by Christina Leimer | Personal, Reflections & Stories
I like to take a walk and look at ordinary things in the environment from a different perspective. When I do, I’m often surprised, sometimes delighted, and occasionally grateful– if for nothing else just the ability to notice momentary beauty, oddity, interesting juxtapositions of lines and color, light and shadow.
Is this what you’d ordinarily see if you were the height of a 3-year old?
Feels kind of spikey. Why the single black spike among the gold?
The combination of blue shapes at this building entrance attracted my attention. The silver gray etching on the windows below the wave and the silver vent in the upper right give it contrast.
What do you think this is? I like the juxtaposition of curvy and straight lines, complementary color and variety of textures. It’s part of a playground jungle gym.
I like the repeating sequence of dark and light blocks, staggered sets of vertical bars and long edge lines as the sun slants across them and shades the balconies on this tall downtown apartment building.
Another repeating pattern that caught my attention. The light and shadow in the downtown apartment building can look flat, depending on how you see it. In this set of stairs the depth is clear in the lighter background columns.
Water in a fountain falling on rocks looks like old, rough glass when you stop its flow in a photo.
by Christina Leimer | Researching Consciousness for Social Change
I’m intrigued by societies using dreams for collective purposes. Mostly those are small and indigenous. But I wonder if it’s possible in complex, industrialized, materialist Western societies, and if so, how would it work? And what could it achieve? With that questioning I found “social dreaming.” If it worked, it certainly faded, and maybe died, with its inventor. But what might we learn from it?
What is Social Dreaming?
Social dreaming, developed by Tavistock Institute consultant W. Gordon Lawrence in London and France in the late 1980s and 1990s, is a process in which individuals from a company, school, religious institution, community or any type of organization, share their night-time dreams with the group. The dreams aren’t interpreted to guide the individual who dreamed the dream. Instead, the group looks for patterns of information or meaning that show up in multiple members’ dreams. That information is important for the group as a whole.
Uncovering Hidden Knowledge & Meaning
After each person shares their dream, participants use free association to stimulate ideas and images that reveal the patterns. In his critique of Lawrence’s work, Julian Manley says the communication flow in these sessions can be similar to stream of consciousness. Also, people usually feel a sense of transcendence, as if meaning has emerged holistically, almost magically. In more structured follow-up sessions participants make sense of the new information and think about it more concretely.
The idea is that we all hold unconscious social, or shared, knowledge that dreams can reveal (Manley, p. 335). This knowing may be about culture or the social environment, including day-to-day group dynamics. The social dreaming process can make this unconscious, or implicit, knowledge explicit. When it’s brought together in the social dreaming process, the information can be used to solve the group’s problems. It can create new thinking and possibilities. At least that was Lawrence’s intent.
However, new knowledge, or unconscious information brought to light, often challenges the status quo. That’s essential if change is needed or serious problems are going to truly be solved. I’ve seen a lot of ignoring the real issues and problems at company retreats though. It takes openness and trust that can be difficult to foster in day-to-day work environments, especially competitive ones. So, when Manley says social dreaming wasn’t a financial success for Lawrence, I suspect this is one reason why.
What Happened to Social Dreaming?
Lawrence’s first book about his idea, Introduction to Social Dreaming: Transforming Thinking, was published in 2005. He worked out the process and published multiple books and articles on the subject until his death in 2013. Subsequently, some of his colleagues set up the Social Dreaming International Network and the Centre for Social Dreaming. Neither of these organizations seem to be very active, so I suspect social dreaming is defunct. (If anyone reading this hears otherwise, please let me know.)
Regardless, I think there are worthwhile takeaways.
Learning from Lawrence’s Social Dreaming Work
Takeaway 1: Ideas that run counter to culture might not be accepted
One is that any idea or process that counters cultural norms and expectations will have hard ground to try to get roots into. Social dreaming first occurred to Lawrence in 1982, several years before he was able to put it into practice. He had to leave Tavistock to do it.
