Social Dreaming, Associative Thinking and Intensities of Affect

Julian Manley

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319925547
• eBook ISBN: 9783319925554
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Personality in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book describes a way of sharing dreams in a group, called 'social dreaming'. It explores how the sharing of real, night time dreams, in a group, can offer information on and insight into ourselves and the worlds we live in and share. It investigates how we can turn dream images, and ideas and feelings that arise from these images, into conscious thought, before describing the ways in which these can be used. Using a background of the psychosocial combined with a philosophical lens influenced by the work of Gilles Deleuze, Julian Manley shows how social dreaming can be understood as a Deleuzian 'rhizome of affects', a web or a root design where things interconnect in a random and spontaneous fashion rather than in a sequential or linear way. He illustrates how social dreaming can link dreams together into a collage of images, and compares this to the rhizome, where clusters of emotional intensity – which emerge from the dream images – weave and interconnect with other clusters,forming a web of interlinked dream images and emotions. From the basis of this rhizome emerges an interpretation of social dreaming as a 'body without organs' and the social dreaming matrix as a 'smooth space' where meanings emerge from the way these images form connections, and come and go according to our emotions at any particular moment. 

Part ISocial Dreaming: Background and Origins

© The Author(s) 2018

Julian ManleySocial Dreaming, Associative Thinking and Intensities of AffectStudies in the Psychosocialhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92555-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. How It All Began

Julian Manley¹

(1)

University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK

Julian Manley

End Abstract

Introduction: The Very Idea!

Many years ago, when I walked into the room where, as a Master’s student at the University of the West of England (UWE), I was to experience my first social dreaming matrix, hosted by Herbert Hahn, my heart sank. I was at that time immersed in the theory and practice of group relations of the Tavistock kind, and the thought of sitting in this room with my fellow students filled me with dread and frustration. For what could be more futile and boring than sitting in a room listening to other people’s dreams? There was plenty of potential for embarrassing moments too. Surely I wasn’t the only one with ‘funny’ dreams! Knowing something about group dynamics, I couldn’t imagine that the sharing of dreams would do anything more than further exacerbate the psychodynamic tensions in the group and create scapegoats at both ends of the spectrum: those who were open and frank with offering their personal dreams and those who were mute and retired.

How wrong I was! To my astonishment, the group settled into a strange sense of harmonious, almost meditative communion of gentle thoughts and feelings punctuated by dreams of others that –inexplicably – seemed to feel very close to my own life and experiences. The session was calm and a feeling of human warmth pervaded the group. I was flummoxed! This perplexity engaged my curiosity and turned it into a quest to find out what exactly was going on. I have since dropped the ‘exactly’ from that quest, but I still endeavour to unveil the reasons for the effects of the social dreaming matrix on myself and others. After many years of study and practice, this book represents my attempt at answering the general question “what is going on?”

Although the question might be simple, the answers are not. Although dreams might have become a legitimate source of discussion after Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, they have rarely been used beyond the couch, and even in the psychoanalytical encounter, they have most frequently been described as a source of uncovering the repressed and more often than not, sexual thoughts and desires of a patient undergoing treatment for mental health issues. The issues of the couch in Freudian analysis are frequently interpreted as having their origins in childhood distress or trauma. Crucially, in the context of social dreaming and the critical ambition of this book, dreams have only been conceived as sources of knowledge within this dyadic psychoanalytical context, never in a shared group or social environment. There are, therefore, considerable impediments to the use of social dreams in academic research. Even in the field of psychosocial studies, where debates sometimes emerge over the difficulties or even the desirability of fusing the ‘psycho’ and the ‘social’, (see the sometimes acrimonious debate highlighting this polemic in a special issue of Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society journal (2008), Chancer and Andrews (2014) and recently Cummins and Williams (2018)), social dreaming has remained on the fringes of intellectual respectability. When a widely respected academic in the field, precisely one that tends towards the ‘psycho’ of psychosocial studies, Wendy Hollway, asks whether social dreaming may be a method which is ‘too far outside social science research method’, (Hollway 2015, pp. 97–98), you know you have a lot of exploring, thinking and reflecting to do!

A Brief Summary of the Principal Features of Social Dreaming

For the reader who is new to social dreaming, I provide the following précis of the main features of social dreaming that make it essentially different from other methods that might be used in psychosocial and qualitative research. This is a brief description that has the aim of providing a foundation for the book as a whole. For a complete summary of social dreaming as perceived by its originator, Gordon Lawrence, see Lawrence (2005) and Manley (2014).

