Let’s Dream Together is a shared, co-designed community, co-evolving on the format of Social Dreaming.
The series began in April 2020 and it is sponsored by Psychology of Sailing. Open internationally, it welcomed so far more than 40 participants from countries such as Austria, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Denmark, France, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, Serbia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, U.K., USA which were able/forced to connect via Zoom software due to the ongoing pandemic. Participants with different professional background, levels of expertise in Social Dreaming co-exist and cooperate in the community.
The series was later dubbed “Experiments in Social Dreamings” because in every new event we make changes in the hosting team and co-design the Social Dreaming event to see how this influences the experience. The Centre for Social Dreaming co-sponsors the experiments that have now set on a 3 weekly pace on Saturdays.
Experiment #9 was on Saturday October 31, 2020 at 8:00 Los Angeles / 11:00 New York/ 12:00 Rio de Janeiro / 16:00 UK/ 17:00 CET
Leslie Goldenberg (USA), Martin Walker (USA) and Sara Mononen (CAN) designed and hosted this matrix with the following structure:
- Social Dreaming Matrix #1 45 minutes
- Reflection 30 minutes
- Social Dreaming Matrix #2 15 minutes
DREAMS OF THE SOCIAL DREAMING MATRIX #1
(1) Dream about a woman dancing in a sexual way, moving to the floor, doing a spiral dance. Wearing tight trousers. She is flirting with me, inviting me to cross a doorstep. Should I cross over the doorstep with her I wonder? And then I wake up.
(2) With people without being able to see them, I could hear the theme of the conversation was the reconstruction, it will be going on and on and then image of a city in Colombia, Cartagena, there was a hill with a yellow dirt the one you see in construction side, on the other side a beautiful church, memory of a wedding, and on the top of the hill there was a woman, she was looking at me.
(3) A church in Rwanda (in reality Tutsi were betrayed by priest and massacred in the Rwandan genocide in this church) in the dream a young man comes in I am sitting in a pew. He comes closer, I move away, her comes closer, I move away again. Then I realize that the young man is my father. In reality he is dead.
(4) In a temple/church in a huge room, I don’t feel comfortable so I walked to the side walk where there was a pig. I walk back into the room, I’m searching for a familiar face, I wanted to ask someone what they are going to do with the pig. Nobody seem to see the pig. Maybe they are going to eat the pig, so I walk again deeper into the huge room. When I go out again the pig is laughing, he doesn’t know we are going to eat it. No religious symbol in the room. When I go out again the pig was gone
(5) Met colleague who had betrayed me, in the dream he is persecuting me. Connection to betrayal in other dreams (~ Father, Priest, President, Pig) in the end we incorporate evil by eating it?
(6) Bathroom with no male/ female signs. I asked my youngest sister only men hear more women trying to arrive and walk into bathrooms that were full of men.
(7) I had a dream in which I was a woman: a Jewish scientist in Nazi occupied France. I was denied authorization for something I wanted to do
(8) My father was a rabbi he had to lie down because he could not tolerate something that was in the room, he put his head in the lap of a woman figure, cradled by the woman.
(9) Dream about father, arms around him. Silver necklace or a compass. A talisman. Feeling was on of calm and protection, but I was protecting and holding him.
(10) looking from a monocular telescope looking to a woman and we look at each other’s face with this rifle thru the telescope target aim.
REFLECTION
The main figure taking the scene in the matrix and reflection was the pig as representation of food, which is to be sacrifice and eaten. immediately the animal became the vessel of associations on what’s repulsive, greedy, dirty, vessel of disease (swine flu).
Other dreams elicited the feminine dimension and its political troubles: woman as mother, Durga (conqueror of man), woman who seduces and it’s seduced, and masculine and feminine seeing each other from afar.
There is an opposite contrasting element, the father figure and the masculine heroes (good priest, ulysses, Sean Connery, dead fathers) perceived as a troubled or missing roles ion Society, yet a point of reference to look at. The feminine and masculine dimensions dancing together or seeing each other through a telescope with the opening and closing signed the opening and closing of the matrix.
The political element with the imminent US election became a voice fagocitating every possible association, from the dreams to the present political horizon.
-The voice of the dream get lost, as the voice of the dream in the following matrix, the final one. In this case giving again space to dreams allowed the emergence of dreams from under the heavy blanket of anxieties coming from the US election.
In the foreground the element of the church/temple, sacred Architecture that contains the unthinkable like the genocides: Rwanda, the genocide as political choice (Mass psychology of fascism, W. Reich). The Matrix here seem to acquire the meaning of womb (in Spanish, the noun Matriz is often referred to the womb).
Because the incest taboo opposes the libido and blocks the path to regression, it is possible for the libido to be canalized into the mother analogies thrown up by the unconscious ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 313
In that way the libido becomes progressive again, and even attains a level of consciousness higher than before ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 313
The meaning and purpose of this canalization are particularly evident when the city appears in place of the mother: the infantile attachment (whether primary or secondary) is a crippling limitation for the adult, whereas attachment to the city fosters his civic virtues and at least enables him to lead a useful existence ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 313
In primitives the tribe takes the place of the city
This discussion makes me think of an article I read last week in the Journal of Applied Psychology. Women’s Leadership Is Associated With Fewer Deaths During the COVID-19 Crisis: Quantitative and Qualitative Analyses of United States Governors https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2020-47004-001.html
The daily dreamer: what is the headline from this matrix?