Takeaway 2: Determine what information dreams can provide that waking consciousness doesn’t
When Lawrence recognized dreams among Tavistock group participants that were influenced by the group, he interpreted it within a sociological/psychological framework of group relations. Social expectations and happenings in the social world were influencing the individual psyche. It showed up in dreams. That’s an important finding. Now that we know that this happens though, would dream sharing and free association add any more information than simply paying close attention to how we’re being affected? Maybe, but it’s important to distinguish what kind of information that would be.
Takeaway 3: To use a process effectively, clarity about its assumptions and purpose is essential
Lawrence’s thinking about social dreaming can be confusing sometimes. In part, that’s probably due to working out something new. It’s an inherent part of the process. However, Manley says Lawrence sometimes included things in social dreaming that he wanted to believe, or that interested him, in ways that make it difficult to do research and development. That’s an important reminder: Clarity is essential if we’re going to be able to apply a process. Certainly to test it.
Takeaway 4: True innovation requires risk
I think much of the confusion in Lawrence’s work comes from his being torn between staying close to the socially accepted boundaries and wanting to make a leap into transcendent, spiritual, even cosmic realms. At times he equates unconscious knowledge with the infinite, quantum physics and David Bohm’s idea of the implicate order and expands the social into the universal relying on Fritjof Capra’s work. At other times, he stops short of cosmic or mystical assertions, Manley says.
That territory of consciousness does get squishy. We just don’t know that much about what it is or how it works. Also, science by-and-large doesn’t deal with the transcendental. Wanting, and needing, to maintain professional credibility, but sensing and experiencing more, Lawrence’s vacillating is understandable. This credibility risk still exists today.
Takeaway 5: Distinguish between personal/private and collective information in dreams
According to Manley, Lawrence never considers that a dream might not contribute to a collective but be only for the individual. In social dreaming, once the dream enters the group through the telling, it becomes part of the material participants work with in the shared dream space. Besides the potential distortions this could produce in shared meaning, it doesn’t allow for dreams to carry both private, personal meaning and collective meaning. It doesn’t offer ways to distinguish between dream material that’s private and material that’s from and/or for the collective, either. Understanding these distinctions, if they exist, is essential for developing a credible, effective social dreaming process.
How Might Social Dreaming Help Us Now?
The 21st Century U.S. during a global pandemic is a different time and place than Western Europe in the late 20th Century. Whether it’s ripe for some form of dreaming for social/cultural/collective purposes is unclear. If it is, it’ll be useful to know what’s been tried, what worked and what didn’t, and to what end. Social dreaming is so culturally different though, we’ll have to break the chains to do it.
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Christina Leimer, aka The Intuitive Sociologist
by Christina Leimer | Researching Consciousness for Social Change
When I think of imagining, I think of it like this:
Photo Source: Canva
I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything. —Alice Walker
If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at the moment.—Adrienne Rich
Creative, fantastical, transformative, radical and free. This kind of imagining can change our lives and our world. But it’s not the most common type of imagination, by far. And it’s not the only type that can lead to change. After reading philosophers’ debates about imagination, it makes me wonder how we’d live without this mental process, imagining takes so many forms. Sometimes we even use it unconsciously, without recognizing what we’re doing is imagining.
Here are some other important ways we use imagination that can improve our lives and facilitate organizational and social change.
One of the most common is perspective-taking. Imagination allows us to step into different views than our own and try them out. It allows us to feel how someone else might feel. I’ve thought of empathy as an emotion, but in his article about using imagination in business, Murray Hunter, consultant, entrepreneur and researcher, calls it a type of imagination. When I reflect on this, it does seem empathy includes imagining. But whatever comprises empathic perspective-taking, it can be used to project what others might do whether in business or any other area of life. Perspective-taking can give us a way to escape from circumstances, at least mentally, or to look beyond the world as it is. Imagination lets us ask what would happen if things had been different. And it helps us relate to the larger community.
