Facilitated by Artists as Visionaries Social Dreaming Network:

Shelly Goebel-Parker, Nita Turnage, Hap Philips, Carol Haake, and Michele Ryker-Owens

All are invited to participate. Social dreaming is a community-building process that has existed in many cultures. By sharing their dreams, community members make clearer what exists in the collective social unconscious. Although the dreams come from individuals, when they are shared in this way they belong to the community.

The social dreaming matrix is constructed as both a container and a bridge. It contains the dreams and dream associations developed by a group of individuals. It bridges between interior life of the group members and the social context within and outside the matrix. Often the themes, imagery and events of the larger world become revealed and understood through the collective dreams within the matrix. The space of the matrix is set up as a spiral of chairs, directred towards a center point. Participants cannont easily make eye contact, but all are part of the whole circle. During the dream matrix each person holds the collective dreamtime on behalf of the larger community and the social structures to which each of us belong.

Once in the matrix, there is no analysis, commentary, questioning or direct response to each others’ dreams. Rather, it is the uncensored unfolding of the collective personal and group consciousness. Each dreamer speaks the imagery of their nighttime dreams and the spontaneous imagery and lucid dreaming that comes into the matrix. At the conclusion the dreamers usually discuss how they see the dreams relating to the larger group. They are also invited to go to the Alcove Studio on the 1st floor and create.

We do social dreaming in the Community Arts Training (CAT) Institute to illustrate the creative process. We offer the Social Dreaming Matrix here in honor and memory of Carol Lark, a CAT Institute alum, who introduced this practice.