The Basics

In social dreaming, a group of people sit together in a quiet room to share their real, night-time dreams; these are shared in no particular order, when it ‘feels right’ to one of the participants. Participants may also free associate to each other’s dreams or to other images and emotions that arise in the course of the matrix. The dreams and associations are offered anonymously, with no names mentioned or recorded. The number of participants varies from about 6 to about 35, with an optimal average being 12–18 (although there have been social dreaming events at conferences that have included even more participants). The number of hosts (the name given to the person who explains the task, keeps the time and provides low key facilitation) can also vary, with more being added according to size of matrix. Often, there is only one host. The host does not interpret the material in the course of the matrix; s/he guides and facilitates the enunciations in a neutral fashion. Each session can last between 40 and 75 minutes, depending on circumstance and size of matrix.

Gathering in a ‘Snowflake Pattern’ Seating Arrangement and Facilitation

The participants sit in a snowflake pattern distribution of chairs, the purpose of which is to break up the lines of vision of the participants while still retaining a sense of belonging to a shared space. In Fig. 1.1 below, the arrows indicate that no matter how much a participant might want to look at another directly in the face, this is made difficult through the distribution of the seating arrangement.

Fig. 1.1

The chairs for the social dreaming matrix are arranged in a snowflake pattern to provide containment but also to disturb the sense of addressing others directly. The arrows indicate the possible averted gaze of participants

This arrangement encourages the idea that in social dreaming we are interested primarily in the dream material rather than the individual person who is telling the dream. The deliberate patterning of the seating in this way for the social dreaming matrix also implies a change of role for the host compared to a facilitator or consultant to a group. In the case of social dreaming, the host is not managing the anxieties and psychodynamics of a group process (Bion 1961; Bion Talamo et al. 1998; French and Vince 2002), but rather attempting precisely to avoid these dynamics. The host needs to hold a space that allows for the telling of dreams and associated images through free association. This is achieved through refraining from interpretation and judgment and by linking and making connections between disparate dream images for the purposes of illuminating emergent meaning. When the host invites participants to speak their spontaneous and emerging associations to the dreams and images, the matrix often becomes a space that resembles a ‘stream of consciousness’. The host’s two main tasks are (1) to select relevant connections between what might otherwise appear to the participants as being an irretrievably unconnected welter of images; and (2) to offer working hypotheses intended to clarify and aid understanding without ever resorting to overt interpretation.

Post-Matrix Session

The post-matrix session that I conduct for research purposes differs slightly from traditional practice. Following the social dreaming matrix, after a short break, the chairs are rearranged into a more conventional distribution (e.g. a circle or a horseshoe configuration), for a post-matrix reflection session, the purpose of which is to allow the participants to debrief and find meaning in the images and associations that have emerged from the previous social dreaming matrix session. The host takes notes on a flipchart or board of the most relevant themes, images and ideas that have emerged from the matrix. This session may last between 30 and 60 minutes. In some versions of social dreaming practice, this session might often be a dialogue or reflection session without the note-taking aspect.

It has always been recognised that there is a need for something to happen after the social dreaming matrix, even though it is the matrix itself that has captured our attention. The need arises from the fact that participants in the matrix may be left with a bewildering sense of a mass of dream images and associations that are felt to be in various degrees of comprehension and confusion. The post-matrix events, therefore, are designed to help participants in their transition back to a more everyday manner of thinking and to attempt to make some sense of the dreams and images of the matrix.

There are various other possibilities for the post-matrix sessions. Typically, matrices are followed up by some form of ‘dream reflection group’ (Lawrence 2007b). The shifting away from the ‘reverie’ space of the matrix to this ‘dialogue’ space is emphasised by rearranging the chairs in a rectangle so that they are neither the ‘snowflake’ of the matrix, nor the circle of the small group recognisable as typical of a group relations conference. The sense of ‘dialogue’ in the reflection group has been closely associated to David Bohm’s use of the word as defined in his book On Dialogue (1996), where he talks about ‘participatory thought’ and the ‘infinite’. Recently, however, the tendency has been to try to go back to the dreams themselves, for example, by some sort of ‘synthesis’ of the dream images in a ‘dream reflection group’, (or ‘systems synthesis’). These are opportunities for the participants, with the help of the host, to reflect upon the dream images, which are linked together to form a ‘collage’ of images, from which working hypotheses are postulated. Another example of a post-matrix event is the Creative Role Synthesis (Lawrence 2007c), where an individual presents to a small group from the bigger social dreaming matrix, a problem or puzzle from the workplace and any associated dreams that the presenter feels may be relevant. Then the group is invited to free associate to the puzzle and its dreams in a way that can allow meaning to suggest itself.

The Data

If data collected from social dreaming is to be used for research, both the matrix and the post-matrix session have to be audio recorded and transcribed for later data analysis. The data analysis begins with th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. Social Dreaming: Background and Origins
• Part II. Deleuzian Approaches
• Part III. From Data to New Thinking
• Back Matter