Concerned about ethical decision making in business, professors Mark A. Seabright and Dennis Moberg suggest moral imagination as a way to counter corrupting influences of organizations. Moral imagination helps us think about the potential for help or harm. Who and what might be aided or hurt. They say imagination influences moral sensitivity, moral judgment, moral intention and moral behavior. Imagination enhances moral sensitivity by helping us take others’ perspectives, widen the community being included for consideration, and expanding possibilities for action. Imagination keeps moral judgment flexible. It gives the ability to take into account varying rules, cases and ethos’, rather than lapsing into rigidity. Further, imagination can shape intention and action by invoking our sense of self. That can help us remain compassionate, keeping our own behavior in mind, instead of judging others by idealized standards.
Other common uses of imagination are scenario planning and strategic imagination. This type of imagining focuses on possibilities, what could be. It’s a form of visioning. It also involves attention and perception—noticing characteristics of the environment or circumstances and mentally evaluating them for opportunities to achieve the vision. Using strategic imagination, we generate alternatives, mull them over and imagine the potential consequences. Like other forms of imagination, strategic imagination requires mental flexibility. But also balanced focus. Attention that’s too open leaves us bouncing from idea to idea, unable to land on one and work it through in our mind. Focus that’s too tight blocks possibilities and can even become obsession.
A form of imagination that’s close to my heart is what sociologist C. Wright Mills called the sociological imagination. It’s not something unique to sociologists. Sociology done without it though can be boring and add little insight. Sociological imagination focuses on big social problems, sees how they relate to history and socio-cultural systems, and how these macro-level forces affect individuals’ beliefs, values, character and behavior. It can go the opposite way too, imagining how individuals affect human systems. Sociological imagination allows us to move from individual meaning-making up through small groups, communities, industries, societies and even global systems and see effects at multiple levels simultaneously. It’s a remarkably flexible mental tool.
Another of my favorites is daydreaming. I hadn’t thought about this as imagination, but of course, what else would it be? According to Hunter, surplus attention and unguided imagination—free association—allows our right hemisphere to take charge. It gathers a range of information from our memory and recombines it, makes new meaning from it, or helps us see a problem, issue or the environment from a different perspective. Others see daydreaming as a passive form of imagining that involves emotion, like superhero fantasies or aspirations. Daydreaming can bring pleasure and can be a way to rehearse potential action.
Imagination involves divergent thinking. This mental attitude and aptitude for roaming across boundaries, taking in information from multiple places and in many forms, is unlike logical thinking which stays within a narrow path. Imagination lends itself to thought experiments, a form of research we don’t hear much about. It was used by Galileo, Descartes, Newton and Leibniz and played a huge role in quantum mechanics and relativity. Thought experiments are used in philosophy, physics, economics and history and seem like a reasonable way to try out social systems change.
After my initial trip through readings on imagination, I now have a lot more questions about it. How does imagination relate to memory? To dreams? To perception? In fantasy, we can totally disregard the rules of society, science and nature, so is perception involved in this kind of imagining? Does imagination itself have power to influence or can that happen only when enacted by a physical body in the material world? Remember, Alice Walker says, imagination can go anywhere. It can do anything.
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Christina Leimer, aka The Intuitive Sociologist
by Christina Leimer | CounterSpeak, Society/Culture
Photo Source: Canva
There’s a hydraulic model of San Francisco Bay in Sausalito. It’s the size of two football fields, housed inside a building where the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers used to simulate conditions in the bay to test the effects of building dams, oil spills, storms and shoreline activity. Inside their small theater at the model’s entrance, I watched a video about the Bay’s history. We’re in the land of the Gold Rush, in the mid-1880s. Old photos showed miners wielding high-pressure hoses, blasting the tops off mountains, the rock and dirt washing into rivers that fed the bay. So much, it nearly filled in the bay. To only 18 feet deep. This bay isn’t a pond. It’s big!