The hosts asked the participants to find a headline that would summarize the social dreaming matrix.
Fake news: Women will save the world
Mummy save us!
The Invisible Force
The comforting Arms of a Mother….is it that unusual….?
Kamala Harris killed by the Trump or proud boys
On the way to Hogfarm I lost my mom and dad
Its the only thing we can be sure of..
ANOTHER POWER IS POSSIBLE..
Women power, saviors, fear and the sacrificed animal
I trust womb for my dreams
Dreams of flirting with pigs and death
from Wavy Gravy in California to the bourgeois Pig in New york
Everyone! find your feminine!
DREAMS OF THE SOCIAL DREAMING MATRIX #2
1 / 11) a vessel my partner and I are constructing together. We are getting married. my partner drops the rings. His sister and two cousins come. They are on their way to a party. They look like cyborgs, learning veils. Black, pink. purple stripes. We are in lockdown so they would be breaking the rules. But they are young and rebellious.
2 / 12) I was mute, I couldn’t speak, I didn’t know who was home, I wanted to cry for help but the door of my room was empty.
being in this matrix echoes my experience of communication in the virtual world of Zoom when a group gathers. that is, the absence of a feeling of real, felt relatedness
3 /13) authorized to share with you: Hispanic woman. Took a taxi t go home. The driver was very skinny. He had a hood, so could not see his face. She gave address of her house and expected him to take her home but to her surprise he took her to a cemetery. Why? > he says this is your house. Then she saw that the man was a skeleton. She asked her husband for help but he could not help her. She went back to sleep and saw the hooded skeleton again. He tried to rape her. At some point she managed to drive him away and she felt GREAT.
POST MATRIX INTEGRATION
As introduced in the previous synopsis here is a space open to possible integration of the matrix that arise in the days following the event. There is a space left open for that in a mailing list that circulate among the participants, and as well on social media channels like the Facebook group of Social Dreaming Community.
Some participants expressed the feeling that this SDM was like a dance.
C.G.Jung talks about the symbol of the Church/Mother in Complete Works 5, Para 313. Together with the Church, the city, cave and well also seem to represent this symbolic area. All those images appeared in the previous editions.
A thread of the ‘unseen factor’, emerged during the reflection but also in the integration parts: For example:
– not knowing what’s on the other side of the doorstep
– unable to see people
– no one else seeing the pig
– the sense of smell (invisible)
– no visible sign to indicate what gender the bathroom is for
– churches / temples etc. — places where people go to relate to the unseen (god)
– betrayal, which often happens behind one’s back, only known after the fact
– Inability to read the emotion of a woman and needing to look through a monocle
– the feminine, women – historically, with a few exceptions, often unseen in political/spiritual realms
The theme of ‘invisibility’ or ‘unseen’ is quite poignant, given that 2020 has had a pandemic as its backdrop, a virus which is invisible, yet seemingly everywhere.
An interesting article on how this virus is forcing wealthy westerners to look at death; talk about it; deal with it. Death, again, takes us into the realm of the unknown, the unseen:
On pre-election dawn association to catastrophe and US political analysis:
https://medium.com/presencing-institute-blog/the-darkest-hour-is-just-before-the-dawn-cc4df0749108
I love this write up. The use of visual images makes the matrix come alive again for me.
The Jungian dream symbol interpretations are rich in and of themselves, but introducing them here seems to dilute the powerful images connecting death and femeninity that came up so powerfully in this matrix.
The hardest part in writing about social dreaming is in capturing the experience of being there itself. While Jung’s contributions to the idea of a collective unconscious are seminal, his views differ from social dreaming in some very fundamental ways. IMHO the most SIGNIFICANT way is in Jung’s primary task being the elaboration of the human psyche, while SD concerns itself exclusively with the realm of dreams and the ways in which dreams relate to EACH other. While Jung used the idea of “universal” archetypes operating in such a way as to makes sense of the human experience, SD eschews ideas relating to the individual psyche so as to create as open a space as possible for the language of dreams to makes itself known almost exclusively as a phenomena arising from itself, rather than any ideas we may have about them. This DELICATE balance is very difficult to achieve when we SHIFT our focus from the dreams, to the process of reflection reflecting about them. Historically, in SD this has led to tension between different ways of doing it, between “reflection” events and “dialogue” events, etc. . While this too big a topic to take on here, this #9 Experiment in Social Dreaming was wonderful successful in tapping into the essence of social dreaming by ENDING in a dreamatrix itself.
My humble gratitude for this learning opportunity!
Hi Martin, thanks for your comment. I think the more the SD expands across people and borders (current times are a huge accelerator of this) the more it will inevitably merge, transform, bastardize, mutate, hybridize, cross-species transmit. It is indeed amazing to witness how alien form take space, the Jungian symbols sits beside the “orthodox way of doing things”. It is true that contamination of different species may create life-threatening conditions and it may very well spell the death of a tradition but this is how evolution works, both biological and cultural evolution. I think the delicate balance is useful if allows a frame of sense for outsiders as well as for insiders, or else the limited gene pool of the tribe will keep bring weaker and weaker offspring inequipped to face the challenges of time. I dream of a dream where jungian dreams can sit side by side with buddhist dreams, alcheringa dreams, lucid dreams and gordon lawrencian dream. Thanks Martin for your wonderful contributing both as host and as a active member of the community.