness where sometimes the dream is more real or pertinent than what is perceived in waking life, as well as the presence of unconscious thinking and no-thinking, which is always putting one off balance but is, ideally, always in an interdependent, or symbiont, relationship with consciousness.

Another manager followed by saying that normally he did not remember his dreams, but he was able to recall some elements of a dream the night before. His dream was in relation to the catalogue of his company. (For a mail-order company, the catalogue is the key selling tool, and thus its quality is critical for this company.)

There was a fashion presentation that was taking place on the gangway of a boat. The presentation was being photographed. The feeling of the place was of elegance, with a lot of people present. It was, however, cold. The people present were fashion designers, and the atmosphere was a little mad, even bizarre. There was a lot of light from the sun and much movement among the people present.

The dreamer ended his description by saying that they were not dealing with issues of fashion in his company.

It was intriguing that one of the first dreams should be about work. Can we assume that the gangway [passerolle], in addition to paralleling the escalator, mentioned above as a transition to the domain of the conscious, symbolized the catalogue issued by the company, with its marketing strategies to sell its goods to potential customers either on the “boat” or the “quay”? In actuality, the company has an attractive catalogue and even has what are called “best-sellers”, but it does not yet have the amount of turnover needed. This is very worrying for all the people in the company: there is stress, and a sense of persecution has grown because of their comparative lack of success. The market is a cold place in reality.

The dream was followed by what the participants called a “flash”. This dreamer had one, which was, “Faith saves one”. The theme of faith had been running through the seminar in other events.

A later dream in the sequence follows.

The dreamer is walking on the left side of a road. Coming towards him is his President, who is also on the left of the road. The right-hand side of the road is piled high with stones. The dreamer is not sure whether these stones are the result of a rock-fall, or whether they are waiting to be used in the rebuilding of the road. He says that he is not sure whether they are there as a result of a natural destruction or whether they are waiting for use in construction. The road itself is well marked—but is the line marking the centre of the road or the edge of it?

This dream echoes the actual political situation of the dreamer as a new managing director working with the president who had, up to now, also held the role of managing director. We thought that the stones on the right—one of the president’s names is Pierre [pierre = stone]—represented the company, which has experienced a downturn in trading. Could the company be turned around—that is, is reconstruction possible—or is it in a disastrous, ruinous state? Where are the limits to any future growth of the company? The unasked questions for all the members of the seminar were: Can the new managing director work with the president? Will they have a confrontational relationship or work in harmony? Who is clinging to which of the company’s values and faith?

Another dreamer is

on the gangway of a boat; he cannot see anything because there is fog, but everyone assures him that when the weather is good, it is a very nice view.

One set of associations was to the present state of the companies seeing the gangway (catalogue), again, as the commercial link between the companies and their customers. While matters may now be bad, perhaps better trading conditions will come when the fog lifts.

Another dreamer said that he had a dream but

in the dream he experienced himself as conscious and awake. He is speaking to another managing director about a new marketing manager who is being transferred from one company in the group to another. (This was true.) The dreamer finds himself saying that this marketing manager speaks English very well—indeed, would have an A grade. The president reacts to this by saying, “You see, you don’t have enough confidence in people. Leave me alone, I am going to read the Bible.” He does so, and in the dream he is facing one of the takers (hosts)¹, who is reading the Bible (the Book of Baruch) in English.

The president is reading the Book of Baruch, which does not appear in the King James I Version but in the Apocrypha, having been excluded from the Protestant canon at the time of the Reformation. Baruch appears in French Bibles. As far as we have been able to check, Baruch was important for giving a message to the conquered people who were under Babylonian rule. He also saved the religious furnishings of the temple after a Holocaust. The president is a Catholic, while it is well-enough known that the consultant is not. So the dream expressed something of the difficulty that the dreamer has in understanding why a French president should have an English-speaking consultant in his work role. And what is the nature of the transference, or authority, feelings between them? Who has access to what kind of knowledge? The possible reason for the selection of Baruch was that it might express something of the phenomenal role of the president in the group—that is, trying to celebrate and maintain its French identity in an international context. Embedded in this dream was the idea of persecution and disaster, but also the idea of being awake, in touch with what is really happening.

The company politics were revealed in an astounding dream:

There is a town in which lives a Little Vassal. The Fat Duke comes to visit, and the Little Vassal welcomes him to the town. There is in the place a big armchair, which could also be a throne, and it is used for that purpose on occasion. When the Little Vassal sits in the armchair, the whole town is illuminated, and the longer he sits in the chair, the more intense is the light. In order to have the very best light possible, it is suggested by the townspeople that the Fat Duke should also sit in the armchair with the Little Vassal.

While the two are sitting in the chair, the son of the Little Vassal, who is an architect, is installing a mobile, which is in the form of a spiral, attaching it to the ceiling of the room in which the Little Vassal and the Fat Duke are seated. It is a very innovative and attractive mobile. The Fat Duke expresses disapproval.

The Little Vassal finds that there are two ways to sit on the throne with the Fat Duke. When the Little Vassal is on his own, he can make his body flat, shaped like a slice of bacon, and spread himself over the greatest area of the throne to provide his fellow townspeople with even more light. When the Fat Duke is present on the throne, however, he finds that if he is not quick enough, the Fat Duke sits on top of him, and he has to shape himself sitting upright like a piece of toast in a rack.

There is a terrible scream from outside the room. People are shouting, “Douleur, frustration, cholère!” [pain, frustration, anger].

This dream can be seen as an allegory, describing the state of the company with its power structure. The Fat Duke and the Little Vassal represent the share holding of the company’s principal owners, with the townspeople as the smaller, private investors. The Fat Duke is German, the Little Vassal is French, though for reasons of confidentiality no further details can be given. The dream summarizes much of the feelings of frustration at being in this joint company, which publicly operated as a French company in reality. There would be joint marketing seminars and meetings. The pain, frustration, and anger is voiced by the managers through the dreams.