Suddenly, 150 years of American progress snapped into sharp relief. “We’re like locusts!” I thought, with a shiver. In the lifespan of four generations, we’ve built intercontinental train tracks, interstate highways and airports, strung electric and telephone wires across the continent, run cables under oceans, dammed rivers and diverted water to build mega-cities like Los Angeles.
Any non-human animal or plant species we saw ripping through the environment at this speed, we’d exterminate.
But we’ve not put any brakes on this behavior. Why not? Because it looks like progress, like a good thing. In many ways, it is. It’s certainly made contemporary life in developed countries convenient and comfortable. I text and talk from my cellphone, take and send pictures, any time to anyone anywhere in the world. Planes and ships can carry me almost anywhere on earth, and rockets can rocket me to the moon. I’m not hot or cold unless I choose to be. And if I get sick, chances are good that medicine or surgery can cure me. It’s extended our life expectancy by decades. But we’re so immersed in this view of progress that we don’t recognize it has put us in chains psychologically and emotionally.
It’s locked us into a machine mentality and culture that’s anti-human.
Many years ago, in a workshop for evaluators, someone who was working for an international development agency talked about the difficulty they were having introducing dairy farming to island people. The organization gave them cows that they were supposed to feed and milk. Instead, they killed and ate the cattle or let them run loose. Eventually the development workers asked the people why they weren’t accepting the progress being offered them. The answer: they enjoyed their fishing and foraging life and community and leisure the rest of the time. They didn’t want to be driven and locked into a routine, required cycle of milking and feeding and maintaining another species and becoming dependent on that artificial system.
In our highly developed, routinized society, we hardly even notice what we’ve given up, the trade-offs we’ve made
it’s been so long ago that we made them and we spend so much of our lives maintaining them. We’re bound by timelines and timeframes and milestones and outcomes. We expect to see an end product, something that’s new, no matter how slightly, no matter if needed or not. We compete with each other; it’s baked into how we live. Who owns what, where they live, and what they drive, and who they associate with, and what kind of work they do, and where they are in the hierarchy.
I’ve worked in higher education for decades, where the academy is supposed to be a collegial community of scholars. It’s not. A professor once told me, the fights are so bitter in the academy because there’s so little to win. Even with less resources to fight over than in large companies, the competitive ethos turns into a battle for status, prestige, and control over minute academic and administrative decisions. In the last couple of decades, as large amounts of money have flowed into STEM disciplines, the divisiveness between disciplines and between faculty and administration and governing boards has deepened with collegiality and community as casualties.
This competitive push for progress is a system of control and domination, of others and of the natural world.
To keep it intact and keep everyone marching along that line, culturally we devalue any human needs and traits that don’t fit this worldview. If the islanders don’t want to milk cows, they’re lazy or backward, we think. If we don’t want to rush from one meeting to the next, from one project to another, we’re labeled undependable or undisciplined. If we’re not energized by the frenzy and franticness, we must be an isolate or an introvert—said derisively. And we may well be those things since more reflective people are the ones who notice the lack of attunement with this cultural way of behaving and experience its abrasiveness.
By denying those parts of our human nature that don’t fit, we’re not only destroying ourselves, we’re destroying other species, and our natural environment, our home—all that’s essential—that nurtures us and needs nurturing.
But nurturing itself is devalued.
It’s as if we shouldn’t even need nurturing, at least not once we pass our early teenage years. Some of the crustiest among us are likely those who need nourishing the most, but aren’t receiving it. They may be the most sensitive among us, but covering it with rancor as a way to protect themselves in a world made hard and harsh by this demanding, controlling worldview in which we live.
