Social dreaming is a method for identifying the cultural knowledge and scientific method deployed in the dream - not the oedipal issues experienced by the dreamer. Social dreaming takes place with many participants simultaneously. The number can be 100 to 6, but mostly with about 30. The sessions for this kind of dreaming, called a Social Dreaming Matrix, last for an hour. Time boundaries are strictly kept. The dreams are expanded through free association. Once a dream is voiced in the Matrix, it ceases to be a personal property for it now belongs to, and is shared by, the Matrix. Use of the term 'matrix' was first introduced into psychology by S. H. Foulkes.
The purpose of the SDM is to transform the thinking of the dreams by means of free association so as to make links among the dreams and become available for new thinking and thought.
Knowledge of the dream is the focus. Knowledge can be of three kinds.
- Knowledge of the inanimate world which is expressed through mathematics, and physics making use of mathematical and mechanical metaphors, and formal logic.
- Knowledge of the organic world as expressed in biology which is linked with the use of evolutionary and organic metaphors, and
dialectical logic.
- Knowledge of the world of the personal, which is the highest and most comprehensive form of knowledge being the mutual knowledge of two persons.
This personal knowledge includes the material and organic. They are vital elements of personal knowledge, but personal life cannot be reduced to them. The first two kinds are knowledge about, but the third is knowledge of. Knowledge of is arrived at through sense perception, and is more than intellectual knowing. Through the senses human beings become aware of the world, cultivating it through our emotions.
Read more about Social Dreaming: History, Transformative Thinking, Non-clinical Applications, Bibliography
Famous quotes containing the words social and/or dreaming:
“Institutional psychiatry is a continuation of the Inquisition. All that has really changed is the vocabulary and the social style. The vocabulary conforms to the intellectual expectations of our age: it is a pseudo-medical jargon that parodies the concepts of science. The social style conforms to the political expectations of our age: it is a pseudo-liberal social movement that parodies the ideals of freedom and rationality.”
—Thomas Szasz (b. 1920)
“Like dreaming, reading performs the prodigious task of carrying us off to other worlds. But reading is not dreaming because books, unlike dreams, are subject to our will: they envelop us in alternative realities only because we give them explicit permission to do so. Books are the dreams we would most like to have, and, like dreams, they have the power to change consciousness, turning sadness to laughter and anxious introspection to the relaxed contemplation of some other time and place.”
—Victor Null, South African educator, psychologist. Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure, introduction, Yale University Press (1988)