All the French managers thought that their company had the majority of shares—after all, the original companies, from which the present group had been structured, were indubitably French. The German–French axis was seen as being right, and fashionable, because old political and national enemies were now allies. It gave the total group, now a joint venture of both French and German businesses, a great deal of commercial power in a highly competitive market.

The mobile of the architect son was very original in the dream, but the Fat Duke disapproved. One of the complaints of the French managers was that the German managers always held sway in the marketing meetings. French ideas were always seen as lacking. The mobile, reminiscent of a DNA structure, was modelled like a double helix. The thought it provoked was that the future managers (architect sons of the Little Vassal) were struggling to give their companies a new identity and marketing stamp, symbolized by the mobile.

The Fat Duke and the Little Vassal sitting on the throne symbolized the hidden struggle between the Germans and the French. The Little Vassal could give light (leadership and employment), and it was assumed that with the aid of the Fat Duke this would be increased, but in fact the Fat Duke would squeeze out the Little Vassal from the throne (the symbol of power).

This dream gave expression to something that was known, but had never been thought publicly. It was a prescient dream. All the French managers believed that their nationality owned the majority shares, whereas in actuality it was owned by the Germans. This was contained in a secret clause. This is an example of the “unthought known” made conscious in a dream. Here we see the influence of systemic thinking. Thinking as being and becoming is influenced by the domain of thinking as dreaming and thinking as the unthought known relate to each other. To put this another way: here, conscious thinking is influenced by the domain of dreaming and the unconscious. Now people could be aware of something that had had to be hidden, or “not thought”.

The infinite is present in the act of dreaming because the dreams introduce other dimensions to existence, expressed often in surreal images. The repeated mention of “faith” is another indication of the infinite in the sense of having faith not to know and be uncertain. The dreams present the facts of everyday life in another form, but in such a way that their real meaning can be discerned. As the dreams are recounted and the participants free-associate, the infinite becomes immanent; it begins to be in the participants’ grasp, and not as something imagined to be transcendent. The infinite is the unknown, and the dream introduces us to this: it questions what we have assumed, and accepted, to be social knowledge.

As important is the fact that the dreams, of which we give a small sample from the totality, together with a small sample of the possible associations, gave expression to the experience of being a manager. The social dreaming matrix gave participants an opportunity to stand outside their company role, to reflect and to think afresh. They could have a range of emotions, like fun and sadder feelings, as they associated to the dreams, which were expanding their thinking.

A few weeks after the seminar, another dream was reported to the writer. One manager, who was due to take over the role of managing director of one of the companies in the group, had been recording his observations of the company in a notebook. He had been noting the issues he had to address and reasoning out the decisions he had to make. He had lost the notebook before the seminar, and his colleagues had commiserated with him on his loss.

The night after the seminar, he had a dream in which he placed the notebook in the drawer of a black desk. On waking, he thought of black desks. He did not have one, either in his office or in his home. The only one he knew of was the president’s, but it was highly unlikely that he would have put his notebook there. As the manager thought of his notebook, he remembered that the desk had been an antique one, with a not very smooth top. He recalled that he had recently been in a hotel with such a desk. He telephoned the hotel, and the manager of the hotel said: “Yes, we have your notebook! We didn’t know where to mail it, but we shall send it tomorrow.” Social dreaming may be useful in finding the “lost properties” of our dreams.

Note

1. The terms “taker” and “host” were introduced later to describe the consultant role in social dreaming.

Chapter Two

What is social dreaming?

The task of social dreaming is to transform thinking through exploring dreams, using the methods of free association, amplification, and systemic thinking, so as to make links and find connections in order to discover new thinking and thoughts.

What is meant by this?

The human ability to transform thinking has meant that daily life is different from five decades ago, and totally different from the time of the Romans, for example. Thinking is transformed in quite ordinary ways: a word is changed; a concept is rethought; an idea is developed; a poem is written; a work of art is created; a scientific law is formulated.

Thinking, and all associated creative and inventive endeavour, has its roots in the undifferentiated matrix of unconscious imagery. It underlies the conscious imagery we use every day of our lives.

The social dreaming matrix is a structured opportunity to share dreams with others. It is both a form and a process. As a form, it is a configuration of people that provides a unique space, or container, or receptacle for thinking of the content of dreams to consider and discover their hidden, infinite meaning. As a process, the matrix, which is explained below, is the system, or web, of emotions and thinking that is present in every social relationship but is unattended and not acknowledged, for the most part. The matrix mirrors the unconscious, or infinite, processes in waking life that give rise to dreaming when asleep.

In social dreaming the dreamers tell their dreams to others. Although individuals are necessary to dream the dreams, the dream itself is not just a personal possession, for it also captures the political and institutional aspects of the dreamers’ social context...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• The history of social dreaming
• Chapter One Social dreaming in a company
• Chapter Two What is social dreaming?
• Chapter Three The marvelling mind of humans
• Chapter Four The underestimated value of unconscious thinking
• Chapter Five The differences of consciousness in relation to the unconscious
• Chapter Six Working with the social dreaming matrix
• Chapter Seven Social dreaming as it illuminates political realities
• Chapter Eight Social dreaming, quantum reality, and the digital age
• Chapter Nine Working hypotheses on social dreaming
• Chapter Ten Case study
• Chapter Eleven Social dreaming as the shadow of the future
• Chapter Twelve Conclusion
• The last word
• Appendix 1 How does a social dreaming matrix work?
• Appendix 2 Applications of social dreaming
• References And Further Reading
• Index