3 Review(s)

Social Dreaming was discovered in the early 1980s at the Tavistock Institute in London. Its focus is on the dream and not the dreamer. It is done with a set of people who come together to share their dreams. This goes against the accepted belief, even dogma, that the study of dreaming can only be pursued in a one-to-one relationship, where one of the participants is a trained psychoanalyst. The chapters in this book on Social Dreaming indicate the endless possibilities of free association and amplification in social dreaming. Although each writer has conveyed this, there still exist in their texts more detailed connotations and possible meanings of particular dreams. In a sense, their chapters are only beginnings for the reader to expand, as none, is in any sense a complete, final version of the potential meanings of dreams in a particular Social Dreaming Matrix.Examining recalled dreams with many others in a Social Dreaming Matrix leads to the transformation of the thinking embedded in the dreams. There are infinite meanings to a dream by regarding the dream as an unconscious product of cultural knowledge, not as an expression of the psyche exclusively, opening new possibilities of thinking. When the individual unconscious resonates, or reverberates, with others in the Matrix the infinite becomes accessible. Being in the infinite is the mental space where new thinking happens. It is the space in which the dream is regarded as an object by taking a global perspective, and giving one's total attention to it, as if it had never existed before. All the finite knowledge of civilisation begins from having the experience of being in infinity, through the awareness of the unconscious with its time-less and place-less qualities, its symbolism, and its paradoxes.