Collective Dreaming

A Current Look at the New Psychology Awakening in Modern Culture. Creating Community Through Individual Dreams That Reflect Our Global Body.
Home
Collective Ideas
Site Map
Collective Dreaming Night!!!!!!!
Project
The Arts

Dreams Are Our Connections to the Spirit of Creation

 

What if dreams were works of art, each representing various combinations of colors, lines, shapes, figures; each featuring a separate motif or intention. What if an entire canvas was displayed before us via the dream, painted in a way that best conveyed a certain message brought to us by our own soul?


What would the feeling tone of the red, blue, violet or yellow open in us? How would certain combinations of lines vibrate within our own being? In what ways would the dream offer us new and unexplored sounds that we haven’t heard before?


Yes, a dream can also be likened to a musical composition. Each one has a different rhythm, a different sound; each dream has a certain vibration that will resonate within us differently each time.


Notice that we all wake up feeling differently each morning—alarm clocks and unruly spouses aside. The dreams coming through us each night bring different color tones, musical tones—feeling tones—that leave us in a different emotional state.


It’s impossible not to be affected by these compositions, for they are journeying us into the very depths of our soul.


Imagine standing before a work of art—say, an abstract composition by the great Wassily Kandinsky. His 1913 piece Composition VII is an incredible example of symbols, colors, and lines all blending together to form a strongly resonating motif—just like a dream. The painting itself resonates differently within each of us, although there are universally recognized symbols in the landscape intentionally placed there by the artist.


Like a painting, the dream offers us no locked-in understanding of itself—it is not a given. Instead, its purpose is to create a certain resonance, a feeling that leads us into a certain space of “a-ha.” It’s like hitting the bulls-eye target with the arrow. By closely attuning our own experience with the painting itself, we will sense an understanding that was not present before this encounter, and so it goes with the dream.


The gods and goddesses of the dreamworld will each present themselves to us in different ways. No two will be exactly alike—nor will our experience of them. Allowing the feeling tone of the dream to present itself—openly, without pre-conceived notions—is the way the dream best accomplishes its mission. The mother serving us soup in the dream may certainly look like our Mother, but the feeling we experience from that motif—like the red horse in the Kandinsky painting—is how the dream symbolically and therapeutically works through us. This is the art of healing.


Music, of course, works the same magic on us. No two compositions will ever sound exactly alike, and the energy created by each piece will leave us feeling different each time. Allowing the music to touch us is the key—as in the dream experience. If we can let the June 1974 experience of the Led Zeppelin tune move us in a different way in 2007, then we know the piece is still doing its work on us. We know our soul has been touched, awakened.

Dreams are just as remarkable, for they engage us in an even more personal way than a painting or music. While Jimmy Page may have had a certain girl in mind when writing “Stairway to Heaven,” the girl in last night’s dream will be an even more personal experience for us—and an image composed by our own personal dream maker. It’s as though we’re always composing works of art and music through our dreams; it is only when we allow ourselves the space in our lives to hear them, see them, feel them, that they are able to do their work. Remembering the dream is only half the job!

 

 

 

The Collective Dreaming Project is now underway! Your contribution is welcome!

 

                               

                                      

 

Collective Dreaming As Therapeutic Art

 

 

While individual work with dreams is the focus of Collective Dreaming, the group setting is a growing—and much needed—aspect of this work that is encouraged, and is now forming to be a critical aspect of this program. While I have focused my work on the individual and her relationship to the collective, the fundamental “breakthroughs” of my access to the “collective dreaming” phenomenon came via studies in Brasil, and through the work of Meredith Sabini and “Social Dreaming.”

W. Gordon Lawrence began working with “social dreaming matrices” in 1982 and has developed an extensive network of psychoanalysts and laypersons who practice this art of “social dreaming.” Claudio Neri writes:

Social dreaming is a method that focuses on dreaming with a view to understanding not the “inner world” of dreamers but the social and institutional reality in which they live. According to Gordon Lawrence, who propounded this technique, dreams contain fundamental information on the situation in which people are living at the time they dream. Social dreaming does not challenge the great value of the traditional psychoanalytic approach to dreams but tries to emphasize their social dimension.
--Neri, “Social dreaming: Report on the workshops held in Mauriburg, Raissa, and Clarice Town,” in Experiences in Social Dreaming (Ed. W. G. Lawrence), 2003.

My emphasis in Collective Dreaming is on the individual’s process as a container for the group, and as a “cog in the wheel,” as it may relate to the organization as a whole. Lawrence writes (2003) that “the experience of a social dreaming matrix places participants in the domain of sphinx—that is, in the realm of knowledge, scientific method, and truth searching” (p. 5). Working with groups in a “social dreaming matrix” where they invite dream images to come into the space of a group session is most productive, I have found, as is the practice of group members bringing already-existing dreams into the matrix. Lawrence adds, “a matrix is a different ‘container’ for receiving dreams, and so the ‘contained’ of the dream alters. The ‘context’ of the dream becomes different from that delivered in other contexts” (p. 4). As part of this web, this “A-Field,” we are each able to serve as individual containers for the group as a whole.

 

For individual, group, or corporate dream consultations, contact us at greggechols@hotmail.com