On April 12th I sat down in front of a screen on the work table right under my boat and connected with 12 people for a Social Dreaming Matrix. I had been eager to host a Social Dreaming Matrix again. One year ago I hosted two in less than a month, in real life and in a real room. The first in the meeting room offered by a counselor and therapist in St.Simons Island USA, the second in a Yoga and Photography Studio in Montreal, Quebec.
This time the social distancing precautions due to the ongoing pandemic prevented me to do so.
I have been meeting monthly with a research group on Social Dreaming in Milan Italy for over a year. The research group is promoted by members of the ARIELE School of Psychosocioanalisys. As I am rarely in Italy I am one of the fews that joins from a computer screen, but hosting a Matrix where all participants connect remotely was new experience for me.
All over the World we are experiencing an increase in use of this technology to support human interaction, and many people including myself are opening their eyes to the versatility and power of such type of technology. I decided to use the Zoom platform, just because I had more familiarity with it, I didn’t actually researched which service would work best. In hindsight all went well with one participant that had to drop of the call due to connection issues on their end.
The organization and promotion of this event happened with the help of Facebook. Some of the participants come from my personal network of acquaintances and collaborators with whom I had SD experiences in the past. The critical mass however came from people who found the event on Social Media.
The response was surprising and the maximum number of 12 participants stretched to 13, with others that were left out and could not join. The decision over which number of participant was precautional and based on intuition on how many people I was comfortable interacting with at the same time on an online meeting. After the experience I realized that the number could be stretched by 1 or 2 more unit but it is about right.
7 women and 6 men joined from different countries, particularly Austria (1), Canada(2), Israel(1), Italy(1), Spain (1), UK(2) and USA (5).
What is peculiar about social dreaming is that often only the essential is summoned: Many details about participants’ stories and identities are just left suspended as the individual was just a function of the collective gathered observing the dreams and association whirling in the matrix. The emerging essentials are the main object of the social dreaming, and they create patterns participants observe and keep weave, or, to use an image of a dream from the session, they are like “driftwood weaving itself into a waterfall”.
For this reason the introduction of each participant was left to name, place where they called from and what they could see from their windows. This did not prevent the session from being active from the very beginning and people from sharing even intimate information and images.
A dream about seeing the never changing eyes of a friend long forgotten introduced a thread that followed in the rest of the matrix. What is the part of us that never change? The eyes, as the mirror of the soul offered an anchor, a dream about Donald Trump seen through interviews that span his entire career shows a face and manner that have not changed, a sort of coherence in the character.
The dream of the three ponds, where water becomes progressively more dangerous and able to suck you in perpetually, introduced the theme of entrapment followed by similar dreams like the one where a participant goes through a window and a room with tight walls, stairs that are steep and have an obstacle that cannot be passed, a prison that looked like a comfortable hostel but still restricted mobility. The associations on this level referred mostly to the experience of lockdown that many are living today.
Another dimension explored starting from the dream of the ponds was how nature is often perceived as hostile. The history of Homo Sapiens is strongly characterized by a progressive emancipation from the limits imposed by nature. Now the hostile nature is back and we struggle to control the diffusion of this pandemic.
A dream that unlocks some of these threads see a staircase with several boxes of fiendishly looking snakes but that looked closer appear docile and vegetarian. The obstacle that we perceive are sometimes illusion propped up by fear and ignorance.
Animals come into the matrix space, the Tarantula a spider that do not weave, but it is thought to be so, wild horse with a blanket of ice on their backs running toward a precipice and shaking it off. For how big the impact of Humans on it, Nature continues indifferent to our wills and whims.
A participant evoke the image of the Spider – grandmother, an important figure in the mythology and folklore of the Southwestern Native Americans. This links the matrix to the dimension of the Elderly people, symbol of wisdom and leadership. By coincidence the day of the Matrix was my grandmother’s birthday and I let the participants know. Queen Elizabeth’s speech on Coronavirus was referenced as an example of measure and dignity in stern contrast with speeches form political leaders. At the same time older people form a weak link in society that requires extra care and protection especially because of the current pandemic.
Towards the end of the time dedicated to the matrix there is a mention to a renewed burst of authoritarian political figures and behaviors on the edges of the Covid-19 crisis.
The session interrupts with a break. Once back we resume a shorter session of Reflection on the content emerged in the Matrix, where we try to bring the discourse to our life.
There is a thread that appear, an un-metabolized dimension, when one participant says she is having a headache. This nudges the participants to re-examine their own feeling during the matrix. An oscillatory movement between hope and despair, feeling trapped and in control seem to describe the progress of the matrix and link it to real-life events. This world challenge is keeping us on our toes, authoritarianism is re-examined and linked to our own well-being. How do we feel in the middle of all of this?
The reference to elderly people provokes a parallel between North American culture and European culture in regards to how differently elders are treated. The American way is questioned and seen as having a broken relationship with the elders.