Social Dreaming

"Social Dreaming" is the name given to a method of working with dreams that are shared and associated to within a gathering of people, coming together for this purpose. Its immediate origins date back to the early 1980s. At that time, Gordon Lawrence was on the scientific staff of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. He was a core member of the Institute's Group Relations Programme, within which he had developed a distinctive approach centring around the concept of "relatedness" — that is, the ways in which individual experience and behaviour reflects and is structured by conscious and unconscious constructs of the group or organization in the mind...

The idea of social dreaming argues that dreams are relevant to the wider social sphere and have a collective resonance that goes beyond the personal narrative. In this fascinating collection, the principles of social dreaming are explored to uncover shared anxieties and prejudices, suggest likely responses, enhance cultural surveys, inform managerial policies and embody community affiliation. Including, for the first time, a coherent epistemology to support the theoretical principles of the field, the book reflects upon and extends the theory and philosophy behind the method, as well as discussing new research in the area, and how social dreaming practice is conducted in a range of localities, situations and circumstances. The book will appeal to anyone interested in the idea that social dreaming can help us to delve deeper into the question of what it means to be human, from psychoanalysts to sociologists and beyond.

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.

Dickens was known for his incredible imagination and fiery social protest. In Social Dreaming , Elaine Ostry examines how these two qualities are linked through Dickens's use of the fairy tale, a genre that infuses his work. To many Victorians, the fairy tale was not childish: it promoted the imagination and fancy in a materialistic, utilitarian world. It was a way of criticizing society so that everyone could understand. Like Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, Dickens used the fairy tale to promote his ideology. In this first book length study of Dickens's use of the fairy tale as a social tool, Elaine Ostry applies exciting new criticism by Jack Zipes and Maria Tatar, among others, that examines the fairy tale in a socio-historical light to Dickens's major works but also his periodicals-the most popular middle-class publications in Victorian times.

How to use design as a tool to create not only things but ideas, to speculate about possible futures. Today designers often focus on making technology easy to use, sexy, and consumable. In Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby propose a kind of design that is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas. For them, design is a means of speculating about how things could be—to imagine possible futures. This is not the usual sort of predicting or forecasting, spotting trends and extrapolating; these kinds of predictions have been proven wrong, again and again. Instead, Dunne and Raby pose “what if” questions that are intended to open debate and discussion about the kind of future people want (and do not want). Speculative Everything offers a tour through an emerging cultural landscape of design ideas, ideals, and approaches. Dunne and Raby cite examples from their own design and teaching and from other projects from fine art, design, architecture, cinema, and photography. They also draw on futurology, political theory, the philosophy of technology, and literary fiction. They show us, for example, ideas for a solar kitchen restaurant; a flypaper robotic clock; a menstruation machine; a cloud-seeding truck; a phantom-limb sensation recorder; and devices for food foraging that use the tools of synthetic biology. Dunne and Raby contend that if we speculate more—about everything—reality will become more malleable. The ideas freed by speculative design increase the odds of achieving desirable futures.

This broad range of papers covers different aspects of social dreaming.The book begins with a summary of the Social Dreaming Matrix conceptualised as a temporary system with its intakes, transformation processes and outputs. The remaining chapters cover social dreaming in different contexts including, amongst others, from the perspectives of art, architecture, theatre, working with immigrants, with pilots and lawyers and family mediators and hospitals.All the papers cover areas outside of the goal orientated activities of the institution, and examine what they may be saying about the organization of the participants.

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.

The Social Dream-Drawing Workshop is a pioneering, practical guide for professionals who work with people going through major life transitions, such as career change, relocation or bereavement. These transitions can evoke enormous feelings of uncertainty and are times of vivid dreaming. Social Dream-Drawing is a highly effective method of group work that mobilizes the dream’s enormous capacity to help us adapt to life, whatever challenges it throws at us. This user-friendly book explains the underlying key concepts and basic steps of the Social Dream-Drawing method, from sharing dream drawings in a group environment to running digital sessions. It shows how working with these expressive drawings can bring an otherwise internal experience out into the open and serve as lifelong mementos of key times in our lives. Including drawings and testimonials from workshop participants and guidance on creating a safe and supportive environment, The Social Dream-Drawing Workshop will appeal to therapists and counsellors as well as social workers, coaches and anyone interested in exploring this fascinating practice.

Social Dreaming is the name given to a method of working with dreams that are shared and associated within a gathering of people, coming together for this purpose. In the first chapter, he outlines some ideas on this phenomenon. Here follows a wide-ranging collection of essays on the experiences of various practitioners, either personal or what they have found when taking this phenomenon into the wider social arena, such as the church, schools, consultancy and working with children.

This collection addresses the ways in which the contributors approach their study of the objects and practices of utopianism (understood as social anticipations and visions produced through texts and social experiments) and of how, in turn, those objects and practices have shaped their intellectual work and research perspectives.