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.