A highly trained artist said to me, while we were having lunch together, that she paints what’s inside her and often it comes quickly and easily. But that feels wrong somehow, like it’s not valuable if it comes too easy. This is another way the rapaciousness our Western culture cultivates bleeds over from the physical to the psychological and emotional. We can come to suspect our own talents, undermine our own contributions to the world. Unless it’s a struggle, unless it takes a lot of time and a lot of effort, perhaps even suffering, how can it be worthwhile? And why should we be paid for it?
Culturally, we seem to think that about the arts and human services professions. What do they produce that’s valuable to society and deserving of remuneration? They are their own rewards—in the case of the arts, self-indulgence and emotional or intellectual expression. In the case of human services, a sense of helping and doing good for others. If people want to follow their aesthetic or compassionate nature, American society punishes most of them financially.
But beauty, and joy, and compassion and empathy are all deep human needs and qualities that make us kinder, gentler individuals and make a society and a culture softer, richer, deeper, and more humane.
As a society, we cannot see and value those qualities and needs when rapaciousness runs amok. The positive parts of our culture of progress, the parts that have made us more physically comfortable, are like a curtain, blinding us to its backside. Or if we do see that side, we’ve been willing to accept the trade-offs. But how do we know when we’ve traded too much?
© Christina Leimer 2020 Contact for reprinting permission.
by Christina Leimer | As the World Changes
Source: The Quarantined Cabaret
When COVID-19 shut the world down in early 2020, much of it went online. For people with internet access and the ability to pay for home delivery, it’s been a way to keep basic needs met and help some small businesses survive—even if it’s been rocky.
What I’ve found hopeful is the creative ways individuals, families and communities are adapting to meet emotional needs as well.
Windows and Balconies
For seniors suddenly isolated in nursing homes and families unable to visit, windows became a bright spot. One man whose job involved driving a bucket truck drove it to his mother’s third floor window at her assisted living facility. He phoned her and when she opened the curtains, there he was, smiling and waving. Windows became places where engagements were announced and tic-tac-toe and hangman were played with grandkids. Teddy bears on window sills were the focus of community scavenger hunts to entertain and connect at a distance. Some stepped outside their windows, turning their balconies into stages, letting neighborhoods sing and dance.
Sharing & Enjoying Talent
The Quarantined Cabaret popped up on Facebook to give singers, dancers, actors, comedians and other creative performers a way to share their talents and people stuck at home a way to enjoy them. Then it morphed to sharing high school productions that were cancelled due to the shelter-in-place. What started as a small group of friends quickly turned into tens of thousands of people from all 50 states and many countries. People who don’t usually get to showcase their talents and people who live in remote areas where it’s difficult to find live entertainment benefit too.
Re-Purposing & Making Do
One couple let their elementary school aged kids organize date nights for them. Travel professionals, missing life on the road and using their gear, re-purposed it to help neighbors haul their groceries, set up camp for their kids in the living room or create a swinging hammock bed for the feel of adventure at home. Some people dressed in head-to-toe costumes or outfitted themselves in clear-plastic trash bags to hug loved ones.
Adapting Business and Ritual
Some small distilleries switched from brews to making hand sanitizer. Others re-tooled to sew and distribute masks. Restaurants, closed to indoor dining and shut down completely in some places, switched to home delivery and providing free-of-charge meals to community members in need. With traditional funeral and memorial rites curtailed, funeral directors and faith leaders modified rites, such as drive-in funeral ceremonies and livestreaming services. Newspapers expanded online obituaries. Some families held funerals at home.
Attention Affects Behavior
What captures our attention shapes our sense of the world. When what we hear about most in the media are the problems, it can be overwhelming. Especially at a time when we’re so much more isolated than usual. Let’s notice our adapting, resilience and creativity and give it its due. By all public health accounts, the pandemic’s going to be with us quite awhile longer. In our global world, it won’t be the last either. One important change that could come from this COVID experience would be a more balanced portrayal of our lives and world.
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Christina Leimer, aka The Intuitive Sociologist
